CBS News

Russia keeps pounding Ukraine, fueling skepticism over Putin’s intentions

CBS News – March 30, 2022

Kyiv — Russia’s unrelenting bombing campaign in Ukraine is fueling skepticism about Moscow’s claim that it will “drastically reduce” its military operations in two areas of the country to “increase mutual trust” and encourage peace talks. Despite the ongoing negotiations, the war continues.

As of Wednesday, the United Nations said it had driven more than 4 million people to flee Ukraine, upending their lives and making them refugees. At least 6 million more Ukrainians have been forced to leave their homes to seek safety elsewhere inside the country.

As CBS News correspondent Debora Patta reports from the capital city of Kyiv — one of the areas where Russia said it would scale back its assault — U.S. military officials see President Vladimir Putin’s latest move more as a repositioning of forces than a retreat, and in Kyiv and elsewhere, the threat remained high on Wednesday.

Boardroom discussions like Tuesday’s peace talks in Turkey mean little on the battlefield. Patta says Ukrainians are not letting their guard down, with soldiers continuing to patrol checkpoints around Kyiv, on high alert as they search for Russian saboteurs.

With shelling still heard north of the capital on Wednesday morning ,it was clear that the danger still lurks on the ground, and in the sky.

“The enemy is still here,” President Volodomyr Zelenskyy told his country on Wednesday night, after Russia’s announcement. “Missile and air attacks have not stopped… that’s the reality.”

Few places have felt that more than the southeastern port city of Mariupol, which has all but collapsed. Even if peace is given a chance, all that’s left of Mariupol is rubble and ruin.

Children from the besieged city, and many others like it in Ukraine’s south and east, want their childhoods back.

“I’m so tired,” said one little girl. “And my toys have no batteries in them.”

Older Ukrainians just want to forget. “What else can I do,” asked Genaidy as he gathered what he could from his damaged apartment to flee Mariupol. “There’s nothing left for me here.”

He’s walking away after nearly 40 years working as a shoemaker in the city.

Russian-backed separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine — where the war now raging had simmered quietly since Putin’s last invasion in 2014 — are in no mood for peace. Video emerged showing rebels forcing Ukrainians to strip down, claiming they were searching for Nazi tattoos.

In nearby Mykolaiv, a Russian rocket ripped through a government building on Tuesday, leaving a gaping hole, and fresh trauma. One woman watched helplessly as her colleague died in her arms — one of 12 people killed in the strike according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service.

Even if the Russian military does make good on its promise to pull back from Kyiv, in the towns around the capital, where fierce battles have been raging, there’s not much left to fight for.

While Ukraine claims to have retaken nearby towns like Irpin, those areas have been decimated, and many people did not make it out alive.

The U.K. said Wednesday that its latest intelligence did show some Russian troops pulling back from the outskirts of Kyiv into Belarus and Russia, “to reorganize and resupply” after suffering heavy losses. The Ukrainian government said it expected Russia to retain some troops near the capital, to keep the pressure on and prevent Ukraine’s forces from heading to the eastern front, where the war is still raging.

Zelenskyy, along with the U.S. and his other Western partners, have made it clear they’ll believe Russia’s claim to be easing the assault on Kyiv and the northeastern city of Chernihiv when they see it happen, and not before. Thirty-five days into an invasion that Putin insisted for months he had no intention of launching, the skepticism was unsurprising.

On Wednesday morning, the governor of Chernihiv said his region was “shelled all night” by Russian artillery: “Civil infrastructure has been destroyed again, libraries, shopping malls and other facilities have been destroyed, and many houses have been destroyed.”

Insider

Russian journalist says families are pressured not to talk about their relatives killed in Ukraine, local papers don’t report their deaths

Bill Bostock – March 30, 2022

• A Russian journalist says families are told to supress news of military relatives killed in Ukraine.
• “They say, now there is no need to make a fuss,” the Siberian journalist told the BBC.
• Russian state-run media is heavily censoring news of the invasion and is painting it as a success.

A Russian journalist says families of soldiers killed in Ukraine are being told to keep silent about it, and that newspapers are told not to report fatalities.

“All local media outlets were instructed by regional government not to publish any data on losses in Ukraine,” the journalist, who works in the Siberia region, told BBC World correspondent Olga Ivshina.

The journalist said that “there are cases when local officials put pressure on the relatives of the victims, ordering them to stay silent,” according to Ivshina.

“They say, now there is no need to make a fuss, we will find a way to commemorate your boys later.”

After weeks without addressing losses in Ukraine, Russia said last week that 1,351 of its soldiers had died in the offensive.

Its total was vastly less than the numbers Ukraine says it has killed. A NATO official estimated that a more accurate estimate was between 7,000 and 15,000.

According to Ivshina, Russian journalists are also being targeted for reporting on war deaths.

“There is evidence of growing pressure on local journalists in Russia who report on the military losses – some of the earlier publications about soldiers killed in action were deleted. Sometimes it happens in a day or two, sometimes within an hour,” she tweeted.

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, recently said that Russia was refusing to provide Ukraine with lists of missing Russian troops so that their bodies can be returned, the Guardian reported.

“The Russian authorities don’t want these bodies,” she said.

Russia has also been accused of using mobile crematorium chambers to conceal the true number of troops killed in the Ukraine conflict.

“These guys are carrying those cremation chambers for themselves,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this month, without providing evidence.

Russian state-run media is painting the invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a “special military operation,” as a success and news of the war is being heavily censored.

However, some journalists are breaking step.

Russian state TV editor Marina Ovsyannikova stormed a live Channel One news broadcast with an anti-war protest sign earlier this month and her colleague Zhanna Agalakova recently publicly resigned over the war.

Top officials from Ukraine and Russia met for peace talks in Turkey on Tuesday, with Ukraine saying it is open to declaring neutral status to end the war.

Reuters

Several Russian servicemen seek help avoiding Ukraine war – lawyers

Dasha Afanasieva – March 30, 2022

LONDON (Reuters) – Several Russian servicemen are seeking legal help to avoid being sent to fight in the war in Ukraine, two lawyers said, after 12 members of Russia’s National Guard were fired for refusing to go.

Lawyer Mikhail Benyash said around 200 people had been in contact to ask what they should do in a similar situation.

Pavel Chikov, another Russia-based lawyer, wrote on Telegram that there were “analogous stories from Crimea, Novgorod, Omsk, Stavropol… The workers are appealing for legal help.”

Reuters could not independently confirm the rush for legal help. The National Guard did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment.

Ukraine and Western officials have said that Russia’s forces are suffering from severely low morale in what Moscow calls its special operation to disarm and “denazify” its neighbour. The West has cast it as a poorly executed, imperial-style land grab.

In five weeks, Moscow has failed to capture any major cities and on Tuesday said it would sharply reduce operations near Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv, although on Wednesday attacks on Chernihiv continued.

On Feb. 25, a day into the invasion, a National Guard commander in the southern Krasnodar region and 11 men from his company refused to follow an order to cross the border to Ukraine, Chikov wrote in an earlier post.

The group said the order was illegal because they didn’t have their international passports and because their main job description was confined to Russia, Chikov wrote. They believed they would be breaking the law by going abroad as part of an armed group.

Reuters could not independently verify the account.

The servicemen were fired, the lawyers said, and went on to file a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. On Tuesday, however, only three of the 12 proceeded with their claim, according to Benyash, who is representing them.

Russia created the National Guard in 2016 to fight terrorism and organised crime. Since then, it has cracked down on peaceful anti-government protests and in 2020 was placed on standby by President Vladimir Putin to intervene in Belarus, which was squashing civil unrest of its own.

(Reporting by Dasha Afanasieva; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Nick Macfie)

The Hill

Britain: Russian units suffering losses, forced to leave Ukraine to resupply

March 30, 2022

The British Ministry of Defense said in an update on Wednesday that Russian forces were suffering losses, forcing them to leave Ukraine “to reorganize and resupply.”

“Russian units suffering heavy losses have been forced to return to Belarus and Russia to reorganize and resupply. Such activity is placing further pressure on Russia’s already strained logistics and demonstrates the difficulties Russia is having reorganizing its units in forward areas within Ukraine,” the British Defense Ministry said in an update released through Twitter.

The British Defense Ministry said that Russia would likely defer to missile strikes and mass artillery to make up for their reduced ground maneuver capability.

“Russia’s stated focus on an offensive in Donetsk and Luhansk is likely a tacit admission it is struggling to sustain more than one significant axis of advance,” the ministry added.

The development comes as the Pentagon said on Tuesday that it did not believe a claim made by Moscow that its troops would be reducing military activity near the cities of Chernihiv and Kyiv, saying that Russia was instead “repositioning” its troops.

“We ought not be fooling – and nobody should be fooling ourselves by the Kremlin’s now recent claim that it will suddenly reduce military attacks near Kyiv or any reports that it’s going to withdraw all of its forces,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said.

“We believe this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine. It does not mean the threat to Kyiv is over,” Kirby noted.

The Russian invasion, now in its second month, has remained unsuccessful at seizing Kyiv. The Pentagon told reporters last week that the first Ukrainian city that was taken by Russia was no longer controlled by its forces.

Business Insider

Putin’s senior advisors are feeding him bad information about the Ukrainian invasion because they’re ‘too afraid to tell him the truth,’ a US official says

Natalie Musumeci and John Haltiwanger – March 30, 2022

• A US official told reporters Putin is being fed bad information about Russia’s war with Ukraine.
• “Putin is being misinformed by his advisors about how badly the Russian military is performing.”
• The official said the advisors are “too afraid to tell him the truth” about the failures of the war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely being fed bad information by his top advisors about Russia’s more-than-month-long invasion of Ukraine because they are “too afraid to tell him the truth” about the failures of the war, a US official told reporters, including NBC News and CNN.

“We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisors about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions, because his senior advisors are too afraid to tell him the truth,” said the official, citing declassified intelligence.

“Putin didn’t even know his military was using and losing conscripts in Ukraine, showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president,” the official added.

The official also said the US has “information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military,” according to CNN. “There is now persistent tension between Putin and the (Ministry of Defence), stemming from Putin’s mistrust in MOD leadership,” the official added.

Western officials told reporters on Tuesday Russian elites will likely blame each other for Russia’s “disastrous progress” in its war with Ukraine.

“It’s also likely that within the Russian system various elements are going to be blaming each other for the lack of success” in Ukraine, a Western official speaking on the condition of anonymity said.

The official added, “People are going to be being quite defensive about their own failures, and I think, looking to point the finger at others.”

Additionally, that official told reporters the West is “much less certain” that Putin “is getting an honest picture on the ground” in Ukraine.

“That’s one of the reasons why Western media, Ukrainian media, is important in continuing to make sure the reality of this conflict, and how it is causing not only death and destruction to the Ukrainians, but a great deal of death to the Russian forces as well,” the official said.

Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 with Russian troops surrounding and shelling several towns across the eastern European country, including civilian targets.

Yet despite Ukraine’s armed forces being greatly outnumbered and outgunned by Russian troops, the Ukrainians have put up a fierce resistance, resulting in a mounting Russian death toll and a largely stalled invasion.

Putin’s opponents and critics have a history of dying in violent ways or finding themselves in a Russian penal colony, which could help explain why his advisors are apparently hesitant to provide the Russian leader with accurate intel.

Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, a top rival of Putin’s and Russia’s former deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, was gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015. Nemtsov had been a vocal critic of Putin, particularly over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

He also worked to expose the involvement of Russian troops in a war in eastern Ukraine that began that same year. Putin had repeatedly denied that the Russian military had a presence in the Donbas region of Ukraine, despite solid evidence to the contrary.

Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic, was poisoned with the Soviet era nerve agent Novichok in August 2020. The Russian opposition leader is now imprisoned in Russia on charges widely decried as politically motivated.

Navalny, who’s called for mass protests against Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine, recently had nine more years added to his sentence. The State Department ripped into Russia over the ruling, decrying it as “a disturbing decision” and “another example of the Russian government’s widening crackdown on dissent and freedom of expression, which is intended to hide the Kremlin’s brutal war, and unprovoked war against.”

Russia has gone to extraordinary lengths to quash opposition to the war in Ukraine, arresting thousands of protestors.

Putin also signed a law in early March that could potentially land Russians behind bars for up to 15 years for spreading “false information” about the war in Ukraine.

Reuters

Ships stranded in Ukraine as conflict slows UN rescue efforts

Jonathan Saul – March 29, 2022

LONDON (Reuters) – With more than 1,000 seafarers stranded on ships in Ukrainian ports and food supplies running low, the United Nations is pressing for their safe passage out of danger but security risks and disagreements are hobbling those efforts, maritime sources say.

Russia’s military took control of waterways when it invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, in what Moscow calls a “special operation”.

Since then at least 100 foreign flagged ships with over 1,000 seafarers have been stuck inside Ukrainian ports with food supplies running low, shipping officials say.

UN shipping agency the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said this month it would seek to create a safe maritime corridor to enable merchant ships and their crews to sail out of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov without the risk of being hit.

“The IMO Secretariat is working with both Ukraine and the Russian Federation to try and assist the safe departure of the ships and their crew,” an IMO spokesperson said.

“However, at present, the ongoing security risks preclude the option for ships to depart from ports in Ukraine.”

Multiple issues including the risk of mines is complicating efforts, sources with knowledge of the situation say.

In recent days Turkish and Romanian military diving teams have been involved in defusing stray mines around their waters, underscoring the broader dangers.

“Efforts to establish these safe blue corridors are extremely challenging,” the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) said.

An ICS spokesperson added that it was trying to deliver provisions to affected vessels, “which are in grave danger of running out of food in the coming days as well as ensuring that vessels are not targeted for any kinetic strikes by any party”.

Five merchant vessels have been hit by projectiles – with one of them sunk – off Ukraine’s coast with two seafarers killed, shipping officials say.

London’s marine insurance market has widened the area of waters it considers high risk in the region.

In a circular letter issued to the IMO on Monday, Russia said it had established a humanitarian maritime corridor starting from March 27 “with the aim of ensuring safe passage” from the Ukrainian ports of Chernomorsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Ochakov, Odesa and Yuzhne.

Russia said the corridor, which would operate daily, represented an 80-mile long and 3-mile wide marine traffic lane from the assembly area.

“The Russian side calls on competent authorities of the Ukraine to provide for the safety and security of the merchant vessels and their crews transition to the assembly area,” it said in the circular.

Ukraine’s Maritime Administration is aware of Russia’s announcement, its deputy head Victor Vyshnov said, which was first made by Russian warships to commercial ships last week.

The IMO spokesperson said its Secretariat had circulated Russia’s communication.

But Vyshnov said any boundaries for the corridor announced by Russia had not been agreed by Ukraine.

“This is just a new sign of Russian propaganda,” he told Reuters.

“Due to the ongoing aggression against Ukraine, and Russian mine-laying activities at sea, no one can guarantee shipping safety in this region.”

Vyshnov said there were preconditions for the safe evacuation of ships.

“Russia must fully stop the hostilities, withdraw its troops and ensure the freedom and safety of navigation in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, including by carrying out mine-sweeping or allowing other littoral states to do this job,” he said.

(Reporting by Jonathan Saul; editing by Jason Neely)

HuffPost

Tucker Carlson Goes Big On Protecting Putin With Bizarre Warning

Josephine Harvey – March 29, 2022

Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a warning on Monday about the repercussions of removing Russian President Vladimir Putin from power, and suggested that Islamic extremists would somehow get hold of the country’s nuclear weapons and use them on Americans.

“So, Russia has a large and restive population of Islamic extremists. Do we think it’s possible that with no one running the country ― because of course we have no chosen successor to Putin ― is it possible, if we did that, that one of those 6,000 nuclear weapons might wind up in the hands of some anti-American terror group and be used against our civilian population here?” he asked. “A nuclear weapon! Well, it’s not just possible, it’s likely.”

Carlson has made a habit of defending Putin, even after the Russian dictator made moves to invade Ukraine. Since the war began, Carlson has become a favorite for rebroadcasts on Russian propaganda channels for blaming President Joe Biden for the invasion, parroting Kremlin propaganda and spreading conspiracy theories justifying the invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, a Mother Jones report revealed a leaked Kremlin memo that directed Russian state-sponsored media to use Carlson’s broadcasts “as much as possible” due to his criticism of the U.S. and NATO and defense of Putin.

Carlson’s scaremongering comments were in response to a speech Biden made in Poland, where he said of Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

White House officials promptly clarified that the remark did not reflect a change in U.S. policy and that Biden was not advocating for regime change in Russia, but that Putin “cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region.”

Other than Carlson, the off-script remark was also blasted by foreign policy experts who warned it was dangerous and would play into Putin’s narrative.

Should Putin lose his grasp on power in Russia, or be assassinated, he would likely be succeeded by another member of the Kremlin elite.