The 18 House Republicans who voted against a resolution to support Finland, Sweden joining NATO
Mychael Schnell – July 18, 2022
More than a dozen House Republicans voted against a resolution on Monday that expressed support for Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
The House passed the measure, which had bipartisan sponsorship, in a 394-18 vote, with all the opposition coming from the Republican Party. Two Democrats and 17 Republicans did not vote.
Eighteen House Republicans objected to the measure: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Dan Bishop (N.C.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Madison Cawthorn (N.C.), Ben Cline (Va.), Michael Cloud (Texas), Warren Davidson (Ohio), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Bob Good (Va.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Morgan Griffith (Va.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Tom McClintock (Calif.), Mary Miller (Ill.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Chip Roy (Texas) and Jefferson Van Drew (N.J.).
The measure specifically demonstrates support for Finland and Sweden joining NATO — which they applied to do in May — and urges member states to formally support their push to join the alliance.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html
Additionally, the resolution opposes any attempts by the Russian Federation to adversely react to the decision by the two Nordic countries to join the military alliance and urges NATO countries to fulfill their 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) defense spending pledge that was agreed to at the 2014 Wales summit.
Passage of the measure came exactly two months after Finland and Sweden applied to become members of NATO and less than three weeks after the military alliance invited the pair of countries to join the group.
The push for Sweden and Finland to join NATO ramped up after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Moscow has since continued its offensive.
Massie said on Twitter on Monday following the vote that “America can’t afford to subsidize socialist Europe’s defense, nor should we. Tonight, I voted against the House Resolution urging NATO’s expansion into Sweden and Finland.”
His tweet included a link to a Newsweek article from March that said only eight of the 30 NATO countries met the guideline of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense in 2021 — a fact that was reflected in the NATO secretary general’s annual report.
Massie and other GOP lawmakers who objected to Monday’s resolution have voted against measures related to the Russia, Ukraine and the invasion in the past.
In May, Massie and Greene voted “no” on three bills connected to the invasion. One compelled foreign entities and individuals under U.S. authority to comply with sanctions on Russia and Belarus. Another called for making it U.S. policy to bar Russian officials from participating in meetings and activities in the Group of 20 and other financial institutions. The third would forbid the Treasury secretary from taking part in transactions related to the exchange of special drawing rights that Russia or Belarus possesses.
Belarus has supported Russia throughout its invasion of Ukraine.
The lawmakers also joined 54 Republicans that day in voting against a bill to suspend multilateral debt payments Ukraine owes.
In April, Massie, Greene, Cawthorn and Roy joined with four progressive lawmakers in opposing a measure urging President Biden to seize assets from sanctioned Russian oligarchs and use the money to help Kyiv amid its battle with Moscow.
Also in April, 10 GOP House members — including Massie, Greene, Biggs, Bishop, Davidson, Gaetz and Norman — voted against the Ukraine lend-lease bill, which sought to make it easier for the U.S. to send military assistance to Ukraine during Russia’s invasion.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. July 16 is the 143d day of full-scale war. The invading forces tried to advance from the north, east and south, shelling peaceful cities throughout Ukraine using artillery and bombing them from the air.
During this time, the Kremlin has changed the goals of its war in Ukraine several times. After a failed operation to seize Kyiv and then the retreat of its troops from Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy oblasts, Russian forces concentrated on fighting for the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, which were under Ukrainian governmental control before the full-scale Russian invasion.
Kherson remains the only provincial capital under Russian control. Russian forces maintain their hold on parts of Zaporizhzhya, Kherson, and Kharkiv oblasts.
Why hasn’t the Russian economy tanked yet? Putin has been preparing for this moment for years
Yvonne Lau – July 16, 2022
When Russia invaded Ukraine, countries around the world condemned the move, and abruptly cut economic, business and diplomatic ties.
Over 1,000 companies—from American to European and Japanese firms—abandoned their business operations in Russia. Western nations booted Russia from SWIFT—the international payments system that moves money around the world—and froze Russia’s central bank assets, barring it from accessing its $630 billion foreign reserve stash.
Across Russia, signs have emerged that the country is adapting to global economic isolation better than most people anticipated.
Russian businessmen have gobbled up western companies’ operations, like Siberian billionaire Alexander Govor’s purchase of McDonald’s 850 outlets across the country. Russian property developers, like MR Group are opening new shopping malls—simply sans western brands like H&M, Nike and Starbucks.
And despite becoming the world’s most sanctioned nation in the world, Russia’s economy hasn’t tanked. Russian President Vladimir Putin had began preparing the country years ago to endure western financial pressure by shoring up its currency reserves and befriending China. And in a stroke of luck, the Kremlin’s coffers are bursting because oil prices have skyrocketed, stabilizing the ruble.
The economy is staying afloat for now. But as the war drags on, cracks are beginning to show as Russia stares down its worst recession in 30 years, faces a looming EU oil embargo and grapples with a growing number of citizens pushed into poverty.
Customers stand in a queue to get in the Russian version of a former McDonald’s restaurant next day after its opening ceremony in Moscow on June 13, 2022. Former McDonald’s restaurants in Russia have been renamed “Vkusno i tochka” (“Delicious. Full Stop”), the new owner said ahead of their grand re-opening .
Stockpiling and rallies
After Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Putin began preparing the country’s economy to endure western sanctions. He stockpiled foreign currencies, reduced Russia’s dollar dependency and pivoted to a stronger partnership with China.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of this year, it did so with large currency reserves and minimal public debt.
In the weeks following the invasion, western nations pummelled Russia with harsh, unprecedented sanctions, restricting Russia’s access to the global financial system. In response, Russia barred citizens from transferring money to bank accounts abroad to prevent capital outflow, while the central bank imposed a 20% emergency interest rate hike as the ruble tumbled to record lows. Those “timely and strong” moves allowed the country to stave off a “full scale financial crisis,” Laura Solanko, senior advisor at The Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies in Transition (BOFIT), an organization that researches emerging economies, told Fortune.
Such measures “would have been very difficult to implement in a democracy, but [feasible] in an autocracy [where] state-owned companies play a larger role,” she says.
The widespread notion that the Russian economy would collapse from sanctions in a few short months was “as unrealistic as Russia’s own blitzkrieg plan to conquer Ukraine” in mere days, because of the government’s preparations to ensure a financially stable economy, Russian political scientist Ilya Matveev told Fortune.
But Russia hasn’t just played a good game of economic defense. Its invasion of Ukraine destabilized the global oil market, raising prices, which provided it with an incredible source of funding.
Petrodollars
Since Feb. 24, petrodollars from energy sales have filled the Kremlin’s coffers and offered it an economic lifeline.
In the first 100 days of the war, Russia earned a record $94 billion from fossil fuel sales, despite selling its crude at a 30% discount and exporting lower volumes, according to analysis from Switzerland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). In May alone, Russia raked in $20 billion from energy sales, alone, up 11% from April.
Russia’s energy revenue is “unprecedented, because prices are unprecedented,” said CREA analyst Lauri Myllyvirta. From January to May this year, the country’s energy revenue grew 50%, says the International Energy Agency (IEA). Russia’s current account surplus—which measures a country’s exports against its imports—reached nearly $139 billion in the first six months of 2022, helped by its profits from energy and commodity exports, coupled with a collapse in imports due to sanctions.
Those petrodollars also powered the ruble’s remarkable turnaround. Russia’s currency is the best-performing currency in the world this year. The ruble’s value plunged to less than one cent in March. But since January, it has surged 45% against the dollar. As of July 12, one U.S. dollar is worth 58.40 rubles. The ruble’s rally, in turn, has helped tame Russian inflation to its lowest level since February. In June, Russia’s consumer prices grew 15.9% year over year, compared to 17.1% in May and 17.8% in April, according to Russian government data.
The “bottom line” is that Russia’s oil and gas revenues haven’t been dented at all, allowing the government to keep funding the war and providing financial support for citizens, Peter Rutland, a Russia-focused professor of government at Wesleyan University, told Fortune.
“In the short run, the deck is stacked in favor of Russia,” he says.
Turbulence ahead
So far, Russia has managed to soften the blow to its economy and for its citizens. But its strong policy moves and growing oil revenues mask the ominous economic future that’s brewing just below the surface.
The ruble’s stunning turnaround is an artificial indicator that Russia’s economy is faring well, Sergei Guriev, scientific director of Sciences Po’s economics program and a research fellow at London-based think tank the Center for Economic Policy Research, told Fortune. Normally, a rising currency reflects the strengthened competitiveness of a country’s exports. But the main driver of the ruble’s strength is the collapse of Russian imports, which have plunged to 20-year lows, and drastically reduced its demand for dollars, Guriev says. The strong ruble doesn’t reflect Russia’s economic strength, but is a “symptom of something that’s very bad” for the nation, he says.
And behind the façade of a stabilizing economy, ordinary Russians are bearing the brunt of the sanctions. Russians’ real wages are expected to drop almost 6% this year, and their real disposable incomes set for a 7.5% decline, according to Russian bank VEB. Putin has authorized 10% hikes for pension incomes and minimum wages that went into effect last month. But even these boosts won’t stop Russians’ real wages, incomes and pensions from deteriorating, VEB said.
Although inflation is currently rising less rapidly than it was, double-digit inflation is set to continue in a country where 21 million people—nearly 15% of the national population—live below the poverty line, a number that has surged since the war began.
“Already-poor [Russians] will get poorer,” Matveev says. Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin aide, predicts that the number of Russians living in poverty will likely double, or even triple, as the war progresses, he told the BBC.
And four months into the war, Russian industries are suffering from a severe tech supply crunch.
Russia has replaced western goods with smartphones from China, refrigerators from Uzbekistan and 5G equipment from Israel and India since the war started. Still, there are big gaps that not even China—Russia’s largest trading partner—will be able to fill.
Sanctions have restricted western companies from supplying the country with chips, electrical equipment and other critical hardware needed to produce everything from kitchen appliances, cars, computers, data servers and military equipment. Entire supply routes for “[data] servers to computers to iPhones—everything—is gone,” one western chip executive told the FT.
China holds only 4% of the global semiconductor share and can’t make up the stymied supply from the world’s biggest chipmakers in the U.S. and Taiwan, Guriev says. Chinese firms are also holding back over concerns of triggering secondary sanctions from the west. The collapse of high-tech imports means that the Russian economy will undergo a “regressive transformation,” Matveev says. He notes that while the world progresses, Russia will be relegated to trying to reach its pre-war economic state, thus its technological and economic gap with the rest of the globe will widen over time.
Russia “hasn’t seen the worst yet,” even as its economy has undergone some initial shocks, Matveev says. “Unemployment will [increase] and shortages [of goods and parts] and price increases will continue,” he says.
Other experts agree. The EU’s sixth sanctions package against Russia, which will ban Russian seaborne crude by December and petroleum products by next February—90% of the bloc’s Russian oil imports—will be a major blow to the Kremlin if it’s implemented properly. The bloc accounted for 61% of Russia’s fossil fuel revenues from January to May this year. If the embargo is seriously enforced, Putin “won’t have enough money to recruit soldiers,” let alone prop up its citizens and industries, Guriev says.
Russia’s central bank expects an 8 to 10% gross domestic product (GDP) decline this year, compared to a pre-war growth forecast of 2%. That figure is a “substantial decline largely caused by western sanctions,” Solanko says.
Russia’s economic squeeze will come in the long run as the country deindustrializes, faces growing unemployment and continued stagflation and a run on goods, Rutland says.
In short, Russia is staring down its worst recession in 30 years, Guriev says.
Russia’s economic crises in 2009, 2014 and 2020 involved steep drops and fast recoveries. But experts agree that Russia won’t experience a speedy economic reboot his time around. Russia is facing a future of stagnation for years, perhaps even decades, Matveev says.
As Solanko notes, Russia is “isolating itself and decoupling from the global economy. This time, the fast recovery won’t come.”
FILE PHOTO: U.S. military forces fire a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rocket during the annual Philippines-US live fire amphibious landing exercise (PHIBLEX) at Crow Valley in Capas, Tarlac province, north of Manila
KYIV (Reuters) – Ukrainian rocket strikes have destroyed more than 30 Russian military logistics centres in recent weeks and significantly reduced Russia’s attacking potential, Ukraine’s defence ministry spokesperson said on Friday.
The official, Oleksandr Motuzianyk, singled out the role played by U.S.-produced HIMARS rocket systems, one of several types of long-range weapon supplied by the West to help Ukraine fight back against Russia.
“In the last weeks, over 30 of the enemy’s military logistical facilities have been destroyed, as a result of which the attacking potential of Russian forces has been significantly reduced,” Motuzianyk said on national television.
Motuzianyk told Reuters in separate comments that the 30 targets were destroyed by multiple launch rocket systems, including HIMARS.
If confirmed, the comments would suggest that Western weapons are having an impact on the battlefield and could indicate a shift in the war’s dynamic after nearly five months.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, has captured a chunk of territory in southern Ukraine and used its artillery supremacy in the east to make gradual territorial gains, eventually capturing Luhansk region.
A top Ukrainian general said on Thursday that Russia had not taken a “single metre” of land in the last week and that Ukrainian strikes were disrupting Russian supply lines, forcing Moscow to keep its ammunition further back from the front line. Reuters was not able to immediately confirm battlefield reports.
HIMARS have a longer range and are more precise than Ukraine’s Soviet-era artillery, allowing Ukrainian forces to hit Russian targets that were previously unreachable.
On Friday, Ukraine’s defence minister said Kyiv had taken receipt of a first consignment of M270 multiple rocket launch systems, without specifying which country provided them.
Russia on Thursday criticised the United States and Britain for helping train Ukraine’s armed forces, calling it part of NATO’s “hybrid warfare” against Moscow. It said Washington was providing Ukraine with instructors to help use HIMARS.
Kyiv said this week that its forces carried out strikes on Russian military infrastructure in a city that lies deep in Russian-occupied territory in southern Ukraine.
Motuzianyk also said that only 30% of Russian strikes were hitting military targets, with the rest landing on civilian sites. That assertion could not be verified by Reuters. Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians in what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Max Hunder; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
New report details Russian torture of Ukrainian civilians
Paulina Smolinski – July 15, 2022
FILE – Men wearing protective gear carry a dead body during the exhumation of killed civilians in Bucha, outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, April 8, 2022. / Credit: Efrem Lukatsky / AP
Washington — An international investigation has found grim new evidence of war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, identifying cases of direct targeting of civilians, torture, rape and forced deportations.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a regional security organization, issued a report Thursday detailing “clear patterns of serious violations of international humanitarian law” committed mainly by the Russian army.
The report describes in vivid detail the torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian troops.
In a summer camp in Bucha, just outside Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv that was occupied for over two weeks by Russian forces, the investigators said they found a series of torture chambers.
“In Zabuchchya, a village in the Bucha district, 18 mutilated bodies of murdered men, women, and children were discovered in a basement: some had their ears cut off, while others had their teeth pulled out,” according to the report.
Speaking Thursday in Vienna, U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE Michael Carpenter described a Russian missile attack on the central city of Vinnytsia that killed more than 20 people, including 3 children, as “disgusting,” but “a reality that we contend with each and every day.”
Ukrainian emergency services showed images of a child’s dead body lying on the ground next to a play stroller she had been pushing down the road with her mother when the missiles struck.
In an interview with CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov called the strike the latest proof that his country is at war with “a state of terrorists.”
“They’re using that weapon against civilian people, against the civilian facilities, against the hospitals… against the kindergartens,” he said.
The OSCE report says that as Russia is increasingly unable to muster enough of its own forces, it has recently begun resorting to conscripting Ukrainian men between the ages 18-65 from territory it occupies and sending them straight to the front lines, with little to no training.
“The escalation, and rising casualty rates, have begun to spark anger even among pro-Russian communities. Several videos posted online purportedly show the wives of Donetsk and Luhansk conscripts demanding assistance for their husbands and asking why men with no military background are being sent to fight,” according to the report.
Incidences of gender-based violence have remained prevalent throughout the war, the report states. Natalia Karbowska, co-founder and director of strategic development for the Ukrainian Women’s Fund, suggested during a June U.N. Security Council briefing that “the Russian Federation is using sexual violence and rape as instruments of terror to control civilians.”
In one instance, 25 girls aged 14 to 24 were allegedly kept in a basement in Bucha where they were gang-raped by Russian troops. Nine of the girls became pregnant, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights.
Russian President Vladimir Putin bestowed the honorary title of “guard” on the military unit accused of war crimes in Bucha, according to a Russian presidential decree.
In a Facebook post, the Russian Embassy in the U.S. dismissed the report as an attempt by Washington “to vilify the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” which it suggested was due to “dissatisfaction with the success of a special military operation.” The Putin regime has consistently referred to the invasion of Ukraine as a “military operation.” Referring to it as a war can land Russians in prison.
The OSCE report also discusses “filtration centers,” set up by Russia’s occupying forces, where Ukrainian civilians “are separated from others and often simply disappear.”
The report says detained individuals are handed over to authorities in the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where some are sentenced to death.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for an immediate end to Russia’s “filtration” operations and for the release of detained Ukrainian civilians. Russian authorities have deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents, according to the Biden administration.
“The unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and is a war crime,” Blinken said in a statement Wednesday. “Russian authorities must release those detained and allow Ukrainian citizens forcibly removed or coerced into leaving their country the ability to promptly and safely return home.”
Producers of fries refusing to supply to Russia, McDonald’s successor says
July 15, 2022
(This content was produced in Russia, where the law restricts coverage of Russian military operations in Ukraine.)
MOSCOW (Reuters) – The head of the company now running the former McDonald’s Corp chain of restaurants in Russia told RBC TV that producers of French fries are refusing to supply to the country and warned that attempts to increase domestic processing are fraught with difficulties.
McDonald’s quit Russia after a Western backlash against Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine, which included a barrage of economic sanctions, and sold all the restaurants it owned to a local licensee in May.
Restaurants began opening under the new name Vkusno & tochka, or “Tasty and that’s it”, on June 12. CEO Oleg Paroev told Reuters the chain had sold almost 120,000 burgers on opening day.
The new ownership was keen to stress that high quality standards would be maintained or even bettered, and that consumers would not notice much difference. It has since been forced to admit that it is facing a shortage of French fries until autumn, blaming a poor harvest in Russia and supply chain woes.
“What has happened now is that due to well known events many foreign companies, I would even say all major producers of fries, have refused to deliver this product to Russia,” Paroev told RBC TV, a business channel, late on Thursday.
Paroev said that factories in both “friendly” and “unfriendly” countries that produce fries belong to five or six major companies, whose headquarters are based in unfriendly nations and which have therefore refused to supply to Russia.
Moscow deems countries that have imposed sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine as “unfriendly”.
Paroev said there was a shortage in Russia’s harvest this year of the specific potatoes needed for French fries and that other issues could arise, with only a few enterprises capable of processing potatoes for French fries in Russia.
Ukrainian forces could wipe out all of ‘exhausted’ Russian troops’ territorial gains, retired US general says
Jake Epstein – July 14, 2022
Soldiers of Ukraine’s special operations unit sit in the car after combat operation on a forest road on the Russian troops’ potential way in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, late Tuesday, June 14, 2022.AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky
A retired US general told Insider that Ukraine could push Russian troops back to pre-war borders.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges said Ukraine’s ability to do so continues to ride on Western support.
He said Russian forces are “exhausted” and “don’t have much else they can do right now.”
Ukraine could push Russian forces back to its pre-war borders by 2023 — wiping out its territorial gains — because President Vladimir Putin’s troops are “exhausted,” a retired US general said on Thursday.
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of the US Army in Europe, told Insider that Ukraine’s ability to push Russian troops back to the existing borders depends on continued Western support through sanctions and weapons deliveries.
“The Russians are exhausted,” Hodges said. “They don’t have much else they can do right now.”
He added that much of Putin’s military is already committed to the war, but Russia has had little territorial success to show for its efforts after 20 weeks of war.
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Hodges said the “full weight” of Western support is just now beginning to take shape with the delivery of long-range rocket systems — weapons Ukraine has begged for from the US and its allies for weeks.
He added that one key to Ukraine’s success will be knocking out Russia’s “only advantage:” Putin’s arsenal of artillery and rockets.
“It looks to me that wherever the Russians do not have overwhelming firepower advantage, then the Ukrainians win one hundred times out of a hundred,” Hodges said. “So, providing the Ukrainian’s ability to strike Russian artillery, Russian rockets, their ammunition storage, and command posts, that’s what destroys and disrupts the one thing that the Russians have that is to their advantage.”
Ukraine also maintains a significant advantage in morale, Hodges said, while Russian troops are bogged down by a lack of resources and capabilities — preventing them from making any “meaningful progress” on the battlefield.
Still, Russia has seen some incremental progress in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where the conflict has emerged as a deadly and slow-moving campaign of artillery exchanges after Putin’s troops failed to capture the capital city Kyiv.
Hodges said Russian troops are willing to keep fighting a “war of attrition” because they have “nothing else they can do,” and Putin could drag the conflict through the end of the year with the hopes that the West loses its interest in supporting Ukraine because of domestic issues like gas prices or inflation.
In a war of attrition, Hodges said, Russia needs unlimited time, ammunition, and personnel. They appear to have enough ammunition, he said, while UK intelligence said on Monday that a troop shortage may force the Kremlin to recruit from prisons.
But, Hodges said, “I do think they’re on the clock a little bit. If the West sticks together through this year then I think it will be over.”
Throughout the war, many Western countries have joined in slapping a slew of sanctions on Russia and providing Ukraine with requested weapons. In turn, Putin has tried to threaten and apply pressure on the West for its widespread support of Ukraine.
The war has also pushed Western countries to unite in historic ways. Last month, the European Union accepted Ukraine as a candidate country to join the bloc, while NATO invited Finland and Sweden into the alliance in a show of defiance against Putin.
“If we don’t stick together, if we don’t deliver what we said we would, then I think the Russians will happily settle for a long war, where they just continue intruding away and doing all they can to destroy Ukraine as a country, and destroy its economy, and destroy the idea of Ukraine as a state,” Hodges said.
‘We Will Kill Them Again’: As Russia Advances, Ukrainians Dig In
KimberlyDozier – July 14, 2022
TOPSHOT-UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CONFLICT – Credit: Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty Images
KYIV—Leaning back from the picnic table, Den drowns his cigarette in a murky cup of water cut from the bottom of a plastic bottle and grimaces as I press him on what he and his fellow volunteers did with suspected Russian soldiers they captured during the opening days of the war.
How did you spot them? He shrugs and lights another cigarette. He says he doesn’t want the Russians to know what to fix.
Then he does offer one tale: a Russian who came to a hospital he and his fellow volunteers were guarding, who didn’t want to take his shirt off. They removed it for him, revealing that the man’s shoulders were bruised in the shape of a flak jacket, something no one would take off voluntarily in a city being rocked by explosions and gunfire — unless it revealed something incriminating, like Russian military insignia.
What happened then? Den laughs uncomfortably and looks down. He mumbles something in Ukrainian, and my fixer, a volunteer battlefield medic who has known Den for years, says the Russians were handed over to Ukrainian special forces. And then what? Another shrug.
“Den” is not his real name. The Kyiv native is on a three-day furlough from his Territorial Defense Force duties to visit his family. Blondish, medium height, with the creased face of fatherhood and middle age, he’s recounting how he volunteered to defend Kyiv on the first day of the Russian invasion, together with his grown sons.
He’s still at it, pulling security in the Kyiv suburb of Hostomel, near the war-shattered airport. He hadn’t wanted to be interviewed, saying he’s no hero. He just picked up a gun and volunteered to fight, as did tens of thousands in the capital alone — a sight, he says, that brought tears to his eyes, as men and some women, young and old, poured into Kyiv’s main sports stadium in the hours after Russia invaded, asking for a gun to defend their home.
Den wants to remain anonymous, because he believes the Russians will be back, and he will have to fight them again. Most Ukrainians I spoke to agree with him, gut-punched by the recent loss of Luhansk, half of the eastern territory Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly set his sights on. They once thought Putin would never dare invade. Now, they believe he will never stop. And while they are thankful for foreign military aid, I heard time and again that it’s just enough to keep them going, but not enough to drive Moscow out. War is the past, present, and future for the Ukrainians, and a resigned fatalism has swept across the nation. They don’t want to sound ungrateful, or weak. They vacillate, just like their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, from bravado to panicked warnings to stoic forbearance.
So, the brutal battle grinds on. U.S. officials mutter that Ukraine is asking for too much aid, or enough to threaten Russia itself, which the Biden administration fears could enable Ukraine to attack Russia proper and trigger Putin to go nuclear. The Ukrainian lawmakers laugh openly when I ask them if they would use those weapons to seize Russian territory. We just want our land back, they say, describing Biden as forcing them to fight with hands tied behind their backs.
Ukrainians bristle at what they consider not-so-veiled accusations of asking for handouts in anonymous quotes that they read in U.S. and European media, with their Defense Ministry trumpeting that it intends to amass a million-strong army to retake its lost territory. But the Ukrainian people also know that most of their troops fighting Russia are barely trained volunteers, with some basic marksmanship and first-aid schooling, if they are lucky. Not that training matters when Russia is still firing a fusillade of artillery, 10 times as much as the Ukrainians, and dozens are being killed, and hundreds wounded daily. Yuriy Sak, adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister, says the Russians are firing an average of 50,000 rounds of artillery a day. “And we are able to respond with five to six thousand,” he says.
And it’s working. Witness the fall of the eastern cities of Severodonetsk and then Lysychansk, with Ukraine in retreat, though Sak gamely insists that was all part of the plan. Though “outnumbered and outgunned … we have been able to wear down Russians around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, which means that they are kind of running low,” on both manpower and resources, and now need to pause to resupply. Sak, a former crisis-comms executive who used to be in business with now-Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, is a prime example of that evolving Ukrainian psyche. He tells me in one call that he is worried that the West isn’t providing Ukraine enough, then tries to reassure me in the next call that losing key territory is part of some cunning plan to exhaust Russia and eventually take all the land back. It doesn’t wash. It makes me wonder if he is trying to convince me, or himself.
Children play at a playground near a residential area destroyed by Russian shelling in the city of Borodyanka, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, on July 7, 2022. – Credit: Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Still, it’s easy to pretend otherwise on this late spring day, sitting with Den at a lakeside picnic table in the forests of Holosiivskyi Park, on Kyiv Day, when whole families don their Sunday best to promenade down the capital’s wide picture-perfect avenues, past Victorian icing-topped buildings, and snap selfies at the Dnipro River overlook.
War looks like an afterthought here, in the occasional pile of sandbags still blocking a government building’s windows, or the rusted iron tank traps that multiply in number as you get closer to Zelensky’s offices, as if some gargantuan kids got distracted and ran off, leaving their game of jacks half-played.
And there’s the raging popularity of camouflage, worn as patterned tights, or across a Chanel-like handbag, or anything even resembling a military uniform, a new wartime chic at the city’s numerous cafés and shisha pubs.
Air-raid sirens still go off daily, but despite deadly impacts, few heed them. I saw only one couple leave their table to seek shelter, returning a few minutes later, before their Georgian wine could get warm or their melted-cheese-and-egg bread congealed. It’s partly the government’s fault, as it discourages reporting where Russian projectiles land, lest that sharpens Moscow’s aim. But chosen ignorance is also bliss, a psychological survival tool, when any moment could end you.
The war has also fallen out of the top headlines, even as Finland and Sweden join NATO, and President Biden promises to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” The media is doing what it does with wars, by moving on to the next horror: a Texas school shooting; the overturning of Roe vs. Wade; and a gunman opening fire on a July 4th parade.
Moscow shows no such distraction, its brutal war machine stumbling into high gear. Billions in sanctions may be denting its high-tech weapons supply. But you don’t need those if you don’t care what you hit. Moscow has plenty of the old “Kill ’em all” Soviet-era gear.
And the killing has been plague-strength. Ukrainian former special operator turned military adviser Oleksandr Biletskyi tells me up to 200 troops are killed a day, and sometimes double that are wounded, averaging roughly 1,000 a week taken out of the fight. Ukraine is trying to offset those losses, thanks to volunteers like Den, who have swelled the ranks from 250,000 up to a million, if the government’s recent claims are to be believed. But Ukraine’s prewar population was 44 million, millions of those now displaced. Russia’s is 144 million or so. All Putin has to do is mobilize his whole country by declaring a war. Many who say he can’t or won’t also predicted he’d never invade.
“The Russians tried to eat the whole elephant,” a stressed-out senior Ukrainian security adviser tells me between medicating shots of pepper vodka. “Now, they’re just eating it piece by piece.” In eight to 10 months, they’ll be back, he says, knocking at Kyiv’s gates again.
Listen to the man himself. Putin warned on July 7 that “we haven’t even yet started anything in earnest” in Ukraine, adding a dare to anyone who hopes to defeat Russia on the battlefield: “Let them try.” And Putin has compared his Ukraine invasion to Peter the Great’s conquest of Sweden, saying it’s his “destiny” to recapture the land seized by the 18th-century emperor. He even mentioned the now-Estonian city Narva, sending that small Baltic country into a tizzy.
“I think Putin’s aim is 1) to render Ukraine non-viable — crippled, uninvestable, in political social and economic torment, and 2) to show that the West doesn’t have the willpower to resist him,” says Edward Lucas, of the Center for European Policy Analysis. He and I had just pulsed Baltic opinion at Estonia’s Lennart Meri security conference, where most attendees seem to believe Estonia and its neighbor Lithuania would be next on the menu, if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine. “We have/had a choice of confronting Putin with a functioning 40-million-strong country on our side or waiting until Ukraine is defeated and doing it later in the Baltic,” Lucas says.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines agrees that Moscow still wants to swallow Ukraine; she just doesn’t think Moscow can, calling it a “disconnect” between Putin’s ambitions and his military’s abilities.
Ukrainian officials appreciate that vote of confidence, and the nearly $55 billion in promised U.S. aid, including more than $7 billion in security assistance the U.S. has partly delivered since Russian forces invaded on Feb. 24. Despite the latest infusions of aid, Sak tells me, “I’m grateful, but we need more.” And faster. “Why not start training Ukrainian pilots how to fly advanced jets right now,” because within a few months, the West is finally going to realize Ukraine needs them to survive, he asks.
Ukrainian officials also gripe privately that the West, the Pentagon especially, takes a “father knows best” attitude to Ukraine’s requests, as in “we know better than you what you need to win this war.” For instance, giving them a dozen long-range artillery systems, called HIMARS for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, when they say they could use at least twice that or more to turn the battle.
It’s a question that makes U.S. officials uncomfortable, because as one senior U.S. official tells me, the slow-rolling has come from a Biden White House still concerned that Kyiv might antagonize Moscow if it does too well on the battlefield. “Not getting enough to turn the tide is accurate, and a big debate within the administration,” and with U.S. allies, the official says. The Pentagon is also concerned it will so drain its stocks feeding the Ukraine war effort that it might be less well-prepared to defend U.S. territory. “But we are moving in a better direction,” the official insists.
A State Department spokesman, speaking anonymously, would only offer a banal “We have moved quickly to send Ukraine a significant amount of weaponry and ammunition so it can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”
In Kyiv, what they see as their Western allies’ delayed absorption of battlefield realities is measured in the lives of people they know lost forever, and in territory lost that will be even harder to win back, as the defender almost always has the advantage.
And Ukraine can’t train enough people fast enough to keep up with Russia’s onslaught. Officials welcome a new British initiative to train up to 10,000 soldiers every four months, which Sak tells me is already underway. But that’s 4,000 short of the numbers they are losing every four months, by Biletskyi’s count. And the Ukrainian military’s own training remains slapdash and uneven, multiple officials and military trainers tell me, in part because commanders need troops as fast as they can get them for the front.
And despite Zelensky’s early attempts at rooting out Ukraine’s infamous corruption, it’s still a “telephone society” i.e., you only get things done if you know the right person. Or if you get the right piece of paper to, say, leave the country if you’re a male of “conscription age” between 18 to 60.
At least two men were removed from my train by Ukrainian border guards before we crossed into Poland — a student in his twenties, and a fortyish guy in a wheelchair with visibly wasted legs — apparently for not having the right pieces of paper proving they’d been released from military service. They were left at an empty station platform just inside Ukraine. That the border guards felt they couldn’t allow at least the guy in the wheelchair to pass spoke volumes, to either their commitment to bureaucracy, or their belief that they need every last man to survive the Russian assault. The border-guard agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
This was supposed to be a good news story. At the start of the war, I’d heard how Ukraine had overhauled its military, chastened after Moscow’s near-bloodless seizure of Crimea in 2014. Aided and advised mainly by the U.S., U.K., Canada, Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Ukrainians made changes that meant their troops in 2022 were better led, provisioned, and fed than their Russian counterparts. Or so the common wisdom went, as Russian forces turned tail and exited western Ukraine in mid-May.
Among the changes I was told by senior U.S., European, Baltic, and Ukrainian officials that were made: They retired most Soviet-trained, old-school-style generals who did not play well, or share information well, with others. They created a non-commissioned officer corps, sergeants who actually take care of the troops, instead of bullying and beating them, as per traditional Russian, and past Ukrainian practice. They mostly fixed their broken logistics delivery system. Better, but not totally fixed, a Kyiv-based military official explains.
Perhaps most important of all, Ukraine’s special-operations troops learned to fight less like U.S. Army Rangers assault troops, punching through enemy lines in a battle charge, and more like Green Berets, who practice the dark art of unconventional warfare, usually behind enemy lines. Ukrainian special operators worked with volunteers like Den, organizing semi-trained locals into lethal squads to secure neighborhoods, gather intelligence, and sometimes protect elite units, as Den’s crew did for a drone reconnaissance team. Den would saunter into the nearest town to get supplies for the drone operators, passing Russian troops who were none the wiser.
Special operators worked with locals that trapped and decimated the infamous 40-mile Russian convoy headed for Kyiv back in March. One group worked to open dams, turning fields into a muddy quagmire that Russian tanks dared not enter. Armed drones struck the flood-trapped convoy, while commandos hit with tank-killing rockets, usually under cover of dark, leaving the ribbon of surviving Russian troops trapped between smoking wrecks, breathing in the stench of their immolated comrades.
It’s called an asymmetric attack — using inferior numbers with superior local knowledge to harass, kill, maim, and psych out one’s opponent. Such devastating trickery was turned high art by the CIA’s precursor, the World War II era Office of Strategic Services. The OSS’s special-operations branch parachuted “Jedburgh” teams into France in 1944, to work with the French resistance and prepare the way for the Normandy landings.
Ukraine’s special-operations forces have been at work the same way, current and former officials inside Ukraine tell me. They point to the near killing of a senior city official who’d been cooperating with the Russians in occupied Melitopol by a mysterious explosion. “Maybe he just lit a cigarette too close to the stove gas,” a lawmaker smirks at me, refusing to confirm or deny the operation. Even the Pentagon, normally reluctant to comment on actions behind Russian lines, confirmed “growing indications of resistance against the Russian occupation,” including “assassinations of local Russian officials,” a senior U.S. defense official said.
A Ukrainian soldier is in position during heavy fighting on the front line in Severodonetsk, in the Luhansk region, on June 8, 2022. – Credit: Oleksandr Ratushniak/AP
Ukraine is defending itself as it has for centuries, environmental scientist Alex Zakletsky tells me, over a sadly dwindling supply of Crimean tea while sitting outside at Cheburek.UA, one of the few restaurants to stay open throughout the conflict, winning a loyal military, and volunteer, following. “We knew we’d have to save Ukraine ourselves,” because the army is too small to defeat the Russians, and the government is too corrupt, with many senior officials in Russia’s pocket, he says, the beret atop his mismatched camouflage “uniform” striking a revolutionary note.
So, when a fellow scientist offered Zakletsky a detailed topographical map of then-Russian-occupied Chernobyl, he didn’t give it to just anyone. He reached out to a friend’s spouse, high up in the security services — the only person he could think of to trust with such sensitive information, gleaned from tracking wolf packs that thrive in Chernobyl’s irradiated forests. He was led to believe it was very useful in taking back Chernobyl, but he refuses to provide more details, as the troops might have to use whatever they found in those maps to fight Russia on the same ground.
Ukrainians are willing, but winning also takes skill — at least some skill. “I just got asked to train 1,500 guys to go behind enemy lines, in roughly a week,” retired U.S. special operations Marine Col. Andrew Milburn tells me, over omelets at the ironically named Bimbo Café. That’s the kind of skill the U.S. would take months if not years to impart.
White-haired and occasionally limping from an old rugby injury, Milburn has his black retriever-like Ukrainian rescue dog in tow, interjecting excited barks as Milburn relates how his firm, the Mozart Group, is regularly asked to do what he considers impossible: turn out highly skilled troops in the time it would normally take to teach how to simply load and fire a weapon safely. And his funding, from international donations, is due to run out in September, and he can’t seem to convince the Ukrainian government that he can help, or that they need it.
A senior European-based special operator who has advised the Ukrainians for years insists they do have their own training programs, but they’re not always well-organized or well-attended. And the soldiers-turned-trainers hate staying in the rear, away from the fight. It makes them feel like cowards.
“We still have too many heroes,” former Ukrainian special operator Biletskyi tells me. He’s seen how NATO troops work, and he says the disorganized training, for volunteers and regular troops, is just one of the many military systems that’s being exposed as subpar as the war stretches on.
And when Ukrainians see things going wrong, they step up to fix it, hence what Biletskyi, Milburn, and the senior special-operations official all call the “hero” syndrome: Individuals feel they must step up and save the day.
“We have shown that … even people with basic training are able to achieve success because they are fighting for their land,” counters Defense spokesman Sak. “But if you are under a barrage of phosphorus bombs, cluster munitions, and if you’re being shot at incessantly by Russian heavy artillery,” what you need is a way to stop that deadly rain.
European officials are worried that Americans don’t know how bad it’s going, or how bad it will likely get. “The Russians … they are just going to keep coming,” one tells me, making angry waves in her cappuccino with her spoon. “And the West is going to start asking Ukraine, ‘We gave you so many weapons.… Why aren’t you doing better?’”
And we’re just going to stand by and blame the victim and watch a bloody marathon that is measured in years, not days or months, she says. And Putin knows that, biding his time until the Western alliance gets restive, divided, and eventually turns away.
This time, we’re prepared, counters scientist-turned-volunteer Zakletsky, who insists the Russians won’t pass easily through Chernobyl to Kyiv a second time, because now the locals, renowned hunters, are prepared. He visited what he calls the “werewolf” tribe for a wedding. At night’s end, the wedding guests started baying at the moon like wolves marking their territory. To his surprise, an actual wolf pack answered back, acknowledging the villagers’ claim. Should the Russians come back, he says, the villagers, and the whole country, will fight like a wolf pack.
Den puts it more simply: “We killed them the last time.” If they come back, he says, “we’ll kill them again.”
Ukrainian photojournalist Olena Maksymenko contributed to this report.
Luhansk Oblast: Ukrainian Armed Forces destroy Russian ammunition depots, Russian subversion and reconnaissance groups ramp up their activity
IrynaBalachuk – July 13, 2022
Serhii Haidai, head of the Luhansk Oblast Military Administration, has reported that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are destroying Russian ammunition depots and neutralising Russian subversion and reconnaissance groups almost on a daily basis.
Quote: “The Russian army continues its relentless shelling [of Luhansk Oblast – ed.]. However, the Russians are probably saving their ammunition stockpile because new supplies have been interrupted by the attacks of our new long-range weapons.
[Russian – ed.] Military depots in Kadiivka and Luhansk have recently been blown up. Last night, there was turmoil in the Luhansk industrial district. So the occupiers have once again deployed subversion and reconnaissance groups in order to look for weak spots in our defence. The ramping up of the subversion and reconnaissance activity is due to their shortage of ammunition.”
Details: Haidai said that the Russians are applying pressure not only from Lysychansk and Popasna, but also from Izium.
He noted that though the Russians are still far from the Ukrainian-held towns and villages in Luhansk Oblast, their actions might threaten bigger cities in Donetsk Oblast and force the Ukrainian Armed Forces to construct new defence fortifications.
The head of the Luhansk Oblast Military Administration also said that Russian occupying forces continued to use artillery and aircraft to apply pressure on the administrative border area between Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. In particular, the Russians are attacking Verkhnokamianske and Bilohorvika, which sustained four rocket strikes and two airstrikes in the past 24 hours.
In addition, Russian occupying forces opened artillery fire on civilian residential buildings in these two villages 13 times over the course of the past 24 hours.
Ukraine reports striking Russian ammunition depot in south
Maria Grazia Murra – July 12, 2022
Ukrainian soldiers run after a missile strike hit a residential area, in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, Thursday, July 7, 2022. Injured residents sat dazed and covered in blood. A crater was now the centre of the courtyard. Last week, the governor of the Donetsk oblast Pavlo Kyrylenko urged the province’s more than 350,000 remaining residents to flee to safer towns further West, saying that evacuating the region was necessary to save lives and allow the Ukrainian army to better defend towns against a Russian advance. Many refuse to leave the city. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, File) ASSOCIATED PRESSA policeman helps an injured woman after a missile strike hit a residential area, in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, Thursday, July 7, 2022. Injured residents sat dazed and covered in blood. Last week, the governor of the Donetsk oblast Pavlo Kyrylenko urged the province’s more than 350,000 remaining residents to flee to safer towns further West, saying that evacuating the region was necessary to save lives and allow the Ukrainian army to better defend towns against a Russian advance. Many refuse to leave the city. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, File) ASSOCIATED PRESSA field of sunflowers in Donbas, Donetsk oblast, eastern Ukraine, Thursday, July 7, 2022. Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting for control of the Donbas, a fertile and industrial region in east Ukraine where a conflict with Moscow proxies has raged since 2014. Russia has made significant gains in recent weeks, and is poised to fully occupy the Luhansk oblast – which, alongside Donetsk oblast, is one of two provinces that make up the region. Attacks on key cities like Kramatorsk and Sloviansk have dramatically increased, killing and injuring scores of civilians each week. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty) ASSOCIATED PRESS
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Ukrainian military on Tuesday reported destroying a Russian ammunition depot in southern Ukraine, resulting in a massive explosion captured on social media, while authorities said the death toll from a weekend Russian strike in the country’s east grew to 41.
An overnight rocket strike targeted the depot in Russian-held Nova Kakhovka, the Ukrainian military’s southern command said. Nova Kakhovka is located about 35 miles (55 kilometers) east of the Black Sea port city of Kherson, which is also occupied by Russian forces.
The precision of the strike suggested Ukrainian forces used U.S-supplied multiple-launch High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, to hit the area. Ukraine indicated in recent days that it might launch a counteroffensive to reclaim territory in the country’s south as Russia bombards the eastern Donbas region.
Russia’s Tass news agency offered a different account of the blast in Nova Kakhovka, saying a mineral fertilizer storage facility exploded, and that a market, hospital and houses were damaged in the strike. Some of the ingredients in fertilizer can be used for ammunition.
A satellite photo taken Tuesday and analyzed by The Associated Press showed significant damage. A massive crater stood precisely where a large warehouse-like structure once stood in the city,
Ukraine now has eight of the HIMAR systems, a truck-mounted missile launcher with high accuracy, and Washington has promised to send another four.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russian shelling over the past 24 hours killed at least 16 civilians and wounded 48 more, Ukraine’s presidential office said in its Tuesday morning update. Cities and towns in five southeast regions came under Russian fire, the office said.
Nine civilians were killed and two more wounded in Donetsk province, which makes up half of the Donbas. Russian rocket attacks targeted the cities of Sloviansk and Toretsk, where a kindergarten was hit, the presidential office said.
The British military said Tuesday that Russia was continuing to make “small, incremental gains” in Donetsk, where heavy fighting led the province’s governor last week to urge its 350,000 remaining residents to move to safer places in western Ukraine.
The death toll from a Russian rocket attack that struck a Donetsk apartment building Saturday rose to 41, the emergency services agency said Tuesday afternoon. It said four more bodies were found and nine people were rescued from the rubble of the building in Chasiv Yar.
Yet many in the Donbas, a fertile industrial region in eastern Ukraine made of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, refuse — or are unable — to flee, despite scores of civilians being killed and wounded each week.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and its surrounding region, Russian strikes hit residential buildings, killing four civilians and wounding nine, Ukrainian officials said.
“The Russians continue their tactics of intimidating the peaceful population of the Kharkiv region,” Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Syniehubov wrote Tuesday on Telegram.
Ukrainian authorities also said that Russian fire struck the southern city of Mykolaiv on Tuesday morning, hitting residential buildings. Twelve people were wounded as the result of the Russian shelling, with some of the rockets hitting two medical facilities, regional governor Vitaliy Kim said on Telegram.
Air raid sirens sounded Tuesday in the western city of Lviv — the first daytime sirens there in over a week — and in other areas of Ukraine as Russian forces continued to make advances.
In eastern Luhansk, “fighting continues near the villages” on the administrative border with neighboring Donetsk, Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
“The Russian army burns down everything in its way. The artillery barrage doesn’t stop and sometimes continues for four to six hours on end,” Haidai said.
The British Defense Ministry’s intelligence briefing said Russia had seized the Ukrainian town of Hryhorivka and continued to push toward the Donetsk province cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
“Russian forces are likely maintaining military pressure on Ukrainian forces whilst regrouping and reconstituting for further offensives in the near future,” the intelligence briefing said.
However, Russia may be relying more heavily on private military contractors, like the Wagner Group, to avoid a general mobilization, the British ministry said. Western officials have accused Wagner of using mercenaries to fight in Africa and elsewhere.
In other developments:
— The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin would visit Iran next week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin will travel to Tehran next Tuesday to attend a trilateral meeting with the leaders of Iran and Turkey, a format for Syria-related talks. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Monday that Russia was seeking hundreds of surveillance drones from Iran, including weapons-capable ones, for use in Ukraine.
— Russian and Turkish military representatives plan to meet in Istanbul on Wednesday to discuss the transport of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, a Russian Foreign Ministry official said. Pyotr Ilyichyov, head of the ministry’s department for international organizations, told Russian news agency Interfax that “representatives of Ukraine, as well as U.N. (officials) in the role of observers” are also expected to take part in the talks. Ilyichyov reiterated that Moscow was ready “to assist in ensuring the navigation of foreign commercial ships for the export of Ukrainian grain.”
— Germany’s justice minister said investigating war crimes in Ukraine would likely take “many years” but he was confident they ultimately will be successful. Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said there will “probably be hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of pieces of evidence that have to be sifted through, documented and evaluated.” The German federal prosecutor’s office said in early March that it had started looking into possible war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. Buschmann spoke Tuesday in Prague, where he and his European Union counterparts were meeting.
Jon Gambrell in Lviv, Ukraine, and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
Details: The Tochka-U missile was shot down over Luhansk, according to preliminary reports.
The missile was allegedly shot down near the village of Yuvileine, which is part of Luhansk.
At the same time, RIA Novosti reports that at least four anti-aircraft missiles had been launched at aerial targets west of Luhansk.
Updated: A spokesman for the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic” people’s militia, Andrii Marochko, said that the Ukrainian army had launched a massive strike on an air defence military unit (air defence system), which protects the sky over Luhansk.
Quote: “Ukraine’s armed forces have launched a massive strike on the air defence military unit that ensures the protection of the city of Luhansk.”
Updated at 03.00: Later, the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic” stated that the Armed Forces of Ukraine had fired nine missiles from American-made HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems at Luhansk.
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