Aug 3: E-Stories
Day 526: Izmail UACounteroffensive Medvedev Graham statute RUabductions Hungary Georgia Latvia Bucha Trump Hungary RUBillionaires CHPropagandA&P Polodyak BBC Noel BelarusianHajun RFE/RL KyivIndie Braw
Catching up…
EA Worldview’s Ukraine Up-date- hop over to Scott’s amazing hourly Ukraine up-date page. I’ll fill in with some bits and bobs.
Note: I’ll be travelling today, so the post features information that is not time sensitive and that I’ve kept aside. E-Stories is back on Thursday in its regular format.
Stories we’re following…
Since the beginning of the counteroffensive, the Ukrainian military has been able to de-occupy an area of more than 240 square kilometers in the south and east of the country. This was stated by Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Anna Malyar on the air of the telethon, her words are quoted by RBC-Ukraine.
Over the past week, two square kilometers have been liberated in the Bakhmut direction, and a total of 37 square kilometers since the start of the offensive.
In the south of Ukraine, more than 12 square kilometers have been liberated in a week, more than 204 square kilometers since the start of the offensive.
According to the latest data cited by the BBC Russian Service, from July 29 to August 1, at least 17 attacks on military registration and enlistment offices were carried out in Russia. Today it became known about at least two more arson attempts - in Ulan-Ude and in Kazan. As Mediazona noted earlier, 11 military registration and enlistment offices were set on fire in Russia in a day. At the same time, the arsonists claimed that they were victims of fraudsters.
After the drone attack on Moscow City, Russia should consider objects of particular symbolic importance for Ukraine as targets, said Andrei Gurulev, a member of the State Duma Defense Committee. According to him, Russia should respond in kind - for example, hit the Motherland monument. On August 1, the Soviet coat of arms was removed from the monument, on the site of which they plan to install a Ukrainian trident. The monument itself may be renamed.
“I think that the warped shield of the Motherland instead of the accursed trident would be very useful now, this topic would fit into the overall work on denazification. We have all the possibilities to screw it beautifully,” Gurulev said.
Noel Reports: "Russia's use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine will be considered an attack on NATO, given Ukraine's proximity to the alliance's territory," US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said in a tweet, responding to Dmitri Medvedev's nuclear threats.
Russia’s defence ministry has said restrictions on movement have been imposed on ships and aircraft in the Kerch Strait, the Tass news agency reported. It did not immediately give a reason for the move. The Kerch Strait connects the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, to the east of the Crimean peninsula.
Russian drone attacks early on Wednesday damaged almost 40,000 tons of grains bound for China, Israel and countries in Africa, the Ukrainian infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, has said.
“The Russians attacked warehouses and grain elevators - almost 40,000 tons of grain were damaged, which was expected by the countries of Africa, China, and Israel,” Reuters reports Kubrakov said in a post on social media.
Operations at Ukraine’s Izmail port have now been suspected due to the damage to the its infrastructure and the constant shelling by Russian forces.
The enemy … is trying to destroy Ukrainian grain, attacking industrial and port infrastructure. Unfortunately, there are hits, unfortunately the silo was damaged, and fires broke out at the site,” Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Ukrainian volunteer army south, part of Ukraine’s armed forces, said in a video statement.
“Russia is trying to cut Ukraine out of the future grain agreement and, most importantly, to strategically displace our country from the global food market,” he said.
Presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, told Reuters Kyiv did not and will not attack civilian vessels or any other civilian objects in the Black Sea, calling Russian statements “fictitious” in response to Russian accusations that Ukraine forces would attack civilian transport in the Black Sea.
“Undoubtedly, such statements by Russian officials are fictitious and do not contain even a shred of truth. Ukraine has not attacked, is not attacking and will not attack civilian vessels, nor any other civilian objects,” Podolyak told Reuters.
Crimean residents conduct 'systematic' sabotage against Russian bases. Pro-Ukrainian residents of Crimea "systematically" attack Russian military bases with Molotov cocktails, forcing Russia to tighten its surveillance over the peninsula, Ukraine's military intelligence reported on Aug. 1.
In Russia, the pace of production and sales of agricultural machinery has fallen in real terms, Kommersant writes, citing data from Rosspetsmash. From January to June, all major segments showed negative dynamics, with the exception of combine harvesters. Least of all, this affected tractors, the output of which decreased by 3.8%, to almost 2.9 thousand units.
Belarusian Hajun Project: Wagner using military storage facilities in Belarus. Russia's Wagner mercenary group is using military warehouses at a disused Belarusian military camp, monitoring group Belarusian Hajun reported on August 1. Belarusian Hajun believes the warehouses began to be used around July 18th and are located in a village called Paplavy, which a 30 minute car journey from the village of Tsel, where Wagner fighters have set up camp.
RFE/RL: Georgians continue to protest Russians cruise ships and Russian tourists docking in Batumi. The video dates back to August 1. During the protests, a Ukrainian woman in Georgia accused of petty hooliganism. Among the passengers on the liner were Russian artists who publicly supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine. During the protest, 23 people were detained. Marina Chobanyan is suspected of resisting the police. She herself claims that she did not break the law, but only filmed what was happening. According to her, her phone, documents and the flag of Ukraine were taken from her.
The European Commission has green-lighted £631bn in state support for businesses affected by the Ukraine war, and the green transition, since March 2022, the since after Russia invaded Ukraine. The Financial Times reports that German firms have received almost half of the funds. However, there is unease in smaller countries amid suggestions that the rules favour bigger economies.
Didzis Šmits, Latvia's Minister of Agriculture, has said exporting Ukrainian grain through Latvian ports is a possible scenario, as reported by Latvian news agency Delfi. Šmits said exports through the Baltic corridor is not an easy task, and delivering grain to Latvia will be a challenge for logisticians, but it isn’t impossible. Šmits pointed out that the capacities of Baltic ports make it possible to export grain from Ukraine, and the key challenge is the different widths of railway tracks, but the cargo might be quickly transferred from one train to another.
Atlantic Council DFRLab: Check back in on DFRLab as we publish a new report on Chinese discourse power by Kenton Thibaut and a new case study on social media manipulation in Sudan by Tessa Knight and our team. Relevant works threaded below.
“From April 2023 | On Sudan, read some of our recent research on the ongoing conflict in the country and the use of social media manipulation when a network of accounts routinely copy-pasted content to promote pro-RSF narratives about their leader Hemedti. From April 2023 | We also saw at least 900 potentially hijacked Twitter accounts liking and retweeting content posted by Sudan’s RSF and Hemedti. Following the outbreak of violent conflict in April, the accounts have continued to amplify RSF content.”
UNESCO: 274 cultural sites damaged in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said on July 31 that as of July 26, at least 274 cultural sites had been damaged during the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The organisation noted that it is conducting a preliminary assessment of the damage to cultural property by cross-checking reports of incidents from several reliable sources. UNESCO recorded the most damage to cultural sites in Donetsk (78 sites), Kharkiv (55 sites), Kyiv (38 sites), Luhansk (33 sites) and Chernihiv (17 sites) oblasts. T
"UNESCO is also developing, with its partner organizations, a mechanism for independent coordinated assessment of data in Ukraine, including satellite image analysis, in line with provisions of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict," UNESCO added.
The Ukrainian non-governmental organization Road to Relief was established in March 2022 to provide humanitarian assistance to civilians in the settlements most affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Volunteers work in Donetsk and Kherson regions, serving a total of 112 villages.
Russian billionaires joined in the recruitment of volunteers for the war—The Moscow Times
Billionaires Oleg Deripaska, Leonid Mikhelson, Sergei Gordeev, Mikhail Gutseriev and other Russian businessmen are actively involved in recruiting volunteers for the war in Ukraine. As the Important Stories publication found out, they arrange future mercenaries in their structures, and they immediately conclude a contract with the Ministry of Defense.
The publication describes a similar scheme using the example of Igor Sergienko, a fighter of the Sokol volunteer battalion. His salary consists of two parts: 200,000 rubles a month are paid to him by the Ministry of Defense under a contract, another 100,000 are paid by a certain “military-industrial complex company” that employed him. Phone numbers for registration in the battalion belong to the Rusal Management company.
To supply mercenaries to the ranks of the Russian army, the company uses the following scheme:
The Rusal company draws up volunteers in its structures.
The next day, a contract is concluded with the Ministry of Defense.
The employment contract is suspended. This enables companies to pay additional bonuses to their new “employees”.
Mercenaries are sent to the Sokol volunteer battalion. Almost all PMCs are part of the Russian armed forces, the Sokol is part of the 108th Airborne Assault Regiment.
The aim of abducting Ukrainian children
Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, has characterised Russia’s alleged mass abduction of children from Ukraine as a deliberate strategy to sever ties between Ukraine and the “next generation that will defend the country”. She said that the abductions were part of Russia’s “hybrid invasion” of Ukraine.
Children taken or kept by Russia were “subject to an extraordinary, relentless range of brainwashing”, Simmons said, which “creates a psychological barrier between the kids and their parents”. This meant that Ukraine not only needed to find and return those children to their families, but it “inherits” the issue of addressing the “psychological journey to undo the harm of that brainwashing”.
Simmons said: “We know that there are children who come back from some of those engagements thinking that fighting Ukraine is the right thing to do.”
Russian Mobilization- July 30-31: Russia forcibly mobilized 60,000 men in occupied Ukrainian territories; students in grades 5 to 9 to undergo military training in the Saratov region; 2,000 IT companies fail to secure army draft exemptions for their employees.
"About 6.2 million Ukrainians went abroad because of the war and remain there," the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine reports. Over 5 million internally displaced people have been registered in Ukraine. However, this number is unreliable as not everyone is registered as an IDP.
Politico: The United States on Tuesday sharply limited Hungary’s participation in its visa waiver program over security concerns regarding new passports issued between 2011 and 2020. Starting Tuesday, ESTA validity for Hungarian passport holders will be reduced from two years to one, and an ESTA will only be valid for a single use. Hungary is the only country affected. Since 2011, Hungary has been issuing passports to Hungarians of the diaspora without the appropriate checks.
WaPo: Donald Trump’s fundraising committees are burning through cash. Trump’s joint fundraising committee raised $53.9 million over the first six months of the year, but spent more than $52 million, new disclosures show. The former president is raising more money than his rivals for the Republican 2024 nomination. But mounting legal bills are putting a strain on his campaign funds.
How are Bucha and Izium district recovering from the damage of Russia’s war?
Russia’s war in Ukraine has already caused $144 billion of damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure, with 25,000 km of roads and 344 bridges rendered unusable by Russian military actions. In frontline and recently liberated areas, local communities are trying to fix the damage done by the Russian invaders. But with external funding limited, the reconstruction efforts outstretch the resources of local governments.
New insights point to Hungary’s collaboration with Moscow on transfer of Ukrainian POWs—KyivIndie
In early June, a bizarre and mysterious joint operation was carried out between two of Ukraine’s neighbors, one to the east and one to the west.
Eleven Ukrainian soldiers, after having been held in Russian captivity for an unknown amount of time, were moved from Russia to Hungary.
Although Ukraine and Russia have regularly exchanged prisoners of war, sometimes via third countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, this time, Ukraine was not informed about the operation beforehand, nor has Budapest provided any information to Kyiv about the Ukrainian citizens on its territory in the weeks following.
Hungary has so far adopted a line of plausible deniability, enabling Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to escape greater international scrutiny for the events, which ― whether initiated by Hungary or passively agreed to ― are unprecedented for an EU and NATO member state in the middle of Russia’s full-scale war.
The information also points to a severe deterioration of working diplomatic contact between Kyiv and Budapest, which has consistently undermined Ukraine’s defense of its territory and sovereignty from inside the EU and NATO since Russia’s full-scale invasion. [continue]