Dec 4 The Sunday Edition
Day 284: UApower UAwheat Fridman Romania ITA UNresolution Haines Macron ThePope CHdisinfo-A&Ps-Lapychak Blinken Mongelli Zabrinsky Lautman Karnitschnig Alinejad SafeguardDefenders
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…
More than 500 Ukrainian localities remained without power on Sunday following weeks of Russian airstrikes on the electric grid, an interior ministry official said. “The enemy continues to attack the country’s essential infrastructure. Currently, 507 localities in eight regions of our country are cut off from electricity supplies,” deputy interior minister Yevgueny Yenin told Ukrainian television, AFP reports.
Ukraine's chief negotiator says Russia must withdraw from Ukraine before starting talks. Lawmaker David Arakhamia, head of the governing Servant of the People faction and Ukraine's chief negotiator with Russia, said Kyiv is ready to provide Russia with security guarantees after it withdraws its troops from Ukraine, pays reparations, brings all war criminals to justice, and voluntarily surrenders nuclear weapons.
US official: Pressure on Putin over nukes forces him to change war tactics. U.S. Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said in Kyiv that the warnings from other states convinced Russian dictator Vladimir Putin that the reaction to the use of nuclear weapons by Moscow would be unprecedented and difficult for Russia. The use of nuclear weapons would have a response and consequences of an incomparable level, Nuland added.
Bloomberg: Russia illegally harvests $1 billion worth of Ukrainian wheat in occupied territories. Research using satellite imagery from NASA’s food security and agriculture program showed that Russia collected almost 6 million tons of wheat from occupied territories, Bloomberg reported.
Christo Grozev: “@pevchikh used pure Osint to hypothesize, very convincingly so far, that the arrested Russian billionaire is Mikhail Fridman. His house's floor-plans match the indoor photo published by the @NCA_UK.”
Romania starts supplying gas to Moldova, countering dependence on Russia. Romania aims to connect Moldovan gas transport to the European pipeline network to help Moldova fight against Russia’s gas blackmail, Romanian gas company Transgaz said in comments to Romanian outlet Agerpress. The gas will be delivered along the Iaşi-Ungheni pipeline, completed in 2013, with an extension pipeline to the capital Chisinau built in 2019.
Russia is working on the possibility of banning oil supplies subject to a western-imposed price cap, Russian deputy PM Novak said today, Reuters reports. “We are working on mechanisms to prohibit the use of a price cap instrument, regardless of what level is set, because such interference could further destabilise the market,” Novak said.
The Italian government, headed by PM Meloni, has decided to nationalize the Russian-owned ISAB oil refinery in Sicily. The Lukoil refinery is one of Europe’s largest and provides Italy with 20% of its oil products.
A draft resolution is circulating at the United Nations for a Nuremberg-style tribunal to hold the Russian leadership accountable for crimes of aggression in Ukraine. There are signs that US opposition to the proposal may be softening in the face of lobbying by President Zelensky.
Beth Van Schaack, the US ambassador for global criminal justice, said this week: “It’s something that President Zelenskiy cares deeply about. This is something Ukraine wants, and I think that’s going to carry a lot of weight. The question is, will they have the votes at the general assembly?”
She added: “So far, all of the [general assembly] resolutions on Ukraine have prevailed. The numbers have been quite strong.”
Zarina Zabrinsky, Death By Cold’: The Ukrainians Surviving the Kremlin's Kholodomor- Byline Times Supplement
Just hours after the European Parliament adopted a resolution recognising the Russian Federation as a state sponsor of terrorism, 70 Russian missiles targeted the energy infrastructure of Ukraine, already damaged by the multiple previous attacks. On 23 November, at 3pm, a message went out on social media platform Telegram notifying Ukrainians that the whole country had lost power. Not everyone received the message as the internet was down. Most regions were also cut off from heat and water.
U.S. intel chief says Russia is using up ammunition in Ukraine faster than it can replace it- NBC News
Russian forces in Ukraine are burning through ammunition faster than the country’s defense industry can replace it, U.S. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines said Saturday.
Russia is using up ammunition “quite quickly,” prompting Moscow to look to other countries for help, including North Korea, Haines told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell at a panel at the Reagan Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California.
Reuters: Macron says West should consider security guarantees for Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron said, should Russian President Vladimir Putin agree to negotiations to end Russia’s war, the West should consider providing Russia with guarantees in the future security architecture, Reuters reported on Dec. 3.
Matthew Karnitschnig, License to kill: How Europe lets Iran and Russia get away with murder- Politico
On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The New York Times: Iran abolished its morality police after the death of a woman they arrested over the strict Islamic dress code ignited months of protests. The decision was a major victory for feminists who have sought for years to dismantle the morality police and for the protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in the force's custody.
What’s up with Pope Francis and the Russian war against Ukraine
In an interview with the Catholic magazine America published Monday, Pope Francis said that soldiers from Buryatia, where Buddhism is a major religion, and the Muslim-majority Chechnya republic, were “the cruellest” while fighting in Ukraine.
“Generally, the cruellest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on,” he said.
The Kremlin quickly reacted with criticism: “This is no longer Russophobia, it’s a perversion on a level I can’t even name,” Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel. “We are one family with Buryats, Chechens and other representatives of our multinational and multi-confessional country,” Zakharova added.
The war crimes perpetrated by Russian soldiers in Ukraine are being documented daily by various volunteer groups working on the ground, under the guidance of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, and every village liberated by the Ukrainian forces reveals new horrific evidence. The crimes that have been revealed in Bucha were just beginning.
It is inconceivable why Pope Francis refuses to recognise Putin as the Russian leader responsible for these criminal acts: he mentions the suffering of the Ukrainian people, and points a finger to soldiers from the republics, but still no adequate condemnation of Putin and the Russian leadership.
Iryna Matvyshyn, a journalist, a human rights defender, and who has written on the Pope’s relationship with Russia, and Russian authorities, has said that the Vatican has nurtured friendly relationships with Russian academic and ecumeniacal circles for years while the Ukrainian community does not enjoy the same level of access, and soft power.
This is why the Pope was reticent to lay the blame completely on Russia when the Big War began, and why, even as evidence of Russian war crimes accumulates, he’s still holding back from stating the obvious. He simply sees the war from a Russian perspective.
I cannot accept that a man of faith—the head of the Catholic world—cannot bring himself to state clearly that Putin and the Russian leadership started the Big War, and are responsible for killing Ukrainian children, women and men. What we have seen in Ukraine is pure evil and I am shocked that the Church, and its leadership has not spoken out against the man that embodies this pure evil.
Microsoft: Russia will likely boost its cyber attacks on Ukraine, allies. Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s digital threat analysis center, urged customers to prepare for more Russian cyber attacks over the winter. Russia will most likely persist with a cyber offensive against Ukrainian critical infrastructure, Watts wrote in the Microsoft blog on Dec. 3.
Sam Sabin, New pro-China disinfo Twitter campaign zeros in on critical NGO- Axios
A pro-China Twitter-based disinformation campaign is actively targeting a human rights group that exposed a secret Beijing operation, researchers at NewsGuard first tell Axios.
Why it matters: Twitter is struggling to grapple with an influx of Chinese-language accounts spreading disinformation following company staff reductions.
The big picture: Pro-China actors are known to rely on Twitter and other social media sites to push back on critical voices.
Over the weekend, a group of previously dormant, suspected Chinese government-linked Twitter accounts spammed the site with adult content to drown out news about ongoing protests, per the Washington Post.
Last month, Google-owned threat intelligence firm Mandiant uncovered a pro-China disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. elections across social media.
Details: NewsGuard analyst Macrina Wang identified 127 inauthentic Twitter accounts as of Nov. 17 pushing false narratives about nongovernmental organization Safeguard Defenders.
In September, Safeguard Defenders published a report detailing how police in China, in coordination with Chinese Communist Party-run entities, had set up a network of overseas police "service stations" across Europe and the rest of the world.
Now, a network of English- and Chinese-language Twitter accounts is spreading false information about the Madrid-based NGO, claiming that Safeguard Defenders is working on behalf of the U.S. government “to mess up other countries” and that the organization falsely identifies alleged criminals as political dissidents.
The intrigue: NewsGuard cannot definitively say if the new campaign is directly tied to the Chinese government.
However, NewsGuard says the involved Twitter accounts are inauthentic given each one was created only recently, has a low follower count, and almost exclusively posts content about Safeguard Defenders.
Between the lines: Experts worry that nation-state actors — and the groups that work on their behalf — will increasingly turn to Twitter to spread disinformation after Elon Musk drastically reduced the company's content moderation teams.