Category: Ukraine War

The New York Times

More Russians Consider Costs of War in Ukraine as Casualties Mount

Anton Troianovski, Ivan Nechepurenko and Valeriya Safronova

April 7, 2022

Ivan Kononov, a senior lieutenant in the Russian marines, loved to cook. He made Italian food for his unit in the field, his brother said, and traded rations for spices when he was serving in Syria.

Alexander Kononov, 32, last saw his brother at the military hospital morgue in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in March. He had died in a firefight for a steel plant in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. He was 34. Walking to the morgue, Alexander Kononov recalled, he passed the open gate of a warehouse and glimpsed dozens of black body bags lined up on the floor.

It was only with his brother’s death, Kononov said in a phone interview, that he started paying attention to the war raging just over 50 miles from his home. And he realized, he said, that his brother had died in a war that “no one needs.”

“If everyone learns everything, there will be protests,” Kononov, who works in a freight business, said, referring to the awareness of the Russian public at large. “And I think that would be for the best. Because this war has to stop. There ought to be no wars at all.”

Six weeks after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, many Russians remain in the dark about the depth of their country’s losses — and about the carnage and atrocities that their military is inflicting as it retreats in the North. But increasingly, the reality of war is intruding in the lives of regular families when death notices and body bags arrive, causing some, like Kononov, to question the war.

For others, though, the grim news of casualties is only hardening a determination to defeat Ukraine and support Putin’s conflict with the West.

“If America didn’t supply weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, then there would be no deaths of our young guys,” Alexander Chernykh, who lost his 22-year-old son, Luka Chernykh, a corporal in military intelligence, said in a phone interview. “My personal opinion is we should just whack America with a nuclear bomb and that’s it, so that they stop getting involved in other countries’ business.”

Whether the growing personal pain of war weakens the public’s resolve for rallying around the Kremlin could help determine the future of the conflict. Insisting that the invasion is only a “special military operation” and that no conscripts will be sent to fight, the government is still trying to avoid the impression that Europe’s biggest land war since 1945 will demand widespread personal sacrifice from regular Russians.

A recent survey by independent pollster Levada found that 35% of Russians were paying little or no attention to events in Ukraine; and on state television, the deaths of Russian soldiers are rarely mentioned.

Russia last announced casualties from the war March 25, setting the count at 1,351 deaths. U.S. officials said last month that a conservative estimate put the Russian death toll at more than 7,000 people. The Russian service of the BBC on Wednesday said it had counted 1,083 military deaths that had been announced by local officials or in the local media across Russia. But 20% of those deaths concerned officers — a disproportionate toll indicating that vast numbers of deaths of lower-ranking soldiers may be going unreported.

The official silence about casualties recalls the Soviet war in Afghanistan. About that conflict, Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich later wrote, “There were only rumors of notifications of death arriving at rural huts and of regulation zinc coffins delivered to prefabricated flats.”

This time, snippets of news about deaths reach the Russian public in announcements by local authorities and universities and notices on wives’ and mothers’ social media pages. And when it does arrive, the grim news is most often cloaked in the official language of the war.

The governor of the Ryazan region in western Russia recently said that four men from the area had died “in the struggle against the criminal nationalist regime.” In Ulyanovsk, a city by the Volga River, the wife of Senior Lt. Vladislav Lukonin of the 106th Guards Airborne Division posted that her husband had died protecting the “peaceful sky above Russia.”

When the Industrial Pedagogical College in the western city of Klintsy disclosed the death of a recent graduate, Alexei Prigoda, who was 23, on its social media page this week, it said he “died participating in the ‘Special Operation on the Territory of Ukraine,’ fulfilling his duty to the Fatherland.”

The next day, the college announced a music festival this weekend called “For Peace! For Russia! For the President!” featuring 10 local rock groups.

In the 1980s, the grinding war in Afghanistan eventually magnified the public’s disenchantment with Soviet rule. A Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, formed at the end of the war to protect young men from abuse by the military, helped to shape a new civil society that pierced the state’s silence.

But the Afghanistan War lasted a decade. Anastasia Nikolskaya, a Moscow sociologist, said she saw no evidence of battlefield deaths turning Russians against the war in Ukraine.

Unlike during the war in Afghanistan, she said, the Russian public is being given a clear explanation for why their country is fighting: for their security in the face of Western aggression, and against Nazism. (To justify the war, Putin falsely describes Ukraine’s government as run by Nazis.) For the most part, she said, Russians are trying to avoid engaging with news of civilian deaths.

“We are trying to distance ourselves from such information,” she said. “It’s too hard to hear and know about this news. We can’t do anything about it.”

Committees of soldiers’ mothers are still operating but trying to stay out of the public eye given the state’s repression of opposition to the war. They have been fielding inquiries from people looking for sons and brothers, as evidenced on their pages on the Russian social network VKontakte.

“I haven’t heard from my brother in a week,” one man wrote. “Who do I contact? My neighbor was told yesterday she would get her son’s body in the next few days.”

In the southern Russian republic of North Ossetia, Oleg Marzoyev, a reserve officer, has been tracking the deaths of soldiers from the region on his accounts on Telegram and Instagram, writing that he was doing so because the government was not.

“You, who make these decisions, what are you trying to achieve?” he wrote last month. “People have a question: Why is there no proper attitude toward the memory of the dead?”

With war deaths growing, word of the dangers of fighting in Ukraine is filtering down through the public, and there have even been cases of service members trying to avoid combat.

Mikhail Benyash, a lawyer in the southern city of Krasnodar, said he has received more than 100 requests from Russian military and national guard service members about their legal rights should they refuse to fight.

He said he was defending three national guard members who protested the decision to fire them for rejecting the order to go to Ukraine. Nine others were pressured to drop complaints, he said.

“They don’t see a point in killing anyone,” he said of the Russians who refuse to fight. “Plus, they don’t see a point in being killed.”

But for soldiers’ families, the state’s propaganda remains influential. Chernykh, whose son grew up in a small town in Siberia and died thousands of miles west, near the Ukrainian town of Konotop, said he did not watch television news. Yet, he said Russia was fighting Nazis who were being supplied by the United States, and he dismissed the idea that his country’s army could be responsible for the atrocities being uncovered in Ukraine.

“I know the Russian spirit, and I know that Russians do not shoot at civilians,” Chernykh, an engineer, said in a phone interview from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. “Only Nazis could do that.”

In another Siberian city, Khanty-Mansiysk, a 38-year-old woman named Alina — she asked that her last name be withheld out of fear of repercussions — also said she believed that her brother, a lieutenant colonel, had perished fighting Nazism.

Through tears, she said that a small group of Nazis in Ukraine was causing misery by encouraging the mistreatment of ethnic Russians. It was all an echo of World War II, she said, when some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis — a storyline propagated at length on Russian television.

“This is a repeat of what happened before,” she said. “This is a repeat of this history.”

For many others, there is the feeling of being at the mercy of events beyond their control. In North Ossetia, Marina Kulumbegova, 25, has been avoiding watching the news. Her father, Robert Kulumbegov, 47, left for eastern Ukraine on the first day of the war to deliver supplies to Russian troops, then stayed to fight, she said, “because there were boys there who were my brother’s age” — 23.

“The only people who know what’s really happening there are the guys who are fighting there,” she said in a phone interview from the city of Vladikavkaz. “To talk about it, to say your opinion on it, has absolutely no use.”

Time

The Ordinary Civilians in Estonia Preparing to Protect Their Country Against Putin

Lisa Abend/Klooga, Estonia – April 7, 2022

Members of the Estonian Defense League after training on March 27, in Männiku, Estonia. Credit – Birgit Püve for TIME

The ambush came at dawn. Moments before, the only sound in the frigid forest of Klooga, 40 km west of the Estonian capital Tallinn, had been light snoring coming from beneath a handful of camouflaged tarps. But seconds after machine-gun fire broke their sleep, several fighters erupted from their makeshift shelters and began returning fire. Flashes from their rifles illuminated the still dark woods, while blue smoke poured from a bomb intended to obscure the enemy’s path.

Read More: ‘Putin’s Appetite Will Only Grow.’ Estonia’s Prime Minister Says We’re Not Doing Enough to Stop Russia

Within minutes, the battle was over. Although the outnumbered fighters did not manage to vanquish the opposing force, Kaia, an accountant who had left her baby at home that weekend, was pleased with the training exercise. “They did pretty well,” she said of the volunteers in the Estonian Defense League (EDL) she was helping instruct. “They stayed calm, and they held their ground.”

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have been preparing to do the same. A shared border with Russia, and a painful history of Soviet occupation that began in the 1940s and saw the deportation and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of citizens, spurred all three nations to join NATO once they regained independence in the 1990s. It has also led them to adopt a broad, society-wide approach to defense that has proved especially relevant more recently, as Russia has ramped up disinformation efforts in the region. Nowhere is that more evident than in Estonia, where 15,000 ordinary citizens like Kaia spend several weekends each year training in guerrilla warfare as part of the EDL. And since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, heightened fears that the Baltics could be the Kremlin’s next target have spurred thousands more to sign up.

“We are not conscripts. We are not regular army,” said Henri, 20, a participant in the Klooga “ambush” who works in sales. (Most members speaking with TIME preferred not to give their last names as a security precaution.) “We are ordinary Estonian men and women ready to put our blood on the line for every inch a possible occupier would want to gain of our land.”

Read More: ‘Everybody’s Waiting for Putin to Die.’ A Russian Businessman on the Hopes for His Homeland

Estonia takes protecting its population of 1.3 million seriously. Its defense budget is proportionately the third highest among NATO countries, and while there are only 7,000 active–duty soldiers in its military, it bulks up its defense and deterrence capabilities with reservists and with the EDL, which is the region’s largest volunteer force. At the start of 2022, it counted some 15,000 members, plus 10,700 in its youth organizations and Women’s Defense League, which provides support to the fighting units. That already added up to nearly 2% of the population, and since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the organization has received roughly 2,000 new applications for membership.

Most members are unpaid, though the Ministry of Defense funds their training and supplies weapons. “I truly believe that Estonians will grab a weapon or a tool against the Russian invaders,” says Lauri Abel, the ministry’s Under Secretary for Defense Readiness. A former commander of the Tallinn EDL, Abel sees the corps’ civilian status as crucial to its success. “They’re the link between the armed forces and society. They are everywhere, working in different companies. They carry the defense spirit to society.”

Even before the war in Ukraine, a full 57% of Estonians said they would be willing to participate in their country’s defense; some 80% approve of the EDL. It helps explain what induced Katlin, a 36-year-old who works in the financial sector, to spend a below-zero Sunday in late March in the snow, learning to make impromptu stretchers that could be used to haul wounded comrades out of the woods. “I wear heels five days a week. So this,” she says, gesturing to her heavy flak jacket and boots, “is a big difference. But I want the knowledge, and I want to be prepared.”

Preparation is at the heart of the league. New recruits spend eight weekends in basic training, where they learn to fire and clean weapons, to handle explosives, and a range of other survival skills. After passing a final test, they are allowed to keep their state-issued weapons at home. “I don’t know many countries in the world where the state entrusts its citizens to have combat weapons at their homes, just in case,” said one veteran member. “If we are suddenly attacked, I don’t need to go to a certain point to get my gear. I can just step out of my front door, walk 20 feet into the bushes, and then I’m dangerous.”

Read More: Inside the Historic Mission to Provide Aid and Arms to Ukraine

Against a conventional army with its large battalions and rigid formations, the EDL’s small, local units are intended to be much more agile. “One of our original principles is that you fight in the area you are from,” says Major Rene Toomse, who oversees the EDL’s training programs. “The point is that during peacetime you have time to learn all the terrain: you know where you can hide, where you can produce good ambushes—it’s your turf. Imagine what kind of leverage that gives you against an invading enemy. They have no idea where to go, and you know every inch.”

The EDL hasn’t yet had to test its abilities in a real conflict, but it collaborates with the Estonian military and with other NATO forces in war games and joint exercises, and is a major reason why researchers at the Rand organization consider Estonia’s total defense capabilities to be among “the most developed” of the Baltic states.

Read More: Meet the Lithuanian ‘Elves’ Fighting Russian Disinformation

That serves as reassurance in a country where many believe that should Ukraine fall, they will be next. After sitting in on the Klooga unit’s practice ambush, Major Toomse drove to a target range where a different unit was spending its Sunday learning to fire two-person antitank weapons called Carl-Gustavs. “If Russia thinks it can reoccupy Estonia or any Baltic country,” Toomse said, “it’s going to be a disaster for them.”

—With reporting by Simmone Shah/New York

Yahoo! News

Ukraine: A killing ground for Russian armor. Are tanks now obsolete?

Niamh Cavanagh, Producer – April 7, 2022

Despite having only the fourth-largest military in the world, Russia is the superpower when it comes to its supply of tanks, with 12,950 in 2020 — more than double the number of the U.S., which came in second with 6,333 vehicles.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues into its seventh week, it appears that President Vladimir Putin’s military forces might be taking a toll. Pictures of destroyed Russian tanks have been posted and shared across social media since the beginning of the war.

As of March 24, the Kremlin had lost hundreds of tanks since the war began in February, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry stated. Russian vehicles have suffered heavy losses thanks to Ukrainian troops armed with antitank missiles, including the U.K.’s Next Generation Light Antitank Weapon, or NLAW, and the American Javelin antitank missile.

This has led some experts to say that warfare has changed, and that tanks and armored personnel carriers are now obsolete. “They are too expensive & are easily destroyed with manifold light anti-tank weapons or drones,” Anders Aslund, an expert on Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, wrote on Twitter.

According to the open-source intelligence organization Oryx, Russia has lost a total of 450 tanks: 221 were destroyed, six were damaged, 41 were abandoned and 182 were captured. And Russia could lose more with the introduction of Switchblades, U.S. combat drones designed to attack personnel and light vehicles. On Tuesday, defense officials announced they were training Ukrainian soldiers in the U.S. on how to use the weapons to attack enemy tanks and armored vehicles. These 100 drones, which are carried in a backpack, were part of an $800 million military aid package to Ukraine.

So with Russia having lost hundreds of tanks, does this mean these armored vehicles are now becoming obsolete in modern warfare? According to Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the global policy think tank RAND Corporation, it’s a definite “not yet.”

“The first and most obvious piece of evidence that I have for that is that Ukrainians right now are asking for more armored vehicles,” Boston told Yahoo News. “And they would very much like to get support from the U.S. and from the West with more armored vehicles and more tanks.”

Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked NATO to either donate or sell 500 tanks to his country. “You have at least 20,000 tanks,” he said to the alliance’s heads of state. “Ukraine asked for a percent, 1% of all your tanks to be given or sold to us.” A number of countries in the organization use the same Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles that Ukrainian soldiers already use themselves. However, it is not clear what type of tanks Zelensky was asking for.

One reason a large amount of Russian tanks have been destroyed, Boston said, is that Russia is doing the attacking — meaning Ukrainians are on the defensive, so they are targeting more enemy munitions. Boston said this is likely to change and more of Ukraine’s tanks would be destroyed when it transitions to the offensive.

Another reason for the graveyard of tanks is that Ukrainians are intelligently targeting Russian logistics, and so the ability to get fuel to the frontline has proved difficult. According to Boston, one specific Russian tank division lost a lot of vehicles due to abandonment rather than direct enemy action.

With this in mind, Boston told Yahoo News he doesn’t know that “we’re yet in the last generation of human-operated tanks.” He explained that this is because infantry will be used on battlefields for many years to come, and so protected transport for soldiers on foot will also be needed. “It’s an insurance policy for your infantry,” he said. “And the infantry protect the tank. That’s why they call it the ‘combined arms’ team. Without it, the tank is just as useless as everything else.”

One former British Army officer, now a defense military analyst, said people should be careful to “avoid drawing the wrong conclusions” on tanks. “Russia’s disastrous tactics have been a terrible advertisement for tanks,” Nicholas Drummond wrote on Twitter. “No artillery support. No infantry support. No air support,” he said, referring to images showing destroyed Russian tanks. “This is not how combined arms tactics work in an era of multi-domain operations.”

But how was there no support available for these tanks? According to Boston, “Russia went into this fight apparently thinking that they had bribed enough Ukrainian officials. And very few Ukrainians actually wanted to fight them, and [the Russians] believed they weren’t going to encounter serious resistance. They appear to have built their operations plan around that incredibly faulty assumption.”

And so time will tell how tanks will show up during the course of this war, but one thing is for certain, according to experts: They will be around for a lot longer.

Politico

Perma-sanctions: Biden under pressure to punish Russia until Putin’s gone

Nahal Toosi – April 6, 2022

Evidence that Russian troops murdered hundreds of Ukrainian civilians is leading some U.S. lawmakers to insist that America and its allies keep sanctions on Moscow so long as Vladimir Putin remains in power — even if he withdraws from Ukraine.

The sentiment is likely to grow in a Congress where anti-Putin feeling is strong and bipartisan. It could put the White House in a tricky position, making it potentially harder to bring peace to Ukraine by enticing Putin through sanctions relief.

The lawmakers want to punish Putin for what he’s done to Ukraine and innocent civilians in particular, and they recoil at the idea of allowing Russia’s economy to be revived with Putin still in power, in part because they don’t trust him not to re-invade Ukraine later.

“As long as we’re in agreement that Putin is a war criminal, he’s conducting crimes, and obviously his government is complicit all the way down the chain with Putin appointees and loyalists, then, how can we in good conscience lift the sanctions?” asked Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), who has called for even tougher penalties on Moscow.

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who served as a top human rights official in the Obama administration, shared similar sentiments online and in an interview. “I can’t imagine returning Russia’s wealth to Putin after what he’s done and while Ukraine lies in ruins,” Malinowski said.

Despite a statement suggesting otherwise from President Joe Biden, his administration insists it’s not seeking regime change in Russia, and for now, it is more focused on raising the pressure, not relieving it. On Wednesday, the administration unveiled new sanctions whose targets included Russian banks and Putin’s daughters.

But White House aides are leery of following Congress’ lead on sanctions, fearful that lawmakers are prone to respond to the political whims of the moment without having to manage the longer-term fallout. Sanctions relief can be a useful instrument in the diplomatic toolkit. And administration officials have signaled — vaguely — that they’re willing to relieve economic pain on the Kremlin if it pulls its troops out of Ukraine.

“The purpose of the sanctions … is not to be there indefinitely. It’s to change Russia’s conduct,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on NBC News earlier this month. “And if, as a result of negotiations, the sanctions, the pressure, the support for Ukraine, we achieve just that, then at some point the sanctions will go away.”

But aides are also well aware that lifting penalties on adversarial regimes has, in the past, spurred fierce political backlash at home, such as in the case of Iran, and they are trying to coordinate their Russia-related moves closely with Congress.

The images of dead civilians, some of them in mass graves, that recently emerged from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha have left many lawmakers conflicted as to exactly how the sanctions endgame should play out. Many suspect that more such atrocities will be uncovered as the fight continues.

“Absent the war crimes evidence, I would say ‘Yes, we should be prepared to relieve sanctions if Putin pulls out of Crimea and all of the rest of Ukraine,’” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) who often defends Biden’s policies. Following the Bucha reports, “this question of when to lift sanctions is going to be a very difficult one.”

The administration’s general sense is that it will be a long time before the Ukraine conflict reaches a point where significant sanctions removal is even an option. “Putin does not seem interested in ending the fight despite the devastation that he’s bringing upon his own forces and his own people and economy,” a senior U.S. diplomat told POLITICO.

That being said, many U.S. officials believed that Russia’s superior military would quickly capture most if not all of Ukraine — a prediction that has proven incorrect.

Regime change or behavior change?

Economic sanctions — a broad term that can mean anything from trade restrictions to freezes on an individual’s financial assets — are in theory designed to shape behavior, analysts and officials say. That logic requires that a person or institution under sanctions needs to know those penalties will be removed if they change their actions. Otherwise, they have little incentive to shift course.

In reality, however, as the United States has grown less willing to use military force and struggled at times with diplomatic efforts, sanctions have become a way to punish or isolate an adversary, even when there’s no sign that they will change their behavior. Countries such as North Korea and Cuba have endured U.S. sanctions for many years without appreciably changing to Washington’s liking.

At the very least, imposing sanctions is a feel-good, symbolic move.

“You’ve got to freakin’ do something sometimes,” said Brian O’Toole, a former Treasury sanctions official.

Looming over the entire sanctions debate are the actions of Putin himself. The Russian autocrat has long believed the United States wants to see him toppled. If he becomes convinced that Washington won’t ease the sanctions so long as he remains in power, he may have even less incentive to withdraw from Ukraine.

Malinowski noted the possibility that Putin may hunker down, but he also pointed out that the Russian leader appears unwilling to withdraw regardless of sanctions pressure. The House member is pushing a bill that would give the U.S. government more authority to seize certain Russian assets and divert them to help rebuild Ukraine.

“We’ll either need to use sanctioned assets directly to help Ukraine, or compel Russia to do so as a condition of easing sanctions,” Malinowski said.

The Zelenskyy factor

Sanctions relief is not a zero-sum game. Many of the decisions related to it will depend on how well Ukrainians fight back against Russians, not to mention power dynamics in Moscow.

The United States and its allies could lift some sanctions, all at once or in stages, depending on the steps Putin takes to bring an end to the fighting. They could also simultaneously impose new sanctions on Russia to punish it for war crimes or other reasons, as they did on Wednesday.

One major factor to be considered is what Ukrainians want.

If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decides to agree to a negotiated settlement with Moscow, he may ask that the United States and Europe relieve sanctions as part of that deal. Zelenskyy’s word would go a long way in Washington, where at the moment he has many admirers within both political parties.

But even then, U.S. officials and their counterparts in Europe would likely weigh their own national security interests. Eastern European and Baltic countries that fear Putin’s appetite for their soil, for example, may lobby against a partial or full end to sanctions on Moscow. But Western European countries whose economies rely heavily on Russian energy exports may favor quicker sanctions relief.

The West Wing has noticed that some U.S. lawmakers want to extend the punishments until Putin is deposed, and some in the White House have expressed internal concern that a move by Congress could tie the hands of negotiators or further provoke Putin.

But the prevailing belief is that if the sanctions were an obstacle to a peace deal and Zelenskyy wanted them dropped, the United States and its allies would acquiesce, according to two senior Biden administration officials.

When asked recently if Zelenskyy can negotiate sanctions relief, however, Blinken was noncommittal.

“If [Ukraine] concludes that it can bring this war to an end, stop the death and destruction, and continue to assert its independence and its sovereignty, and ultimately that requires the lifting of sanctions, of course we’re going to look at that,” Blinken told NBC News.

The atrocities in Bucha, not to mention what will likely be more such tragedies uncovered in the future, will make it harder for Zelenskyy to agree to a deal with Russia, predicted O’Toole.

“If everybody is honest with themselves about this, there’s so little chance that there is a real resolution to this with Putin in power,” O’Toole said.

A good deal also will depend on who’s in charge at the White House come the cessation of hostilities; the president has significant authority to impose or remove sanctions through executive actions. But Congress can also pass legislation to bind the president.

The case of Iran is instructive: The United States used sanctions to help push Iran to agree to a 2015 deal that restricted its nuclear program. But Republicans and many Democrats opposed the agreement and the sanctions relief it required. The lawmakers passed legislation giving themselves more power to review such agreements.

The deal is now largely defunct since then-President Donald Trump abandoned it in 2018, but Biden’s efforts to revive the agreement have drawn bipartisan backlash, with lawmakers unhappy with the idea of providing sanctions relief for Iran’s Islamist regime. As a result of the back and forth, international companies have largely refrained from reentering the Iranian market, complicating the calculus of a meaningful end to economic punishment.

Likewise in Russia, hundreds of companies have left the country as the United States, European Union and other governments unveiled their sanctions. As long as Putin stays in power, many of those companies may never return, even if the economic restrictions are lifted. And were Putin somehow to be toppled, or die, there’s no guarantee his successor will be any more acceptable to the West.

For as long as Putin rules, though, the sanctions should remain, some lawmakers say.

“There will be attempts to normalize trade relations again if Russia ends their aggression, but I disagree,” said Rep. John Curtis, a Republican from Utah. “Putin’s government should be treated as a pariah going forward.”

Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report. 

Business Insider

Putin’s UN ambassador says if Russia really wanted to kill civilians in Ukraine, more people would be dead

Rebecca Cohen – April 6, 2022

• Putin’s UN ambassador said if Russia were targeting Ukrainian civilians, more would be dead.
• He also claimed that Russia is acting in “strict compliance” with international humanitarian law.
• Russia has repeatedly denied evidence of mass civilian killings, including that in Bucha over the weekend.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Nations ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said at a press conference Tuesday that if Russia really wanted to kill Ukrainian civilians, more would be dead.

“I would like to reiterate that the Russian military forces act in strict compliance with international humanitarian law and do not target civilians and civilian objects,” Nebenzya said.

He said that if the Russians were pursuing attacks on civilians, “the scale of losses and devastation would be worse by digits.”

Nebenzya also alleged that the US had killed more civilians in its occupation of Iraq than Russia is accused of killing in Ukraine since their invasion on February 24.

The United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Sunday that it had recorded 1,417 civilian deaths and 2,038 civilian injuries in Ukraine since Russia invaded the eastern European country in February.

The agency said, however, that it “believes that the actual figures are considerably higher.”

Russia has strongly denied evidence of civilian massacres in Ukraine, including recent evidence of mass graves holding nearly 300 bodies in the town of Bucha.

“The truth of what happened in Bucha will reveal itself,” Nebenzya said at the press conference.

A tweet from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Sunday, meanwhile, said “All the photos and videos published by the Kiev regime in Bucha are just another provocation.”

Business Insider

Top US general says the only way the US could have stopped Putin was to send troops into Ukraine, which Biden warned would start World War III

Bill Bostock – April 6, 2022

Mark Milley said sending US troops into Ukraine was likely the only way to stop Putin from invading.

But the general said he was against doing so, as it would “risk armed conflict with Russia.”

NATO forces have refused to engage militarily with Russia on Ukrainian soil, distressing Zelenskyy.

The top US general said the only way to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin would be to send US troops into Ukraine — an action he and President Joe Biden have both opposed, saying it would spark a new conflict with Russia.

“Short of the commitment of US military forces into Ukraine proper, I’m not sure he was deterrable,” Gen. Mark Milley told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

“The idea of deterring Putin from invading Ukraine, deterring him by the US, would have required the commitment of US military forces, and I think that would have risked armed conflict with Russia.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly asked the US and NATO to send troops and enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, moves that would likely bring Western forces in direct combat with Russian forces.

NATO has stayed away from direct intervention, choosing to supply military and humanitarian aid.

Biden tweeted on March 11 that a direct US or NATO military incursion into Ukraine would be unfeasible and would start a world war.

“I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO,” he said.

“But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

On Tuesday, Milley said he “certainly wouldn’t have advised” sending US troops into Ukraine to deter Putin.

As the West announced sanctions on Russia following the invasion, Putin put Russia’s nuclear-weapons program on high alert, brandishing the threat of nuclear war to ward off military intervention. However, Western officials believe that nothing has actually changed with the readiness of Russia’s nuclear program.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has slowed in recent weeks. Ukrainian and Western officials have said they believe Putin is repositioning troops for an all-out attack on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

The region is home to the pro-Russian separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia recognized the Ukrainian territories as independent states days before the invasion.

As the fighting has continued across Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian officials have held negotiations about a cease-fire.

Zelenskyy told the BBC on Monday that talks would continue despite evidence of Russian war crimes. Ukraine has accused Russia of killing at least 300 civilians, many in a gruesome fashion, in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.

Russia to pay bonds in rubles, which may cause default

Ken Sweet – April 6, 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — Russia said Wednesday that it made a debt payment in rubles this week, a move that may not be accepted by Russia’s foreign debtholders and could put the country on a path to an historic default.

The Ministry of Finance said in a statement that it tried to make a $649 million payment toward two bonds to an unnamed U.S. bank — previously reported as JPMorgan Chase — but that payment was not accepted because new U.S. sanctions prohibit Russia from using U.S. banks to pay its debts.

Russia said it has instead transferred the funds in rubles into a special bank account with Russia’s National Settlement Depository, the country’s securities regulator. The ministry added that once the country is allowed to access foreign exchange markets — not something that will happen for the foreseeable future due to sanctions — it will decide whether to allow bondholders to convert the ruble payment back into dollars or euros.

While Russia has 30 days of leeway to catch up with its payments, investors have been betting on a default. The contracts governing Russia’s bonds require in most cases payment in euros or dollars with few and narrow exceptions known as an alternative payments clause. Russia contends that it has met those exceptions but sovereign debt experts have argued otherwise.

“It is not clear to me, even if the clause is there, that Russia would be entitled to use it,” said G. Mitu Gulati, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and an expert on sovereign debt restructurings and contracts, in an email. “That’s a debatable question. I’d argue that they are not. But this would be a question for a court.”

Ratings agencies have downgraded Russia’s debt to “junk” status and said a default is highly likely.

While Russia has signaled it remains willing to pay its debts, the Kremlin warned that if sanctions stayed in place, it would continue to pay debtholders in rubles instead of dollars or euros.

“Russia has all the resources needed to service its debts,” said Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman. “If this blocking continues and transfers for debt repayments are also blocked from these frozen funds, they can be paid out in rubles.”

The U.S. has been attempting to force Russia to use its foreign currency reserves — or any revenue from oil and gas sales — in order to deplete the country’s financial resources. The sanctions placed on Russia this week barred the country from using any of its foreign reserves held in U.S. banks for debt payments.

Previously the Treasury Department had been allowing Russia to make debt payments, which stopped Russia from defaulting last month when it transferred a payment on March 17.

Russia has not defaulted on its foreign debts since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the collapse of the Russian Empire led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Even in the late 1990s during Russia’s sovereign debt crisis the country was able to continue to pay foreign debts with the help of international aid, although it did default on its domestic debt.

Reuters

U.S. training small number of Ukrainians on Switchblade drones -defense official

Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali – April 6, 2022

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A small number of Ukrainians have been trained in the United States on how to operate killer “Switchblade” drones, single-use weapons that fly into their targets and detonate on impact, a senior U.S. defense official disclosed on Wednesday.

The Ukrainians undergoing training on the Switchblades and other weaponry number less than a dozen. They had arrived in the United States for regular military education programs prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

“We took advantage of the opportunity to pull them aside for a couple of days and provide them some training, particularly on the Switchblades UAV,” the senior U.S. defense official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity. “UAV” refers to an unmanned aerial vehicle.

The United States withdrew its military advisers from Ukraine ahead of Russia’s invasion, seeking to avoid a direct military confrontation between U.S. and Russian forces that could escalate into a broader war.

As a result of the withdrawal, the United States and NATO have largely constrained their provision of weaponry to Ukraine to systems that Ukrainian forces knew how to operate prior to Russia’s invasion.

That includes U.S. weapons that have given Ukraine an edge against Russian forces, like Javelin anti-tank missiles and portable Stinger surface-to-air missiles that can target Russian aircraft. It also includes Soviet-era systems that are still in the inventories of some NATO nations.

But Switchblades, which are relatively easy-to-use and could be highly effective in attacking Russian ground forces, had not been part of training packages prior to Russia’s invasion. The drones are made by AeroVironment Inc https://www.avinc.com/tms/switchblade-600.

The drones, which have a range of 40 km (25 miles), can be used against vehicles including trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers.

In recent testimony, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Celeste Wallander, said the United States had committed to sending Ukraine 100 Switchblade systems.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday that the Pentagon is sending Ukraine two variants of the Switchblade, including one with an anti-armor warhead.

“The Switchblade 600 and 300 will move as quickly as they possibly can,” Austin told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee.

Ukrainians are expected to quickly use the first 100 systems sent.

“I’m convinced that when we get the first set of Switchblades in, there will be an immediate request from the Ukrainians for more,” the top U.S.commander in Europe, Air Force General Tod Wolters, told Congress on March 30.

The senior U.S. official declined to say on Wednesday where in the United States the training of Ukrainians was taking place or offer more information on other weapons systems they’re being trained on.

“Our expectation is that these individuals will be heading back into Ukraine relatively soon as they were originally anyway,” the official told reporters.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart; Editing by Mark Porter, Leslie Adler and Jonathan Oatis)

Business Insider

Ukraine says Russia is using ‘mobile crematoriums’ to burn the bodies of civilians in Mariupol and hide evidence of war crimes

Jake Epstein – April 6, 2022

• Mariupol City Council said Russia is using mobile crematoriums to “cover their tracks.”
• “They collect and burn the bodies of Mariupol residents murdered and killed,” it alleged on Telegram.
• The council said Russia ordered the cover-up after international outrage over mass civilian killings in Bucha.

The city council of besieged Ukrainian port city Mariupol accused Russian forces of using mobile crematoriums to burn the bodies of civilians killed in the brutal assault and hide evidence of war crimes.

“Killers cover their tracks. Russian mobile crematoriums have started operating in Mariupol,” Mariupol city council alleged Wednesday on Telegram.

“They collect and burn the bodies of Mariupol residents murdered and killed as a result of the Russian invasion,” the city council added.

It said Russian leadership “ordered the destruction of any evidence of crimes committed by its army in Mariupol” in the wake of international outrage over the death of hundreds of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha at the hands of President Vladimir Putin’s forces.

Russian forces have continuously shelled Mariupol in a weeks-long campaign, targeting schools, hospitals, and even a theater marked as a shelter with children inside.

The US State Department has suggested that Russian forces have “brutalized” the city because President Vladimir Putin is angry at Ukraine’s fierce resistance.

Attempts to evacuate civilians or create humanitarian corridors from Mariupol have been difficult, and it’s not immediately clear how many civilians have died there.

In a conservative estimate, the city council said around 5,000 civilians have been killed as a result of Russia’s siege.

But, the city council warned, “given the size of the city, catastrophic destruction, the duration of the blockade, and fierce resistance, tens of thousands of civilians from Mariupol could fall victim to the invaders.”

The city council also said that all potential witnesses to Russian forces’ “atrocities” are being hunted through filtration camps — which Ukrainians have said are relocation camps for abducted civilians along the Russia-Ukraine border.

“The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the Nazi concentration camps. The Russian fascists turned our whole city into a death camp,” Mariupol’s Mayor Vadym Boichenko said in the Telegram post.

He added: “Unfortunately, the eerie analogy is gaining more and more confirmation. This is no longer Chechnya or Aleppo. This is the new Auschwitz and Majdanek. The world should help punish Putin’s villains.”

Translations by Oleksandr Vynogradov.