Dec 3: E-Stories
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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 sounds of explosions have been heard in Dnipro on the morning of 2 December, reports the Ukrainian Air Force.
One of the 11 Shahed drones deployed by Russia to attack Odesa Oblast on the night of 1-2 December has hit an infrastructure facility, reports the Odesa Oblast Military Administration. There were no casualties as a result of this attack.
Zarina Zabrinsky reporting from Kherson: “Russians killed Nina's son; she struggles to pay for gas. Leonid, 87, fights dementia in a war zone. Luba cares for a non-walking daughter w/o power. Raya, 88, tends to her handicapped grandchild alone. Lida, 88, survives on a $162 monthly pension, needs $540 for care.”
In his nightly video address, Zelensky said he met with the military command and had discussed scenarios to produce “concrete results” for 2024.
“In particular, this concerns the issue of mobilisation. Everyone in Ukraine understands that changes are needed in this domain,” he said, adding, “this is not simply a question of numbers, of who can be mobilised … It’s a question of a time frame for each person who is now in the military, for demobilisation and for those who will join the military. And it’s about conditions.”
The Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant lost its power supply after the last remaining line to it from Ukrainian-controlled territory was disrupted, but it has since been repaired. Ukraine’s energy ministry said the blackout could have led to “nuclear catastrophe”.
Ukraine's Armed Forces have been checking the video where Russian occupiers shot Ukrainian soldiers who had surrendered, presumably near the settlement of Stepove, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, reports DeepState Telegram channel; Oleksandr Shtupun, Spokesperson for the Ukrainian Defence Forces on Tavriia front, in a comment for Ukrainska Pravda.
Combat Situation Update
Overnight, Russia attacked Ukraine with 11 Shahed drones of which 10 were shot down. Additionally, a single launched Kh-59 missile was shot down in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Ukrainian defenders have repelled 21 attacks on the Bakhmut front and 21 attacks on the Avdiivka front over the past day, reports General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Facebook, information as of 06:00 on 2 December.
A total of 84 combat engagements have taken place over the past 24 hours.
The Russians conducted airstrikes on Serebrianka Forest in Luhansk Oblast and Novomykhailivka in Donetsk Oblast.
Over 100 settlements in Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts came under artillery fire.
In the area of responsibility of the Tavriia Operational Strategic Group on the Avdiivka front, Russian forces are continuing their attempts to surround Avdiivka. Ukrainian soldiers are firmly holding the defence, inflicting significant losses on the Russians.
On the Zaporizhzhia front, Russian forces unsuccessfully tried to restore their lost position near the settlement of Robotyne in Zaporizhzhia Oblast eight times.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Defence Forces are continuing to conduct offensive operations on the Melitopol front, inflicting losses in military personnel and equipment on the Russian occupying forces and exhausting the Russians along the entire frontline.
Russian channel Dva mayora with a report from the field in the Kherson region. Seems like Teplinsky isn't able to fix things for the Russians over there.
"They do not allow you to approach or move away, the FPV immediately flies or the Ukrainian Armed Forces mortar is working. And if our mortar fires somewhere, everything from the Ukrainians flies there. Their birds constantly change each other in the carousel, the noise and hum fills the entire forest, they control the roads, see people, and the FPV immediately flies into the car.
Zelensky acknowledges need for greater war mobilization. President Volodymyr Zelensky on Dec. 1 said changes to mobilization are necessary as he ordered a strategic turn focused on defense following a lackluster counteroffensive in Ukraine’s southern regions.
Behind the Lines
The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Lithuania worked together to unseat Russia from the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), where it has traditionally had great influence.
Three seats on the OPCW’s Executive Council were vacant this year in the Eastern Europe allocation and were contested by Poland, Ukraine and Russia. Usually candidates are agreed upon in advance, but other countries have the opportunity to stand in a general ballot.
So Dmytro Kuleba and Gabrielius Landsbergis agreed that Lithuania would take advantage of this opportunity and put itself forward as a candidate. After that, the two ministers began working together to ensure that Lithuania would receive a non-zero result in the voting.
In the voting for members of the OPCW Executive Council, Ukraine received 126 votes, Poland 123, Lithuania 76 and Russia 65. That is, the "Russian" votes were split in half and not in Russia’s favour.
Russian drones use Ukrainian SIMs for flight guidance. Ukrainian SIM cards issued by the Kyivstar mobile operator have been found in downed Shahed drones, local media reported on Dec. 1.
A high-ranking member of Argentine President-Elect Javier Milei’s transition team officially announces that Argentina under Milei will reject the previous government’s agreement to join BRICS in January.
Worrying: Handelsblatt reports that the city council of Troisdorf decided on Tuesday to take over part of the industrial property of Dynitec (belongs to Diehl) through the “right of first refusal”.
The problem → This is the largest production facility for explosives in Germany. Essential for companies such as Rheinmetall or Diehl Defence, which are currently receiving large orders for artillery ammunition, guided missiles and more for Ukraine.
Dynitec wanted to significantly expand production there to fulfil delivery obligations to the Bundeswehr and Ukraine. Now there is no space for that.
As a precautionary measure, Diehl had already rented additional space around its production facility to expand production. Now, they wanted to buy this area — which Diehl describes as the most important. However, the city wants to acquire the area itself and has the right of first refusal.
Meanwhile, the German Minister of Defence, Boris Pistorius, has become involved — according to his statement, he has already talked to the Prime Minister of the federal state.
Rheinmetall aims to start production of armored vehicles in Ukraine in 2024. German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall plans to build the first armored vehicles on-site in Ukraine from the summer of 2024, CEO Armin Papperger said in an interview with German business magazine WirtschaftsWoche on Dec. 2.
Media: 2nd group of Ukrainian soldiers complete Patriot air defense training in Germany. Bundeswehr Lieutenant General Andreas Marlow, who oversaw the training, said that the Ukrainian soldiers will now be able to operate the systems independently.
Zeit: Russia is said to have requested NATO data when planning Nord Stream. Submarine coordinates and NATO ammunition: Russia is said to have used the Nord Stream approval process for sensitive data queries. MPs are shocked.
The Russian state-owned company Gazprom apparently tried to obtain secret NATO data as part of the approval process for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline . This is what members of the state parliament from various factions said unanimously after a witness interview in the committee of inquiry into the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Climate Foundation . The climate foundation was largely financed by Nord Stream 2 AG.
According to the Green Party in the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, confidential military data on NATO ammunition was even temporarily published in the plan approval decision. The Green chairman of the investigative committee, Hannes Damm, expressed shock at this. The mining authority's actions towards Gazprom "endangered the security of the Federal Republic and NATO". [continue]
Hungarian drivers block Ukrainian trucks trying to leave Slovakia, UNIAN reports.
Pavlo Kravchuk, a manager at the Europe Without Barriers civic organisation, has reported that striking Polish hauliers are not letting a SAFE Boats International patrol boat sent as part of the US government aid into Ukraine.
Ukrainian and Polish officials met in Warsaw on on Dec. 1 to find a solution to end a protest by Polish truckers who want the EU to reinstate entry permits.
Tensions between Poland and Ukraine have risen after Polish truckers and farmers started a blockade of some of the busiest border checkpoints with Ukraine. Polish truckers say they are at a severe disadvantage because their Ukrainian counterparts do not need to purchase expensive permits to enter the EU. They want the licensing requirements to be reinstated.
A note about Austria: Russia has always considered Austria a natural ‘ally’. Austro-Russian relations go back in time, and have been maintained ever since. Schallenberg’s chatting on the ‘sidelines’ of the OSCE meeting with Lavrov is not surprising. In the context of the OSCE meeting, Austria has justified the meeting with his Russian counterpart on the basis that it is Austria’s OSCE host nation responsibility to defend decisions to e.g. allow Russian deputies sanctioned by the EU. Therefore, Austria’s OSCE insisted on the participation of the Russian delegation, Minna Alander reports.
How about the integrity of NATO security? Vienna has been a hotbed for Russian intelligence operations since time immemorial. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former president of Estonia, has noted that sensitive NATO intelligence is not shared with Austria.
OSCE Conference participants have accused Moscow of undermining the Vienna-based organisation. Latvia’s representative, Katrina Kaktina, accused Russia of obstructing the OSCE agenda and of committing war crimes in Ukraine.
Meanwhile in Russia
Russia extends pre-trial detention of jailed US journalist Kurmasheva. A court in the Russian city of Kazan extended the pre-trial detention of Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) journalist with dual U.S. and Russian citizenship, to an additional two months, the news organization announced on Dec. 1.
Putin signs decree to increase size of Russian army by 170,000 troops. Russia's Defense Ministry commented on the decree, saying that it was a response to an "increase in threats" that are associated with its full-scale war in Ukraine, as well as "ongoing NATO expansion." The decree would increase the number of the Russian armed forces to 2,209,130, including 1,320,000 military personnel Thus, the number of military personnel has increased by almost 170,000 people.
BBC News: Putin's desperate for fresh manpower in Ukraine. Unprecedented raids on conscripts are taking place in Moscow. Military registration & enlistment offices en masse organize a “one-day conscription”, sending people with serious illnesses & even visitors from other regions to the army.
Budget money, which is being poured into the Russian military-industrial complex in record amounts to increase the production of weapons for the war with Ukraine, has begun to flow into cash. The head of Rosfinmonitoring, Yuri Chikhanchin, announced this at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. According to him, the volume of identified “cash out” transactions in the field of state defense procurement since the beginning of 2023 has reached 6.5 billion rubles.
Work to prevent cashing out is being carried out jointly with the Bank of Russia and the Federal Tax Service, Chikhanchin said. “We managed to reduce cash withdrawals from budget funds by 20% and the use of fly-by-night companies by about 10%,” reported the head of Rosfinmonitoring.
Central Bank of Russia will sell off $12 billion of its last reserves to keep the ruble from falling in time for Putin's election.
From January 2024, the Central Bank will buy foreign currency under the budget rule (for oil and gas revenues of the treasury above the baseline), and will also begin a pending procurement within the framework of this mechanism, which was suspended for the period from August 10 to December 31. At the same time, the Central Bank will also sell foreign currency. It is a matter of utilizing the National Wealth Fund to cover budget expenditures and investments.
Russian authorities are attempting to quell dissent from the wives of soldiers deployed in Ukraine, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said. The MoD said in its daily intelligence briefing that some were being paid off while others have been discredited online.
Russian Media: Moscow police raid LGBTQ clubs. Police in Moscow raided several LGBTQ clubs overnight, independent Russian media outlet Meduza reported on Dec. 2, citing eyewitness reports and local telegram channels.
The Belarus Red Cross Society has been suspended from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies due to noncompliance by the Belarus Red Cross with the request for the dismissal of Mr. Dimitry Shevtsov for his statements, including on nuclear weapons and on the movement of children to Belarus, and his visit to occupied Luhansk and Donetsk.
Julia Davis continues to collect evidence for war crimes—incitement through propaganda. “Sergey Karnaukhov, Associate Professor of the Department of Theory and History of State and Law of the Institute of Politics, Law and Social Development at the MSU, claims "there is nothing human in Ukraine" and predicts a terrible future for Finland.”
UEFA leaves Russian football team out of Nations League for 2024/2025 season. The national team of Belarus was included in the schedule, although there was a stipulation that it would not play in any matches against the Ukrainian national team.
RFL/RL: The Redut Ruse—Inside Russia’s Fake Private Mercenary Company Fighting In Ukraine.
An investigation by Schemes and Systema – RFE/RL’s Ukrainian and Russian investigative units, respectively – revealed that Redut is not, in fact, a private military company. It is a front: a shadowy recruitment network run by the Russian military’s main intelligence directorate, known as the GRU.
Based on battlefield records and multiple interviews with Redut fighters and recruiters, the investigation provided an unprecedented look inside this secretive GRU program that at times resembles a hall of mirrors: contracts signed with nonexistent companies, fighters attached to military units on paper only, and in one case, a posthumous state award from Russian President Vladimir Putin for a Redut fighter of whom the Defense Ministry said it had no record. [continue]
Redut was created “so that people could avoid paying taxes or, for example, any court costs,” one recruiter told Systema. All roads lead back to Russian military intelligence, the Schemes and Systema investigation found.
Allied Support
Reuters: Western allies raise pressure on countries helping Russia sell oil above cap. This cap, introduced in 2022, only began to be enforced recently. It forbids Western companies from providing maritime services like transportation, insurance and finance to any craft that help Russia get around the price cap.
The EU to impose sanctions on the private military company (PMC) Redut by the end of 2023. As a source told Current Time, the draft sanctions list notes that Redoubt is responsible for actions that undermine the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine. In the document, Redut fighters are called participants in attempts to eliminate Zelensky. Specific details of the assassination attempts have not been provided.
Germany hands over new military aid package, includes vehicles, drone-detection systems. The package included four HX81 tractors and their semi-trailers (used for the transportation of tanks and other heavy equipment), eight Zetros off-road trucks, four other vehicles, 15 HLR 338 precision rifles and 60,000 rounds of ammunition, five drone-detection systems, laser range finders, and more than 4,000 155mm shells.
US Ambassador: Two autotransformers delivered to Ukraine. "While Russia sends missiles and drones at Ukraine’s energy grid, the U.S. is helping keep the power on," U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink said.
Delivery of GLSDB long-range weapons by US to Ukraine pushed to 2024. Ukraine will likely receive its first large batch of the U.S.-pledged Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB) long-range weapons, adapted to strike at a range of 160 kilometers, in early 2024, Reuters reported on Nov. 30, citing the Pentagon and sources familiar with the matter.
Bloomberg: EU to announce plans to use frozen Russian assets for Ukraine's reconstruction. The EU is likely to announce a proposal to use the tax profits from frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine's reconstruction in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported on Nov. 30.
US, allies sanction Russia-based North Koreans over satellite launch. The U.S. and allied countries have sanctioned eight foreign-based North Korean individuals, including two residing in Russia, in response to a launch of Pyongyang's spy satellite, the U.S. Treasury Department announced on Nov. 30.
Brussels Conference on Uyghur Issue: 2 Chinese individuals — one from the local Chinese embassy and the other from Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs — showed up uninvited at the panel discussion on “China's growing influence in the EU: Implications for EU policy, national security and human rights” organized by European Parliament’s Subcommittee of Human Rights / The Italian Federation of Human Rights at the Uyghur Congress and hosted by MEP Pina Picierno; attendees included President of World Uyghur Congress Dolkun Isa, Hong Kong activist Finn Lau and President of the Tibetan community in the Netherlands Dawa Tsering.
Up-date on Guyana: Not good. Tomorrow in Venezuela a 'referendum' will be held to decide whether to invade Guyana to annex the part that Caracas claims. The Maduro regime is preparing troops.
Matteo Pugliese reports that “as Guyana is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, it could request military assistance from the United Kingdom. It will also be interesting to see the reaction of Brazil (which has deployed troops) in the event of an invasion of Guyana, after Lula's chattering position on Ukraine.”
They are using the same tactic we all know too well: the use of referendums to annex territory. You will recall that I had said that one of the effects of not stopping Russia in its track and beating it back would be an increase in instability across the globe—more precisely, proxy wars. More information will come out as to which forces are behind the claimed ‘referendum’ and if this event is piloted or organic. Venezuela is a Russian-aligned state.
The strategy of the legalisation of terrorist activity was established by the Soviet Union in 1956 in their national security directive.
Disinformation operations in wartime
Please note: the Russian strategy aims to win the war by any means. This may seem banal but it’s something we always need to keep in mind when you start hearing about ‘negotiations’ and ‘pauses’: the aim is to win, not negotiate.
Therefore, they will continue increasing their presence on the ground to erode/attrit Ukrainian capabilities and swing the advantage in their favour. They will also work abroad via political and psychological warfare to weaken Allied support. The example below shows how the press is being used to advance the weakening of allied support by intimating that there is a riff between the president’s office and the military. Seymore Hersh is a well-know ‘neo-Realist’, whose articles have been featured in the Russian press, including the Valdai Club.
American Journalist Seymour Hersh claims the Russian Federation and Ukraine are allegedly conducting secret peace negotiations along the Gerasimov-Zaluzhny line, despite the objections of Zelensky and the White House.
Hersh claims, with reference to “anonymous” US officials, that the issue of possible fixation of borders along the current front line with the retention of Crimea and the occupied territories of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions for the Russian Federation is allegedly being discussed, in exchange an option is being considered in which Ukraine can join NATO, but with the obligation that the alliance will not station troops or offensive weapons there.
“The American official said that Zelensky was made to understand that it was not him, but “the military that would solve this problem, and negotiations would continue with or without you.” “If necessary, we will pay for your trip to the Caribbean,” the American official told me,” wrote Hersh.
Julia Davis, “Give the Kremlin an Inch and it Will Take Half of Europe”, Cepa.
EUvsDisinfo: The UN and Klaus Schwab are using LGBT rights against Russia
Klaus Schwab [World Economic forum] concept of inclusive capitalism foresees the abolishment of private property, the steep decrease of global population, the destruction of the nation state, and the creation of a joint management system through large corporations. Schwab’s “Great Reset” de facto declares war on the views of all religions.
At present the advocates of inclusive capitalism are attempting to promote the LGBT ideas as part of human rights through the UN. This strong anti-Russian measure is thought to compensate for Schwab’s losses due to the beginning of the special military operation. International organisations are trying to make Russia, a promoter of traditional values, a pariah due to Russia’s critical position towards LGBT rights.
The Response
This article promotes a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about traditional values, portraying Russia as a moral stronghold, in contrast to morally bankrupt West.
The “moral Russia vs immoral others” narrative is embedded in a conspiracy theory about the World Economic Forum (WEF), a Switzerland-based organisation known for hosting annual Davos summits. The WEF and annual Davos summits hosted by it are often the object of various conspiracy theories.
The claims about WEF’s plans to abolish private property, decrease world population and make it totally controlled by large corporations have been previously debunked by a number of authoritative debunking initiatives including Reuters Fact Check and BBC's reality check.
Our past analysis looked into the disinformation-spreading websites alleging that the Covid-19 outbreak was a fake pandemic, the final decision about which was taken in January 2020 at the WEF Annual Summit in Davos.
See also earlier disinformation cases alleging that the morally corrupt West is using the Kyiv Nazi regime to destroy Russia, that Western Satanists are mad at Russia, and that the WEF and influential circles are planning to control the world through forced vaccination against Covid-19. Also read our analysis on the topic of big conspiracies.
Programming notes…
I couldn’t resist: Henry Winkler will always be the Fonz for me. I grew up watching “Happy Days”, so I must include his interview here with Jack Tapper.