Category: Ukraine War

Reuters

Russia gives up key northeast towns as Ukrainian forces advance

Max Hunder and Vitalii Hnidyi – September 10, 2022

KYIV/HRAKOVE, Ukraine (Reuters) -Moscow abandoned its main bastion in northeastern Ukraine on Saturday, in a sudden collapse of one of the war’s principal front lines after Ukrainian forces made a rapid advance.

The swift fall of Izium in Kharkiv province was Moscow’s worst defeat since its troops were forced back from the capital Kyiv in March. Ukraine hailed it as a turning point in the 6-month-old war, with thousands of Russian soldiers leaving behind ammunition stockpiles and equipment as they fled.

Russian forces used Izium as the logistics base for one of their main campaigns – a months-long assault from the north on the adjacent Donbas region comprised of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The state-run TASS news agency quoted Russia’s defence ministry as saying it had ordered troops to leave the vicinity and reinforce operations elsewhere in Donetsk.

The head of Russia’s administration in Kharkiv told residents to evacuate the province and flee to Russia to “save lives,” TASS reported. Witnesses described traffic jams of cars with people leaving Russian-held territory.

If the reported gains are held, it would be a serious blow for Russia, which Western intelligence services say has suffered huge casualties. It would also be a big boost for Ukraine, which is keen to show Western nations supplying it with weapons it deserves their continued support.

There is pressure on Kyiv to demonstrate progress before winter sets in, amid threats by Russian President Vladimir Putin to halt all energy shipments to Europe if Brussels goes ahead with a proposal to cap the price of Russian oil exports.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in Kyiv that Ukrainian forces had demonstrated they were capable of defeating the Russian army with the weapons given to them.

“And so I reiterate: the more weapons we receive, the faster we will win, and the faster this war will end,” he said.

In his nightly video address on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s armed forces had recovered around 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) of territory since its counter-offensive was launched earlier this month.

“The Russian army is claiming the title of fastest army in the world … keep running!” Andriy Yermak, Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, wrote on Twitter.

Ukrainian officials stopped short of confirming they had recaptured Izium, but Yermak earlier posted a photo of troops on its outskirts and tweeted an emoji of grapes. The city’s name means “raisin.”

The Russian withdrawal announcement came hours after Ukrainian troops captured the city of Kupiansk farther north, the sole railway hub supplying Russia’s entire front line across northeastern Ukraine. Ukrainian officials posted photos early on Saturday of their troops raising the country’s blue-and-yellow flag in front of Kupiansk’s city hall.

That left thousands of Russian troops abruptly cut off from supplies along a front that has seen some of the most intense battles of the war.

Igor Girkin, a former commander of pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, called the Russian pullback “a major defeat” in remarks on Telegram.

MECHANISED ASSAULT

Ukraine has for weeks been talking up a big counteroffensive in the south, which also is under way though details are sparse.

Russia still occupies extensive territory in the Donbas and in the south near the Crimean Peninsula it seized in 2014.

Days ago, Kyiv’s forces burst through the front line in the northeast and have since recaptured dozens of towns and villages in a swift mechanised assault, surging forward dozens of kilometres (miles) a day.

Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, sounded a cautionary note, urging people not to report prematurely that towns have been “taken” just because Ukrainian troops were sighted. Troops entered Balakliia a few days ago, she said, but it was only on Saturday that Ukraine established control in the city.

In Hrakove, one of dozens of villages recaptured in the Ukrainian advance, Reuters saw burnt-out vehicles bearing the “Z” symbol of Russia’s invasion. Boxes of ammunition were scattered along with rubbish at positions the Russians had abandoned in evident haste.

“Hello everyone, we are from Russia,” was spray-painted on a wall. Three bodies lay in white body bags in a yard.

The regional chief of police, Volodymyr Tymoshenko, said Ukrainian police moved in the previous day, and checked the identities of local residents who had lived under Russian occupation since the invasion’s second day.

“The first function is to provide help that they need. The next job is to document the crimes committed by Russian invaders on the territories which they temporarily occupied,” he said.

‘FIGHTING IS GETTING CLOSER’

A witness in Valuyki, a town in Russia’s Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine, told Reuters she saw families from Kupiansk eating and sleeping in their cars along roads.

“I was at the market today and saw a lot of people from Kupiansk. They say half of the city was taken by the Ukrainian army and Russia is retreating … the fighting is getting closer,” the witness said.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said officials were giving food and medical aid to people queuing at a crossing into Russia. Senator Andrey Turchak, from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, reported more than 400 vehicles at the frontier.

Russian rocket fire hit Kharkiv city on Saturday evening, killing at least one person and damaging several homes, part of a surge in shelling since Kyiv’s counter-offensive, Ukrainian officials said.

Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield accounts.

“The advance is enormous. There are sporadic battles, but mostly the occupiers are fleeing,” Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Gaidai told Ukrainian television on Saturday.

(Reporting by Reuters reporters; Writing by Peter Graff, Andrew Heavens and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Daniel Wallis)

Daily Beast

Moscow Officials Urge Putin to GTFO: ‘Everything Went Wrong’

Allison Quinn – September 10, 2022

More and more Russian officials are urging Vladimir Putin to get the hell out of the Kremlin as Moscow suffered another series of humiliating defeats in Ukraine this weekend.

Just one day after several municipal deputies in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg called on the State Duma to try the Russian leader for treason, their colleagues in Moscow joined in and demanded he step down because his views are “hopelessly outdated.”

The open letter to Putin from municipal deputies in the Russian capital’s Lomonosovsky district started out by seemingly trying to let him down gently, telling him he had “good reforms” in his first term and part of his second.

But then, “everything went wrong,” the deputies said.

“The rhetoric that you and your subordinates use has been riddled with intolerance and aggression for a long time, which in the end effectively threw our country back into the Cold War era. Russia has again begun to be feared and hated, we are once again threatening the whole world with nuclear weapons,” the letter read.

“We ask you to relieve yourself of your post due to the fact that your views and your governance model are hopelessly outdated and hinder the development of Russia and its human potential,” the deputies said in closing.

Though they made no mention of the war against Ukraine, their plea came as Putin’s deranged “special military operation” next door took a spectacular nosedive, with thousands of Russian forces fleeing as Ukraine’s military launched a series of surprise counter-offensives and reclaimed nearly 400 square miles of territory in a matter of days.

Putin Insists His War Against Ukraine Is Doing Great Things for Russia

Even as Russian defense officials sought to play down the mass surrender as nothing more than a strategic maneuver, it was clearly not perceived that way even by many of Putin’s most loyal cronies.

The same Russian propagandists who’d spent the first six months of the war thumping their chests about a supposedly “inevitable victory” suddenly changed their tune. Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT who’d repeatedly called for Moscow to mercilessly obliterate Ukraine, suddenly posted a sentimental screed on Twitter calling for unity between the two nations.

“In this situation, the best picture of the future is the overall picture of the past. Our shared past, recent. When everyone was together, when there was Victory Day, when there was a parade, when both Russian and Ukrainian were taught,” she wrote, waxing nostalgic over a time when “wonderful songs were sung both in one language and the other.”

Even the pro-Kremlin Telegram channels run by Russian military bloggers had a dramatic change of tune as Ukraine claimed new wins Saturday: They began to openly blast military leadership—and Putin personally—for the embarrassing failures.

“Stalin, as much of a vampire as he was, never stooped to this and said how we lost nothing and there are no problems,” wrote one pro-Kremlin blogger. “For him, those who cowardly run away and ‘withdraw troops’ were the alarmists.”

Fortune

‘We realized that there’s no way we can return’: Russia’s best and brightest are leaving the country in record numbers. 6 young Russians explain why they left

Yvonne Lau – August 20, 2022

Three months ago, Sonya, a 25-year-old who works at a major mobile gaming company and moonlights as a tutor, made one of the toughest decisions of her life: She left Russia.

She had an old but cozy communal apartment with her boyfriend and two other roommates in Moscow’s city center, a tight-knit group of friends, and spent several days a week taking classes at a local dance academy—her lifelong passion.

“It’s my home. My family, friends are there. My whole life. How can you possibly abandon all these things?” she told Fortune.

But like countless other young educated Russians, Sonya, who asked that only her first name be used, packed her bags and fled the country after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Over 3.8 million Russians left from January to March this year, according to the Federal Security Services’ own estimates. Some left for work or travel reasons, but many also left because of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Other estimates put the number of people who left because of the war at 300,000 to 3.8 million. The exact number is still unknown. A recent survey from non-governmental organization OK Russians says that the average age of Russians who left the country after Feb. 24 is 32 years old, while 80% of them have a higher education degree.

And as the war approaches its six month anniversary, the country is experiencing a second wave of outward migration, as individuals and families who needed more time to wrap up their lives are now leaving. And although the estimates vary widely, this year’s mass exodus from the country is comparable to the initial emigration out of Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed and 1.2 million Russians left in 1992 and 1993. Russia’s current, large-scale brain drain of young, skilled and educated citizens, could decimate sectors from journalism, to academia, and technology, experts say.

Sonya was part of the second exodus. In March, she bought tickets for the cheapest flight out, which was $650—only slightly less than her monthly salary of $750—and left in May. She said she realized early on that life in Russia was untenable, because of “the war… more horrid details about the situation in Ukraine were being revealed. The government, the system. Inhumane [and] anti-democratic laws. A ruined economy.”

“Everyday we were, and still are, going through an uncontrollable stream of shame and anger,” she says.

For a better future

Almost overnight, Putin’s war on Ukraine turned Russia into a global pariah and plunged the economy into chaos.

International leaders condemned Putin’s actions, and Western nations hit the country with unprecedented sanctions, including cutting it off from SWIFT, the international payments system.

Since February, over 1,000 global companies have curbed their operations in Russia, curtailing job opportunities and access to goods and services for Russians. Inflation soared to nearly 18%, while real wages plunged 7.2% in April.

In the first quarter of this year, the number of Russians living below the poverty line surged to 20.9 million—14.3% of the population, compared to 12.4 million in the last quarter of 2021, an increase of nearly 67%, according to Russia’s government statistics agency, which attributes the rise in poverty to inflation. Former Putin aide Andrei Illarionov told the BBC in April that this number could double or triple as the war continues.

As a result, young people in Russia envision an uncertain and unstable life ahead due to the war. They’re more opposed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than other demographics groups because they don’t want war, nor to be isolated from the rest of the world, according to surveys and experts.

“They feel more acutely than other groups that the war has deprived them of a future,” Kseniya Kirillova, an analyst for think tank Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), told Fortune.

Last June, 23-year-old Roman Pastukhov left his hometown of Blagoveshchensk, a small Russian city where China is a 5-minute pontoon ride away. He knew he had to leave Russia to obtain a widely-recognized post-graduate degree, and had received a scholarship to study environmental science and technology in Japan.

Russia’s social, political, and economic problems, which have piled up over the years, made living in Russia an unattractive prospect, Pastukhov told Fortune. “A mid-range job won’t get you anywhere,” he said, citing low salaries, high inflation, and an unstable ruble.

Pastukhov and his wife Anastasiia, had planned to return to Russia to see family and figure out the next chapter of their lives. But Putin’s war reinforced that living there would only bring financial instability and repression. After Feb. 24, Pastukhov lost access to his investment accounts, due to western sanctions on Russian banks.

He says at first, he was mostly upset and terrified for his friends in Ukraine. Now, he’s shocked at how well state propaganda is influencing Russians.

“We realized that there’s no way we can return to Russia anytime soon. Once we get in, we might not be able to get out. Staying outside seems to be the safest option for now,” Pastukhov says.

‘The creative class that I know has already left Russia’

For over a decade, 32-year-old digital artist Grishanti Holon—a professional pseudonym— participated in radical art groups, including the infamous anti-government collective Voina, and hung up anti-Putin posters.

Despite his activism, the government recognized his talent and awarded him with the title of “Talent of Russia” in 2019. But he says life under Putin’s regime had by then become unlivable because free creative and political expression was impossible.

By December 2021, the “atmosphere became so tense” that he left Moscow for Bali with his partner and professional team, Holon told Fortune. He believes if he had tried to do it after the war started, he would not be able to.

“I’m more than sure I would’ve been detained and imprisoned,” he says. After the war began, he halted a digital NFT project in partnership with Russian state bank Sberbank mid-launch, as he didn’t want to support the country’s war effort, even indirectly.

Now, the “vast majority of the creative class that I know has already left Russia. [Our community] in Bali alone is several hundred people,” Holon says.

Academics, activists and tech workers are also leaving in droves. Around 10% of Russia’s tech workforce has left—or is planning to leave—the country, the Russian Association for Electronic Communications told Russia’s Parliament in May.

Elena, a 31-year-old freelancer who creates content on YouTube, shared her story with Fortune in March, when she fled Moscow for Istanbul. Her elderly parents ask when she will return, but she says she has no plans to do so because the “news and ideas coming from the Russian government terrifies me,” she told Fortune.

She’s now learned basic Turkish and opened an account with a European digital bank. She says her friends have settled in Brazil and South Korea.

“Educated people who understand the real situation are leaving the country; selling their houses, making different documents, and learning foreign languages,” she says.

In January 2021, 36-year-old Andrey Gusev, the product head for blockchain and gaming firm Sabai Ecoverse, left Zelenograd, a small city outside of Moscow, for Phuket for better career opportunities. He has no plans to return.

“Seventy percent of my friends, who were in intellectual spheres…like IT, science and engineering, have left or are actively looking for ways to leave Russia,” he told Fortune.

Another tech worker, Alexander Salomatov, founder of metaverse and crypto consulting firm Soulmate Consulting, left Moscow for Bali in January of this year. He wanted to develop tech projects with a global team and user base, which seemed difficult to do in Russia. But it was the war that reinforced his belief that “now is not the best time” to live in Russia and traditional allies like Belarus and Kazakhstan.

“I can’t image what [good] is going to happen in Russia… if all of the most talented, energetic, and enterprising people have left their homeland,” Holon says.

Lost human capital

The mass flight of human capital—tech workers, academics, journalists, and anti-war activists—could decimate certain sectors and hurt a Russian economy that’s already reeling and largely cut off from international trade and business.

The country has now lost its “most valuable human resources,” Michael Reynolds, director of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Princeton University, told Fortune. “Young, educated, talented, and entrepreneurial Russians who, with their education and skills, would have become leaders in the Russian economy and helped drive its growth,” he says.

Some Russians will continue to contribute to their home economy through remote work, and can act as a sanctions buffer by setting up import-export operations in countries like Turkey, Armenia, and India. But the “bulk of this talent will be lost,” Reynolds says.

The Russian economy isn’t simply going to collapse because of the exodus, experts say. The supply of talented and skilled workers remaining in Russia—approximately only 30% of Russians hold a passport that lets them travel abroad—is “sufficient to keep the economy afloat,” Margarita Zavadskaya, a social science senior research fellow at the University of Helsinki’s Finnish Centre for Russian and East European Studies, told Fortune. 

“But those who would replace [emigres] are likely to be less [skilled] on average and will… be more politically compliant,” she says. Some young Russians who stayed behind, like poet and teacher Katya V., who told her story to Fortune in March, says that she and her friends who remained in Russia did so to support their families and to protest from within. “I don’t want to give up everything here for [the government] to enjoy [ruling] without any resistance,” she says.

Still, the bottom line is that the Russian economy is losing competent and competitive [workers],” Zavadskaya says.

Putin has sought to portray the brain drain from the country as a positive, saying Russians who left the country and those who hold pro-western views as “traitors” who seek to destroy Russia.

“The problem is that… their [slave] mentality is there, not here, with our people. I am convinced that a natural and necessary self-detoxification of society like this will strengthen our country,” Putin said earlier this year.

But the government is showing signs that it might not let go of expats so easily.

Russian human rights organization Perviy Otdel (First Department) reported in May that FSB agents have started asking the relatives of those who have fled the country to ask them to return.

And Russia’s prospects for rebuilding and reaccumulating its lost human capital will ultimately be difficult in the short-term and with Putin still in power.

“Russia’s economic revival is only possible if the devastating war [ends], and the existing political regime collapses,” Zavadskaya says.

Russia would need to promise economic and political stability to attract Russians to return, Reynolds says. But as he notes, “there is no prospect of stability now.”

Daily Beast

How Putin Is Pushing His Army Bosses Through a ‘Meat Grinder’ of Death

Shannon Vavra – August 10, 2022

Russia has now lost at least 100 senior officers since it invaded Ukraine earlier this year, according to some tallies. It’s a devastating milestone for Moscow—and just the latest indication that Vladimir Putin’s war effort in Ukraine is wavering.

In the past two days alone, three senior Russian officers were reported dead: Lt. Colonel Nikolay Gorban, a commander from the Foreign Security Service (FSB) special forces; army aviation commander Colonel Vasily Kleshchenko; and Colonel Vitaly Tsikul of Russia’s 90th Tank Division—reportedly the 100th Russian senior officer to die in the war.

While exact tallies of Russian casualties can be difficult to pin down, a British intelligence analysis released this week found that at least 10 Russian generals have died on the battlefield since February.

But it’s not just deaths that are decimating Russia’s forces. Russia has been chipping away at its leadership ranks just by firing them outright, too. General-Colonel Aleksandr Chayko, the former commander of the Eastern Military District, was dismissed in May, according to British intelligence. Russia has likely replaced General-Colonel Aleksandr Zhuravlev with General-Lieutenant Vladimir Kochetkov to head up the Western Military District. General Aleksandr Dvornikov, who was heading up the operation in Ukraine, has also reportedly been dismissed.

The series of killings and firings could be an indication that Russia’s forces are still, nearly six months into the war, mismanaged from the inside out, according to Glen Howard, the president of the Jamestown Foundation.

Another General Killed as Russian Leak Admits ‘Big Shot Fucking Command’ Was Obliterated

“I see a lot of that was just kind of their own negligence and sloppy generalship,” said Howard, who previously worked in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

The series of dismissals likely represents Moscow trying to find an approach that works for the war in Ukraine—but the continued hemorrhaging means President Putin probably just hasn’t figured it out yet.

“Putin is definitely adopting a strategy trying to find a fighting general that will succeed,” Howard said. “And luckily for us, he hasn’t found one yet.”

Russia’s military has struggled from the outset of the war to achieve key objectives. Russian troops failed to seize Kyiv, the capital, in the early days of the war, faltering instead outside of the capital due to a series of logistics failures. Putin had plans to install a Moscow-backed regime in Ukraine and take over the entire country, neither of which have come to pass. And troops have been abandoning and sabotaging equipment, according to reports from Ukrainian intelligence.

Putin’s trial-and-error approach has been prominent throughout the war, in part because Ukrainian forces have been so resistant to the invasion, applying pressure on the Russian forces so much that they have to adapt their plans to meet Ukraine’s fight, according to the Pentagon.

“They have made some incremental gains in the east, although not very much in the last couple weeks, but that has come at extraordinary cost to the Russian military because of how well the Ukrainian military has performed and all the assistance that the Ukrainian military has gotten,” Colin Kahl, Biden’s undersecretary of defense for policy said in a Monday briefing. “And I think now, conditions in the east have essentially stabilized and the focus is really shifting to the south, and in part, that’s because the Ukrainians are starting to put some pressure down south and the Russians have been forced to redeploy their forces down there.”

All of that second-rate work is seeping into leadership circles, too; Russia’s military’s failures in the war have likely led to a series of dismissals of Russian leadership, according to British intelligence.

“The poor performance of Russia’s armed forces during its invasion of Ukraine has been costly for Russia’s military leadership, highly likely resulting in the dismissal of at least six Russian commanders since the start of hostilities in February 2022,” the intelligence report noted.

All of these losses are making Russia’s fighting force progressively less impressive, which could mean Russia is in for a grueling fight ahead.

“The war is taking a toll on them,” Howard said. “We faced their ‘A team,’ and now they don’t have any more reserved. The best of their best? We faced them and defeated them. Now we’re facing the ‘B Team.’ And so as they fight the ‘B team,’ they’re now moving into the ‘C Team.’ The quality level is just deteriorating.”

The diminished status of Russia’s forces will be welcome news for Ukrainians and Western nations, including the United States, as they continue to provide key military aid to Ukraine. In a war of attrition, with both sides intent on outlasting the other, both militaries are focused on grinding down the other military until they throw in the towel.

The significant losses Russia is suffering could place an increasing amount of pressure on Putin to either call it quits in Ukraine, or lean into kicking off a greater mobilization. So far, Putin has only admitted domestically that Russia is waging a “special military operation” in Ukraine, not an all-out war, and has been unwilling to kick off a larger mobilization.

And although the Russian forces have tried to recoup from their early failures in the war with a series of regroupings and change in approach, troops and leadership are still bearing some of the costs.

Russia has sustained between 70,000 and 80,000 casualties since February, according to a Department of Defense assessment shared Monday.

The Tricks Putin Is Cooking Up in His Mysterious War ‘Pause’

It’s “pretty remarkable considering that the Russians have achieved none of Vladimir Putin’s objectives at the beginning of the war,” Kahl said of the dwindling numbers.

That’s a significant jump from other U.S. government assessments in recent weeks. Just last month, CIA Director Bill Burns said the Russians had suffered about 60,000 casualties.

“The meat grinder continues,” Howard said. “There’s still a large number of people getting killed.”

And although dismissals and death are wrecking Putin’s forces, it doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the war or a Russian loss. According to the Department of Defense’s assessment, as of Monday, it’s not possible to say “with a high degree of certainty” at this stage how long Russia can sustain these levels of losses.

“A lot of it would depend, I think, on the political decisions that Vladimir Putin will make ultimately about whether he can continue to recruit and send additional forces to the front, whether he was at some point… willing to engage in national mobilization or some other effort,” Kahl said.

And already this week Putin has faced some embarrassing news. Explosions tore through a Russian air base on Tuesday in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. A Ukrainian military official claimed responsibility for the damage, suggesting that a long-range Ukrainian weapons system was used to launch the attack, according to The New York Times.

USA Today

Russia has endured 80,000 casualties, US official says; oligarch’s $90 million plane may be seized: Aug. 8 recap

John Bacon, Tom Vanden Brook, Jorge L. Ortiz – August 10, 2022

The Russian military has suffered as many as 80,000 dead and wounded since its invasion of Ukraine, Colin Kahl, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, said Monday.

He called it an “extraordinary cost” inflicted by Ukrainian forces fighting for stakes that “are existential for them.” The figure is nearly twice the 42,340 Russian casualties estimated by the Ukrainian military, which does not report on its own combat losses. Neither does the Kremlin.

Russia has not achieved the objectives President Vladimir Putin’s intended when the invasion began Feb. 24, Kahl said.

“His overall objective was to overrun the entire country, to engage in regime change in Kyiv, to snuff out Ukraine as an independent sovereign and independent nation,” Kahl said. “None of that has happened.”

Russia also appears have lost as many as 4,000 armored vehicles, including tanks, Kahl said. Ukrainian officials peg that number at 4,070 armored vehicles and 1,811 tanks.

Pentagon officials had been reluctant to quantify casualties on both sides of the war, citing unclear estimates. By comparison, in 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, about 50,000 U.S. troops were wounded and more than 5,200 were killed.

Latest developments:

►The Ukraine military said Monday that it destroyed a Russian ammunition depot in the Kharkiv region and shot down a cruise missile near Odesa.

►Daniil Medvedev, Liudmila Samsonova and Daria Kasatkina, three Russian tennis players who were banned from competing at Wimbledon because of the war in Ukraine, won tournaments over the weekend that serve as U.S. Open tune-ups. “We are all very angry about the situation,” Samsonova said of the Wimbledon ban.

US to seize oligarch’s $90 million jet

Federal officials targeting Russian oligarchs are preparing to seize a jet they say is owned via a chain of shell companies and relatives by billionaire Andrei Skoch.

A New York-based federal judge has signed a seizure warrant for the Airbus A319-100, a model typically used to carry more than 130 passengers in commercial service. Federal prosecutors say the $90 million jet is sitting at an airport in Kazakhstan. The United States and Kazakhstan have a treaty requiring each country to honor the other’s warrants and other law enforcement actions. Federal officials said they believe Skoch is also the owner of the $156 million yacht Madame Gu and the yacht’s helicopter, both of which also have been targeted for possible seizure.

President Joe Biden has created and deployed a team of federal prosecutors and other experts to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs as part of efforts to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies for the invasion of Ukraine.

While federal officials routinely conduct this kind of work, Biden’s Task Force KleptoCapture has gotten new resources and additional staffing to help and has already seized yachts it says are owned by oligarchs. Biden has proposed selling off the seized property to help fund Ukrainian reconstruction and defense efforts.

“A seizure like this, that’s step No. 1 in a process that ultimately ends in forfeiture,” said Stefan D. Cassella, a former top federal asset forfeiture prosecutor. “The biggest hurdle is proving that the particular airplane is owned by this particular person.”

– Trevor Hughes

US sends $1 billion more in security aid to Ukraine

The Biden administration will send another $1 billion in ammunition, weapons and vehicles to Ukraine, the Pentagon announced Monday.

The latest military aid package includes ammunition for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, that Ukraine has used to destroy Russian ammunition depots and command posts dozens of miles behind the front line in eastern Ukraine. Defense officials have credited the weapon and stiff Ukrainian resolve with slowing the Russian advance there. The package includes conventional artillery ammunition, armored ambulances and anti-tank weapons.

This represents the largest single shipment of security aid among the 18 sent to Ukraine since August 2021, Pentagon spokesman Todd Breasseale said. The Biden administration has provided Ukraine with $9.8 billion in military aid, the lion’s share of the $11.8 billion in security assistance the U.S. has sent the eastern European country since 2014.

Melitopol would be ‘reunified’ with Russia under referendum

The Russian-appointed leader of Ukraine’s occupied Zaporizhzhia region signed an order Monday to hold a referendum on “reunification” with Russia that could take place as soon as next month. The announcement from Evgeny Balitsky came one day after the city’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, said Ukrainian forces used U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets to strike Russian troops in the area, killing more than 100.

“I am signing an order to the Central Election Commission to start preparations for a referendum,” Balitsky said at a public forum in the southeastern city of Melitopol. “We are together with Russia.”

Russia stops allowing U.S. nuclear arsenal inspections that are part of treaty

At a time of increasingly strained relations, Russia said it will stop allowing the U.S. to inspect its nuclear arsenals, claiming Western sanctions imposed because of the assault on Ukraine have hampered similar tours of U.S. facilities by Russian monitors.

In halting U.S. inspections under the New START nuclear arms control treaty for the first time, Moscow said sanctions on Russian flights, visa restrictions and other obstacles are keeping Russian military experts from inspecting U.S. nuclear weapons sites, giving the Americans “unilateral advantages.”

The development came on the same day UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged countries with nuclear weapons to abide by their commitment to not be the first ones to use them, warning that the nuclear arms race has returned amid growing international tension.

Moscow, Kyiv blame each other for shelling at nuclear plant

“Suicidal” shelling of Europe’s largest nuclear plant must be halted and international inspectors must be granted access to ensure its safe operation, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said Monday. Moscow and Kyiv blamed each other for a series of attacks at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station that the International Atomic Energy Agency said has created “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster.”

Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Andriy Yusov, said his organization had received credible information from several sources that Russian forces have planted explosives at the plant to head off an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive in the region. The Ukraine power company Energoatom quoted a Russian general as saying, “The station will be either Russian or nobody’s.”

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of carrying out the rocket attacks. The Russian Embassy in Washington issued a statement blaming Ukraine for the shelling, claiming a “disinformation campaign” in the U.S. media is falsely blaming Russian forces.

Ukrainian officials have previously said Russia is launching attacks from the plant and using Ukrainian workers there as human shields.

Embargo eased, Ukrainian grain shipment is first to reach destination

A cargo ship carrying 12,000 tons of Ukrainian corn arrived Monday in Turkey, the first vessel to arrive at its destination under a deal that eased Russia’s tight blockade of Ukrainian ports.

The Turkey-flagged Polarnet docked at Derince port in the Gulf of Izmit, three days after setting off from Chornomorsk. The first ship to depart Ukraine, the Sierra Leone-flagged Razoni, left Aug. 1 but had not reached its destination in Lebanon and was anchored off Turkey’s southern coast, according to the Marine Traffic website.

The ships are sailing under a deal to unblock grain supplies and stave off a global food crisis. Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the first ship’s arrival “sends a message of hope to every family in the Middle East, Africa and Asia: Ukraine won’t abandon you. If Russia sticks to its obligations, the ‘grain corridor’ will keep maintaining global food security.”

Six more ships carrying agricultural cargo have received authorization to leave Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, carrying more than 236,000 tons of grain. Ukraine has 20 million tons of grain sitting in silos.

Battered infrastructure could lead to humanitarian crisis

The eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk has no running water because of unrelenting Russian bombing, so residents must fill bottles by hand at public pumps throughout the city. The city’s remaining population has adapted, but local officials warn that the arrival of winter could set the stage for a humanitarian crisis. Most of the eastern Donetsk region is without gas for heating, and public wells and municipal water pipes are likely to freeze in winter.

Lyubov Mahlii, 76, collects 5 gallons of water twice a day from a public tank near her apartment, dragging the plastic bottles up four flights of stairs.

“When there are bombings and sirens, we keep carrying it,” she said. “It’s a great risk for us, but what can we do?”

Contributing: The Associated Press

Daily Beast

Putin’s Twisted Mind Games Just Hit a Disturbing New Low

Shannon Vavra – August 10, 2022

Russian authorities have been trying to sow the seeds of a propaganda effort aimed at convincing residents of occupied territories that Ukraine is already divided, according to a new report from the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.

“Ukraine has already been divided,” the Russian occupiers said, according to the intelligence agency. “In the territory of the western regions, Polish zlotys were put into circulation, in most shops there are double price tags. There is nowhere to run from Russia. Ukraine is not what it used to be.”

The false information, which has been focused on Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia, according to the agency, is intended to inject doubt into residents of Ukraine nearly six months into the war, the intelligence agency said.

“The moves are aimed at undermining the moral and psychological stability of the Ukrainian-minded population remaining in the city,” the agency said in a statement.

Ukraine’s government urged residents to remember that Ukraine will not bow to Russia’s intimidation tactics, and that one day the territory will rid itself of occupiers.

How Putin Is Pushing His Army Bosses Through a ‘Meat Grinder’ of Death

“All residents of the occupied territories should remember: All Ukrainian lands will be freed, Ukraine will remain an indivisible and unitary state, and every occupier and collaborator will receive a well-deserved retribution,” the agency said.

The apparent propaganda effort is not an isolated incident. Russia has been waging an information operations war alongside its kinetic fight in Ukraine this year, too, in attempts to portray Ukraine and Ukrainian officials as the aggressors, and to curry support for Russia. In the days building up to the invasion earlier this year, Russia was preparing to run false flag operations against its own forces in order to claim a justification to attack Ukraine, an administration official told The Daily Beast in January.

In the months before the war began, too, Russian officials and Russian influencers spread and amplified narratives focused on painting Russia’s troop movements to the border with Ukraine as a response to provocation from the West and spreading anti-North Atlantic Treaty Organization sentiment.

News of the apparent Russian efforts to convince Ukrainians that their country is already being divided up comes as U.S. officials warn that Russia has a plan to annex certain Ukrainian regions. White House National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby warned just weeks ago that Russia has possible plans to annex all of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, as well as Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, just as Ukrainians work to mount a counteroffensive there.

In 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, Russia relied on spreading propaganda to reshape the narrative in its favor. Russia had throttled Ukrainian broadcasts in Crimea and replaced many of them with Russian broadcasts, enabling Moscow to spread pro-Russia narratives. And in March that year, when the referendum on Crimea showed support for joining Russia, only three in 10 Ukrainians outside Crimea believed the referendum reflected the truth while a majority of Crimeans polled as saying they thought it did reflect their views. (The referendum has widely been viewed a sham throughout the world; the United Nations announced the referendum was invalid in 2014, and nations, including the United States, have continued to reaffirm Crimea is a part of Ukraine and not recognize the peninsula’s annexation.)

The White House has warned that Russia may be redeploying the 2014 annexation playbook now.

“We’re seeing ample evidence in the intelligence and in the public domain that Russia intends to try to annex additional Ukrainian territory,” Kirby told reporters in a July briefing. “Russia is beginning to roll out a version of what you could call an ‘annexation playbook,’ very similar to the one we saw in 2014.”

Russia’s plans may include coordinating “sham referenda” and claiming justification to annex territories, Kirby said. Already, Russia’s plan includes installing proxy officials in seized territories.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine again this year, Russia’s efforts to spin the narrative about the war have built up to a steady pace and have targeted audiences outside of Ukraine as well. The Biden administration has assessed that Russian disinformation proxies have been working to paint Western aid to Ukraine as the reason the war is dragging on and the reason there is a looming food crisis, in an apparent attempt to dilute U.S. support for Ukraine, according to U.S. intelligence, as The Daily Beast first reported.

The European Union has worked to ban RT and Sputnik in order the curb Russia’s spread of propaganda and misinformation, but Russia has found ways to skirt around them. Russia has leaned on diplomats to spread disinformation in the meantime, and has begun leaning on over 200 websites with no clear Russia ties to spread Russian propaganda, including claims that Ukrainian forces have staged Russian attacks, according to the Associate Press and NewsGuard.

Reuters – Aerospace & Defense

Exclusive: Russia starts stripping jetliners for parts as sanctions bite

August 9, 2022

• This content was produced in Russia, where the law restricts coverage of Russian military operations in Ukraine

MOSCOW, Aug 8 (Reuters) – Russian airlines, including state-controlled Aeroflot (AFLT.MM), are stripping jetliners to secure spare parts they can no longer buy abroad because of Western sanctions, four industry sources told Reuters.

The steps are in line with advice Russia’s government provided in June for airlines to use some aircraft for parts to ensure the remainder of foreign-built planes can continue flying at least through 2025.Advertisement · Scroll to continueReport an ad

Sanctions imposed on Russia after it sent its troops into Ukraine in late February have prevented its airlines from obtaining spare parts or undergoing maintenance in the West.

Aviation experts have said that Russian airlines would be likely to start taking parts from their planes to keep them airworthy, but these are the first detailed examples.

At least one Russian-made Sukhoi Superjet 100 and an Airbus A350, both operated by Aeroflot, are currently grounded and being disassembled, one source familiar with the matter said.Advertisement · Scroll to continueReport an ad

The source declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue.

The Airbus A350 is almost brand new, the source said.

Most of Russia’s fleet of aircraft consists of Western passenger jets.

Equipment was being taken from a couple of Aeroflot’s Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s, as the carrier needs more spare parts from those models for its other Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s, the source said.

The Russian Ministry of Transport and Aeroflot did not reply to requests for comment.

‘MATTER OF TIME’

Russian-assembled Sukhoi Superjets are also heavily dependent on foreign parts. An engine has already been removed from one Superjet to allow another Superjet to continue flying, the first source said.Advertisement · Scroll to continue

To be sure, engines are frequently swapped between aircraft and are usually supplied under separate contracts, industry experts said. They are not considered part of the core airframe.

It is “only a matter of time” before Russia-based planes are cannibalised, a Western aviation industry source said.

Newer generations of jets – A320neo, A350 and Boeing 737 MAX and 787 – have technology that has to be constantly updated.

Within a year of the sanctions coming into effect, it will be a “challenge” to keep modern jets in service even for Russia’s highly developed and competent engineering base, Western sources have said. 

The logo of Russia’s flagship airline Aeroflot is seen on an Airbus A320 in Colomiers near Toulouse, France, September 26, 2017. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau/File PhotoRead More

The practice of removing parts to keep another plane flying is commonly known as turning the disused planes into “Christmas trees”. Although relatively rare, it is most often linked to financial difficulties and has never happened on the same scale as the widespread reshuffle being predicted in Russia in order to address the impact of sanctions.

Jetliners may be made operational again provided parts taken away are put back, though this would not necessarily reconstitute the traceability needed for jets to re-enter global markets.

Many parts have a limited life that must be logged.

Nearly 80% of Aeroflot’s fleet consists of Boeings (BA.N) and Airbuses (AIR.PA) – it has 134 Boeings and 146 Airbuses, along with nearly 80 Russia-made Sukhoi Superjet-100 planes as of end last year, based on the latest data available.

According to Reuters calculations based on data from Flightradar24, some 50 Aeroflot planes – or 15% of its fleet, including jets stranded by sanctions – have not taken off since late July.

Three out of seven Airbus A350s operated by Aeroflot, including one now being used for parts, did not take off for around three months, the Flightradar24 data shows.

Russian carriers flying fewer routes due to Western sanctions means there are unused jets grounded that can be stripped, a second industry source said.

“Western manufacturers understand that almost all Superjets are being operated in Russia,” said Oleg Panteleev, head of the Aviaport aviation think-tank. “You can simply stop producing and shipping spare parts – and it will hurt.”

DISMANTLING

The Russian aviation industry’s development plan up to 2030 estimated that Russia could face the biggest challenges with A350 and Bombardier Q series as maintenance on them is carried out overseas.

The Russian government’s advice envisages “partial dismantling of a certain parts of the aircraft fleet”, which would keep two thirds of the foreign fleet operational by end-2025.

The main challenge will be keeping engines and sophisticated electronic equipment in working order, said Panteleev.

“It will be hard to get them repaired,” he said.

Aeroflot, once among the world’s top airlines but now reliant on state support, experienced a 22% fall in traffic in the second quarter of this year from a year ago, the company’s data showed, after sanctions prevented it from flying to most Western destinations.

Securing supplies from countries which have not imposed sanctions on Russia is unlikely to help, as companies from Asia and the Middle East fear a risk of secondary sanctions against them by Western governments, the sources said.

“Each single part has its own (unique) number and if the documents will have a Russian airline as the final buyer, then no one would agree to supply, neither China nor Dubai,” the first source said, adding that all parts have to be made known to Boeing and Airbus before they are supplied to the end-user.

Register Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Josephine Mason, Matt Scuffham and Jane Merriman