Dec 13 Buonasera Mag
Day 293: UACounteroffensive ZNPP Melitopol Zelensky Shmyhal Paris Crimea RUmilitary 400 $1B G7 EU GER HUN SuperYacht FXT QatarGate-A&Ps-Motychak Sutton Calenda Iacoboni Chernov Andrushka Strobel Bildt
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.
Stories we’re following…
The Russian forces attacked nine regions of Ukraine in one day - 6 dead and more than 30 wounded are reported.
Forbes: Ukrainian troops may be preparing for their fourth counteroffensive. Russian and Ukrainian forces recently engaged in artillery-on-artillery “counterbattery” around Huliaipole and Polohy in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a little over 100 kilometers northeast of Russian-occupied Melitopol.
President Macron commented on the agreement to remove heavy weapons from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzia’s NPP and that talks were under way on the modalities around this. Reuters reports from the international conference being held in Paris to provide urgent aid to Ukraine: “We managed to protect Chornobyl and our goal is to protect Zaporizhzhia. The coming weeks will be crucial.”
The international resilience conference in Paris sees 47 countries and 22 multilateral organisations in attendance “to set up a small coordinating mechanism to process Ukrainian requests for funding and help in kind to survive winter after Russia mounted a series of massive missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure,” from now until March 2023. It’s the same coordinating model adopted from Ramstein airbase conferences for military aid. The conference will not deal with the influx of refugees from Ukraine into EU member states.
ISW: Russian forces appear to lack sufficient infrastructure to support their troops in Crimea. Russian military bloggers claimed that the 1472nd Naval Clinical Hospital in Sevastopol is facing blood donor supply shortages for wounded Russian personnel, the Institute for the Study of War says in its latest update.
UK Defense Ministry: Russia ‘highly unlikely’ to retake areas lost in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russia is “unlikely to make operationally significant advances” in the coming months, the U.K. Defense Ministry said on Dec. 12. Russian troops have been forced into defensive positions in eastern and southern Ukraine after facing major battlefield defeats.
Putin won’t hold his traditional year-end press conference for the first time in at least a decade as Russian troops continue to lose ground in Ukraine. “As for the annual news conference, yes, there won’t be one before the New Year,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday, adding that the president was still expected to talk to reporters, also during foreign visits.
Ukraine’s intelligence: Russia built nearly 400 cruise missiles since February despite Western sanctions. Russia appears to have built 240 air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles, as well as about 120 sea-based Kalibr cruise missiles since February, despite Western sanctions intended to diminish Moscow's arms manufacturing capabilities, according to Vadym Skibitsky, a deputy head of Ukraine's military intelligence.
President Zelensky urged G7 leaders on Monday to support his idea of convening a special global peace summit in winter dedicated to bringing peace to his country. President Zelensky also appealed to the G7 nations for an additional 2bn cubic metres of natural gas as well as long-range weapons, modern tanks, artillery units and shells.
PM Shmyhal: Russia trying to overwhelm Europe with new refugee wave. By attacking Ukraine's energy infrastructure, Russia is trying to "flood" the European Union with a new refugee wave, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Dec. 12.
Carlo Calenda, head of the Azione Party in Italy, visited a refugee centre on the border with Poland, and reports that “it was -7C, and the refugees have very few hours of energy and heating. The children play almost in complete darkness, the adulsts try to prepare dinner; these are not normal scenes of life, now, they are a priority.”
Zelensky believes war in Ukraine ends if Putin dies. In an interview with David Letterman, President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believes Russia's war in Ukraine ends if President Vladimir Putin dies. Zelensky also reiterated that he believes Putin won't dare to use nuclear weapons as he "loves life and is afraid of death." "I saw him (Putin), and I saw his desire to live. He loves life very much – he even sits behind a long table… because he is afraid of COVID-19 or something else," Zelensky said.
Prime minister: Ukraine needs $1 billion to restore energy sector. Ukraine needs as much as $1 billion to restore critical infrastructure quickly in order to get through the winter, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Dec. 12.
G7 agrees on coordination platform for Ukraine aid, pledges more air defense. The G7 agreed during a virtual summit to create a joint platform to coordinate both long and short-term support provided to Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion, the White House said in a statement on Dec. 12.
The United States has shipped the first part of its power equipment aid to Ukraine, US officials said on Monday, as Washington works to support the country’s energy infrastructure against intensifying attacks from Russia.
EU sanctions Iran for supplying Russia with drones for its war in Ukraine. The European Union on Dec. 12 added four individuals to the list of sanctions against Iran, as well as four entities “for their role in the development and delivery of UAVs used by Russia in its war against Ukraine.”
EU Council to increase European Peace Facility fund used to provide arms to Ukraine by 2 billion euros. The EU Council on Dec. 12 agreed to increase its European Peace Facility defense fund used to purchase weapons for Ukraine by 2 billion euros.
Germany has confirmed the delivery of 24 new self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine, Die Zeit writes. The head of the defense committee of the Bundestag, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmerman, informed about the shipment of another batch of weapons.
EU governments struck a deal with Hungary yesterday that sorts out financial aid for Ukraine in 2023 and gains Budapest’s approval for a global minimum corporate tax, all in exchange for EU flexibility about funds paid to Hungary, on the condition that Orban undertakes reforms on the rule of law. For now, EU countries agreed to freeze some €6.35 billion in funds from the regular EU budget for Hungary. The historic decision marks the first time ever that the EU will use the new conditionality mechanism to fend off rule of law “risks” linked to Orbán’s dismantling of democratic checks and balances.
Royal Romance, the 92-meter superyacht of sanctioned pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician and oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, is set to be sold at auction after law enforcement seized it in Croatia. The media reported, citing the Ukrainian government, that proceeds from the sale of Royal Romance will go to Ukraine. The yacht was estimated to cost $200 million. Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine in April on suspicion of high treason and handed over to Russia in a prisoner swap in September.
The Bahamas police have arrested former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the country’s attorney general said in a statement on Monday, adding that the Bahamas has received formal notification from the US of criminal charges against him.
Elon Musk abruptly dissolved Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council on Monday night, just moments before it was scheduled to meet with company representatives. The council was an advisory group of nearly 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.
Qatar Gate: Up-date from Politico
12:25 CET: the resolution for VP Eva Kaili’s “early termination” was passed.
Brussels police launched new raids Monday in a corruption scandal centered on bribes allegedly paid by Qatar to EU lawmakers, according to Belgian federal prosecutors. Belgian judge Michel Claise ordered the search of the Brussels seat of the Parliament to retrieve IT data. Additional raids were carried out in Italy Sunday.
Now expelled from the S&D Group and arrested, EU Parliament’s VP Eva Kaili has been charged with corruption, money laundering and criminal organization, along with three other people, her partner, Parliament assistant Francesco Giorgi; former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri; and a third, unnamed Italian.
The prosecutors said Monday that they had now searched 19 residences and offices, plus the myriad Parliament offices that have now been probed and cordoned off. Greek authorities on Monday froze the assets of Kaili’s family.
The scandal in Brussels will draw much more scrutiny to Qatar’s highly sustained foreign lobbying and interlocking influence campaigns, argues Jamie Dettmer.
Belgian prosecutors aren’t the only ones investigating whether the Qataris buy influence and seek covertly to sway policy with gifts and money,” Jamie writes. “U.S. federal prosecutors have launched multiple Qatar-linked probes in recent years trying to establish whether pay-to-play lobbyists and former American officials broke lobbying laws.
Mstyslav Chernov, 20 days in Mariupol: The team that documented city’s agony- AP News
The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.
We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage.
Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake?”
I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.
The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.
Serhii Andrushko, On Eve Of Russian Invasion, Ukrainian Court Catered To Yanukovych's Interests, RFE/RL Investigation Finds- RFE/RL
As Russian troops accumulated in the tens of thousands along Ukraine’s borders in December 2021, Moscow-friendly former leader Viktor Yanukovych was preparing for an offensive of his own – a bid to overturn, in court, the Ukrainian legislature’s decision that stripped him of his title and status as president in 2014.
Media reports and other evidence suggest the Kremlin may have considered Yanukovych a candidate for that role. A journalistic probe by Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, uncovered details about a pair of court cases that could have lent the fugitive ex-president’s appointment an air of legitimacy – on paper, at least, if not in the minds of millions of Ukrainians.
Warren P Strobel, Rise of Open-Source Intelligence Tests U.S. Spies- The Wall Street Journal
China puts a premium on OSINT and has an estimated 100,000 analysts tasked with scouring scientific and technical developments globally, mostly in the U.S., according to research by William Hannas of Georgetown University. The system for gathering such intelligence is centrally directed but “functions at all levels in separate but interlocking organizations,” Mr. Hannas and Huey-Meei Chang wrote in a 2021 paper.
“We don’t have a comparable effort,” said Jason Matheny, former head of the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and the president of Rand Corp., also a federally funded research organization. “It really is an immense enterprise in China.”
Beijing’s authoritarian rulers don’t face legal and ethical quandaries that U.S. and European spy agencies confront when sifting through public information that might contain individuals’ private data, according to the officials and studies.
Lyse Doucet & Zarghuna Kargar, The secrets shared by Afghan women- BBC World News
"My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream."
At times, voices of Afghan women rise from the streets of Kabul and other cities in small, loud, protests. Often, they ring out in speeches by women now far away, outside Afghanistan. But mostly, their thoughts are only expressed quietly, in safe places. Or they fester in their heads as they try to reconcile their lives with the increasingly rigid rules of the Taliban government. They restrict what women wear, where they work, what they can do, or not, with their lives.