The first shipments of the latest round of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, which includes heavier weapons systems, started arriving in the region over the weekend, according to the Pentagon.
The recently approved $800 million in security assistance includes Howitzer artillery systems, 40,000 artillery rounds, armored personnel vehicles and other weapons.
A senior U.S. defense official said Monday that four flights of shipments from the assistance package arrived in the region over the weekend with a fifth expected in the next 24 hours. The official did not detail which weapons from the recent package landed in the region first.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby in a press briefing said the Defense Department expects to start training Ukrainian trainers outside of Ukraine on how to use the U.S.-provided Howitzers in the coming days. The Ukrainian trainers will then return to Ukraine and train more troops.
FILE: Lightweight 155 mm Howitzer System / Credit: U.S. Army photo
According to Kirby, the training isn’t expected to take long since the Ukrainians already know how to use artillery systems and merely need to familiarize themselves with the American systems. The Ukrainians use 152mm artillery systems, and the U.S. is providing 155mm artillery systems.
The Russians have refocused on the Donbas region after failing to control Kyiv. The Pentagon assesses they are now conducting “staging operations,” which involves “setting the conditions for more aggressive, more overt and larger ground maneuvers” in the east, according to Kirby.
The impending fight in the east is expected to rely more on armored vehicles and artillery systems than in the north since the terrain in southeastern Ukraine is more flat and wide open.
“The artillery is a specific item the Ukrainians asked for because of the specific fighting they expect is going to occur in the Donbas,” Kirby said on Monday. “And we know the Russians also believe the same thing because we see them moving artillery units into the Donbas as well.”
The recently approved $800 million in assistance to Ukraine also includes Switchblade drones, more Javelin anti-tank missiles, and armored personnel carriers. Overall, the U.S. has provided $2.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded at the end of February.
Russia says it launched mass strikes on Ukrainian military overnight
April 18, 2022
Tanks of pro-Russian troops drive along a road near Mariupol
(Reuters) -Russia said on Monday it had launched mass strikes overnight on the Ukrainian military and associated military targets, using its air force, missile forces, artillery and air defence systems to hit hundreds of targets across its southern neighbour.
The Russian defence ministry said in a statement that air-launched missiles had destroyed 16 Ukrainian military facilities overnight, including five command posts, a fuel depot and three ammunition warehouses, as well as Ukrainian armour and forces.
It said those strikes took place in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and in the port of Mykolayiv, and that the Russian air force had launched strikes against 108 areas where it said Ukrainian forces and armour were concentrated.
The defence ministry accused Ukraine of planning “monstrous provocations” with mass civilian casualties designed to cast Russian forces in a bad light.
Specifically, it said Ukraine was plotting to shell Orthodox churches and cathedrals in various Ukrainian regions on the night of April 23, the eve of Orthodox Easter which is celebrated by most Ukrainians and Russians. It said it had evidence to back its assertions but did not provide any. There was no immediate response to the allegations from Ukraine.
Ukraine’s defence ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The Russian defence ministry also spoke of destroying 12 Ukrainian strike drones and tanks in other parts of Ukraine and of using Iskander missiles to destroy four arms and equipment depots in the Luhansk, Vinnytsia and Donetsk regions.
Russia, which sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, has pledged to continue what it calls “a special military operation” to degrade the Ukrainian military and root out people it calls dangerous nationalists, until it has met all its objectives.
It is currently focused on trying to take full control of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which has been besieged for weeks.
The defence ministry said Russian artillery had also struck 315 Ukrainian military targets overnight and that air defence systems had been used to bring down two MiG-29 fighters and one SU-25 plane.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Ukraine: 7 dead, 11 injured after Russia’s military launched missiles into Lviv
Lawrence Richard – April 18, 2022
At least seven people have been killed and 11 others were injured in Lviv, Ukraine, Monday morning, after Russia’s military launched several missiles into the city, officials said.
Smoke rose over the Western city after four missiles hit three warehouses and also struck a civilian car tire service garage, where people were working, a Ukraine military spokesperson said.
The explosions severely injured three adults and a child suffered minor injuries.
LVIV, UKRAINE – APRIL 18: Smoke rises after five aimed missile strikes hit Lviv, Ukraine on April 18, 2022. Photo by Ozge Elif Kizil/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
West Air Command confirmed the missile attack, which also reportedly damaged infrastructure along train rails. The missiles were believed to be intended for a train station, the Ukrainian military spokesperson said.
Local authorities are still attempting to extinguish the flames and clear the rubble.
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said the attack further proves that there are no safe places for civilians in Ukraine.
Across the country, Ukraine has vowed to “fight absolutely to the end” to keep Russia from capturing the port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said.
Last week, Russia’s military started a seemingly relentless siege of the city, which, if it falls, would be Russia’s biggest victory of the war.
A few thousand Ukrainian fighters reportedly remain in the city.
Capturing Mariupol would provide Russia direct access to the Sea of Azov, giving it routes to resupply and reignite its offensive strategy in Ukraine, specifically in the eastern Donbas region. It would also provide Russia a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, an area it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
During a nightly address Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his administration and military were “doing everything to ensure the defense” of his country.
Fox News’ James Levinson, Matt Finn, Jeff Paul and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
A single missile before dawn was the warning: Your city is in Russia’s firing line
Nabih Bulos – April 18, 2022
A Ukrainian soldier digs up fragments left by a missile in Kramatorsk early Monday. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
It came at exactly 3 a.m. Monday: A flash of light streaking over the city’s darkened streets, then the massive blast, shaking walls, rattling windows and waking those few who had managed an already-troubled sleep.
In the last couple of days, this city in eastern Ukraine had seen relatively few strikes, this despite the persistent sounds of artillery thudding somewhere in the distance, too far to tell from where but to which residents would almost hopefully say “nasha” — ours.
But the Monday morning explosion was another unnerving reminder (not that any was needed, with almost all shops shuttered; two hotels barely operating; most windows boarded up or shattered; and sirens wailing the same sustained note for hours) that Kramatorsk is firmly in the firing line of advancing Russian forces.
A Ukrainian soldier lays out fragments left by a missile that struck Kramatorsk early Monday. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
By the time the nightly curfew lifted a few hours later, residents woke to the news that an Iskander, a short-range Russian ballistic missile, had slammed dramatically but harmlessly into a field behind a hotel and a vocational school. It was unclear what it was targeting, but it sent the latest tremor of fear through the city even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned hours later that the Russian offensive for the east had begun.
Standing in mud by the missile crater — 9 feet deep and triple that in width — was a policeman with a clipboard, flanked by another policeman and two soldiers, taking turns digging out missile fragments from the black chernozem soil and recording what serial numbers they could discern off the components they recovered.
Even before this war started, Kramatorsk was the lynchpin for the Ukrainian government’s earlier conflict against Moscow-backed separatists who tried to seize the city in April 2014 before they were ousted a few months later. For the almost eight years of that fight, Kramatorsk became the main resupply base for the Ukrainian army and the seat of power for the government’s Donetsk regional administration.
As Russia shifts its focus to taking the Donbas region, its forces are closing in from the north, east and south like a shark’s mouth ready to devour Kramatorsk along with the nearby city of Sloviansk. The prize of capturing both would underscore what Moscow wants to accomplish in the east while allowing Russian forces to encircle much of Ukraine’s army.
Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko in front of the reinforced city council building. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Such a prospect has forced Mayor Oleksandr Goncharenko into action. In the weeks since the Russian invasion began, he’s reoriented the city to be on a war footing, stockpiling enough supplies to last a siege two to three months long.
The change is even reflected in the city council building. To enter, one has to go through the rear of the building, past guards and a sandbag bunker. The floor is obscured by boxes loaded with foodstuffs, including large jars of pickles, bags of rice as well as medicines.
It’s been tough, the mayor said, convincing the town’s last holdouts to leave.
A cluster munitions attack this month on the Kramatorsk train station, which left more than 50 people dead and scores wounded, had spurred people to flee. But judging by municipal trash collection levels, Goncharenko said, there were anywhere from 35,000 to 40,000 people still in the city. Evacuations on buses arranged by the municipality had dwindled to a single bus per day.
Many believe one motive for those staying is that a large percentage of the Donbas’ ethnic Russian population harbors pro-Moscow sentiments and would probably not oppose living under Russian rule. But Goncharenko suggested that two months of withering war had changed such allegiances.
“Eight years ago, for Kramatorsk, perhaps 60% were for the Russians. Today I don’t think it’s more than 10%. The mentality has changed,” he said.
“We have to thank Mr. Putin for that — that through this war he brought our people together. Ukrainians are more united now.”
He surmised most people have stayed because they have few options.
“It was the same in 2014. The ones who stay, they have only their house or flat, and they tell us, ‘What would we find in other cities?’ ” he said. “Their home for them is more precious than their own lives.”
That attitude seemed very much on display Monday morning. Though there had been no casualties, the shock wave from the explosion had shattered windows in a swath of eight residential buildings on Kramatorsk’s “Heroes of Ukraine” street, a few hundred yards away. Despite the gray weather, residents and municipal workers swept up the detritus, checked on homes and prepared to put up sheets of plastic to protect against the elements.
Helena, a 55-year-old social worker who gave only her first name for reasons of privacy, was sleeping when she heard the explosion, which destroyed her balcony. She blamed the attack on media coverage during a visit by former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko two days prior. He had come to Kramatorsk to distribute aid, she said, as she tried to shoo away visiting reporters for fear that the attention would spur another strike.
“All the locals asked Poroshenko not to do publicity here,” she said. “If he wanted to give us aid, just do that and leave.”
Alexy Dyakov, 44, removes a window broken by a Russian missile strike across the street. He will not leave Kramatorsk because his mother can’t travel. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Alexy Dyakov, a 44-year-old jeweler living in the nearby village of Lazurny, had come with his mother, Lyudmilla Anatolivna, an elegant, white-haired woman with a black and white fur cap, to see what happened to his apartment. The situation in Lazurny was getting worse — his home there was damaged from another shelling — and he decided to move to a place where he at least had a basement.
“Now I’m not so sure,” he said. He walked around the apartment, a musty two-bedroom that seemed to have been untouched since the Soviet era: display cabinets with tchotchkes and old china; thick carpeting and faded furniture; even an old rotary phone and an ancient TV with an aerial.
He detached the aerial as he spoke, using it to poke away shards of glass from a window pane.
Dyakov had already evacuated his wife and children to Poland, but he had come back to take care of his mother, who recently had heart surgery and wouldn’t survive the journey. She stood in the hallway, speaking calmly at first but breaking down as the sentences rushed out of her.
“He’s here because of me,” she said of her son, who looked at her not unkindly but said nothing.
“I’m guilty. His family left and he’s away from them.”
Lyudmilla Anatolivna breaks down in her son’s apartment. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
She added that the basement here was their only hope of protection, but it was no longer an option. She felt more vulnerable than ever: The recent blast near the other apartment they owned had damaged her hearing. She couldn’t hear the sirens now. She couldn’t even write her thoughts to calm herself.
“My hand shakes too much,” she said.
Her voice rasped with rage.
“Kill Putin! They say we’re brothers. But do brothers do this? All the time they say Ukrainians kill, but it’s them, those Russian bastards,” she said.
“My mother was Russian. Thank God she didn’t live to see this. Idiots! . . . If something give me a machine gun, I’d kill them just the way they kill our soldiers, our children, our women, everyone.”
Moments later, the siren that had been blaring for more than 30 minutes stopped. Anatolivna seemed not to notice.
Police say 269 bodies recovered in Ukraine’s war-torn Irpin
Zohra Bensemra and Joseph Campbell – April 18, 2022
View of new graves for people killed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in IrpinCars destroyed amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine are seen in IrpinA member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces sits next to a destroyed car, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Irpin
(Reuters) – Ukrainian investigators have examined 269 dead bodies in Irpin, near Kyiv, since the town was taken back from Russian forces in late March, a police official said on Monday, as workers dug fresh graves on its outskirts.
The town, which had a pre-war population of about 62,000, was one of the main hotspots of fighting with Russian troops before they pulled back from Ukraine’s northern regions to intensify their offensive in the east.
At a cemetery on the outskirts of Irpin, dozens of new graves have been dug and heaped with wreaths. Under the watch of a few tearful mourners, workers hurriedly shovelled the sandy earth into one grave on Monday.
“As of now, we have inspected 269 dead bodies,” said Serhiy Panteleyev, first deputy head of the police’s main investigation department, at an online briefing.
He said forensic work was ongoing to determine the cause of death for many of the victims, sharing photos of severely charred human remains.
He said seven sites in Irpin where civilians were allegedly shot have been inspected, without giving further details.
Russia denies targeting civilians and has dismissed allegations its troops committed war crimes in occupied areas of Ukraine.
(Additional reporting by Max Hunder; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Jan Harvey)
Russian commanders angry at how long it’s taking to capture Mariupol, where Ukraine says it will fight to the end: UK intel
Kieran Corcoran – April 18, 2022
Charred buildings and destroyed cars in Mariupol on April 13, 2022.Leon Klein/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Mariupol, a port city in southern Ukraine, has seen the fiercest fighting of the Russian invasion.
Troops there have been surrounded and outnumbered, fighting in hellish conditions.
On Monday, UK officials said Russian leaders would be upset that the city was still unconquered.
Russian commanders will be unhappy with their troops’ inability to conquer the besieged city of Mariupol in Ukraine, British intelligence said Monday morning.
In a daily update on the fighting in Ukraine, officials wrote: “Russian commanders will be concerned by the time it is taking to subdue Mariupol. Concerted Ukrainian resistance has severely tested Russian forces and diverted men and materiel, slowing Russia’s advance elsewhere.” (Materiel is a catch-all term for military supplies.)
Mariupol, a port city on Ukraine’s southern coast, has been the scene of intense fighting for almost the entire duration of the 54-day invasion.
It has been surrounded for weeks, hit continuously by shelling and slowly advancing ground troops. Survivors who made it out of the city have repeatedly described it as a “hell on earth,” deprived of food, water, and heating.
Its mayor said 21,000 people there had been killed and that their bodies were “carpeted through the streets.”
Ukrainian fighters in the city have held out for weeks.
Reports from the Associated Press and Financial Times described a last stand by soldiers from Ukraine’s marine corps and its right-wing Azov Battalion paramilitary.
It said they were resisting from inside a bomb-outed Soviet steelworks and a series of tunnels. Some fighters there surrendered in recent days. These included Aiden Aslin, a British man serving as a marine, who featured in a Russian propaganda broadcast and appeared to speak under duress.
Captured soldier Aiden Aslin, a British man who joined the Ukrainian army in 2018, appeared to speak under duress during an interview with Russian state TV.IZ.RU
Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, told ABC’s “This Week” that the troops in Mariupol “will fight until the end.”
Russian leaders have given no public statements of frustration with their progress in Mariupol.
But analysts and intelligence officials have said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin would have been enraged by a war effort that fell short of his apparent expectations of a swift victory.
After an unsuccessful advance on northern Ukraine and its capital of Kyiv, Russia announced a pivot in its strategy to focus its forces on the eastern Donbas region, which includes Mariupol.
To Push Back Russians, Ukrainians Hit a Village With Cluster Munitions
Thomas Gibbons-Neff and John Ismay – April 18, 2022
The remains of a destroyed Russian armored vehicle in a neighborhood damaged during the war in Husarivka, Ukraine. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times) (NYT)
HUSARIVKA, Ukraine — It was in early March when the spent warhead of a cluster munition rocket landed next to Yurii Doroshenko’s home in eastern Ukraine, having dispensed its lethal bomblets over his village.
“They were shelling and it hit the street,” he said.
These types of internationally banned weapons have been repeatedly used by the Russian military since it invaded Ukraine in February. Human rights groups have denounced their use. Western leaders have linked their presence to a bevy of war-crimes allegations leveled at Moscow.
But the cluster munition that landed to next to Doroshenko’s house was not fired by Russian forces. Based on evidence reviewed by The New York Times during a visit to the area, it is very likely to have been launched by the Ukrainian troops who were trying to retake the area.
Nobody died in that strike in Husarivka, an agricultural hamlet surrounded by wheat fields and natural-gas lines, though at least two people were killed as Ukrainian forces shelled it for the better part of month, targeting Russian forces.
As the war approaches its eighth week, both sides have relied heavily on artillery and rockets to dislodge each other. But the Ukrainians’ decision to saturate their own village with a cluster munition that has the capacity to haphazardly kill innocent people underscores their strategic calculation: This is what they needed to do to retake their country, no matter the cost.
Cluster munitions — a class of weapon comprising rockets, bombs, missiles, mortar and artillery shells — split open midair and dispense smaller bomblets over a wide area. The hazard to civilians remains significant until any unexploded munitions have been located and properly disposed of by experts.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which took effect in 2010, bans their use because of the indiscriminate harm they can cause to civilians: Humanitarian groups have noted that 20% or more of antipersonnel submunitions fail to detonate on impact, yet they can explode later if they are picked up or handled.
More than 100 nations have signed the pact, though the United States, Ukraine and Russia have not.
“It’s not surprising, but it’s definitely dismaying to hear that evidence has emerged indicating that Ukraine may have used cluster munitions in this current conflict,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. “Cluster munitions are unacceptable weapons that are killing and maiming civilians across Ukraine.”
An adviser to the Ukrainian armed forces and the Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
Russian troops had seized Husarivka from Ukrainian units in the first few days of March, occupying buildings on its outskirts and near its center. The 220-millimeter Uragan artillery rocket that landed near Doroshenko’s home — fired from a truck-mounted launcher many miles away — struck on either March 6 or 7, said Doroshenko, the town’s informal leader.
By that point, the village was well under Russian control.
During a visit around the property and Doroshenko’s street Thursday, Times reporters viewed large pieces of the artillery rocket that dispensed the cluster munitions, confirming the type of weapon that had been fired. It landed near the Russian army’s makeshift headquarters in an adjacent farm workshop, residents said, meaning the Russian forces were almost certainly the target.
Throughout the occupation, Ukrainian forces incessantly shelled the Russian troops there, and at least two of the same type of cluster munition were lodged in a field by Doroshenko’s home, just a few hundred yards away from the Russians’ headquarters.
The rockets fell around a small neighborhood of a dozen or so single-story homes interspersed with small gardens.
As the rockets neared the farm, their warheads — probably carrying 30 antipersonnel bomblets apiece — would have separated from the weapons’ solid rocket motors, breaking open and casting their deadly cargo across the neighborhood.
These small munitions each contain the equivalent of about 11 ounces of TNT, slightly less than twice as much as a standard hand grenade.
The attack on the Husarivka farm appears to be the first use of a cluster munition by Ukrainian troops since the Russian invasion began Feb. 24. In 2015, Ukrainian forces used cluster munitions during the opening months of their war against Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.
When confronted with the prospect that the Ukrainian military had shelled his village with cluster bombs, Doroshenko, 58, seemed indifferent.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The main thing is that after those rockets everybody comes out alive.”
The hazard posed by small undetonated munitions prevented Times reporters from closely examining all the weapons that landed. They visually verified from a distance two of the three rocket remnants as being Uragan cluster munitions, which leave behind the rocket’s nose cone followed by a long skeletal metal frame that held the bomblets together in flight.
On April 8, the Times verified that a similar kind of Uragan rocket, loaded with anti-vehicle land mines, was fired by Russian troops in a strike against the town of Bezruky, a suburb of Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second-largest city.
Much has been said about the Russian shelling of Ukrainian towns — frequent artillery barrages that wound and kill residents and push the ones who remain in these contested areas into basements or shelters. The danger to civilians is no different under the barrels of Ukrainian artillery, as their forces desperately try to retake the parts of the country under Russian control.
Lubov Dvoretska, 62, lost her husband, Olexandr, during the shelling of Husarivka by Ukrainian forces at the end of March, just days before Russian troops retreated from there.
“Ones are shooting this way, others another way,” she recounted. “My God, everything is thundering. And on March 10, it was said that half of Husarivka had left for Chepelivka. Pack up and leave because it will get worse. And then I left.”
Dvoretska fled, but her husband, Olexandr, stayed behind to tend their livestock. Later, residents told her that Olexandr was injured in a mortar strike on March 22 and most likely died the next day.
“He was discovered dead in the house on the 23rd, and on the 24th they could barely reach me on the phone to notify me,” she said. “Just as he was, in the same clothes, he was buried inhumanly, like an animal.”
Another man, Volodymyr Strokov, was killed during the shelling March 22, residents said.
Before the war, Husarivka had a population of just over 1,000. It is now down to around 400, after hundreds packed what they could and left. Ukrainian forces retook the village around March 26. Now, the village — about 3 miles from the front line near the eastern city of Izyum — is attacked daily by both Russian artillery and aircraft, residents said.
Through tears, Dvoretska pointed to where her neighbors had buried her husband in a raised dirt grave in their backyard, marked with a homemade wooden cross.
“I never thought it would happen this way,” she yelled. “It never got in my head that I will be left alone at my old age. Alone.”
Paratroopers with the 173rd Airborne Brigade fire live Stinger missiles in Croatia
Rachel Nostrant – April 18, 2022
U.S. paratroopers with the Italy-based 173rd Airborne Brigade live-fired the FIM-92 Stinger man-portable air-defense system for the first time on April 9.
The missiles were shot as part of Exercise Shell 22 in Croatia.
Soldiers from 1st and 2nd Battalion, 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment, based in Vicenza, Italy, fired a dozen of the surface-to-air missiles in two-man squads.
Each missile costs about $38,000. The 173rd Airborne Brigade has only previously fired replica Stinger rounds, Stars and Stripes reported.
Each squad was comprised of a team chief and a gunner. The soldiers fired the missiles toward a small target with a flare, brigade spokesperson Capt. Rob Haake told Stripes. The missiles landed in the Adriatic Sea, he said.
According to Haake, “every single [soldier] walked away with a big smile” after firing their missiles. “Everyone felt very fulfilled. They said it was an amazing experience.”
Paratroopers assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade fire an FIM-92 Stinger during an air defense live-fire exercise near Medulin, Croatia, on April 9, 2022. (Staff Sgt. John Yountz/Army)
Exercise Shell 22, which was held alongside Croatian forces, also marked the first time the Croatian Air Defense Regiment had conducted a live-fire exercise with U.S. troops.
Also included in the exercise were training events involving airspace control, deconfliction and surveillance.
“We get to cross-train with them, and they get the same with us. My favorite part wasn’t even the live fire; it was seeing our soldiers interact with the Croatians,” Chief Warrant Officer Mark Giauque, the lead coordinator of the exercise told Stripes. “You see them working together and exchanging patches, and you just see the overall camaraderie build over the training.”
U.S. paratroopers stand alongside soldiers with the Croatian Air Defense Regiment as part of Exercise Shield 22 near Medulin, Croatia, on April 9, 2022. (Staff Sgt. John Yountz/Army)
Haake told Stripes that around 300 troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade are currently deployed in Latvia in response to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
The 173rd Airborne Brigade is the U.S. Army’s contingency response force in Europe, meaning it provides rapidly deployable paratroopers to combatant commanders in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Longtime MSNBC Analyst Malcolm Nance Leaves to Fight Russia in Ukraine
Alex Weprin – April 18, 2022
A longtime MSNBC on-air terrorism and national security analyst is now fighting Russians in Ukraine.
Malcolm Nance, a former naval intelligence officer who became executive director of The Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies after leaving the service, appeared on Joy Reid’s 7 PM program Monday from a “secure location,” where he revealed that he had joined the “International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine,” essentially a Ukrainian version of the French Foreign Legion.
Nance has been an MSNBC analyst since 2007, according to his LinkedIn page, appearing on a number of shows to discuss intelligence, insurgency and national security-related topics.
An MSNBC spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter Monday that Nance “is not a contributor” with the cable news channel, though it is not clear when he parted ways with the network. He was identified as an MSNBC analyst on-air as recently as February 28, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had already begun.
On Reid’s show Monday, Nance appeared on-air in full camo, wearing body armor bearing the Ukrainian and American flags, and holding an assault rifle.
“The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, ‘I’m done talking, all right? It’s time to take action here,’” Nance told Reid. “I am here to help this country fight what essentially is a war of extermination. This is an existential war and Russia has brought it to these people and they are mass murdering civilians, and there are people here like me who are here to do something about it.”
Putin’s suspected purge of his inner circle was fueled by a misinformation bubble he created
Erin Snodgrass and Kelsey Vlamis – April 18, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin.Photo by Kay Nietfeld/picture alliance via Getty Images Putin’s suspected purge of his inner circle was fueled by a misinformation bubble he created
Reports say Russian President Vladimir Putin blames high-level officials for failings in Ukraine.
But experts told Insider Putin is responsible for creating a culture that allows misinformation.
“That only happened because he didn’t want to hear the truth,” said Russia expert Robert English.
When his country’s forces first invaded Ukraine in the early hours of February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin was, by many accounts, anticipating a certain and speedy victory.
Reports suggest that the longtime leader was expecting to roll into the neighboring territory, flatten a modest resistance, and be met by scores of grateful Ukrainians bearing bread and salt, the traditional Ukrainian greeting custom.
“I think that he is lashing out and scapegoating people whom he thinks probably misled him,” said Simon Miles, an assistant professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a historian of the Soviet Union and US-Soviet relations.
In mid-March, Ukrainian media reported that Putin fired Roman Gavrilov, the deputy chief of the Russian national guard, while Russian reports claimed Gavrilov had resigned. The cause of Gavrilov’s departure was not immediately clear, with one source telling the outlet Bellingcat that his dismissal was due to “leaks of military info that led to loss of life,” while two others said it was for “wasteful squandering of fuel.”
Days later, reports emerged claiming Putin had placed under house arrest two senior officials with the FSB, Russia’s security service, over intelligence failings in Ukraine. One such official has since been sent to Lefortovo prison, an infamous FSB jail on the outskirts of Moscow, according to Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist and leading expert on Russian intelligence.
But experts told Insider that if Putin is upset with the information or advice he’s gotten from advisors, the longtime president himself is responsible for creating an autocratic culture of fear that allowed misinformation to filter directly to him.
“That only happened because he didn’t want to hear the truth,” said Robert English, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. “It happened because he was more comfortable surrounding himself with yes-men and sycophants instead of intelligent, independent people who would challenge his prejudice.”
A Ukrainian serviceman walks amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on April 6, 2022.AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File
Putin thought taking Ukraine would be easy. He was wrong.
Soldatov told The New Yorker in March that some of the firings in Russia’s intelligence community may be a result of failed political warfare within Ukraine, his sources have suggested.
He said the foreign-intelligence branch of the FSB was likely tasked with setting up networks of pro-Kremlin political groups within Ukraine before the invasion, but those groups failed to materialize.
The cause of these Russian missteps, according to experts, is likely flawed or overinflated information delivered to Putin from the country’s intelligence apparatus and his advisors.
“They probably told him that they had much more extensive networks and penetration of Ukraine’s government – that they had laid the groundwork for a much more effective internal opposition to Zelenskyy, which would be triggered by Russian troops coming across the border,” Miles said. But that, “as we know, didn’t materialize at all.”
Putin may have also overestimated opposition within Ukraine to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which was “not completely crazy,” said Daniel Treisman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose work focuses on Russian politics and economics.
“Opinion polls suggested Zelenksyy wasn’t very popular,” Treisman told Insider. Though Zelenskyy has received overwhelming support from around the world and in Ukraine, prior to the war, his approval rating was about 30%, while the Ukrainian Parliament’s was even lower.
“Putin believed that a much larger part of the Ukrainian population felt tied to Russia and alienated by the Ukrainian government administration,” Treisman said, adding that he was “probably given a very misleading view of the Ukraine public opinion” by those around him.
Vladimir Putin.Pool Sputnik, AP
Bad news doesn’t filter up in autocratic regimes
Last month, a US official said Putin’s top advisors are purposely feeding him bad information about the war, because they are “too afraid to tell him the truth.”
When all state power lies in the hands of a single individual, advisors and employees have an outsize incentive to prove their value to the man in charge — even at the expense of accuracy and accountability, Miles told Insider.
“I would suspect that he was getting very overly inflated stories from those figures in the FSB who are now allegedly under house arrest,” Miles said, referring to Russia’s early military failures in Ukraine. “And when his intelligence services gave him information, they let him believe that they did so with high confidence.”
Miles added that bad news does not filter up very well in authoritarian regimes.
“No one wants to own responsibility for saying things are not going well,” Miles said. “Also, no one wants to own the risk of proposing the alternative way to do it.”
Putin’s reputation for firing those who disagree with him goes back years. In 2004, weeks before his reelection, the first-term president abruptly fired Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and the rest of his cabinet. Though publicly loyal to Putin, Kasyanov had challenged Putin’s approach to dealing with oil industry oligarchs, The Washington Post reported at the time.
More recently, a viral video taken days before the invasion showed Putin pressing Russia’s spy chief to clearly say “yes or no” on whether he supported recent actions by Russia in Ukraine. Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, stammered and appeared to stumble over his words as Putin cut him off multiple times, providing a rare glimpse into the internal dynamics of the Kremlin.
“He got the bad advice that he asked for, even if he didn’t realize he was asking for it,” English said of Putin.”He was, because he fired independent thinkers, he pushed aside people who disagreed with him, and he gradually promoted people who fed his ego, who fed his pride.”
Putin’s isolation is decades in the making
Putin’s misinformation problem lies not only with the individual people in his circle but with the circle itself — in particular, its shrinking size. Much post-invasion reporting has remarked on Putin’s increasing isolation in the months leading up to Russia’s assault on Ukraine.
But his shift toward isolation has actually been building for decades, experts said.
“When he started out in the early 2000s, he had a broad range of different types of advisors with different views,” Treisman said. “Now it’s narrowed down to this hard-line, Russian nationalist friends and advisors.”
In recent years, Putin’s social isolation turned physical as well. For much of Putin’s reign, he has lived at the suburban presidential compound located an hour outside of Moscow, Miles said. Lately, Putin rarely went into the Kremlin except for official business.
“So the isolation is not new. And I think that that isolation was a key role in his decision to launch this,” Miles said, referring to the war.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin holds a meeting of the Russian Security Council at the Kremlin.Alexei Nikolsky\TASS via Getty Images
A simple, timeless tale
Putin’s apparent confidence, and miscalculation, going into the invasion of Ukraine was reminiscent of a prior era in Russia’s history. Soviet Union intelligence and military officials were initially reluctant to invade Afghanistan in 1979, a conflict that would ultimately contribute to the fall of the USSR. The officials understood what would happen as a result of the invasion, English said.
“In the end, they were ignored, and a small group, four senior figures, kind of impulsively decided, and they did it in a kind of delusion that seems somewhat similar to Putin’s delusion,” English said.
Soviet leaders decided to go to war despite many indications they could fail, not unlike Putin. Some even believed that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan they would be welcomed as liberators, similar to Putin’s expectation in Ukraine. Neither happened.
The regimes of both the USSR and Russia today suffered from a fear of stepping too far out of line, which led to bad or incomplete information reaching the top, according to English.
“You don’t rise up through the Communist Party system if you’re an independent, critical thinker and you don’t rise up through the Putin administration if you’re an independent, critical thinker either,” he said.
English added that both cases illustrate that bad things happen “when autocrats with their egos and their prejudices get in power and they don’t have anyone to check them.”
And when things go wrong the leader blames the people around them — even though they didn’t really have a choice because they were afraid, protecting their careers and their families by telling the person in charge what they want to hear, according to English, who said such a dynamic is far from unique to Russia.
“It happened in Soviet times, it happened in ancient times,” English said. “It’s a simple, timeless tale.”
