The Tarbabys Blog

Insider

France seized a $120 million super-yacht owned by Russian oligarch and Putin confidant Igor Sechin – a man dubbed ‘Darth Vader’ by Russian media

Kate Duffy – March 3, 2022

• France said its customs officials seized a super-yacht owned by a Russian oligarch.
• The yacht, worth an estimated $120 million, belongs to Igor Sechin, CEO of Russia’s Rosneft.
• Western nations have targeted rich Russians tied to the Kremlin as part of Ukraine war sanctions.

A super-yacht owned by a Russian oligarch has been seized by France under sanctions targeting individuals linked to the Kremlin, the French finance ministry said Thursday.

The yacht, Amore Vero, is owned by Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft, the ministry said. Superyacht Fan put Amore Vero’s price tag at $120 million.

The yacht was seized on Wednesday night in La Ciotat, a town in the south of France, per a press release tweeted by French finance minister Bruno Le Maire. The vessel had been docked in La Ciotat since early January, the release said.

Sechin was placed on European Union and United States sanctions lists soon after Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday last week. The EU, US, UK and others have sanctioned a number of high-profile Russian business executives that have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sechin has been described in Russian media as the country’s “Darth Vader.” He was deputy prime minister of Russia until 2012 and is said to be a close ally of Putin.

The 280-ft Amore Vero has a swimming pool that converts into a helicopter pad, according to Oceanco, its maker. It also has a private owner’s deck and a sun deck with a jacuzzi, Oceanco says.

The yacht can accommodate up to 14 guests in seven suites, and has two VIP cabins, according to Superyacht Times.

The EU sanctions “require the detention of the vessel with immediate effect,” the French finance ministry’s press release said.

The seizure of Amore Vero appears to be the second instance of a European authority seizing a Russian oligarch-owned super-yacht since Ukraine sanctions were enacted.

Germany recently seized Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s $600 million super-yacht, Forbes reported Wednesday, citing multiple unnamed sources. Usmanov’s yacht was docked in Hamburg, Germany, for a refit when it was seized, per Forbes.

Sechin’s yacht was seized by French customs officials on Wednesday, Le Maire said Thursday.

A superyacht owned by a US-sanctioned Russian billionaire arrived in the Maldives earlier this week, Agence France-Presse reported Tuesday. It’s one of several Russian-owned pleasure craft believed to be headed to the sunny island nation, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US.

The yacht, Clio, is owned by Oleg Deripaska, the founder of the Russian aluminum group Rusal who was sanctioned by the US in 2018. Clio dropped anchor off Malé, the capital of the Maldives, on Monday, AFP said, citing port officials.

HuffPost

Veterans Group’s Blistering Ad Exposes GOP As ‘Party Of Putin’

Lee Moran – March 3, 2022

VoteVets, a progressive political action committee that works to elect Democratic military veterans to Congress, blasts GOP praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin in a new online spot.

The group’s 76-second ad, released Wednesday, begins with footage of former President Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complimenting the Russian leader, who is being condemned worldwide following his military invasion of Ukraine.

“Nothing good comes from appeasing a dictator, whether it’s the butcher in Moscow or the defeated loser in Mar-a-Lago,” says the video’s narrator.

“Remember, Donald Trump was impeached for threatening to withhold military aid for Ukraine,” the voiceover continues. “Aid Ukraine needed to hold off Russian aggression. He tried to extort Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, the hero now leading the resistance on the streets.”

The narrator recalls that “52 out of 53 Republican senators voted to let Trump get away with it.” Moreover, Trump “divided NATO, threatened to pull America out and convinced his pal Putin that the West was weak.”

“Donald Trump’s appeasement of Putin wasn’t just a personal act of treason, it’s the Republican Party’s official position,” the narration concludes.

Donald Trump never says a bad word about Vladimir Putin. Even as Ukraine is invaded, he calls Putin "very savvy." When he tried to extort Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and was impeached, the Republican Party refused to convict.

One thing is certain, the GOP is the #PartyOfPutin. pic.twitter.com/1lDARwYFKZ

— VoteVets (@votevets) March 2, 2022

Associated Press

Fire out at Ukraine’s key nuclear plant amid Russian attacks

Jim Heintz, Yuras Karmanau and Mstyslav Chernov – March 3, 2022

Ukraine Nuclear Plant

This image made from a video released by Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant shows bright flaring object landing in grounds of the nuclear plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine Friday, March 4, 2022. Russian forces shelled Europe’s largest nuclear plant early Friday, sparking a fire as they pressed their attack on a crucial energy-producing Ukrainian city and gained ground in their bid to cut off the country from the sea. (Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS

A woman sits by the window of a Lviv-bound train, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, March 3, 2022. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office says a second round of talks with Russia aimed at stopping the fighting that has sent more than 1 million people fleeing over Ukraine’s borders, has begun in neighboring Belarus, but the two sides appeared to have little common ground. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda) ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stanislav, 40, says goodbye to his son David, 2, and his wife Anna, 35, on a train to Lviv at the Kyiv station, Ukraine, Thursday, March 3. 2022. Stanislav is staying to fight while his family is leaving the country to seek refuge in a neighbouring country. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)ASSOCIATED PRESS

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A fire at Europe’s biggest nuclear plant ignited by Russian shelling has been extinguished, Ukrainian authorities said Friday, and Russian forces have taken control of the site.

Ukraine’s state nuclear regulator said that no changes in radiation levels have been recorded so far. It said staff are studying the site to check for other damage to the compartment of reactor No. 1 at the Zaporizhzhia plant in the city of Enerhodar.

The regulator noted in a statement on Facebook the importance of maintaining the ability to cool nuclear fuel, saying the loss of such ability could lead to an accident even worse than 1986 Chernobyl accident, the world’s worst nuclear disaster, or the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns in Japan. It also noted that there is a storage facility for spent nuclear fuel at the site, though there was no sign that facility was hit by shelling.

The shelling of the plant came as the Russian military pressed their attack on a crucial energy-producing Ukrainian city and gained ground in their bid to cut off the country from the sea. As the invasion entered its second week, another round of talks between Russia and Ukraine yielded a tentative agreement to set up safe corridors to evacuate citizens and deliver humanitarian aid.

Leading nuclear authorities were worried — but not panicked — about the damage to the power station. The assault, however, led to phone calls between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders. The U.S. Department of Energy activated its nuclear incident response team as a precaution.

Earlier, nuclear plant spokesman Andriy Tuz told Ukrainian television that shells fell directly on the facility and set fire to one of its six reactors. That reactor is under renovation and not operating, he said.

The Zaporizhzhia regional military administration said that measurements taken at 7 a.m. Friday (0500 GMT) showed radiation levels in the region “remain unchanged and do not endanger the lives and health of the population.”

The mayor of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, announced on his Telegram channel Friday morning that “the fire at the (nuclear plant) has indeed been extinguished.” His office told The Associated Press that the information came from firefighters who were allowed onto the site overnight.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council in “coming hours” to raise the issue of Russia’s attack on the nuclear power plant, according to a statement from his office.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tweeted that the Zaporizhzhia plant’s reactors were protected by robust containment structures and were being safely shut down.

In an emotional speech in the middle of the night, Zelenskyy said he feared an explosion that would be “the end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe.”

“Only urgent action by Europe can stop the Russian troops,” he said. “Do not allow the death of Europe from a catastrophe at a nuclear power station.”

But most experts saw nothing to indicate an impending disaster.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the fire had not affected essential equipment and that Ukraine’s nuclear regulator reported no change in radiation levels. The American Nuclear Society concurred, saying that the latest radiation levels remained within natural background levels.

“The real threat to Ukrainian lives continues to be the violent invasion and bombing of their country,” the group said in a statement.

Orlov, the mayor of Enerhodar, said Russian shelling stopped a few hours before dawn, and residents of the city of more than 50,000 who had stayed in shelters overnight could return home. The city awoke with no heat, however, because the shelling damaged the city’s heating main, he said.

Prior to the shelling, the Ukrainian state atomic energy company reported that a Russian military column was heading toward the nuclear plant. Loud shots and rocket fire were heard late Thursday.

Later, a livestreamed security camera linked from the homepage of the Zaporizhzhia plant showed what appeared to be armored vehicles rolling into the facility’s parking lot and shining spotlights on the building where the camera was mounted.

Then there were what appeared to be muzzle flashes from vehicles, followed by nearly simultaneous explosions in surrounding buildings. Smoke rose into the frame and drifted away.

Vladimir Putin’s forces have brought their superior firepower to bear over the past few days, launching hundreds of missiles and artillery attacks on cities and other sites around the country and making significant gains in the south.

The Russians announced the capture of the southern city of Kherson, a vital Black Sea port of 280,000, and local Ukrainian officials confirmed the takeover of the government headquarters there, making it the first major city to fall since the invasion began a week ago.

A Russian airstrike on Thursday destroyed the power plant in Okhtyrka, leaving the city without heat or electricity, the head of the region said on Telegram. In the first days of the war, Russian troops attacked a military base in the city, located between Kharkiv and Kyiv, and officials said more than 70 Ukrainian soldiers were killed.

“We are trying to figure out how to get people out of the city urgently because in a day the apartment buildings will turn into a cold stone trap without water, light or electricity,” Dmytro Zhyvytskyy said.

Heavy fighting continued on the outskirts of another strategic port, Mariupol, on the Azov Sea. The battles have knocked out the city’s electricity, heat and water systems, as well as most phone service, officials said. Food deliveries to the city were also cut.

Associated Press video from the port city showed the assault lighting up the darkening sky above deserted streets and medical teams treating civilians, including a 16-year-old boy inside a clinic who could not be saved. The child was playing soccer when he was wounded in the shelling, according to his father, who cradled the boy’s head on the gurney and cried.

Severing Ukraine’s access to the Black and Azov seas would deal a crippling blow to its economy and allow Russia to build a land corridor to Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014.

Overall, the outnumbered, outgunned Ukrainians have put up stiff resistance, staving off the swift victory that Russia appeared to have expected. But a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia’s seizure of Crimea gave it a logistical advantage in that part of the country, with shorter supply lines that smoothed the offensive there.

Ukrainian leaders called on the people to defend their homeland by cutting down trees, erecting barricades in the cities and attacking enemy columns from the rear. In recent days, authorities have issued weapons to civilians and taught them how to make Molotov cocktails.

“Total resistance. … This is our Ukrainian trump card, and this is what we can do best in the world,” Oleksiy Arestovich, an aide to Zelenskyy, said in a video message, recalling guerrilla actions in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during World War II.

The second round of talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations was held in neighboring Belarus. But the two sides appeared far apart going into the meeting, and Putin warned Ukraine that it must quickly accept the Kremlin’s demand for its “demilitarization” and declare itself neutral, renouncing its bid to join NATO.

Putin told French President Emmanuel Macron he was determined to press on with his attack “until the end,” according to Macron’s office.

The two sides said that they tentatively agreed to allow cease-fires in areas designated safe corridors, and that they would seek to work out the necessary details quickly. A Zelenskyy adviser also said a third round of talks will be held early next week.

Despite a profusion of evidence of civilian casualties and destruction of property by the Russian military, Putin decried what he called an “anti-Russian disinformation campaign” and insisted that Moscow uses “only precision weapons to exclusively destroy military infrastructure.”

Putin claimed that the Russian military had already offered safe corridors for civilians to flee, but he asserted without evidence that Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” were preventing people from leaving and were using them as human shields.

The Pentagon set up a direct communication link to Russia’s Ministry of Defense earlier this week to avoid the possibility of a miscalculation sparking conflict between Moscow and Washington, according to a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the link had not been announced.

Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Chernov reported from Mariupol, Ukraine. Sergei Grits in Odesa, Ukraine; Francesca Ebel, Josef Federman and Andrew Drake in Kyiv; and other AP journalists from around the world contributed to this report.

The Hill

National security staffer allegedly pushed out during Trump administration rehired

March 3, 2022

A National Security Council (NSC) staffer pushed out under former President Trump has been rehired by the Biden administration.

Ellen Knight, a government classification expert, is now working at the NSC as senior director for records, access, and information security management, NSC spokeswoman Emily Horne told The New York Times.

“Ellen Knight is a dedicated career public servant,” Horne said in a statement, according to the paper. “We’re thankful to have her return to the National Security Council as the senior director for records, access, and information security management, and benefit from her extensive experience in classified information management.”

During the Trump administration Knight worked at the NSC on a two-year detail assignment from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). She was involved with the prepublication review process for former national security adviser John Bolton’s book, “The Room Where it Happened,” which she claims led to retaliatory measures by the Trump administration.

Knight, in a September 2020 letter, claimed that lawyers at the NSC played “an outsized role in the review process” after she informed them that she received Bolton’s manuscript. She says NSC political appointees intervened in the process by delaying the issuance of a letter that deemed the book cleared. They also allegedly challenged her evaluation of the book.

Additionally, she claimed that White House lawyers pressured her to reverse her conclusion that Bolton’s book did not include any classified information and was safe to be published, according to the Times.

In the letter, the ex-staffer’s lawyer suggested that she may have been retaliated against for her stance on the review and refusal to block the publication of the book.

Knight was serving at the NSC on finite assignment, but the letter said she was given assurances that she would stay at NSC in a direct-hire position once her detail finished.

In 2020, however, she was told there was not a path forward for her at the NSC, and ultimately returned to NARA.

The letter was filed in Washington, D.C., federal court as part of the saga involving Bolton’s book. The Trump administration sought to block the publication of the book, claiming that it had classified information and could compromise national security if shown to the public.

The attempt was unsuccessful and the book published, but a lawsuit soon followed. The Justice Department ultimately dropped the suit and ended a criminal investigation into whether the book included classified information, according to the Times.

The Hill has reached out to the NSC and White House for comment.

Associated Press

Ukrainian drone enthusiasts sign up to repel Russian forces

Matt O’Brien – March 4, 2022

In better times, Ukrainian drone enthusiasts flew their gadgets into the sky to photograph weddings, fertilize soybean fields or race other drones for fun. Now some are risking their lives by forming a volunteer drone force to help their country repel the Russian invasion.

“Kyiv needs you and your drone at this moment of fury!” read a Facebook post late last week from the Ukrainian military, calling for citizens to donate hobby drones and to volunteer as experienced pilots to operate them.

One entrepreneur who runs a retail store selling consumer drones in the capital said its entire stock of some 300 drones made by Chinese company DJI has been dispersed for the cause. Others are working to get more drones across the border from friends and colleagues in Poland and elsewhere in Europe.

“Why are we doing this? We have no other choice. This is our land, our home,” said Denys Sushko, head of operations at Kyiv-based industrial drone technology company DroneUA, which before the war was helping to provide drone services to farmers and energy companies.

Sushko fled his home late last week after his family had to take cover from a nearby explosion. He spoke to The Associated Press by phone and text message Friday after climbing up a tree for better reception.

“We try to use absolutely everything that can help protect our country and drones are a great tool for getting real-time data,” said Sushko, who doesn’t have a drone with him but is providing expertise. “Now in Ukraine no one remains indifferent. Everyone does what they can.”

Unlike the much larger Turkish-built combat drones that Ukraine has in its arsenal, off-the-shelf consumer drones aren’t much use as weapons — but they can be powerful reconnaissance tools. Civilians have been using the aerial cameras to track Russian convoys and then relay the images and GPS coordinates to Ukrainian troops. Some of the machines have night vision and heat sensors.

But there’s a downside: DJI, the leading provider of consumer drones in Ukraine and around the world, provides a tool that can easily pinpoint the location of an inexperienced drone operator, and no one really knows what the Chinese firm or its customers might do with that data. That makes some volunteers uneasy. DJI declined to discuss specifics about how it has responded to the war.

Taras Troiak, a dealer of DJI drones who started the Kyiv retail store, said DJI has been sending mixed signals about whether it’s providing preferential access to — or disabling — its drone detection platform AeroScope, which both sides of the conflict can potentially use to monitor the other’s flight paths and the communication links between a drone and the device that’s controlling it.

DJI spokesperson Adam Lisberg said wartime uses were “never anticipated” when the company created AeroScope to give policing and aviation authorities — including clients in both Russia and Ukraine — a window into detecting drones flying in their immediate airspace. He said some users in Ukraine have reported technical problems but DJI has not disabled the tool or given preferential access.

In the meantime, Ukrainian drone experts said they’ve been doing whatever they can to teach operators how to protect their whereabouts.

“There are a number of tricks that allow you to increase the level of security when using them,” Sushko said.

Sushko said many in the industry are now trying to get more small drones — including DJI alternatives — transported into Ukraine from neighboring European countries. They can also be used to assist search-and-rescue operations.

Ukraine has a thriving community of drone experts, some of whom were educated at the National Aviation University or the nearby Kyiv Polytechnic University and went on to found local drone and robotics startups.

“They’ve got this homebuilt industry and all these smart people who build drones,” said Faine Greenwood, a U.S.-based consultant on drones for civic uses such as disaster response.

Troiak’s DJI-branded store in Kyiv, which is now shuttered as city residents take shelter, was a hub for that community because it runs a maintenance center and hosts training sessions and a hobby club. Even the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, once paid a visit to the store to buy a drone for one of his children, Troiak said.

A public drone-focused Facebook group administered by Troiak counts more than 15,000 members who have been trading tips about how to assist Ukrainian troops. One drone photographer who belongs to the Ukrainian Association of Drone Racing team told The Associated Press he decided to donate his DJI Mavic drone to the military rather than try to fly it himself. He and others asked not to be named out of fear for their safety.

“The risk to civilian drone operators inside Ukraine is still great,” said Australian drone security expert Mike Monnik. “Locating the operator’s location could result in directed missile fire, given what we’ve seen in the fighting so far. It’s no longer rules of engagement as we have had in previous conflicts.” In recent days, Russian-language channels on the messaging app Telegram have featured discussions on ways to find Ukrainian drones, Monnik said.

Some in Ukraine’s drone community already have experience deploying their expertise in conflict zones because of the country’s long-running conflict with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Monnik’s firm, DroneSec, has tracked multiple instances just in the past year of both sides of that conflict arming small drones with explosives. One thing that Ukrainians said they’ve learned is that small quadcopter drones, such as those sold at stores, are rarely effective at hitting a target with explosive payloads.

“It would seem somewhat short-sighted to waste one,” said Greenwood, the consultant based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I assume the chief goal would be recon. But if things are getting desperate, who knows.”

DJI also has experience in responding to warfighters trying to weaponize its drones and used so-called “geofencing” technology to block drone movements during conflicts in Syria and Iraq. It’s not clear yet if it will do the same in Ukraine; even if it does, there are ways to work around it.

Small civilian drones are no match against Russian combat power but will likely become increasingly important in a protracted war, leaving drone-makers no option to be completely neutral. Any action they take or avoid is “indirectly taking a side,” said P.W. Singer, a New America fellow who wrote a book about war robots.

“We will see ad-hoc arming of these small civilian drones much the way we’ve seen that done in conflicts around the world from Syria to Iraq and Yemen and Afghanistan,” Singer said. “Just like an IED or a Molotov cocktail, they won’t change the tide of battle but they will definitely make it difficult for Russian soldiers.”

——

AP video journalist Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.

Air Force Times

What a Ukrainian cannon on a bridge might tell us about what happened there

Philip Athey – March 4, 2022

For military artillery crews, going against an armored vehicle well within range of that vehicle’s gun is the thing of nightmares.

Vehicles are more armored, can shoot on the move, typically can shoot faster and are designed for a close fight.

Artillery howitzers, on the other hand, are meant to lob shots onto an enemy position miles away from the front line.

But in the desperate fighting around Kherson, Ukraine ― now reportedly taken over by the Russians ― in the very first days of the Russian invasion, a Ukrainian artillery crew may have faced off with Russian armored vehicles advancing on a hotly contested bridge outside the city.

Though Kherson, Ukraine, fell into Russian hands on Wednesday, the defenders of the city, possibly including one brave howitzer crew, played a significant role in slowing down the Russian southern advance.

Incredible first-hand look from @npwcnn of the bridge to Kherson, Ukraine that was the scene of much fighting in the last 24 hours pic.twitter.com/EPIymr48RT

— Nora Neus (@noraneus) February 25, 2022

On Feb. 26 a CNN reporter toured a bridge on the outskirts of Kherson, Ukraine, that just hours earlier had been the scene of some of the most intense fighting in the first few days of the war.

The bridge was key chokepoint that, if taken, would allow the Russian military to cross the Dnieper River and into central and southern Ukraine.

By the time Nick Paton Walsh and the rest of his CNN crew arrived at the bridge it had changed hands multiple times.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the city saw the toughest fighting in the first few days of the war.

Though it is impossible to tell without eyewitness accounts or video of the actual fighting, CNN footage shows one Ukrainian 152 mm 2A65 Msta-B, a Soviet-style howitzer, appearing to be lined up facing the strategically important bridge head on, surrounded by impacts and two abandoned artillery shells.

“Shelling continued back and forth, and through the smoke CNN could see what appeared to be armored vehicles on the bridge moving towards the Ukrainian side, although it was not possible to confirm who they belong to,” Walsh said.

Tactically, sending in U.S. howitzers to stop such an advance using direct fire would go directly against U.S. military doctrine.

“The preferred defense technique against an armored or mechanized ground attack is for the battery or platoon to displace to an alternate position and continue the mission,” an Army manual on how to deploy a howitzer battery said. “Direct confrontation with this type of force is not advised.”

However, Soviet-style howitzers, like the Msta-B, were designed with direct fire in mind, said Tim Heck, an Eastern armies scholar and a Marine reserve artillery officer.

The Mst-B comes with some forward-facing armor that modern U.S. howitzers simply don’t have.

“If they are shooting thin skinned vehicle, no worries,” Heck said in a written statement. “Tanks would be trickier, but not unreasonable if the ammo load is right.”

But even with the splinter shield in front, the Ukrainian crew likely would have been vulnerable to anything more than a light or medium machine gun, Heck said.

Roman Fontana, a former enlisted U.S. Marine who has worked with the Ukrainian military, said the Ukrainian force tends to be creative in how it deploys old equipment often in need of repairs.

“They’ll take weapons not for their intended uses and turn it into something else,” Fontana said.

If a U.S. artillery battery was to perform direct fire, it typically would use every gun in the battery. The fact that only one howitzer seemed to be set up to take on the advancing armored vehicles may indicate the Ukrainian force had to get creative with limited resources.

Fontana said the barrel on that specific cannon may have been too worn down to be used effectively for indirect fire. But it still was possible to shoot straight over short distances.

“If you have a broken tennis racket that you patched together and fixed, you can still get the ball where you need it to go.” he said.

Another possibility from the images was that the howitzer was attempting to withdraw when the vehicle towing it was taken out by enemy fire.

Heck noted that the cannon did not have its trails dug in, indicating that the emplacement may have been a rush job and it was possible the crew retreated from the cannon before it was able to get a shot off.

Eventually, the Russians were able to take the bridge and now have taken Kherson, according to The New York Times.

But the Russian advance in the area and in the rest of the country was significantly delayed due to the unexpected fighting prowess of the Ukrainian military.

And possibly due to one suicidally brave cannon crew willing to face down a column of advancing Russian armored vehicles.

Yahoo! News

Why Russian attacks in Ukraine are likely to get more deadly

Niamh Cavanagh and Sam Matthews – March 4, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted Thursday that his invasion of Ukraine was “going to plan,” and experts warn that the failure of Russian forces to swiftly achieve victory in the first eight days of the war could mean the worst is yet to come for civilians.

“Russia has a substantial air and missile advantage over Ukraine,” Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the nonprofit organization RAND, told Yahoo News. “If Russian leadership, if Vladimir Putin, continues to double down on this and insist that Kyiv is to be taken, there is still a great deal of violence left that Russia can resort to.”

Trying to predict exactly how the war will play out, or whether Putin might be compelled to agree to a ceasefire, is difficult. If history is a guide, however, the Russians may simply try to force Ukraine into submission, no matter how long that ultimately takes.

During a nearly 11-week campaign, from December 1994 through February 1995, Russian forces laid siege to the Chechen city of Grozny. When it was done, estimates put the civilian death toll at between 25,000 and 30,000.

Beginning in 2012, Russian forces aided the Syrian government in a relentless, four-year attack on the Syrian city of Aleppo that left an estimated 31,000 civilians dead.

What’s playing out now in Ukrainian cities, experts say, bears a striking resemblance to those two conflicts. Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center, said the images of the bombing of Kharkiv are “like Aleppo all over again.”

Sergiy Orlov, the deputy mayor of Mariupol, said on Wednesday that his city was witnessing a “human catastrophe,” with entire districts of its outlying areas having been leveled by Russian bombs and artillery fire. Medics have not been allowed to retrieve the dead as the Kremlin attempts to bomb towns and cities into submission, he said.

Philip Reeker, the U.S. chargé d’affaires to the U.K., warned that “medieval tactics are certainly what we can expect [from Putin]. That is exactly what President Putin and the Russian military have in mind.”

In terms of military might, Russia has the clear advantage over Ukraine in the conflict. Its tanks alone outnumber those of the Ukrainian forces by a margin of 3 to 1, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. As for military aircraft, Ukraine has 200 attack aircraft, including helicopters and 27 warships, while Russia has at least 1,300 aircraft and 34 warships.

Yet nine days into the war, the level of resistance being mounted by Ukraine has taken many experts by surprise.

“We expected to see certain things, and we didn’t see them,” Boston said. “You’ve seen Ukrainian civilians walking out, blocking the movement of Russian armored vehicles. We see them walking right up to the Russians in some cases.”

Boston said Putin may have simply miscalculated how to execute his assault on Ukraine.

“We saw an initial set of cruise and ballistic missile strikes take place,” Boston said. “But it was not followed up by a large-scale airstrike campaign, like one might expect. Parts of this operation look a lot like how they tried to execute the Crimea operation.”

Unlike in 2014, when Putin swiftly seized the Crimean Peninsula, Ukrainians are now fighting back, keeping Kremlin-led forces out of most major cities. “One crucial difference is that the Ukrainians are shooting back this time,” Boston said. “So it seems to have caught whoever made the plan off guard.”

While people in the West have cheered on the Ukrainian resistance, however, the days and weeks ahead are likely to hold no shortage of tragic moments.

“It’s important to keep in mind that although what has happened so far is awful, and it is a crime, it can get a great deal worse,” Boston said. “And I, frankly, am not totally sure how it will not get a great deal worse.”

The Telegraph

Lord Owen: Ukraine is going to be Putin’s undoing

Christopher Hope – March 3, 2022

David Owen has met his fair share of Soviet and Russian leaders.

“I met with Brezhnev when he was ageing, but he was still dignified, quite well-informed. Gromyko was very much on the ball… a serious negotiator. But Putin, I think he’s a different kettle of fish in every way.”

Speaking to Christopher Hope on the Telegraph’s Chopper’s Politics podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above, the former foreign secretary says he’s seen a shift in the Russian President.

“I’ve never had a one-on-one meeting with him, but I’ve been in the room with him. I was there at the banquet at Buckingham Palace in 2003 when he came over. I went to the meeting with BP. I was at that time chairman of Yukos International, a large Russian oil company. Then there was this feeling that this is a person you could have dialogue with. I think in the last two years, there’s been a substantial change in this man’s approach.”

“Compare how drastically he prepared the way with Russian opinion for taking the Crimea to this, then there were a lot of preliminary discussions and debate, it came as no surprise. Now? Absolutely nothing.”

“There’s no doubt this is a different man to one we were in G8 with. Ukraine is going to be his undoing, I have no doubt. How long will it take? Who knows.”

Daily Beast

Former Fox News Director Jack Hanick Indicted for Helping Russia

Jose Pagliery – March 3, 2022

As the United States increasingly goes after some of the Kremlin’s business tentacles, the latest person arrested for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia is a former Fox News director who left to launch a Russian propaganda network.

The Department of Justice on Thursday revealed that Jack Hanick was quietly arrested in London on Feb. 3 for dodging U.S. sanctions by helping a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeyev, start his right-wing Tsargrad TV.

The DOJ simultaneously unsealed a grand jury indictment against him, accusing Hanick of knowingly engaging in business dealings with Malofeyev, who had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in financing Russia-backed soldiers in eastern Ukraine who have violently tried to break off from the democratic country since 2014.

Sean Hannity’s Ukraine War ‘Plans’ Are Even Dumber Than You Think

The indictment also accuses Hanick of lying to FBI agents about his travels to Greece and Bulgaria to expand the TV network in 2015 and 2016, when he was interviewed by American investigators last year in New York City.

Federal agents assert that many of the damning details about Hanick’s Kremlin adventures were laid out in an unpublished memoir he kept in his email account, which was searched by the feds with a court-approved search warrant.

Malofeyev was sanctioned in December 2014 by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for financing separatists in the Donbas region in southeastern Ukraine.

Russia-aligned fighters there operated with the not-so-secret help of that country’s military and used that government’s weapons when they shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing 283 passengers and 15 crewmembers.

Malofeyev (also spelled in the West as Malofeev) started an Orthodox Christian network called Tsargrad TV. In 2020, he launched a similarly named right-wing political group in Russia with an imperialist bent that would—much like the National Rifle Association does in the United States—pressure politicians to toe the conservative line.

I’m a Former Russian TV Anchor. Fox News Mimics State TV.

According to The Warsaw Institute, a Polish-based geopolitical think tank, “Tsargrad” would test political candidates’ adherence to “traditional family, religious, and cultural values of the Russian people.”

The Financial Times in 2015 analyzed how Malofeyev launched his “conservative yet modern spin on global news” in an attempt to mimic the rise of Fox News. Then, in 2018, the online news site Salon called out Hanick for joining the Russian operation, noting that he had previously served as a director for Fox News host Sean Hannity. However, on Thursday, Fox News told The Daily Beast that assertion was wrong and never corrected.

Hanick got his start at Fox News when it first launched in 1996. Fifteen years later, in 2011, he left. Three years later, he joined forces with Malofeyev’s Russian propaganda operation. The Justice Department now wants to extradite him from the United Kingdom to New York City.

Damian Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, issued a statement noting that sanctions “prohibit United States citizens from working for or doing business with Malofeyev but as alleged, Hanick violated those sanctions by working directly for Malofeyev on multiple television projects over the course of several years.”

Williams noted the indictment underscores his office’s “commitment to the enforcement of laws intended to hamstring those who would use their wealth to undermine fundamental democratic processes. This Office will continue to be a leader in the Justice Department’s work to hold accountable actors who would support flagrant and unjustified acts of war.”

Correction: A previous version of this story stated Hanick was a producer on Sean Hannity’s show. While he worked at Fox News for 15 years, a Fox spokesperson said he never worked on Hannity’s program.