Month: March 2022

USA Today

‘This is my land, I stay’: These Ukrainian women are among thousands choosing to fight, not flee

Gabriela Miranda, USA TODAY – March 25, 2022

Just last month, Olga Kovalenko moved into her first apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine, and got engaged to her longtime boyfriend. Now she spends mornings cleaning her rifles and pulling people out of bomb-stricken homes.

When Ukraine enacted martial law and banned men 18 to 60 years old from leaving the country after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, Kovalenko knew she’d never forgive herself if she left her homeland. She called her parents and volunteered to join Ukraine’s military forces.

“I wasn’t about to leave all the saving and defending to the men. I may be a woman, but I have no children, and I’m ready to fight,” Kovalenko told USA TODAY. “This is my land, I stay.”

Kovalenko is one of thousands of Ukrainian women refusing to flee as bombs have raged and cities have been bombarded, steadfast in their decision to defend their beloved home and extinguish Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hopes for a swift victory. Women make up about 15% of Ukraine’s army, according to the Ukrainian government.

WHERE ARE THEY GOING?: Millions of refugees are fleeing Ukraine.

Each day Kovalenko said her unit goes to different cities that have been hit by Russia’s relentless attacks. They evaluate the damage, help evacuate civilians and are ready to fend off Russian forces. Fortunately, Kovalenko hasn’t encountered a Russian soldier yet but said she would “do what’s necessary” to win the war.

STUDENTS FLEE UKRAINE: International students studying in Ukraine escape to safety

Kovalenko was born in Kyiv to a Ukrainian mother and Russian father – she said both her parents are proud. Her father even said he stands with Ukraine and is “disappointed” with the invasion.

“I’m different, I’m half of each side in this war, but I choose to do what’s right. I choose to risk my life for my country; it’s what my Ukrainian blood tells me to do,” Kovalenko said.

Makeup artist now wields weapons

Alona Bushynska, an Odessa native who was once a makeup artist for 17 years, has traded in her brushes for medical supplies and weapons. A few months ago, her biggest worry was scheduling her next client. Today it’s protecting her unit and partners in a civilians task force in Ukraine.

Bushynska said she decided to join the war effort while she watched neighborhoods near Kyiv destroyed by Russian forces. Each morning, the task force wakes up to the sounds of bombs and brings medical supplies to soldiers and civilians.

The task force operates in units of two: One person provides medical assistance while the other is armed and ready to defend as needed. The task force is filled with dozens of women who chose to fight, Bushynska said. Among them: former journalists, paramedics and teachers.

“We’re not professional warriors, we are just civilians who stayed because we want to protect our houses. We want there to be homes and buildings for people to come back to,” Bushynska told USA TODAY. “If I die, I die. But I want to stay.”

Ukraine has a long history of female fighters

Women such as Kovalenko and Bushynska are no different than the thousands of female Ukrainian soldiers who fought in World War I, in the Austro-Hungarian army, and in World War II, in the Red Army, Ukrainian veteran Kateryna Pryimak said.

During Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine, Pryimak enlisted in the Ukrainian army and fought on the front lines to protect the region. Now eight years later, she’s defending her country in a new way – with medical supplies and volunteers.

Pryimak is the head of the Women’s Veteran Movement, an organization that provides support for veterans, and has set up a headquarters in Kyiv. Dozens of women, many like Pryimak, are paramedics. They provide food, clothes and medical resources.

“Guns are not the only thing needed. Food, medical attention and even a smile, that’s also what the women who have stayed behind provide to the soldiers and civilians,” Pryimak said.

She said she knows of thousands of women who have joined the fight against the Russian invasion – and she’s not surprised. Since 2014 and before, women have shown they are just as capable of bravery as their male counterparts, she said.

Bushynska said she will continue to fight with other civilians for as long as it takes. Kovalenko will defend Ukraine until her “last breaths.”

“Men don’t always have to fight and women don’t always have to sit at home and wait,” Kovalenko said. “We are here to help and we’ll stay here until the war is over, until my last breath if needed.”

NBC News

Rumors of ‘filtration camps’ and mass deportation in Ukraine raise old USSR fears

Cassandra Vinograd – March 25, 2022

The reports have filtered out for days: Mass kidnappings, forced deportations, Ukrainians spirited across the border to Russia.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry said Thursday that 6,000 residents of the besieged city of Mariupol had been “forcibly deported” by Russian forces — stripped of their passports and identity documents — and taken to Russia as “hostages.”

Like much in this war, the claims have been impossible to independently verify. A statement from the foreign ministry Thursday echoed allegations and details released by Mariupol’s city council in recent days, stating that “several thousand” of its residents had been taken to “filtration camps” in Russia before being “redirected to remote cities.”

Russia, in turn, has cited the “evacuations” of more than 380,000 people from Ukraine to its territory.

Communications are sporadic or down, and no foreign journalists are left in the city. That’s meant relying on the rare videos that have emerged from the city — and on the testimony of those who’ve managed to escape.

Yet the language — “filtration camps” — and the imagery of mass deportations are particularly resonant, evoking a dark chapter in Russian history.

The trauma and memory of mass deportations inflicted by the then-Soviet Union are still fresh. An estimated 3 million people on the USSR’s borders were rounded up and forcibly deported to remote parts of Siberia and Central Asia between 1936 and 1952, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Some 60,000 were Poles and Ukrainians.

The echoes of history — and their power — have not been lost on Mariupol’s city council.

“What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people,” it said in a statement March 19. “It is hard to imagine that in the 21st century people will be forcibly deported to another country.”

Some escapees from Mariupol have described Russian soldiers encouraging them to go to Russia “for their own safety.” Others have spoken of friends being interrogated by Russian forces, then disappearing.

With verifiable information limited and access to Mariupol impossible, the claims could be true. They also could be enhanced by the fog of war — or elements of a parallel information war, in which messaging is key to enforcing each side’s narrative.

Regardless, the reports have caught the attention of Ukraine’s supporters, humanitarians and even the White House. Department of State spokesman Ned Price said the United States was trying to corroborate the “very concerning” accounts, “which have in fact continued to mount.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that his government was trying to verify the exact number of citizens who had been forcibly deported, alleging that Russia was trying to forcibly conscript many into its army. That followed a March 22 statement from Ukraine’s defense minister stating that Russia was forcing men in occupied territories of Ukraine to conscript as “cannon fodder.”

On Thursday, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman said prosecutors were investigating the “illegal deportation” of more than 2,000 children to Russia.

She said Ukrainians have been taken to different cities across Russia, citing the case of a family from the left bank of Mariupol who were taken out of a bomb shelter, loaded onto buses and taken to the Russian city of Taganrog. After being interrogated by Russian intelligence, she said, they were put on another train.

“They last got in touch with us on March 20,” she added.

Yahoo! News

Moscow ‘plotting to seal off Crimea’ to stop ‘panicking Russians’ from fleeing

Kate Buck – March 24, 2022

Ukrainian intelligence officials have claimed the Kremlin is preparing to seal off Crimea in order to block the exit of any “panicked” Russians trying to flee.

In 2014, Russia seized Ukraine’s southern peninsula of Crimea, an area of significant strategic importance in an invasion which marked what one Western intelligence official described as the “creeping militarisation” of the Black Sea.

While Nato and the international community deemed the annexation illegal, they failed to stop it and Moscow has since established two federal “subjects” in the area – the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol.

Eight years on and Putin mounted a full scale invasion of Ukraine, in an apparent attempt to annex more land in the east of the country, specifically the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk.

However, Western officials believe the invasion is not going to plan, with Moscow frustrated by the lack of progress. The war has sparked numerous protests across Russia.

On Wednesday, the intelligence department of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence claimed in a Facebook post that the Kremlin plans to block bridges, ferries and air connections from the mainland to Crimea in order to prevented panicking Russians from fleeing the region.

The post said Russia is now holding 600,000 Russian citizens “hostage” who are “illegally on the peninsula”.

The statement said: “Putin’s authorities are trying to react to panic moods among Russian citizens who illegally moved to Ukrainian Crimea after February 2014.

Read more: Russian Navy ship paraded in propaganda footage ‘destroyed by Ukraine’

“The occupants seek to stop the flow of refugees from the peninsula.”

It added that families of Russian officers and officials in Sevastopol have “urgently” sold real estate and are removing assets from the peninsula.

These claims have not been verified, however it is clear that there is some anger aimed at Putin’s invasion in the Russian homeland.

On 4 March, Moscow enacted two laws that criminalised independent war reporting and protesting the war, with penalties of up to 15 years in prison.

Three days after those laws came into force police reportedly detained more than 4,300 protesters in 56 different cities, according to the OVD-Info independent protest monitoring group.

Some Russian state-controlled media carried short reports about the protests but they did not feature high in news bulletins.

Russia’s RIA news agency said the Manezhnaya Square in Moscow, adjoining the Kremlin, had been “liberated” by police, who had arrested some participants of an unsanctioned protest against the military operation in Ukraine.

The last Russian protests with a similar number of arrests were in January 2021, when thousands demanded the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny after he was arrested on returning from Germany where he had been recovering from a nerve agent poisoning.

In recent days, there has been mounting speculation as to the scale of Russian troop losses, with one Nato source estimating that up to 15,000 Russian troops have been killed in the past month.

The anonymous officer said that battlefield casualties suffered by Russia are thought to total between 30,000 and 40,000 since Putin launched his invasion on February 24.

On Thursday, British military intelligence said that “Russian forces have almost certainly suffered thousands of casualties during their invasion of Ukraine.”

In an effort to bolster their troops, Russia is likely looking at bringing reservists and conscription, further intelligence has suggested.

An update added: “Russia is likely now looking to mobilize its reservist and conscript manpower, as well as private military companies and foreign mercenaries, to replace these considerable losses.”

The Week

Putin’s ‘Achilles heel’ in Ukraine is Russians believing their ‘soldiers are dying unnecessarily,’ CNN says

Peter Weber, Senior editor – March 24, 2022

Soviet Russia finally pulled out of Afghanistan because fierce Afghan resistance, fueled by U.S.-provided Stinger missiles, was eating away at Russian forces, eventually resulting in 15,000 Russian deaths. “Today the death toll of Russian troops in Ukraine could already match those killed over 10 years in Afghanistan,” CNN’s Nic Robertson reported early Thursday, citing NATO estimates.

“Afghan parallels with today’s war in Ukraine are clear,” Robertson said. “Russia’s enemies, if not Russia, have learned the lessons of the Afghan war.”

“Across dozens of Russian cities, more than 15,000 people have been arrested for protesting the war,” Robertson said. “Recently, anxious parents of troops have begun showing up. Putin’s Achilles heel is the perception soldiers are dying unnecessarily. It’s why he’s tightened reporting laws and swamped Russia with Kremlin propaganda, and it’s why the Ukrainian military shows off battlefield gains — like knocking out Russian tanks or captured Russian soldiers — because they know bad press back home is what the Red Army out of Afghanistan.”

Thus far, Kremlin-friendly media has rarely strayed from the party line. So, for example, this drone footage of Mariupol after weeks of relentless Russian bombing and airstrikes is “shocking” proof on CNN of Russia’s scorched-earth campaign of punishing and killing Ukrainian civilians to achieve otherwise unattainable territorial gains.

On Russian state TV, it is portrayed as Ukrainian forces burning down their own house to thwart the Russians.

But there are signs of low morale among Russian forces in Ukraine, reported to be suffering from frostbite and hunger, not just stalemate and high casualties. And the morale problems aren’t just among Russian ground troops and field officers in Ukraine, CNN says, pointing to a report it obtained by U.S. military attachés in Moscow who “casually inquired” about a Russian major general’s Ukrainian family roots and were shocked when the general’s “stoic demeanor suddenly became flushed and agitated.”