Category: Ukraine War

Business Insider

Russian officers who hadn’t been paid by Moscow sold key intel on the Black Sea Fleet to Ukrainian resistance fighters. Then the headquarters blew up.

Jake Epstein – September 25, 2023

• Russian officers reportedly leaked sensitive intel on the Black Sea Fleet to Ukrainian partisans.
• A resistance group told the Kyiv Post that the officers hadn’t received salary payments from Moscow.
• Ukrainian later targeted the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in a huge missile strike last week.

After missing their anticipated salary payments, Russian officers decided to leak sensitive information about Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet to a Ukrainian partisan movement. The intelligence later paved the way for a devastating missile strike on the fleet’s headquarters in the occupied Crimean peninsula, Ukrainian media reported.

Ukrainian resistance fighters told the Kyiv Post in a recent interview that they managed to gather information about high-ranking Russian commanders from officers who were frustrated by Moscow’s failure to pay their salaries on time. The officers were financially compensated in exchange for the information, which was then passed along to state agencies and reportedly used to plan last week’s attack on the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters.

“Delays in payments alone do not force the military armed forces of the Russian Federation to go against the Russian authorities,” a spokesperson for the partisan movement of Ukrainians and Tatars in Crimea (ATESH) told the Kyiv Post, which revealed details of the arrangement in a Monday report. “But the financial reward only helps them to decide on cooperation with the ATESH movement, it serves as an additional incentive.”

Kyiv’s forces on Friday bombarded the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in Sevastopol, located on the southwestern edge of Crimea, with several Western-made Storm Shadow long-range cruise missiles. Videos and photographs of the attack showed the moment one of the missiles slammed into the building, as well as the major structural damage that the facility suffered as a result.

The Ukrainian military later said that it timed the strike to coincide with a meeting of Russia’s naval leadership. On Monday, Kyiv’s Special Operations Forces said 34 people were killed — including Adm. Viktor Sokolov, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet — and another 105 were injured. Insider was unable to immediately and independently confirm the claims.

It is not clear how much money was offered to the Russian officers, nor are the identities of these officers known. ATESH said they had access to activities of the Black Sea Fleet’s leadership though. The group said information was passed to state agencies like the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), the latter of which confirmed to the Kyiv Post that it has worked with partisans to help target Russian positions around Crimea.

“The Russian military is well aware of the existence of the partisan movement and throw all their forces and means to suppress it and identify our agents,” the ATESH spokesperson said. “The growing resistance among the Crimeans confuses them very much.”

The strike on the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters marked the latest in a string of Ukrainian attacks over the past few weeks targeting high-value Russian positions and assets around Crimea, which Kyiv has vowed to liberate from nearly a decade under Russian occupation.

These incursions include the destruction of multiple S-400 air-defense systems, attacks on an air base and on a command post belonging to the Black Sea Fleet, and a massive missile strike on a shipyard in Sevastopol. Western intelligence assessed that the assault damaged two ships while also delivering a long-term blow to Moscow’s maritime logistics and operations, and Ukraine’s military claimed dozens of Russian sailors were killed.

“Crimea will definitely be demilitarized and liberated,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote on social media after the Friday strikes on the headquarters. “Merchant ships will return to the Black Sea. And the Russian warships will eventually take their rightful place, turning into an iconic underwater museum for divers that will attract tourists from all over the world. To a free Ukrainian Crimea.”

Business Insider

Russia is exhausting its resources and ‘a reckoning is coming,’ says Ukraine’s spy chief

Thibault Spirlet – September 18, 2023

• Russia is running out of military resources, Ukraine’s spy chief told The Economist.
• Kyrylo Budanov cited Russia’s struggling mobilization and Putin’s meeting with Kim Jong Un.
• Budanov predicts Russia’s supply of weapons will dry up by 2026, if not sooner.

Russia is running out of reserve troops and weapons it desperately needs to sustain its fighting in Ukraine, Ukraine’s intelligence chief said.

“Contrary to what the Russian Federation declares, it has absolutely no strategic reserve,” Kyrylo Budanov told The Economist in an interview published on Sunday.

Budanov cited Russia’s underperforming troops, its poor-quality equipment, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un, as evidence for his claim.

“If everything is fine and Russia has enough resources, why are they looking for them all over the world? The answer is obvious. There is nothing to extract any more,” he said.

Budanov pointed to the “premature” deployment of Russia’s 25th Combined Arms Army in early August, which he said had only 80% of the manpower and 55% of the equipment it needed to operate effectively.

The UK Ministry of Defence also reported earlier this month that Russia had likely deployed the 25th early, in August instead of December.

It’s likely that it was “rushed into action early” as Russia “continues to grapple with an over-stretched force along the front and Ukraine continues its counter-offensive on three different axes,” the MOD said.

While Russia is reportedly poised to step up its mobilization drive, Budanov told The Economist that head count is the only obvious advantage that Russia retains over Ukraine.

When it comes to Russian human resources “the quality is low, but the quantity is sufficient,” he said.

That’s not the case for military hardware. Given what he called Russia’s dwindling military resources, Budanov predicted that Russia’s economy will survive only until 2025, and its flow of weapons will dry up in 2026, or “perhaps earlier,” he told the outlet.

“A reckoning is coming,” Burdanov said, per The Economist.

Later in the interview, Burdanov acknowledged that Ukraine also risks running out of resources, but he insisted his country has Western allies ready to supply them with aid, whereas Russia is dependent on itself.

While some Ukrainian officials have said they are noticing a “shift” in their partners’ readiness to continue supplying support at the same level, Budanov said he had “good intelligence” about realities in the West.

“Warehouses in Western countries are not completely empty. No matter what anyone says,” he added. “We can see this very clearly as an intelligence agency.”

The New York Times

With Prigozhin’s Death, Putin Projects a Message of Power

Anton Troianovski and Valerie Hopkins  – August 25, 2023

Just as the news broke Wednesday of the presumed death of mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, President Vladimir Putin of Russia was presiding over a televised World War II anniversary ceremony on a dark stage lit dramatically in red.

He held a moment of silence, flanked by service members in dress uniforms, while a metronome’s beats sounded, like the slow ticking of a clock: Tock. Tock. Tock.

The eerie split screen — the reported fiery demise of the man who launched an armed rebellion in June and the Russian president telegraphing the state’s military might — may have been coincidental. But it underscored the imagery of dominance and power that Putin, 18 months into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, appears more determined than ever to project.

Prigozhin may have been brutally effective, throwing tens of thousands of his fighters into the maw of the battle for Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, tying up Ukrainian forces in the process and hobbling Kyiv’s ability to stage a counteroffensive. His internet “troll farm” helped the Kremlin interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, while his mercenary empire helped Russia exert influence across Africa and the Middle East.

But with his June rebellion, Prigozhin threatened something even more sensitive: Putin’s own hold on power. After the crash of Prigozhin’s plane Wednesday, the Kremlin appears to be sending the message that no degree of effectiveness and achievement can protect someone from punishment for violating Putin’s loyalty.

“Everyone’s afraid,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with ties to the Kremlin, said of the reaction among the Russian elite to the plane crash Wednesday that Western officials theorize was caused by an explosion on board. “It’s just that everyone sees that anything is possible.”

Never before has someone so central to Russia’s ruling establishment been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination, said Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst.

“This is a rather harsh precedent,” Vinogradov said, adding that the Kremlin appeared to be doing little to dissuade Russians of the view that it had sanctioned Prigozhin’s killing. After all, if members of the ruling elite concluded that one of the Putin system’s most powerful players had been killed against the Kremlin’s wishes, it would send a devastating signal of Putin’s loss of control.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Friday that the suggestion by foreign officials that the Kremlin was behind Prigozhin’s death was an “absolute lie.”

To some, the fact that Prigozhin was able to survive for two months after staging his rebellion was more surprising than the crash of his private jet. In an address to the nation on June 24, as Prigozhin’s forces were marching on Moscow and already in control of a city of a million people in Russia’s southwest, Putin accused the warlord of “betrayal.”

And betrayal, Putin has said previously, is the one act that cannot be forgiven. So when Putin appeared to strike a deal with Prigozhin allowing him to retreat safely to neighboring Belarus, the act struck some Russians as a sign of the president losing control. The view was magnified when photographs surfaced of Prigozhin meeting with African officials on the sidelines of Putin’s marquee summit with African leaders in St. Petersburg in July.

“After he ‘forgave’ Prigozhin, it was understood by those around him as weakness,” said Alexei Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station before the Kremlin shut it down last year.

Venediktov, in an interview in Moscow on Thursday, argued that Prigozhin’s apparent death had strengthened Putin’s dominance in the Russian political system after the chaos of the rebellion. Now, “Putin has shown his elite,” Venediktov went on, that “any betrayal will be found out.”

U.S. officials are increasingly certain that Prigozhin was killed in Wednesday’s crash, and that Putin ordered the assassination. But when it comes to the power dynamics inside Russia’s ruling elite, whether Putin personally ordered the attack may be beside the point: What matters is that Prigozhin suffered a violent death after Putin publicly condemned him.

“He called him a traitor,” Remchukov said. “And that was enough for everyone to see that this person is no longer invulnerable.”

When Putin broke his silence about the plane crash Thursday, some 24 hours after it happened, he described Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate.” Putin revealed that his personal ties with Prigozhin dated back to the early 1990s, and he acknowledged for the first time that he had personally asked Prigozhin to carry out tasks on his behalf.

“He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results, for himself and, when I asked him about it, for our common cause,” Putin said.

Prigozhin had long been suspected of acting in the shadows in Putin’s interest while giving the Kremlin plausible deniability. His forces deployed to eastern Ukraine in 2014, back when Putin was stoking a separatist war there while insisting he had nothing to do with it. In 2016, Prigozhin’s internet “troll farm” intervened in U.S. politics as part of the Kremlin’s attempt to swing the presidential election to Donald Trump.

But what Putin left unsaid in his brief eulogy of Prigozhin was that by turning against the Russian president after decades of devoted service, Prigozhin may have signed his own death sentence.

On Friday, another longtime confidant of Putin, Alexei Dyumin, issued a statement that made the message a little clearer. Dyumin, a former bodyguard of Putin who is now the governor of a region south of Moscow, said he had known Prigozhin “as a true patriot, a decisive and fearless man.” He said he mourned the crash’s victims and all Wagner fighters who had died in Ukraine, and added: “You can forgive mistakes and even cowardice, but never betrayal. They were not traitors.”

The apparent subtext was that Prigozhin’s soldiers and commanders were loyal men worthy of respect. But it also hinted at the notion that if Prigozhin himself was a traitor — as Putin had said — then he may have deserved his death.

But Prigozhin’s death also carries risks for the Kremlin. In Ukraine, Wagner was seen as one of Russia’s most effective and brutal fighting forces, exacting and taking enormous casualties in the monthslong battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

In Africa, where Prigozhin built a mercenary empire propping up autocrats loyal to Moscow in countries such as Mali and the Central African Republic, it is far from clear whether Wagner will be able to retain its footprint. Wagner’s top military commander, Dmitri Utkin, was listed as a passenger alongside Prigozhin on the plane that crashed, according to Russian authorities.

Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Putin who is now a political consultant based in Israel, said the Kremlin was most likely behind the plane crash, and he argued that the risky decision to kill Prigozhin to send a signal of deterrence revealed the president’s fears of losing power.

“To send this signal, Putin decided to risk a bunch of projects,” Gallyamov wrote on social media. “This is important for understanding what his priorities are right now: maintaining power, not external expansion.”

Putin has also long made it clear that he sees his personal interests as inextricable from those of the Russian state. “He believes that if something is important for keeping him in power, then all other concerns are secondary,” said Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University at St. Petersburg.

It’s a philosophy that Vyacheslav Volodin, the chair of Russia’s lower house of parliament, summed up simply earlier this year: “As long as there is Putin, there is Russia.”