Aug 20 Buonsera- Saturday Ed
Day 178: Sevastopol, running from Crimea, RU Black Sea Fleet, US $, Moldova, Intelligence up-date, China-RU G20, Germany, Luxembourg. Arts & posts: Stradner, Korhonen, Miller, Rosalie, Kirillova
Catching up…
EA Worldview’s Ukraine Up-date- hop over to Scott’s amazing Ukraine up-date page in the morning. I’ll fill in with some bits and bobs.
They’ve also been fleeing Crimea all day. Bye bye Малыш.
Stories we’re following…
According to the occupation forces, at 8:17am a drone flew into the roof of the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.
More than half of Russia Black Sea naval aviation has been knocked out, according to a western official in Ukraine. Western officials have said that the Ukrainian raid on the Saky airbase in occupied Crimea last week knocked out “more than half” of Russia’s combat naval aviation in the Black Sea. However, overall “combat stasis” remains.
Security Service discovers underground server room in Kyiv used by Russian hackers. Over 100 servers were found inside the facility, which was rented out to hackers in Ukraine and abroad. The servers were used for cyberattacks, including against government websites.
General Staff: Russia continues to advance in several directions. Russian troops conducted offensives near the villages of Blagodatne and Vasylky in Mykolaiv Oblast to “improve their tactical position,” according to the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces.
UK lawmaker: Accident at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant should be considered trigger for NATO Article 5. Tobias Ellwood, Chair of the Defense Select Committee of the House of Commons, called for such a disaster to be considered an attack on NATO member states on Twitter.
Sensing Russia’s momentum has completely stalled, the United States is rushing into Ukraine another $775 million in advanced missiles, armored vehicles, and artillery to help Kyiv’s counteroffensive to retake territory, according to a senior defense official.
British intelligence acknowledges that Ukraine is not making major progress in Kherson Russian media is gloating about this but there is growing speculation that Ukraine's Kherson blitz was a feint to divert Russian elite units and personnel away from Donetsk.
While Ukraine’s foreign ministry has the number of Russian casualties at about 44,300, Mediazona, an independent news organisation in Russia, has delved into the background of some of these deaths. Looking into these deaths, Mediazona found that the disproportionate majority of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine came from poor and minority regions of Russia.
Russia has just accused Ukraine of using chemical warfare against its troops. Russia and its affiliated proxies in the Donetsk People's Republic repeatedly warned of Ukrainian chemical weapons use. Now, Russia is taking its "evidence" that Ukraine used chemical weapons to the OPCW. All while it denies Assad's actual use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Portugal, Cyprus, and Greece are against EU-wide visa ban on Russian tourists.
S&P on Aug. 19 joined Fitch in upgrading Ukraine's rating after the war-torn country secured a two-year reprieve on its foreign debt from creditors earlier in August.
Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu has announced that Moldova will ask for help from Romania – an active member of NATO – in case of armed aggression from Russia.
The Chinese and Russian leaders Xi Jinping and Putin will attend the G20 summit in Bali in November, Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, told Bloomberg News.
UK says Russia has 'no moral right' to sit at G20 meeting. A spokesperson of the British Ministry said that Russia shouldn't be allowed to participate the Group of 20 while it continues to wage war in Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Germany plans to send 255 Vulcano projectiles to Ukraine. 155 mm Vulcano projectiles are capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 70 kilometers. The German government also said it would supply to Ukraine 5,000 man-portable anti-tank weapons, 100,000 first aid kits, 200 trucks, a COBRA counter-battery radar system, and 20 rocket launchers on pick-up trucks with 2.000 rockets
Luxembourg based Eurasian Resources Group halts iron ore supply to Russia's MMK due to sanctions.
The Axioma, a £65m superyacht, of a Russian oligarch hit by sanctions will be auctioned off by the Gibraltar government on Tuesday, becoming the first of the luxury vessels to be sold off since restrictions were imposed on hundreds of rich Russians after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Janne M. Korhonen-The PM Marin story explained
1. Someone had leaked a video of Marin dancing with her friends.
2. A known neo-nazi and the Finnish equivalent of 4chan anonymous message board began to speculate that the participants in the video were on drugs. Their evidence: they thought someone on the video talked about "flour gang", which these trolls interpreted to mean drugs.
3. It is worth noting that police officers, crime reporters with 20+ years of experience, and researchers who have actually studied Finnish drug culture all say that the word for "flour" (jauho) isn't used to refer to drugs. Also, the audio quality is very poor.
4. The trolls from the anonymous message board - a hotbed of misogynism and far right trolling - began to drum up the "controversy." A known pro-Putin conspiracy theorist picked up the neo-nazi tweets and amplified them.
5. Large segments of Finnish media jumped on the bandwagon. So far, their key pieces of evidence are a) a journalist insinuating that lack of bottles in the short video means that the participants must be on drugs b) an anonymous "acoustics expert".
6. Note that this conveniently anonymous expert says that someone in the audio is talking about "flour", which the police, crime journalists and actual researchers say isn't used to refer to drugs in Finnish drug culture.
7. Extra irony points accrue from the fact that many people who now criticize Marin steadfastly defended a conservative member of parliament who just some weeks ago was accused by nine separate individuals to have been grooming underage girls and plying them with alcohol.
8. In short, this is probably the dumbest scandal I've seen, and I've seen some pretty fucking dumb ones.
The parade Putin never did in Kyiv
In the heart of Kyiv, in Khreshchatyk Street, Ukrainians paraded the captured, wasted Russian tanks and other military equipment. Master trolling. The destroyed Russian military vehicles are on display in Kyiv ahead of Ukraine’s Independence Day on Wednesday.
Greg Miller, Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed- WaPo
In the final days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s security service began sending cryptic instructions to informants in Kyiv. Pack up and get out of the capital, the Kremlin collaborators were told, but leave behind the keys to your homes.
The directions came from senior officers in a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) with a prosaic name — the Department of Operational Information — but an ominous assignment: ensure the decapitation of the Ukrainian government and oversee the installation of a pro-Russian regime.
I-24 News, Putin losing information war in Ukraine, says UK spy chief
In an op-ed in The Economist, Jeremy Fleming wrote that both countries are using their cyber capabilities in the war in Ukraine, but that Russian President Vladimir Putin's tactics are "irresponsible and indiscriminate."
"So far, President Putin has comprehensively lost the information war in Ukraine and in the West. Although that's cause for celebration, we should not underestimate how Russian disinformation is playing out elsewhere in the world," Fleming wrote.
George F. Will, Opinion Putin is doing his best to out-fascist Mussolini—WaPo
Fascism’s vitality in the 21st century marks it as the most successful fighting faith from the 20th century. So, it is well to understand fascism’s founder, who 100 years ago this October orchestrated the March on Rome (he arrived there by railroad sleeper car) that propelled him into power at 39, the youngest ruler in the world at that time. The destroyer of Italy’s parliamentary democracy has a political descendant occupying the Kremlin today.
Kirillova, New Concept of ‘Russian Sovereignty’ Is Inextricably Linked to the War—The Jamestown
The theory that “restoring” and protecting Russia’s sovereignty is Putin’s “historical mission” was developed long before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine (Еvrazia.org, December 23, 2011). However, the doctrine justifying the peremptory connection between “sovereignty” and war was created after the full-scale hostilities had begun.
Call for an investigation into Russian interference in Italy
This is an interesting development. Minister of Foreign Affairs, Luigi di Maio, has proposed to form a commission to investigate the relationships between Russians and Italian politicians. As Jacopo says in the tweet, they may not end up forming the commission, but Di Maio knows better than anyone about these relationships.
