A missile struck a humanitarian kitchen in Ukraine run by celebrity chef José Andrés, wounding four workers
Zahra Tayeb – April 17, 2022
The missile strike incident (not pictured here) took place in Kharkiv, a city that has been subjected to ongoing attacks from the air.AP Photo/Felipe Dana
A missile struck a community kitchen in Ukraine Saturday serving people fleeing the war.
The kitchen was run by a non-profit organization set up by Michelin-star chef José Andrés.
The explosion wounded four staff and left team members “unnerved,” Andrés tweeted.
A missile struck a humanitarian kitchen in Ukraine on Saturday, wounding four people who were part of a team working to feed people displaced by the war.
The community kitchen based in Kharkiv, one of Ukraine’s largest cities, was run by the World Central Kitchen, a non-profit governmental organization set up by celebrity chef José Andrés. The Spanish-American Michelin-star chef, who owns at least a dozen restaurants in several locations around the world, created the charity more than a decade ago to provide meals to people in disaster and war zones.
Andrés and the chief executive of the World Central Kitchen, Nate Mook, confirmed the Saturday explosion in separate tweets.
“This is the reality here — cooking is a heroic act of bravery,” Mook wrote on Twitter, adding that he was at the kitchen meeting the team only 24 hours prior to the missile strike.
Andrés said staff workers were “unnerved but safe” after the attack.
“Giving food in the middle of a senseless war is an act of courage, resilience, resistance … and we will continue cooking.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the World Central Kitchen has served more than one million meals to people who have fled from violence. The organization has set up stations at all eight Ukraine-Poland border crossings and serves hot meals to refugees 24 hours a day.
The World Central Kitchen was initially founded after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti where Andrés and his team distributed food to hungry people. In 2017, it served more than 3.4 million meals after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and fed 11,400 furloughed workers in one day out of a pop-up kitchen in Washington, DC in 2019.
WINIFRED, Montana – Ed Butcher, 78, tied up his horse, kicked mud off his cowboy boots and walked into his house for dinner. He’d been working on the ranch for most of the day, miles away from cellphone range. “What did I miss?” he asked his wife, Pam, as he turned their TV to cable news. “What part of the world is falling apart today?”
“Russia’s aggression has gone from scary to terrifying,” the TV commentator said, as Pam took their dinner out of the oven.
“We’re talking about a war that involves a very unstable nuclear power,” the commentator said, as they bent their heads over the venison casserole to say a prayer.
“This could escalate,” the commentator said. “It could explode beyond our wildest imaginations.”
Ed turned the TV off and looked out the window at miles of open prairie, where the wind rattled against their barn and blew dust clouds across Butcher Road. Ed’s family had been on this land since his grandparents homesteaded here in 1913, but rarely had life on the ranch felt so precarious. Their land was parched by record-breaking drought, neglected by a pandemic work shortage, scarred by recent wildfires, and now also connected in its own unique way to a war across the world. “I wonder sometimes what else could go wrong,” Ed said, as he looked over a hill toward the west end of their ranch, where an active U.S. government nuclear missile was buried just beneath the cow pasture.
“Do you think they’ll ever shoot it up into the sky?” Pam asked.
“I used to say, ‘No way,’ ” Ed said. “Now it’s more like, ‘Please God, don’t let us be here to see it.’ “
The missile was called a Minuteman III, and the launch site had been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor.
It’s buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a 110-ton door of concrete and steel. It’s 60 feet long. It weighs 79,432 pounds. It has an explosive power at least 20 times greater than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima. An Air Force team is stationed in an underground bunker a few miles away, ready to fire the missile at any moment if the order comes. It would tear out of the silo in about 3.4 seconds and climb above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and detonate within a few hundred yards of its target. The ensuing fireball would vaporize every person and every structure within a half-mile. The blast would flatten buildings across a five-mile radius. Secondary fires and fatal doses of radiation would spread over dozens more miles, resulting in what U.S. military experts have referred to as “total nuclear annihilation.”
“I bet it would fly right over our living room,” Ed said. “I wonder if we’d even see it.”
“We’d hear it. We’d feel it,” Pam said. “The whole house would be shaking.”
“And if we’re shooting off missiles, you can bet some are headed back toward us,” Ed said.
Over the years, they’d reckoned with every conceivable threat to their land. Drought killed the nutrients in the soil. Hail destroyed the crops. Wolves and mountain lions attacked the cattle. Eagles dive-bombed the sheep. Animal skulls littered the same prairie where dozens of newborn calves arrived each spring. The Butchers’ eldest son had died suddenly on the ranch of an asthma attack. Their great-grandson had just been delivered in the bunkhouse, the sixth generation to be born onto the property. One of the things Ed appreciated about ranch life was that it brought him closer to the natural cycles of life and death, which only made the idea of man-made, mass nuclear destruction more unimaginable.
“I guess we’d head for the storage room,” Ed said.
“Make a few goodbye calls,” Pam said. “Hold hands. Pray.”
Ed got up to clear his plate. “Good thing it’s all hypothetical. It’s really only there for deterrence. It’ll never actually explode.”
“You’re right,” Pam said. “It won’t happen. Almost definitely not.”
* * *
Even though it was on their ranch, they had never been allowed down inside the missile silo. Sometimes they saw convoys of Humvees and a wide-load semi traveling on their dirt roads toward the launch site, and once Ed had glimpsed part of the Minuteman III as it was being lowered into the ground, with its black-and-white painted warhead and rocket engine. But the exact comings and goings of the missile on their land remained classified. The 80-foot bunker was mostly a place of their imagination.
It was known to the government as Launch Facility E05, one of 52 active nuclear missile sites on the old homestead farms of Fergus County. The government had chosen to turn the lonely center of Montana into a nuclear hot spot in the 1950s because of what was described then as its relative proximity to Russia, and also because the region could act as what experts called a “sacrificial nuclear sponge” in the event of nuclear war. The theory was that rather than unloading all of its missiles on major U.S. cities, an enemy would instead have to use some of those missiles to attack the silos surrounding Winifred, Mont., home to 35,000 cattle and 189 residents whose birthdays and anniversaries were all printed on the official city calendar.
Winifred was where the Butchers went for church on Sundays and for mail delivery each Wednesday, but they spent most of their time with their children and grandchildren on the ranch. They had 12,000 acres to manage and no paid employees, so two decades into retirement, Ed was still helping mend fences and check on the cows.
“Are you heading out today on the horse?” Pam asked him one morning, knowing he still occasionally liked to ride up to 20 miles a day.
“Nah, too cold,” he said. “I’m a fair-weather cowboy anymore. I’ll take the four-wheeler.”
He put on his work gloves and drove onto the ranch, bumping over fields of sagebrush and dry creek beds as he turned away from the silo and neared the ponderosa pine forest on the south end of the property. He passed his grandfather’s old bunkhouse, his father’s first hunting cabin and a dozen hills and landmarks named after family friends and dead pets. Several horses spotted his four-wheeler and ran over to greet him. “No treats today, fellas,” he said, and he continued out to the cow pasture, where the first calf of the spring had been born overnight. He watched the calf struggle to stand and then fall back over. “Come on, girl. You’ve got it,” he said, and he turned off the engine and watched until the calf got back on its feet.
He’d only lived away from the ranch once during his life, when he went to college in Billings and then started a career as a professor in North Dakota. He’d been on his way toward a doctorate in U.S. history until his father had a heart attack in 1971, and his mother called to say she was planning to sell the ranch unless he wanted to move back to Montana. He was their only child. The Butcher name was on the road, just like the Wickens and the Wallings and the Stulcs and all of the other original homestead families. Even though he loved teaching, he moved back with Pam to take over the ranch.
Their soil was usually too dry for grain, and there was almost no margin in raising cattle. It was no way to get rich, but over the years, Ed had taught himself and his three children to “get fat off the scenery,” he said. Now, as he drove, he watched the snow melt off the nearby Judith Mountains and the cumulus clouds roll across the sky from Canada. A herd of antelope raced across the prairie and a porcupine waddled across the road in front of him.
“Not much has changed out here in a hundred years,” he said, and then he drove over the hill toward the silo, which was a few miles from their house. The parched yellow grass on the government’s one acre of land matched the rest of the Butcher ranch, but the Air Force had installed a chain-link fence and a portable bathroom. Behind the fence there were a few telephone poles, a small circle of concrete in the ground and a metal manhole cover that led down to the bunker. “No trespassing,” a small sign read. “Use of deadly force authorized.”
When the military built the launch site during Ed’s teenage years, he’d seen it mostly as a potential intrusion, a symbol of federal government overreach and what he called the “insanity of the nuclear arms race.” He’d been born into the dawn of nuclear warfare, and even if the historian in him believed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end World War II, he hoped never to see that kind of devastation again in his lifetime. As a college professor, he’d driven a Volkswagen bus with a peace sign painted on the rear window, and Pam had attended a small protest against the Minuteman missiles at a federal building in rural North Dakota. They’d moved back to the ranch expecting that they might see some of the nuclear drama they’d heard about at other silos: toxic chemical leaks, accidental near-explosions, Russian spies or groups of nuns who chained themselves to the silo fence in acts of protest.
But, instead, each time Ed went to check on the silo, all he found was wind and sky and occasionally a cow entangled in the fence. The Air Force replaced the original Minuteman missile with a Minuteman II and then a Minuteman III. Military crews built better dirt roads on the Butcher ranch. They plowed those roads in winter. They provided jobs for electricians and contractors in Fergus County. They worked on the launch site mostly under the cover of night, and, as far as Ed could tell, nothing much ever happened. The missile was never launched. The nuclear apocalypse never came. After a while, the silo started to feel to Ed less like a hazard than just another part of the landscape. It was a benign relic of the Cold War. It was one acre out of 12,000 – or at least that’s what Ed had thought until late February, when Russia invaded Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin put his nuclear weapons on higher alert.
“I bet Russian satellites are counting the hairs on my head right now,” Ed said.
He looked up at the sky and then pulled his hat down toward his eyes. He turned away from the silo and headed back to check on the cows. “I liked it better when this place felt like a piece of history,” he said.
* * *
Instead, at that moment:
Motion sensors were detecting any movement within 100 yards of the launch facility.
Military helicopters were patrolling for suspicious activity across all 450 active missile sites in Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado.
Two members of the Air Force team were beginning another 24-hour shift in a bunker seven miles from the Butcher ranch, where they took an elevator 60 feet below ground into a small room reinforced with four-foot concrete walls. They had a tiny bathroom. They had a bed. They had an escape tunnel. They had a control panel where they could key in an eight-digit code to launch 10 nuclear missiles from Fergus County into the sky.
And a few miles further down the road, Ed’s youngest son was at the county courthouse, helping to work on the next generation of America’s nuclear arsenal. Ross Butcher, 53, was one of three elected commissioners in Fergus County, and lately part of his job was to coordinate with the military as it began replacing the Minuteman IIIs with a new and more efficient nuclear weapon, called the Sentinel. The Air Force had ordered 642 of them from Northrop Grumman at an estimated lifetime cost of about $260 billion, and now the military had sent Fergus County officials letters and power point presentations about what to expect during the next 10 years of “nuclear improvements to enhance our national defense.”
“A complete renovation to all launch facilities,” read one slide, and Ross flipped over to the next.
Thirty-one new communications towers. Eight more control centers. Twelve-hundred miles of high-speed underground wiring. Two workforce hubs with 2,500 to 3,000 employees.
“They’re talking about adding almost 50 percent to our population,” Ross said. “That kind of impact changes everything.”
National polling had shown that most U.S. taxpayers don’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a fleet of nuclear weapons that the government hopes will remain underground until they eventually expire, but the military had found little of that resistance in Fergus County. Malmstrom Air Force Base in nearby Great Falls contributed more than $375 million to the local economy each year. Towns across rural Montana had named school teams after the Minuteman and built museum exhibits on nuclear history, and Fergus County had erected a 60-foot decommissioned missile as a monument next to the playground in a city park.
Ross had gone to meetings across central Montana about the impact of the new Sentinel missile, and he’d made the case that Fergus County’s role was both economic and patriotic. “This is world peace through superior firepower,” he’d said. He’d lived alongside a nuclear missile on his family’s ranch for 53 years, and in all of that time, no country had fired a nuclear weapon.
“Nukes are a part of our global reality, so we better have good ones,” he’d told county officials. “I’d love to go around promoting total world peace, but it’s not realistic. We need to show that big stick or a bully can start pushing us around.”
Which brought him to the last piece of information the Air Force had sent to Fergus County, about the projected lifetime of the Sentinel missiles in a continuing era of nuclear armament:
“Strong deterrence and protection into the 2070’s and beyond,” it read.
* * *
Back at the ranch, Pam Butcher had begun to wonder if mankind would survive that long. “Everywhere I look, it’s like humanity’s moving toward its final hours,” she said, because that’s how she interpreted the recent wildfires, the droughts, the political instability in Europe, the erosion of American democracy, the inflation of the U.S. dollar, the coronavirus pandemic, and also the series of tragedies that had devastated her family in the past few years. Her brother and his wife had recently been killed in a collision with a semitruck. Her son-in-law had died of the coronavirus in 2021. And Trevis, her eldest son, had suffered a fatal asthma attack in his sleep after working 16-hour days on the ranch in dust and wildfire smoke. He’d always been in good health, and at the time of his death, he was managing the ranch and also becoming a leader within Montana’s state Republican Party. The only way Pam could make sense of his death was by thinking that God needed Trevis to help get things in order for a monumental event. Maybe God was preparing for the rapture, Pam thought.
She’d started to get ready herself, storing several years of extra food supplies in the cellar and ordering dozens of books and DVDs from a Christian website. They sat in piles around the living room: “Midnight Strikes,” “Final Age of Man,” “Realms of the Dead,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Final Empire,” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
“Oh, look,” Pam said, one afternoon, as she flipped through the stack and then held up her newest DVD to show Ed. On the cover was an image of a parched desert landscape, a nuclear firebomb, three men wearing hazmat suits, and a crumbling Statue of Liberty. “MEGADROUGHT,” the cover read. “The Annihilation of the Human Race Accelerates.”
“Will you sit and have a piece of cake and watch it with me?” Pam asked.
Ed shook his head and walked to his desk across the room. “You go ahead. I’m going to answer some emails.”
“Next time,” she said, and she sat in front of the TV and started the DVD. The screen flashed with disconnected images from around the world: an empty reservoir, a famished child, a group of rioters breaking the windows of a car, a screaming woman, a military helicopter, a cloud of smoke, a nuclear missile launching into flight.
“The four horsemen from the Book of Revelation are now riding,” the narrator said, as a fire spread across the TV screen. “We have transitioned into the prophetic end times.”
“Amen,” Pam said, as she turned up the volume. “Amen.”
“Are you prepared for the worst?” the narrator asked. “Who will survive?”
Pam’s plan was to go toward the cellar, where she thought she’d stockpiled enough supplies for them to be self-sufficient for at least a few years. They had a freezer full of meat and 3,000 rounds of military-grade ammunition to hunt the deer and elk on their land. They had a generator, 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and 20,000 gallons of propane. They could use their central fireplace to heat the whole house and their bushels of wheat to make fresh flour. Pam had gone online to buy water-filtration devices, purification tablets, and more than a dozen five-pound “survival kits” that included evaporated soup and freeze-dried meals.
“The earth is under attack,” the narrator said.
“Everyone on the planet is in grave danger,” he said.
“North Korea, China, and Iran could all launch nuclear attacks. Russia is flexing its military muscle. America should expect an unimaginable threat at an unimaginable time.”
Pam had imagined it. She had seen the threat with her own eyes when she was 8 years old and her father woke her in the middle of the night to watch the United States launch one of its first tests of an unarmed nuclear missile in rural Nevada, not far from where her family lived in Utah. She watched the sky light up with a flash of orange light as the missile rose above earth and disappeared overhead, leaving behind a cloud of smoke that rolled outward across the desert. Only years later did she begin to think about what would happen once a missile made its final descent. She’d taken a tour of a nearby launch control center, sat in the bunker with the Air Force team, and heard about realities of nuclear war. The missile on the Butcher ranch could demolish an entire city. The detonation of all 150 nuclear missiles in Montana could blanket the world in fire and smoke, block out sunlight, lower Earth’s temperature, devastate agriculture, and lead to mass starvation and extinction.
“War is now inevitable,” the narrator said, as the camera shook and people wearing gas masks ran from the sound of machine guns. Pam watched missiles and fireballs shoot across her TV screen until finally it went dark.
“Wow,” she said, after a moment, and Ed looked up from his computer.
“Wow,” he said.
“What did you think?” she asked him.
“I think whenever the good Lord calls, I’ll be ready to go with him,” he said.
“It’s getting so real,” she said. “It feels like it could happen at any moment.”
***
That night, the temperature dropped below freezing, a snowstorm rolled in from the mountains, and Ed awoke to the sound of an emergency call. His grandson, Josh, had gone to check on the cattle a little after 3 a.m., and he’d found the second calf of the season lying motionless at the bottom of a ravine. The calf was only a few hours old, and it had stumbled away from its mother and fallen into the frozen creek bed. Josh had picked up the calf, carried it to his truck, and turned up the heat. He’d driven back to the house and put the calf into an electric warming bed, but it was still cold and mostly unresponsive.
“I think we’re going to lose this one,” Josh told Ed, but when they checked on the calf a few hours later, it had opened its eyes. It was sluggish but not dead, so they decided to drive it back onto the ranch to see if it could somehow reunite and bond with its mother.
Ed’s daughter-in-law drove the pickup truck past the missile silo and out toward the cow pasture. His 4-year-old great-granddaughter held the calf in the passenger seat, trying to hug it back to warmth. Ed and Josh sat in the bed of the truck, and then they dropped the calf in the field and tried to call over to its mother.
“Mooo,” Josh yelled.
“Mooo. Come get your baby,” Ed called out, but the cow ignored them. This was her first calf, and she had no experience mothering. She chewed on the grass. She laid down. She glanced over at the shivering calf, stood up, and then walked farther away.
“She’s shunning her,” Josh said.
“It’s natural,” Ed said. “You have to expect some losses.”
“Yeah, but the second calf,” Josh said.
Ed nodded “I know. It hurts.”
They mended a nearby fence and started heading back toward the truck. “Mooo!” Ed called out, one more time, and the cow looked at him and then stood. She walked in the direction of her calf. She looked at it and eventually licked its head. She lay beside the calf and shielded it from the wind as the sun started to break through the clouds.
Ed stood next to his great-granddaughter and watched for another few moments, until finally the cow prodded the calf onto its feet and led it back toward the herd.
“How great is this?” Ed asked his great-granddaughter. There were no predators circling the cow pasture, no military helicopters patrolling above the ranch, no explosions coming from the silo over the hill. For the moment, it was just sky and wind and another new life awakening on the Butcher family ranch, where the missile was still buried below ground.
German food minister says Western countries need to send more weapons into Ukraine to avert a global famine: report
Yelena Dzhanova – April 17, 2022
A scene in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.Vadim Zamirovsky/AP
Germany’s agricultural minister said Ukraine needs to be stocked with weapons to avoid a global famine.
Food Minister Cem Özdemir urged Western nations to increase arms to Ukraine, per German news outlet WAZ.
He said Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a “starvation strategy” on the agricultural landscape.
Germany’s agricultural minister warned of the potential for a global famine if Ukraine does not receive more weapons from Western countries.
According to Food Minister Cem Özdemir, Russian troops are wreaking havoc on the world’s agricultural supply, he told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), a German newspaper, in a report published Sunday.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is increasingly turning out to be an attack on the international community,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that the West supports Ukraine with more, more effective weapons — and Germany shouldn’t be exempt from that.”
Özdemir told WAZ that Germany has received notice that Russian troops, at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s command, are “deliberately destroying agricultural infrastructure and supply chains.”
If they continue to destroy the agricultural landscape in Ukraine, there could be devastating consequences on the world supply chain of food, he said to WAZ.
He characterized the operation to destroy Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure as Putin’s “starvation strategy,” and urged international organizations, such as the United Nations World Food and Agriculture Committee, to back him.
“Here we have to agree on fundamental, structural questions of agricultural and food policy worldwide,” he said, according to WAZ.
Russia and Ukraine play pivotal roles in the grain market. Ukraine is a major exporter of both wheat and corn, accounting for 12% and 17% of global supply, respectively. And Russia’s wheat exports account for almost 17% of global supply, Insider’s Urooba Jamal notes. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, food prices have started to soar.
“Shortages of these commodities and broad-based increases in prices could add to inflation pressures and food insecurity,” a World Bank spokesperson told Insider.
The potential effects have worried economists in the United States, who are paying close attention to any reverberations from the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association, for example, told Insider he’s watching out for how barley will affect the beer supply in the US.
“Ukraine and Russia together produce about a fifth of the world’s barley,” Watson said in an interview with Insider.
Craft brewers in the US aren’t majorly dependent on Ukrainian barley. “But these are global markets,” Watson said. “So what happens to the market when the countries that would typically buy these exports from those countries can’t, is the big unknown. Are they able to pivot to other products or sources?”
The F-35 was ‘designed precisely’ to fight and win in the kind of war happening in Ukraine, former test pilot says
Constantine Atlamazoglou – April 17, 2022
A US Air Force F-35 over Poland, February 24, 2022.US Air Force/Senior Airman Joseph Barron
Russia’s war on Ukraine has shown what air warfare over a modern battlefield looks like.
Neither side has the F-35, but it is designed for this environment, former test pilot Billie Flynn said.
F-35s have “capabilities precisely focused on what we have been seeing in Ukraine,” Flynn said.
As the war in Ukraine approaches its third month, neither Russia nor Ukraine have been able to dominate the air, as both still have operational surface-to-air missile batteries and aircraft.
This makes the war in Ukraine unique among recent conflicts, and it provides useful lessons about how modern airframes would operate in contested airspace.
In an interview with The Aviationist on April 7, Billie Flynn, a former Canadian lieutenant colonel and senior F-35 test pilot for Lockheed Martin, highlighted the role that the F-35 could play in similar conditions.
“The F-35 was designed precisely for an environment that we are seeing in Ukraine now,” Flynn said.
The new generation
A US Air Force F-35A over RAF Lakenheath, March 22, 2022.US Air Force/Staff Sgt. Dhruv Gopinath
The F-35, built by Lockheed Martin, is one of two fifth-generation fighter jets used by the US, alongside the F-22 Raptor, and one of four in use around the world. China’s J-20 entered mass production in late 2021 and hasn’t seen combat. Russia’s Su-57 hasn’t entered mass production and has only deployed in a few limited missions in Syria.
A multirole stealth aircraft, the F-35 is intended for air-superiority and strike missions.
It is equipped with a powerful electronic-warfare and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance suite. Those capabilities, which allow the F-35 to gather and distribute real-time battlefield information to friendly forces, have earned it the nickname “the quarterback of the skies.”
The weaponry it carries varies. In a configuration known as “beast mode” it carries four 500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs on its wings, two GBU-12 in its internal weapons bay, and an AIM-9 air-to-air heat-seeking missile. That configuration sacrifices stealth for firepower.
When in stealth mode, the jet foregoes externally mounted weapons to preserve its low-observable profile.
There are three variants of the F-35. The F-35A is designed for conventional takeoffs and landings, the F-35B for short takeoffs and vertical landings, and the F-35C for aircraft-carrier operations.
A buffed-up team
A US Air Force B-52H bomber and Italian Air Force F-35s on a training flight, March 7, 2022US Air Force/Tech. Sgt. Corban Lundborg
In a contested airspace, the survivability of older fourth-generation fighter aircraft, like the ubiquitous F-16, will be limited, Flynn told The Aviationist.
F-16s are “not survivable in the very highly contested world,” like in Ukraine, where there are “significant numbers of sophisticated surface-to-air threats,” Flynn said.
However, the F-35’s ability to enhance the capabilities of friendly aircraft is exactly what would make it invaluable in a similar conflict, Flynn said.
“The F-35 was designed to operate in highly contested airspace, with capabilities precisely focused on what we have been seeing in Ukraine today. If you have F-35s, you do not necessarily need F-16s to do the damage that the F-35 would bring,” according to the former F-35 test pilot.
The F-35 would be particularly effective against surface-to-air missile systems and other ground defenses, neutralizing them and enemy aircraft to achieve air dominance.
US Air Force F-35s at Ämari airbase in Estonia, February 24, 2022.US Air Force
The aircraft’s stealth profile will be one of its main advantages in doing so.
“Remember,” Flynn said, “we see them, they don’t see us. It’s like playing football, when one team’s invisible and the other team is not with a gross advantage on behalf of the F-35. F-35 would see all the enemy air-to-air threats and kill them all, plus completely neutralizing the surface-to-air missile threat to achieve air dominance.”
Once air dominance is achieved, aircraft like the F-16 can provide additional firepower against enemy ground forces, but even then the F-35 will be needed to protect them, according to Flynn.
The F-35 could also conduct close-air-support missions for troops on the ground. When friendly ground troops are in close contact with the enemy, however, the F-35 may have to use its less advanced armaments and accept more risk to do so.
“There may be a time when the troops are in contact and you’re going to come down and use the gun in the F-35,” Flynn said. “That’s a lot of risk for an $80 million F-35, but our job is to protect the troops on the ground.”
Flying solo
A US Air force F-35A without radar reflectors over Eastern Europe, February 28, 2022.US Air Force/Airman 1st Class Edgar Grimaldo
The US has repeatedly said that it will not become a combatant in Ukraine.
F-35s have been flying missions in stealth mode near Ukraine’s borders, though it’s not clear if they were conducting regular patrols to deter Russia or using their electronic capabilities to monitor forces in and around Ukraine.
Nevertheless, their presence so close to the conflict zone has had an impact, according to Flynn.
Having that jet flying along NATO’s eastern flank “is a significant deterrent” against Russian forces “continuing their ambitions to push further eastward. Because the F-35 represent an extraordinary lethal threat,” Flynn said.
The F-35’s “capacity to neutralize the enemy cannot be matched by any other airplane that flies in anybody else’s air force,” Flynn said. “So just the fact that the F-35s are there scares everybody on the other side.”
Constantine Atlamazoglou works on transatlantic and European security. He holds a master’s degree in security studies and European affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
An 80-km line of trucks at the Polish border is trying to escape EU sanctions
Courtney Vinopal, Breaking news reporter – April 17, 2022
Trucks lining up along the Polish-Belarusian border in March.
The European Union set off a rush to the borders for thousands of drivers when it announced earlier this month it would ban Russian and Belarusian trucks from working in the bloc in response to the war in Ukraine.
On April 16, the line of Russian and Belarusian trucks hoping to leave the EU before sanctions took effect stretched for 80 kilometers (50 miles) at the border of Poland and Belarus, at a border crossing in the Polish town of Koroszczyn.
Russian and Belarusian freight road operators have been banned since April 16 from working in the EU, except for those transporting essentials such as food, mail, medicine, and energy. Belarusian leader Aleksander Lukashenko, an ally of Russia, has supported Vladimir Putin’s war by hosting Russian troops in the months before the invasion and allowing them to cross into Ukraine.
Yet as many as 400 vehicles were still waiting at border crossings as the midnight deadline passed on April 16, with some stuck at the border for up to 33 hours, and thousands more believed to be in the EU. Long lines were also reported in the Polish town of Bobrowniki.
The trucking industry feels the strain
The war in Ukraine has exacerbated an already-existing truck driver shortage, as Ukrainian truckers began leaving jobs in western Europe to return home and fight. The Federal Association of Freight Transport, Logistics and Disposal estimated in March that more than 100,000 Ukrainian truck drivers—many of whom work for Polish and Lithuanian hauling companies—could be drafted into military service.about:blank
The European ban on Russian and Belarusian vehicles may further disrupt the sector, although the European president of XPO logistics told the Financial Times it’s unlikely to be as disruptive as the loss of Ukrainian drivers. Thousands more Russian and Belarusian vehicles are likely trapped in the EU, reports the BBC, though it’s not clear what will happen to them now that the deadline has passed.
Sanctions are reshaping a globalized world
Should Europe seize sanctioned trucks, for example, Russia could retaliate against Polish truckers passing through the country on their way to or from countries such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, the head of the trade body for Polish transport groups told the Financial Times.about:blank
The sanctions against Russia, and the pileup of trucks at the Polish border, shows how wide-spanning Western sanctions are reshaping economic borders and forcing countries to turn inward, reducing their dependency on some international trading partners. The EU was a top trading partner of Russia’s before the war, importing more than €158 billion worth of goods from the bloc in 2021. But the trucking ban will further cripple trade, even if Europe tries to retain access to essential commodities such as energy and fertilizers. Not only is Europe cutting off trade with Russia by land, it’s also cracking down on Russian ships entering its ports, as well as seeking to wean itself off energy imports from the country. In the US, automakers are rushing to secure their own supplies of raw materials used to make electric vehicle batteries, and the government is turning to its own strategic petroleum supply to try to make up for a loss of Russian oil.
While it will take months before Russia bears the full brunt of sanctions, the lines of the globalized world are being redrawn as Putin’s war in Ukraine continues, and they are unlikely to go back to the way they were.
STORY: A deadline for Ukrainian troops holed-up in Mariupol to lay down their arms came and went on Sunday (April 17).
Russia issued the ultimatum for the out-numbered soldiers who have been defending the smoldering Azovstal steelworks.
But several hours after the deadline, in the early hours of the morning, and there was no sign of surrender.
Azovstal – one of Europe’s largest metallurgical plants – has become a last stand for the defending forces.
Moscow says its solders have cleared the urban area of Mariupol and are almost completely in control.
Having failed to overcome Ukrainian resistance in the north, the Russian military is now focused on Donbas.
Capturing the eastern region’s main port city would be a major strategic prize for Russia – connecting territory it holds in Donbas with the Crimea region it annexed in 2014.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said his government was in contact with the troops at Azovstal.
Speaking on Saturday (April 16) he accused Russia of trying to “destroy everyone” in Mariupol and said killing the soldiers would put paid to peace efforts.
It’s unclear how many soldiers are inside the steelworks. Satellite images have shown smoke and fire coming from the area, which is riddled with tunnels underneath.
Meanwhile Russia continued with long-range attacks on other locations in Ukraine, all part of what it calls a special military operation.
Local media reported an explosion in Kyiv, though the capital’s deputy mayor said air defense systems had thwarted Russian attacks.
The mayor of the nearby city Brovary said a missile attack had damaged infrastructure.
According to the RIA news agency, Russia said it had destroyed an ammunition factory near the capital.
Russia Loses Another General, Vows ‘Elimination’ of Resistance
Barbie Latza Nadeau – April 17, 2022
Vladyslav Musiienko/Reuters
The dawn deadline Russia gave determined Ukrainian soldiers to surrender and lay down their weapons in Mariupol passed without incident on Sunday morning, as Vladimir Putin’s increasingly sloppy troops closed in on the strategic port city.
Russia’s defense ministry, still reeling from the loss of 8th Army Major General Vladimir Frolov in combat on Saturday, was just as determined, threatening to “eliminate” any Ukrainian and foreign troops trying to hold on to the battered city.
Russia has made considerable gains on the city after spending weeks trying to wipe it off the map. Western intelligence officials said it could fall to Russia soon, providing a key land bridge between Crimea and the eastern separatist regions it so desperately wants to take.
President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that his fighters had only a small part of the city under their control. “The situation is very difficult in Mariupol,” he said overnight Sunday, according to CNN. “Our soldiers are blocked, the wounded are blocked. There is a humanitarian crisis … Nevertheless, the guys are defending themselves.”
Russia warned in a statement Sunday that there were “up to 400 foreign mercenaries who joined the Ukrainian forces” huddling inside a steel plant, including many Europeans and Canadians who had come to support Ukrainian troops. “In case of further resistance, all of them will be eliminated,” the statement said.
Further north, heavy bombardment on Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv killed and injured dozens of emergency workers and civilians, according to CNN which cited Kharkiv Regional Military Administration head Oleg Sinegubov. “They are currently receiving treatment in the hospital.” Sineguboy wrote on Telegram. “Thirty-one people were injured in Russian shelling, including four children.”
He also wrote that Russian forces were using aerial bombardment, after being pushed back on land. “The enemy cannot approach Kharkiv as our armed forces are holding strong positions and are even advancing in some directions,” he said. “Therefore, Russians resort to shameful shelling of residential neighborhoods.”
Bolstered by the gains in Mariupol and undeterred by the losses, Russian troops renewed efforts on Kyiv early Sunday, striking Brovary to the east. On Saturday, attacks on strategic targets further west in largely untouched Lviv also signaled that the war is at a turning point. Citing the Institute for the Study of War, the Washington Post reported Sunday that Russian troops were likely “setting conditions for a larger-scale, better-coordinated offensive.” Simply put, the worst may be yet to come.
Pandemic, war, and inflation has spurred some people to a life of ‘homesteading’ and ‘prepping.’ Here’s how these practitioners live off the land and plan for disaster.
Gabrielle Bienasz – April 16, 2022
The Green Gardens Homestead in Washington.
Homesteading is living off the land, but social media influencers have added a modern spin.
After the pandemic, war, and inflation, it’s grown even more attractive.
Prepping, another survivalist-style niche, has overlap with homesteading and has seen an uptick, too.
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Five years ago, Nivek Anderson-Brown and her husband moved to Virginia, where they now raise chickens, grow crops, sell at farmer’s markets, and broadcasts content on TikTok as the Leaf and Bean Farm — all part of the life of a 21st century, live-off-the-land homesteader.
“People were like, ‘Are you crazy?’ when we first did it. And then, when the pandemic happened, they were like, ‘Tell us what you did!'” Brown said.
Greens of Brown’s homestead.
In a time of chaotic supply chains, rising food prices, inflation, and war anxiety, being able to provide for yourself has a new glow, whether it’s through “homesteading” or its close cousin, “prepping,” 10 of the communities’ online members told Insider.
The homesteading life
“Any small amount of trying to grow your own food or preserving. That’s homesteading,” says Ciearra Evans, of The Thrifted Planer homestead.
But the lifestyle tends to build upon itself, Brown said. For example, she started out growing and drying herbs, then realized she had enough land to forage.
Once she did, she found a patch of the mint-like plant horehound — which led to her making homemade cough drops.
“It was just like one thing rolling into another,” she said. “It takes on a life of its own.”
Preserving at Brown’s homestead.
The term “homesteading” has been co-opted throughout history, from 1970s hippie communes to formerly enslaved Black Americans seeking land in Kansas to fundamentalist Christians raising children off the grid, said Brian Cannon, professor of history at Brigham Young University and author of a book about post-World War II homesteading.
“I think we have, in the US, dating clear back to Thomas Jefferson, the conviction that rural life is wholesome,” he added.
Chickens at Brown’s homestead.
Homesteading also can be a form of political or social dissent, according to a 2016 dissertation Jordan Travis Radke on modern homesteaders, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It’s a way to “opt out” of systems that feel entrenched, from the government to climate change, she wrote.
Many homesteaders tend to be white, Cannon said, which is no surprise, considering land is a key (but not essential) element of homesteading, and many Black Americans have lost land throughout US history.
It’s something on the minds of Evans and Brown, who try to garden and create content as well as give voices to Black homesteaders online.
“There aren’t a lot of people that look like me that do this,” Brown said.
Homesteader’s cousin
For some, homesteading can eventually or immediately evolve into “prepping,” a term coined for another survivalist-type niche that focuses on preparing for a harder or possibly more dystopian future, the perception of which has come to pass for some.
More preserved food at Brown’s homestead.
In particular, prepping has seen heightened interest as inflation has grown worse and amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine-driven anxiety about food shortages, prepper-influencers told Insider.
Tiffany Holloway, an apartment-style prepper on TikTok, said her following grew by about tens of thousands in March amid increasing inflation.
Holloway herself got into prepping after the 2021 ice storms in Texas. One of her neighbors ran out of baby formula. “I ended up having to nurse her baby for her,” via pumping, Holloway said. “This whole experience taught me that you have to prepare.”
Holloway now teaches prepping on TikTok for people with small spaces and lower budgets, as well as focusing on prepping for potential domestic violence as a DV survivor herself – i.e., having a bag with a burner phone, money, and financial and identifying documents.
However, there can be a darker side to the prepper community, as far as folks who lean too far into extreme anxiety or paranoia.
Holloway said she finds some of the content on TikTok fear-monger-y, though she said that’s not her niche.
“I try to keep it pretty positive on my page,” she said.
Most preppers isolate and stay silent about their stores, something known as the “gray man” trope.
“People will become desperate. Ninety-five percent of people don’t have food at their house,” said Cam Hardy of The Casual Preppers Podcast.
If they know you have food, “they’ll know exactly where to go,” he said
2.7 million disabled Ukrainians, including children, are ‘trapped and abandoned’ in desperate circumstances as war rages on, warns UN
Bethany Dawson – April 16, 2022
A woman sits on her wheelchair beside houses destroyed by Russian shelling amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in SumyREUTERS/Zohra Bensemra
The UN has warned that the lives of 2.7 million people with disabilities in Ukraine are at risk.
Many people with disabilities are trapped in their homes and have no access to medication or food.
Very few recorded refugees are disabled, indicating most were forced to survive inside the war-torn country.
The United Nations has warned that the lives of 2.7 million people with disabilities in Ukraine are at risk due to Russia’s invasion.
The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities statement said people with disabilities “have limited or no access to emergency information, shelters and safe havens, and many have been separated from their support networks.”
It added that “there are ongoing reports that many people with disabilities, including children, are trapped or abandoned in their homes, residential care institutions and orphanages, with no access to life-sustaining medications, oxygen supplies, food, water, sanitation, support for daily living and other basic facilities.”
While more than 4.8 million people have fled Ukraine due to the war, the UN committee notes that very few of these people — or even those who are internally displaced — are disabled, indicating few have been able to leave their homes.
He said, “transporting refugees with disabilities often requires a lot of special tools, knowledgeable workers, and accessible accommodations, which can be expensive. Many of the organizations catering to refugees are not equipped to deal with refugees with disabilities.”
Anna Kaminski, a volunteer at the Ukraine-Poland border, told Insider that she hasn’t “seen any special provisions being made for the arrivals of elderly or disabled people.”
US military is already using lessons from the war in Ukraine for training soldiers: report
Sarah Al-Arshani – April 16, 2022
A US Army soldier fires an AT4 anti-armor weapon during an exercise at the Vaziani Training Area in Georgia, August 7, 2019.US Army/Spc. Ethan Valetski
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine featured a disinformation campaign and attacks on civilian areas.
The US is already using those lessons in army training for possible future wars, The AP reported.
US Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said the whole military is trying to learn lessons from Ukraine.
US Army trainers are already using lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine to train soldiers for potential future conflicts with adversaries like Russia or China, The Associated Press reported.
“I think right now the whole Army is really looking at what’s happening in Ukraine and trying to learn lessons,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told The AP.
According to The AP, this month’s training at National Training Center involves role-players that speak Russian. The scenario’s focus is on enemy forces that use social media to create propaganda about US troops as well as forces that use missiles in their effort to take over cities.
Wormuth told The AP that the crisis in Ukraine shows how important the information domain is going to be for US forces.
Brig. Gen. Curt Taylor said that the goal is to train brigades on how to use all their tools in combat to wage a coordinated attack, including countering misinformation online.
Another part of the training will focus on dealing with an enemy that’s willing to use missiles to strike civilian areas, The AP reported.
Russia has attacked hospitals, and apartment buildings, among other civilian buildings. Ukraine, alongside numerous other countries, has accused Russia of war crimes in the targetting of civilian areas.
“We’ve got to be prepared for urban combat where we have an adversary that is indiscriminately firing artillery,” Taylor said.
The nuclear missile next door
