The New York Times

Live Updates: Biden Will Announce $800 Million in New Aid for Ukraine

The announcement is expected to come shortly after the Ukrainian president gives a virtual address to Congress on Wednesday. The prime ministers of three NATO countries visited Ukraine’s battered capital to show their “unequivocal support.”

Mark Landler and Matina Stevis-Gridneff – March 15, 2022

European Leaders visit Kyiv to show support as Russian bombardment terrifies city.

LONDON — Three European leaders staged a defiant show of support for Ukraine on Tuesday, traveling to its besieged capital, Kyiv, even as a relentless Russian artillery bombardment left apartment towers in the city ablaze, forcing terrified residents to flee into the street with only the clothes on their backs.

The dramatic visit by the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, which unfolded in tight secrecy as they crossed the Ukrainian border by train after dawn, was a strikingly personal gesture. But it caught other European leaders off guard, angering some and baring uncomfortable divisions in how best to demonstrate Western solidarity with Ukraine.

It also came as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia disparaged the second consecutive day of negotiations with Ukraine, undercutting the faint glimmers of hope raised from talks the day before that both sides were looking for a way to halt the war.

The Kremlin slapped retaliatory sanctions on President Biden and other senior American officials. Mr. Biden announced his own plans to travel to Europe next week to showcase the unity of the NATO alliance in the face of Russian aggression.

A spokesman for Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said the three visitors were “de facto” representing the European Union in Ukraine. In Brussels, however, officials said the trio did not have the E.U.’s blessing, and some European diplomats complained that the trip was too risky, given the Russian forces encircling Kyiv.

Others said they admired the audacity of the group, which also included Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic and Prime Minister Janez Jansa of Slovenia, casting it as a powerful symbol of the backing for Ukraine among countries on Europe’s eastern flank, where the specter of Russian aggression looms larger than in Paris or London.

Still, for all the symbolism of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine’s leaders under the threat of Russia’s rockets, Ukraine was facing the devastating barrage largely on its own. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, imposed a 35-hour curfew, starting on Tuesday evening, which suggested the capital was entering an even more difficult phase of its grinding struggle to hold off Russian troops and tanks.On the Ground: Ukraine Under Attack

“This is their attempt to annihilate the Ukrainian people,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an emotional video address to the Canadian Parliament, repeating his plea for NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over the country. “It is an attempt to destroy our future, our nation, our character.”

Mr. Zelensky asked the lawmakers to imagine if the CN Tower in Toronto were shelled like the towers in Kyiv. His language has become more pointed, even scolding, with each speech to a Western audience, revealing his frustration with leaders who have resisted more direct military involvement out of fear that it would entangle them in a wider conflict with Russia.

The Ukrainian leader, who has become a hero to many in the West, is scheduled to speak via video to Congress on Wednesday, where he is expected to amplify his pleas for more help and increase the pressure on the United States and its allies.

Mr. Biden is planning to announce $800 million in new security assistance to Ukraine on Wednesday, according to White House officials. The administration last week announced $200 million in security assistance for Ukraine and has made available a total of $2 billion in such funding.

On Tuesday evening, the Polish state broadcaster carried video of the Czech, Slovene and Polish leaders meeting Mr. Zelensky and other officials across a long table, with Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag behind them.

“They are here to support us,” Mr. Zelensky said at a news briefing after the meeting, which also was shown on Ukrainian television. “It is a great, courageous, right, friendly step. I am confident that with such friends, such countries and neighbors and partners, we can really win.”

A photograph posted earlier on Mr. Morawiecki’s Twitter account showed the three men poring over a map, seated in what appeared to be a train carriage en route to the Ukrainian capital.

“It is here, in war-torn Kyiv, that history is being made,” Mr. Morawiecki said in the Twitter post. “It is here, that freedom fights against the world of tyranny. It is here that the future of us all hangs in the balance.”

The White House announced that Mr. Biden would fly to Brussels for an extraordinary summit meeting of NATO on March 24. That may result in further economic and military aid for Ukraine but will likely fall short of Mr. Zelensky’s request for a no-fly zone. Administration officials declined to say whether Mr. Biden planned to meet with the Ukrainian president, whom he has called a hero. But they said Mr. Biden may go on to somewhere in Eastern Europe to meet with refugees streaming out of Ukraine.

The river of people fleeing the war continued unabated on Tuesday, as Russia claimed to have seized control of the strategic Kherson region in the south. Russian forces kept up their pounding of civilian targets in Kyiv, where Ukrainian troops were fortifying intersections with sandbags, tires, and iron spikes.

A pre-dawn rain of rockets on Kyiv shattered windows, left craters in buildings, and turned a 16-floor apartment house into a towering inferno. The fire spread quickly after a missile struck the building, blowing a jagged hole at its entrance. Firefighters rescued residents from windows by ladder through billowing smoke. By midafternoon, they had carried out two bodies encased in black bags.

“I came out with nothing,” said Mykola Fedkiv, 85, a retired geologist. “I left everything, my telephone, my medicines, everything.”

When the missile struck, Mr. Fedkiv fled his 12th-floor apartment and made his way down the stairs. He climbed through the blasted entrance hall and found himself in the bomb crater. People pulled him out by his arms. He stood outside for hours, hoping to re-enter his apartment to collect personal documents. Asked where he planned to stay the night, he responded, “God knows.”

Conditions were even more desperate in the coastal city of Mariupol, which has been pummeled by Russian forces in a two-week siege that has left some residents crushed in the rubble and many others dying in a winter freeze with no heat, food, or clean water. Officials can no longer account for the number of dead and missing.

Officially, 2,400 civilians killed in Mariupol have been identified, but Pyotr Andryushchenko, an adviser to the city government, said he believed the toll was far higher, possibly as many as 20,000. Ukrainian estimates of the number of people trapped have ranged from 200,000 to 400,000.

Mr. Andryushchenko said 2,000 vehicles had managed to escape Mariupol on Tuesday and that another 2,000 were packed and ready to leave. Officials told civilians to “delete all messages and photos from phones” in case Russian soldiers searched them for signs of support for Ukrainian forces.

The perils of reporting accurate information from Ukraine’s combat zones were further underscored Tuesday with news that a Fox News cameraman and a Ukrainian colleague had been killed in an attack on Monday outside Kyiv — raising to at least three the number of journalist fatalities in Ukraine in the past few days.

In Kherson, a southern city under Russian occupation, the mayor said that members of Russia’s national guard were rounding up activists who opposed Russia’s presence, possibly trying to recruit them through coercion.

“They’re all in the city, in the jail,” the mayor, Igor Kolykhaev, wrote in several text messages, referring to the activists. Russian troops, he said, “collect them, hold them, work them over and release them.”

Kherson was the first major city to fall to Russian forces after the Feb. 24 start of the invasion. Although Kremlin officials had predicted that the Ukrainian people would welcome their “liberation” by Russian troops, residents of Kherson have been defiant, regularly gathering in the central square to protest the Russian presence, even when Russian troops fire into the air to disperse them.

Russia claimed to have captured the entire Kherson region, potentially strengthening its ability to push west toward the strategic port cities of Mykolaiv and Odessa. A senior Ukrainian military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Russian forces were in control of much of the Kherson region, but said Ukrainian forces were attacking their positions and inflicting losses.

Negotiations via video link between Russia and Ukraine continued for a second day on Tuesday, though Mr. Putin doused prospects of any imminent breakthrough. In a phone call with the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, Mr. Putin complained that “Kyiv is not demonstrating a serious attitude toward finding mutually acceptable solutions,” according to the Kremlin.

Mr. Putin also continued to struggle in the information battle with Ukraine. On Tuesday, President Emmanuel Macron of France said his country could offer diplomatic “protection” to a Russian state television employee who was detained and fined over an on-air antiwar protest on Monday.

The employee, Marina Ovsyannikova, burst onto the live broadcast of Russia’s most-watched news program on Monday evening, yelling, “Stop the war!” and holding a sign that read, “They’re lying to you here.”

Russia also faced further isolation from Britain, which imposed sanctions on more than 370 people it labeled oligarchs, political allies of, or propagandists for Mr. Putin. Among those blacklisted: Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former president of Russia; Mikhail Mishustin, the current prime minister; and Mikhail Fridman, the billionaire founder of Alfa Bank, one of the country’s largest private banks.

Russia, for its part, said it had sanctioned 13 Americans including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III in response to American sanctions against Mr. Putin and other officials. Also on its list was Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, and Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Mr. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, shrugged off the news, suggesting in jest that the Kremlin’s announcement might have missed its intended mark. The president, Ms. Psaki said, is a “junior, so they might have sanctioned his dad by mistake.”

Mark Landler reported from London, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels. Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall and Lynsey Addario from Kyiv, Ukraine; Michael Schwirtz from Odessa, Ukraine; Anton Troianovski from Istanbul; Andrew Higgins from Warsaw; Ian Austen from Ottawa; Steven Erlanger from Brussels; David E. Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Glenn Thrush from Washington; and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York.

The Week

Putin says pro-Western Russians are ‘scum and traitors’ who need to be removed from society

Catherine Garcia, Night editor – March 16, 2022, 9:55

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered an unsettling warning to any Russians who might be supportive of the United States and other Western countries.

“Any people, and particularly the Russian people, will always be able to tell apart the patriots from the scum and traitors and spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths,” Putin said during a televised address on Wednesday. “I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion, and readiness to meet any challenge.”

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, anti-war protesters have been demonstrating in the streets, leading to thousands of arrests. Earlier this week, Marina Ovsyannikova, a producer at the state-run Channel One television station, held up an anti-war sign during a news broadcast.

Putin mentioned in his speech the sanctions imposed on Russia by Western countries, and said these “steps are aimed at worsening the lives of millions of people.” Despite foreign countries withdrawing their business from Russia and Moscow’s stock market remaining closed, Putin said having to deal with the repercussions is worth it because “the struggle we are waging is a struggle for our sovereignty, for the future of our country and our children.” Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, he declared, “fully justified themselves.”

Putin’s speech was “in part, an informal and indirect sanctioning of mass repression,” Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political analysis firm R. Politik, told The New York Times. She said the Russian president was making it clear to law enforcement authorities that “all spheres of society that show any sympathy to the Western way of life” should be targeted, and that “was scary — very scary.”

Insider

Biden said privately he has no idea why Sen. Sinema is trying to stop his legislative agenda, book says

Tom Porter – March 16, 2022

• President Joe Biden is baffled by Sen. Sinema’s hostility to his agenda, a new book says.
• An aide compared describing her motives to trying to explain TikTok to Biden, per an extract in Axios.
• Sinema has blocked Biden’s attempt to reform the filibuster to pass election reform.

President Joe Biden privately expressed perplexity at why Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona helped block key parts of his legislative agenda, according to extracts from a new book published by Axios.

The book, “This Will Not Pass,” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, is the first major account of the first year of the Biden administration.

It details the obstacles the president has encountered in getting key parts of his legislative agenda through Congress, where the Democrats hold a razor-thin Senate majority.

Among the key hurdles has been the opposition by Sinema to Biden’s plans to temporarily reform the Senate’s filibuster rule, which has been used by Republicans to stop legislation the White House wants.

The extract details a number of times Sinema opposed Biden, including one occasion when she asked why she should wear a COVID mask in his presence.

“She became the first-ever lawmaker to argue with White House aides when they asked her to wear a face mask in the company of the president, repeatedly asking why that was necessary when she had been vaccinated,” the book said.

Opposition to mask rules has been one of the rallying points of Republicans hostile to Biden’s COVID policies.

Per the book, she also discouraged the president from visiting Arizona after signing his COVID relief bill in 2021.

It also said she attended a GOP fundraiser where she mocked Biden and praised Rep. Andy Briggs, an Arizona GOP lawmaker who has defended Donald Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories and spread disinformation about the Jan 6 riot.

The extract says that Biden has struggled to grasp the reasons for Sinema’s behavior.

“One person close to the president likened Biden’s perplexity at Sinema to his difficulty grasping his grandchildren’s use of … TikTok. He wanted to relate, but he just didn’t quite get it,” the authors write.

Biden has faced opposition from another Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, in seeking to pass one of the other central planks of his domestic legislative agenda — his $2.7 trillion Build Back Better spending bill.

With many Democrats fearing Republican gains in the mid-terms, Biden in his first State of the Union speech in March indicated he was seeking to achieve more limited legislative priorities.

Associated Press

Biden sending more anti-aircraft systems, drones to Ukraine

Lisa Mascaro – March 15, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy summoned the memory of Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in appealing Wednesday to the U.S. Congress to do more to help Ukraine’s fight against Russia. President Joe Biden said the U.S. is sending more anti-aircraft, anti-armor weapons and drones.

Zelenskyy, livestreamed to a rapt audience of lawmakers on a giant screen, acknowledged the no-fly zone he has sought to “close the sky” to airstrikes on his country may not happen. Biden has resisted that, as well as approval for the U.S. or NATO to send MiG fighter jets from Poland.

Instead, Zelenskyy pleaded for other military aid to stop the Russian assault.

Biden, describing help he was already prepared to announce, said the U.S. will be sending an additional $800 million in military assistance, making a total of $2 billion in such aid sent to Kyiv since he took office more than a year ago. About $1 billion in aid has been sent in the past week. Biden said the new assistance includes 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 100 grenade launchers, 20 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenade launchers and mortar rounds and an unspecified number of drones.

“We’re going to give Ukraine the arms to fight and defend themselves through all the difficult days ahead,” Biden said.

Biden spoke hours after Zelenskyy delivered a video address to members of U.S. Congress in which he made an impassioned plea for the U.S. and West to provide more help to save his young democracy than world leaders have so far pledged to provide.

For the first time in a public address to world leaders, he showed a packed auditorium of lawmakers a graphic video of the destruction and devastation his country has suffered in the war, along with heartbreaking scenes of civilian casualties.

“We need you right now,” Zelenskyy said. “I call on you to do more.”

Lawmakers gave him a standing ovation, before and after his short remarks, which Zelenskyy began in Ukrainian through an interpreter but then switched to English in a heartfelt appeal to help end the bloodshed.

“I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths,” he said.

Nearing the three-week mark in an ever-escalating war, Zelenskyy has used the global stage to implore allied leaders to help stop the Russian invasion of his country. The young actor-turned-president often draws from history, giving weight to what have become powerful appearances.

Biden has stopped short of providing a no-fly zone or the transfer of military jets from neighboring Poland as the U.S. seeks to avoid a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

The White House has been weighing giving Ukraine access to U.S.-made Switchblade drones that can fly and strike Russian targets, according to a separate person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. It was not immediately clear if the new drones that Biden said would be delivered to Ukraine include the Switchblades.

Zelenskyy has emerged as a heroic figure at the center of what many view as the biggest security threat to Europe since World War II. Almost 3 million refugees have fled Ukraine, the fastest exodus in modern times.

Wearing his now trademark army green T-shirt, Zelinskyy began the remarks to his “American friends” by invoking the destruction the U.S. suffered in 1941 when Japan bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by militants who commandeered passenger airplanes to crash into the symbols of Western democracy and economy.

“Remember Pearl Harbor? … Remember September 11?” Zelenzkyy asked. “Our countries experience the same every day right now.”

Biden said he listened to Zelenskyy’s “significant” speech but did not directly address the Ukrainian’s critique that the U.S. and West could be doing more. The U.S. president said Zelenskyy’s speech reflected Ukrainians “courage and strength” shown throughout the crisis.

“We are united in our abhorrence of Putin’s depraved onslaught and we’re going to continue to have their backs as they fight for their freedom, their democracy, their very survival.”

Sen. Angus King, the Maine independent. said there was a “collective holding of the breath” in the room during Zelenskyy’s address. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said, “If you did not look at that video and feel there is an obligation for not only the United States but but the free countries of the world to come together in support of Ukraine, you had your eyes closed.” Majority Whip Dick Durbin called the address heartbreaking and said, “I’m on board with a blank check on sanctions, just whatever we can do to stop this Russian advance.”

Outside the Capitol demonstrators held a large sign lawmakers saw as they walked back to their offices. “No Fly Zone=World War 3.”

The Ukrainian president is no stranger to Congress, having played a central role in Donald Trump’s first impeachment. As president, Trump was accused of withholding security aid to Ukraine as he pressured Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on political rival Biden. Zelenskyy spoke Wednesday from a giant screen to many of the same Republican lawmakers who declined to impeach or convict Trump, but are among the bipartisan groundswell in Congress now clamoring for military aid to Ukraine.

He thanked the American people, saying Ukraine is grateful for the outpouring of support, even as he urged Biden to do more.

“You are the leader of the nation. I wish you be the leader of the world,” he said “Being the leader of the world means being the leader of peace.”

It was the latest visit as Zelenskky uses the West’s great legislative bodies in his appeals for help, invoking Shakespeare’s Hamlet last week at the British House of Commons asking whether Ukraine is “to be or not to be” and appealing Tuesday to “Dear Justin” as he addressed the Canadian Parliament and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He often pushes for more help to save his young democracy than world leaders have so far pledged to provide.

To Congress, he drew on the image of Mount Rushmore and told the lawmakers that people in his country want to live their national dreams just as they do.

“Democracy, independence, freedom.”

Biden has insisted there will be no U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine and has resisted Zelenskyy’s relentless pleas for warplanes as too risky, potentially escalating into a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

“Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III,” Biden has said.

Zelenskyy appeared to acknowledge the political reality.

“Is this to too much to ask to create a no fly zone over Ukraine?” he asked, answering his own question. “If this is too much to ask, we offer an alternative,” he said, calling for weapons systems that would help fight Russian aircraft.

Already the Biden administration has sent Ukraine more than 600 Stinger missiles, 2,600 Javelin anti-armor systems, unmanned aerial system tracking radars, grenade launchers, 200 shotguns, 200 machine guns and nearly 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition, along with helicopters, patrol boats, satellite imagery and body armor, helmets, and other tactical gear, the U.S. official said.

Congress has already approved $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, and the newly announced security aid will come from that allotment, which is part of a broader bill that Biden signed into law Tuesday.

___

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Mary Clare Jalonick, Aamer Madhani, Ellen Knickmeyer, Farnoush Amiri, Kevin Freking, Alan Fram, Nomaan Merchant and Chris Megerian and Raf Casert in Brussels, Jill Lawless in London, Aritz Parra in Madrid and videojournalist Rick Gentilo contributed to this report.

CBS News

A closeup look at the U.S. air defense system near Ukraine

Norah O’Donnell – March 15, 2022

About 50 miles from Ukraine at an airport in Eastern Poland, a major show of American force is designed to deter Russian aggression. The U.S. has deployed two Patriot missile batteries, which are among the most sophisticated air defense systems in the world.

The weapon defeats threats by shooting them out of the sky.

“All of these missiles are designed to defeat tactical ballistic missiles, designed to defeat cruise-type missiles, as well as aircraft,” said the battery commander, who CBS News was asked not to name for security reasons. “Regardless of intentional or accidental, the system actually does not have the means of discriminating against those, it identifies threats and we have the ability of defeating those threats.”

The systems have been at this location for about a week, he said.

It’s not just the U.S. deploying Patriot missiles, Germany and the Netherlands are deploying them too as the war in Ukraine moves closer to NATO’s doorstep. A Russian missile hit a military facility just 15 miles from the Polish border on Sunday. Local reports say a suspected Russian drone was found in Romania last week.

The airport in Eastern Poland is also used as a way station for weapons going to Ukraine. On Tuesday, what appeared to be a convoy of trucks left the airport heading for the border.

The U.S. is moving more than weapons — there are now 100,000 U.S. troops operating in Europe for the first time since 2005, including those at the site of the Patriot batteries.

“We always are maintaining a high level of readiness,” Major General Gregory Brady, who is in charge of the Army’s missile defense systems throughout Europe, told CBS News. “They are here ready to defend against any type of aerial threats that could threaten NATO territory.”

“CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell traveled to the Ukraine-Poland border as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered the fastest refugee displacement crisis in Europe since World War II. O’Donnell shares firsthand accounts from Ukrainian refugees and looks at how NATO is preparing while Russia pushes the war in Ukraine close to Poland’s border in the 30-minute documentary “Norah O’Donnell Reports: Crisis in Ukraine,” premiering Friday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m. ET on the CBS News app.

Kyiv Independent

Russia concentrates military power for Kyiv assault

Illia Ponomarenko – March 15, 2022

The operative lull in the battle for Kyiv over the last few days seems to be running to its end.

New indications suggest Russia is getting ready to relaunch a massive offensive in the region, the war’s main goal. 

Despite a very complicated situation with many of its main axes of attack throughout Ukraine, Russia keeps throwing more military power west and east of Kyiv, in a bid to possibly surround and penetrate the city.

Satellite images issued by U.S. company Maxar reveal Russia’s very recent activity close to the Hostomel Airfield, including armored units and towed artillery. 

“Russia is likely seeking to reset and re-posture its forces for renewed offensive activity in the coming days,” as the British Defense Ministry said in its March 11 intelligence update.

“This will probably include operations against the capital, Kyiv.”

As the expert community believes, Kyiv should brace itself for a hard defense within short notice, potentially for Russian attempts to impose a full blockade and trigger a humanitarian disaster to force the Ukrainian leadership into a deal. 

Nonetheless, as the situation suggests, Russian prospects look increasingly grim as well.

With Russia’s failed attempts to seize Kyiv in a blitz attack, along with steady defense efforts, the capital city has all chances to grind over and bleed dry invading forces in fierce urban combat, effectively precipitating a strategic victory over Russia.

Russia’s scarce progress

As in any of the key areas, such as Mykolaiv, or Kharkiv, or Chernihiv, Russia has demonstrated very little progress in the battle for Kyiv over the last few days. 

A series of fierce attacks before March 8-9 ended up with Russia gaining a foothold northwest of Kyiv, in the satellite cities of Irpin, Bucha, and Hostomel, a key junction on the E373 road, more commonly known as the Warsaw Highway. 

Along with the P02 road to the north, this has become the Russian military’s vital throughway between the Kyiv metropolitan area and Belarus via the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.

At huge costs, Russia has formally secured this passage for supplies and fresh troops.

However, as multiple evidence suggests, the narrow corridor is still prone to extreme logistics issues, which end up causing fuel and food shortages among Russian forces advancing towards Kyiv.

Very illustrative was the situation regarding the ill-fated Russian military convoy stretching 64 kilometers along the highway northwest of Kyiv. 

For many days, numerous satellite pictures showed the convoy, basically, a giant traffic jam, standing still, very likely due to fuel shortage and poor technical condition of vehicles that effectively stalled the movement.

But according to the latest observations, the giant convoy has largely dispersed, likely redistributed among multiple Russian units in the area. 

After gaining a foothold in parts of Hostomel, Bucha, and Irpin, Russia also demonstrated very limited success trying to advance further south to the defunct E40 road connecting Kyiv and Zhytomyr.

According to Ukraine’s General Staff, this group of Russian forces is most probably poised to partially surround Kyiv from the west and cut the capital city off from supplies. 

On March 8, the Institute For the Study of War (ISW), a Washington D.C.-based think tank, said Russian forces were concentrating on a possible assault against the capital in the coming 24 to 96 hours.

Nonetheless, amid extremely slow progress due to logistical issues and a strong Ukrainian defense, Russia has probably decided to take a breathing spell in operations and agreed on civilian evacuation from Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, and Borodyanka, the cities that have been largely ruined.

As the Ukrainian military suggests, Russian forces in many ways used this lull to try and re-array west of Kyiv and possibly get its logistics issues resolved for an effective onslaught. 

The last few days in the area have been relatively calm, although the warring parties have had sporadic clashes.

Russia is also investing a lot of effort into trying to gain a foothold east of Kyiv, particularly the Brovary area. But this axis has proved even less successful.

Similarly to the Dnipro west bank, Russia is also confined to a few key highways leading northeast to Russia and Belarus, particularly the E-95, M-02, and H-07 roads. 

And the problem for Russia is that it has so far failed to seize or effectively block two key cities on its way to Kyiv, namely Chernihiv and Sumy, both of which continue offering fierce resistance since day one of the invasion and inflicting severe enemy casualties. 

Without the stiff control of either of the two cities, along with ensuring safe communications along the highways, gaining ground east of Kyiv is also extremely problematic.

As a result, Russia has no effective control over the vast territories between Kyiv and Chernihiv or Sumy, where Ukrainian regular military and territorial defense forces are practicing hit-and-run tactics. 

“Sending large military forces to Kyiv from the north means long convoys moving along roads in the forest,” says Andriy Zagorodnyuk, former Ukraine’s defense minister and the chairman of the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies. 

“Convoys are very vulnerable in such a terrain. One needs to just target the convoy head, and the whole convoy effectively stops. And then it gets decimated. And this is what we see on a constant basis. The local geography is not on the invader’s side.” 

Day after day, the Ukrainian military and local social media users indicate multiple pieces of evidence of Russia’s massive loss of manpower and hardware in combat, especially in Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kyiv regions. 

As one of the latest developments, a Russian battalion tactical group, part of the 90th Armored Division’s 6th Regiment, sustained severe losses close to Brovary on March 10. 

According to Ukrainian statements, most of the regiment’s personnel, along with the commanding officer Colonel Andrey Zakharov, were killed in action. The division’s advancing groups had to retreat and stay on the defensive. 

The Ukrainian victory likely further disrupted Russian efforts to set conditions for offensive operations east of Kyiv, as the Institute For the Study of War commented on the engagement. 

“The episodic, limited, and largely unsuccessful Russian offensive operations around Kyiv increasingly support the Ukrainian General Staff’s repeated assessments that Russia lacks the combat power near the capital to launch successful offensive operations on a large scale,” the think tank said on March 10.

Besides, the ISW added, Ukrainian air force and air defense operations continue to hinder Russian maneuvers on the ground by likely limiting Russian close air support and also exposing Russian mechanized forces to Ukrainian air and artillery attacks. 

This suggestion was clearly illustrated by the March 10 engagement at Brovary, where the advancing Russian armored convoy moving concentrated on a highway was spotted and then decimated by intense and dense Ukrainian artillery and tank strikes.https://www.youtube.com/embed/ShxAORZfjp8?feature=oembed

Moreover, according to the ISW conclusions, the likelihood is increasing that Ukrainian forces could fight the Russian forces advancing to take Kyiv to a standstill, eventually. 

Logistics and organization issues, as well as poor morale and inadequate planning, have already cost it the swift victory it had evidently hoped for on Feb. 24.

“There are as yet no indications that the Russian military is reorganizing, reforming, learning lessons, or taking other measures that would lead to a sudden change in the pace or success of its operations,” the ISW also said on March 10.

“Although the numerical disparities between Russia and Ukraine leave open the possibility that Moscow will be able to restore rapid mobility or effective urban warfare to the battlefield.” 

Russia’s success unlikely 

The expert community has a consensus that Russia’s chances of seizing Kyiv are at least questionable, given the general performance to date. 

The blitzkrieg plan that would see the Ukrainian leadership in Kyiv being captured and forced into a deal within days has ultimately failed. The war gets increasingly protracted for Russia, which has already employed close to 95% of its military power deployed against Ukraine, according to Ukrainian and Western intelligence, with no key goals reached so far.

Upon that, multiple pieces of evidence suggest Russian forces are getting exhausted and running out of reserves due to systemic organizational issues and high casualty rates. 

As of March 11, the Ukrainian military reported a total of over 12,000 Russian fatalities since Feb. 24, along with 353 tanks, 1,165 light armored vehicles, 125 artillery pieces, 58 multiple launch rocket systems, 57 airplanes, and 83 helicopters. 

Speaking late on March 11, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Brigadier General Kyrylo Budanov said Russia since Feb. 24 had 18 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) rendered combat-ineffective in clashes with the Ukrainian military. Thirteen more BTGs have been completely destroyed in action, according to the official. 

Budanov called this “horrific losses Russia has never had.” 

In general, according to Ukrainian and Western intelligence, Russia was believed to have concentrated a total of 120-125 BTGs for its full-scale military action against Ukraine. 

Zagorodnyuk of the Center for Defense Strategies believes that, although not very accurate, Ukraine’s official figures on the Russian death toll might be close to reality.

Upon the think tank estimates, up to a total of 45,000 Russian military personnel could have been forced out of action as killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or demoralized, after two weeks of fierce fighting. 

This might correspond to up to one-third of Russia’s total military contingent deployed against Ukraine, the expert suggests. 

Nonetheless, all sources suggest a concentration of Russian forces near Kyiv, despite seemingly unfavorable terms on the ground. 

“The Kyiv axis is among their top priorities,” says Ruslan Leviev of the Conflict Intelligence Team, an online investigation group checking Russia’s military activity. 

“As we believe, Russians may acknowledge the fact that at some point they will have to seek talks and offer a deal. So they need the strongest leverage they can get for the talks, which is the siege of Kyiv and a humanitarian disaster in the city.” 

According to the group’s estimates, Russia may be trying to concentrate a total of nearly 21-22 battalion tactical groups against Kyiv, including nearly 15 coming from the northwest. 

The Russian force from the east could have been much stronger, the CIT said, but the Ukrainian resistance in the northern regions, particularly Chernihiv, has diverted a significant portion of the enemy force from the capital city.

The Russian perspective of encircling Kyiv does not seem promising, given the mission’s complexity, the group believes. But even in case of an uneven success, Russia will unlikely resolve to try and break through the city defenses. 

“Although they have made numerous mistakes in terms of military strategy and leadership, I think they understand that with their force available, assaulting Kyiv makes no sense, Leviev says. 

“It will not be successful,” he said. 

It is much more likely that Russians will try and establish a blockade amid relentless shelling and airstrikes. Such tactics of forcing cities into surrendering via total terror have so far barely worked against Mariupol, Sumy, and especially Kharkiv, which carry on with their fierce resistance despite massive destruction and loss of life. 

Kyiv, being a very large and well-fortified city, is an incomparably more difficult target for a Russian blockade, let alone an all-out assault, as experts believe. 

“Assaulting Kyiv in this situation would a stupid thing to do,” says Zagorodnyuk. 

“But we have already seen them doing stupid things — so we should not rule this out.”

 Author: Illia Ponomarenko is the defense and security reporter at the Kyiv Independent. He has reported about the war in eastern Ukraine since the conflict’s earliest days. He covers national security issues, as well as military technologies, production, and defense reforms in Ukraine. Besides, he gets deployed to the war zone of Donbas with Ukrainian combat formations. He has also had deployments to Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an embedded reporter with UN peacekeeping forces. Illia won the Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship and was selected to work as USA Today’s guest reporter at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Daily Beast

Putin’s Own Soldiers Are Refusing to Fight in Ukraine

The Daily Beast – March 15, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin has two options at this point, says Ukrainian diplomat Olexander Scherba: Either he destroys Ukraine and takes its cities and then withdraws, or “he withdraws without doing that because he cannot accomplish anything here.”

Putin may not realize it, but “everyone outside this very close circle around Putin understands that this campaign is going down the drain,” Scherba adds on this episode The New Abnormal. “The [Ukrainian] soldiers are ready to fight until the last drop of blood here and Russian soldiers increasingly are clueless about what they’re doing here.”

Watch: Journalist interrupts Russian TV news to protest against Ukraine invasion

Journalist interrupts Russian TV news to protest against Ukraine invasion

Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova burst on to a live news broadcast to protest against her country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Not only are they clueless, but they’re simply refusing to fight, Scherba, who is currently in western Ukraine, tells co-host Molly-Jong-Fast. He shares that soldiers in Crimea refused to be deployed when they discovered they were ordered to take Odessa, and intercepts of communication between soldiers in Ukrainian cities and their parents indicate that they’re spooked by how many of their own have died.

But we should still “assume the worst,” he says, sharing his opinion on the one thing that Ukraine needs from the U.S. to win.

Putin’s Paranoid, Isolated, and Trying to Bluff His Way Through

Also on the podcast, The Nation’s Elie Mystal pleads with Joe Biden to say the word “abortion” and explains how sending federal doctors to Texas would be enough to save the state from its own fuckery.

And Molly and co-host Andy Levy discuss whether Tucker Carlson can feel embarrassment, and Molly actually sorta defends Mitt Romney when it comes to Tulsi Gabbard.

Reuters

U.S. Senate unanimously condemns Putin as war criminal

Moira Warburton – March 15, 2022

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, a rare show of unity in the deeply divided Congress.

The resolution, introduced by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and backed by senators of both parties, encouraged the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague and other nations to target the Russian military in any investigation of war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“All of us in this chamber joined together, with Democrats and Republicans, to say that Vladimir Putin cannot escape accountability for the atrocities committed against the Ukrainian people,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.

Russia calls its actions a “special military operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” Ukraine. Putin has also called the country a U.S. colony with a puppet regime and no tradition of independent statehood.

Moscow has not captured any of the 10 biggest cities in the country following its incursion that began on Feb. 24, the largest assault on a European state since 1945.

(Reporting by Moira Warburton in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

The New York Times

Russia Deploys a Mystery Munition in Ukraine

John Ismay – March 15, 2022

American intelligence officials have discovered that the barrage of ballistic missiles Russia has fired into Ukraine contain a surprise: decoys that trick air-defense radars and fool heat-seeking missiles.

The devices are each about 1 foot long, shaped like a dart and white with an orange tail, according to an American intelligence official. They are released by the Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles that Russia is firing from mobile launchers across the border, the official said, when the missile senses that it has been targeted by air defense systems.

Each is packed with electronics and produces radio signals to jam or spoof enemy radars attempting to locate the Iskander-M, and contains a heat source to attract incoming missiles. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about intelligence matters, described the devices on the condition of anonymity.

The use of the decoys may help explain why Ukrainian air-defense weapons have had difficulty intercepting Russia’s Iskander missiles.

Powered by a solid-fuel rocket motor, the Iskander can reach targets more than 200 miles away, according to U.S. government documents. Each mobile launcher can fire two Iskanders before it must be reloaded.

Photographs of the dart-shaped munitions began circulating on social media two weeks ago. They had stumped experts and open-source intelligence analysts — many of whom mistook them for bomblets from cluster weapons based on their size and shape.

Richard Stevens, who spent 22 years in the British Army as an explosive ordnance disposal soldier and later worked as a civilian bomb technician for 10 years in southern Iraq, Africa and other regions, said he had been exposed “to plenty of Chinese and Russian munitions, but I had never seen this.”

Stevens posted photos of the munitions to a site for military and civilian bomb disposal experts that he started in 2011, and found that no one else seemed to have seen these mystery munitions before either.

“That Russia is using that size of weapon — the Iskander-M — and quite a few of them I believe, that’s why we’re seeing this now,” Stevens said. “It’s just that, post-conflict in the past 10 to 15 years, no one has had the opportunity to see this.”

The devices are similar to Cold War decoys called “penetration aids,” the intelligence official said, that have accompanied nuclear warheads since the 1970s and were designed to evade anti-missile systems and allow individual warheads to reach their targets. The incorporation of the devices into weapons such as the Iskander-M that have conventional warheads has not been previously documented in military arsenals.

“The minute people came up with missiles, people started trying to shoot them down, and the minute people started trying to shoot them down, people started thinking about penetration aids,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. “But we never see them because they’re highly secret — if you know how they work, you can counteract them.”

The use of the decoys may point to some level of carelessness or urgency by Russian military leadership, Lewis said, given that Russia knows they will inevitably be collected and studied by Western intelligence services so that NATO air defenses can be programmed to defeat the Iskander’s countermeasures.

And it is highly unlikely, he said, that the version of the Iskander that Russia has sold to other countries would contain these decoys.

“That suggests to me that the Russians place some value on keeping that technology close to home and that this war is important enough to them to give that up,” Lewis said. “They’re digging deep, and maybe they no longer care, but I would care if I were them.

“I think that there are some very excited people in the U.S. intelligence community right now.”

Daily Beast

Ex-Black Ops Agent: This Is How Putin Could Meet His End

A. Craig Copetas – March 15, 2022

Spooks from Langley to Kyiv are likely to be quietly untangling an espionage conundrum that dare not speak its name, according to a former senior intelligence agent who was once regularly involved in such discussions: “Could President Putin really be assassinated?”

“The operation is on every intelligence agency’s design table,” a veteran clandestine operative for France’s General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) told The Daily Beast. “I know this because I used to plan them.”

To be sure, killing Putin as a means of ending his war in Ukraine is a volatile topic to raise officially. It’s also diplomatically discourteous. “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if someone internally just took this guy out and eliminated him,” Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio recently mused, hurriedly adding, “that’s not the official policy, obviously, of the United States, no one’s talking about the U.S. doing it.”

The retired DGSE agent—an elimination specialist whose attention to detail receives high praise from his fellow liquidators—said the most efficient method would be poison.

“The attempt will be from within the Kremlin. This is not an outside job,” he said.

This would certainly not be the first attempt to assassinate a sitting Russian leader. Back in 1866, the revolutionary nihilist Dmitry Karakozov tried and failed to murder Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg. He was executed for his effort.

Arguably the most curious effort merely resulted in a catastrophic change of menu at the only Chinese restaurant in Moscow. The year was 1952 and the Hotel Peking on Mayakovsky Square was nearing its completion to celebrate Sino-Soviet friendship. Although the hotel didn’t open until 1955, two years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong sent a favorite chef to Moscow to open a restaurant just off the hotel’s lobby.

The story—endlessly told by the Peking’s staff and management during the nearly two years that I lived in one of the hotel’s apartments—had all the trappings of an espionage horror movie. The chef was not really a cook. He was an assassin sent to kill Stalin. But the KGB got to him first, slamming a kitchen cleaver into his head, and—according to hotel legend—leaving his ghost, ax-in-head, to haunt the hallways in search of Stalin.

How today’s spooks might be proposing to take out Putin—deniably, of course—is another mystery, but a stroll down memory lane in the assassination business inspires recollections of classics like the ice-ax, the roof-toss and, the favorite of Genovese crime family hitman Richard “the Iceman” Kulinski, a nasal spray bottle filled with cyanide.

“Russian intelligence is likely the only one left that deploys poison as a default,” says the Frenchman, citing a long roster of Russian potions used to eradicate Kremlin enemies from 1957 KGB defector Nikolai Khokhlov (coffee laced with thallium) to a 2004 assassination attempt on Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko (dinner seasoned with dioxin).

Putin prefers poison. Polonium-210 triggered the 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko and Novichok was responsible for the nearly fatal 2018 attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in England. Back on home turf, Prince Felix Yussupov in 1916 allegedly took out the mad monk Grigori Rasputin with cyanide and a few bullets in the head; more recently, Putin’s people in 2020 attacked opposition leader Alexei Navalny with Novichok. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov at the time disagreed it was a “trend,” adding, “you’ll agree that in many countries in the world, everyday a lot of poisonings happen,” he said.

“All true,” says the DGSE agent, “but nobody does it better than the Russians.”

Yet poisoning Putin wouldn’t be an easy task. According to a source who works in the upper echelons of a Russian ministry, Putin in February allegedly sacked the some 1,000 people—from cooks to launderers to secretaries to bodyguards—who catered to his daily personal and professional needs, and replaced them with a new group of attendants.

“Putin is of course aware someone is coming after him,” says the Frenchman. “Killing Putin is not an easy task, but Putin knows it can be done, and that’s guaranteed to scare him.”

Scheduling is everything. Would-be assassins like to “gather information. Determine habits. Correlate all of Putin’s back-up options,” the covert operator adds, ticking the boxes. “Doubt Putin will travel far by vehicle. There’s no armored vehicle that can survive a few tons of explosives buried under the street.”

The former DGSE black-operations planner says any hit on Putin most likely will have someone in his inner circle, or a phantom just outside the perimeter, as the trigger man. “It will be an expensive job, a fortune,” he says. “In my experience, I’d wager an asset is already in place. There always is.”