The New York Times

How Ukraine’s Outgunned Air Force Is Fighting Back Against Russian Jets

Maria Varenikova and Andrew E. Kramer – March 22, 2022

LVIV, Ukraine — Each night, Ukrainian pilots such as Andriy loiter in an undisclosed aircraft hangar, waiting, waiting, until the tension is broken with a shouted, one-word command: “Air!”

Andriy hustles into his Su-27 supersonic jet and hastily taxis toward the runway, getting airborne as quickly as possible. He takes off so fast that he doesn’t yet know his mission for the night, although the big picture is always the same — to bring the fight to a Russian air force that is vastly superior in numbers but has failed to win control of the skies above Ukraine.

“I don’t do any checks,” said Andriy, a Ukrainian air force pilot who as a condition of granting an interview was not permitted to give his surname or rank. “I just take off.”

Nearly a month into the fighting, one of the biggest surprises of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s failure to defeat the Ukrainian air force. Military analysts had expected Russian forces to quickly destroy or paralyze Ukraine’s air defenses and military aircraft, yet neither has happened. Instead, “Top Gun”-style aerial dogfights, rare in modern warfare, are now raging above the country.

“Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight,” said Andriy, who is 25 and has flown 10 missions in the war. “In every fight with Russian jets, there is no equality. They always have five times more” planes in the air.

The success of Ukrainian pilots has helped protect Ukrainian soldiers on the ground and prevented wider bombing in cities, since pilots have intercepted some Russian cruise missiles. Ukrainian officials also say the country’s military has shot down 97 fixed-wing Russian aircraft. That number could not be verified, but the crumpled remnants of Russian fighter jets have crashed into rivers, fields and houses.

The Ukrainian air force is operating in near total secrecy. Its fighter jets can fly from air strips in western Ukraine, airports that have been bombed yet retain enough runway for takeoffs or landings — or even from highways, analysts say. They are vastly outnumbered: Russia is believed to fly about 200 sorties per day while Ukraine flies five to 10.

Ukrainian pilots do have one advantage. In most of the country, Russian planes fly over territory controlled by the Ukrainian military, which can move anti-aircraft missiles to harass — and shoot down — planes.

“Ukraine has been effective in the sky because we operate on our own land,” said Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force. “The enemy flying into our airspace is flying into the zone of our air defense systems.” He described the strategy as luring Russian planes into air defense traps.

Dave Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and principal attack planner for the Desert Storm air campaign in Iraq, said the impressive performance of the Ukrainian pilots had helped counter their disadvantages in numbers. He said Ukraine now has roughly 55 operational fighter jets, a number that is dwindling from shoot-downs and mechanical failures, as Ukrainian pilots are “stressing them to max performance.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appealed repeatedly to Western governments to replenish the Ukrainian air force and has asked NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over the country, a step Western leaders have refused to take. Slovakia and Poland have considered sending MiG-29 fighter jets, which Ukrainian pilots could fly with minimal additional training, but as yet no transfers have been made.

“Russian troops have already fired nearly 1,000 missiles at Ukraine, countless bombs,” Zelenskyy said in a video address to Congress on March 16, appealing for more planes. “And you know that they exist, and you have them, but they are on earth, not in Ukraine — in the Ukrainian sky.”

Deptula said transferring these jets into Ukraine is critical. “Without resupply,” he said, “they will run out of airplanes before they run out of pilots.”

Pilotless drones are also a tool in the Ukrainian military’s arsenal but not in the battle for control of the airspace. Ukraine flies a Turkish-made armed drone, the Bayraktar TB-2, a plodding, propeller aircraft that is lethally effective in destroying tanks or artillery pieces on the ground but cannot hit targets in the air. If Ukraine’s air defenses fail, Russian jets could easily pick them off.

As in other aspects of Ukraine’s war effort, volunteers play a role in the air battles. A volunteer network watches and listens for Russian jets, calling in coordinates and estimated speed and altitude. Other private Ukrainian pilots have removed up-to-date civilian navigation equipment from their planes and handed it over to the air force, in case it can be helpful.

Air-to-air combat has been rare in modern war, with only isolated examples in recent decades. U.S. pilots, for example, have not flown extensive aerial dogfights since the first Iraq War in 1991. Since then, U.S. fighter jets have engaged in air-to-air combat on just a few occasions, shooting down 10 planes in the Balkan War and one plane in Syria, according to Deptula.

In the night sky, Andriy said he relies on instruments to discern the positions of enemy planes, which he says are always present. He has shot down Russian jets but was not permitted to say how many or which type. He said his targeting system can fire at planes a few dozen miles away.

“I mostly have tasks of hitting airborne targets, of intercepting enemy jets,” he said. “I wait for the missile to lock on my target. After that, I press fire.”

When he shoots down a Russian jet, he said, “I am happy that this plane will no longer bomb my peaceful towns. And as we see in practice, that is exactly what Russian jets do.”

Most of the aerial combat in Ukraine has been nocturnal, as Russian aircraft attack in the dark when they are less vulnerable to air defenses. In the dogfights over Ukraine, Andriy said, the Russians have been flying an array of modern Sukhoi jets, such as the Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35.

“I had situations when I was approaching a Russian plane to a close enough distance to target and fire,” he said. “I could already detect it but was waiting for my missile to lock on while at the same time from the ground they tell me that a missile was fired at me already.”

He said he maneuvered his jet through a series of extreme banks, dives and climbs in order to exhaust the fuel supplies of the missiles coming after him. “The time I have to save myself depends on how far away the missile was fired at me and what kind of missile,” he said.

Still, he said in an interview on a clear, sunny day, “I can still feel a huge rush of adrenaline in my body because every flight is a fight.”

Andriy graduated from the Kharkiv Air Force School after deciding to become a pilot as a teenager. “Neither me nor my friends ever thought we would have to face a real war,” he said. “But that’s not how it turned out.”

Andriy has moved his wife to a safer part of Ukraine, but she has not left the country, he said. She spends her days weaving homemade camouflage nets for the Ukrainian army. He never tells family members when he is going on duty, he said, calling only after returning from a night flight.

“I only have to use my skills to win,” Andriy said. “My skills are better than the Russians. But on the other hand, many of my friends, and even those more experienced than me, are already dead.”

Business Insider

US suggests Russian forces are devastating Mariupol because Putin is angry that Ukrainians are resisting

Jake Epstein – March 22, 2022

• The US State Department said Russia’s bombardment on Mariupol could be fueled by “vengeance.”
• Spokesperson Ned Price said Putin may have been surprised by Ukraine’s resistance and that Russian forces are taking it out on the city’s civilians.
• Ukraine’s southern port city has been devastated by Russian forces during the ongoing war.

The US State Department suggested that Russian forces are bombarding civilians in the southern port city of Mariupol because President Vladimir Putin is angry that Ukrainians are resisting.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price said during a Tuesday press briefing that there are a number of theories as to why Putin’s forces have “brutalized” the population with shelling and airstrikes.

“Mariupol is, of course, a strategic location,” Price said. “But there also may be an element of vengeance… against this population, with Putin perhaps having been under the misimpression — whether he was misinformed or just unwitting of reality — that his forces would not be greeted as anything other than the aggressors that they are.”

Price added that Russian forces have faced stiff resistance to the advancement of Russian forces in Mariupol.

Price added that the ferocity of the Ukrainian defense may have surprised the Kremlin — leading to the ongoing onslaught against the besieged city.

“We have seen the residents of Mariupol rise up to defend their homeland, their country, to defend their territorial integrity the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine,” Price said.

Mariupol has been devastated by Russian forces after nearly a month into Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has refused to surrender.

Soldiers and civilians of the besieged city have been buried in mass graves after intense Russian attacks, and convoys of cars filled with people trying to escape the city stretch for miles.

Schools, hospitals, and homes have all been targeted by Russian forces, including a theater sheltering hundreds of children that was bombed.

Ukrainian officials have also claimed that Putin’s forces have forcibly deported thousands of civilians to remote Russian cities.

Meanwhile, multiple attempts by Ukraine and Russia to mediate a ceasefire or create humanitarian corridors to safely evacuate civilians have not been successful.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has slammed the brutal assault, calling Russia’s actions “war crimes.”

“The besieged Mariupol will go down in history of responsibility for war crimes. The terror the occupiers did to the peaceful city will be remembered for centuries to come,” Zelenskyy said in a video address on Telegram on Sunday.

Daily Beast

Deadbeat Dads and Ex-Cons Rounded up to Fight by Desperate Putin, Says Ukraine

Allison Quinn – March 22, 2022

After weeks of devastating losses and plummeting morale, the Russian military has devised a new way to bolster its ranks of soldiers being sent to kill civilians in Ukraine: preying on men who’ve fallen behind on alimony or credit card payments.

That’s according to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, which reports that those in debt are offered the chance to have their obligations erased in exchange for signing a contract with the Russian military. Russian prosecutors are also said to be seeking out those who’ve run afoul of the law and offering similar proposals.

“The number of such people is increasing… considering the consequences of the sanctions on the Russian economy,” the Ukrainian intelligence agency noted.

Such proposals have reportedly been documented in Tatarstan, Pyatigorsk, Rostov-on-Don, and the North Caucasus.

News of the new recruiting method comes after data from the Russian Defense Ministry was leaked Tuesday showing that more than 9,800 troops have been killed since Vladimir Putin launched his “special operation” on Feb. 24.

In between those thousands of deaths were myriad reports of Russian soldiers abandoning their tanks or feigning fuel shortages to avoid joining the war, along with similar reports of Russian soldiers seeking food from Ukrainian villagers.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, has insisted that Russian morale is high.

On Wednesday, he claimed it was an “absolutely irrefutable fact” that the overwhelming majority of Russians support Putin’s war against Ukraine.

It’s not clear how much of that support is manufactured, however, as a new troll factory in St. Petersburg calling itself “Cyber Front Z” has reportedly set up shop to flood the Russian internet with comments in support of Putin’s aggression.

The Russian news outlet Fontanka reports that one of its reporters managed to infiltrate the propaganda operation, which is said to rely heavily on staffers who up until now were being paid to write phony reviews on online shopping sites.

Employees are reportedly promised a salary of 45,000 rubles ($427) a month to post pro-Kremlin comments on videos shared online that are critical of the war or feature Ukrainian officials.

“The main work will be to create a patriotic picture in the comments under trending videos and in the category ‘politics and news,’” reads a message from the “curator” of the troll factory’s YouTube section.

For help with commenting, the curator reportedly sent staffers notes and pictures featuring the emblem of RIA FAN, a news site that is part of a media group whose board of trustees is headed by none other than Putin pal Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“Look, when they write that no one in Russia supports the actions of authorities, you write the opposite. You don’t need to say the majority. ‘I support it.’ … Write that, ‘well I have acquaintances that support the authorities,’” the curator was quoted saying.

When asked who was bankrolling the whole operation, the curator was quick to disavow any ties to the Russian government.

“He’s not at all connected to the Defense Ministry, it’s just a caring entrepreneur.”

Business Insider

Russian troops are getting frostbite in Ukraine because they don’t have the right cold-weather gear, US official says

Jake Epstein – March 22, 2022

• A US official said some Russians were getting frostbite in Ukraine because they had the wrong gear.
• The official said the issue had forced those troops to the sidelines of the fighting.
• It’s the latest setback Russian forces have faced in their invasion.

Russian forces are getting frostbite while fighting in Ukraine because they don’t have adequate cold-weather gear, a senior US defense official said.

The official told reporters during a Tuesday Pentagon briefing that the frostbite problem had forced some Russian troops to the sidelines during the war.

“They’re struggling on many fronts,” the official said, according to the Task & Purpose reporter Haley Britzky.

It’s the latest setback Russian forces have faced in their invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24.

A US defense official told reporters at a Monday background briefing that Russian forces were experiencing issues with morale within their ranks because they did not expect such a fierce resistance from Ukraine.

Many Russian troops also had no idea which orders they’d be forced to take in Ukraine, the official said. Russian forces were also having communication and logistical problems in Ukraine, the official said.

Russia’s advance on Ukraine has appeared to largely stall across multiple fronts as it struggles to achieve significant military objectives.

As a result, Russian forces are ramping up their assault on Ukrainian cities and civilians, leaving scores dead and displacing millions.

Fox News

Russian combat power drops below 90% as Ukrainians, frostbite stall Putin invasion: DOD

Caitlin McFall – March 22, 2022

Russia President Vladimir Putin’s invasion into Ukraine has persisted for nearly four weeks but his forces remain stalled, with the Pentagon assessing Tuesday that his combat power is dropping.

“We’ve assessed, for the first time, that the Russians may be slightly below a 90% level of assessed available combat power,” a senior defense official told reporters.

UKRAINE SAYS ITS RETAKEN KEY KYIV SUBURB; BATTLE FOR MARIUPOL RAGES

The drop in power is reflective of the 150,000 soldiers he amassed on Ukraine’s border in the lead-up to the invasion last month.

“It is not an assessment of all Russian military power,” the senior defense official added.

Security officials continue to warn that Putin may be looking to bring supplemental forces into Ukraine to aid his war as Russian ground forces remain stalled across the country.

But there is scant evidence that any foreign fighters have headed to Ukraine despite reports that Putin has offered incentives to fighters from nations like Syria.

The senior defense official said there are indications of continued “discussions” by Moscow to aid its war “both in terms of resupply and also reinforcement,” but there is no indication any such plan has been enacted.

Experts anticipate that if the Kremlin does move to send in reinforcements, it would pull support from troops stationed outside of Russia before pulling additional troops from inside its own borders.

“Of the battalion tactical groups that Mr. Putin has available to him across Russia, he’s used about 75% in this particular operation,” the senior defense official explained. “So I think our assumption would be he’d pull from outside the country first.”

UKRAINIAN CHILD DEATH TOLL MOUNTS, HUMANITARIAN CRISIS WORSENS WITH SOME CITIES LEFT WITH 3 TO 4 DAYS OF FOOD

Ukrainian forces have continued to counter stiff Russian aggression. But despite weeks of shelling, Putin’s troops have not been able to make significant progress in advancing on the capital city of Kyiv.

“We’re definitely seeing anecdotal evidence that the Ukrainians are not only defending well, where they choose to defend, but they are making efforts to take back territory,” the senior defense official added.

Reports surfaced Tuesday showing that Ukrainian forces were able to retake a suburb outside of Kyiv, but the senior defense official said they were unable to verify the reporting.

Citing the Russian Ministry of Defense, a Russian tabloid claimed this week that 9,861 Russian troops had been killed in the fighting with another 16,000 injured – a stark difference from the 498 troops killed and 1,597 reported as injured by the ministry on March 2.

The report has since been taken down and the Pentagon has been unable to verify any causality estimates during the 27-day war.

But the senior defense official said it is not only the mounting number of deaths hindering Russian troops.

“They’re having trouble. And we picked up indications that some troops have actually suffered and been taken out of the fight because of frostbite,” the official said. “They are having continued logistics and sustainment issues.”

The official said not only has Russia failed to properly plan for logistics and sustainment but also the “Ukrainians have done a good job frustrating their efforts.”

Yahoo! News

‘Hard days ahead in Ukraine,’ White House says of Russian invasion

Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent – March 22, 2022

WASHINGTON — Russia will face increased economic isolation, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday from the White House as President Biden prepared for his trip to Brussels, where he is to meet with European allies in an effort to end the invasion of Ukraine that was launched late last month by the Kremlin.

Biden “will join our partners in imposing further sanctions on Russia and tightening the existing sanctions to crack down on evasion and to ensure robust enforcement,” Sullivan said at a White House briefing, adding that Biden will also announce “further American contributions to a coordinated humanitarian response.” Russia’s invasion has caused a massive refugee crisis while also leaving Ukrainians who have stayed behind without necessities like drinking water.

Since deciding to attack its much smaller neighbor, Russia has seen an exodus of Western companies. Oligarchs close to the Kremlin have seen their assets seized, while ordinary Russians can no longer use American credit cards like Visa and Mastercard. Earlier this month, Russia joined Cuba and North Korea as the only nations in the world to be deprived of top-tier trading privileges by the United States.

Yet for all that, Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown no signs of backing down in his campaign to turn Ukraine into the kind of vassal state it was during the nearly eight-decade existence of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian forces have thus far defended the capital, Kyiv, and the key Black Sea port of Odesa, even as Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, has been devastated.

With Biden making clear that the United States would not send troops to Ukraine out of fears of provoking Russia into a broader conflict, it is not apparent just how the current stalemate will be resolved. “There will be hard days ahead in Ukraine,” Sullivan acknowledged. “This war will not end easily, or rapidly.”

Sullivan predicted, however, that Putin would fail to ultimately “subjugate” Ukraine and its people, even if Russia sees military gains in the days and weeks to come.

According to the United Nations, 953 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since the start of the war, including 78 children.

Associated Press

20 days in Mariupol: The team that documented city’s agony

Mstyslav Chernov – March 21, 2022

MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.

We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage.

Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake?”

I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.

The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.

Video: Mariupol residents suffer continued bombardment

Mstyslav Chernov is a video journalist for The Associated Press. This is his account of the siege of Mariupol, as documented with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and told to correspondent Lori Hinnant.

We ran into the street, abandoning the doctors who had sheltered us, the pregnant women who had been shelled and the people who slept in the hallways because they had nowhere else to go. I felt terrible leaving them all behind.

Nine minutes, maybe 10, an eternity through roads and bombed-out apartment buildings. As shells crashed nearby, we dropped to the ground. Time was measured from one shell to the next, our bodies tense and breath held. Shockwave after shockwave jolted my chest, and my hands went cold.

We reached an entryway, and armored cars whisked us to a darkened basement. Only then did we learn from a policeman why the Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to extract us from the hospital.

“If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you filmed is a lie,” he said. “All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain.”

The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol.

It was March 15. We had no idea if we would make it out alive.

As a teenager growing up in Ukraine in the city of Kharkiv, just 20 miles from the Russian border, I learned how to handle a gun as part of the school curriculum. It seemed pointless. Ukraine, I reasoned, was surrounded by friends.

I have since covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, trying to show the world the devastation first-hand. But when the Americans and then the Europeans evacuated their embassy staffs from the city of Kyiv this winter, and when I pored over maps of the Russian troop build-up just across from my hometown, my only thought was, “My poor country.”

In the first few days of the war, the Russians bombed the enormous Freedom Square in Kharkiv, where I had hung out until my 20s.

I knew Russian forces would see the eastern port city of Mariupol as a strategic prize because of its location on the Sea of Azov. So on the evening of Feb. 23, I headed there with my long-time colleague Evgeniy Maloletka, a Ukrainian photographer for The Associated Press, in his white Volkswagen van.

On the way, we started worrying about spare tires, and found online a man nearby willing to sell to us in the middle of the night. We explained to him and to a cashier at the all-night grocery store that we were preparing for war. They looked at us like we were crazy.

We pulled into Mariupol at 3:30 a.m. The war started an hour later.

About a quarter of Mariupol’s 430,000 residents left in those first days, while they still could. But few people believed a war was coming, and by the time most realized their mistake, it was too late.

One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, the cell phone, radio and television towers. The few other journalists in the city got out before the last connections were gone and a full blockade settled in.

The absence of information in a blockade accomplishes two goals.

Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on, and they panic. At first I couldn’t understand why Mariupol fell apart so quickly. Now I know it was because of the lack of communication.

Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolished buildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us, there would be nothing.

That’s why we took such risks to be able to send the world what we saw, and that’s what made Russia angry enough to hunt us down.

I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important.

The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel. She died.

A second child died, then a third. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets.

The doctors pleaded with us to film families bringing in their own dead and wounded, and let us use their dwindling generator power for our cameras. No one knows what’s going on in our city, they said.

Shelling hit the hospital and the houses around. It shattered the windows of our van, blew a hole into its side and punctured a tire. Sometimes we would run out to film a burning house and then run back amid the explosions.

There was still one place in the city to get a steady connection, outside a looted grocery store on Budivel’nykiv Avenue. Once a day, we drove there and crouched beneath the stairs to upload photos and video to the world. The stairs wouldn’t have done much to protect us, but it felt safer than being out in the open.

The signal vanished by March 3. We tried to send our video from the 7th-floor windows of the hospital. It was from there that we saw the last shreds of the solid middle-class city of Mariupol come apart.

The Port City superstore was being looted, and we headed that way through artillery and machine gunfire. Dozens of people ran and pushed shopping carts loaded with electronics, food, clothes.

A shell exploded on the roof of the store, throwing me to the ground outside. I tensed, awaiting a second hit, and cursed myself a hundred times because my camera wasn’t on to record it.

And there it was, another shell hitting the apartment building next to me with a terrible whoosh. I shrank behind a corner for cover.

A teenager passed by rolling an office chair loaded with electronics, boxes tumbling off the sides. “My friends were there and the shell hit 10 meters from us,” he told me. “I have no idea what happened to them.”

We raced back to the hospital. Within 20 minutes, the injured came in, some of them scooped into shopping carts.

For several days, the only link we had to the outside world was through a satellite phone. And the only spot where that phone worked was out in the open, right next to a shell crater. I would sit down, make myself small and try to catch the connection.

Everybody was asking, please tell us when the war will be over. I had no answer.

Every single day, there would be a rumor that the Ukrainian army was going to come to break through the siege. But no one came.

By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in.

On March 9, twin airstrikes shredded the plastic taped over our van’s windows. I saw the fireball just a heartbeat before pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face.

We watched smoke rise from a maternity hospital. When we arrived, emergency workers were still pulling bloodied pregnant women from the ruins.

Our batteries were almost out of juice, and we had no connection to send the images. Curfew was minutes away. A police officer overheard us talking about how to get news of the hospital bombing out.

“This will change the course of the war,” he said. He took us to a power source and an internet connection.

We had recorded so many dead people and dead children, an endless line. I didn’t understand why he thought still more deaths could change anything.

I was wrong.

In the dark, we sent the images by lining up three mobile phones with the video file split into three parts to speed the process up. It took hours, well beyond curfew. The shelling continued, but the officers assigned to escort us through the city waited patiently.

Then our link to the world outside Mariupol was again severed.

We went back to an empty hotel basement with an aquarium now filled with dead goldfish. In our isolation, we knew nothing about a growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit our work.

The Russian Embassy in London put out two tweets calling the AP photos fake and claiming a pregnant woman was an actress. The Russian ambassador held up copies of the photos at a U.N. Security Council meeting and repeated lies about the attack on the maternity hospital.

In the meantime, in Mariupol, we were inundated with people asking us for the latest news from the war. So many people came to me and said, please film me so my family outside the city will know I’m alive.

By this time, no Ukrainian radio or TV signal was working in Mariupol. The only radio you could catch broadcast twisted Russian lies — that Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shooting at buildings, developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some people we talked to believed it despite the evidence of their own eyes.

The message was constantly repeated, in Soviet style: Mariupol is surrounded. Surrender your weapons.

On March 11, in a brief call without details, our editor asked if we could find the women who survived the maternity hospital airstrike to prove their existence. I realized the footage must have been powerful enough to provoke a response from the Russian government.

We found them at a hospital on the front line, some with babies and others in labor. We also learned that one woman had lost her baby and then her own life.

We went up to the 7th floor to send the video from the tenuous Internet link. From there, I watched as tank after tank rolled up alongside the hospital compound, each marked with the letter Z that had become the Russian emblem for the war.

We were surrounded: Dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients, and us.

The Ukrainian soldiers who had been protecting the hospital had vanished. And the path to our van, with our food, water and equipment, was covered by a Russian sniper who had already struck a medic venturing outside.

Hours passed in darkness, as we listened to the explosions outside. That’s when the soldiers came to get us, shouting in Ukrainian.

It didn’t feel like a rescue. It felt like we were just being moved from one danger to another. By this time, nowhere in Mariupol was safe, and there was no relief. You could die at any moment.

I felt amazingly grateful to the soldiers, but also numb. And ashamed that I was leaving.

We crammed into a Hyundai with a family of three and pulled into a 5-kilometer-long traffic jam out of the city. Around 30,000 people made it out of Mariupol that day — so many that Russian soldiers had no time to look closely into cars with windows covered with flapping bits of plastic.

People were nervous. They were fighting, screaming at each other. Every minute there was an airplane or airstrike. The ground shook.

We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. At each, the mother sitting in the front of our car would pray furiously, loud enough for us to hear.

As we drove through them — the third, the tenth, the 15th, all manned with soldiers with heavy weapons — my hopes that Mariupol was going to survive were fading. I understood that just to reach the city, the Ukrainian army would have to break through so much ground. And it wasn’t going to happen.

At sunset, we came to a bridge destroyed by the Ukrainians to stop the Russian advance. A Red Cross convoy of about 20 cars was stuck there already. We all turned off the road together into fields and back lanes.

The guards at checkpoint No. 15 spoke Russian in the rough accent of the Caucasus. They ordered the whole convoy to cut the headlights to conceal the arms and equipment parked on the roadside. I could barely make out the white Z painted on the vehicles.

As we pulled up to the sixteenth checkpoint, we heard voices. Ukrainian voices. I felt an overwhelming relief. The mother in the front of the car burst into tears. We were out.

We were the last journalists in Mariupol. Now there are none.

We are still flooded by messages from people wanting to learn the fate of loved ones we photographed and filmed. They write to us desperately and intimately, as though we are not strangers, as though we can help them.

When a Russian airstrike hit a theater where hundreds of people had taken shelter late last week, I could pinpoint exactly where we should go to learn about survivors, to hear firsthand what it was like to be trapped for endless hours beneath piles of rubble. I know that building and the destroyed homes around it. I know people who are trapped underneath it.

And on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had bombed an art school with about 400 people in it in Mariupol.

But we can no longer get there.

This account was related by Chernov to Associated Press reporter Lori Hinnant, who wrote from Paris. Vasylisa Stepanenko contributed to the report.

NBC News

Javelin missiles are helping Ukraine wreak havoc on Russian troops, experts say

Corky Siemaszko – March 22, 2022

The Javelin antitank missiles that figured in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment for deliberately delaying military aid to Ukraine are now wreaking havoc on the Russian invaders.

The lightweight but lethal weapon has, military experts said, helped the underdog Ukrainians inflict major damage on Moscow’s much-vaunted military and stymie their advance.

Not only has the United States-made weapon become a symbol of resistance, it’s been dubbed “Saint Javelin” in a meme circulating on the web created by Canadian marketer Christian Borys, which shows Mary Magdalene, a saint of the Orthodox church, cradling a Javelin in her arms.

“The Javelin, very specifically that system’s advanced capabilities, have been vital to Ukrainian military survival and ability to hold ground” against the Russians, said John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the nonpartisan Madison Policy Forum in New York City.

Produced by defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, the 46-pound weapon is shoulder-fired and has the “lethality to penetrate any tank or mobile vehicle on the battlefield,” Spencer said.

“It can also shoot down helicopters,” he said.

Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that the Javelins “have taken on a symbolic meaning beyond the military.”

“The Javelins are the most sophisticated and most effective weapon the Ukrainians have, but not the most numerous,” Cancian said.

The Ukrainians have more Israeli-made NLOS “Spike” antitank missiles in their arsenal as well as German Panzerfaust 3 antitank weapons, Cancian said.

“The short answer is that infantry antitank weapons (of which Javelin is one) seem to be quite effective,” Cancian said in an email to NBC News. “There are lots of social media videos of their use. Further, the Russians seem to be moving very slowly, if not actually stalled, and these weapons must be part of what has given the relatively small and weak Ukrainian forces so much ability to resist.”

Russia has roughly four times as many troops as Ukraine’s 130,000-strong army. It also spends about $78 billion on its armed forces annually, compared to the $1.6 billion Ukraine has been able to budget for its military.

But Russia has only a quarter of its forces fighting in Ukraine, with the rest deployed in the Caucasus or defending the border with China. Meanwhile, Ukraine has some 900,000 reserves and is fighting on its home turf.

The FGM-148 Javelin is one of the more than 1,700 antitank weapons that have been rushed by NATO via Poland to Ukraine since Moscow’s forces invaded more than three weeks ago, and the evidence of their effectiveness soon became clear when the Russian tank advance on the capital city, Kyiv, was quickly stopped in its tracks, the experts said.

Manned most often by a team of two soldiers, the Javelin fires a heat-seeking missile with a range of up to 2.5 miles. It has what’s known as a “fire and forget” system, which allows the soldiers to quickly take cover after firing, before the enemy can detect them. It’s called a Javelin because it strikes tanks from the top like a spear, the experts said.

The Javelins can also fire directly at a target, making them a threat against low-flying helicopters, they said.

Also, they said, the Javelin is easy to use, which is a plus because much of the fighting in Ukraine is being done by civilians with very little military training.

The Ukrainians have touted the success of the Javelin by sharing images of their soldiers hefting the weapons along with photos of destroyed Russian tanks.

Kyiv put in its first order for a little over 200 Javelin missiles in 2018, according to various published reports. That same year, Trump signed an agreement to give Ukraine $250 million in military aid.

But it wasn’t until a year later that these weapons helped detonate a scandal that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment.

During a July 25, 2019, phone call with Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “We are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.”

Trump replied, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.”

Then Trump suggested that Zelenskyy should investigate the Ukrainian business dealings of Joe Biden, then considered Trump’s top rival for the presidency in 2020, and his son Hunter Biden, for possible corruption.

After the phone call with Zelenskyy, in which he was assured by the Ukrainian president that his new prosecutor would look into these matters, Trump released millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine.

Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led House in December 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. But he was acquitted by the Senate, which had a Republican majority, of these charges in February 2020.

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote with the Democrats to convict Trump on the abuse of power charge.

Fortune

Russia’s largest tank manufacturer may have run out of parts

Christiaan Hetzner – March 22, 2022

Sanctions imposed on Russia to cripple its economy may be starting to hurt its military capabilities.

The country’s primary armored vehicle manufacturer appears to have run out of parts to make and repair tanks, according to a Facebook post by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Citing “available information,” it reported state-owned company Uralvagonzavod, which builds tanks such as the T-72B3, has had to temporarily cease production in Nizhny Tagil.

In addition to Uralvagonzavod, one of the largest tank manufacturers in the world with reportedly 30,000 employees last year, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant has also run out of foreign-made parts.

“The specified companies specialize in the manufacturing and repair of tanks, as well as other armored equipment needed by the Russian Federation armed forces,” the General Staff wrote in its Facebook post.

Western allies, including the United States and the European Union, have ordered a complete halt to the export of certain components like microchips to Russia as part of an escalation package of sanctions.

So-called dual-use goods have been banned, since they can be employed for both military as well as civilian applications.

“Our aim is to reduce the Kremlin’s capacity to wage war on its neighbor,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen explained earlier this month.

It may be working. Halting the manufacture and repair of T-72B3s, as well as more advanced but less numerous T-80s and T-90s, could hobble Russia’s efforts to continue its advance across war-torn Ukraine.

Over the past 27 days since Putin’s invasion, Russian tank columns have been one of the main targets of drone strikes by Ukraine’s fleet of Bayraktar TB2s.

They have also come under heavy fire from infantry personnel wielding shoulder-launched “fire and forget” Javelin missiles, as well as next-generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAWs) that can destroy or at least disable the tracked vehicles.

On Monday, the General Staff claimed Ukraine’s forces had eliminated 509 tanks in total, an estimate that Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commanding officer of U.S. Army Europe, seemed to share.

Some tanks, either abandoned or out of fuel, have even been filmed being carted away by tractor-driving Ukrainian farmers.

Developments in Russia are however notoriously difficult to independently verify with any degree of certainty given Putin’s stranglehold over the media.

In a potentially inadvertent leak on Monday, a pro-Kremlin website published data from the Ministry of Defense citing nearly 9,900 Russian dead and over 16,000 wounded before the post was swiftly taken down.

Business Insider

A new class of oligarchs could rise from Putin’s seizure of Western assets, says an expert in Russian finance

Huileng Tan – March 22, 2022

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to take over assets of foreign companies that leave the country.
• The assets could be auctioned off, Russia’s Economy Ministry has suggested.
• A fire sale of the assets could create a new class of oligarchs, said a Russian finance expert.

Russia has announced it’s considering seizing the assets of foreign companies that exit the country — and it could create a new class of oligarchs, an expert on Russian finance told Insider.

Those who manage to acquire ownership of seized assets at fire-sale prices through state auctions could become the new class of tycoons, said Hassan Malik, a senior sovereign analyst at Boston-based investment management consultancy Loomis Sayles.

“There’s certainly a risk that you just see the creation of a new class of crony capitalists or oligarchs,” Malik told Insider.

As international companies exit Russia en masse, they are leaving behind assets such as factories and offices that are in working condition. Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to take over such idle but productive assets, telling government officials the Kremlin would seek to “introduce external management and then transfer these enterprises to those who actually want to work,” according to the Associated Press.

Russia’s Economy Ministry has suggested the assets could be auctioned off, Bloomberg reported on March 10. The auctions could mirror a controversial 1990s “loans-for-shares” program launched by former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, Malik told Insider. At the time, rich Russian businessmen and banks close to the authorities lent the government money in exchange for stakes in state-owned industrial companies. The shares were acquired at “dirt-cheap prices,” The New York Times wrote in 1996.

Malik described the deals as “sweetheart deals” because when the Russian state “predictably defaulted” on the loans, the creditors seized their shares. This created a generation of outrageously rich oligarchs, said Malik, who is also the author of “Bankers and Bolsheviks,” a book about finance in the early 1900s during the Russian Revolution.

Russia’s richest man, Vladimir Potanin, built up his vast fortune through the “loans-for-share” scheme when he acquired metals giant Nornickel. Potanin has a net worth of $24.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Billionaire Roman Abramovich (net worth $14.5 billion) acquired a controlling stake in oil company Sibneft through the program.

Today, the Russian government — in need of funds amid sweeping international sanctions over the Ukraine war — could offload seized foreign assets to favored investors at a discount again, Malik told Insider. “I think it’s a real risk given Russia’s history,” he said.

Some foreign investors could be eyeing Russia

The Kremlin may also open such auctions up to foreign players, which could entice opportunistic investors eyeing a way into the market, said Malik.

“There may be players from countries where they feel relatively insulated from the threat of Western sanctions,” he said.

Potential investors could hail from China, India, or countries in the Middle East that have not condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said Malik.

Among them, China is most likely to take an active role in pursuing investments in Russia, as it has more leverage in its power relations with the West than do many other countries, said Malik. Large, state-owned companies are unlikely to take the risk of running afoul of international sanctions, but investors could set up a holdings company that only operates and trades in China and Russia to get around restrictions, he said.

China appears to be eyeing opportunities in the Russian market already.

Chinese ambassador to Russia, Zhang Hanhui, told a group of business leaders in Moscow on Sunday to seize opportunities presented by a “void” in the country, the Russia Confucius Culture Promotion Association wrote on its official WeChat account.

Zhang did not mention sanctions, but told business leaders the international situation was “complex,” with large companies facing issues in supply chains and payments. “This is a time when private, small- and medium-sized enterprises can play a role,” said Zhang.