Category: Ukraine War

Daily Beast

Russian Troops Sabotage Their Own Missile System to Sell as Scrap Metal, Says Ukrainian Intel

Allison Quinn – June 14, 2022

Ukrainian authorities say they have uncovered an alleged new scheme from fed-up Russian troops angling to get out of the war: They’re apparently now sabotaging their own weapons and trying to sell the parts as scrap metal.

That’s according to the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, which on Tuesday named and shamed the Russian forces they say failed spectacularly in a recent attempt to sell off parts of Russian missile systems in the Donetsk region.

“In order to avoid going to the frontline, the commanders of a squadron from the 933rd anti-aircraft missile regiment… decided to make their equipment unfit for active service,” the agency said in a statement. The troops “removed the control units from Tor-M2U [missile systems] and decided to sell them at a collection point for precious metals.”

Putin Nemesis Warns of Sinister Twist in Russian Attack Plan

The plan is said to have backfired when the troops demanded a higher payoff for the goods, prompting the local workers at the scrap metal point to alert law enforcement of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.

Ukrainian intelligence says the damaged Russian equipment was ultimately blamed on active fighting rather than sabotage, with the entrepreneurial troops sent back to the frontline despite their best efforts. They were identified as members of the 933rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division, part of the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District.

The intelligence arm of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry did not disclose how it learned of the apparent sabotage scheme. But the report adds to a long list of increasingly creative attempts by Russian troops to abandon the fight, from fake marriage to self-injury.

In response to the rock-bottom morale among troops, there have been reports of the Russian military sending in FSB officers and high-ranking brass to keep tabs on disloyal troops.

In audio of what Ukrainian intelligence described as an intercepted call released Tuesday, a man identified as a Russian soldier can be heard complaining to his wife about his struggles to bring those under his command in line.

After she tells him she heard about Ukrainian forces edging out Russian soldiers in several areas, the man responds that “it doesn’t matter” to him.

“My own fucking mules are driving me batshit crazy,” he said, before going on to tell her the situation with morale is worse than “critical” among his men.

“Well fucking shoot one of them demonstratively, and the others will maybe shut up,” she said.

Rolling Stone

‘They’re Wiping Us From Earth’: Evading Russian Artillery With a Ukrainian Military Unit

Mac William Bishop – June 12, 2022

Near Lyman, Ukraine – Crossing the final checkpoint into a battle zone feels like a consecration.

The Ukrainian soldiers manning the last friendly post have a singular focus and intensity that’s lacking behind the lines. They wave us through solemnly, without smiles or chatter. We coast through the invisible barrier separating the “front” from the “rear,” then floor the gas and accelerate forward.

I’m in eastern Ukraine in late May, in a region called Donbas, where the war has become a whirlwind of carnage that is claiming the lives of as many as 100 Ukrainian soldiers a day. The casualties on the Russian side are almost certainly even higher, according to Ukrainian defense officials. I’ve heard conflicting reports about what is happening here, about whether the Ukrainian military is collapsing or the Russians are succeeding in breaking through the defender’s lines, cutting off thousands of soldiers. But it’s clear that Russia is inching forward, each day bringing it closer to its goal of annexing the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk and cementing the region under Moscow’s rule.

Ukraine won’t stop fighting. But it is sacrificing thousands of its finest soldiers and still losing ground. It cannot win the war without game-changing foreign-military assistance: American heavy artillery, Danish anti-ship missiles, German air-defense systems — these are slowly making their way to the battlefield. But can the Ukrainian military hold out long enough for any of it to make a difference?

To truly understand what is going on — to get a sense of morale and see how the soldiers are holding up under Russian assault, I must descend into the inferno, and I need a guide. A Ukrainian paratrooper will lead the way.

I’ve called in favors with the commander of a reconnaissance company in an air-assault brigade, and he links me up with an officer whose elite scout unit is operating near intense fighting outside a town called Lyman, a senior lieutenant who goes by the nom de guerre “Mace.”

Mace is soft-spoken and cordial, lean and fit as an endurance athlete. His face is that of a young man, but the salt-and-pepper hair hidden beneath his field hat and his calm self-possession amid chaos reveal he is a seasoned veteran who saw his share of combat before the current invasion. He takes me to the front in a Škoda station wagon, roaring down country back roads at 100-plus miles an hour, blasting techno as the foliage whips past in a blur.

Mace knows that speed counts here, and he weaves in and out of the anti-tank barricades that are strewn along the roads, gunning the engine as soon as we clear the concrete blocks and berms of dirt. I’m glad he knows which roads are mined. As we careen down a hill toward a crossroads surrounded by a scattering of farmhouses, I see a Ukrainian Akatsiya self-propelled artillery gun dashing toward the T-intersection ahead of us. It looks like we will get there at the same time. I point out the vehicle to Mace wordlessly, and I’m gratified to hear the engine revving instantly.

We are of the same mind. The Akatsiya, alone and moving in the open, is a prime target for the Russians. Likely it’s been “shooting-and-scooting”: If they want to survive, the gun crew has to strike a balance between staying in position long enough to provide effective fire support to friendly ground forces, without lingering so long they get discovered by Russian drones.

The Russians are ceaselessly hunting Ukrainian heavy weapons, and their rockets, artillery, and missiles can strike anywhere here, at any time. The fields beside us are pockmarked with blast impacts, and the tails of dozens of dud rockets stick out of the earth as if planted by some mad farmer.

The intersection is a critical danger point: The Akatsiya must slow to nearly a stop to make the turn. If I was a Russian gunnery officer observing it via drone, that’s when I’d try to hit it. The equation “speed x time = distance” looms in my mind.

We fly through the intersection ahead of the Akatsiya, and its crew doesn’t spare us a glance. They’re intent on their own survival, and making the cover of the tree line.

My concern is not abstract.

In the same area only days later, a team of journalists from The Washington Post is nearly killed when visiting a Ukrainian unit, artillery shells falling just yards from where they are standing. That they survive is pure luck.

Days before that, a French journalist is killed in an artillery strike while filming the evacuation of civilians fleeing the fighting in Severodonetsk, the focal point of the Russian assault.

It isn’t necessarily that one can make all of the right choices and thereby stay safe on a battlefield. Sometimes luck works against you when artillery shells are falling. But it is worse to be caught in some places than others.

When we are back in the trees I relax slightly, but Mace doesn’t slow down. He has a destination in mind.

“This is hell on Earth,” Mace says quietly. We are watching as BM-21 Grad rockets rain down on Ukrainian positions near a village called Sviatohirsk. It’s impossible to see their individual effects amid the smoke and haze covering the densely forested hills. Standing in an observation post on high ground amid feathery grass and wild garlic, I give up on trying to count individual impacts and instead just count the salvos, timing each barrage. I witness as many as 480 rockets fired on a single position in less than a minute, followed by artillery.

Between my service in the U.S. Marines and over more than a decade as a foreign correspondent, I’ve been engaged in the professional study of organized human violence for 25 years. But I’ve never seen anything even close to this volume of artillery being unleashed.

Mace has chosen our ground well, as you’d expect from an officer in an elite reconnaissance unit. We’re in a fold of earth on a hill that gives us a clear view of the battle raging around Sviatohirsk — a quiet little village nestled among chalk hills, overlooked by a nearly 400-year-old monastery on the opposite side of the river. It lies to our left. We can also see the fighting around Lyman — a key railway junction — to our right.

What these two places have in common is they are on the Russian-occupied side of the winding Seversky Donets River, the main natural barrier to the enemy’s advance. There are tens of thousands of Russian soldiers with hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles attacking here, assaulting in a vast crescent surrounding Severodonetsk, one of the largest cities in Donbas that remained in Ukrainian hands before the invasion began in February.

Lyman is obscured by smoke from a forest fire that began amid the fighting. The white smoke of the burning trees is interlaced with dark columns rising from destroyed buildings or vehicles. The rumble of booms is almost continuous. The whump-whump-whump of artillery is punctuated by the scream of tactical ballistic missiles, and the salvos of rocket artillery make a distinctive pattering of successive concussions. Almost all of it is being fired by the Russians. The Ukrainian soldiers here have endured this maelstrom for weeks.

“Things usually start to really kick off around 3 p.m.,” Mace says. He describes what has become routine for his brigade of paratroopers: Russian scouts move forward to probe Ukrainian positions, then call in large-scale artillery strikes when they make contact. The artillery is followed by masses of armor supported by infantry. It’s classic “combined arms” warfare, and would have been as familiar to a soldier in World War II as it is to Mace.

“The biggest problem is the artillery,” Mace says. “The Russians just have so much.”

What about the long-range artillery being provided by the United States and others?

“It’s just starting to show up on the battlefield,” Mace says. But for now, “there’s just too much artillery. Too many tanks. We are fighting too hard.”

Will Severodonetsk need to be abandoned?

“It’s possible,” he says. If it falls, it will be the biggest city taken by the enemy since Mariupol was lost in May, and will effectively mean that Russia controls the entire province of Luhansk, a primary goal of Putin’s invasion.

There’s a sudden pop as a cluster munition bursts over the battlefield, leaving behind a smattering of dark puffs as submunitions rain down on the village’s defenders. It’s followed by another seconds later.

The production and use of cluster munitions have been banned by an international treaty that went into effect in 2010, but that doesn’t mean very much: Neither the United States nor Russia — the world’s biggest arms dealers — have signed the accord. Neither has Ukraine. Cluster munitions spread submunitions — small explosives called bomblets — over a wide area, and are intended to kill or maim personnel and destroy vehicles and equipment. Many of the bomblets don’t explode as designed when they hit the ground. Those unexploded bomblets will be found for years afterward.

Sometimes children mistake them for toys.

“Their actions are not as haphazard as before,” Oleksandr Motuzianyk, the spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, tells me back in Kyiv when I ask about changing Russian tactics. “They’re using combined arms and air support more effectively.”

The simple fact is that despite its missteps, Russia has taken a lot of land since the invasion started. Ukraine, lacking Russia’s deep reserves of manpower — however unskilled or untrained — cannot recapture it without superlative military technology. Meanwhile, the Russians are pushing ahead: Motuzianyk says their strategy is to encircle troops defending Severodonetsk.

The population of Severodonetsk was more than 100,000 before the invasion in February. Local officials and aid workers estimate that only 12,000 civilians remain, the rest having fled. The entire region has emptied, and daily life has ground to a halt.

The nearby city of Kramatorsk, which held 150,000 inhabitants before the war, is a ghost town. Only a few old people remain; a handful of shops open for a few hours in the daytime to provide food and groceries to the soldiers passing through and the few locals who still remain. A ballistic missile hit a train station there, crowded with refugees, killing 59 people in early April, and wounded more than 100, according to Ukrainian defense officials.

Slovyansk and Kramatorsk are just a few miles apart, and they have become staging areas for the Ukrainian military. They are under constant attack from Russian missiles and rockets: I am awoken throughout the night by resounding booms and constant air raids. One strike takes down the power grid and cellular networks for hours. Multiple strikes in both cities kill civilians, who refuse to leave their homes.

“Do you hear that?” an old man calls to his neighbor, gardening in his yard, as a violent series of explosions echoes through the streets.

“Oh, it’s just thunder,” the gardening man replies. Nearby, a middle-aged woman is pleading with an elderly neighbor to leave. “Where will you go when the Russians get here?”

The Russians have a lot of ground to cover before they can make it as far as Kramatorsk, but the woman has a point.

“The enemy intends to get to the administrative border of Luhansk” with the current offensive, Motuzianyk says. “The enemy intends to take full control of the region.”

But, he adds, “the main tactic remains that of scorched earth.”

“Clearly the Russian leadership demanded changes to Russian tactics to achieve victories, and they are doing what they must to achieve that,” Motuzianyk says. “They are destroying communities and wiping us off the Earth without regard for civilians.”

At a small compound taken over by the airborne scouts, soldiers relax in the yard, grabbing whatever rest they can between missions. I’m standing beside a portly old soldier with a grandfatherly manner, enjoying the sunshine as cottony poplar seeds float densely through the air around us, lending an atmosphere of surreal tranquility as shells and rockets land in the surrounding hills.

The munitions strike so often that you begin to ignore anything that goes “boom,” and only react to things that go “crack,” indicating the explosive has landed unreasonably close.

Fighting here isn’t a new experience for many of the paratroopers, and they are quick to remind me that for them the war began in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and sent its soldiers into Donbas to support pro-Russian separatists. Most Ukrainians remain bitter about the relatively weak Western response to those actions, and it’s why they fear the West will once again buckle to Putin’s aggression.

Ukrainians from all walks of life have told me how concerned they are about a repeat of 2014, with the international community acceding to the Russian seizure of their land — despite the blood they are spilling to defend it.

“These guys shouldn’t have had to fight for eight years,” the old soldier grimaces in dismay as he watches the young paratroopers. “They should be at home making babies. But here we are, stuck in this shit.”

The commandeered building that the recon teams are using as their base is a hive of activity. There’s civilian cars and captured Russian trucks the paratroopers are trying to get back into service. Many of the vehicles sport bullet holes or other obvious battle damage.

These paratroopers receive intensive instruction — many have trained with U.S. Special Forces and other elite NATO units — and their experience is unmatched: they have been regularly rotating through Donbas since 2014. Mace suggests I speak to one of his most seasoned veterans, a hardcore fighter who has been operating in Donbas for eight years. He’s a rugged looking guy with a scratchy voice. I ask him what has changed now.

“One of the biggest problems is the drones,” says “Ostap,” the nom de guerre of the scout. “I hear Orlans [a type of Russian reconnaissance drone] all the time. But I almost never see them. They’re too small and too high. It’s next to impossible to shoot them down.”

But the defense ministry says that soldiers have shot Russian drones down in the hundreds, I say.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I only believe what I see with my own eyes.”

A big part of the problem in defending this part of Donbas, Ostap believes, is that the people who have stayed behind — the people who haven’t fled — don’t really believe they are part of Ukraine. In his view, the civilians who remain are all separatist sympathizers. He says they help the Russians navigate backcountry roads that aren’t on the maps.

“Yeah, they’re all waiting for Russkiy mir,” Mace says, laughing when I ask his opinion about the locals. Russkiy mir, or “Russian world,” is the revanchist concept that Russia needs to restore its central role in the affairs of its neighbors, and its borders, to what they were at the height of the Soviet empire.

He asserts there have been instances of local collaborators getting caught providing information about Ukrainian troop movements or locations. Indeed, Slovyansk fell to Russian separatists in 2014: The retaking of the city by the Ukrainian military later that summer was the first major battle in Donbas.

“Almost everyone here is pro-Russian. But you can’t arrest people just for that,” Mace says. In any case, the police and the SBU —Ukraine’s internal security service — were doing what they could. “The SBU even arrested a couple of people in our brigade,” he says.

“We’re looking for bears,” Mace says. He means Ukrainian tanks. I’ve seen several T-80s obscured among the trees, hoping to stay hidden from Russian aircraft and drones. We round a corner and there’s one right in front of us, a squat hulking shape with the long barrel of its 125-mm cannon pointing down the road.

There’s a tank platoon in the dark forest here, holding in reserve on favorable terrain, lest the Russians succeed in crossing the river.

There’s been other signs of Ukrainian forces moving east to get in the fight. On the highway to Kramatorsk, we would pass periodic tank carriers loaded with armored vehicles or tanks, fuel trucks, and a few rarer sightings, like bridging equipment and a Buk anti-aircraft missile system that had only three of its four mounting points armed with missiles.

It doesn’t seem like a lot of equipment given the scale of the fighting. I don’t see any of the new artillery systems provided by the United States in its most recent aid package: There are also busloads of sleeping soldiers. Russians have concentrated their greatest resources here, according to President Zelensky. Mace doesn’t see being outnumbered as the biggest problem, however.

“The problem is that we don’t have enough well-trained people,” he says. “The Territorial Defense Forces [volunteers called up for the current crisis, often with minimal training and equipment] will go to their trenches, and as soon as they see an enemy tank, they fill the radio net with panicked chatter and then run away, abandoning their positions.”

He shakes his head grimly: “We need quality, not quantity. The opposite of the Russians.”

As we dash through the forest, we happen upon a Ukrainian unit using an intersection as a staging area, they gather in a small clearing next to a large oak tree. They’re in a mix of uniforms, some are even wearing articles of civilian clothing. Most of them are standing in front of a prisoner.

The prisoner is on his knees, blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back. He’s wearing the distinctive uniform of Russian infantry. Because of Mace’s dedication to fast driving, I don’t process what I’ve seen until we pass. “A Russian prisoner!” Even as the words leave my mouth, a single gunshot cracks out.

I whip around to look back over my shoulder at the scene through the rear window as we turn left, praying I am not witness to a war crime.

There is no evidence of widespread abuse of prisoners of war by Ukrainian forces, but there are several ongoing criminal investigations into isolated incidents in which Russian prisoners appear to have been tortured or even executed.

The military here has more than doubled since Russia’s invasion in late February. More than 700,000 Ukrainians are now under arms, and perhaps only one-third of those have received anything resembling professional military training. But there is no shortage of hatred on the battlefield. Only days before, I attended a Defense Ministry briefing, unveiling a series of online videos designed to ensure Ukrainian soldiers understood the laws of war.

“Sometimes we face skepticism, people say, ‘Well, the Russians don’t obey the rules of war. Why should we?’” said Col. Viacheslav Rachevskiy, the officer conducting the briefing. “But it is about being a civilized army.”

Ukraine can’t afford to let untrained soldiers jeopardize Western support, and it wants to highlight that it takes the issue seriously. The moral high road is as much an asset in this fight as any weapon system. Ukraine has worked to codify the laws of war into the Ukrainian criminal code, to bring the country in line with the generally accepted norms of international humanitarian law, according to Rachevskiy. “It’s the sign of a European, modern democratic army,” he said.

When I look back, the prisoner is still on his knees: He’s talking. He appears alive and unharmed. I don’t see anyone pointing a weapon at him. What did I hear? An accidental discharge? A celebratory gunshot? A mock execution? There is no way to know.

“Can we stop? Can I talk to him?”

Mace doesn’t look back, he makes the turn and accelerates. It’s hardly the first time the paratrooper has seen a Russian prisoner. “If he hears you speaking English, then he’ll spread tales of American puppet masters in these woods,” he says.

Besides, Mace explains, he doesn’t know who those soldiers are. They aren’t in his unit.

The last I see of the Russian, he is alive and on his knees, being interrogated in the field.

When “Sasha” gets in the car, he says he just doesn’t want to talk about anything. Sasha has been waiting outside the one grocery store in Kramatorsk that is still functioning: Its parking lot has become a local hot spot for soldiers to meet up for rides to and from the front. He tosses his bags in the back and squeezes into the rear seat of the Chinese-made sedan that will ferry me back to my own vehicle.

The big brooding soldier is unshaven, his fatigues filthy from combat, except for a field hat that is clearly brand new. The local driver who has been shuttling me around has agreed to bring the soldier to Dnipro: He has leave papers and is trying to get home to Mykolaiv, so that’ll take him about halfway. The fuel shortage is critical in eastern Ukraine for non-military traffic, so filling a civilian car with strangers headed roughly the same direction has become a common practice: There are Telegram channels where people offer and seek rides to and from every city.

Less than 30 minutes into the drive, Sasha opens up suddenly and unexpectedly. What he reveals is chilling, and indicative of how bad things have gotten in Donbas.

“I nearly beat to death one of the men in my unit,” he confides. “We were in trenches on the front lines. He was using his cellphone.”

Sasha breathes heavily.

“The Russians tracked his signal and located our position. He called his mom for 15 minutes, then his wife for 15 minutes … and then his girlfriend for almost two hours. They bombarded us all night. That’s why I beat him.”

Later, he tells us more about the front.

“We lost six men on our first patrol,” he says. “Six out of 10. They were all my friends.”

He breaks down and begins to cry.

Sasha eventually admits that he has been given leave to go to a hospital to seek therapy, for what soldiers a century ago would have called shell shock and what we now call PTSD. He has been given 10 days to recover from his battlefield trauma and return to his unit.

When we have a chance to talk alone, he shows me videos of his wedding in October. He tells me he is scared to talk to his family about his experiences. Sasha doesn’t want to return to combat. All he can think about are the soldiers who were killed on his first patrol.

“Those six men were my friends, they were my brothers, and I love them very much,” he says. “I can’t just leave them behind. I will always carry them with me.”

He looks down, overcome with emotion.

“What is in my heart is that I never wish to see Donbas again in the future. Nothing you do there makes any difference.”

Business Insider

A Ukrainian sniper killed one of Putin’s most notorious mercenaries, say reports

Alia Shoaib – June 12, 2022

• Vladimir Andonov, from the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries, had also fought in Syria and Libya, say reports.
• Andonov’s death appeared to be confirmed by Russian military sources.
• Andonov was accused of shooting Ukrainian prisoners of war during fighting in the Donbas in 2014.

A notorious Russian mercenary accused of killing prisoners of war and civilians in Ukraine has been killed, according to reports.

Vladimir Andonov, 44, who has been dubbed “The Executioner,” was shot by a sniper near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on June 5, according to several Russian media outlets including the newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets.

Zhambal-Zhamso Zhanaev, the head of Russia’s Trans-Baikal Territory in Buryatia, where Andonov lived, confirmed his death to the paper and said his body will be transported back to the region to be buried.

Andonov, who was known within Russia by his call sign Vakha or “the volunteer from Buryatia,” gained notoriety due to his role in Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

He is reported to have come to the Donbas in 2014 as a volunteer and was part of a unit that “liberated” the town of Logvinovo, where three Ukrainian prisoners of war were later found shot dead. 

According to the website Peacemaker, which tracks Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, Andonov gave an interview about the mission in 2015 in which he boasted that “there were no survivors among the “dills,”‘ a Russian slur referring to Ukrainians.

He was known to be a mercenary of the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company with close ties to the Russian government that has been accused of committing war crimes and using brutal methods in Ukraine and other countries.

Following his time in the Donbas, he spent some years out of the public eye, during which he was widely rumored to have been deployed as part of Wagner units in Syria and Libya.

Last year, a survivor of a massacre in the town of Espia, Libya told the BBC that he believed he recognized Andonov as one of the attackers that shot his family dead.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials have claimed its forces destroyed a Wagner Group military base in the eastern Luhansk region, killing 22, Ukrainian news outlet Hromadske said.

Head of Luhansk regional military аdministration, Serhiy Haidai, shared a video of a burning building at a football stadium in Kadiivka which was the site used by the Wagner Group.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine launched a well-aimed attack on it. Only one survived,” Haidai tweeted.

Business Insider

Putin is ‘preparing to starve much of the developing world’ in order to win Russia’s war in Ukraine, Yale historian says

Kelsey Vlamis – June 12, 2022

• Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of blocking millions of tons of grain exports.
• Yale historian Timothy Snyder said Putin plans to starve places in Asia and Africa to win the war.
• “When the food riots begin, and as starvation spreads, Russian propaganda will blame Ukraine,” he said.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder said Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to starve some countries as part of his efforts in Ukraine.

Snyder published a lengthy Twitter thread Saturday explaining how he believes Putin is using food insecurity to his advantage and called it the “latest chapter of hunger politics.”

“Russia has a hunger plan. Vladimir Putin is preparing to starve much of the developing world as the next stage in his war in Europe,” Snyder, a professor at Yale University and expert on authoritarianism, began, noting the importance of Ukraine’s food exports to the global food supply.

The area around the Black Sea, including Ukraine and Russia, has been referred to as the “world’s breadbasket” due to its fertile soil and high rates of grain production. Collectively, the two countries account for 30% of the global wheat exports while Ukraine produces about 12%.

Experts previously told Insider that cutting off those exports could have massive implications for countries like Yemen, which previously got nearly a quarter of its wheat imports from Ukraine.

Ukraine has accused Russia of blocking millions of tons of grain exports from leaving its ports, a charge the Kremlin has denied.

“If the Russian blockade continues, tens of millions of tons of food will rot in silos, and tens of millions of people in Africa and Asia will starve,” Snyder said.

—Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) June 11, 2022

The historian said he believed Putin’s “hunger plan” had three main objectives. First, to cut off Ukraine’s exports in an attempt to destroy its statehood. Second, to create instability in Europe by producing refugees from areas that rely on Ukraine’s food, like North Africa and the Middle East.

Lastly, he said Putin wanted to use mass starvation as a “backdrop for a propaganda contest.”

“When the food riots begin, and as starvation spreads, Russian propaganda will blame Ukraine, and call for Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine to be recognized, and for all sanctions to be lifted,” Snyder said.

The historian also said both Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, and Adolf Hitler had sought to control Ukraine’s food supply, but that Putin’s plan was “a new level of colonialism.”

“Russia is planning to starve Asians and Africans in order to win its war in Europe,” he said.

For his part, Putin has sought to blame global food supply issues on the West and pushed for sanctions on Russia to be lifted, while Britain has accused him of “trying to hold the world to ransom” with food.

The war in Ukraine has waged on since Russia invaded on February 24. Russian forces refocused on the eastern Donbas region after failing to capture the capital of Kyiv, but Ukrainian officials said this week the country is in need of more weapons.

NBC News

Kremlin crackdown on dissent targets the Russians protesting Ukraine war

Shira Pinson and Yuliya Talmazan – June 12, 2022

Swapping out price tags for antiwar leaflets, wearing green ribbons, flashing a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

Those are things that can get ordinary Russians who don’t agree with the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine detained, fined or even jailed.

Since the start of Moscow’s incursion, media in Russia have been cautioned against calling it a “war,” and new draconian legislation has been put in place to stop people from “discrediting” the Russian army, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

That has meant the few Russians who still dare speak up against the war have gotten inventive to escape arrest. But it’s far from guaranteed.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-10-1/html/r-sf-flx.html

Artist and musician Alexandra Skochilenko, from St. Petersburg, has been in detention for nearly two months after replacing several price tags at a local supermarket with small pieces of paper containing messages about the Russian army’s actions in Ukraine.

One of them read: “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. About 400 people hid in it from shelling.” Another said: “Putin has been lying to us from TV screens for 20 years. The result of this lie is our willingness to justify war and senseless deaths.”

Skochilenko’s lawyer, Yana Nepovinnova, told NBC News that Skochilenko’s act of protest was caught by a customer, who raised a complaint.

Skochilenko, 31, is now facing criminal charges of spreading “deliberately false information” about the Russian army and could face up to 10 years in prison, Nepovinnova said. Skochilenko has admitted to swapping the price tags, but she denies that she was spreading false information, according to her lawyer. Her detention has been extended until at least July 1.

“I feel like they came into our home and took my family away because of some price tags,” Sofia Subbotina, Skochilenko’s partner, said on the phone from St. Petersburg, sounding dejected. “Ten years is a monstrous term. They sentence people to less for murder.”

Nepovinnova said she fears Skochilenko’s case will be used to send a “clear message” to others who dare speak up that they will face the same fate.

“She is essentially behind bars for her words,” Nepovinnova said.

During the decades of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent, political protest in Russia has become nearly obliterated. Still, in the first days of the war, thousands of Russians took to the streets to voice their opposition. But that has largely fizzled out amid police violence, mass arrests and the Kremlin propaganda insisting most Russians support Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. What continues are the one-person protests of all shapes and forms to get one message across: There are people in Russia who do not agree with the war.

Another St. Petersburg resident, Artur Dmitriev, said he was detained in early April for holding up a sign that read: “The war has brought so much grief that it is impossible to forget. There is no forgiveness for those who are making aggressive plans again.”

This anti-war message was, in fact, an abbreviated direct quote from a speech made by Putin last year on the day Russia celebrates victory over Nazi Germany.

This made no difference to the authorities.

After spending 24 hours in detention, Dmitriev, 43, said he had a court hearing and was found guilty of “discrediting Russian armed forces,” according to the court papers he showed NBC News, under the newly enacted legislation. He said he was fined 30,000 rubles, or $520.

Holding up his court papers in a Zoom video, Dmitriev said his guilty verdict proves the absurdity of the system that detained and fined him for using Putin’s own words.

He said he even sent a snarky email to the president’s press office, asking the Russian leader to split the fine since they were now “accomplices.” The office responded but essentially ignored his request, Dmitriev said.

He admitted he was afraid throughout the ordeal and even more so now that he’s on law enforcement’s radar. But he said it’s important to speak up.

“It’s obvious where we are headed. It’s classical Orwell,” Dmitriev said. “If you are standing aside, you are only making it worse. But if you do this, you are letting people know that they are not alone.”

Making sure others don’t feel isolated is also close to Mikhail Podivilov’s heart.

That’s why the IT specialist stood with his bank card above his head at a Moscow metro station one evening in late March, hoping others would take notice, he said.

Written on his card was the word “Mir,” or “peace,” in Russian. (“Mir” is the name of a payment system used by Russian banks, and many bank cards feature it prominently.)

Within five minutes, he was being questioned by police, Podivilov, 22, said.

Speaking with NBC News via Zoom from his home in the suburban town of Ozyory in the Moscow region, Podivilov said the police officers wrangled with him for nearly an hour, trying to get him to move. He refused and all the while stood there with his card above his head, his feet and hands freezing on a chilly Moscow evening, Podivilov said. In the end, they let him go.

Podivilov said he was surprised to just walk away. But despite the fear of arrest, he said he does not have “a moral right to be afraid.”

“In Ukraine, that’s where people can be afraid,” Podivilov added, with no hesitation in his voice. “The maximum that can happen to me is I will get jailed.”

OVD-Info, an independent Russian organization that tracks political persecution and freedom of assembly violations, maintains a long tally of names and acts of Russians who have stood up against the war, including by displaying the blue-and-yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag, standing with a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in Red Square, holding up banners with nothing but eight asterisks (corresponding to the letters in the slogan “No to war” in Russian), and even wearing green ribbons, which have become a symbol of opposition to the war.

It estimated that as of early June, more than 16,000 people had been detained over anti-war protests. It said there are nearly 2,400 court cases underway for allegedly “discrediting” Russian armed forces under the newly enacted legislation, and that it’s aware of at least 170 suspects facing criminal charges related to speaking out against the war.

But for the millions of others who remain silent, the fear is too much to bear, said artist and activist Eugene, who said he did not feel safe revealing his last name.

Eugene, 31, offers an opportunity to those who want a chance to say something against the war to do so anonymously.

Since March 20, he has been running an Instagram account called Malenkiy Piket, or Little Protest in Russian. It’s meant to be a safe space where people can send in photos of small figurines, perhaps a representation of themselves, made out of plasticine or Legos, that are holding up peace messages. The figurines are discreetly placed around people’s towns and cities, or, if it feels too dangerous, in the safety of their homes.

The account’s feed is full of colorful photos of figurines, often dressed in Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow colors and placed against city monuments, benches, riverbanks or people’s kitchen tables, with signs reading, “No to war,” “Ukrainians forgive us,” and “Why?” Their might goes beyond their size, emblematic of how much space is left for freedom of expression in Russia.

For Eugene, it allows ordinary Russians who, over the decades of Putin’s rule, have lost the ability for political thinking to “exercise their political bodies,” he said, speaking via Zoom from his dimly lit St. Petersburg flat. Malenkiy Picket is like a training ground for what it’s like to still speak up when fear is omnipresent, he added.

Eugene said he knows he is risking his freedom by running an account that gives people a platform to speak up, even if it’s in the most discreet of ways.

“Some days I’m scared; others, I’m not,” he said.

Aware of the risks, he said he made sure Malenkiy Piket would keep running and posting, even if he was detained. He said he believes things in Russia are about to get a lot darker before they can get better, but he is not planning to give up fighting for freedom of expression and against the war.

“Even if tomorrow is the end of the world, I should still try to do something,” he said with a smile.

Business Insider

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a ‘preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil’

John L. Dorman – June 11, 2022

• Austin rejected Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during his speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
• “It’s a preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil that none of us would want to live in,” he said.
• Zelensky also spoke at the summit, stating that “the future rules of this world are being decided” in Ukraine.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin while speaking in Singapore on Saturday articulated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a “preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil.”

While speaking at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, Austin remarked on the potential repercussions of the deadly invasion, which was launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February and has been widely condemned by an array of global leaders, notably those from NATO member countries.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is what happens when oppressors trample the rules that protect us all. It’s what happens when big powers decide that their imperial appetites matter more than the rights of their peaceful neighbors. And it’s a preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil that none of us would want to live in,” he said at the major Asian defense summit.

He added: “So we understand what we could lose. We see the dangers of disorder.”

The Pentagon chief then spoke of the importance of the “rules-based international order,” highlighting how Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea all helped Ukraine in the aftermath of the invasion, while also noting the critical contributions from India, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also gave an address to the summit on Saturday — with his speech was conducted virtually — where he emphasized that the global order was being tested in his country.

“I am grateful for your support … but this support is not only for Ukraine, but for you as well,” Zelensky said, per Reuters. “It is on the battlefields of Ukraine that the future rules of this world are being decided along with the boundaries of the possible.”

Since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine, an alliance of leaders — including US President Joe Biden — have continued to appropriate money for arms necessary for the Ukrainian military to fight back against invading forces.

The first few weeks of the war featured critical errors on the part of the Russian military, with the country suffering major losses among its members on the ground and utilizing inadequate equipment.

Russia has recalibrated and in recent weeks has focused its actions largely in eastern Ukraine — largely in the Donbas region, which have included intense battles in the city of Severodonetsk.

Ukraine has pleaded for longer-range weapons from the West in order to counter the weaponry being used by Russia.

Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, recently told The Guardian that the battle against Russia is “an artillery war now” and said his forces were currently “losing in terms of artillery.”

On Friday, Austin also met with his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Wei Fenghe, the minister of national defense, where he emphasized that the US did not “seek confrontation or conflict” as it pertains to Taiwan.

Since entering the White House last year, Biden has had several foreign policy rifts with China, largely as it relates to the United States’ stance of “strategic ambiguity” regarding Taiwan, which the Chinese government considers a breakaway province.

Business Insider

Obama warns the Ukraine war is ‘far from over’ and the ‘costs will continue to mount’

Jake Epstein and John Haltiwanger – June 10, 2022

• Former US President Obama warned that Russia’s war in Ukraine is “far from over.”
• Speaking at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on Friday, he said the costs will “continue to mount.”
• According to Ukrainian officials, hundreds of troops on both sides are dying every day.

Former US President Barack Obama on Friday cautioned that Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine will not end anytime soon and warned it will have far-reaching consequences. 

“Make no mistake, this war is far from over. The costs will continue to mount,” Obama said during a speech at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on Friday, adding that the trajectory of the war remains unpredictable and urged the world to remain “strong, steadfast and sustained” in its support until the conflict ends.

Obama praised the fierce resistance of Ukrainian forces and civilians against the aggression of Russian troops, citing their “courage” as a reason that President Vladimir Putin has been unable to achieve his desired strategic objectives within the eastern European country.

“They’ve united to defend not just their sovereignty, but their democratic identity,” he said. “Their actions have rallied much of the world behind the values of self-determination and human dignity — it’s inspiring.”

The war, Obama said, has turned Russia into an international pariah — cutting the country off from resources and forcing its “best and brightest” to leave.

Obama’s warning, however, underscores the current status of the 15-week-long war, which has become a slow-moving, scorched-earth, and bloody campaign in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.

Ukraine said earlier this week that over 40,000 civilians have been killed or injured since the February 24 invasion — a figure much higher than the latest United Nations tally of roughly 9,500 casualties.

The UN, however, has warned in all its casualty reports that it “believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, officials have said both Ukraine and Russia are losing hundreds of troops each day.

The Ukraine war has also prompted the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Well over seven million people have fled across Ukraine’s border since the war began, according to the UN refugee agency, and there are close to five million Ukrainian refugees across Europe.

There are also concerns that the war will catalyze a global food crisis, given Ukraine is a major exporter of wheat, sunflower oil, and corn. Russia’s blockade on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports is threatening the food supplies of countries around the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

The roots of the war in Ukraine can be traced back to 2014, when Obama was still in the White House. That year, Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The Kremlin in 2014 also began supporting rebels in a war against Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. By the time Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, roughly one-third of the Donbas was controlled by the Kremlin-backed rebels.

Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine in 2014 led to historic tensions between Moscow and Washington, which have been on the rise ever since.

The Obama administration slapped sanctions on Russia over the 2014 annexation of Crimea, but they didn’t go nearly as far as more recent economic penalties imposed on Russia by the Biden administration and European countries in response to the broader invasion of Ukraine this year.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has criticized the West over its response to the annexation of Crimea, suggesting it paved the way for the wider war.

“If the world had punished Russia for what it did in 2014, there would be none of the horrors of this invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” Zelenskyy said in late March. “We need to fix these terrible mistakes now.”