Expect air warfare in Ukraine to ‘fundamentally’ change over next 72 hours, former fighter pilot says
Matt Leach – March 2, 2022
Reuters
The Russian Air Force could soon engage Ukraine at a higher level, a former F-22 fighter pilot told Fox News on Tuesday.
“I think over the next 72 hours, we’re going to see a fundamentally different picture for the Ukrainian Air Force, and I’d expect to see more high-level engagement by the Russian Air Force,” Dan Robinson, a Royal Air Force veteran and former F-22 fighter pilot, said Tuesday evening.
Overnight, Russia launched the largest air assault of the invasion so far, according to. Wednesday marked the seventh day of the invasion.
However, the airspace over Ukraine is still contested and Ukrainian air and missile systems remain “viable and intact,” a senior U.S. Defense Department official said Tuesday.
“The big thing is, though, what is to come? You have to wonder whether the Russian Air Force will emerge over time,” Robinson told Fox News. “That’s the real question.”
“As to why they haven’t emerged so far, there’s speculation around the actual capability of the Russian Air Force versus the perceived capability of what they have,” Robinson said.
“There’s speculation around a lack of sophisticated precision-guided munitions and targeting pods, which allows a certain degree of standoff and to preserve range,” he continued. “Without those, they have to get up close and personal, which drags them to within range of things like Stinger missiles that Ukrainian soldiers can operate on the ground.”
Robinson said implementing a no-fly zone above Ukraine would lead to direct conflict between NATO and Russian pilots.
“That is extremely problematic in terms of the escalatory nature of what is what this potentially could be,” he told Fox News.
President Biden has said U.S. forces will not be used inside Ukraine, and there is no consideration for a no-fly zone.
Photos: Residential areas hit by missile strikes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters 7th day
Dylan Stableford and Yahoo News Photo Staff – March 2, 2022
As Russia’s military assault on Ukraine entered its seventh day Wednesday, images taken by photographers inside the war-torn sovereign nation show the devastation left by the apparent bombings of civilian targets.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city, the roof was blown off a regional police headquarters as well as a university building, officials there said.
A woman cries outside houses damaged by what residents said was a Russian airstrike in Gorenka, Ukraine, on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
In Gorenka, outside the capital, Kyiv, houses were left destroyed by what local residents said was a Russian airstrike.
Even a gym located near a Kyiv TV tower targeted by Russian missiles was nearly burned to the ground.
A gym near a Kyiv TV tower that was damaged in an airstrike Monday still smolders a day later. (Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky decried the attacks on civilian targets as a blatant terror campaign waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had insisted his “special military operation” would not target civilians.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said more than 2,000 civilians have been killed, but that figure could not be immediately verified.
According to the United Nations, more than 800,000 Ukrainians have fled the country since Russia’s attack began.
Those who did not flee have been forced to take up arms, making Molotov cocktails, welding antitank blockades and learning how to use assault rifles in order to defend themselves from advancing Russian forces.
A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces outside a house that residents say was damaged by a Russian airstrike in Gorenka on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)A man inside his apartment damaged by recent shelling in the Ukrainian town of Yasynuvata on Wednesday. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)People remove debris from an apartment building damaged by shelling in Yasynuvata on Wednesday. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)A residential building damaged by shelling in the town of Horlivka, Ukraine, on Wednesday. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)Women inspect debris inside an apartment in a residential building damaged by shelling in Horlivka on Wednesday. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)Destroyed armored vehicles are seen through broken windows of a house in Bucha, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Serhii Nuzhnenko/Reuters)
Moscow says hundreds of Russian troops killed, thousands more injured in Ukraine
David Knowles, Senior Editor – March 2, 2022
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday that 497 Russian troops had been killed and 1,597 injured to date since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine last Thursday.
A military adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offered a sharply different estimate hours later, saying that over 7,000 Russian soldiers had been killed so far and hundreds had been taken prisoner, Reuters reported.
The high number of Russian casualties in Moscow’s first official tally of the war comes as Ukrainian forces have mounted a robust defense of their homeland that seems to have taken the Kremlin by surprise.
Senior Pentagon officials said in closed-door briefings Monday that the number of Russian and Ukrainian military deaths appeared to be the same, the New York Times reported, with about 1,500 killed on each side over the course of the first five days of the conflict.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service put the number of Ukrainian civilians killed even higher. “More than 2,000 Ukrainians died, not counting our defenders,” the service said in a statement.
The United Nations human rights office, meanwhile, said Wednesday that 136 Ukrainian civilians, including 13 children, had been killed in the fighting, while another 400 had been injured.
“The real toll is likely to be much higher,” Liz Throssell, a U.N. spokesperson, told reporters.
On Wednesday, Russian forces stepped up their offensive on Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainian casualty totals have yet to be updated.
Protests against Putin’s war have broken out across Russia, resulting in the arrests of more than 6,800 people. Jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny appealed to his countrymen to continue to take to the streets to protest the war.
“Let’s at least not become a nation of frightened silent people. Of cowards who pretend not to notice the aggressive war against Ukraine unleashed by our obviously insane tsar,” he said through a spokesperson in a message posted to Twitter.
Women clear debris at a residential building in a Kyiv suburb on Feb. 25. (Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images)
Daniel Hoffman, a former top CIA expert on Russia, told Yahoo News on Wednesday that the worst casualties of the war were yet to come.
“So Vladimir Putin, he’s going to burn down Ukraine’s house, and he feels like he can’t exist on this planet if Ukraine is striving for freedom, liberty, and democracy and economic links to the West,” Hoffman said on the “Skullduggery” podcast.
When Russia laid siege on the Chechen capital, Grozny, from December 1994 through February 1995, an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 civilians were killed, according to the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. Moscow put the official number of Russian soldiers killed at 1,376, but U.S. officials believed the tally to be much higher.
During the Syrian government’s four-year siege of the city of Aleppo, Russia aided in that country’s relentless bombing campaign that left an estimated 31,000 civilians dead.
“I am deeply fearful we’re going to see something like Grozny or Aleppo, where Russia goes scorched earth, because they have failed, utterly failed, thus far,” Hoffman said.
Zelensky’s comments suggested that Russia’s invasion harmed its own aims of destabilizing the West and weakening Western alliances.
Russia had cited the possibility of Ukraine and other former Soviet satellite states becoming members of NATO as a reason for invading Ukraine, saying it was acting out of self-defense against the bloc’s eastward expansion.
‘We have truly become one’
“During this time we have had more unity than for over 30 years before,” Zelensky said Wednesday.
“At first we were equally scared, then we felt equally painful. And now we do not care. Except for victory. Except for the truth. Except for peace. Except for the tranquility we want to achieve. Except for the lives of our people, for whom we are worried. Except for Ukraine.
“During this time, we have truly become one. We forgave each other a lot. We started loving each other. We help each other. We are worried for each other.”
Russia has met significant resistance from Ukrainians, with Western intelligence concluding that Russia appeared to have been caught off guard and moving slower than it expected.
EU ‘united’
Zelensky also said the EU had also been united against Russia.
“During this time we have united the European Union already on a new level,” he said. “Higher than formal. Higher than inter-state. At the level of the ordinary people. Millions and millions of Europeans. From the Atlantic Ocean to the suburbs of Kharkiv, where fierce fighting continues.”
He noted the standing ovation he was given after addressing the European Parliament on Tuesday, saying: “When the European parliament stood and applauded us, our struggle, it was an assessment of our efforts. Our unity.”
He later added: “Our diplomats and our friends unite the world for the sake of Ukraine and peace even more.”
The EU has taken unprecedented steps to help Ukraine against Russia, including the introduction of economic sanctions, purchasing and sending weapons, banning Russian planes from flying over its airspace, and supporting Ukrainian refugees.
Ukraine wants EU membership
Zelensky said on Monday that he officially applied to have Ukraine join the EU.
“Indeed over time, they belong to us. They are one of us and we want them in,” she told Euronews.
It is not clear when Ukraine would be able to join even if all member states agreed to its membership, as the joining process is bureaucratic and can be lengthy.
Zelensky applied directly to the European Parliament on Tuesday, saying: “We have proven our strengths, we have proven that, at a minimum, we are exactly the same as you are. Do prove that you are with us.”
Can Europe quit Russian oil — and go green in the process?
Mike Bebernes, Senior Editor – March 2, 2022
“The 360” shows you diverse perspectives on the day’s top stories and debates. 0:19 0:59 State of the Union: Biden announced U.S. and allies will release 60 million barrels from strategic oil reserves 60 million barrels of oil from reserves around the world.
What’s happening
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted the United States and its allies to impose tough sanctions designed to isolate Russia from the world economy. While those sanctions have dealt a major blow to Russia’s financial system, they mostly have not included direct restrictions on the country’s most important industries: oil and gas.
Those exemptions show how deeply reliant the West has become on Russian energy exports, which supply about 40 percent of Europe’s natural gas and a quarter of its crude oil. Governments have warned that shutting off the flow of Russian fossil fuels could cause global energy prices to skyrocket — a shock that would be especially harmful to European countries, which were already dealing with cripplingly high energy costs before the war started.
“We’re not going to do anything which causes an unintended disruption to the flow of energy,” U.S. deputy national security adviser Daleep Singh told reporters last week.
The crisis in Ukraine has highlighted for many world leaders the importance of breaking their energy relationship with Russia. Germany, for example, suspended certification of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the lead-up to the invasion. Kadri Simson, the European Union’s energy commissioner, said Monday that the assault “made our vulnerability painfully clear,” adding that it was unwise to “let any third country destabilize our energy markets or influence our energy choices.”
Why there’s debate
Europe ending or significantly reducing its reliance on Russian oil and gas would represent a major shift in the global energy market, but experts are divided over whether that disruption would be a move forward or a setback for the green energy transition that’s necessary to combat the worst effects of climate change.
Optimists are hopeful that European countries, which have already made aggressive pledges to decarbonize, will double down on their investment in renewables in order to fill the energy gap created by a drawdown in Russian imports. Others say the invasion creates potent new political ground for the green energy push, since advocates can now argue that it’s needed to bolster national security and global stability — on top of the well-documented environmental benefits.
But skeptics fear that pressure to keep energy prices from spiking will push countries to seek out whatever fossil fuels are available to meet their energy needs — including coal, which releases about twice as much carbon as natural gas. It’s also possible that other oil-exporting nations, including the U.S., might ramp up their production to meet surging European demand, they say. And there are concerns that isolating Russia’s economy will make materials needed to produce green energy sources harder to acquire and make it more difficult to pressure Russia — the fourth most prolific carbon emitter in the world — to decarbonize its own economy.
What’s next
It’s possible that the continued assault on Ukraine could inspire western nations to impose direct sanctions on Russia’s fossil fuel industry in the near future. “Nothing is off the table,” President Biden told reporters Wednesday when asked about a potential U.S. ban on Russian oil.
Perspectives
Optimists
Russia’s invasion creates an entirely new rationale for the green energy revolution
“For all we talk about how inexpensive renewables are, and how quickly energy storage is coming down in price, that hasn’t been enough when it appears that ‘just’ the climate is at stake. Now European sovereignty is at stake.” — Daniel Kammen, energy researcher, to Los Angeles Times
Nations and individuals will be more willing to make the sacrifices needed to switch to renewables
“Much of the gas-price premium right now is driven by uncertainty — not knowing what Russian President Vladimir Putin might do next. … Ripping off the Band-Aid now would take uncertainty off the table. It would mean front-loading many of the investments that would need to happen regardless. All that does come with large upfront costs borne by ratepayers, shareholders, and taxpayers alike.” — Gernot Wagner, Bloomberg
Fossil fuel burning may increase in the short term, but over time green energy will thrive
“We may need, for the remaining weeks of this winter, to insure gas supplies for Europe, but by next winter we need to remove that lever. That means an all-out effort to decarbonize that continent, and then our own. It’s not impossible.” — Bill McKibben, Guardian
High fossil fuel prices make renewable alternatives more attractive
“Steep gas prices are, of course, a great selling point for electric cars, not that they need it at this point.” — Froma Harrop, RealClearPolitics
Without Russian gas, countries will be forced to speed up their transition to renewables
“Gas was already, at best, a short-term ‘bridge technology’ that was meant to hold Europe over between phasing out coal and oil (the dirtiest fossil fuels) and the full adoption of renewables. We can now ditch gas sooner than we had planned.” — Paul Hockenos, CNN
Skeptics
Spiking energy prices will create pressure for countries to ramp up fossil fuel burning
“High energy prices also provide grist for those who argue that the costs of the net-zero transition represent an additional and unnecessary burden at a time when many households and businesses are struggling to pay their energy bills. … In a time of inflation and cost-of-living pressures around the world, their arguments will find a ready audience.” — Mark Nicholls, Energy Monitor
Nations may prioritize fossil fuels to reach energy independence as quickly as possible
“The renewed emphasis on energy independence and national security may encourage policymakers to backslide on efforts to decrease the use of fossil fuels that pump deadly greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.” — Patricia Cohen, New York Times
Europe has few viable alternatives to Russian fossil fuels
“The flexibility is there, but each of the options is worse than just burning Russian gas; otherwise, we wouldn’t have burned Russian gas in the first place.” — Georg Zachmann, energy industry analyst, to Scientific American
Building the green energy future will be more difficult without Russia
“Existing plans to transition away from fossil fuels largely rely on siting new energy generation sources and producing consumer electric vehicles — activities that will require lots of metal that Russia produces.” — Jael Holzman, Politico
Hopes of convincing Russia to lower its emissions have become even dimmer
“Any potential for greater climate engagement with Russia before the next major climate meeting in Egypt later this year is off the table for the time being. This is a setback for international climate efforts, given Russia’s role as one of the world’s top five greenhouse gas emitters.” — Ellie Martus and Susan Harris Rimmer, Conversation
Green alternatives will take too long to meet Europe’s immediate energy needs
“Western countries, including the U.S., should follow France’s lead and either expand or relaunch their nuclear-power programs. But there should be no illusions about how long such an effort will take (or how much it will cost) to make a difference. This is not a quick solution, and nor, incidentally, is doubling down on renewables. … The best solution for now is to encourage increased oil and gas production from existing and new fields on both sides of the Atlantic.” — Andrew Stuttaford, National Review.
Putin is determined to ‘burn down Ukraine’s house,’ former CIA operative says
Michael Isikoff, Chief Investigative Correspondent – March 2, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin is now determined to ruthlessly crush Ukrainian resistance no matter what the cost to his country, and the Ukrainians fighting Russian forces are “all going to die,” says a former CIA station chief in Moscow.
In an interview on the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast, Daniel Hoffman — for years, one of the CIA’s top experts on Russia — said the Russian president is “not the Vladimir Putin I was tracking back in the day at the CIA. He’s a different guy.” He says that Putin has dug himself into such a deep hole with the Ukraine invasion that he now no longer believes he has any choice but to level the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has inspired his country and much of the world, becoming “the great 21st century communicator” in resisting Putin’s invasion, he said. But, in the end, “I think Ukraine’s darkest days are ahead of them, tragically,” Hoffman said. “So, Vladimir Putin, he’s going to burn down Ukraine’s house.”
What follows is an edited transcript of Hoffman’s conversation with Michael Isikoff, Chief Investigative Correspondent for Yahoo News, Daniel Klaidman, Yahoo News Editor in Chief, and Victoria Bassetti, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Isikoff: As we sit here today, the reports are of this Russian military convoy, 40 miles long, headed right to Kyiv. What do you expect over the next 24 to 48 hours from the Russians? How far is Vladimir Putin going to go?
I think Ukraine’s darkest days are ahead of them, tragically. I will tell you that this isn’t the Vladimir Putin I was tracking back in the day at CIA. He’s a different guy. He won a lot of wars — a brutal war in Chechnya. He invaded Georgia in 2008, but didn’t try to take Tbilisi. He invaded Ukraine in ’14 and annexed Crimea, and invaded the Donbas, and kind of settled on a frozen conflict there.
All those things were Vladimir Putin playing chess with limited but achievable objectives. This one, Vladimir Putin has altered his risk calculus. He’s playing poker where he might not have the strongest hand. But I am deeply fearful we’re going to see something like Grozny or Aleppo, where Russia goes scorched earth, because they have failed, utterly failed, thus far.
A satellite image shows a military convoy near Ivankiv, Ukraine, on Monday. (Satellite image 2022 Maxar Technologies/Handout via Reuters)
Klaidman: We’ve seen this incredible resistance from the Ukrainians, very inspiring. How does [Putin] deal with that? And, ultimately, is he going to try to just break their spirit by going after civilians?
Russia has a different view of collateral damage, and they have a different view of casualties for their own. In our rules of engagement in the U.S., we do the best we possibly can not to strike civilian targets. For the Russians, just look at the battle of Stalingrad. That’s kind of the way Vladimir Putin sees the world. Think about the poisoning of [Russian dissident Alexander] Litvinenko with radioactive polonium-210. He created a human dirty bomb. There just is an “ends justify whatever means you want to use.” That’s kind of the way that they do things.
And I’ll just tell you a quick story. I asked once, a long time ago, a Russian intelligence officer, I asked him, “What is it about your neighbors and your tactics for dealing with them?” And he said to me, “Listen, let’s just say you have a really nice house, and I don’t. My house is a crappy house. I’m just gonna go burn yours down. That’s kind of the way we think.”
So Vladimir Putin, he’s going to burn down Ukraine’s house, and he feels like he can’t exist on this planet if Ukraine is striving for freedom, liberty, and democracy and economic links to the West. That was where they were headed, and Vladimir Putin can’t let that happen. … And this is why I get back to the risk calculus for Vladimir Putin. He could have probably gotten autonomy for Donbas. He could’ve probably eliminated a bunch of sanctions, and he might’ve been able to extract other concessions from us. … There was no way a week ago that France and Germany were going to admit Ukraine [to NATO].
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, applauds after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address on Tuesday to the European Parliament. (Yves Herman/Reuters)
And now, thanks to Zelensky, who’s an extraordinary leader, it’s NATO joining Ukraine in a fight for freedom. Standing up for what matters. It’s like Zelensky jolted Western democracies out of a post-Cold War slumber, and here they are, taking on a brutal dictator who is an anathema to everything that we believe in. That’s the story for me.
Bassetti: So if Putin is no longer the man that you’ve been studying for the majority of your career, how are Western states today adapting to this new understanding?
I can tell you, the No. 1 recurring question that President Biden is asking the intelligence community is, “Give me the leadership profile on Vladimir Putin. No, no, no, no, no. Not the one from February ’22. I need the one from today.” Because he’s not the same guy. There are all kinds of rumors about whatever might be wrong with him medically. Sen. Marco Rubio said that he had neuropsychological issues. Rubio sits on a Senate intel committee, wouldn’t go into detail about sources and methods, wouldn’t go into further detail about exactly what that means. But that’s a very important statement that he made. … And so what we might see are the Russian elites changing their assessment of Vladimir Putin. Those elites who are watching him and thinking, “Holy s***, we thought this was brinkmanship. And he’s taken us to a war that is destroying our economy.”
Isikoff: You say he’s not the guy you tracked for many years. And yet, many of the examples you cited about Putin’s brutality have been a matter of public record for decades — the horrific leveling of Chechnya, the polonium poisoning of Litvinenko. That was 2006. Then the invasion of Georgia was 2008. And as you look back, did we not do enough to deter him much much earlier?
So you have a good long list there. I’ll add a few more. Downing a Malaysian airliner. Interfering in our elections. And European elections. He has gotten away with a lot. And it’s telling that after — I remember this extremely well — after Russia invaded Georgia, and what’s the policy of the Obama administration? Reset. Excuse me, but at the time, I was thinking, like, “What the f***, reset? Are you kidding me? With this guy, after what he just did?”
An Emergencies Ministry member walks amid debris from a Malaysia Airlines plane crash in Ukraine’s Donetsk region in 2014. (Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters)
Isikoff: One quick follow up on U.S. policy over the years. In 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. And the United States and Western allies went to war to expel him. Now, we have Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, and President Biden has taken the use of U.S. troops off the table. How do you square the way we responded to Saddam Hussein in 1991, with how we are responding to Vladimir Putin in 2022?
I’m glad you asked that, because I’ve thought so much about it. I had already begun serving in the government when Saddam invaded Kuwait. And President George Herbert Walker Bush built a global coalition. And we deployed in defense of Saudi Arabia, and then launched that invasion. But it was a global coalition. And we took the lead. … The difference obviously is that Russia has nuclear weapons.
And what this administration is trying to do is thread the needle. … So we’re going to try to provide Ukraine with the military and humanitarian assistance that they need. We’re going to use lots of economic pressure on Russia. But direct, kinetic conflict? No. … And so I think, if it were me, I would have suggested that President Biden not rule anything out. I don’t know why he said we aren’t going to put troops there. You don’t need to tell the enemy what we’re doing or what we’re thinking about. He should’ve said, “Look, everything’s on the table.”
And the other thing I would just say is, in contrast to 1990-1991, the guy who’s built the coalition? It’s Zelensky. … What has brought us all together has been this Ukrainian freedom fighter, a Jewish comedian is kicking the s*** out of Vladimir Putin. He is a 21st century leader who understands social media and understands how to get the message out to his own people and to get the kind of support that he needs internationally. If you listen to his speech today to the European Parliament, I mean, just extraordinary ability that he has to communicate. He is the great 21st century communicator. … He’s got the world — at least those of us in the West who believe in freedom, liberty and democracy — rising up in support of those sacred principles, enshrined in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights, on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Zelensky during an interview with Reuters in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Umit Bektas/Reuters)
Klaidman: So, Dan, when you were in the intelligence community, you were paid to understand the leaders of rival nations, including Putin. I know that you can’t be inside his head, but you must have theories as to why he has evolved the way he has. I mean, you know, from being this calculating, cunning person who knows where the limits are, to what he’s doing now. What is your theory?
So my theory is he’s a guy who likes to project strength. He’s a guy who likes to ride his horses half-naked and do judo throws and look like a tough guy. But time is not on Russia’s side, and he’s weaker [than] before he attacked Ukraine. He is weaker than he was five years ago, 10 years ago. He is haunted by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Arab Spring, neighbors that are prosperous, NATO members like the Baltic states that are prosperous economically. And he’s haunted by the fact that his own country, men and women, are extremely disenchanted with his leadership. And, so he sees this threat from Ukraine that is going to blow right back on his regime’s security in a way that he just can’t allow, because he’s weaker. He can’t withstand it anymore.
You know, he killed Boris Nemtsov in 2015. … I mean, good guy. I met him in Estonia. Smart guy. Why did he do that? Well, he did it ’cause he’s gotta show he’s the most ruthless guy. You know, that’s the reason. Why did he try to kill [Alexei] Navalny with a banned chemical nerve agent that’s got bread crumbs leading all the way back to the Kremlin? Same thing with [Sergei] Skripal. Because you’ve gotta show that, “If you mess with me, if you betray me, I will kill you, and I’m gonna do it in a way that you’re not gonna like.”
You know, he could have taken a hammer to Skripal’s head and killed him. Same thing with Navalny. But they had to show, Putin had to show that he was still the most ruthless guy. He’s gotta show his own, his own guys, that he’s that. And he’s gotta show the population writ large.
The last thing I wanna tell you is he lived through the KGB coup in 1991 against [Mikhail] Gorbachev when the population was up in arms about the failures, the expectations were rising with glasnost and perestroika. But then they realized, behind that, is zero.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Moscow on Wednesday. (Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via Reuters)
And, so, the KGB saw that Gorbachev just wasn’t the guy. You had to be more ruthless, not less ruthless. And they removed him. And that is why Vladimir Putin ultimately — perceiving himself as weaker than he’s ever been, in my estimation — lashes out at Ukraine. And that has ramifications for how this ends, which is only gonna get worse. And the ultimate question is whether the Russian military decides they’ve had enough committing war crimes and they decide, “You know what? This Vladimir Putin guy is gonna have to be thrown off to the side, cast aside, take the blame for all of this. ‘We were just following orders, sir,’” and move on.
Bassetti: Is there any off-ramp from this right now, aside from what you just described, which is either complete devastation to Ukraine or an internal coup?
Vladimir Putin is superclose to not having an off-ramp. Could he have one today? He might. But he’s also got to know that even if he goes and chooses the diplomatic off-ramp, his own inner circle is going to say, “What the f*** did you just do to our economy and our standing in the world? And you made us look pretty bad too.” And then the knives come out and he gets stabbed in the back and the face, and he’s done.
Isikoff: You have been a Fox News contributor for a number of years now. I’d like to know what goes through your mind when you hear somebody like Tucker Carlson on Fox News defending Vladimir Putin, saying, “He’s never done anything to you or me. Why should we support Ukraine over Russia?” Which is a message that is resonating with some large segment of the Fox News audience.
I’ve never been on Tucker’s show, but I’ll leave my Fox News colleagues out of it. I’ll just say that, probably like everybody, when I watch the news — and I watch lots of different programs, and I am a faithful listener of the “Skullduggery” podcast — there’s things that I agree with, and there are things that I don’t agree with. And at the end of the day, all I can do — and I found this at CIA too — all I can do is deliver my analysis with no predisposed ideological bias.
A promo of Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the News Corp. building in New York City. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
Isikoff: Let me just ask it another way, leaving aside your Fox News colleagues. Are you concerned that Russian propaganda is permeating the American political dialogue, and we have folks in this country who are effectively fifth columnists — opposing U.S. policy, supporting Russian policies?
I think there’s a spectrum there. So, in our domestic scene, there is a swath of people in this country who say, “I’m tired of the Iraq, Afghanistan wars. I want out.” Very similar to the isolationism that we saw in the ’20s and ’30s. … And that’s a swath of our population [that] are susceptible to the, “Hey, Ukraine’s far away. Why should we care about Ukraine? What does that matter?” What I always tell people is the lesson of the last century was that when we are not involved with the major issues of the world, then we pay the price.
Klaidman: Before we wrap here, I just want to go back to Putin’s tactics against the Ukrainians. There was a lot of talk about how he was going to send in teams of saboteurs and assassins and either kidnap or assassinate Zelensky. That hasn’t happened yet.
Look, I think that would have been part of the plan, to send in mercenaries to conduct a “non-attributable decapitation strike” against Ukrainian government leadership. They would’ve sent them in weeks, months before the attack in order to be there to conduct surveillance and mount these attacks. The fact that Zelensky is still alive means they haven’t been successful. But I don’t doubt that they’re there. I don’t doubt that the FSB is there. … I also think Ukraine knows their neighbor. And so they’ve taken countermeasures, and good on ’em for doing it.
Bassetti: I have a question for you. You said there are really dark days ahead for Ukraine. Now, how do you assess how long they’re gonna be able to hold out?
They’ll all die. They’ll hold out to the end, until they’re all dead.
Some Russian Troops are Surrendering or Sabotaging Vehicles, Pentagon Official Says
Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes – March 2, 2022
Pro-Russian troops in the separatist-controlled settlement of Mykolaivka, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Reuters) (Reuters)
WASHINGTON — Plagued by poor morale as well as fuel and food shortages, some Russian troops in Ukraine have surrendered en masse or sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid fighting, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday.
Some entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting a surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense, the official said. A significant number of the Russian troops are young conscripts who are poorly trained and ill-prepared for the all-out assault. And in some cases, Russian troops have deliberately punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.
The Pentagon official declined to say how the military made these assessments — presumably a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks may be across the sprawling battlefield. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational developments.
But taken together, these factors may help explain why Russian forces, including an ominous 40-mile convoy of tanks and armored vehicles near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, have come to a near crawl in recent days, U.S. officials said.
Besides dealing with shortages of fuel, food and spare parts, the Pentagon official said, Russian commanders leading that armored column toward Kyiv may also be “regrouping and rethinking” their battle plans, making adjustments on the fly to gain momentum for what U.S. intelligence and military officials say is an inevitable push in the next several days to encircle and ultimately capture the capital.
“They have a lot of power available to them,” said the Pentagon official, adding that 80% of the more than 150,000 Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s borders have now joined the fight.
But U.S. analysts have been struck by the “risk-averse behavior” of such a large force, the Pentagon official said. Russia launched an amphibious landing to seize Mariupol, a pivotal port city on the Sea of Azov, but landed forces around 40 miles from the city. That allowed the Russians extra time and space to mount an invasion, but also gave the city’s defenders time to prepare. Overnight, Russian troops surrounded Mariupol.
Russia’s vaunted air force has yet to gain air superiority over Ukraine, with Russian warplanes thwarted by Ukrainian fighter jets and a surprisingly resilient and potent array of air defenses, from shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to much larger surface-to-air weapons, the Pentagon official said.
For Russian forces coming out of Belarus, logistics problems have proved stubborn, a European official said Tuesday.
Before the invasion, U.S. and British intelligence had raised questions about the supply chain for the Russian troops in Belarus. During military exercises there, some of the soldiers were getting inadequate supplies of food and fuel, according to independent analysts. But U.S. officials told allies that the Russians had fixed those problems by mid-February, which was one reason that U.S. warnings about the invasion intensified in the middle of last month, according to the European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational developments.
But the challenges that Russian forces have faced show that their supply chain troubles have not been completely resolved, the European official said.
The logistics failures may help explain the presence of the long, slow-moving convoy of military equipment that is coming toward Kyiv, a tactical failure that is presenting a key target for the Ukrainian military, the European official said.
Russian officials, the European official said, expected to have secured air supremacy, at least around Kyiv. But the fact that Ukrainian air defense systems were still operating has put both Russian aircraft and the convoy of equipment in danger.
Russian Troop Deaths Expose a Potential Weakness of Putin’s Strategy
Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt – March 2, 2022
A Russian army service member gets off an armoured personnel carrier BTR-82 during drills at the Kuzminsky range in the southern Rostov region, Russia January 26, 2022. REUTERS/Sergey Pivovarov (Sergey Pivovarov / reuters)
WASHINGTON — When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, President Vladimir Putin was so worried about Russian casualty figures coming to light that authorities accosted journalists who tried to cover funerals of some of the 400 troops killed during that one-month campaign.
But Moscow may be losing that many soldiers daily in Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine, American and European officials said. The mounting toll for Russian troops exposes a potential weakness for the Russian president at a time when he is still claiming, publicly, that he is engaged only in a limited military operation in Ukraine’s separatist east.
No one can say with certainty just how many Russian troops have died since last Thursday, when they began what is turning into a long march to Kyiv, the capital. Some Russian units have put down their arms and refused to fight, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Major Ukrainian cities have withstood the onslaught thus far.
American officials had expected the northeastern city of Kharkiv to fall in a day, for example, but Ukrainian troops there have fought back and regained control despite furious rocket fire. The bodies of Russian soldiers have been left in areas surrounding Kharkiv. Videos and photos on social media show charred remains of tanks and armored vehicles, their crews dead or wounded.
The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that “there are dead and wounded” Russian troops but offered no numbers. He insisted Ukrainian losses were “many times” higher. Ukraine has said its forces have killed more than 5,300 Russian troops.
Neither side’s claims have been independently verified, and Biden administration officials have refused to discuss casualty figures publicly. But one American official put the Russian losses as of Monday at 2,000, an estimate with which two European officials concurred.
Senior Pentagon officials told lawmakers in closed briefings on Monday that Russian and Ukrainian military deaths appeared to be the same, at around 1,500 on each side in the first five days, congressional officials said. But they cautioned that the figures — based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports — were estimates.
For a comparison, nearly 2,500 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan over 20 years of war.
For Putin, the rising death toll could damage any remaining domestic support for his Ukrainian endeavors. Russian memories are long — and mothers of soldiers, in particular, American officials say, could easily hark back to the 15,000 troops killed when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, or the thousands killed in Chechnya.
Russia has deployed field hospitals near the front lines, say military analysts, who have also monitored ambulances driving back and forth from Russian units to hospitals in neighboring Belarus, Moscow’s ally.
“Given the many reports of over 4,000 Russians killed in action, it is clear that something dramatic is happening,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, who was NATO’s supreme allied commander before his retirement. “If Russian losses are this significant, Vladimir Putin is going to have some difficult explaining to do on his homefront.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, added, “There are going to be a lot of Russians going home in body bags and a lot of Russian families grieving the longer this goes on.”
In particular, Pentagon officials and military analysts said it was surprising that Russian soldiers had left behind the bodies of their comrades.
“It’s been shocking to see that they’re leaving their fallen brethren behind on the battlefield,” said Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration. “Eventually the moms will be like, ‘Where’s Yuri? Where’s Maksim?’”
Already, the Ukrainian government has begun answering that question. On Sunday, authorities launched a website that they said was meant to help Russian families track down information about soldiers who may have been killed or captured. The site, which states it was created by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, says it is providing videos of captured Russian soldiers, some of them injured. The pictures and videos change throughout the day.
“If your relatives or friends are in Ukraine and participate in the war against our people — here you can get information about their fate,” the site says.
The name of the site, www.200rf.com, is a grim reference to Cargo 200, a military code word that was used by the Soviet Union to refer to the bodies of soldiers put in zinc-lined coffins for transport away from the battlefield; it is a euphemism for troops killed in war.
The website is part of a campaign launched by Ukraine and the West to counter what American officials characterize as Russian disinformation, which includes Russia’s insistence before the invasion that the troops surrounding Ukraine were simply there for military exercises. Information and the battle for public opinion around the world have come to play an outsize part in a war that has come to seem like a David vs. Goliath contest.
On Monday, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, read out before the General Assembly what he said were the final text messages from a Russian soldier to his mother. They were obtained, he said, by Ukrainian forces after the soldier was killed. “We were told that they would welcome us and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass,” he wrote, according to Kyslytsya. “They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard.”
The decision to read those texts, Russia experts and Pentagon officials said, was a not-so-veiled reminder to Putin of the role Russian mothers have had in bringing attention to military losses that the government tried to keep secret. In fact, a group now called the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia played a pivotal part in opening up the military to public scrutiny and in influencing perceptions of military service, Julie Elkner, a Russia historian, wrote in The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies.
On Tuesday, a senior Pentagon official said entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense. In some cases, Russian troops have punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.
The Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operational developments, declined to say how the military had made these assessments — presumably from a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks might be across the sprawling battlefield.
Images of body bags or coffins, or soldiers killed and left on the battlefield, a Biden administration official said, would prove the most damaging to Putin at home.
Ukrainian officials are using the reports and images on social media of Russian casualties to try to undercut the morale of the invading Russian forces.
On Monday, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, offered Russian soldiers cash and amnesty if they surrendered.
“Russian soldier! You were brought to our land to kill and die,” he said. “Do not follow criminal orders. We guarantee you a full amnesty and 5 million rubles if you lay down your arms. For those who continue to behave like an occupier, there will be no mercy.”
Putin’s brutal record in Chechnya and Syria is ominous for Ukraine
Do those fights preview the present war?
Jason Fields – March 2, 2022
Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock
Wars aren’t civilized. The very definition of war includes death and cruelty, and everyone who dies has loved ones who mourn them.
But some wars are more brutal than others, more deadly to civilians, and Russia’s recent wars in Chechnya and Syria stand out. Can those fights offer a preview of what the world can expect in Ukraine?
The Russian Federation fought its first war against Chechnya in 1994. It went on until 1996, was hugely unpopular at home, and showed that what had been a Soviet bear of a military was now a toothless Russian tiger. Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin had to settle for a ceasefire over a definitive victory.
The second Chechenwar began in 1999. It wasthen-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s war, and it was to the death. A “they make a desert and call it peace” kind of war. The Chechen capital of Grozny — already damaged by the first war — was left as a hole in a map, called the most destroyed city on the planet by the United Nations. Almost nothing was left standing, nearly no one spared.
As many as 250,000 civilians were killed in the combined Chechen wars, along with many thousands more combatants on both sides. Reports of rape, arson, torture, and other crimes by Russian soldiers were widespread —and cast as a wholly necessary evil by those forces. “Without bespredel [no limits warfare], we’ll get nowhere in Chechnya,” a 21-year-old Russian conscript told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “We have to be cruel to them. Otherwise, we’ll achieve nothing.”
The Russians employed infantry, special forces, tanks, and artillery, as well as carpet-bombing parts of Chechnya, with seemingly little regard for whether civilians were underneath their planes.
There’s also evidence of cluster bombs being employed. These are larger bombs that contain smaller explosive munitions inside; when the larger shell detonates, the smaller bombs spread with no control over where they will land. They’re banned by international treaty largely because they typically cause more civilian casualties than other bombs,though neither Russia nor the United States have signed that pact.
Russia again used cluster bombs in Syria, a war it joined in 2015, a war Putin, now president, fought largely through the air, withSyrian President Bashar al-Assad’s troops providing ground forces.
The bombing was not indiscriminate. It was worse: Hospitals were considered legitimate targets by Russian commanders. Even civilians whose only concern was the safety of others — rescue workers called the White Helmets because of the hardhats they wore — were killed while they were responding to earlier attacks.
Russia denies civilian deaths from any of the air strikes.
The city of Aleppo, Syria, was particularly hard hit in a siege that went on for four years. It was ended in 2016 in large part by Russian air power. And what had been an ancient center of culture and the largest city in modern Syria was a sea of broken concrete and bent rebar.
Thousands of civilians died. That was inevitable given the tactics chosen:“Using that amount of firepower in an urban area with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of civilians, predictably killed hundreds of civilians,” Human Rights Watch reported in 2016. “Those who ordered and carried out unlawful attacks should be tried for war crimes.”
So what about Ukraine? Rocket attacks have hit Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, killing dozens of people. Bombs are falling on Kyiv, the capital. But, so far, Russia hasn’t churned these cities into rubble, though it has the power to do so a thousand times over.
But that says nothing about the future as Putin becomes more frustrated and angry. The war isn’t going the way he expected. And historically, Russian tactics have varied little, with cities being pounded before the ground assault begins, Russia expert Mark Galeotti told The Week.
“They bomb them into rubble and put a flag on top,” he said. “In Ukraine, they have mass firepower in the van, and we fear that this is going to get very ugly.”
Russia threatens to block Wikipedia over Ukraine invasion article
Kris Holt, Contributing Writer – March 2, 2022
DeFodi Images via Getty Images
Editors at the Russian version of Wikipedia say the country’s communications regulator has threatened to block the site. They shared a notice from Roskomnadzor, which claimed a page about the Ukraine invasion includes “illegally distributed information,” such as the number of Russian military casualties and those of Ukrainian civilians and children, according to Reuters.
The regulator demanded that editors remove that information from the article, which is called “Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022).” Roskomnadzor said that if editors don’t comply, it will block all of Wikipedia in Russia. Currently, new and unregistered users aren’t able to edit the article in order to protect it from vandalism.
The article includes casualty estimates from both the Ukrainian and Russian governments, as Motherboard notes. As of Tuesday, it included claims from Ukraine that 352 civilians and more than 110 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, while 1,684 civilians had been wounded. The country said Russia had sustained 5,710 Russian military casualties. Russia, however, claimed two of its soldiers and 200 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed.
Editors of Wikipedia’s Russian site may add more sources for the information, but one told Motherboard they likely won’t respond to the threat otherwise. Roskomnadzor has issued several other warnings to the site over the years.
“The invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the senseless loss of life and has also been accompanied by information warfare online,” the Wikimedia Foundation said on Tuesday. “The spread of disinformation about the ongoing crisis affects the safety of people who depend on facts to make life-and-death decisions and interferes with everyone’s right to access open knowledge.”
It added that it’s “working with affected communities to identify potential threats to information on Wikimedia projects, and supporting volunteer editors and administrators who serve as a first line of defense against manipulation of facts and knowledge.”
Since the start of the invasion, Russian regulators have restricted access to Twitter and Facebook. They have also demanded that tech companies remove restrictions on state media channels. Facebook, YouTube and TikTok all blocked RT and Sputnik in Europe. Twitter has placed labels on tweets from Russian state media outlets.
Meanwhile, the former head of Yandex’s news operations has accused the Russian search giant of censoring information about the invasion. In a note to his former colleagues posted on Facebook, Lev Gershenzon urged them to “stop being accomplices to a terrible crime” and, if they were unable to do anything else to change things, to quit.
