Author: John Hanno

Time

A Visit to the Crime Scene Russian Troops Left Behind at a Summer Camp in Bucha

Simon Shuster/Bucha, Ukraine – April 13, 2022

A crane lifts a corpse from a mass grave in Bucha; authorities say more than 400 civilians were murdered Credit – Rodrigo Abd—AP

Something terrible happened in the basement of the children’s summer camp in Bucha. The steps leading down to its unlocked door were lousy with trash from Russian army rations: dried macaroni, empty juice boxes, tins of meat. Standing at the bottom of the stairwell, Volodymyr Roslik, the camp groundskeeper, looked up and raised an eyebrow at me, as if to offer one more chance to reconsider going in.

The airless tunnel behind that door resembled a series of torture chambers divided by concrete walls. There was a room that appeared to be used for executions at the front, its walls pocked with bullet holes. In the next room stood two chairs, an empty jug and a wooden plank. In another the Russians had brought in two metal bedsprings and leaned them against the wall. To Ukrainian investigators, the tableaus suggested that prisoners were tortured here: tied to the bedsprings and interrogated; strapped to the plank and waterboarded.

“The signs of torture were also on the bodies,” says Taras Shapravskyi, the deputy mayor of Bucha. Five dead men in civilian clothes were found in that chamber, he told me. “They had burns, bruises, lacerations.” It was dark when the groundskeeper took me there the following week and shined a flashlight in the room where they had lain. Two trails of dried blood ran down a wall into the dirt, next to a fleece hat that appeared to have a bullet hole.

The Russian forces withdrew in the first days of April from this commuter town 15 miles outside the Ukrainian capital. Before the invasion, Bucha was well known in Kyiv as a place to get away, to drop kids off at the summer camp for a couple of weeks or take them to a ropes course called the Crazy Squirrel. Now Bucha is a byword for war crimes, like Srebrenica or My Lai. Scores of bodies littered the streets when the Russians left. A mass grave still occupies the churchyard. Shops and homes lie vacant, pillaged and burned. More than 400 civilians were found dead here, according to local authorities, nearly all with fatal gunshot wounds. “These were not the victims of shelling or aerial bombardment,” says Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “These were intentional killings, close up and systematic.”

Inside the summer camp for children ages 7 to 16, the Russians set up a garrison from which to terrorize the town, shooting at civilian passersby and bringing prisoners down into the basement. Local officials and witnesses to the violence told me the occupying force displayed a total lack of military discipline. Empty liquor bottles lay among snipers’ nests dug beside a playground. Dirty mattresses and cigarette butts littered an administrative building, which was strewn with an odd trove of loot apparently taken from local homes: an old boom box, costume jewelry, a leather briefcase, none of it valuable enough for the occupiers to carry as they fled. In one room, the Russians left a pile of hair shorn off with clippers. On the floor of another sat two lumps of human excrement. “This was no army,” says Roslik, the camp groundskeeper. “This was a horde.”

The scenes of depravity they left behind have changed the course of the war in Ukraine. The Russian army’s crimes, described in both Kyiv and Washington as a campaign resembling genocide, have hardened the will of Western governments to arm Ukraine and narrowed the space for a negotiated peace. Leaders from across Europe have come through Bucha to see the devastation for themselves. They emerged voicing new pledges of support for Zelensky, promising more than a billion dollars in military aid from the European Union alone.

“You stand here today and see what happened,” Zelensky told reporters on a visit to Bucha April 4, days after the Russians withdrew. “We know that thousands of people have been killed and tortured,” he added, “with extremities cut off, women raped, children killed.” Less than a week later, at least 50 more Ukrainians—nearly all of them women, children and the -elderly—were slain in a rocket attack against a train station in Kramatorsk, where they had gone to flee the country’s eastern regions, the focus of the war’s next phase.

David Arakhamia, the lead Ukrainian negotiator in talks with Moscow, says Bucha made it difficult to face the envoys of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We wanted to stop the process altogether,” he told me. “We wanted revenge, not diplomacy.” But Zelensky urged the team to carry on, “even if there is only a 1% chance of peace after Bucha,” says the negotiator, who has continued holding talks with the Russians almost every day.

At the same time, investigators have fanned out across the country to document apparent Russian war crimes. A team of experts from France has come to help Ukraine gather documentation for an international tribunal. “The evidence is mounting,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters on April 12. “I called it genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out even the idea of being Ukrainian.”

Moscow knows how bad this is. The Foreign Ministry in Moscow has accused Ukraine of “staging” the massacre to make the Russian forces look bad. Putin called Bucha a “fake.” His propaganda channels offered theories to undermine the grim reality with doubt. They suggested that crisis actors had posed as corpses in videos of Bucha. They claimed that “foreign mercenaries” came to town and killed people after the Russians withdrew.

But the barbarity was too blatant, and witnessed by too many people. The local government estimates that around 3,700 people remained in the town during the occupation. Their stories of looting, torture, rape, and murder are consistent with the evidence emerging from the ground.

Before the invasion, life in Bucha centered around the Church of St. Andrew, whose golden domes reach upward from a hill near city hall. The parish priest, Father Andriy Halavin, was officiating a funeral on the second day of the invasion, Feb. 25, as a battle raged for control of an airport just north of town. Explosions and helicopters ripped through the air, close enough to drown out his sermon at the graveside.

The battle went on for several days. The Russians needed that airport to land an invading force outside the capital, and the Ukrainians put up a ferocious fight, shelling the runways and blowing up a bridge to block the advance of Russian tanks into Kyiv. “All of this was happening over our heads—the flames, the booms,” Halavin recalls.

Control of Bucha changed hands at least twice before the Russians managed to seize the town in the first week of March. The battle had cost them dearly, and it left them angry. More than a dozen burned-out Russian tanks and personnel carriers stood in the streets. As the Russians dug in, they set up artillery positions in a local school and moved into the dormitories at the children’s summer camp.

Halavin considered keeping his church open as a sanctuary for locals. But he says he changed his mind after the Russian troops began going house to house, kicking in doors and dragging entire families into the streets. At one point the church itself came under fire, leaving deep gashes in the walls. “The soldiers were shooting at anything that moved. Men, women, children,” Halavin told me. “To cross the street was to stare death in the eyes.”

The priest stashed away his robes and did his best to stay out of sight. A few times during the monthlong occupation, he snuck back into the church to pray and fetch some candles for his home. By the second week, the smell of death in parts of Bucha became hard to bear. The morgue was full, and it was too dangerous to take bodies to the cemetery. Many victims were left in the road or covered with just enough soil to keep the dogs away.

A local coroner then asked Halavin to help organize a burial in the churchyard. The priest consented. On March 10, they dug a trench and waited for a truck to come from the morgue with a few dozen bodies. “There was no way to have a ceremony or any sermons at the grave,” he says. “It was all done quickly, with a few hurried prayers.”

The trench was still there, in the church’s shadow, when the congregation gathered for Sunday mass on April 10, their first since the end of the occupation. Most of the bodies had already been exhumed and sent to the morgue for identification and a proper burial. A long plastic sheet was draped over those who remained in the pit, to keep the crows at bay.

Olha Ivanitska, an elderly parishioner, saw two of her friends as she limped into the church’s vestibule. She embraced them and touched their cheeks with her hands. “You’re still alive,” she said. “We’re still alive.”

They knew they were lucky. As they emerged from their homes, from their basements and bunkers, the people of Bucha often found their friends missing or dead, their streets full of wrecked military vehicles, their neighbors’ homes shelled into rubble.

Some residents set out to assess the damage and rebuild. Leonid Chernenko, a janitor at School No. 3, came back to work on April 10 to check what the Russians had stolen. “All the computers are gone,” he told me while fumbling with the keys to the boiler room. That was the least of the problems. Sappers had not had time to check the school for booby traps and mines. More than a hundred empty boxes of Russian artillery shells lay in the schoolyard among empty beer bottles and army rations. Most of the windows had been shattered.

Around the school, many of the victims of the Bucha massacre still lie in temporary graves. One of them is at the edge of the children’s summer camp. Igor Kasenok, who lives across the street, told me he dug that grave one day in March. The man inside it had made the mistake of approaching the Russians on foot, Kasenok said. The soldiers shot him and left him there.

Kasenok found the body in the street the next day, when he went to fetch some firewood for the stove in his basement, a cluttered warren he had shared during the occupation with more than 30 of his neighbors and many of their pets. Kasenok gave the dead man the dignity of a burial, fashioning a cross out of some boards. “They could have shot me too for that,” he said while showing me the plot.

As we spoke, Kasenok’s wife came out, trailed by a pair of cats. We began to talk about their grandchildren. All three of them live around Luhansk, in a part of Ukraine the Russians took in early March. Kasenok and his wife haven’t heard from them since.

The urge to reassure the couple made me stammer, and the only thing that came to mind was the summer camp across the street. I suggested that maybe one day, after Bucha rebuilds, the kids could come visit and play over there. “Better to raze the place,” Kasenok answered. “It’s a place of killing now.”

The Telegraph

Without the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea fleet is far more exposed to missiles and drones

Dr Sidharth Kaushal – April 14, 2022

The return to port of the Moskva, which is the Black Sea fleet’s flagship, has both symbolic and operational significance.

Beyond its symbolic role, it is the sole vessel in the fleet equipped with wide-area air defences in the form of the S-300F. The Moskva has thus provided air cover to other vessels during their operations, which have included coastal bombardments and amphibious feints.

In the absence of the Moskva, the fleet lacks vessels with a comparable air defence suite, and will thus find it more risky to conduct similar operations.

Though Russia has comparable ships, including two Slava Class Cruisers in the Eastern Mediterranean, it cannot replace the Moskva due to the fact that Turkey has closed access to the straits to the belligerent warships for the duration of the conflict.

Of equal note is the Neptune anti-ship system with which Ukraine claims to have hit the vessel. The R-360 anti-ship cruise missile, which is fired by the Neptune, is a derivative of the Soviet KH-35. It is capable of striking targets at reported ranges of up to 180 miles and has the capacity to fly at sea-skimming altitudes to evade radar detection.

The missile is apparently capable of using GPS guidance in tandem with inertial guidance to improve its accuracy and uses an onboard active radar seeker to detect its target in its final stages before impact.

The missile threat to ships is an old one. What is new, however, is the growing number of actors that field them. In addition to Ukraine, both Hezbollah and the Houthis have utilised older Chinese-made anti-ship cruise missiles against expensive ones in their conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The expanding suite of tools to track targets at sea, including commercial satellite networks, open-source data and relatively cheap capabilities like drones, mean that striking maritime targets at reach is no longer something only major powers can do. Incidents such as the striking of the Moskva and the destruction of the Russian amphibious landing vessel Saratov by a Ukrainian Tochka ballistic missile while in port highlight this.

In some ways, this might be cause for celebration. Similar capabilities can be used by other targets of aggression such as Taiwan, for example. However, it may be a mistake to assume that only adversaries will be challenged by these developments, which will make theatre entry harder for all major navies, even against sub-peer opponents.

To be sure, the Moskva has certain weaknesses that a western ship might not. It lacked some of the electronic countermeasures such as the Nulka decoy, which vessels like the USS Mason used to defeat cruise missile attacks, its command and control systems may not meet western standards and its crew may have proven lacking in alertness and discipline.

However, as the sinking of HMS Sheffield should remind us, even well-trained crews can struggle to counter surprise cruise missile strikes which leave them with low warning times.

Over long campaigns, most crews will at some point be at risk of coming under attack when they are not alert. As the ability to strike vessels at sea with cruise missiles and to destroy them in port with ballistic missiles proliferates, power projection may become more difficult for all the great powers.

Dr Sidharth Kaushal is a Research Fellow at The Royal United Services Institute

The Week

Russia’s loss of its Black Sea flagship Moskva is a ‘massive blow,’ and maybe also ‘poetic justice’

Peter Weber, Senior editor – April 14, 2022

Russian and Ukraine agree that the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, its Black Sea flagship, was taken out of commission on Wednesday, but there’s no agreement on how that happened. Russian state-run media, citing the Defense Ministry, said “ammunition detonated as a result of a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser,” the ship “was seriously damaged,” and “the entire crew” of 510 was evacuated. Hours earlier, the governor of Odessa said Ukraine had hit the ship with Neptune anti-ship missiles and inflicted “very serious damage.”

Either way, “one of the Russian Navy’s most important warships is either floating abandoned or at the bottom of the Black Sea, a massive blow to a military struggling against Ukrainian resistance 50 days into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his neighbor,” CNN reports. And “whatever the reason for the fire, the analysts say it strikes hard at the heart of the Russian navy as well as national pride, comparable to the U.S. Navy losing a battleship during World War II or an aircraft carrier today.”

Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy at King’s College in London, said losing the Moskva would be a “massive blow” for Russia.

“Only the loss of a ballistic missile submarine or the Kutznetsov,” Russia’s lone aircraft carrier, “would inflict a more serious blow to Russian morale and the navy’s reputation with the Russian public,” retired U.S. Navy Capt. Carl Schuster, former director of operations at the U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, tells CNN.

It is “a significant setback for Russia’s war effort, for both military and morale reasons,” and the Moskva’s demise would “be seen as poetic justice in Ukraine,” since it was the warship that told Ukrainian forces to surrender on Snake Island early in the war, only be told to “go f–k yourself,” BBC News reports. “In more practical terms, this incident is likely to result in Russian warships having to move further offshore for their own safety,” and the Moskva has been a thorn in Ukraine’s side since the invasion began, “loitering offshore and menacing” Odessa.

Yahoo! News

Russia admits Black Sea flagship ‘seriously damaged’ as Ukraine claims missile strike

Niamh Cavanagh, Producer – April 14, 2022

LONDON — Russian officials said their flagship Black Sea vessel was “seriously damaged” in what Ukrainian officials claimed was a missile strike against the warship Moskva.

Defense Ministry officials in Moscow said on Thursday that the explosion on the Moskva, a warship leading the country’s naval assault against Ukraine, was “due to a fire” and said that “ammunition exploded on board.” They added that the crew, believed to include around 500 sailors, were all safely evacuated from the burning ship. The ministry said the fire is now under investigation.

However, the governor of Odesa claimed the damage was a result of a Ukrainian missile strike.

“It has been confirmed that the missile cruiser Moskva today went exactly where it was sent by our border guards on Snake Island!” the governor, Maksym Marchenko, said in a post on Telegram. “Neptune missiles protecting the Black Sea have caused significant damage to this Russian ship.”

The Neptune is a Ukrainian-made anti-ship weapon that came into operation just last year, and its design is based on the Soviet Kh-35 cruise missile. The launchers are mounted on trucks and can hit targets up to roughly 175 miles away, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Neither Russia’s nor Ukraine’s claims have been independently verified, and it’s not clear if the ship was entirely disabled. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said early Thursday that the U.S. cannot confirm Ukraine’s claims of hitting the ship but did say it was a “big blow to Russia.”

Alessio Patalano, a professor of war and strategy at King’s College London, told CNN that losing the flagship vessel would be a “massive blow” for Russian forces. “Ships operate away from public attention, and their activities are rarely the subject of news,” he said. “But they are large floating pieces of national territory, and when you lose one, a flagship no less, the political and symbolic message — in addition to the military loss — stands out precisely because of it.”

Two Ukrainian sources confirmed to Sky News that the 13,780-ton warship had been hit by missiles launched by Ukraine. “She is on fire,” one of the sources said of the warship. “The level of damage is being clarified. … She is about 25 nautical miles from Snake Island.”

The Moskva is the ship that tried to attack Snake Island in February on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The warship approached the island in the Black Sea and ordered 13 Ukrainian soldiers to surrender. However, the Ukrainian soldiers told the Moskva to “go f*** yourself.” After the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the soldiers “died heroically but did not give up.” It was later reported by the country’s navy that they had been captured alive by Russia. According to the Ukrainian Parliament, the soldiers were later released in a prisoner swap.

The warship has led the naval assault on Ukraine, making it an important military target. Moskva has been a naval power in the Black Sea since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It carries a number of anti-submarine and mine-torpedo weapons and holds over a dozen Vulkan anti-ship missiles.

If the Moskva is lost, it will be the second Russian warship to be destroyed by the Ukrainian military. On March 25, officials from Ukraine said they had struck a landing ship, named by Ukrainian forces as the Saratov, at the port of Berdyansk the day before. Videos from social media showed fires raging and smoke billowing from the docks, which had been occupied by Russian forces.

Reuters

U.S. targets seven Belarus national carrier planes for violating export controls

David Shepardson – April 14, 2022

(Reuters) -The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday confirmed it had identified seven Boeing 737 Planes operated by Belarusian national carrier Belavia that are in apparent violation of U.S. export controls.

The seven Belarusian-operated aircraft are the first to be identified since restrictions on Belarus were tightened last week. The Commerce Department said restrictions that bar them from operating services abroad should effectively ground them from future international flights.

The list of planes subject to restrictions, imposed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now includes 146 Russian-owned or operated aircraft and seven Belarusian aircraft

Belavia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The export controls bar companies around the world from providing any refueling, maintenance, repair, or spare parts or services to the identified airplanes.

The Commerce Department actions are part of the Biden administration’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which the department said Belarus has enabled and supported.

Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves said: “By rejecting the international rule of law, Russia and Belarus have made it clear that they do not deserve the benefits of participating in the global economy, and that includes international travel.”

Last week, the department stepped up its crackdown against Russian airlines, slapping Aeroflot, Azur Air, and UTair with enforcement actions for violating American export controls.

The enforcement action denies the three Russian carriers export privileges and targets the entire airlines, not just specific planes. The U.S. government believes the actions will over time make the carriers largely unable to continue flights.

Previously, the United States had identified more than 170 Boeing planes that Russian airlines were operating in violation of U.S. sanctions, including about 40 Aeroflot Boeing 737 and 777 planes, 21 Azur Boeing planes and 17 UTair Boeing aircraft. It has removed some that have left Russia.

The United States, European Union and other countries have barred Russian planes from U.S. airspace.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by David Holmes)

CNN

What images of Russian trucks say about its military’s struggles in Ukraine

By Brad Lendon, CNN – April 14, 2022

Moscow’s supply lines have been hit hard by Ukrainian resistance.

(CNN) Think about modern warfare and it’s likely images of soldiers, tanks and missiles will spring to mind. But arguably more important than any of these is something on which they all rely: the humble truck. Armies need trucks to transport their soldiers to the front lines, to supply those tanks with shells and to deliver those missiles. In short, any army that neglects its trucks does so at its peril.

Yet that appears to be exactly the problem Russia’s military is facing during its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, according to experts analyzing battlefield images as its forces withdraw from areas near Kyiv to focus on the Donbas.

Photographs of damaged Russian trucks, they say, show tell-tale signs of Moscow’s logistical struggles and suggest its efforts are being undermined by its reliance on conscripts, widespread corruption and use of civilian vehicles — not to mention the huge distances involved in resupplying its forces, or Ukraine’s own highly-motivated, tactically-adept resistance.

“Everything that an army needs to do its thing comes from a truck,” says Trent Telenko, a former quality control auditor for the United States’ Defense Contract Management Agency, who is among those parsing the images for clues as to how the war is going.

“The weapon isn’t the tank, it’s the shell the tank fires. That shell travels by a truck,” Telenko points out. Food, fuel, medical supplies and even the soldiers themselves — the presence of all of these rest on logistical supply lines heavily reliant on trucks, he says. And he has reason to believe there’s a problem with those supply lines.A Russian military truck with the letter ‘Z’, a symbol of its invasion of Ukraine, in the town of Armyansk, Crimea, on February 24.

Canary in the coal mine

Telenko describes one recent photo of tire damage on a multimillion-dollar mobile missile truck, a Pantsir S1, as the canary in the coal mine for Russia’s logistical efforts.

As such an expensive piece of equipment, he would have expected its maintenance to be first-rate. Yet its tires were crumbling just a few weeks into the war — what Telenko refers to as “a failure mode.”

If trucks are not moved frequently the rubber in their tires becomes brittle and the tire walls vulnerable to cracks and tears. Telenko says the problem is common when tires are run with low inflation to cope with the sort of muddy conditions that Russian forces are facing in the Ukrainian spring.

For Telenko, who for more than a decade specialized in maintenance problems in the US military’s truck fleet, the condition of the Pantsir S1 is a revealing mistake.

“If you’re not doing (preventive maintenance) for something so important, then it’s very clear the entire truck fleet was treated similarly,” he says.Ukrainian soldiers in front of damaged Russian military trucks in the town of Trostsyanets, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of Kyiv on March 28.

Telenko’s theory has echoes of US World War II Gen. Omar Bradley’s famous quote that “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” And he is not the first to have detected a lack of professionalism in Russia’s military, which includes hundreds of thousands of conscripts.

In one notorious incident early in the war, a 40-mile (64-kilometer) convoy of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, and towed artillery became stalled 19 miles (30 km) outside Kyiv, bogged down according to Britain’s Ministry of Defense not only by Ukrainian resistance but “mechanical breakdowns” too.

Last month, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told CNN’s Don Lemon that Russia had made “missteps” and “struggled with logistics,” while on Saturday a senior US defense official said the Russians had still not solved “their logistics and sustainment problems” and would be unable to reinforce their forces in eastern Ukraine “with any great speed.”
A satellite image of the stalled 40-mile-long convoy of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, and towed artillery in southern Invankiv.

Another ‘bad sign’

Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, sees another “bad sign” for Russian truck logistics: its use of civilian trucks to replace military ones lost in battle.

“Civilian trucks are not made to military grade. They’re not made to carry the loads, they’re not made to carry the specific pieces of equipment,” and in many cases cannot even operate off roads, O’Brien says.

The rigors of war are already trying enough for the sturdiest military grade truck, let alone a civilian one.

“A single mile in peacetime, if you drive it in wartime is like 10 or 20 miles (16 to 32 km) because you are pushing the truck hard with huge payloads,” O’Brien says.

Switching between the two introduces a maintenance problem, as spare parts may not be compatible. And, as O’Brien points out, “You don’t want to have to get a new truck every time an old one breaks down.”

Compounding the problem, according to Alex Vershinin, a former US Army officer who served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that when vehicles do break down Russia has limited resources to recover them.An ambulance truck marked with a “Z” is seen destroyed at the central train station that was used as a Russian base in Trostyanets, Ukraine, on March 30.

The Russian army’s battalion tactical groups — those at the spearhead of its advances into Ukraine — normally have only one light and one heavy recovery vehicle, even in units featuring dozens of vehicles, Vershinin wrote last month for the US Military Academy’s Modern War Institute. This means combat vehicles sometimes need to be diverted to towing duties and sometimes broken down “vehicles need to be towed up to a hundred miles,” wrote Vershinin.

O’Brien suggests Russia has neglected its trucks largely because they are not glitzy enough for a military keen to show off its cutting edge weapons systems.

In recent years, Putin has boasted about Russia’s hypersonic missiles like the Zircon and Kinzhal, stealth fighter jets like the Su-57, and its modern fleet of 11 ballistic missile submarines.

“Often glamorous dictator militaries are good at the showy weapons, they buy the fancy aircraft and the fancy tanks, but they don’t actually buy the less glamorous stuff,” O’Brien says.A truck that was being used by the Russian military lies destroyed in Trostyanets, Ukraine, on March 29.

Conscription and corruption

At the root of Russia’s logistical problems, experts say, are two things that plague its military: conscription and corruption.

About 25% of the Russian military’s million troops are conscripts, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies — though many experts believe that figure may be misleading, suspecting some of the non-conscript troops are either coerced or tricked into enlisting.

Russia’s conscripts tend to serve one-year stints, occupy the lower ranks, and fill many of the positions in the logistics chain, including vehicle maintenance.

“You can’t really learn anything in a year about maintaining military systems,” Telenko says.

Conscripts also have little motivation as they know their time in the job is so limited, he says.

A senior US defense official said Wednesday said Washington is seeing morale problems among Russia’s conscripts, who make up “almost half” of its forces in Ukraine.

“We have evidence, even recent evidence, that they have been disillusioned by this war, weren’t properly informed, weren’t properly trained, weren’t ready, not just physically but weren’t ready mentally for what they were about to do,” the US official said.

By contrast, in the US military vehicle maintenance is handled by a volunteer non-commissioned officer corps, professional sergeants and corporals who stay for extended enlistments and are motivated by pay rises and promotions.

“You want to have as good people maintaining logistics as you do for every other branch,” says O’Brien, at the University of St Andrews. He adds, in reference to Russia’s apparent struggles, “Were they in a shape for a logistics war or did they not just take it seriously?”

Then there is the corruption that experts say has dogged the Russian military for years.

Matthew Stephenson, a Harvard Law School professor and editor in chief of the Global Anti-corruption Blog, wrote in March that corruption had a particularly corrosive effect on the Russian military’s maintenance and supply logistics.

“All of these problems that anti-corruption experts and national security specialists had been emphasizing for years do seem to be manifesting in the current Russian invasion,” he wrote.

“Corruption — in the form of embezzlement or bribery — can also lead to the purchase of substandard equipment, for example by giving the contract for equipment or maintenance to a less qualified supplier that is more willing to pay kickbacks. Or the person in charge of allocating the maintenance or procurement budget can simply report spending the full budgeted amount on high quality products or services, but then purchase low quality substitutes and pocket the difference.

Telenko’s view is that some of the effects are now being seen on the battlefield. He says money that should have been used for maintenance is “likely lining the pockets of officers in charge of the conscripts who would be servicing the trucks.”The aftermath of an explosion that destroyed a Russian truck in the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 4.

A truck too far?

There are other, subtler, signs of Russian struggles that might easily be missed by anyone who isn’t logistically minded, experts say.

For instance, says Alex Lord, Europe and Eurasia analyst at the Sibylline strategic analysis firm in London, Russia’s military has historically relied on its large manpower reserves to handle logistics, rather than mechanized systems using wooden pallets and forklifts.

Telenko gives the example of loading artillery shells onto a truck. A forklift can lift a pallet of two dozen shells in a single go, while manually lifting individual shells onto a truck would consume far more time and manpower.

This makes Russian logistics around 30% less efficient than leading Western militaries, says Jason Crump, CEO of Sibylline and a veteran of 20 years in the British military.”This means that it takes more trucks to do a given task in the same time, so greater fuel use and wear and tear,” Crump says.

It also means Russian trucks spend more time standing still while loading and unloading, according to Lord.

“This provides opportunities for Ukrainian forces to target them — as we have seen Ukrainian commanders exploit numerous times during the current campaign,” he says.

Why Russian TV propaganda is crucial to understanding the war in Ukraine

All these problems only exacerbate the problems facing Moscow in what is already an uphill struggle for its forces given the distances involved.

Trucks can usually operate up to 90 miles (145 kilometers) from their supply depot, Telenko points out.

But Ukraine is about the size of Texas, almost 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) wide and 350 miles (563 kilometers) long.

That means Russia would need to open numerous supply depots inside Ukraine for its troops to advance farther into Ukraine’s interior.

With Moscow already pulling back under fierce Ukrainian resistance that seems like a tall order. Russia is already thought to have lost a substantial number of trucks.

Building more to replace them could take at least six months, Telenko estimates, by which time more losses would be likely.

“I don’t see how the Russians can maintain their current positions, let alone make any offensive moves with their current truck fleet,” he says.

“Trucks are the backbone of any modern mechanized military force, and if you don’t have them you walk.”

Daily Beast

Lonely Putin Is Losing Control of His Own Spiraling Minions

Shannon Vavra – April 14, 2022

After a series of embarrassing setbacks in trying to capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, over the past 40-odd days, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ultimately decided to have his forces retreat, and regroup to go after eastern Ukraine. But his cronies can’t seem to get the picture straight.

Putin loyalist Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic—also known as Putin’s “foot soldier”—said on his Telegram account this week that Russia will still be working to take Kyiv.

We will “take Kyiv and all other cities,” Kadyrov said.

The picture on the ground is far different, though. With Russian forces failing to take Kyiv, they left and abandoned that goal, instead focusing on the east. As recently as Tuesday this week, a senior U.S. defense official confirmed in a briefing that Russia is still focusing on the eastern portions of Ukraine.

‘There Is Such Fuckery Going on Here’: Russian Soldiers ‘Revolting’ as They Get Stiffed on Ukraine Payouts

In all fairness, Russia is working to take eastern portions of Ukraine, which Kadyrov mentioned as well. But for the moment, his messaging seems way off from Putin’s current planning process.

But this isn’t a function of a war dragging on and messaging getting lost in the fog. The list of mishaps and communications not going according to plan goes back months. In mid-March, Kadyrov claimed he and Chechen forces were near Kyiv—a claim Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov flat-out denied. And during a now notorious meeting with Russia’s Presidential Security Council in February, Putin lashed out at the chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, when Naryshkin spoke about Russia’s policy towards eastern Ukraine in a way that apparently irked Putin. Naryshkin hesitated and stammered his way through his words, molding them to Putin’s will as they went—and as Putin continually interrupted him.

The trouble might be self-inflicted, at least in part. Putin has isolated himself from his advisers while waging a war that is, unlike any war in Europe before, being documented in real time on social media. All eyes are on Putin and his cronies’ every move. And for Putin’s Russia, which isn’t built for transparency or message coordination and rollout, the fumbles are glaringly obvious.

“The Russians don’t practice this. It’s not an open society, they don’t talk to the press—they don’t even attempt to be transparent. Undoubtedly because it’s such a stovepiped system and they don’t have much experience or use in talking to the press it’s inevitable they’d be working at cross-purposes,” Douglas London, a former CIA chief of station, told The Daily Beast. “Putin is very much a stovepiped decision-maker in terms of how he delegates power and authority.”

Examining what Putin wants to do next in the war is like a game of Russian roulette—and many, even in Putin’s inner circle, are just throwing out ideas they think might stick, or that might align with what Putin wants, even if they have no clue what he’s thinking, according to Anton Barbashin, a Russian political analyst.

“Among the many decision-makers or elites in Russia… only a few have a clear-cut understanding of what is actually happening [including] what’s the strategy and how it evolves. We never know who exactly knows the situation,” Barbashin told The Daily Beast. “There’s just a lot of people speculating on how they understand the situation.”

Some of the fudged messages coming from advisers are tied to their interest in vying for attention from Putin and trying to show him just how loyal and useful they can be in the war.

“It’s essentially a competition to prove to the Kremlin, ‘Look, this version is better for Russia and I’m ready to execute it. I’m ready to be that institution that you can rely on to solve your problems,’” Barbashin said. “They’re showing specifically their loyalty to the Kremlin, to Putin, to the cause. And they’re trying to compete.”

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An increasingly isolated and rage-filled Putin has found himself surrounded by advisers too scared to tell him things were not going well on the battlefield, though, leading him to have an inaccurate picture of the war, which may also contribute to bad messaging, according to top Biden administration officials.

“We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told reporters in a briefing last month.

Putin has cordoned himself off so much in recent months that it’s not clear anyone knows what Moscow’s next move will be.

“Generally speaking it is very hard to understand even for them, what is the decision… because the Kremlin doesn’t know yet,” Barbashin said. “That has been a Kremlin thing for decades now to work several options at the same time [and] depending on the circumstances choosing one.”

The messages from Kadyrov need to be taken with a sizable grain of salt because he is essentially operating as a kind of vassal ally to Russia—one with his own personal goals and interest in maintaining a foothold in Russian power circles.

“He’s a very special kind of duck in this mix,” Barbashin said. “The way he’s been engaged in this war, the way he is participating, is kind of like he’s acting on its own.”

Putin’s war has encountered a whole slew of other problems that have tripped Putin and his cronies up. Putin’s forces, for one, struggled to take Kyiv, a situation that “frustrated” Putin, according to a CIA analysis shared with U.S. lawmakers. A senior defense official said in briefings last month that a column of Russian forces was stalling outside of Kyiv due to failures of resourcing and a lack of fuel. Russian command and control has been a mess. And officials have been scratching their heads at why Russia launched a series of cyberattacks on Ukrainian banks and websites in advance of the invasion—but have largely failed to run a flurry of successful hacks while waging war in Ukraine, a move which some analysts say could have made their invasion more chaotic for Ukrainians, and lent an advantage to Russia.

U.S. intelligence officials eventually realized it wasn’t clear if Putin had a top military commander in charge of running the war in Ukraine, according to CNN. Units running different operations around Ukraine weren’t communicating with each other, making for a poor distribution of resources and lack of coordination, officials said.

Putin appears to know that he might need more coordination if he is going to walk away with any “positive” news to bring back to Russia. As Russia has retreated from Kyiv and works to regroup and refocus on the eastern portions of Ukraine, Russia is tapping Aleksandr Dvornikov, the chief of staff of Russia’s Central Military District, to be the top commander in Ukraine. And a military convoy north of Izyum might be poised to provide more logistics support to the offensive in eastern Ukraine, as a way to make up for lack of preparation earlier, a senior U.S. defense official said in a briefing Tuesday.

But this little bit of optics play—announcing a new leader—isn’t likely to overhaul the disorganized way the war is going for Russia, in particular because the military is just not equipped for an overarching command structure right now, London said.

“I don’t think it’s going to make for an immediate solution to a lot of the problems they’re having, particularly in terms of logistics, command control, and… morale,” London told The Daily Beast. “They may now have said they’ve got this overall battlefield commander… I don’t necessarily know it’s going to quite roll out that way because they’re not organized to work that way. They’re not organized to function in this overall very organized chain of command.”

Air Force Times

Russian military’s damaged Black Sea flagship sinks

Adam Schreck, The Associated Press – April 14, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine — The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, a guided-missile cruiser that became a potent target of Ukrainian defiance in the opening days of the war, sank Thursday after it was heavily damaged in the latest setback for Moscow’s invasion.

Ukrainian officials said their forces hit the vessel with missiles, while Russia acknowledged a fire aboard the Moskva but no attack. U.S. and other Western officials could not confirm what caused the blaze.

The loss of the warship named for the Russian capital is a devastating symbolic defeat for Moscow as its troops regroup for a renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine after retreating from much of the north, including the capital.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the ship sank in a storm while being towed to a port. Russia earlier said the flames on the ship, which would typically have 500 sailors on board, forced the entire crew to evacuate. It later said the blaze had been contained and that the ship would be towed to port with its missile launchers intact.

The ship can carry 16 long-range cruise missiles, and its removal from combat reduces Russia’s firepower in the Black Sea. It’s also a blow to Russian prestige in a war already widely seen as a historic blunder. Now entering its eighth week, Russia’s invasion has stalled because of resistance from Ukrainian fighters bolstered by weapons and other aid sent by Western nations.

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The news of the flagship’s damage overshadowed Russian claims of advances in the southern port city of Mariupol, where they have been battling the Ukrainians since the early days of the invasion in some of the heaviest fighting of the war — at a horrific cost to civilians.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Wednesday that 1,026 Ukrainian troops surrendered at a metals factory in the city. But Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, rejected the claim, telling Current Time TV that “the battle over the seaport is still ongoing today.”

It was unclear how many forces were still defending Mariupol.

Russian state television broadcast footage that it said was from Mariupol showing dozens of men in camouflage walking with their hands up and carrying others on stretchers. One man held a white flag.

Mariupol’s capture is critical for Russia because it would allow its forces in the south, which came up through the annexed Crimean Peninsula, to fully link up with troops in the eastern Donbas region, Ukraine’s industrial heartland and the target of the coming offensive.

The Russian military continues to move helicopters and other equipment together for such a effort, according to a senior U.S. defense official, and it will likely add more ground combat units “over coming days.” But it’s still unclear when Russia could launch a bigger offensive in the Donbas.

Moscow-backed separatists have been battling Ukraine in the Donbas since 2014, the same year Russia seized Crimea. Russia has recognized the independence of the rebel regions in the Donbas.

The loss of the Moskva could delay any new, wide-ranging offensive.

Maksym Marchenko, the governor of the Odesa region, across the Black Sea to the northwest of Sevastopol, said the Ukrainians struck the ship with two Neptune missiles and caused “serious damage.”

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, called it an event of “colossal significance.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry said ammunition on board detonated as a result of a fire, without saying what caused the blaze. It said the “main missile weapons” were not damaged. In addition to the cruise missiles, the warship also had air-defense missiles and other guns.

The Neptune is an anti-ship missile that was recently developed by Ukraine and based on an earlier Soviet design. The launchers are mounted on trucks stationed near the coast, and, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the missiles can hit targets up to 280 kilometers (175 miles) away. That would have put the Moskva within range, based on where the fire began.

The U.S. was not able to confirm Ukraine’s claims of striking the warship, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Thursday. Still, he called it “a big blow to Russia.”

“They’ve had to kind of choose between two stories: One story is that it was just incompetence, and the other was that they came under attack, and neither is a particular the good outcome for them,” Sullivan told the Economic Club of Washington.

During the first days of the war, The Moskva was reportedly the warship that called on Ukrainian soldiers stationed on Snake Island in the Black Sea to surrender in a standoff. In a widely circulated recording, the soldier responds: “Russian warship, go (expletive) yourself.”

The AP could not independently verify the incident, but Ukraine and its supporters consider it an iconic moment of defiance. The country recently unveiled a postage stamp commemorating it.

Russia invaded on Feb. 24 and has lost potentially thousands of fighters. The conflict has killed untold numbers of Ukrainian civilians and forced millions more to flee.

It’s also further inflated prices at grocery stores and gasoline pumps because Ukraine and Russia are major producers of crops and energy, while dragging on the global economy. The head of the International Monetary Fund said Thursday that the war helped push the organization to downgrade economic forecasts for 143 countries.

Also Thursday, Russian authorities accused Ukraine of sending two low-flying military helicopters across the border and firing on residential buildings in the village of Klimovo in Russia’s Bryansk region, some 11 kilometers (7 miles) from the frontier. Russia’s Investigative Committee said seven people, including a toddler, were wounded.

Russia’s state security service had earlier said Ukrainian forces fired mortar rounds at a border post in Bryansk as refugees were crossing, forcing them to flee.

The reports could not be independently verified. Earlier this month, Ukrainian security officials denied that Kyiv was behind an air strike on an oil depot in the Russian city of Belgorod, some 55 kilometers (35 miles) from the border.

Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

Business Insider

Russian ships are heading south as the Russian Black Fleet flagship battles ‘extensive’ fire, officials say

Christopher Woody, Abbie Shull – April 14, 2022

• Russian Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva is battling an “extensive” fire following an explosion aboard, officials say.
• Ukrainians forces claim to have hit the ship with missiles, but Western official could not confirm that on Thursday.
• While the details remain unclear, the incident is seen as a significant blow to the Russian navy.

Russian Navy ships in the northern Black Sea have moved south as the Russian Black Fleet flagship, the guided-missile cruiser Moskva, battles a severe fire, Western officials said Thursday.

Ukrainian forces claim to have struck the Russian cruiser with a long-range missile launched from shore. Western officials say there is not yet enough information to attribute the fire to a specific cause, but the damage to the Russian flagship appears extensive and amounts to a “significant blow” against Russia’s navy.

US officials believe Moskva “has experienced significant damage” and that the ship is still “battling a fire, but we do not know the extent of the damage,” what caused that damage, or whether there are casualties, a senior US defense official told reporters on Thursday, speaking anonymously to describe developing events in Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials say their forces struck the Russian warship with Neptune anti-ship missiles. One official said the Moskva was “drowned.” Russian state media said Thursday that the warship was afloat, its main armaments were intact, and the fire had been localized, implying it has been contained to some area but perhaps not extinguished.

Western officials have called Ukraine’s claims “credible” and said the Russian account of a fire breaking out aboard was “difficult to believe,” but the US official wouldn’t rule out an accident.

“The risk of fire is ever present and potential for explosions are also ever present, particularly on a surface combatant, which is designed in this case for air defense,” the US defense official said, pointing to the munitions and fuel that a ship like Moskva would be carrying.

This would be the first known use of the Ukrainian-developed Neptune missiles. The Neptune is capable of striking land and sea targets within a 200-mile range. It’s the first mid-range cruise missile produced by Ukraine and designed primarily to strike warships, like the Moskva.

The cruiser was between 60 and 65 nautical miles south of the port city of Odesa when it experienced an explosion. “Sixty miles is well within the Neptune’s effective range but it also could have been something else,” the US official said.

The US official called the fire “extensive” and “significant” but said it’s unclear if there is damage to the hull. The warship does appear to be sailing east, however. “Our assumption is that she’ll be heading to Sevastopol for repairs, but that’s really all we can say,” the US official said.

Roughly a half-dozen ships were “fairly dispersed” in the northern Black Sea at the time of the explosion, according to the US official, who said that four or five those ships, which were “as close or closer” to the coast as the Moskva, “have all moved south.”

“At this point, we hold them no closer than about 80 nautical miles from the coast, but ships move and I can’t predict where there’ll be an hour from now,” the US official added.

That movement has raised speculation that Russian commanders are trying to increase the distance between their ships and Ukrainian coastal defenses, which are being bolstered by weaponry provided by Western countries.

The Moskva is perhaps best known for involvement in the attack on Ukraine’s Snake Island at the start of the Russian invasion. When asked by the Russian fleet to surrender, Ukrainian guards on the island were heard saying “Russian warship, go f— yourself.” Speaking Thursday, however, the US official couldn’t confirm that Moskva had been involved in that incident.

Since then, Moskva has been active around Odesa. The Russians have repeatedly sent landing ships toward the port but diverted them at the last moment, tying up Ukrainian forces in the area with threats of an assault.

While the circumstances are unclear, the damage to Moskva is significant for Russia, which will be unable to reinforce its ships in the Black Sea following Turkey’s closure of the sea to warships at the outset of the conflict.

Alessio Patalano, an expert on naval warfare in East Asia at King’s College London, called it “one of the most severe naval losses since the Falklands War.”

“Tonight Russian commanders will feel less secure as they reflect upon the fact that the [Black Sea] is no longer their lake. It’s a box with no way out,” Patalano said. “Things have got much harder.”

Yahoo! News

Putin nemesis Bill Browder reveals the ‘real money’ funding Kremlin’s war

Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent – April 14, 2022

NEW YORK — A trillion dollars: That’s how much money famed investor Bill Browder believes Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs have stolen from the Russian people since the fall of the Soviet Union.

“And that was money that was supposed to be spent on health care and education, roads and services,” Browder said at a Manhattan event to celebrate the publication of his second book, “Freezing Order,” which chronicles how he became a Putin nemesis as a result of his attempts to expose Kremlin corruption. Those efforts led to the death of Browder’s attorney Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured in a Russian prison and whose name is affixed to sanctions bills passed by Congress.

Learning of Magnitsky’s death was “the most heartbreaking, traumatic, and devastating moment of my life,” Browder writes — and a sign of how committed Putin was willing to pursuing perceived enemies of the state. The grandson of American communist leader Earl Browder, Bill Browder had made billions through Hermitage Capital Management, the fund he started in 1996, during the chaotic period of full-contact Russian capitalism.

As Browder heightened scrutiny of some of the companies he invested in — most notably, energy giant Gazprom — he ran afoul of a Kremlin that, under Putin, has declared such questions off limits, as they would go to the very heart of the kleptocracy that had ruled Russia since the nation’s industry was sold off and plundered in the early 1990s.

“Everyone tries to think about Russia as a sovereign state and Putin as a leader acting in national interest,” Browder said to Yahoo News, describing that outlook as a fundamental misunderstanding. “You think you can apply political science to Russia. You need to apply criminal science. You need to be a criminologist to understand Russia. People don’t go into government to serve the country. They go into government to steal money.”

Browder was banned from entering Russia in 2005 and has since watched a series of American presidents try to improve relations with the Kremlin. He now lives in London, a city favored by the oligarchs he despises.

“We basically said, ‘It’s OK. We want your money. We want your oil,’” Browder told Yahoo News in an interview at the Century Club ahead of Tuesday’s book release party.

Today it is uncontroversial to call Putin a war criminal. But the man bombing Kharkiv is the same one who leveled the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 2000, invaded Georgia in 2008 and seized Ukrainian territory for the first time in 2014. “When I walked into the offices of government ministers in Europe, or the United States, back in the early days talking about sanctioning Russia — it’s like I walked in with a giant turd on my head,” Browder said.

Today, Browder is known less as an investor than as a human rights campaigner and Putin critic. Tuesday’s party thus included an eclectic mix: the professional basketball player Enes Kanter Freedom, former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara, private equity giant Stephen Schwarzman and National Review journalist Jay Nordlinger, who in 2017 highlighted the refusal of federal authorities to allow Browder into the U.S. The decision was reversed.

Browder is especially withering when it comes to the Western attorneys, bankers and publicists who help Putin’s oligarchs hide their ill-gotten gains, sue investigative journalists into submission and burnish their blood-spattered records with favorable coverage.

There could be only one motive for Western firms to do business with the Kremlin, Browder believes. “They’re just a bunch of greedy bastards that are trying to make as much money as possible,” he said, alluding to the legal travails of British journalist Catherine Belton, who was sued for reporting on Kremlin corruption. “They don’t care who they’re working for.”

Last week, Browder testified in Washington during a hearing on the Enablers Act, which would tighten already existing rules around money laundering, in effect providing more government scrutiny into the secretive movement of funds from countries like China and Russia.

“If we make banks report dirty money but allow law, real estate and accounting firms to look the other way, that creates a loophole that crooks and kleptocrats can sail a yacht through,” Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., said last fall when introducing the legislation. While it targets any institution or individual abetting money laundering, the measure has assumed a new urgency since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

Browder has additionally called for foreign accomplices of Russia to be deprived of entry into the United States, a proposal clearly aimed at Kremlin allies residing in the British capital, which has earned the unflattering nickname “Londongrad.” He bemoans the notion that high-profile seizures of oligarchs’ yachts give the impression of fatal blows, when they are really just minor difficulties or men worth billions.

“The real money is held in highly complex trusts and structures,” Browder said, in offshore havens like Jersey and the Cayman Islands.

Sanctions are one way to fight Putin. Weapons are another. “The Ukrainians say they need a no fly-zone,” he pointed out, rejecting the idea that such a move would immediately lead to nuclear war. “At what point,” he wondered, “do you finally stand up to Russia?”

And much as he would like to see Putin defeated, he hopes to return to Russia one day when it is a free country, one that doesn’t threaten him with prison or murder.

“It’s fascinating. It’s interesting. It’s unforgettable. It’s horrible,” Browder told Yahoo News. “It’s nasty, brutish. It’s got everything. If Putin wasn’t in power, and there was a democratic government, I would love to go back there.”