Month: April 2022

Fortune

Russian official admits sanctions are crippling the economy as the country grapples with a selloff and mass shortages

Christiaan Hetzner – April 22, 2022

The ruble may not be showing it, but Western economic sanctions imposed against Russia are working.

In revealing testimony before the Duma parliament, the head of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) told the country’s lawmakers she had to throw everything but the kitchen sink just to prevent a full-blown run on the banking system.

“The sanctions imposed against Russia affected the situation in the financial sector, spurred the demand for foreign currencies, and caused fire sales of financial assets, a cash outflow from banks, and surging demand for goods,” said Elvira Nabiullina in prepared remarks first published in English on Friday.

The frank assessment of Russia’s economic problems contrasts sharply with political attacks launched against the current U.S. administration for a sanctions policy that failed to force Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.

Presenting the CBR’s annual report to parliament this week, Nabiullina painted a picture to lawmakers of just how grim the situation was that confronted her.

Depositors withdrew 2.4 trillion rubles in the first weeks after the war broke out, eating up a year’s worth of bank profits and a third of its accumulated capital cushion.

Without the imposition of strict capital controls, there would have been “a series of defaults and a domino effect” throughout the financial system, she argued.

It doesn’t end there, either, not by a long shot, as businesses have flashbacks to what it was like when the coronavirus pandemic hit.

“Loan repayment holidays were resumed. Currently the demand for them is comparable with the first month [of] the 2020 lockdown.”

Numerous moratoriums have also been granted that ease the regulatory requirements for banks, with accountants effectively allowed to freeze the value of the assets on their balance sheets at artificially high pre-crisis levels.

Marking them down to reflect the reality of Russia’s shrinking economy would only trigger a crippling wave of deleveraging among lenders—either through divestments, a withdrawal of credit to the economy, or a mixture of both.

“Today’s scale of the regulatory easing is unprecedented,” she admitted, arguing that otherwise easing measures would not have been commensurate to the scale of problems faced.

Since foreign reinsurers are canceling their contracts with Russian companies, Nabiullina’s central bank was forced to hike the guaranteed capital to the Russian National Reinsurance company 10-fold to ensure there was enough reserves to cover insured losses.

Pain only now beginning

While all of these measures and many more the CBR instituted may have prevented a meltdown in the banking system, companies starved of key raw materials and choked off from their export markets will experience severe pain as they scramble to adjust.

“The sanctions have affected the financial market, but now they will start to impact the real economy increasingly more significantly,” the governor said.

Despite inflation surpassing 9% in February, her monetary policy committee will target a return only back to 4% for 2024. Nor would they intervene if consumer prices run hot in the meantime.

Nabiullina said this was a natural and inevitable process as supply chains adjust to the sanctions. The central bank, in other words, is helpless in this regard as hiking its 17% benchmark rate would not resolve the coming supply-side restrictions.

“Currently this problem might not be as acute because the economy still has inventories, but we can see that the sanctions are being tightened almost every day,” Nabiullina added, predicting there was no way of telling how long this will potentially last.

“Already in the second quarter, beginning of the third quarter, we will actively enter a period of structural transformation and the search for new business models for many enterprises.”

Translation: Russian companies haven’t even begun to feel the pain.

Associated Press

Ukraine battered again; Zelenskyy says US officials to visit

David Keyton and Yesica Fisch and – April 22, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces in Ukraine tried to storm a steel plant housing soldiers and civilians in the southern city of Mariupol on Saturday in an attempt to crush the last pocket of resistance in a place of deep symbolic and strategic value to Moscow, Ukrainian officials said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, announced he would meet Sunday in his nation’s capital with the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the U.S. secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin. The White House declined to comment.

Speaking at a news conference, Zelenskyy gave little detail about logistics of the encounter but said he expected concrete results — “not just presents or some kind of cakes, we are expecting specific things and specific weapons.”

It would be the first high-level U.S. trip to Kyiv since the war began Feb. 24. While visiting Poland in March, Blinken stepped briefly onto Ukrainian soil to meet with the country’s foreign minister. Zelenskyy’s last face-to-face meeting with a U.S. leader was Feb. 19 with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In attacks on the eve of Orthodox Easter, Russian forces pounded cities and towns in southern and eastern Ukraine.

A 3-month-old baby was among eight people killed when Russia fired cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odesa, officials said. Zelenskyy said 18 more were wounded.

“The war started when this baby was one month old. Can you imagine what is happening?” Zelenskyy said. “They are just bastards. … I don’t have any other words for it, just bastards.”

The Ukrainian military said Saturday it destroyed a Russian command post in Kherson, a southern city that fell to Russian forces early in the war.

The command post was hit on Friday, killing two generals and critically wounding another, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency said in a statement. The Russian military did not comment on the claim, which could not be confirmed.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a Zelenskyy adviser, said in an online interview that 50 senior Russian officers were in the command center when it was attacked.

The fate of the Ukrainians in the sprawling and besieged seaside steel mill in Mariupol, where Russia says its forces have taken the rest of the city, wasn’t immediately clear. Earlier Saturday, a Ukrainian military unit released a video reportedly taken two days earlier in which women and children holed up underground, some for as long as two months, said they longed to see the sun.

“We want to see peaceful skies, we want to breathe in fresh air,” one woman in the video said. “You have simply no idea what it means for us to simply eat, drink some sweetened tea. For us, it is already happiness.”

Russia said it took control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses. Russian attacks also struck populated areas.

Associated Press journalists observed shelling in residential areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city; regional Gov. Oleh Sinehubov said three people were killed. In the Luhansk area of the Donbas, Gov. Serhiy Haidai said six people died during the shelling of a village, Gorskoi.

In Sloviansk, a town in northern Donbas, the AP witnessed two soldiers arriving at a hospital, one of them mortally wounded.

Sitting in a wheelchair outside her damaged Sloviansk apartment, Anna Direnskaya, 70, said, “I want peace.”

One of many native Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, Direnskaya said she wishes Russians would understand that Ukrainians are not bad people and that there should be no enmity between them.

“Why is this happening?” she said. “I don’t know.”

While British officials said Russian forces had not gained significant new ground, Ukrainian officials announced a nationwide curfew ahead of Easter Sunday, a sign of the war’s disruption and threat to the entire country.

Mariupol has been a key Russian objective and has taken on outsize importance in the war. Completing its capture would give Russia its biggest victory yet, after a nearly two-month siege reduced much of the city to a smoking ruin.

It would deprive Ukrainian of a vital port, free up Russian troops to fight elsewhere and establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014. Russia-backed separatists control parts of the Donbas.

An adviser to Ukraine’s presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovych, said Russian forces resumed airstrikes on the Azovstal plant and were also trying to storm it, in an apparent reversal of tactics. Two days earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had given an order not to send troops in but instead to blockade the plant.

Ukrainian officials have estimated that about 2,000 of their troops are inside the plant along with civilians sheltering in its underground tunnels.

Earlier Saturday, the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard, which has members holed up in the plant, released the video of about two dozen women and children. Its contents could not be independently verified. But if authentic, it would be the first video testimony of what life has been like for civilians trapped underground there.

The video shows soldiers giving sweets to children who respond with fist-bumps. One young girl says she and her relatives “haven’t seen neither the sky nor the sun” since they left home Feb. 27.

The regiment’s deputy commander, Sviatoslav Palamar, told the AP the video was shot Thursday. The Azov Regiment has its roots in the Azov Battalion, which was formed by far-right activists in 2014 at the start of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine and has elicited criticism for some of its tactics.

More than 100,000 people — down from a prewar population of about 430,000 — are believed to remain in Mariupol with scant food, water or heat. Ukrainian authorities estimate that over 20,000 civilians have been killed in the city.

Yet another attempt to evacuate women, children and older adults from Mariupol failed Saturday. Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russian forces did not allow Ukrainian-organized buses to take residents to Zaporizhzhia, a city 227 kilometers (141 miles) to the northwest.

“At 11 o’clock, at least 200 Mariupol residents gathered near the Port City shopping center, waiting for evacuation,” Andryushchenko posted on the Telegram messaging app. “The Russian military drove up to the Mariupol residents and ordered them to disperse, because now there will be shelling.”

At the same time, he said, Russian buses assembled about 200 meters (yards) away. Residents who boarded those were told they were being taken to separatist-occupied territory and not allowed to disembark, Andryushchenko said. His account could not be independently verified.

In the attack on Odesa, Russian troops fired at least six missiles, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister.

“Residents of the city heard explosions in different areas,” Gerashchenko said via Telegram. “Residential buildings were hit. It is already known about one victim. He burned in his car in a courtyard of one of the buildings.”

Zelenskyy’s news conference was held in a Kyiv subway station, where he paused at one point as a train noisily passed through. The subway system, which includes the world’s deepest station, attracted widespread attention early in the war when hordes of people took shelter there.

Regarding the expected visit Sunday by U.S. officials, Zelenskyy said: “I believe that we will be able to get agreements from the United States or part of that package on arming Ukraine which we agreed on earlier. Besides, we have strategic questions about security guarantees, which it is time to discuss in detail, because the United States will be one of those leaders of security countries for our state.”

Fisch reported from Sloviansk, Ukraine. Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov and Felipe Dana in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Inna Varenytsia in Kviv and Associated Press staff members around the world contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Looking to deepen pain for Putin, West studying oil and gas

Ellen Knickmeyer – April 22, 2022

• The tanker Sun Arrows loads its cargo of liquefied natural gas from the Sakhalin-2 project in the port of Prigorodnoye, Russia, on Oct. 29, 2021. Polls show people want the U.S. to do more. (AP Photo/File)
• The landfall facilities of the ‘Nord Stream 2’ gas pipeline are pictured in Lubmin, northern Germany, Feb. 15, 2022. Nord Stream 2 is a 1,230-kilometer-long (764-mile-long) natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea, running from Russia to Germany’s Baltic coast. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States unleashed some of its toughest actions against Russian President Vladimir Putin right after he rolled his troops into Ukraine. Polls in the U.S. find that people want Washington to do more. So what’s left, financially, diplomatically and militarily, to step up the pressure?

The U.S. could get strong results from any number of next steps, economists and current and former U.S. officials say. It could simply persist in pouring cash and potent weaponry into Ukraine — a likely course. It could even commit to shutting down some of the inroads the Kremlin has made into U.S. political and financial systems, also conceivable.

But the mightiest trigger the West can pull now on Russia, many experts agree, is the one on a gas pump nozzle. Cutting off Russian profits from oil and natural gas sales has become a main topic among world leaders looking at what else they can do to force Putin to end his invasion.

“It would be very useful to try to devise a way to reduce proceeds from those sales and that really is the proper objective, I think, of a ban,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a meeting of world finance leaders Thursday.

“But if we can think of a way to do that without harming the entire world from higher energy prices, that would be ideal,” Yellen said.

President Joe Biden already has ended the relatively minor U.S. imports of Russian oil and other fossil fuel products. But the U.S. would be central if allies move to cut the global flow of Russian fuel and punish nations and businesses that fail to comply.

Global purchases of Russian oil and gas production account for at least 40% of government revenue for Moscow. Exports are keeping Russia’s economy afloat despite the sanctions enacted so far and financing the war.

Cutting back further on Russian petroleum to the market would make a global supply crunch even worse, increasing prices for everyone, including in the United States.

Republicans already are making gas price increases that stem in part from Russia’s war a top campaign point against Biden.

“Everybody wants a pain-free option, right?” asked Daniel Fried, a former assistant U.S. secretary of state for Europe, and one of many urging the U.S. to take tougher action as Russia builds forces for a new phase of attacks in Ukraine. “Yeah, they seldom exist.”

“If anybody writes they can do this thing without some effect on gas prices, you know, without taking a hit — you’re crazy, because you can’t,” Fried said.

The U.S. is already being asked to assure the world that U.S. producers can help make up for lost Russian supply, if Europe moves to cut the hose on Russian oil purchases quickly. The U.S. would likely be an administrator and enforcer in any secondary sanctions to penalize China or other nations or businesses if they buy from or enable Russia’s oil and gas industry.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said European nations have considered diverting their payments for Russian oil and gas into escrow accounts, similar to deals forced on Iran and Iraq as part of sanctions.

A poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that more than half of respondents want Biden to be tougher on Putin.

People in the U.S. may just be coming around to accepting that doing that could mean financial hardships for them. By 51% to 45%, respondents in the AP-NORC poll said the U.S. should focus on sanctioning Russia as effectively as possible more than on limiting damage to the U.S. economy.

But ask Alan Gold of Potomac, Maryland, if he’s willing to pay more for gasoline as part of any global move to starve Russia of money for the Ukraine war, and the answer you get is a growl.

“I’m paying $5 a gallon now,” Gold said this past week at a strip mall gas station, jerking his head at the price tally rolling upward as he pumped gas into his vehicle.

Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist of the Institute of International Finance, said Russia’s war is boosting the price it gets for its oil and gas, driving the surplus in Russia’s current accounts to nearly $60 billion, a recent high despite all the West’s sanctions.

Economists and policymakers have to decide next steps as part of the larger context of militaries at war, the risks of nuclear war and the cost of Ukrainian lives, Ribakova told an online panel with Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance this past week. “This is the cost we’re thinking about when we think about sanctions … not just about economics.”

Barring major shifts, the financial realm is the one where the next major U.S. actions against Russia will come from.

Militarily, the U.S. is unlikely to send in many new, complex weapons systems, like U.S. tanks or fighter or bomber jets. Doing so would tie up Ukrainian fighters in training on unfamiliar weapons when they’re needed for fighting, by the Pentagon’s reasoning.

Instead, the U.S. is expected to keep doing what it’s doing militarily, only more so, pumping in more cash and basic battlefield weapons and resupplies. On Thursday Biden pledged an additional $1.3 billion for heavy artillery, 144,000 rounds of ammunition and other aid.

Further boosting U.S. intelligence-sharing to help Ukraine in the fight is an option.

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. and likeminded nations are exploring ways Russia could be further isolated. Russia has already been suspended from the U.N. Human Rights Council and is facing a push at the world body’s educational, scientific and cultural organization to strip it of its UNESCO presidency and bar it from hosting a June meeting of its World Heritage Committee.

Russia is unlikely to be suspended from the International Civil Aviation Organization, World Health Organization or Food and Agriculture Organization, however. Any attempt to remove it from the world body’s most powerful grouping – the U.N. Security Council – would fail on a Russian and likely Chinese veto.

Talk of the U.S. officially designating Russia or Russian mercenaries as terrorists or supporters of terrorism hasn’t gained traction.

There is another big step the U.S. and its democratic allies should take, that doesn’t get as much attention, argues Alex Finley, a former officer of the CIA’s directorate of operations: Clean up their own act.

“We need to examine our own role,” said Finley, who tracks seizures of Russian yachts and other Western penalties on Putin. She and others say lax regulation and enforcement in the West have allowed Putin and Russia to influence U.S. elections, park cash from corrupt enterprises in shell companies and offshore tax havens, and buy visas and passports to Western countries.

It’s all served to erode transparency and the rule of law in Western democracies, as Putin intended, said Finley.

The West got lax because “we made money with it,” Finley said. “But we did it in a way that we sold … part of the soul of democracy.”

Associated Press writers Matthew Lee, Robert Burns and Fatima Hussein contributed from Washington.

Daily Beast

The Embarrassing Truth Behind Putin’s War Failures

David Volodzko – April 22, 2022

The ongoing war in Syria was supposed to be a crucible for the modern Russian war machine, reforming its operational capabilities in preparation for future conflicts. Now that Russia is facing a test of those skills in Ukraine, it is turning into a disaster that they should have seen coming.

Moscow officially lost only 112 servicemen in six and a half years in Syria, compared to what it admits are 1,351 in a single month in Ukraine—the true numbers are likely to be far higher. And they have been forced to humiliatingly pull out around 40,000 troops from around Kyiv and Chernihiv having failed to make any significant progress in those regions and falling back to their old targets in eastern Ukraine. This raises the question of exactly what the Kremlin learned in Syria and, more importantly, what it should have learned but obviously has not.

Unlike Ukraine, Syria’s cities would never be part of the Russian federation and could therefore be flattened. Meanwhile, its non-white population was framed as foreign terrorists. Jabhat al-Nusra fighters, ISIS, and hundreds of children were portrayed to the voters back home as equally fair targets. By contrast, Ukrainians are largely seen by the Russian public as Russians themselves or, at the very least, close cousins. These factors freed Russia up to use Syria as merely a means to an end, or more specifically, two ends.

First, it used Syria as a proving ground to enhance command-and-control coordination. Like its Soviet predecessor, Russia’s military is an artillery force with armored battalions and the ground-based nature of its power is not as fast nor flexible as air or naval forces, making such coordination critical. Not to mention, if such command coordination is achieved, then as the Institute for the Study of War’s lead Russia analyst, Mason Clark, wrote in a 2021 report, it “will erode one of the United States and NATO’s key technological advantages.”

Second, Moscow declared a withdrawal from Syria in March 2016, then again in January 2017, and again in December of that year. This wasn’t just a feint to get its enemies to lower their guard, it also helped prevent Russia from being pulled too deeply into the war, thus minimizing losses. But just as importantly, it broke the war into a series of campaigns, allowing Moscow to rotate its forces through Syria, giving them ample combat experience. As Michael Kofman, director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), wrote in a 2020 report, “The entire Russian military must now serve [in Syria] in order to progress in rank.”

According William Alberque, the director of strategy, technology and arms control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), some of the lessons that were not learned well enough include use of drones for artillery spotting, the danger of MANPADS on the contested battlefield, and the need for secure supply lines. Each of these factors have proven devastating for Russian forces in Ukraine.

But the biggest lessons, he said, have been how to detect, disrupt, and destroy small groups of fighters, the importance of the destruction not just of suppression of enemy air defenses, the use of secure comms, the value of precision-guided missiles, and the benefit of drawing the enemy out rather than engaging in urban warfare.

Albuquerque added that Russia learned a few more things in Syria. Namely, “how to destroy cities, terror tactics to make civilians flee, and the use of proxies as holding forces/cannon fodder.”

So what went wrong? For one thing, Russia is one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and by far the most corrupt major power. Ruling a mafia state has its advantages if you’re the Godfather, but it’s hard to know who to trust. Moscow recently purged 150 Federal Security Service (FSB) agents and sent Sergei Beseda, the head of the FSB’s 5th Service, which handles intelligence in Ukraine, to Lefortovo Prison, which was used under Stalin to conduct torture-based interrogations and mass executions. One theory says Beseda gave information to the CIA, but the official reason, which may very well be true, is that he lied to the state and stole funds meant for espionage activities in Ukraine. If true, this means Putin’s own spy chiefs not only let him bring a knife to a gun fight—they sold off the combat blade and bought a cheap butter spreader.

Another thing that led Putin astray was his own over-confidence. Since taking office in 2000, he has been involved in six wars—Chechnya, Georgia, the North Caucasus, Syria, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Ukraine.All but the last have been victorious. Syria and the CAR are ongoing, but the preservation of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Faustin-Archange Touadera’s administration represent strategic wins. Putin thought he couldn’t lose.

Corruption and over-confidence prepared a path, but the biggest problem was Putin’s lack of experience ina war of this scale. Syria was a limited deployment in a far-off desert nation with minimal ground forces, Georgia only lasted 12 days, and Russia supported Touadera in the CAR from a distance with weapons, military instructors and Wagner mercenaries. Besides, even if Ukraine was the same game as Syria, and Russia could simply copy/paste its lessons, it still wouldn’t help since Moscow has apparently forgotten those lessons.

Russia did apply its Syria lessons in Ukraine—but it did so in 2014, when it used Crimea to train a rapid-reaction professional force. Now, however, Moscow is running four combined arms headquarters independently with only partial management at the defense center in Moscow. Why? Partly because it’s not just propaganda when Putin talks about a “special military operation.” He truly believed the rest of Ukraine, like Crimea, would offer little resistance and that the war would only last a matter of days.

In Syria, says military historian Peter Caddick-Adams, “They were not up against a peer adversary—in fact they have never been: Afghan, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria—unlike in Ukraine. Syria was predominantly an air war, with little threat, so Russian pilots treated it more as range practice, dumping munitions on preselected targets” he told The Daily Beast.

“Thus, what Russia did not learn from Syria was how to coordinate an all arms battle (artillery, armor, anti-tank, air defense, infantry, engineers, etc) at high tempo in complex terrain with aircraft of different types, helicopters, airborne and marine troops, with a well-balanced logistics and supply system—which is what they have needed for Ukraine.”

He added, “Russian communications are very lowbrow, and they are using unencrypted mobile phones in Ukraine, a bad habit picked up in Syria, where few opponents could understand Russian or had the technical competence to intercept.”

Simply put, Russia’s PhD in desert warfare is making for a poor career in Ukraine. Indeed, few things have revolutionized the modern Russian military like the war in Syria, but nothing will affect it quite like Ukraine. One might even call this Russia’s Vietnam moment. But one thing’s for certain, Russia looked at Ukraine and mistook a tiger for a cat. Now even if it decides to cut its losses and completely withdraw, it may not be so easy. As the old Chinese saying goes, when you’re riding a tiger, the hard part is getting off.

Business Insider

Russia is bombing the same targets moments apart to kill Ukrainian rescue crews that arrive to save survivors

Jake Epstein – April 22, 2022

• Russian forces are using a vicious bombing strategy to target rescue workers in Ukraine, according to multiple reports.
• Putin’s troops have fired on the same target moments apart, catching rescue crews helping survivors in the second attack.
• Russia was accused of carrying out these ‘double tap’ attacks during the Syrian Civil War.

Russian forces are bombing the same targets just moments apart to try and kill Ukrainian rescue crews that arrive to save survivors, according to multiple reports.

In two months of war, several ‘double-tap’ attacks have been reported in the bombarded northeast Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

As recently as April 17, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported that it witnessed a double-tap attack in Kharkiv.

An ABC team was following a local Red Cross unit when Russian missiles hit a nearby building. A few minutes later, after the Red Cross, paramedics, and Ukrainian troops arrived at the scene to help survivors, a second missile attack hit the building.

Five civilians were killed that day, according to the ABC.

Another double-tap strike in Kharkiv was recorded last month, according to a recent report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Russian forces on March 1 launched a cruise missile strike at a government building in the city’s Freedom Square. A few minutes later, when rescuers arrived to look for survivors, a second rocket hit the building.

At least ten people were killed and dozens more were injured in the attack, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called a “war crime” and “state terrorism.”

Despite the danger caused by double-tap strikes, firefighters in Kharkiv have routinely showed up to put out fires caused by strikes, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The double-tap strategy is not new to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook, either.

Russia was accused multiple times in recent years of launching double-tap attacks during the Syrian Civil War, killing scores of civilians and rescuers.

The OSCE has said the vicious attacks are a violation of international law. It’s not immediately clear if double-tap strikes have occurred in other cities around Ukraine.

Business Insider

A Ukrainian woman who escaped Russia’s assault on Mariupol says troops were targeting apartment buildings ‘as if they were playing a computer game’

Rebecca Cohen – April 22, 2022

• A Ukrainian woman described her month hiding in a Mariupol basement during Russia’s assault.
• She said when she finally escaped, she witnessed Russians targeting apartment buildings.
• The journey to safety took 14 hours and she said she was strip-searched by Russian troops at each of the 16 checkpoints.

A Ukrainian woman who escaped Russia’s assault on Mariupol said that she witnessed Russian troops targeting apartment buildings “as if they were playing a computer game.”

Alina Beskrovna lived in a basement in Mariupol for a month as Russian troops destroyed her city outside. In a first-person account to UN News, she detailed how she went into hiding the morning of February 24 — the day Russia first invaded Ukraine — and stayed there until March 23.

She said people who could not get out within the first few days of the invasion were forced to stay because of active fighting in the streets.

“Those who tried to flee found themselves in a battlefield,” she said.

She described hope during the second week of the war when rumors spread on Telegram that there would be a humanitarian corridor opening up for civilians to go west to Manhush, but it turned out to be a false rumor, she said.

Mariupol, a port city on Ukraine’s southern coast, has been the scene of intense fighting for almost the entirety of Russia’s invasion.

The city’s mayor told the Associated Press last week that 21,000 people had been killed, and those who have fled described the city as “hell on earth.”

When Beskrovna finally decided to risk her life and flee from her hiding spot beneath the city, she said she witnessed Russian attacks with her own eyes.

“I saw with my own eyes how they aimed at apartment buildings, as if they were playing a computer game,” she recalled.

Beskrovna also said that resources quickly dwindled in the basement during her stay, and with Russia targeting the city’s electrical, water, and gas systems, they lost access to those necessities early on.

She also said communication was cut off very quickly. She said she does not know if her father is alive as they lost contact weeks ago.

“I knew why it was being done: To leave us completely helpless and hopeless, demoralized, and cut off from the outside world,” she said.

On March 23, she was able to board a train to Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, which took 14 hours. She said Russian troops strip-searched her and other passengers at all 16 checkpoints.

While she felt relief when she finally heard the Ukrainian language in Zaporizhzhia, she quickly realized that city wasn’t safe either.

“Despite feeling as though I was getting out of this black hole of destruction and death, Zaporizhzhia itself wasn’t safe; there were constant air raids,” she said. “But we had made it out of Mariupol and couldn’t believe we were alive.”

Reuters

Russia says it plans full control of Donbas and southern Ukraine

April 22, 2022

(Reuters) -Russia plans to take full control of Donbas and southern Ukraine during the second phase of what it calls its special military operation, the deputy commander of Russia’s central military district said on Friday, Russian news agencies reported.

The statement from Rustam Minnekayev, the deputy commander, is one of the most detailed about Moscow’s latest ambitions in Ukraine and suggests Russia does not plan to wind down its offensive there anytime soon.

Minnekayev did not mention them by name, but two major Ukrainian cities in southern Ukraine, Odesa and Mykolayiv, remain under Ukrainian control.

The Interfax and TASS news agencies cited him as saying that full control of southern Ukraine would improve Russian access to Moldova’s pro-Russian breakaway region of Transdniestria, which borders Ukraine and which Kyiv fears could be used as a launch pad for new attacks against it.

Kyiv earlier this month said that an airfield in the region was being prepared to receive aircraft and be used by Moscow to fly in Ukraine-bound troops, allegations Moldova’s defence ministry and authorities in Transdniestria denied.

“Control over the south of Ukraine is another way to Transdniestria, where there is also evidence that the Russian-speaking population is being oppressed,” the TASS news agency quoted Minnekayev as saying at a meeting in Russia’s central Sverdlovsk region.

Minnekayev was not cited as providing any evidence for or details of that alleged oppression.

He was quoted as saying that Russia planned to forge a land corridor between Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which it annexed in 2014, and Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

The last Ukrainian fighters left in the port city of Mariupol in Donbas are holed up at a vast industrial facility which President Vladimir Putin has ordered to be blockaded rather than stormed. Mariupol sits between areas held by Russian separatists and Crimea. Its capture would allow Russia to link the two areas.

Minnekayev was cited as saying by Russia’s RIA news agency that media reports of Russian military setbacks were wide of the mark.

“The media are now talking a lot about some failures of our armed forces. But this is not the case. In the first days …the tactics of Ukrainian units were designed to ensure that, having pulled ahead, individual groups of Russian troops fell into pre prepared ambushes and suffered losses,” RIA cited him as saying.

“But the Russian armed forces very quickly adapted to this and changed tactics.”

According to RIA, he also said that daily missile and other strikes against Ukrainian forces meant Russia could do serious damage without losing troops.

Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what it called an operation to degrade its southern neighbour’s military capabilities and root out people it called dangerous nationalists.

Ukrainian forces have mounted stiff resistance and the West has imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in an effort to force it to withdraw its forces.

Daily Beast

Russian General Lets Slip a Secret Plan to Invade Another Country and Seize Ukraine’s Entire Coastline

Barbie Latza Nadeau – April 22, 2022

As Russian troops tighten their grip on the strategic port town of Mariupol, their strategy is finally becoming clear. Russian military commander Rustam Minnekaev now says the second phase of President Vladimir Putin’s “special operation” is focused on establishing a “land corridor” from the Donbas all the way to Moldova, which would cut off the rest of Ukraine from the sea.

“One of the tasks of the Russian army is to establish full control over the Donbas and southern Ukraine. This will provide a land corridor to the Crimea, as well as influence the vital objects of the Ukrainian economy,” Minnekaev said Friday at a meeting with the Union of Defense Industries, as reported by the Russian state-owned Interfax. “Control over the south of Ukraine is another way out to Transnistria, where there are also facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population.” Transnistria is a separatist region of Moldova that has so far not been officially involved in the war despite hosting a Russian military base since the 1990s.

The general’s words suggest that Moldova’s sovereign borders would also come under threat from further Russian expansion. Phony efforts to protect Russian-speaking peoples have often foreshadowed Putin’s imperial invasions.

In reality, Russian speakers have been struck down in the hundreds in eastern Ukraine during the brutal invasion.

If successful, the strategy would include taking the port of the former seaside resort town of Odesa near the Moldovan border, which has suffered sporadic bombardments but no full-fledged invasion so far. Russia’s warship Moskva was hit about 75 miles off the coast of Odesa two weeks ago, before it sank en route to Crimea.

The refocusing of troops from northern Ukraine to the southern regions of the country has further choked Mariupol, where Ukrainian troops and civilians are holed up in a steel factory surrounded by Russian troops. Satellite imagery identified a growing number of graves outside the port city, where Ukrainian officials say up to 200 new graves have been dug since April 3.

While the Russian military has largely now left northern Ukraine alone save for sporadic missile strikes, fresh evidence of Russia’s ruthless tactics there in recent weeks continue to build a case for widespread war crimes. Andrii Nebytov, the head of police for Kyiv region, told CNN that they are examining 1,084 bodies found in the region outside Kyiv, including Bucha, for signs of torture. “These are civilians who had nothing to do with territorial defense or other military formations,” he said. “The vast majority—between 50 percent and 75 percent—are people killed by small arms, either a machine gun or a sniper rifle, depending on the location.”

Among the atrocities are evidence of widespread rape and sexual mutilation. The youngest victim who survived to tell her story is just 15, according to CNN. Several female bodies in mass graves show evidence of horrific crimes as well.

On Friday, the United Nations Human Rights Office described Russian atrocities against Ukrainians as a “horror story of violations against civilians” that shows no sign of abating.

Yahoo! News

What are howitzers? A look at the cannons in latest U.S. military aid to Ukraine

Niamh Cavanagh, Producer – April 22, 2022

LONDON — The first shipments of the Biden administration’s $800 million military aid package have arrived in Ukraine. Included among the first round of weapons are 18 155 mm howitzers, in addition to another 72 cannons that were announced this week. The howitzers heading to Ukraine will have a “significant” impact on Ukrainian firepower, according to a senior U.S. defense official, as the war with Russia enters its third month.

What is a howitzer?

A howitzer is a short cannon, placed at a steep angle of descent, used to fire at relatively high trajectories. The cannons can fire up to four rounds per minute, according to the U.S. Army. The weapons can be traced back to the 15th century when similar models were used by the Czechs and were known as “houfnice” cannons. Since World War I, the word “howitzer” has been used to describe these weapons.

How many are the U.S. sending to Ukraine?

The Department of Defense confirmed that 18 155 mm howitzers would be sent to Ukraine as part of the $800 million in military aid. In a second $800 million military aid package, announced by Biden on Thursday, an additional 72 howitzers, 72 tactical vehicles to tow the cannons and 144,000 rounds will be sent to Ukraine. The weapons are from U.S. Army and Marine Corps stocks.

A senior U.S. defense official told reporters on Wednesday that howitzer rounds, ammunition for the cannons, arrived in Europe on Tuesday to be sent to Ukraine. The official added that more were arriving on Wednesday and in the “coming days.”

Will Ukrainians be trained to use them?

Training of Ukrainian soldiers on how to use the howitzers — expected to last about a week — “has begun,” a defense official said this week. The official declined to say where the training was taking place, but said it was not in Ukraine. “This is training the trainers,” the official told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a smallish number of Ukrainians, a little bit more than 50.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told the Military Times on April 14 that there were no more plans to deploy U.S. troops to handle the training and instead, the trainees will return home to train other soldiers.

Why send howitzers?

The U.S. sent howitzers after Ukrainian officials asked for artillery. It is believed the cannons will play a significant role in Russia’s new battle for the Donbas region, which consists of flat, rolling plains, a defense official told Stars and Stripes. “We knew from talking to Ukrainians that artillery was going to be a critical need because of the way the terrain lays,” the official said. “And so we saw early on the Russians were moving artillery [for the battle in the Donbas].”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon spokesman reiterated on Thursday that sending the assistance has been in full “consultation” with Ukraine, and that the weapons sent by the U.S. “provide enough artillery now to equip five battalions for Ukraine for potential use in the Donbas.”

“I want to stress again that what we’re providing is done in full consultation with the Ukrainians and that they believe that these systems will be helpful to them in the fight,” Kirby said. “Where and when they employ them and how they employ them is, of course, up to them.”