Dec 21 Buonasera Mag
Day 301: ZelenskyInDC Ukenergo Starlink $610M Medvedev Putin RUhackers $1.8B Trump -A&P-Matviichuk TheLookout Tsikhanouvskaya Kuzio UAWorld Zivo Michel Soldatov Eristavi InfoNapalm Janusz Franke
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…
Ukrenergo: Ukraine faces ‘significant’ energy deficit. Ukraine is facing a significant electricity shortage as of noon on Dec. 20 following Russia’s overnight drone attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure and shelling by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine on Dec. 19, reported Ukraine’s state grid operator Ukrenergo.
Minister: Ukraine to receive over 10,000 Starlink systems in coming months. “Elon Musk assured us he will continue to support Ukraine. He understands the situation,” said Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.
UK Defense Ministry: Putin aims ‘to deflect responsibility for military failure’ in Ukraine. The ministry characterized Putin’s televised meeting with senior Russian military officials as "choreographed" to portray a sense of "collective responsibility" for the invasion of Ukraine.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has undertaken a trip to Beijing and held talks with the Chinese president Xi Jinping during which he said they discussed the Ukraine conflict.
In a call with reporters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that continued western arms supplies to Ukraine would lead to a “deepening” of the conflict – something which could backfire on Kyiv, he warned.
Putin has vowed that Russia will fulfil all the goals of what Moscow calls its “military campaign” in Ukraine in an end-of-year meeting of his top defence officials, and promised to give his armed forces anything they asked for to support them. In his speech where he he laid his country’s military plans to defence chiefs in Moscow, Putin said he will ensure that Russia’s nuclear forces are combat-ready and that there were no financial limits on what the government would provide its military.
Putin also said during the defense ministry meeting that it “became obvious” that war in Ukraine was unavoidable, claiming it's "better today than tomorrow" that it happened. “It became obvious that clashes with these forces, including in Ukraine, were inevitable. The only question was when it would happen,” he said.
A Kremlin-linked hacking group known for focusing on Ukraine has stepped up its spying efforts against Ukraine’s NATO allies in recent months — in part by trying to hack a big oil firm in a NATO country in August, according to US cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks. The hacking group — which Ukraine has accused of working out of Crimea on behalf of Russian intelligence — unsuccessfully tried to break into the network of an oil refinery company based in a NATO country “that continues to import oil from Russia,” Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence group, told CNN on Tuesday.
Russian federal lawmakers draft legislation that would impose fines as high as 1 million rubles (about $14,000) for disseminating maps that “dispute Russia’s territorial integrity” (namely, maps that deny Russian sovereignty over Crimea and other occupied parts of Ukraine).
Following a “technicality” violation, Russia’s Justice Ministry has filed a lawsuit to dissolve the Moscow Helsinki Group, one of the country’s oldest human rights groups
In a recorded message demanding “maximal alertness,” Putin urged Russia’s intelligence agencies to dig up more “traitors, spies, and saboteurs”.
ISW: Intensifying Russian pressure degrades Lukashenko’s maneuver room to avoid making concessions to Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s long game to "reestablish suzerainty" over Belarus is making progress, the Institute for the Study of War said in its latest report. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed that Russia “gave” Belarus an unspecified number of S-400 air defense systems during his meeting with Putin in Minsk on Dec. 19, confirming ISW’s 2021 forecast that Russian-made S-400 systems would begin operating in Belarus.
Please read the thread below…
AP: US to send $1.8 billion in military aid, Patriot missile battery, to Ukraine. The United States will provide $1.8 billion in military aid to Ukraine in a package that will include a Patriot missile battery and precision-guided bombs for fighter jets, U.S. officials told the Associated Press.
World Bank approves $610 million package to address Ukraine's urgent needs. The World Bank Group announced on Dec. 20 a new financing package that includes projects to boost relief and recovery efforts for Ukraine amid Russia's full-scale invasion.
Italian journalists attacked by Russian forces in Kherson. Russian troops “deliberately attacked” Italian journalists Claudio Locatelli and Niccolo Celesti in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson, ANSA, an Italian media outlet, reported, citing a video published by Locatelli on Facebook.
Taras Kuzio: “Israel is sending 24 power transformers and 38 generators to Ukraine. Russia has not protested. Azerbaijan sent 45 power transformers and 50 generators and Russian strongly protested. Why? Because Russia does not respect its former Soviet neighbours as sovereign countries.”
The House Ways and Means Committee voted to publicly release Donald Trump’s tax information, which he kept secret in defiance of modern tradition. After debating behind closed doors for hours, the Committee approved the release of six years’ worth of Mr. Trump’s tax returns. But it could take some time before anything is available to the public.
Thread by Adam Zivo published December 18, 2022
Earlier this year, an editor at a progressive publication pressured me to misrepresent interviews I'd conducted with black queer refugees in Ukraine because he refused to believe that they didn't consider racism or Nazism a huge issue in the country.
He rewrote my article opening to make racism in Ukraine seem harsher, and then asked that I remove sections where the refugees mentioned that Ukraine had evolved over the past 10 years and that racism and Nazism weren't major issues for them anymore.
He ignored the screenshots I'd taken of conversations with other racialized refugees, such as @mariamposts, supporting the narrative that Ukraine had become a fairly inclusive country. He also ignored my previous work with Indian refugees in Warsaw.
The editor claimed that it was not the publication's job to rebut negative claims about Ukraine, but to just give snapshots of the refugees' experiences – except he seemingly only wanted to use snapshots of their lives if they portrayed Ukraine as racist. It was so disingenuous.
It got so bad that he asked me why I was preoccupied with discussing racism and Nazism in the story – as if those weren't vitally important topics to touch upon when discussing gay black refugees in Ukraine (it was also only <20% of the total word count)
When I pushed back, he became rude and unprofessional, to the point where I decided to withdraw my article from the publication.
It was a powerful reminder of how, for some western journalists and editors, Eastern Europe can only be seen as a backwards and brutish place that is statically stuck in the past. The chauvanism and prejudice is exasperating.
This happened months ago, but it popped up in my head today as I've been interviewing representatives from the Jewish Ukrainian community and pondering why so few international media outlets have platformed local Jewish voices when discussing the myth of rampant Nazism.
Casey Michel, Russia’s Colonized Populations Can Do Without All the “Westsplaining” The New Republic
Now, as Russia barrels toward defeat, questions and conversations have begun circling about Russia’s future, in a way we haven’t seen since the Soviet collapse. Legacies of Russian colonialism have resurged to relevance—and not just in former Soviet republics. Over the past few months, those non-Russian populations still considered part of Russia have begun having far more pointed, and far more pronounced, conversations about their roles in the Russian Federation—and what future, if any, they should have with Moscow. The viability of the Russian Federation is, suddenly, very much up in the air.
And yet the lessons of Bush’s speech appear to be lost. Because as conversations about the disintegration of the Russian Federation pick up pace, prominent Western voices apparently can’t help but swoop in to tell these populations still colonized by Moscow that they shouldn’t dream of any kind of independence—that their states would, much as Bush told Ukrainians decades ago, never be viable.
Maksym Eristavi’s Spaces…
If you would like to subscribe to Maksym’s patreon page to help him continue his work, please visit his webpage. Maksym and Val Voshchevska create content amplifying Ukrainian voices, and provide backgrounders and indepth analysis on issues regarding Ukraine and Russian colonialism.
Andrzej Leszkiewicz & Andrii Luchkov, Putinjugend: Children for Russian War- InfoNapalm
After Russia attacked Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, militaristic policy has become a norm for Russian society. Moreover, military propaganda is directed not only at the adults — it also targets children. The Kremlin actively influences the yet unshaped child identity and attempts to instill the idea that participation in Russian wars is a sacred duty of every citizen. Propaganda is amplified by the actual military training aimed at children with the goal of their future involvement into military operations. It should be noted that military propaganda efforts engulfs not only Russian children but also those living in the occupied territories as well as children from the countries allied with Russia (Belarus, Serbia). Such militarization constitutes a threat both for the underage children and for the states which are potential targets of Russian aggression — or have already become its victims.
Afghanistan: the regime has banned women from attending university
Musk appears to have been invited to testify in the European Parliament. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola has sent a letter to the tech billionaire asking him to come to Brussels for a "frank exchange in public".
