London: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday predicted that Russia would lose the war against his country, and thanked the British people for their support from “Day One” since Moscow’s military offensive.
“I stand before you on behalf of our brave soldiers who are right now under artillery fire,” Zelenskyy said in a rousing address to Parliament, during which he complimented the “strong British character”.
Speaking of his country, Zelenskyy said Ukraine “will always come out on top of evil”.
“This lies at the core of our, and also your, traditions,” he said ahead of his meeting with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
“Russia will lose”, Zelenskyy in a historic address, wearing his trademark olive sweatshirt.
This is his first visit to the UK since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“We know freedom will win, we know Russia will lose and the victory will change the world,” he declared in his address at Westminster Hall.
To coincide with the visit, Sunak extended UK’s ongoing support to train Ukrainian fighter jet pilots and marines to help upskill their defensive capabilities.
Buckingham Palace has confirmed that the surprise visit, not announced in advance due to security reasons, will also include an audience with King Charles III.
According to UK government officials, the leaders will discuss a two-pronged approach to Britain’s support for Ukraine, starting with an immediate surge of military equipment to the country to help counter Russia’s “offensive” and reinforced by long-term support.
“President Zelenskyy’s visit to the UK is a testament to his country’s courage, determination and fight, and a testament to the unbreakable friendship between our two countries,” Sunak said.
“Since 2014, the UK has provided vital training to Ukrainian forces, allowing them to defend their country, protect their sovereignty and fight for their territory. I am proud that today we will expand that training from soldiers to marines and fighter jet pilots, ensuring Ukraine has a military able to defend its interests well into the future,” he said.
“It also underlines our commitment to not just provide military equipment for the short term, but a long-term pledge to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine for years to come,” he said.
Downing Street said the bolstered training offer will ensure Ukraine’s pilots are able to fly sophisticated North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) standard fighter jets in the future.
As part of that long-term capability investment, the UK will work with Ukraine and international allies to coordinate collective support to meet Ukraine’s defensive needs.
A training programme for marines will be in addition to the recruit training programme already running in the UK, which has seen 10,000 Ukrainian troops brought to battle readiness in the last six months, and which will upskill a further 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers this year, officials said.
The UK says it will continue to work with the Ukrainian Armed Forces and international community to scale the programme up in 2023.
Last week, Ukrainian troops arrived in the UK to learn how to command Challenger 2 tanks, following the Sunak’s decision to send the main battle tanks to Ukraine.
Under his expanded offer, Sunak will provide Ukraine with longer range capabilities aimed at disrupting Russia’s ability to “continually target Ukraine’s civilian and critical national infrastructure and help relieve pressure on Ukraine’s frontlines”. During the visit, Zelenskyy and his team will also meet Britain’s defence and security chiefs, including the Chief of Defence Staff and Chief of the Air Staff, to discuss the details of the training programme.
Meanwhile, the UK announced further sanctions on Wednesday in response to Russia’s “continued bombardment of Ukraine, including the targeting of those who have helped [Russian President] Putin build his personal wealth, and companies who are profiting from the Kremlin’s war machine”.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said the latest package hits six entities providing military equipment such as drones for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as eight individuals and one entity connected to nefarious financial networks that help maintain wealth and power amongst Kremlin elites.
The Guardian speaks to three St Petersburg residents: a soldier, a street artist and an actor, all with very different views on Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine which is nearing its first anniversary.
Maxim, who has just come back from the frontline, thinks a Putin victory is in clear sight. ‘MV Picture’ shows her doubt towards the war through her art while Andrey, an actor, isn’t quite sure where his loyalties should lie
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised an era of openness for the social media platform. Yet that transparency will soon come at a price.
On Thursday, the social-networking giant will shut down free and unfettered access to reams of data on the company’s millions of users. As part of that overhaul, researchers worldwide who track misinformation and hate speech will also have their access shut down — unless they stump up the cash to keep the data tap on.
The move is part of Musk’s efforts to make Twitter profitable amid declining advertising revenue, sluggish user growth and cut-throat competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.
But the shift has riled academics, infuriated lawmakers and potentially put Twitter at odds with new content-moderation rules in the European Union that require such data access to independent researchers.
“Shutting down or requiring paid access to the researcher API will be devastating,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who has spent years relying on Twitter’s API to track potentially harmful material online.
“There are inequities in resources for researchers around the world. Scholars at Ivy League institutions in the United States could probably afford to pay,” she added. “But there are scholars all around the world who simply will not have the resources to pay anything for access to this.”
The change would cut free access to Twitter’s so-called application program interface (API), which allowed outsiders to track what happened on the platform on a large scale. The API essentially gave outsiders direct access to the company’s data streams and was kept open to allow researchers to monitor users, including to spot harmful, fake or misleading content.
A team at New York University, for instance, published a report last month on how far wide-reaching Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had been by directly tapping into Twitter’s API system. Without that access, the level of Kremlin meddling would have been lost to history, according to Joshua Tucker, co-director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
Twitter did not respond to repeated requests to comment on whether this week’s change would affect academics and other independent researchers. The move still may not happen at all, depending on how Twitter tweaks its policies. The company’s development team said via a post on the social network last week it was committed to allowing others to access the platform via some form of API.
“We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week,” they said.
Yet the lack of details about who will be affected — and how much the data access will cost from February 9 — has left academics and other researchers scrambling for any details. Meanwhile, many of Twitter’s employees working on trust and safety issues have either been fired or have left the company since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October.
In Europe’s crosshairs
The timing of the change comes as the European Commission on Thursday will publish its first reports from social media companies, including Twitter, about how they are complying with the EU’s so-called code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement between EU legislators and Big Tech firms in which these companies agree to uphold a set of principles to clamp down on such material. The code of practice includes pledges to “empower researchers” by improving their ability to access companies’ data to track online content.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, talked to Musk last week to remind him about his obligations regarding the bloc’s content rules, though neither discussed the upcoming shutdown of free data access to the social network.
“We cannot rely only on the assessment of the platforms themselves. If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO.
“It’s worrying to see a reversal of the trend on Twitter,” she added in reference to the likely cutback in outsiders’ access to the company’s data.
While the bloc’s disinformation standards are not mandatory, separate content rules from Brussels, known as the Digital Services Act, also directly require social media companies to provide data access to so-called vetted researchers. By complying with the code of practice on disinformation, tech giants can ease some of their compliance obligations under those separate content-moderation rules and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their revenues if they fall afoul of the standards.
Yet even Twitter’s inclusion in the voluntary standards on disinformation is on shaky ground.
The company submitted its initial report that will be published Wednesday and Musk said he was committed to complying with the rules. But Camino Rojo — who served as head of public policy for Spain and was the main person at Twitter involved in the daily work on the code since November’s mass layoffs — is no longer working at the tech giant as of last week, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions within Twitter. Rojo did not respond to a request for comment.
American lawmakers are also trying to pass legislation that would improve researcher access to social media companies following a series of scandals. The companies’ role in fostering the January 6 Capitol Hill riots has triggered calls for tougher scrutiny, as did the so-called Facebook Files revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, which highlighted how difficult it remains for outsiders to understand what is happening on these platforms.
“Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” U.S. Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement in reference to the upcoming change to data access. “This is the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”
Rebecca Kern contributed reporting from Washington.
This article has been updated to reflect a change in when the European Commission is expected to publish reports under the code of practice on disinformation.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
The European Union will launch a new platform to counter disinformation campaigns by Russia and China amid growing worries, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said today.
A so-called Information Sharing and Analysis Center within the EU’s foreign services —the European External Action Service (EEAS) — will seek to track information manipulation by foreign actors and coordinate with the 27 EU countries and the wider community of NGOs.
“We need to understand how these disinformation campaigns are organized … to identify the actors of the manipulation,” said Borrell.
One EEAS official said it would be a decentralized platform to exchange information in real-time with NGOs, countries and cybersecurity agencies, enabling better understanding of emerging disinformation threats and narratives and quicker action to tackle such problems.
Almost a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU continues to fend off Russian attempts to manipulate and distort information about the war. Kremlin-led propaganda seeking to blame the EU for a global food crisis due to its sanctions has also spread to countries in Africa and the Middle East.
Borrell also warned of a “new wave” of disinformation of fabricated images, videos and websites posing as media outlets spreading “five times the speed of light across social networks and messaging services.”
The EU’s existing disinformation unit, the Stratcom division, in a first-ever report, noted that most of the foreign information manipulation in 2022 had centered on narratives supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian and Chinese diplomatic channels were particularly involved.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
The EU’s energy war with Russia has entered a new phase — and there are signs that the Kremlin is starting to feel the pain.
As of Sunday, it is illegal to import petroleum products — those refined from crude oil, such as diesel, gasoline and naphtha — from Russia into the EU. That comes hot on the heels of the EU’s December ban on Russian seaborne crude oil.
Both measures are also linked to price caps imposed by the G7 club of rich democracies aimed at driving down the price that Russia gets for its oil and refined products without disrupting global energy markets.
Those actions appear to have bitten into the Kremlin’s budget in a way other economic penalties levied in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have not.
The Kremlin’s tax income from oil and gas in January was among its lowest monthly totals since the depths of COVID in 2020, according to Janis Kluge, senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Kluge noted that while Russia’s 2023 budget anticipates 9 trillion rubles (€120 billion) in fossil fuel income, in January it earned only 425 billion rubles from oil and gas taxes, around half compared to the same month last year.
It’s only one month’s figures and the income does fluctuate, but Kluge called it “a bad start.”
Russia’s gas sales to Europe have also collapsed — in part as a result of Moscow’s own energy blackmail — with its share of imports declining from around 40 percent throughout 2021 to 13 percent for November 2022, according to the latest confirmed European Commission monthly figure.
But it’s oil that matters most to Kremlin coffers.
On Friday, EU countries struck a deal on two price caps which will come into full force later this year following a 55-day transition period. A cap of $100 will apply to “premium” oil products, including diesel, gasoline and kerosene. A cap of $45 will be enforced on “discount” products, such as fuel oil, naphtha and heating oil.
The EU ban and the G7 price caps are meant to work in tandem. While the EU bans Russian oil, cutting off a vital market, the price caps ensure that insurance and shipping firms based in the EU and other G7 countries aren’t completely blocked from facilitating the global trade in Russian oil. They still can, but it must be under the price caps. This way — so the theory goes — Russia’s fossil fuel revenue will take a hit without disrupting the global oil market in a way that could endanger supply and drive up the price for everyone.
Squeezing the Kremlin
Russia is selling more crude to China and India to make up for the lost trade with the EU | iStock
So far, EU leaders think, it’s working.
Buyers in China and India and other countries are hoovering up more Russian crude, making up for the lost trade with Europe. But knowing that Russia has few alternative markets, buyers have been able to drive down the price. “The discounts that Russia has to give, that its partners can demand, are strong and are here to stay,” said one senior European Commission official. Russian Urals crude is trading at around $50 per barrel, around $30 below the benchmark Brent crude price.
“I think in general the EU and the G7 can be quite happy with how things have unfolded with regards to the oil embargo and the price cap up to now,” said Kluge. “There has been no turbulence on global oil markets and at the same time Russia’s revenues have gone down considerably. The key reason here is that the price which Russia receives for its crude has gone down.”
The question is whether the EU can keep up the economic pressure on Russia without harming itself in the process.
So far, at least as far as oil is concerned, it’s been plain sailing. Oil markets have proved remarkably flexible since the EU’s crude ban in December, with export flows simply shifting: Asia now takes more Russian crude — often at a discount — while other producers in the Middle East and the U.S. step in to supply Europe.
So far, it is looking likely that a similar “reshuffle” of global trade will take place with oil products like diesel, said Claudio Galimberti, senior vice president of analysis at Rystad Energy.
The nature of the oil product sanctions means that there’s nothing to stop Russian crude from being exported to a third country, refined, and then re-exported to the EU, meaning that India and other countries are becoming more important oil product suppliers to the West.
China and India, as well as others in the Middle East and North Africa, also look likely to snap up Russian oil products that are no longer going straight into Europe, freeing up their own refining capacity to produce yet more product that they can sell into Europe and elsewhere.
“There is a reshuffle of product the same way there was a reshuffle of crude,” Galimberti said.
There could still be problems, however. “Europe is not going to import Russian diesel, so it needs to come from somewhere else,” Galimberti said, pointing to two major refineries in the Middle East — Kuwait’s Al-Zour and Saudi Arabia’s Jazan — upon which European supply will now be increasingly dependent.
“If you had a blip in one of these refineries you could see a price response in Europe,” said Galimberti. But for now, after a glut of imports in advance of Sunday’s ban, “inventories of distillates are full,” he added.
“Europe is in good shape.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
The Oscars are wading into a Russian-Ukrainian geopolitical minefield.
Of the five films shortlisted by the U.S. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for this year’s best documentary, one is about Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny and another is “A House Made of Splinters,” about a Ukrainian orphanage in the war-torn east of the country.
While neither film will warm the heart of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the competition between the two has sparked a conflict between Ukrainians and the Russian opposition.
“Ukraine has been invaded by Russia and tens of thousands have been murdered by the Russian army, millions have been kicked out of their homes. Therefore, I can understand that reaction to a film that focuses on the fate of one single — Russian — person,” said Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian investigative journalist who is in the Navalny movie. “This is why I will never start arguing with Ukrainians who are upset about the film getting nominated for an Oscar.”
“Navalny,” directed by Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher and produced by HBO Max and CNN Films, tells the story of the opposition leader who led a growing political movement against Putin, was almost killed by a nerve agent and then returned to Moscow despite the threat of arrest; he’s now languishing in a Russian prison. The movie does touch on Navalny’s nationalist views and his dalliance with far-right forces, but it’s all too little for Ukrainians aghast at Navalny’s stance on the 2014 occupation of Crimea.
At the time he denounced Putin’s annexation as a “flagrant violation of all international norms” but he also said the peninsula wouldn’t go back to Ukraine. “Is the Crimea a sandwich or something you can take and give it back? I don’t think so,” he told Ekho Moskvy radio.
But his political leanings haven’t stopped a wave of support for his bravery in standing up to Putin.
“Navalny” got wide recognition, distribution on HBO Max, a Times Square poster and was praised by Hollywood stars. Actor Hugh Jackman has supported the movie in a video recommendation tweet.
“It is a documentary about a man who is literally risking his life every single day,” Jackman said.
However, Ukrainians, deeply traumatized by the ongoing Russian invasion, see the documentary as an attempt to whitewash Navalny, who they accuse of still being a Russian nationalist despite opposing Putin.
Tetiana Shevchuk, a lawyer with the Anti-Corruption Action Center, complains that Navalny’s backers have been pressing for his release, but haven’t done much to protest the war.
“They were silent for 11 months of the war, but now that Oscar is on the horizon, they have become more active and imitate the anti-war movement. If the Academy awards them an award, it will be another tone-deaf gesture,” Shevchuk said.
Questioning Navalny’s credentials can provoke outrage.
Maria Pevchikh, who heads Navalny’s team of anti-corruption investigators and is one of the producers of the documentary, refused to answer POLITICO’s questions on that topic, saying they were offensive and unprofessional.
However, Pevchikh is scathing about allegations that Navalny and his supporters are pussyfooting around the war to not risk offending nationalist Russians.
“Is that why Navalny’s supporters have been talking about the war to an almost entirely Russian audience of ten million people on a specially created channel since the first day of the war? Without interrupting for a single day? Apparently this is a clever attempt on our part not to lose their audience,” she tweeted.
Less promoted but still visible
“House Made of Splinters,” a co-production of Denmark, Ukraine, Sweden and Finland, tells the story of children from a special orphanage in the eastern Ukrainian city of Lysychansk made just before Russia’s full-scale invasion last year; the city is now a field of ruins and under Russian occupation.
“Children are all safe now. They were evacuated abroad. And their educators have been internally displaced to other regions of Ukraine. So, they are also relatively safe,” said Azad Safarov, assistant director of the film. “However, the special orphanage was destroyed after a missile strike.”
Splinters got strong reviews and recognition at cinema festivals last year, but it made less of a splash than “Navalny,” said Darya Bassel of the Moon Man production studio, a Ukrainian co-producer of the film.
“The film, for example, does not have an American distributor. So, the result — an Oscar nomination — indicates that the film really impressed academics and maybe they just advised each other to watch the film, and thus the film was nominated,” Bassel said, calling it: “Word of mouth radio.”
When asked about what she thinks of the Navalny documentary competing for the same award, Bassel said that everyone fights for what is important to them. For her, it is important to talk about Ukraine and how Russia’s war ruins lives in her country.
“I just don’t want us to be placed at the table with Russian opposition and pushed to start a dialogue,” Bassel said.
Navalny’s views
In “Navalny,” Grozev, lead Russia investigator with Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group, helps the opposition leader figure out who tried to kill him by placing Novichok nerve agent in his underwear.
However, Grozev initially had significant reservations about Navalny due to his past public statements about Crimea, his view of Russia and much more.
“I enquired about him from many Russian colleagues who have an uncontested liberal, non-imperialistic worldview, and they all had the opinion that he has evolved from an opportunistic populist to a staunch democrat with liberal democracy values,” Grozev said.
The journalist spent days arguing with Navalny about politics, concluding he was pretty mainstream and not an imperialist. According to Grozev, nowadays Navalny thinks that Russia should be decentralized, the president’s power should be cut down to a minimum and that a successful Ukraine would be a competitive benchmark for Russia.
But Crimea remains a sore point; Navalny can’t break with the overwhelming view among his countrymen of all political views that the peninsula can’t simply be returned to Ukraine.
“We did argue a lot with him over his views on Crimea. While I never agreed with his view, I must also admit that it is very different from that that is claimed now by many anti-Navalny activists,” Grozev said.
According to him, Navalny still views the annexation of Crimea as an egregious violation of international law. But now that it has happened, Russia and Ukraine should sit down and prepare a long-term plan for giving the residents the right to decide which nation they want to belong to — after “advertising campaigns” by both countries and a U.N.-controlled period of independence. However Ukrainians warn that the idea makes no sense as more than 800,000 Russian colonists have moved to Crimea since it was annexed.
“In my opinion, Navalny and his anti-corruption team are now doing everything they can to stop the war — including him shouting against the war in each court hearing, writing anti-imperialistic and anti-war op-eds that get him further punishments, and his organization paying for fines for anti-war protests and running a separate full-time anti-war TV channel,” Grozev said.
“Unfortunately, none of this has led to mass protests in Russia, and I can completely understand many Ukrainians’ sentiment that all Russians bear collective guilt for not doing enough to stop this barbarism,” he added.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Beijing’s top envoy to the EU on Wednesday questioned the West’s call to help Ukraine achieve “complete victory,” on the eve of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s possible arrival in Brussels.
Fu Cong, the Chinese ambassador to the EU, also criticized the bloc for “erosion” of its commitment on Taiwan, warning “senior officials from the EU institutions” to stop visiting the self-ruled island.
Fu’s provocative comments on Ukraine and Taiwan, two of the most sensitive geopolitical controversies between China and the West, come as Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning a trip to Moscow, according to the Russian government.
Insisting that the Russia-Ukraine “conflict” was merely an “unavoidable” talking point, Fu said Beijing otherwise enjoys a multifaceted “traditional friendship” with Moscow.
“Frankly speaking, we are quite concerned about the possible escalation of this conflict,” Fu said at an event hosted by the European Policy Centre in Brussels. “And we don’t believe that only providing weapons will actually solve the problem.”
“We are quite concerned about people talking about winning a complete victory on the battlefield. We believe that the right place would be at the negotiating table,” Fu added.
His remarks come on the same day as Zelenskyy visits London, his first trip to Western Europe since Russia launched its full-scale invasion almost a year ago. POLITICO reported that Zelenskyy — who according to his aides has never had his calls picked up by Xi, while the Chinese leader has instead met or called Putin on multiple occasions over the past year — was also planning a visit to Brussels on Thursday, before bungled EU communications threw the trip into doubt.
The idea of a “complete victory” for Ukraine has been most vocally supported by Baltic and Eastern European countries. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed support for “victory” for Ukraine.
But toeing Xi’s line, Fu said the “security concerns of both sides” — Ukraine as well as Russia — should be taken care of.
Fu also dismissed the comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan, both of which face military threats from a nuclear-armed neighbor.
“I must state up front that [the] Ukrainian crisis and the Taiwan issue are two completely different things. Ukraine is an independent state, and Taiwan is part of China,” he said. “So there’s no comparability between the two issues.”
He went on to criticize the EU’s handling of the Taiwan issue.
“Nowadays, what we’re seeing is that there is some erosion of these basic commitments. We see that the parliamentarians and also senior officials from the EU institutions are also visiting Taiwan,” he said.
The European Commission has not publicized any details of its officials’ visit to Taiwan. The European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm, has not replied to a request for comment.
If the EU signed an investment treaty with Taiwan, Fu said this would “fundamentally change … or shake the foundation” of EU-China relations. “It is that serious.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
“I am wicked and scary with claws and teeth,” Vladimir Putin reportedly warned David Cameron when the then-British prime minister pressed him about the use of chemical weapons by Russia’s ally in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and discussed how far Russia was prepared to go.
According to Cameron’s top foreign policy adviser John Casson — cited in a BBC documentary — Putin went on to explain that to succeed in Syria, one would have to use barbaric methods, as the U.S. did in Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. “I am an ex-KGB man,” he expounded.
The remarks were meant, apparently, half in jest but, as ever with Russia’s leader, the menace was clear.
And certainly, Putin has proven he is ready to deploy fear as a weapon in his attempt to subjugate a defiant Ukraine. His troops have targeted civilians and have resorted to torture and rape. But victory has eluded him.
In the next few weeks, he looks set to try to reverse his military failures with a late-winter offensive: very possibly by being even scarier, and fighting tooth and claw, to save Russia — and himself — from further humiliation.
Can the ex-KGB man succeed, however? Can Russia still win the war of Putin’s choice against Ukraine in the face of heroic and united resistance from the Ukrainians?
Catalog of errors
From the start, the war was marked by misjudgments and erroneous calculations. Putin and his generals underestimated Ukrainian resistance, overrated the abilities of their own forces, and failed to foresee the scale of military and economic support Ukraine would receive from the United States and European nations.
Kyiv didn’t fall in a matter of days — as planned by the Kremlin — and Putin’s forces in the summer and autumn were pushed back, with Ukraine reclaiming by November more than half the territory the Russians captured in the first few weeks of the invasion. Russia has now been forced into a costly and protracted conventional war, one that’s sparked rare dissent within the country’s political-military establishment and led Kremlin infighting to spill into the open.
The only victory Russian forces have recorded in months came in January when the Ukrainians withdrew from the salt-mining town of Soledar in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. And the signs are that the Russians are on the brink of another win with Bakhmut, just six miles southwest of Soledar, which is likely to fall into their hands shortly.
But neither of these blood-drenched victories amounts to much more than a symbolic success despite the high casualties likely suffered by both sides. Tactically neither win is significant — and some Western officials privately say Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may have been better advised to have withdrawn earlier from Soledar and from Bakhmut now, in much the same way the Russians in November beat a retreat from their militarily hopeless position at Kherson.
For a real reversal of Russia’s military fortunes Putin will be banking in the coming weeks on his forces, replenished by mobilized reservists and conscripts, pulling off a major new offensive. Ukrainian officials expect the offensive to come in earnest sooner than spring. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov warned in press conferences in the past few days that Russia may well have as many as 500,000 troops amassed in occupied Ukraine and along the borders in reserve ready for an attack. He says it may start in earnest around this month’s first anniversary of the war on February 24.
Other Ukrainian officials think the offensive, when it comes, will be in March — but at least before the arrival of Leopard 2 and other Western main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Zelenskyy warned Ukrainians Saturday that the country is entering a “time when the occupier throws more and more of its forces to break our defenses.”
All eyes on Donbas
The likely focus of the Russians will be on the Donbas region of the East. Andriy Chernyak, an official in Ukraine’s military intelligence, told the Kyiv Post that Putin had ordered his armed forces to capture all of Donetsk and Luhansk by the end of March. “We’ve observed that the Russian occupation forces are redeploying additional assault groups, units, weapons and military equipment to the east,” Chernyak said. “According to the military intelligence of Ukraine, Putin gave the order to seize all of the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”
Other Ukrainian officials and western military analysts suspect Russia might throw some wildcards to distract and confuse. They have their eyes on a feint coming from Belarus mimicking the northern thrust last February on Kyiv and west of the capital toward Vinnytsia. But Ukrainian defense officials estimate there are only 12,000 Russian soldiers in Belarus currently, ostensibly holding joint training exercises with the Belarusian military, hardly enough to mount a diversion.
“A repeat assault on Kyiv makes little sense,” Michael Kofman, an American expert on the Russian Armed Forces and a fellow of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. “An operation to sever supply lines in the west, or to seize the nuclear powerplant by Rivne, may be more feasible, but this would require a much larger force than what Russia currently has deployed in Belarus,” he said in an analysis.
But exactly where Russia’s main thrusts will come along the 600-kilometer-long front line in Ukraine’s Donbas region is still unclear. Western military analysts don’t expect Russia to mount a push along the whole snaking front — more likely launching a two or three-pronged assault focusing on some key villages and towns in southern Donetsk, on Kreminna and Lyman in Luhansk, and in the south in Zaporizhzhia, where there have been reports of increased buildup of troops and equipment across the border in Russia.
In the Luhansk region, Russian forces have been removing residents near the Russian-held parts of the front line. And the region’s governor, Serhiy Haidai, believes the expulsions are aimed at clearing out possible Ukrainian spies and locals spotting for the Ukrainian artillery. “There is an active transfer of (Russian troops) to the region and they are definitely preparing for something on the eastern front,” Haidai told reporters.
Reznikov has said he expects the Russian offensive will come from the east and the south simultaneously — from Zaporizhzhia in the south and in Donetsk and Luhansk. In the run-up to the main offensives, Russian forces have been testing five points along the front, according to Ukraine’s General Staff in a press briefing Tuesday. They said Russian troops have been regrouping on different parts of the front line and conducting attacks near Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region and Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Novopavlivka in eastern Donetsk.
Combined arms warfare
Breakthroughs, however, will likely elude the Russians if they can’t correct two major failings that have dogged their military operations so far — poor logistics and a failure to coordinate infantry, armor, artillery and air support to achieve mutually complementary effects, otherwise known as combined arms warfare.
When announcing the appointment in January of General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff — as the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, Russia’s defense ministry highlighted “the need to organize closer interaction between the types and arms of the troops,” in other words to improve combined arms warfare.
Kofman assesses that Russia’s logistics problems may have largely been overcome. “There’s been a fair amount of reorganization in Russian logistics, and adaptation. I think the conversation on Russian logistical problems in general suffers from too much anecdotalism and received wisdom,” he said.
Failing that, much will depend for Russia on how much Gerasimov has managed to train his replenished forces in combined arms warfare and on that there are huge doubts he had enough time. Kofman believes Ukrainian forces “would be better served absorbing the Russian attack and exhausting the Russian offensive potential, then taking the initiative later this spring. Having expended ammunition, better troops, and equipment it could leave Russian defense overall weaker.” He suspects the offensive “may prove underwhelming.”
Pro-war Russian military bloggers agree. They have been clamoring for another mobilization, saying it will be necessary to power the breakouts needed to reverse Russia’s military fortunes. Former Russian intelligence officer and paramilitary commander Igor Girkin, who played a key role in Crimea’s annexation and later in the Donbas, has argued waves of call-ups will be needed to overcome Ukraine’s defenses by sheer numbers.
And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest necessary for an attacking force to succeed.
Ukrainian officials think Russia’s offensive will be in March, before the arrival of Leopard 2 and other Western tanks | Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images
But others fear that Russia has sufficient forces, if they are concentrated, to make some “shock gains.” Richard Kemp, a former British army infantry commander, is predicting “significant Russian gains in the coming weeks. We need to be realistic about how bad things could be — otherwise the shock risks dislodging Western resolve,” he wrote. The fear being that if the Russians can make significant territorial gains in the Donbas, then it is more likely pressure from some Western allies will grow for negotiations.
But Gerasimov’s manpower deficiencies have prompted other analysts to say that if Western resolve holds, Putin’s own caution will hamper Russia’s chances to win the war.
“Putin’s hesitant wartime decision-making demonstrates his desire to avoid risky decisions that could threaten his rule or international escalation — despite the fact his maximalist and unrealistic objective, the full conquest of Ukraine, likely requires the assumption of further risk to have any hope of success,” said the Institute for the Study of War in an analysis this week.
Wicked and scary Putin may be but, as far as ISW sees it, he “has remained reluctant to order the difficult changes to the Russian military and society that are likely necessary to salvage his war.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
“Attention. The air alert is over. May the force be with you.”
That voice reading that message, heard on the Englishversion of an app signaling the end of Russian air raids over Ukraine, belongs to Luke Skywalker (well, the actor Mark Hamill).
The app received a Star Wars-themed update last year, just one of several actions that Hamill has taken to support Ukraine in its fight against Vladimir Putin’s “evil empire.”
In an exclusive interview with POLITICO, Hamill said that his position as an ambassador for the fundraising platform United24’s “Army of Drones” project is the most important role he’s ever played.
“I’m an actor, I deal in illusion and fantasy,” he said from his house in Malibu, California. “I’m like a modern-day court jester.” But the role helping Ukraine “is much more meaningful than what I’m used to doing. And I’m happy to do it.”
Moreover, Hamill said he is not only an ambassador but a “good soldier” and would do anything that Volodymyr Zelenskyy (or his fundraising team) asks him to do. “I follow orders,” Hamill said.
POLITICO revealed last week that Hamill is selling signed posters to raise cash for maintaining the Ukrainian army’s drone supply. It really is the return of the Jedi — Hamill revealed he hasn’t sold autographed items since 2017, when “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” came out. “It’s just not something I do,” he said. The posters are expected to arrive in Kyiv and go on sale any day now.
The “Army of Drones” project for which Hamill is an ambassador involves drone procurement and maintenance, as well as pilot training, with the drones used to monitor the front line.
It is a joint venture between the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the fundraising platform United24, which was set up by Zelenskyy and has so far raised more than €252 million.
“Drones are so vital in this conflict. They are the eyes in the sky. They protect the border, they monitor,” Hamill said, adding that Russia is using drones to attack civilians while Ukraine uses them as reconnaissance support to gather information.
The actor said he was “honored” that Zelenskyy personally asked him to come on board. “I’m not used to being contacted by world leaders,” he said.
But he is used to taking a political stand.
Referring to himself as a “life-long Democrat,” Hamill is very vocal on Twitter with his support of the U.S. Democrats and has critcized former President Donald Trump.
“Every Democrat that asked me to help them in their campaigns, doing Zooms and appearances … I said yes to all of them,” Hamill said, before adding proudly that he once received a letter from President Joe Biden, although: “I follow him on Twitter, but he doesn’t follow me back.”
But at the moment Hamill’s political focus is on Ukraine, and he said he feels “obligated” to do everything that Zelenskyy’s fundraising team asks him to do, “however small it is.”
Zelenskyy thanked Hamill with a virtual meeting, in which the president said: “The light will win over darkness. I believe in this, our people believe in this.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
In one of her first acts as governor, Sanders garnered national attention for a directive banning the term Latinx across the Arkansas government. In her Tuesday response, Sanders similarly waded into culture war subjects that have animated conservatives in the Biden years, inveighing against “false idols” of the left and other conservative punching bags.
“That’s not normal. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong,” she said.
Huckabee also hitthe president for his stewardship of the economy and the Biden administration’s handling of immigration policy.
Those broadsides are not far apart from the depiction of Biden and his fellow Democrats presented by her previous boss, former President Donald Trump, underscoring the lasting impression he has made on the Republican party — albeit with the former president’s sharpest edges shaved off.
Trump, the only major declared Republican candidate for the White House, released his own short response to Biden’s speech in which he painted a bleak picture of the country and accused the president of allowing illegal immigrants to “storm” the country and letting drug cartels smuggle drugsacross the border.
Trump also highlighted inflation, the rise in murder rates, and said the Biden administration is “trying to indoctrinate and mutilate our children” — a reference to sexual orientation and gender identity issues that have animated the party.
By contrast, Sanders echoed those same themes, without the same level of rancor and in a way that Republicans have at times sought for in hopes of modulating the former president’s agenda into an enduring coalition. At the outset of her remarks, she referenced her thyroid cancer diagnosis and treatment, as well as her mother’s experience with a different form of cancer, before swiftly pivoting into a condemnation of Biden.
“The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left; the choice is between normal or crazy,” she said.
Sanders also teased the forthcoming release of an education plan for Arkansas that she said would — if enacted — raise teachers’ salaries, expand parental choice and improve childhood literacy.
Sanders’ speech stands in contrast to the tone left by her predecessor, Republican Asa Hutchinson, a regular presence on Washington Sunday shows who in the past has condemned some of Trump’s rhetoric, his most controversial policies while and members of the former governor’s fellow lawmakers in Arkansas.
Hutchinson has at times flirted with a presidential run as a conservative alternative to Trump, while Sanders has tamped down speculation that she is angling for a higher position.
“I look forward to serving as governor of Arkansas for a full eight years if the people of Arkansas will give me that privilege and that opportunity,” she said this week on “Fox News Sunday.”
Meridith McGraw contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
