Business Insider

An elite Ukrainian drone unit exploits the cover of night to destroy Russian tanks and trucks while their soldiers sleep, report says

Alia Shoaib – March 20, 2022

• An elite Ukrainian drone unit has been striking Russian targets with anti-tank grenades while troops sleep.
• The drone unit has destroyed dozens of “priority targets” including Russian tanks, command trucks and other vehicles.
• Ukrainian forces have had surprising success in using drones to destroy Russian equipment.

An elite Ukrainian drone unit is destroying the weaponry of the invading Russian forces as their soldiers’ sleep, The Times of London reported.

Aerorozvidka, a specialist air reconnaissance unit within the army, says it has destroyed dozens of “priority targets” including Russian tanks, command trucks, and other vehicles in nighttime raids, the paper reported.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html

Russian forces stop moving during the night and typically hide their tanks in between houses in villages where conventional artillery cannot strike them, Yaroslav Honchar, the unit commander based in Kyiv, told the paper.

But the elite drone unit, which has dozens of squads of expert drone pilots, has these stationary vehicles in its cross-hairs.

“We strike at night, when Russians sleep,” Honchar told the paper. “In the night it’s impossible to see our drones.”

“We look specifically for the most valuable truck in the convoy and then we hit it precisely and we can do it really well with very low collateral damage. Even in the villages, it’s possible. You can get much closer at night,” he said.

The unit’s arsenal of drones ranges from cheap commercial ones to heavy-duty octocopters that have been modified to drop anti-tank grenades and to see with thermal cameras, according to the paper.

The R18 drone has a 4km range and capacity to drop 5kg bombs is particularly prized by Honchar’s drone warriors, the paper said. The team also uses PD-1, or Punisher drone, developed by Ukraine, that can carry 3kg of explosives and hit targets up to 30 miles.

Since Russia began its invasion, Ukrainian forces have had success in using drones such as the highly-rated Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 to destroy the equipment of invading forces, Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) wrote in The Spectator.

The success of the drones “speaks more to the skill of its Ukrainian operators and the incompetence and operational failures of Russian forces,” Bronk wrote.

Aerorozvidka’s drone unit, which flys up to 300 missions a day, according to The Times, operates using Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system, which was activated in Ukraine days after Russia invaded.

This means drone teams can operate regardless of internet or power outages, which are currently rampant across the country.

“If we use a drone with thermal vision at night, the drone must connect through Starlink to the artillery guy and create target acquisition,” an Aerorozvidka leader told The Times.

Aerorozvidka uses an advanced Nato-supported intelligence system, Delta, which pulls together information from various sources including satellites and drone reconnaissance to precisely identify targets.

This helps the unit make the most efficient use of their limited supply of bombs, according to The Times.

Aerorozvidka was created by model plane enthusiasts in 2014 and has since been integrated into the Ukrainian general staff following the success of its operations against Russian forces in Crimea, The Times said.

In recent weeks, supporters from around Europe have been donating drone parts and other equipment such as 3D printers to help build and repair devices damaged by Russian rifles.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The New York Times

Ukraine Reminds Georgia of Its Own War With Russia. That Creates a Dilemma.

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. To many Georgians, that means the country should stand unequivocally with Ukraine. But the government is more cautious.

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By Patrick Kingsley, Photographs by Laetitia Vancon

March 19, 2022

KHURVALETI, Georgia — When she hears the latest news from Ukraine, Tina Marghishvili, a Georgian farmer, remembers the forest her father planted. She remembers her childhood home, her cows, her family orchard — all the land and belongings that her family hasn’t seen since 2008, when Russian troops forced them from their hometown during that year’s Russian-Georgian war.

“I watch the Ukraine news, I remember 2008, and it makes me cry,” said Ms. Marghishvili, 57, who now lives in a camp for Georgians displaced by that 2008 war. “Georgia should be sanctioning Russia, blockading them, boycotting their exports.”

And for Ms. Marghishvili, the big mystery is: Why hasn’t the Georgian government already done that?

Along Russia’s borders, in post-Soviet countries like Georgia that remain caught between Russian and Western influence, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has presented governments with a strategic dilemma.

Apart from Belarus, none have backed the Russian offensive. But nor have they strongly opposed it — fearful of upsetting a dominant neighbor that is a major source of trade and remittances, a guarantor of some countries’ security and a potential aggressor to others.

A small, mountainous country of 3.7 million people at the southeastern extreme of the European continent, Georgia is perhaps running the narrowest gauntlet. Russia invaded parts of Georgia 14 years ago, and Russian troops still protect South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two secessionist statelets that broke away from Georgia during the 1990s and then expanded in 2008. That has put Russia in de facto control of roughly a fifth of Georgian territory, including the town in South Ossetia where Ms. Marghishvili once lived.

To the Georgian government, this precarious dynamic makes it unwise to speak out too strongly against Russia, lest Russia turn on Georgia next.

“We live next to a volcano,” said Giorgi Khelashvili, a lawmaker for Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream. “The volcano just erupted, and it just happens that the lava is currently flowing down the other side of the mountain.”

But this cautious approach has put the Georgian government at odds with most of its population — creating a far more pointed clash between majority opinion on Ukraine and government policy than in most other European countries.

Recent polling suggests nearly 60 percent of Georgians want a stronger stance on Ukraine from their elected officials, and many have hung Ukrainian flags from their apartments and offices in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. Tens of thousands of Georgians have rallied to support Ukraine, and to criticize the government’s equivocal approach to a brotherly nation.

“We have different lands and different countries, but we have the same sky and we have the same enemy,” said Dato Turashvili, a popular Georgian novelist, and one of many Georgians flying a Ukrainian flag outside his home.

“The Georgian government says, ‘It’s better to be careful, Russia is dangerous’ — but that doesn’t matter to the Kremlin,” said Mr. Turashvili. “If they take Kyiv, they will take Tbilisi.”

The government says the criticism is unfair, since it has taken some measures that could anger Russia.

Days after the invasion began, Georgia submitted a rushed application for membership in the European Union — a largely symbolic indication of its pro-Western orientation, since full membership is years away. The government sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, admitted more than 5,000 Ukrainian refugees and voted in favor of a United Nations resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine.

Georgia has also admitted more than 30,000 Russians since the war started, of whom 12,000 have remained there, with Tbilisi joining Istanbul as one of the primary destinations for the new wave of young Russian exiles.

But despite rising anger from Georgian society, the Georgian government has generally avoided condemning Russia directly, and has refused to impose sanctions on the Russian economy. The government has clashed with the country’s ceremonial president, who has taken a stronger position; prevented a charter plane of Georgian volunteers from flying to Ukraine; and blocked entry to several Russian dissidents.

The Georgian prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, also dismissed the effectiveness of sanctions, suggesting that no external actor could save Ukraine — a comment that many Georgians found needlessly defeatist. Tellingly, Russia did not include Georgia on a recent list of countries it had deemed unfriendly, while Ukraine has withdrawn its ambassador to Georgia.

All this has led to allegations that Georgian Dream has been co-opted by Moscow — unproven claims that have nevertheless gained momentum because the party’s founder and former leader, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, made much of his fortune in Russia. Mr. Ivanishvili’s representatives ignored several interview requests. But he no longer has a formal role in the party, and the party denies claims of Russian interference.

“If that had been the case,” said Mr. Khelashvili, the Georgian Dream lawmaker, “then Georgia’s permanent insistence on integrating with the West, and most importantly our latest declaration about joining the European Union, would have seemed quite out of logic.”

But to many Georgians, the party’s attitude to Russia still strays from pragmatism into needless deference, said Olesya Vartanyan, a Tbilisi-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, a global affairs research institute.

For years, Ms. Vartanyan had tried to avoid describing Georgian Dream as pro-Russian, choosing instead to argue that the party’s interests merely aligned with Russia’s. Now, for the first time, she said, “I say this is not the Georgian Dream, this is the Russian Dream.”

One cause of the government’s caution can be found a few hundred yards from the home of Ms. Marghishvili, the displaced farmer. She now lives close to the boundary of South Ossetia, one of the two breakaway territories guarded by Russian troops. The southern tip of South Ossetia runs just 500 yards north of Georgia’s main east-west highway, meaning that Russian troops stationed there could cut Georgia in half within minutes.

Up a potholed road lies Khurvaleti, one of hundreds of Georgian villages bisected by the boundary line. In the years since 2008, Russian troops have increasingly fortified this boundary with fences and ditches — cutting off many Georgians from their homes, and often arresting those who still try to cross it.

Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Georgian intelligence officers have detected no indications of renewed Russian aggression against Georgia, said Giorgi Sabedashvili, head of analysis at the Georgian state security service.

But in villages like Khurvaleti, where the situation is always tense, this is little comfort.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, “people are more afraid here,” said Valya Vanishvili, 85, a Khurvaleti resident whose home has been separated from the rest of the village by a Russian fence.

“The Russians are doing to Ukraine what they did to us,” said Ms. Vanishvili, standing on one side of the fence as two Times journalists stood on the other. “Maybe something will happen again here,” she added.

To some Georgians, these fears justify the government’s ambiguous position on Ukraine.

Supporters of the government stance include the Georgian Orthodox Church, one of the country’s most powerful civil institutions, whose priests have historically criticized the liberal values they associate with the West.

“We remember that Russian troops are standing just 50 kilometers away,” said the Rev. Andrea Jaghmaidze, a spokesman for the church, referring to the boundary between Georgia and South Ossetia, about 30 miles distant. “Therefore great wisdom should be shown,” he added, “so as not to place extra burden on the country.”

But many Georgians feel that it would be not only more dignified to take a more vocal stance, but also more strategic.

By taking an ambiguous stance on Ukraine, Georgia risks signaling to the West that it is uninterested in proper ties with Europe and North America, and therefore not worth the West’s support, said Giorgi Gakharia, a former prime minister.

“If your standing is not clear, and if your standing is not values-based,” then “the Brits, the Germans, the French, the Americans will have questions,” Mr. Gakharia said. “Where does Georgia stand?”

In some cases, the desire for a stronger stance against the Russian state has morphed into anger at the new Russian émigrés, who have found themselves in an intimidating environment.

“Citizens of the Russian Federation,” reads a flyer recently posted across central Tbilisi. “You are not welcome here.”

Some Georgian landlords have refused to rent apartments to Russian tenants. Alexey Voloshinov, a 20-year-old journalist for Rosbalt, a Russian news organization listed by the Kremlin as a foreign agent, said a landlord had refused him tenancy last week “because we’re Russians, and the Russian soldiers killed her son in the Russian-Georgian war in 2008,” Mr. Voloshinov said.

Mr. Turashvili, the novelist, empathizes with dissidents and journalists like Mr. Voloshinov. His most famous novel, “Flight From The U.S.S.R.,” is about a group of Georgian dissidents who tried to escape the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

But in a sign of the times, even Mr. Turashvili is wary of admitting too large a wave of Russians. Like many Georgians, he worries that a majority have fled for financial reasons rather than any sincere opposition to the Kremlin.

“They have the best writers in Russia,” Mr. Turashvili said. “But maybe no good readers.”

Mariam Zibzibadze contributed reporting.

The New York Times

The Battle for Kyiv Looms as a Long and Bloody Conflict

Ukraine’s capital is the biggest prize of all for the Russian military. If Russia tries to take control, it could lead to one of the biggest urban conflicts since World War II.

By Andrew E. Kramer, Photographs by Lynsey Addario

March 19, 2022

Credit…Ukrainian security forces at a fortified checkpoint next to a market that provides food, shelter and medical care for up to 5,000 soldiers and the needy around northern Kyiv. 

KYIV, Ukraine — The city of Kyiv covers 325 square miles and is divided by a broad river. It has about 500,000 structures — factories, ornate churches and high-rise apartments — many on narrow, winding streets. Roughly two million people remain after extensive evacuations of women and children.

To the northwest and to the east, tens of thousands of Russian troops are pressing toward the city, Ukraine’s capital, backed by columns of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery. Inside Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers and civilian volunteers are fortifying the downtown with barriers, anti-tank mines and artillery.

Kyiv remains the biggest prize of all for the Russian military; it is the seat of government and ingrained in both Russian and Ukrainian identity. But capturing it, military analysts say, would require a furious and bloody conflict that could be the world’s biggest urban battle in 80 years.

“What we are looking at in Kyiv would dwarf anything we’ve seen since World War II,” said David Kilcullen, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army who has extensively studied urban combat. “If they really, really want to level Kyiv, they can,” he said of the Russian leadership. “But the level of political and economic damage would be tremendous.”

For comparison, one of the largest urban battles this century was the nine-month siege of Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 and 2017 to oust its Islamic State occupiers. Mosul covers 70 square miles and had a wartime population of about 750,000 people — a fraction of the numbers for Kyiv, where the metropolitan area’s prewar population was 3.6 million.

Negotiations over a cease-fire are continuing, and a long, heated battle over Kyiv is not inevitable. Despite superior numbers and firepower, Russia has not achieved a breakthrough. A Western official, in a briefing with reporters this past week, said the Russians had taken heavy casualties, been unable to establish any meaningful off-road presence, and — perhaps most surprising — failed to achieve dominance in the air.

But the first stages of the battle have already begun, with cruise missile bombardments, troop movements to encircle the city and a fight to gain air superiority. Savage, street-by-street gunfights akin to guerrilla warfare have broken out in northwestern suburbs like Irpin, an important gateway into the city. It could be the beginning of a long, drawn-out siege using hunger and street fighting to advance toward the city center.

After three weeks of fighting in the suburbs, Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers, who are operating in loosely organized small units and relying heavily on ambushes, are growing more confident in the city’s defense. Part of their strategy is to make the assault so costly for the Russian army in lives that it will exhaust or demoralize its troops before they reach the city center.

“There’s no talk of capitulation for Kyiv,” said Lt. Tetiana Chornovol, the commander of an anti-tank missile unit operating on the outskirts of the city. “Everything is going far better than we thought.”

Lieutenant Chornovol, 42, is a former activist in Ukraine’s street protest movement who sent her two children to safety before reporting for duty as a reserve officer. She commands two teams of a half-dozen or so people each, firing Ukrainian-made, tripod-mounted missiles, which they transport to ambush positions in their personal cars.

Lieutenant Chornovol drives a red Chevy Volt electric hatchback, which she calls an “ecologically clean killing machine.”

Interviewed beside a burning grocery warehouse in the suburban town of Brovary, the lieutenant popped the hatchback to reveal a beige tube, holding a Stugna-P missile. It has a range of three miles and hits a target within a diameter of one foot.

Seemingly unfazed by combat, Lieutenant Chornovol described the Ukrainian tactic of ambushes that has defined the early phases of the battle for the capital. Last week, she said, she blew up a Russian tank a few miles east of Brovary on the M01 highway.

“We look for firing positions where we can see a stretch of road,” Lieutenant Chornovol said, adding that “we know a column will drive on the road” eventually. With her car parked some distance away, covered in camouflage, she and her team lay in wait in a tree line for three days before a Russian column came rumbling down the road.

When the command came to open fire, she used a laser to lock in on the tank, pushed a button, then watched as the tank lit up in flames before she rushed back to her car to escape return fire. “I shoot at armor,” she said, when asked about the human toll. “If they climb inside, it’s their fault.”

The tactics Lieutenant Chornovol described are indicative of the city’s defenses, which rely on a blend of sophisticated air defense systems, army troops, civilian volunteers and paramilitary organizations.

An urban environment favors booby traps, ambushes and lightly armed but mobile defenders against a regular army. Ukrainians have laid out pie-sized anti-tank mines on the shoulders of roads, which can be quickly dragged across streets to block advances. In cities, the urban grid channels the invader’s armored vehicles into narrow streets, where they become vulnerable.

The Russians also have a formidable force, but of a different nature. They rely on superior troop numbers and powerful, but less mobile, weaponry.

Russian tanks, for instance, are moving methodically in long columns through small towns outside Kyiv, rarely straying from roads. At times, the vehicles are creating gigantic traffic jams.

On the Dnieper River’s west bank, soldiers and vehicles from two Siberia-based Combined Arms Armies — parlance for large Russian military groupings — are creeping forward, said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va. Russian special forces units, or Spetsnaz, have turned the once-tranquil suburb of Irpin into a battle zone, he said.

On the eastern bank, Russia’s 41st Combined Arms Army has been probing into outlying towns like Brovary, where Lieutenant Chornovol blew up a Russian tank.

Why the Russians are advancing tanks into the urban landscape of Kyiv’s outskirts, where they are vulnerable to ambush, is something of a mystery, Mr. Kofman said. “They are trying to make quick progress down roads while the Ukrainians are trying to engage them in cities, rather than out in the open fields,” he said.

And time is not on the Russians’ side. Kyiv is surrounded by bogs, thawing now with the coming spring and hampering any efforts by the Russians to fan out with their heavy weapons around the city’s perimeter. Tanks that venture off roads are already sinking into the mud.

It remains unclear whether the Russian army will attempt a full urban assault, Mr. Kofman said, but the movements so far suggest plans to at least encircle Kyiv.

That will require gaining dominance in the sky, which Russia has unsuccessfully been trying to achieve. Ukrainian and Russian pilots have clashed in dogfights over Kyiv and a Russian jet crashed into one neighborhood. Sometimes, the plumes of Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles can be seen rising into the sky.

Russia has failed to control the sky over Kyiv, analysts say, because it has not destroyed the city’s air defense missiles or all the secretive air strips in western Ukraine used by Ukrainian pilots in flights to defend the capital.

At night in Kyiv, booms are heard from air defense strikes overhead, and in the morning, the mangled, silvery, metallic remnants of Russian cruise missiles, fired from Russian territory hundreds of miles away, can be found in parking lots and gardens around the city.

The ground fighting has become a vicious battle for suburban towns and highways, fought over a landscape of warehouses, car dealerships and neighborhoods of single-story homes and apartment blocks on the city’s outskirts, interspersed with tracts of pine forest.

In the town of Horenka, about a mile north of Kyiv, for example, what had been a quiet suburb is now a tableau of destruction from Russian shelling. Roads are pockmarked with craters from mortar rounds and littered with shorn tree branches. Cars are perforated by shrapnel, and sheet metal has been blown off houses. A sprawling warehouse of a French home improvement and gardening retailer, Leroy Merlin, burned.

On a roadside were two empty carrying tubes for American-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles. “Raytheon/Lockheed Martin,” read the stenciled markings. “Guided missile surface attack.” Ukrainians have been joking that, after the war, they will use these tubes to store potatoes.

In Horenka a few days ago, a dog injured in the fighting hobbled forlornly on three legs amid an array of bricks from a destroyed home.

“A month ago, people lived here, it was a normal town,” said Lt. Artyom Bolyukh, a former architect now in the army who uses the nickname The Artist. “Now this is our outer perimeter.”

Like Lieutenant Chornovol, he traveled to and from his position by civilian car, a gray Toyota station wagon, blending into the thin stream of traffic still on Kyiv’s streets.

To fully encircle Kyiv, the Russians must engage in several more suburban battles. At that point, two options would open for the Russian military, according to Mr. Kilcullen, the expert on urban combat: starve the city or try a block-by-block assault.

Modern cities typically have limited stocks of food, as grocery stores rely on regular deliveries, and Kyiv is no exception. But severe food shortages would most likely not begin in Kyiv for at least a month, according to Mr. Kilcullen. For now, a highway to the southwest remains open for supplies of weapons and food.

Street fighting, on the other hand, would cause significant casualties for the invaders. The Russian military might also skip some steps of a classic urban assault, trying, for example, a special forces raid on the city center or a battle before the encirclement is completed, Mr. Kilcullen said.

And despite Ukrainian tactical successes in the battle for the suburbs using small units like Lieutenant Chornovol’s ambush teams, the Russian force remains a formidable threat, said Dima Adamsky, an expert on Russian security policy at Reichman University in Israel.

“It is adapting,” he said, “and it is continuing to fulfill its operational plans.”

The New York Times – Guest Opinion

Putin Made a Profound Miscalculation on Ukraine

By Yaroslav Hrytsak – March 19, 2022

Dr. Hrytsak is a Ukrainian historian and a professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University.

LVIV, Ukraine — Ukraine is once again at the center of a potentially global conflict. World War I, as the historian Dominic Lieven put it, “turned on the fate of Ukraine.” World War II, according to the legendary journalist Edgar Snow, was “first of all a Ukrainian war.” Now the threat of a third world war hinges on what could happen in Ukraine.

It’s a striking repetition. Why has Ukraine, a midsize country of 40 million people on the eastern edge of Europe, been at the epicenter of warfare not once, not twice, but three times?

Part of the answer, at least, is geographical. Set between Russia and Germany, Ukraine has long been viewed as the site of struggle for the domination of the continent. But the deeper reasons are historical in nature. Ukraine, which has a common origin point with Russia, has developed differently over the course of centuries, diverging in crucial ways from its neighbor to the east.

President Vladimir Putin likes to invoke history as part of the reason for his bloody invasion. Ukraine and Russia, he asserts, are in fact one country: Ukraine, in effect, doesn’t exist. This, of course, is entirely wrong. But he is right to think history holds a key to understanding the present. He just doesn’t realize that far from enabling his success, it’s what will thwart him.

In 1904 an English geographer named Halford John Mackinder made a bold prediction. In an article titled “The Geographical Pivot of History,” he suggested that whoever controlled Eastern Europe would control the world. On either side of this vast region were Russia and Germany, poised to do battle. And in between was Ukraine, with its rich resources of grain, coal and oil.

There’s no need to go into the finer details of Mackinder’s theory; it had its flaws. Yet it proved extremely influential after World War I and became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thanks to the Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, the concept migrated into Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Lenin and Stalin had not read Mackinder but acted as if they had. For them, Ukraine was the bridge that would carry the Russian Revolution westward into Germany, making it a world revolution. The path to conflict again ran through Ukraine.

The war, when it came, was catastrophic: In Ukraine, around seven million perished. In the aftermath, Ukraine was sealed up in the Soviet Union, and the question for a time seemed settled. With the collapse of Communism, many believed that Mackinder’s thesis was outdated and the future belonged to independent and sovereign states, free from the ambitions of bigger neighbors. They were wrong.

Mackinder’s argument — that Eastern Europe and Ukraine held the key for a contest between Russia and Germany — never went away. In fact, it took pride of place in Mr. Putin’s mind. With one change, however: He substituted Germany with the West in its entirety. Ukraine, to Mr. Putin, became the battleground for a civilizational contest between Russia and the West.

He didn’t act on it at first. In the early years of his tenure, he seemed to expect — in line with those in Boris Yeltsin’s circle who oversaw the end of the Soviet Union — that Ukrainian independence wouldn’t last long. In time, Ukraine would be begging to be taken back. It didn’t happen. Though some Ukrainians remained under the sway of Russian culture, politically they leaned to the West, as shown by the Orange Revolution of 2004, when millions of Ukrainians protested against electoral fraud.

So Mr. Putin changed course. Soon after the war in Georgia in 2008, in which the Kremlin seized control of two Georgian regions, he designed a new strategic policy for Ukraine. According to the plan, any steps Kyiv might take in the direction of the West would be punished with military aggression. The objective was to cleave off Ukraine’s Russophone east and turn the rest of the country into a vassal state headed by a Kremlin puppet.

At the time, it seemed fantastical, ludicrous. Nobody believed it could be genuine. But by the final weeks of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014, in which Ukrainians demanded an end to corruption and an embrace of the West, it became horribly clear that Russia was intent on aggression. And so it proved: In a rapid-fire operation, Mr. Putin seized Crimea and parts of the Donbas. But crucially, the full extent of his ambition was thwarted, in large part through the heroic resistance mounted by volunteers in the country’s east.

Mr. Putin miscalculated in two ways. First, he was hoping that, as had been the case with his war against Georgia, the West would tacitly swallow his aggression against Ukraine. A unified response from the West was not something he expected. Second, since in his mind Russians and Ukrainians were one nation, Mr. Putin believed Russian troops needed barely to enter Ukraine to be welcomed with flowers. This never materialized.

What happened in Ukraine in 2014 confirmed what liberal Ukrainian historians have been saying for a long time: The chief distinction between Ukrainians and Russians lies not in language, religion or culture — here they are relatively close — but in political traditions. Simply put, a victorious democratic revolution is almost impossible in Russia, whereas a viable authoritarian government is almost impossible in Ukraine.

The reason for this divergence is historical. Up until the end of World War I (and in the case of western Ukraine, the end of World War II), Ukrainian lands were under the strong political and cultural influence of Poland. This influence was not Polish per se; it was, rather, a Western influence. As the Harvard Byzantinist Ihor Sevcenko put it, in Ukraine the West was clad in Polish dress. Central to this influence were the ideas of constraining centralized power, an organized civil society and some freedom of assembly.

Mr. Putin seems to have learned nothing from his failures in 2014. He has launched a full-scale invasion, seemingly intended to remove the Ukrainian government from power and pacify the country. But again, Russian aggression has been met with heroic Ukrainian resistance and united the West. Though Mr. Putin may escalate further, he is far from the military victory he sought. A master tactician but inept strategist, he has made his most profound miscalculation.

Yet it’s one based on the belief that he is at war not with Ukraine but with the West in Ukrainian lands. It’s essential to grasp this point. The only way to defeat him is to turn his belief — that Ukraine is fighting not alone but with the help of the West and as part of the West — into a waking nightmare.

How this could be done, whether through humanitarian and military help, incorporating Ukraine into the European Union or even supplying it with its own Marshall Plan, are open questions. What matters is the political will to answer them. After all, the struggle for Ukraine, as history tells us, is about much more than just Ukraine or Europe. It is the struggle for the shape of the world to come.

Yaroslav Hrytsak is a professor of history at the Ukrainian Catholic University and the author, most recently, of a global history of Ukraine.

The New York Times – Opinion

While Putin Shrinks, Zelensky Soars

By Maureen Dowd – March 19, 2022

WASHINGTON — Myron Cohen, a garment district silk salesman turned popular comedian in the Ed Sullivan era, loved to tell this chestnut:

Picture a skinny little guy, a shrimp, a nothing. He walks into a lumber camp looking for a job.

The foreman is skeptical, so the shrimp steps up and fells a towering oak in 90 seconds.

“Where’d you learn that?” says the foreman.

“In the Sahara Forest,” replies the guy.

“You mean the Sahara Desert,” the foreman corrects.

“Sure, now,” the guy says.

Hubris guided Vladimir Putin’s malevolent and maladroit invasion of Ukraine. As The Associated Press pointed out, U.S. military officials assumed Russia would deploy electronic and cyber warfare to blind and paralyze Ukrainian air defenses and communications. But the Russians did not take control of Ukrainian airspace when they launched their attack.

Putin was cocksure, dismissing Volodymyr Zelensky as a shrimp, a nothing. But Zelensky has shown the world what true stature is.

Putin has always had a Napoleon complex, puffing out his bare chest on horseback; fishing shirtless in Siberia; winning staged judo and hockey displays.

But Zelensky understands that stature is not about phony macho photo shoots. Stature is a physical quality, but, more important, it is a human and moral quality. Keats was barely over five feet, but look at his spiritual size.

Our military leaders have lately been quoting Napoleon, who said, “The moral is to the physical as three to one.” We have seen this with the Ukrainians, who are not only courageously resisting the Russians, but also launching counteroffensives.

As The Times reported, the number of Russian casualties has hurt morale; our intelligence reports have described Russian soldiers simply parking their tanks and wandering into the woods.

Putin doesn’t realize what the world knows: You don’t show your muscularity by razing cities, by bombing a maternity hospital, a boarding school for the visually impaired, a bread line, a community center and a shelter painted with a message in Russian pleading that children are inside. What kind of monster treats the word “CHILDREN” as an invitation to kill? This just proves that the Russian dictator is, as President Biden and his secretary of state contended, a war criminal.

You don’t show your power by starting a war that reveals how weak and mediocre your army is and strengthens European bonds when your goal is to divide and weaken Europe.

No matter what happens in Ukraine, Putin will be a loser with no moral stature and Zelensky will have towering moral stature.

Donald Trump, who called Putin’s barbaric strategy “genius” and “savvy” after spending four years legitimizing that malefactor, also comes out a loser. Trump is stuck on the fringe of his party, sharing the wrong side of a moral divide with Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance, Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Trump and Putin, what a pair, shrinking in stature in the eyes of the world. Tiny, tiny Trump and cruel fool Putin. The corrupt, paranoid germophobes love surrounding themselves with sycophants, conjuring delusional worlds and giving unhinged rants.

Putin let loose on those who question his misbegotten war: “Any people, and even more so the Russian people, will be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths. Spit out on the pavement.”

He even went after his pals, the oligarchs, “who can’t do without foie gras, oysters or the so-called gender freedoms” in Miami or the French Riviera.

Trump and Putin sowed the seeds of their own destruction. They wanted all of the attention and credit. Now they deserve all of the blame.

Grandiosity and fantasy worlds will trip up these poisonous authoritarians. Neither man has a democratic bone in his body. And both think they know better than anyone else.

“When you have an autocrat who’s been in power for too long, they don’t listen to people anymore, and this war was afflicted by very bad decision making,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian who teaches at New York University, said on MSNBC. This has left Putin vulnerable and humiliated before Russian elites and the world, she said. But it has also, parlously, left him without an offramp “because autocrats don’t negotiate.”

Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton, told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that the Russians have a fractured identity. Culturally and scientifically, they are a world-class power. But economically and politically, they have a hard time matching the West, so “they resort to coercion.”

“The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with some personal ruler,” Kotkin said. “Instead of getting the strong state that they want to manage the gulf with the West, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism.”

Zelensky spoke to a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, comparing the terror in Ukrainian skies to the death hailed down from the skies on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and on New York and Washington on 9/11. He also showed a devastating video that brought tears to lawmakers’ eyes.

Underlining his role as David to Putin’s Goliath, Zelensky said, “Strong doesn’t mean big.” Strong means supporting human rights and freedom and demanding the right to die when “your time comes and not when it’s wanted by someone else, by your neighbor.”

Business Insider

Zelenskyy calls the Russian military ‘incompetent, capable of simply driving their people to slaughter’

Katie Balevic – March 20, 2022

• Zelenskyy said an “incompetent” Russian military was leading to “unprecedented losses.”
• He has said some 14,000 Russian soldiers have died, while Western estimates are closer to 7,000.
• Zelenskyy added that some Russian combat units were destroyed “by 80-90%” during the fighting.

In a stark message Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said some areas of combat have been “simply piled with corpses of Russian soldiers.”

The Ukrainian president said that his forces continue to deter Russian forces and “inflict unprecedented losses on Russian troops.” He added that the Russian military has proven itself “incompetent, capable of simply driving their people to slaughter.”

“Some units of the occupiers were destroyed by 80-90%,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram. “In places of especially fierce battles, the frontline of our defense is simply piled with the corpses of Russian soldiers.”

“And these corpses, these bodies, are not taken away,” he added. “New units are driven on the offensive through these bodies. Some reserves that the command of the Russian troops collect wherever they can.”

Zelenskyy has said over 14,000 Russian soldiers have died thus far. US intelligence estimated last week that 7,000 of the 150,000 Russian troops involved in the war have died.

“We are well aware that Russia has just a bottomless human resource and a lot of equipment, missiles, and bombs. But I want to ask the citizens of Russia. What have they done to you over the years that you stopped noticing your losses?” Zelenskyy said. “This is 14,000 mothers, 14,000 fathers. These are wives, these are children, relatives, and friends. And you don’t notice it?”

He warned there would “only be more victims” as Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Zelenskyy has called for peace talks with Russia multiple times in the last several weeks, warning that Russia will otherwise incur losses that will take “several generations to recover” from.

During an interview with CNN on Sunday, Zelenskyy said he is ready for negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but he warned that if those talks failed, it “would mean that this is a third World War,” Insider’s John Dorman reported.

“Ukraine has always sought a peaceful solution,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram. “Because we count everyone killed, because every ruined family, every ruined house matters to us. Because were are Ukrainians, and for us, a person is priceless.”

Read the original article on Business Insider

Yahoo! News

‘A psychopath’: Chechen warlord Kadyrov raises prospect of more brutal phase to Ukraine war

Alexander Nazaryan, Senior W. H. Correspondent – March 19, 2022

WASHINGTON — Launched by Moscow in 1999, the second Chechen war elevated the stature of Russia’s new and then little-known prime minister, a former intelligence officer named Vladimir Putin. Intended to bring the mountainous Islamic region back under the Kremlin’s control, the exceptionally brutal campaign endeared Putin to Russians nostalgic for a show of strength from what was considered by much of the world to be a fading nuclear superpower.

“The bandits will be destroyed,” Putin said at the time, in an echo of how he would talk of the “Nazis” he now claims to be purging from Ukraine’s government and military. “We must go through the mountain caves and scatter and destroy all those who are armed.”

So when Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov announced earlier this week that he was in Ukraine to support Putin’s invasion, it seemed as if the past had caught up with the present. Even though Kadyrov’s journey to the front — he claimed on social media to have nearly reached the capital, Kyiv, which is still under Ukrainian control — may have been fictitious, amounting to little more than a publicity stunt, some say his involvement could lead to an even bloodier conflict.

“Kadyrov is a psychopath who personally tortures his political prisoners,” Russia expert Michael Weiss told Yahoo News, alluding to Kadyrov’s well-known human rights abuses. Weiss and others say the apparent presence of Kadyrov’s soldiers in Ukraine could signal a new phase of fighting, one in which the rules of conventional warfare are discarded as Putin becomes more desperate for victory.

Kadyrov, 45, rules Chechnya under Putin’s supervision. And if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the conflict’s leading man, Kadyrov is the more colorful counterpart to chief villain Putin, given to brandishing a golden gun and trotting out a pet tiger. And even as he was supposedly preparing for war, Kadyrov engaged in a social media feud with Tesla founder Elon Musk.

His cartoonish demeanor, however, disguises a deep lust for power and a penchant for violence. Kadyrov commands a paramilitary outfit called the Kadyrovites, who work to suppress any rebellion in Chechnya, which has struggled to free itself from Russia (and other empires) for centuries. By doing Putin’s bidding — which has included hunting down opponents in Istanbul and Berlin — Kadyrov essentially guarantees he will retain the Kremlin’s support.

“The Russian military is facing a critical lack of manpower,” explains Emil Aslan, professor of security studies at Charles University in Prague. Kadyrovites, he told Yahoo News, “are an essential asset to the Russian military, both in tactical and psychological terms.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday that the Biden administration could not confirm the presence of Chechen fighters in Ukraine. But such confirmation has come from battlefield reports, as well as from social media posts, where a kind of meta-battle is being waged for world opinion.

The Kremlin has not hyped Kadyrov’s role and, in fact, challenged the bombastic warlord’s own assertion that he was on the outskirts of Kyiv. At the same time, the Kremlin has few other allies to turn to.

“Russia’s scrounging for troops in Chechnya and beyond is probably a sign of how poorly the war has gone for them,” says Ben Friedman, policy director at the Washington, D.C., think tank Defense Priorities.

Although Ukraine’s military is much smaller than Russia’s, poorly trained Russian conscripts have been repelled repeatedly since Putin launched an invasion last month. And with the United States and other nations continuing to supply weapons to Kyiv, Russia could be coming dangerously close to defeat, potentially leaving it to rely on the kind of grueling warfare that allowed Putin to declare victory in Chechnya two decades ago, after an earlier attempt to conquer the Muslim-majority region proved unsuccessful.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin launched a disastrous invasion of Chechnya in 1994, seeking to keep the small, oil-rich republic from gaining independence. Yet Chechnya mounted a furious defense that culminated in a battle for Grozny, the Chechen capital, that left hundreds of Russian soldiers dead. The humiliated Russian army retreated, and Chechnya achieved a measure of autonomy — and peace.

An earnest student of Soviet propaganda, Putin could now be trying to use crude stereotypes about Chechens’ fighting prowess to frighten an otherwise emboldened Ukrainian resistance.

After a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere that were blamed on Chechens — but were likely carried out by Kremlin security services — Putin started a second Chechen war that saw Grozny leveled and the small republic’s civil society effectively destroyed. In exchange for their loyalty, the Kadyrov family — who had once been rebels themselves — were given unfettered power over the Chechen populace. They have wielded that power ruthlessly, in particular when it comes to the nation’s gay and lesbian population.

A 2006 report by Human Rights Watch found that dissidents could face almost medieval retribution. “They started kicking me, and then brought an ‘infernal machine’ to give me electric shocks. They attached the wires to my toes and kept cranking the handle to release the current. I couldn’t bear it,” a survivor of Kadyrov’s torture, named in the report as “Khamid Kh.,” testified.

Bringing such methods to Ukraine would only exacerbate a conflict that has already led President Biden to call Putin a “war criminal.”

A supporter of Putin’s campaign from the start, Kadyrov said earlier this week that he was on the battlefield and ready to fight. That assertion was later debunked by a Ukrainian news outlet that determined Kadyrov’s announcement had actually been sent from Chechnya. Still, Chechens are involved in the conflict, with Ukraine accusing them of trying to assassinate Zelensky.

Their role could broaden should Russia’s assault fail to take Kyiv and other large cities. If forces aligned with Kadyrov “are asked to target neighborhoods, target civilians, they will do it,” says Jean-François Ratelle, a University of Ottawa expert on the Chechen wars. “They could be used to commit war crimes against civilians.”

Putin could also use Chechens to shoot Russian conscripts attempting to desert, Ratelle said. The practice has precedent in Russian history: During World War II, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had Red Army frontline soldiers trailed by security services ordered to shoot anyone trying to retreat from the terrifying German onslaught.

So far, all the alleged war crimes in Ukraine appear to have been committed by Russians at the Kremlin’s behest. But the prospect that Kadyrov could become more involved in the conflict alarms experts on Chechnya and its tumultuous history.

Weiss, the Russia expert, said reports that Putin was recruiting fighters in Syria — where Russia helped bolster dictator Bashar Assad’s ruthless regime in that nation’s civil war — were another development pointing to an escalation. “Putin is throwing everything he can into this war.”

If the second Chechen war cemented Putin’s grip on Russia, the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine could prove his undoing — but not before thousands more soldiers and civilians die in the process, especially if he looks to Kadyrov for the cruelly unconventional warfare that is the Chechen warlord’s calling card.

Others see Kadyrov’s belligerent shows of support for the war in Ukraine as a desperate attempt to frighten Ukrainians with racist tropes about Muslim Chechens and their supposed disposition toward violence.

Yet while Kadyrov himself is loyal to Putin — little surprise, since Putin installed his father as the leader of Chechnya in 2000; the elder Kadyrov was assassinated by separatists in 2004 — other Chechens despise the strongman and his Kremlin ties, choosing instead to fight on behalf of Ukraine.

“I want to tell Ukrainians that real Chechens, today, are defending Ukraine,” a dissident Chechen commander said last month.

The Hill

Markarova says reparations, security guarantee talks need to occur if Russia exits Ukraine

March 20, 2022

Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova on Sunday said that if Russia ended its invasion of Ukraine and withdrew from the country, the issue of reparations and safety guarantees would need to be discussed.

Markarova discussed the current state of Ukraine on CBS’s “Face the Nation” when host Margaret Brennan asked her what Ukraine’s vision for an end to the war looked like, noting that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had recently said that a withdrawal of Russian troops would not be enough for U.S. sanctions to be lifted.

“I will let Secretary Blinken to say what he said. But for us, clearly, it’s a brutal attack. We’ve lost people, many of our cities are destroyed and still are being destroyed. We’ve lost 60 universities completely, I mean, they’re erased… So we need this to stop they need to stop and get out from Ukraine,” Markarova said.

“But we also need to be talking about reparations, about the security guarantees and everything else. We need to know that this attack – which I want to remind is not the first attack, Russia attacked us in 2014. Russia attacked us in 1980 and so we know that the goal that Russia has in this now as it’s used to having in the past is to destroy Ukraine,” she added.

Despite the continued destruction and civilian deaths, Markarova said Ukraine was still open to negotiations that would lead to an end to the war.

“Now of course from the day one, our president said we would like this to stop we are ready to negotiate. Negotiate does not mean to surrender. We are not ready to give up on either our dreams on the territorial sovereignty or integrity,” she said. “But we are ready to negotiate even with the brutal enemy in order to stop it. And we’re asking all of our friends and allies to help us to aid fight successfully, but also to put all the pressure so that Russia negotiates.”

The Week

Ukraine has ‘defeated the initial Russian campaign,’ study concludes

Grayson Quay, Weekend editor – March 20, 2022

The D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War concluded that “Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war,” in an assessment published Saturday, The New York Times reported.

The assessment argues that Russia had failed in its initial goal of swiftly capturing Kyiv and other major cities and toppling the Ukrainian government and that Russian forces “are very unlikely” to capture these major objectives if they persist in their present strategy.

“The doctrinally sound Russian response,” the assessment concluded, would be for Russian forces to pause and regroup instead of “continuing to feed small collections of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive.”

United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made similar comments in Bulgaria on Saturday. “I think [Russia] envisioned that they would move rapidly and very quickly seize the capital city. They’ve not been able to do that,” he said, according to CNN.

In an address to the nation delivered Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said over 14,000 Russian troops have been killed since the invasion began on Feb. 24. The U.S. estimates Russian military deaths at around 7,000.

“In places of especially fierce battles, the frontline of our defense is simply piled with the corpses of Russian soldiers,” Zelensky said.

Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday that the “deficiencies of the Russian military are exacerbating the damage and risks of the war.”

Schake argued that “Russia’s first resort to overcome inadequacies has been to shift its focus from attacking military forces to targeting civilian populations indiscriminately.”

As of Saturday, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was able to confirm that 847 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the fighting, though the report also says the “OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher.”

Reuters

Russia uses hypersonic missiles in strike on Ukraine arms depot

March 19, 2022

LONDON (Reuters) – Russia said on Saturday it had used hypersonic Kinzhal (Dagger) missiles to destroy a large weapons depot in Ukraine’s western Ivano-Frankivsk region.

Russia’s Interfax news agency said it was the first time Russia had deployed the hypersonic Kinzhal system since it sent its troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told a briefing that the underground depot hit by the Kinzhal system on Friday housed Ukrainian missiles and aircraft ammunition, according to a recording of the briefing shared by Russian news agencies.

Reuters was not able to independently verify Konashenkov’s statements.

A spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force command confirmed a Russian missile strike on Delyatyn in the Ivano-Frankivsk region on Friday, without giving further details.

Russia prides itself on its advanced weaponry, and President Vladimir Putin said in December that Russia was the global leader in hypersonic missiles, whose speed, manoeuvrability and altitude make them difficult to track and intercept.

The Kinzhal missiles are part of an array of weapons unveiled in 2018.

Konashenkov added on Saturday that Russian forces had also destroyed military radio and reconnaissance centres near the Ukrainian port city of Odessa using the Bastion coastal missile system.

Moscow refers to its actions in Ukraine as a “special operation” to weaken its southern neighbour’s military capabilities and root out people it calls dangerous nationalists.

Ukrainian forces have mounted stiff resistance and Western countries have imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia in an effort to force it to withdraw its forces.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Frances Kerry and Helen Popper)