Video appears to show a Russian attack helicopter being split in half by a British hi-tech missile fired by Ukrainian fighters
Alia Shoaib – April 3, 2022
A video appears to show a UK anti-aircraft missile shooting down a Russian helicopter in Ukraine.
The UK reportedly sent a team of Starstreak operators to a secret location in a neighboring country to train Ukrainian forces.
Russia’s ambassador to the UK said that British weapons supplied to Ukraine are “legitimate targets.”
A British anti-aircraft missile has been used to shoot down a Russian helicopter in Ukraine for the first time, reports say.
Footage shows the Starstreak high-velocity missile system striking a Russian Mi-28N attack helicopter over the Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine, causing its tail to snap off mid-air and splitting the aircraft in half.
UK forces operating a Starstreak high velocity missile, like the kind sent to Ukraine.CARL COURT/AFP/GettyImages.
Starstreak is Britain’s most advanced operated portable missile system, and the UK sent a cosignment to Ukraine in March along with another shipment of Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapons (NLAWs).
A British Ministry of Defense source told The Times of London that it believed the video showed Starstreak in action.
The weapon is guided onto its target by three laser beam darts, according to The Times. The missile accelerates to Mach 4 (3,000 mph) and is the fastest short-range missile in existence.
It can be fired from a stand or shoulder launcher and can strike targets up to 7km, or over 4 miles, away, the paper said.
Because of the complexity of using it, troops must have 1,000 successful hits on a simulator before they are allowed to launch a live missile.
To help Ukrainians master the weapon, the British Ministry of Defense sent a team of Starstreak operators and a simulator to a secret location in a neighboring country for training, The Times reported.
Although British operators had planned to spend two to three weeks intensively training Ukrainian troops, its use this week suggests that soldiers have learned how to use it in just one or two weeks, the paper said.
The British Ministry of Defense source told The Times that the anti-aircraft system had been deployed for nearly a week.
Russia’s ambassador to the UK told Russian news agency TASS on Saturday that British weapons supplies to Ukraine are “legitimate targets” for the Russian army.
Ambassador Andrey Kelin said that supplying arms such as Starstreak missiles is “destabilizing.”
“They exacerbate the situation, making it even bloodier. Apparently, those are new, high-precision weapons,” Kelin told the news agency.
“Naturally, our armed forces will view them as a legitimate target if those supplies get through the Ukrainian border.”
Russian retreat leaves trail of slain civilians in town near Kyiv
Simon Gardner, Zohra Bensemra and Abdelaziz Boumzar – April 2, 2022
Soldiers walk to see destroyed Russian military vehicles, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in Bucha, in Kyiv regionA serviceman uses his mobile phone to film a destroyed Russian tank and armoured vehicles, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in Bucha, in Kyiv regionUkrainian soldiers are pictured on their military vehicle, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine in Bucha, in Kyiv regionUkrainian soldiers are pictured on their tanks as they drive along the street, amid Russia’s invasion on Ukraine, in Bucha, in Kyiv region
BUCHA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Dead civilians still lay scattered over the streets of the Ukrainian country town of Bucha on Saturday, three days after the invading Russian army pulled back from its abortive advance on Kyiv to the southeast.
The smell of explosives still hung in the cold, dank air, mingling with the stench of death.
Sixty-six-year-old Vasily, who gave no surname, looked at the sprawled remains of more than a dozen civilians dotted along the road outside his house, his face disfigured with grief.
Residents said they had been killed by the Russian troops during their month-long occupation.
To Vasily’s left, one man lay against a grass verge next to his bicycle, his face sallow and eyes sunken. Another lay in the middle of the road, a few metres from his front door. Vasily said it was his son’s godfather, a lifelong friend.
Bucha’s still-unburied dead wore no uniforms. They were civilians with bikes, their stiff hands still gripping bags of shopping. Some had clearly been dead for many days, if not weeks.
For the most part, they were whole, and it was unclear whether they had been killed by shrapnel, a blast or a bullet – but one had the top of his head missing.
“The bastards!” Vasily said, weeping with rage in a thick coat and woollen hat. “I’m sorry. The tank behind me was shooting. Dogs!”
“We were sitting in the cellar for two weeks. There was food but no light, no heating to warm up. “We put the water on candles to warm it … We slept in felt boots.”
OPEN GRAVE
Local officials gave Reuters reporters access to the area, and a policeman led the way through streets now patrolled by Ukrainian tanks to the road where the bodies lay.
It was not clear why they had not yet been buried.
Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk said more than 300 residents of the town had been killed, and a mass grave at one church ground was still open, with hands and feet poking through the red clay heaped on top.
Several streets were strewn with the mangled wrecks of burned-out Russian tanks and armoured vehicles. Unexploded rockets lay on the road and, in one spot, an unexploded mortar shell poked out of the tarmac.
A column of Ukrainian tanks patrolled, flying blue and yellow national flags. One resident who had survived the ordeal hugged a soldier, and gave the military battle-cry: “Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes!”
Mariya Zhelezova, 74, worked as a cleaner at an airplane factory whose poor health stopped her leaving before the Russians came.
Walking with her 50-year-old daughter Iryna, she tearfully recalled brushes with death.
“The first time, I went out of the room and a bullet broke the glass, the window, and got stuck in the dresser,” she said. “The second time, shattered glass almost got into my leg.
“The third time, I was walking and didn’t know he was standing with a rifle and the bullets went right past me. When I got home, I couldn’t speak.”
She removed a white cloth armband that she said residents had been ordered to wear.
“We don’t want them to come back,” she said. “I had a dream today – that they left, and didn’t come back.”
The Kremlin and the Russian defence ministry in Moscow did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
(Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Ukraine: Dozens of dead civilians found on street in Bucha as Russian forces retreat
Chiara Giordano – April 2, 2022
The dead bodies of dozens of civilians have been found scattered across the streets of a town recaptured by Ukranian forces.
Journalists in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, watched as Ukrainian soldiers backed by a column of tanks and other armoured vehicles used cables to drag bodies off of a street from a distance, fearing they may have been rigged to explode.
Locals said the dead were civilians who were killed by departing Russian soldiers without provocation.
One AFP reporter said they had seen at least 20 bodies on the ground. Bucha’s mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, said more than 300 residents had been killed.
“Those people were just walking and they shot them without any reason. Bang,” said a Bucha resident who declined to give his name citing safety reasons. “In the next neighborhood, Stekolka, it was even worse. They would shoot without asking any question.”
Ukraine said on Saturday its forces had seized back all areas around Kyiv, claiming complete control of the capital region for the first time since Russia launched the invasion.
Troops have retaken more than 30 towns and villages around Kyiv since Russia pulled back from the area this week, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned in his nightly video address that departing Russian troops were creating a “catastrophic” situation for civilians by leaving mines around homes, abandoned equipment and “even the bodies of those killed”.
Boris Johnson spoke with Mr Zelensky on Saturday evening, a Downing Street spokesperson said.
“He congratulated Ukraine’s brave armed forces for successfully pushing back Russia’s invading army in a number of areas, but recognised the huge challenges that remain and the immense suffering being inflicted on civilians,” they added.
The prime minister updated Mr Zelensky on the progress made at the recent military donor conference, convened by the UK with 35 countries, No 10 said, and “committed to continue to step up defensive support”.
Russia has vowed to target UK weapons shipped into Ukraine after one of its helicopters was reportedly shot down by a British-made missile.
Andrey Kelin, Moscow’s ambassador in London, claimed Britain’s decision to send arms supplies to the Ukrainian army had made the war “even bloodier”.
His comments came after the Starstreak high-velocity missile system, supplied to Ukraine by Britain in March along with anti-tank weapons, was involved in an attack on a Russian aircraft in the Luhansk region.
They also follow British defence secretary Ben Wallace’s promise to send more lethal aid to Kyiv.
Mr Kelin told the Tass news agency: “All arms supplies are destabilising, particularly those mentioned by Wallace.
David Arakhamia, a Ukrainian negotiator, reportedly indicated draft peace treaty documents were at an advanced enough stage to allow for direct consultations between the two nations’ leaders.
The Interfax Ukraine agency quoted Mr Arakhamia as telling Ukrainian television Russia accepted Ukraine’s overall position, with the exception of its stance on Crimea.
A man stands next to a civilian vehicle that was destroyed during fighting as Ukrainian servicemen ride on a tank vehicle outside Kyiv (Vadim Ghirda/AP)
In the east, a Red Cross convoy was again seeking to evacuate civilians from the besieged port city of Mariupol after abandoning an attempt on Friday because of a lack of security guarantees. But that renewed mission was not expected to reach the port until at least Sunday.
The Russian Defence Ministry blamed the Red Cross for humanitarian aid columns being unable to reach the city on Friday or Saturday.
RIA news agency cited a senior official as saying due to the actions of the Red Cross, the convoys had left very late and were not able to reach Mariupol on time.
Civilians cheer along with a Ukrainian serviceman as a convoy of military and aid vehicles arrives in the formerly Russian-occupied Kyiv suburb of Bucha (Vadim Ghirda/AP)
Russia has depicted its drawdown of forces near Kyiv as a goodwill gesture in peace negotiations, but Ukraine and its allies say Russian forces have been forced to regroup after suffering heavy losses.
Pope Francis on Saturday came the closest he has yet to criticising Russian president Vladimir Putin since the invasion began on 24 February.
During a visit to Malta, the head of the Catholic Church criticised the “infantile” war in Ukraine, saying the world thought such behaviour was a thing of the “distant past”.
He said: “Once again, some potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests, is provoking and fomenting conflicts, whereas ordinary people sense the need to build a future that, will either be shared, or not be at all.”
Missing Ukrainian photographer and videographer Maksim Levin, who was working for a Ukrainian news website and was a long-time contributor to Reuters news agency, was found dead in a village north of Kyiv on Friday.
Concerns were raised for the 41-year-old journalist after he went missing on 13 March while photographing fighting taking place near the capital.
Russia denies targeting civilians in what Mr Putin calls a “special military operation” aimed at demilitarising and “denazifying” Ukraine.
Descent into Hell: Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near Kyiv
Sergiy Karazy and Herbert Villarraga – April 1, 2022
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A view of destroyed Russian tank, in Dmytrivka village
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A Russian military uniform is seen on the ground, in Dmytrivka village
Residents walk past a destroyed Russian tank, in Dmytrivka village
DMYTRIVKA, Ukraine (Reuters) – Wisps of smoke still rising from the smouldering wrecks of tanks, business executive Leonid Vereshchagin wends his way past the charred corpses of Russian troops in this Ukrainian hamlet after what he calls a living hell.
For a month, he and his wife sought refuge in a friend’s basement in Dmytrivka, about 22 miles (35 km) west of Kyiv, as Russian troops advanced and occupied the area and took over the homes of some of his neighbours.
Most of the 300 residents left, but around a third remained, co-existing with the Russians as their tanks patrolled day and night.
“They went to our houses. Those houses that were closed, they opened them, they just broke the windows and they tried to open the doors,” he said, returning to his village on Friday. “We were with them when they were visiting houses, they were trying to open cupboards.”
“I have a very brave wife, she was watching them, making clear that they should not take anything,” he added, sitting in the same basement he had hunkered down in. Several mattresses lay on the floor, and to the side, shelves with provisions.
Three days ago, while the Russians were patrolling the area, Ukrainian troops arrived. When the Russians returned, unaware, there was a fierce battle. Vereshchagin and his wife escaped in a car through the woods during a brief break in the fighting.
Some houses in the smart residential area were completely destroyed. In the garden of one cowered a doe, badly injured from shelling, raw flesh exposed where patches of fur had burned.
“The Hell started in the evening on the (March) 29th,” Vereshchagin said. “From one side we were hearing the tanks shooting at us, and from the area of Bucha was a massive mortar shelling,” he added, referring to a town to the north.
“It’s something like you having a casque (helmet) and someone is hitting by hammer from above.”
The pungent smell of dank vegetation sits heavy in the air. A mist envelops the rural area, a patchwork of fields and forest land.
Reuters correspondents saw the remains of eight Russian soldiers next to destroyed tanks on the road running through the hamlet.
One had been decapitated by a blast. His naked body lay nearby, his feet blown off and a blackened arm still extended upward as if frozen in time.
“You see that enemy overestimates its potential around Kyiv at least. And we keep going forward liberating our cities and evacuating our people,” said Deputy Interior Minister Yevhen Yenin. “The first task is to restore public order to provide supplies of water, food, electricity, communication,” he added.
To the north, near the Belarus border, lies the nuclear disaster site Chernobyl.
“According to our reconnaissance, Russians have left Chernobyl but we should be aware of any unpleasant surprise that could be hidden there,” Yenin said.
Vereshchagin dismisses Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rationale for the invasion – clearing neo-Nazis and protecting Russians in Ukraine. While born in Ukraine, his mother tongue is Russian.
“I’ve never ever experienced any problems in Ukraine being a Russian-speaking Ukrainian,” he said.
“Definitely neither I nor any of my Russian speaking friends were waiting for any salvation army, which was completely fake and paranoia.”
(Writing by Simon Gardner; editing by Diane Craft)
Ukraine War Pushes Germans to Change. They Are Wavering.
Katrin Bennhold and StevenErlanger – April 13, 2022
The facility where the Nord Stream 2 pipeline arrives outside Lubmin, Germany after crossing the Baltic Sea, April 1, 2021. (Lena Mucha/The New York Times)
BERLIN — Chancellor Olaf Scholz surprised the world, and his own country, when he responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a 100 billion euro ($108 billion) plan to arm Germany, send weapons to Ukraine and end his nation’s deep dependence on Russian energy.
It was Germany’s biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, what Scholz called a “Zeitenwende” — an epochal change — that won applause for his leadership at home and abroad.
But six weeks later, the applause has largely ceased. Even as images of atrocities emerge from Ukraine since the invasion by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Scholz has ruled out an immediate oil and gas embargo, saying it would be too costly. He is dragging his feet on sending 100 armored vehicles to Ukraine, saying that Germany must not “rush ahead.” There are new debates in the ruling coalition about just how to go forward with the massive task Scholz has laid out, let alone how fast.
Already doubts are building as to the German government’s commitment to its own radical plans. “Zeitenwende is real, but the country is the same,” said Thomas Bagger, a senior German diplomat who will be the next ambassador to Poland. “Not everyone likes it.”
The changes Scholz announced go far deeper than his commitment to spend 2% of gross domestic product on the military — some 70 billion euros ($76 billion) a year, compared with France’s 41 billion euros ($44 billion).
They go to the heart of Germany’s postwar identity as a peaceful exporting nation — and to the heart of a business model that has enriched Germany and made it Europe’s largest and most powerful economy.
Now Germans are being asked “to rethink everything — our approach to doing business, to energy policy, to defense and to Russia,” said Claudia Major, a defense expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “We need a mindset change. We need to recognize that this is about us — that power politics are back and Germany must play a role.”
But she added, “Once again Germany is not leading. It is being dragged.”
Truly reorienting Germans for a new world where security has its real costs — not only in terms potentially of lost lives, but also in lost trade, higher energy prices, slimmer profits and lower economic growth — will be a wrenching endeavor that will take time, even a generation, and more than an afternoon’s policy pronouncement.
That realization is dawning, for Germans and their frustrated European partners.
“I don’t understand how anyone in Germany can sleep at night after seeing horrors like this without doing anything about it,” said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s outspoken ambassador in Berlin, referring to the atrocities in Ukraine. “What does it take for Germany to act?”
Even Annalena Baerbock, the self-assured Green foreign minister, expressed concerns that Zeitenwende may be more temporary than fundamental. She said she worried that the consensus was fragile, that Germans who favor close ties to Russia were silent now but had not changed their views.
“You can feel this,” she said. “They know they have to do it right now with regard to sanctions, energy independence and weapons deliveries, also with regard to how we treat Russia. But actually, they don’t like it.”
Since Scholz put forth his Zeitenwende before a special session of the parliament Feb. 27, multiple cracks in Germany’s commitment to change have already begun to appear.
German celebrities made headlines with an appeal to the government against rearmament and the “180-degree change in German foreign policy” that has so far been signed by 45,000 people. Green lawmakers have lobbied to spend only part of the 100 billion euro ($108 billion) special fund on the military, citing other needs like “human security” and climate change. Labor unions and industry bosses are warning of catastrophic damage to the economy and an immediate recession if Russian gas stops flowing.
As the CEO of German chemicals giant BASF, Martin Brudermüller, put it last week: “Cheap Russian energy has been the basis of our industry’s competitiveness.”
It has in fact been the basis of the German economy. Now that German businesses are facing the possibility of being asked to do without it, resistance is quietly mounting. Government ministers say they are being asked discreetly by business leaders when things will “go back to normal” — that is, when they can return to business as usual.
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, business as usual has largely meant “change through trade” — the conviction that economic interdependency would alter authoritarian governments like Russia and China for the better and help keep the peace. Prosperity and democracy, the thinking went, go hand in hand.
The link to Russia is particularly complicated by a long and complex history of hot and cold war, including guilt over the millions of Russians killed by the Nazis. This reinforced the belief that the security architecture of Europe had to include Russia and take account of Russian interests.
It was a model that paid off nicely for Germany, too.
“We export to China and import cheap gas from Russia; that’s been the recipe for the German export success,” said Ralph Bollmann, a biographer of Angela Merkel, a former German chancellor who is now seen as having protected Germans from a rivalrous world but not preparing them for it.
Few in Germany, including its intelligence services, predicted that Putin would invade a sovereign European country. But the war has set off a cycle of soul-searching, even among prominent politicians like Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a former foreign minister and now federal president.
A senior member of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, he was a prominent supporter of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, now halted, that bypassed Ukraine and that the United States opposed.
“We were clinging to the idea of building bridges to Russia that our partners warned us about,” Steinmeier said, after Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador, accused him of enabling Putin. “We failed to build a common Europe,” Steinmeier said. “We failed to incorporate Russia in our security architecture.” He added: “I was wrong.”
In the immediate aftermath of Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech, the details of which he had shared with only a handful of people, the resolve to act decisively seemed palpable.
The three diverse parties in his coalition swung behind it, and partisan divisions with the conservative opposition were briefly forgotten, too. Public opinion mirrored the shift, rewarding the new chancellor with better popularity ratings.
But in a short time, the breadth of the change Scholz announced seems to have intimidated even his own three-party coalition. “The government has made some courageous decisions, but it can seem afraid of its own courage,” said Jana Puglierin, director of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
There is skepticism that the political establishment is ready to break fundamentally from Moscow, or that German voters will happily pay so much more for energy and food for the foreseeable future.
“German pacifism runs very deep,” said John Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who has lived in the country on and off since the 1960s. “German illusions may have shattered, but not its traumas about Russia and the war.”
That “neurotic relationship with Russia may be on pause for the moment, but it will return in full force as soon as the shooting stops,” he said.
Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesperson in parliament for the Social Democrats, said that Germany’s soft stance toward Russia “reflects German society, and what will remain is this idea that Russia is there and part of Europe, and we will have to deal with that.”
The war has produced “dashed hopes” of a peaceful united Europe, shared by his generation of 1989, he said. But he noted that with this war, “there can be no return to business as usual. No one really wants to go back to the old times of engagement with Russia.”
Still, he said, “We shouldn’t overdo it. The balance will shift to more deterrence and less dialogue. But we must keep some dialogue.”
Puglierin has little patience for such arguments. “People need to let these old ideas go and adapt to reality as it is, and not as they want it to be,” she said. “Russia has shown that it does not want a stable relationship on this existing security order, which is now an empty shell.”
A prominent conservative lawmaker, Norbert Röttgen, argued that Germany must make a complete and immediate break with Russia. “War has come back to Europe, one that will affect the political and security order of the continent,” he said.
Germany must also draw on the lessons of its dependency on Russia for its future relationship with the more powerful authoritarian realm of China, on which key sectors of Germany’s export-driven model rely, Röttgen said.
“The real Zeitenwende,” Puglierin said, “will come when we remake our model for a future of competition with both Russia and China and realize that every dependency can be used against us.”
Russia says Ukraine blew up an oil depot in Russian territory in a helicopter raid, part of an apparent wider fightback
Bill Bostock – April 1, 2022
A Russian politician said two Ukrainian helicopters blew up an oil depot in Russia on Friday.
The governor of Belgorod said Ukrainian helicopters launched an airstrike on the city of Belgorod.
Ukrainian officials denied carrying out the attack, saying it could be a false flag operation.
A Russian politician said Friday that Ukrainian forces blew up an oil depot on Russian soil in a helicopter raid.
Belgorod regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on Telegram that two Ukrainian helicopters launched an airstrike on the depot in the Russian city of Belgorod, located 24 miles north of the Ukrainian border.
There were no casualties but two oil workers were injured, Gladkov said.
Insider was unable to verify the authenticity of the videos.
During a press conference Friday, Col. Oleksandr Motuzyanyk, a spokesman for Ukraine’s ministry of defense, said Ukraine could neither confirm nor deny it was responsible.
A representative for Ukraine’s army earlier told the BILD newspaper that the attack could be a false flag operation to justify further violence against Ukrainians.
Russia’s defense ministry has not commented on the incident.
The apparent attack came amid a wider Ukrainian counter offensive, focused on retaking parts of the territory lost to Russia at the start of the war.
The gains came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russia was preparing to shift the focus of its attacks on Ukraine, to focus on attacking the eastern Donbas region.
Zelenskyy said that a claim Russia was “radically” scaling back attacks on Kyiv was actually a repositioning.
April 1 (Reuters) – Two of Ukraine’s military helicopters struck a fuel depot in the Russian city of Belgorod on Friday, a Russian official has said, making the first accusation of a Ukrainian air strike on Russian soil since Moscow invaded its neighbour in late February.
Video images of the purported attack posted online showed what looked like several missiles being fired from low altitude, followed by an explosion. Reuters has not yet been able to verify the images.
The helicopters struck the facility after crossing the border at low altitude, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on messaging app Telegram.
The resulting blaze injured two workers, Gladkov added, while some areas were being evacuated in the city near the Ukrainian border.
However, Russian oil firm Rosneft, which owns the fuel depot, said in a separate statement that no one was hurt in the fire, though it gave no information on the cause.
Ukraine’s defence ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.
An ammunition depot near Belgorod caught fire on Wednesday, causing a series of blasts. At the time, Gladkov said authorities were waiting for the Russian defence ministry to establish its cause.
Moscow calls its action in Ukraine “a special military operation”. (Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Russia’s War Lacks a Battlefield Commander, U.S. Officials Say
Helene Cooper andEric Schmitt – April 1, 2022
WASHINGTON — Russia is running its military campaign against Ukraine out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, according to U.S. officials who have studied the five-week-old war.
That centralized approach may go a long way to explain why the Russian war effort has struggled in the face of stiffer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, the officials said.
The lack of a unifying military leader in Ukraine has meant that Russian air, ground and sea units are not in sync. Their disjointed battlefield campaigns have been plagued by poor logistics, flagging morale and between 7,000 and 15,000 military deaths, senior U.S. officials and independent analysts say.
It has also contributed to the deaths of at least seven Russian generals as high-ranking officers are pushed to the front lines to untangle tactical problems that Western militaries would leave to more junior officers or senior enlisted personnel.
A senior U.S. official said that NATO officials and the intelligence community had spent weeks waiting for a Russian war commander to emerge. No one has, leaving Western officials to conclude that the men making decisions are far from the fight, back in Moscow: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu; Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian military; and even President Vladimir Putin.
On Wednesday, Biden administration officials, citing declassified U.S. intelligence, said Putin had been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s problems in Ukraine. The intelligence, U.S. officials said, also showed what appeared to be growing tension between Putin and Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.
Russian officials have disputed the U.S. intelligence assertion, with the Kremlin on Thursday calling it a “complete misunderstanding” of the situation that could have “bad consequences.”
But it is hard to run a military campaign from 500 miles away, U.S. military officials said. The distance alone, they said, can lead to a disconnect between the troops who are doing the fighting and the war plans being drawn up in Moscow. Instead of streamlining the process, they said, Russia has created a military machine that is unable to adapt to a quick and nimble Ukrainian resistance.
A second senior U.S. official said that Russian soldiers, who have been taught not to make a single move without explicit instructions from superiors, had been left frustrated on the battlefield, while Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov continued to plot increasingly out-of-touch strategy.
This top-down approach means that Moscow transmits instructions to generals in the field, who then transmit them to troops, who are told to follow those instructions no matter the situation on the ground.
“It shows up in the mistakes that are being made,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe during the Kosovo war.
Last week, Ukrainian forces blew up the Russian warship Orsk, which had docked in southern Ukraine. Describing the incident, Clark asked: “Who would be crazy enough to dock a ship in a port” before first securing the area?
That the Russian planners who sent the Orsk into the port were inattentive to the potential danger shows that no one is questioning decisions coming from the top, officials said. The troops at the bottom are not empowered to point out flaws in strategy that should be obvious, they said.
Military analysts said a complex chain of events, originating with a broken-down command structure that begins in Moscow, had led to the deaths of the Russian generals.
“I do not see the kind of coherent organizational architecture that one would have expected given the months of exercises and presumably even longer period of planning in advance of the invasion,” retired Gen. David Petraeus, who served as the head of the military’s Central Command and as the top commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, said in an email.
In a U.S. war command structure, a four-star field commander would coordinate and synchronize all subordinate air, land and naval forces, as well as special operations and cyberoperations. The campaign would have a main objective, a center of gravity, with operations supporting that goal.
In the case of the deaths of some of the Russian generals, for instance, the problem originated far away from the battlefield, when Moscow did not respond quickly enough after Ukraine jammed Russian communications, the analysts said.
Putin’s dishonest portrayal of the mission of the Russian military may have hurt its ability to prosecute the effort, which the Russian president initially presented publicly as a limited military operation.
Clark recalled teaching a class of Ukrainian generals in 2016 in Kyiv and trying to explain what an American military “after-action review” was. He told them that after a battle involving U.S. troops, “everybody got together and broke down what happened.”
“The colonel has to confess his mistakes in front of the captain,” Clark said. “He says, ‘Maybe I took too long to give an order.’ ”
After hearing him out, the Ukrainians, Clark said, told him that could not work. “They said, ‘We’ve been taught in the Soviet system that information has to be guarded and we lie to each other,’ ” he recalled.
Putin’s decision to send Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov to the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol this week for a victory lap despite the fact that Mariupol has not fallen demonstrates the Russian president’s continued belief that the biggest battle is the information one, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert.
The feared Chechen “is a general, not a real military commander,” he said, adding, “This shows that what Putin still believes is that propaganda is the most important thing here.”
Russian officials are signaling that Putin might be lowering his war ambitions and focusing on the eastern Donbas region, although military analysts said it remained to be seen whether that would constitute a meaningful shift or a maneuver to distract attention before another offensive.
The Russian army has already committed more than half of its total combat forces to the fight, including its most elite units. Moscow is now tapping reinforcements from outside Russia, including Georgia, as well as rushing mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private military company, to eastern Ukraine.
Putin has also signed a decree calling up 134,000 conscripts.
“They seem to have no coherent concept of the amount of force it will take to defeat the Ukrainian regular and territorial forces in urban terrain, and to retain what they destroy or overrun,” said Jeffrey J. Schloesser, a retired two-star Army general who commanded U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan. “Hundreds of thousands of more Russian or allied troops will be necessary to do so.”
War in Ukraine fuels fears among draft-age Russian youths
The Associated Press – April 1, 2022
In this photo released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Jan. 22, 2022, servicemen of the engineer-sapper regiment take the military oath in the Voronezh Region, Russia. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)A food delivery courier rides a bicycle at sunset in Moscow, Russia, on March 30, 2022, along a street where a huge letter “Z” is displayed, a symbol of the Russian military. (AP Photo, File)The Kremlin is seen after sunset from Zaryadye Park near Red Square in Moscow, Russia, March 28, 2022. (AP Photo, File)Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting via videoconference in Moscow, Russia, March 25, 2022. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)In this photo released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Jan. 22, 2022, servicemen of the engineer-sapper regiment take the military oath in the Voronezh Region, Russia. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)
As Moscow’s forces bog down in Ukraine, many young Russians of draft age are increasingly jittery about the prospect of being sent into combat. Making those fears particularly acute is an annual spring conscription that begins Friday and aims to round up 134,500 men for a one-year tour of military duty.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu pledged at a meeting of the military brass this week that the new recruits won’t be sent to front lines or “hot spots.”
But the statement was met with skepticism by many in Russia who remember the separatist wars in the southern republic of Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s, when thousands of poorly trained young men were killed.
“I don’t trust them when they say they won’t send conscripts into combat. They lie all the time,” said Vladislav, a 22-year-old who is completing his studies and fears he could face the draft immediately after graduation. He asked that his last name not be used, fearing reprisals.
All Russian men aged 18-27 must serve one year in the military, but a large share avoid the draft for health reasons or deferments granted to university students. The share of men who avoid the draft is particularly big in Moscow and other major cities.
Even as President Vladimir Putin and his officials say that conscripts aren’t involved in what Russian authorities call “the special military operation in Ukraine,” many appeared to have been taken prisoner during its initial days. Videos emerged from Ukraine of captured Russians, some being shown calling their parents, and were put on social media.
The mother of one of the prisoners said she recognized her 20-year-old draftee son in a video even though he was shown blindfolded.
“I recognized him by his lips, by his chin. You know, I would have recognized him by his fingers,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Lyubov, for security reasons. “I breastfed him. I raised him.”
The Defense Ministry was forced to walk back its statements and acknowledge that some conscripts were sent to Ukraine “by mistake” and were taken prisoner while serving with a supply unit away from the front.
There have been allegations that before the invasion, some conscripts were forced to sign military contracts that allowed them to be sent into combat — duty that is normally reserved only for volunteers in the army. Some of the captured soldiers said they were told by their commanding officers that they were going to a military exercise but suddenly found themselves fighting in Ukraine.
Lyudmila Narusova, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, spoke in early March about an entire company of 100 men who were forced to sign such contracts and were sent into the combat zone — and only four survived. Military officials did not comment on her allegation.
Svetlana Agapitova, the human rights commissioner in St. Petersburg, said Wednesday that relatives of seven soldiers had written to her to complain the men had been forced to sign the contract and sent to Ukraine against their will. She said two of them already had been brought back to Russia.
In recent years, the Kremlin has emphasized increasing the share of volunteer contract soldiers as it sought to modernize the army and improve its readiness. The force of 1 million now has over 400,000 contract soldiers, including 147,000 in the infantry. If the war drags on, those numbers could be insufficient to sustain the operations.
The Kremlin could eventually face a choice: Keep fighting with a limited number of troops and see the offensive stall, or try to replenish the ranks with a broader draft and risk public outrage that could fuel anti-draft sentiment and destabilize the political situation. Such a scenario occurred during the fighting in Chechnya.
Dmitry, a 25-year-old IT expert, has a deferment that should keep him out of the draft for medical reasons. But he’s still nervous like many others, fearing authorities could abruptly waive some deferments to bolster the military.
“I hate the war. I think it’s a total disaster,” said Dmitry, who also asked that he not be identified by has last name, fearing reprisals. “I fear that the government could change the rules and I could face the draft. They also were saying for months that they wouldn’t attack Ukraine, so why should I trust what they say about the draft now?”
Proposed legislation would facilitate the draft by allowing military recruiters to call up conscripts more easily, but the bill has been put on hold for now.
Still, it added to the public’s anxiety.
Alexei Tabalov, a lawyer who advises conscripts, said medical panels at recruitment offices often admit youths who should be exempt from service because of illness. Now, he added, their attitudes could grow even tougher.
“It’s quite probable that doctors may shut their eyes to conscripts’ illnesses and declare them fit for military duty,” Tabalov said.
In addition to lowering the medical standard for draftees, there are fears that the government could try to impose some sort of martial law that would ban Russian men from leaving the country and, like Ukraine, force them to fight.
“We have received a lot of calls from people fearing mobilization,” Tabalov said. “People now are afraid of everything in this situation. No one even thought before about the need to analyze the law on mobilization.”
The Kremlin has strongly denied any such plans, and military officials insist the army has enough contract soldiers to serve in Ukraine. Still, many Russians remain skeptical of the officials’ denials, given their track record.
“What kind of trust could there be if Putin says one day that conscripts will not be sent there … and then the Defense Ministry recognizes that they were there?” Tabalov asked.
An existing law allows for a 21-month alternative civil service in hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities for those who view military duty as incompatible with their beliefs, but military conscription offices often broadly ignore requests for such service.
After the war began, Tabalov said his group saw a large increase in inquiries about the alternative service law, which is vaguely phrased and allows military officials to easily turn down applications.
“We are worried that in the current militarist mood, military conscription offices can take a tougher attitude and reject appeals for the alternative civil service,” he said.
In tears at border, Ukrainians say they held on until they had to flee
Joanna Plucinska and Anna Voitenko – April 1, 2022
FILE PHOTO: People fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine arrive in Poland
SHEHYNI, Ukraine (Reuters) – Valery Petrovich Sorokin, 66, didn’t want to leave his home outside of Kharkiv. He suffers from arthritis and struggles to move. But, a month into the war, as Russian bombs fell around him, his family told him he had to go to Poland with them.
“There are planes all the time and the sound of bombing all the time, it’s very loud,” he told Reuters tearfully as his family huddled under green tents set up to protect refugees from the rain as they waited at the Shehyni border crossing in Ukraine.
“They did it, they did these horrible things. It’s hard to believe,” he said, choking on his words. “For what? For ambitions? The ambitions of the ‘ruler’?”
Sorokin is one of hundreds of Ukrainian refugees who were waiting in the rain to cross from Shehyni into Medyka, in Poland, on Thursday. Many had stayed in cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol in the east until they ran out of supplies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 on what he calls a “special military operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an unprovoked war of aggression.
More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled abroad since the start of the invasion, with the majority crossing into Poland, which had the region’s largest Ukrainian community of about 1 million before the war. So far, 2.4 million Ukrainians have entered Poland, according to the Polish border guard service.
RELENTLESS BOMBARDMENT
After failing to capture a single major Ukrainian city in five weeks of war, Russia says it has shifted its focus to the southeast, where it has backed separatists since 2014.
The area includes the port of Mariupol, scene of the war’s worst humanitarian emergency, where the United Nations believes thousands of people have died after more than a month under Russian siege and relentless bombardment.
Alena Kogemiakiva, 25, was carrying all her remaining possessions, including her two pet rats in small backpack.
“I was in Mariupol the whole time,” she said. “We just slowly watched how the number of our homes was getting smaller every day. Everyone I know, they don’t have a house right now.”
Tatiana Victorovna Dumskava, a schoolteacher, said she waited until March 22 to leave Mariupol. It was only when she and her husband had “two sips of water each” left that she realised she had no choice but to leave.
“My apartment was burning right in front of my face. We didn’t have any lights, any electricity, any gas, any water,” she told Reuters. “Our apartment block was destroyed by shelling. There was no balcony left.”
But she said that, despite the destruction, she hoped she’d be able to return home in some way.
“We want to go back very badly, to go back to Ukraine. We just want to be in a peaceful place for a few months and then go back home,” she said. “I can’t even imagine not going back there.”
(Reporting by Joanna Plucinska, Anna Voitenko and Gerhard Mey; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A view of destroyed Russian tank, in Dmytrivka village
Ukrainians reclaim shelled homes near KyivFILE PHOTO: A Russian military uniform is seen on the ground, in Dmytrivka village
