Dec 19 Buonasera Mag
Day 299: Kyiv Dnipro Belarus 10K surrender Shoigu Putin EU CIA GasCap CND Latvia UK Iran China-A&Ps-Avdeeva Jawin UKDef Pugliese Starr Smelyansky Tsybulska Wheaton Griffin Bekiempis
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…
Russia launches drone attack on Ukraine overnight on Dec. 19. As a result of the attack, infrastructure and homes were damaged, and two people were injured in Kyiv, Kyiv Oblast Governor Oleksiy Kuleba wrote on Telegram. In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, the attacks damaged several homes and power lines. Ukraine’s Air Force reported shooting down 30 Iranian-made kamikaze drones.
Ukraine’s atomic energy agency has accused Russia of flouting nuclear safety by sending a “kamikaze” drone over part of a nuclear power plant in Mykolaiv region just after midnight.
Russia amassing additional troops near occupied Melitopol and on the border with Belarus. The increase in Russian troops may be a response to reports of Ukraine's imminent counteroffensive in the southeast.
Kyiv is “right to prepare” for Minsk to join Moscow’s new offensive because the probability “might increase in coming weeks”, Belarus opposition leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said in an interview with Kyiv Post. She said:
Belarusian armed forces are part of the society and share the same view on the war – 86% of Belarusians are against participation in the war. This has stopped the order to send Belarusian troops to the battlefield in Ukraine. It was not a good will of dictators or Lukashenko’s standing up to Putin - he is fully on the Kremlin’s side.
However, the probability of such an order remains and might increase in coming weeks. I think the Ukrainian leadership is right to prepare for this scenario even though it means distracting significant forces from active war zones in the south-east.
Zelensky: More air defense can deprive Russia of its main tool of aggression. President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Ukraine's international partners to provide the country with additional air defense systems in order to deprive Russia of its "main instrument of terror"— missile strikes.
Cabinet Ministry: Ukraine to open around 10,000 new ‘invincibility centers.' Ukraine intends to triple the number of “invincibility centers” across the country, the Cabinet Ministry announced on Dec. 17. The centers offer people the ability to warm up, charge their phones, and connect to the internet amid Russia's ongoing attacks.
Ukraine’s intelligence: Over 1.2 million calls made to surrender hotline service. Over 1.2 million calls have been made to Ukraine’s “I Want to Live” hotline, according to the Defense Ministry’s Intelligence Directorate’s representative Andriy Yusov on Dec. 17. The “I Want to Live” hotline allows Russians to surrender themselves or their units to the Ukrainian army.
Russian Defense Minister Shoigu claims to "visit" troops in occupied Ukraine. Attaching a short video of Shoigu in a military helicopter, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that he had spoken with troops about the current battlefield assessment “on the front line” and at a “command post.” It was unclear when Shoigu’s visit really took place or whether he had come to Ukraine at all.
Russian military group Wagner continues to take a major role in attritional combat around Bakhmut in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the UK Ministry of Defence has said.
Putin arrived in Belarus today amid fears he intends to pressure the former Soviet ally to join a new ground offensive against Ukraine and open a new front. Ukrainian joint forces commander Serhiy Nayev said:
During (these talks) questions will be worked out for further aggression against Ukraine and the broader involvement of the Belarusian armed forces in the operation against Ukraine, in particular, in our opinion, also on the ground.”
Lavrov held talks with his Belarusian counterpart, Sergei Aleinik, in Minsk earlier today ahead of Putin’s visit to Belarus.
Russia transfers more military equipment to Belarus. Russia transferred at least 50 Ural military trucks to Belarus on Dec. 16, the Belarusian Hajun, a watchdog that monitors the movement of Russian troops, reported on Dec. 18.
Intelligence: Iran resupplies Russia with new batch of kamikaze drones. Russian forces resumed attacks against Ukraine using Iranian kamikaze drones, said Andrii Yusov, the Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate spokesman. He added that Iran shipped a new “relatively small” batch of Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones.
I haven’t seen propaganda this bad in quite a while: Let’s put Dad in danger for the sake of a smartphone.
Russia’s lower chamber of the parliament voted in support of a bill in the first reading proposing to not apply criminal liability for crimes committed in Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine to “defend the interests” of Russia.
As the cracks in Russia's war on Ukraine deepen, Russian oligarchs sanctioned by the West are now saying Putin tricked them into appearing to support his invasion of Ukraine, according to an extensive investigation published Saturday by The New York Times.
CIA Director: China has been paying 'careful attention' to Russia's poor military performance in Ukraine. CIA Director Bill Burns said in an interview with PBS that no other foreign leader "has paid more careful attention to that war and Russia's poor military performance than Xi Jinping has," as he thinks about his own ambitions in Taiwan and elsewhere.
President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, called for additional financial and military support to Ukraine against Russian aggression. The EU needs to strengthen its financial and military support for Ukraine because “Ukraine must win this war,” Roberta Metsola, president of the EU Parliament, told Germany's Bild newspaper.
EU countries will need to reach a compromise on a gas price cap on Monday, and the latest proposal on the table offers a good basis to do so, Malta’s energy minister Miriam Dalli said.
EU ministers have reached an agreement to cap gas prices, after weeks of talks and despite concerns that such an intervention could cause greater volatility in the market. Ministers agreed to trigger a cap if prices on the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF) gas hub’s front-month contract exceed €180 (£157) per megawatt hour for three days.
The Canadian government has announced plans to seize $26m in sanctioned assets from Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, with the proceeds from the forfeiture to go to the reconstruction in Ukraine and compensation of victims of the Russian invasion.
Latvia allocates over 500,000 euros to support Ukrainian state media. The Latvian government has agreed to allocate nearly 560,000 euros ($593,292) to purchase generators for Ukrainian state media, Delfi reported on Dec. 18.
The UK is set to announce a major new artillery package for Ukraine as British prime minister Rishi Sunak prepares to meet with his Nordic, Baltic and Dutch counterparts in Riga, Latvia, on Monday. PM Sunak said:
From the Arctic Circle to the Isle of Wight, the UK and our European allies have been in lockstep in our response to the invasion of Ukraine, and we remain steadfast in our ambition for peace in Europe once again,” Sunak said ahead of the visit.
But to achieve peace, we must deter aggression and our deployments across the region together are vital in ensuring we are able to respond to the gravest of threats. I know this Joint Expeditionary Force summit will only underline our close friendships and unwavering support for Ukraine.
Iran’s foreign ministry has said it will not “seek permission from anyone” to expand relations with Russia, dismissing US concerns over a growing military partnership between Tehran and Moscow.
One of China’s top diplomats in the U.K. and five other officials were leaving the country following a shocking attack on a protester at the consulate in Manchester. MPs in London were outraged that the U.K. government had allowed these diplomats to walk away without consequences and demanded that they be banned from returning to Britain. Another sign of the tension between London and Beijing.
Sarah Wheaton, Parliament of loopholes: Why the Qatar scandal was inevitable- Politico
Allegations of corruption and money laundering have landed a vice president of the European Parliament in jail and embarrassed the European Union’s only directly elected institution with sealed-off offices and cash-filled suitcases. The details may not have been predictable, but the eventual reckoning was: Transparency campaigners have been warning about lax rules and even laxer enforcement at the Parliament for years.
Morris & Oremus, Russian disinformation is demonizing Ukrainian refugees- WaPo
On social media, pro-Kremlin networks are exploiting German anger over its energy crisis to undermine support for Ukraine
The news clip showed a towering blaze in a residential neighborhood in Germany, followed by a weeping homeowner giving an interview from the rubble of her burned-down house. A chyron at the bottom of the screen explained that Ukrainian refugees had set the fire, accidentally ravaging the home of their German hosts.
The video, which bore the logo of the German tabloid Bild, spread from a small YouTube account through the messaging app Telegram to Russian state media, until it could be found on nearly every major social platform, a forensic analysis later showed.
But it was a fake, with footage from unrelated events stitched together to form a bogus news report that cast Ukrainian refugees as feckless instigators wreaking havoc on the generous Germans who had taken them in.
Victoria Bekiempis, Schiff: ‘Sufficient evidence’ to criminally charge Trump over efforts to overturn election- The Guardian
Schiff’s dramatic statement on CNN’s State of the Union came one day before the House January 6 select committee to which he belongs is poised to release an outline of its extensive investigative report on the US Capitol attack, which has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers.
The committee is expected to use its last meeting on Monday to refer Trump, as well as others, to the US justice department in relation to the former president’s attempts to reverse his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden.
During this final meeting, the panel is expected to outline an executive summary of its findings, propose legislative recommendations, vote to adopt the report – and then vote on possible criminal and civil referrals. Schiff is one of nine members, seven of whom are Democrats like him, serving on the January 6 committee.