Feb 11: The Saturday Edition
Day 352: UASitRep Bakhmut IAEA cyberattack 50% RUCrudeOil Kakhovka Muradov Biden IMF Montenegro Trump QatarGate China-A&Ps-Avdeeva UKDef Kerziouk NYT Henley Finley Davis Byk Cadwalladr
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…
Energy minister: Russia’s Feb. 10 mass strike hits energy infrastructure in 6 oblasts. Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said that thermal and hydroelectric power plants, as well as other high-voltage infrastructure in six regions have been impacted. Halushchenko added that the most difficult situation in Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Khmelnytskyi oblasts.
Russian forces must capture the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut to proceed with their campaign, Prigozhin said in the same interview, while acknowledging that Ukrainian troops were mounting fierce resistance. Russian forces have been attempting to encircle and capture Bakhmut, a city in the eastern Donbas region, which has become the focal point of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and of Moscow’s drive to regain battlefield momentum.
Russia is ready for negotiations with Ukraine, but without preconditions, state media have reported the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Vershinin, as saying. In an interview with state-run Zvezda television, Vershinin said it was not Ukraine, but the US and the EU that should make the decision on talks with Russia.
IAEA: Russian mass attack on Ukraine causes shutdown of nuclear reactor. The instability in Ukraine's power grid, caused by Russia's Feb. 10 mass attack, led to the shutdown of one of the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant's reactors, according to IAEA head Rafael Grossi.
Zelensky: ‘Today’s missile strike is a challenge to NATO, collective security.’ Following Moscow’s 14th mass missile attack across Ukraine on Feb. 10, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that “this terror can and must be stopped by the world.”
Ukraine's Air Force insists Russian missiles entered Romania's airspace. Ukraine's Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat repeated Commander Valerii Zaluzhnyi's claim that two Russian missiles launched at Ukraine on Feb. 10 had entered NATO member Romania's airspace. Romania's Defense Ministry earlier denied the Ukrainian commander-in-chief's allegations.
Danilov: Russia may launch massive cyberattack ahead of renewed offensive. “A precursor and component of a new wave of large-scale aggression by Russia, like a year ago, may be offensive in cyberspace, and we must be ready to fight back,” National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov.
Half of Russia’s main battle tanks in Ukraine are likely to have been captured or destroyed in combat, a senior US defence official has said. Celeste Wallander, the assistant defence secretary for international security affairs, did not provide an exact figure for the number of tanks lost since Russia invaded last February but her estimate comes as Ukraine is set to receive an influx of heavy western tanks from its supporters.
There are fortunes to be made delivering Russian crude oil to India. Price assessments by Platts, a unit of S&P Global, show a margin of more than $20 between a barrel of Russia’s Urals crude lifted in the Baltic region and the same oil delivered to the west coast of India. On a flow that’s now running at about 1.5 million barrels a day, that works out at $1 billion a month.
NPR: Russia appears to be draining water from the enormous Kakhovka Reservoir in Ukraine, imperiling drinking water, agricultural production and safety at Europe's largest nuclear plant, according to satellite data obtained by NPR. Since early November 2022, water has been gushing out of the Kakhovka Reservoir, in Southern Ukraine, through sluice gates at a critical hydroelectric power plant controlled by Russian forces. At stake is drinking water for hundreds of thousands of residents, irrigation for nearly half-a-million acres of farmland, and the cooling system at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
Putin to address Russian parliament before one-year anniversary of invasion of Ukraine. Putin will allegedly speak about the invasion, economy, and social welfare. The announcement comes after Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov expressed concern last week that Russia may renew its offensive to mark the one-year anniversary of the all-out war.
President Biden will use his trip to Poland this month to rally allies while aiming to sustain the coalition that has supported Ukraine defences since Russia’s invasion a year ago, Associated Press reports. The US president’s visit, set for 20-22 February, comes as polling in the US and abroad suggests support is waning for maintaining tens of billions of dollars worth of assistance for Ukraine in the war.
International Monetary Fund staff will meet with Ukrainian officials in Warsaw next week, a source familiar with the plans has said, as Ukraine presses for a multibillion-dollar borrowing program to cover its funding needs amid the war with Russia.
Lithuania sends L-70 anti-aircraft guns to Ukraine on Friday, LRT reported. "They will be able to destroy enemy planes, helicopters and UAVs at a distance of up to 5 km in all weather conditions," the report reads.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has expressed his hopes that 80 Leopard 2 tanks will be ready to be sent to Ukraine by the end of March while commenting on the results of the EU Summit. When replying to journalists' questions as to whether he was sure that two battalions (that is, about 80 Leopard 2 tanks) will be ready to be supplied to Ukraine by the end of March, Scholz stated: "I hope that we will manage to do that, after all."
Slovakia to consider delivering MiG-29 jets to Ukraine. Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Slovakia for MiG-29 fighter jets, Slovak newspaper SME reported. Heger added that negotiations will begin now.
Montenegro has closed the program of citizenship in exchange for investment, it was often used by rich Russians In October 2021, the authorities of Montenegro published a document with 166 positive decisions on the issuance of "golden passports". Most of them were Russians.
Switzerland rejects Spain’s request to re-export anti-aircraft guns to Ukraine. The Swiss government has not allowed Spain to transfer Swiss-made anti-aircraft guns to Ukraine, Reuters reported on Feb. 10. Madrid asked Switzerland to permit the re-export of its two 35-mm anti-aircraft guns to Kyiv in January.
Politico: “Belgian authorities on Friday arrested MEP Marc Tarabella, who had already been ejected from his socialist party, in the probe connected to alleged corruption in the European Parliament. The prosecutor also confirmed that various raids took place on Friday morning. A safe deposit box of Tarabella’s at a bank in Liège was searched, as well as multiple offices in the Walloon town of Anthisnes, where Tarabella is still mayor. The prosecutor did not comment on what charges Tarabella may face. According to parliamentary reports, violations of Belgian law by Tarabella and Cozzolino could include corruption, participation in a criminal organization and money laundering.”
Jon Henley, Moldovan PM resigns blaming ‘crises caused by Russian aggression’- The Guardian
Moldova’s pro-western government has resigned after 18 months in power following a series of economic and political crises that have engulfed the country in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The prime minister, Natalia Gavrilita, told a news conference on Friday that the “time has come for me to announce my resignation”, adding that no one could have expected her government “to manage so many crises caused by Russian aggression”.
Hours earlier, the government said a Russian missile had violated Moldovan airspace and summoned Russia’s ambassador to protest.
Moldova’s intelligence service said on Thursday that Russia was acting to destabilise the country, after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Kyiv had intercepted a “plan for the destruction of Moldova” by Russian intelligence.
Fun…if true about Dmitry Medvedev…from General SVR
Putin heard a report on the situation with a former Federal Protective Service officer who guarded Dmitry Medvedev and had fled abroad. The officer is now blackmailing the former president of Russia promising to "sell" the video materials he has to the media.
The video materials show how the FSO officers are carrying out execution measures to remove Dmitry Medvedev out of drunkenness: they beat him, dip his head into the toilet, spit in the face and in every possible way mock Putin's Deputy Chairman of the Security Council.
The former security guard demands only 20 million dollars in cryptocurrency and promises to destroy and forget everything . As the president was told, nothing can be done yet about it. The blackmailer is out of reach. Apparently, they will have to pay.
Julia Davis, Russian Media Monitor
Top Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov couldn't be more furious: he is enraged about Zelensky's trip to Europe, deliveries of Western weapons, comments from viewers and even his own production team. Watch Solovyov unravel:
Taras Byk, Is Putin’s Russia heading for collapse like its Czarist and Soviet predecessors? Atlantic Council
On January 31, delegates gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels for a conference exploring the prospects for the “decolonization” of Russia. The event highlighted growing international recognition of modern Russia’s imperial identity and increasing awareness of the threats this poses to European security.
An event on this scale would have been hard to imagine just one year ago. However, the invasion of Ukraine has thrust the topic of Russian imperialism firmly into the European mainstream. Over the past year, a steady stream of analytical articles and opinion pieces have appeared in respected international publications accusing Vladimir Putin of pursuing an imperial agenda in Ukraine and calling for the decolonization of Russia itself. While there is still no consensus on the desirability of a new Russian collapse, the topic is no longer taboo.
Staff, In Its Push for an Intelligence Edge, China’s Military Turned to Balloons- Dnyuz
Long before an unmanned Chinese airship floating over the United States grabbed the world’s attention, Taiwan may have glimpsed Beijing’s ambitions to turn balloons — seemingly so old-fashioned and ponderous — into elusive tools of 21st-century military power.
Residents in Taipei and elsewhere on the island have spotted and photographed mysterious pale orbs high in the sky at least several times in the previous two years. But few people here, even officials, gave them much thought then. Now, Taiwanese officials are grappling with whether any of the balloons were part of China’s growing fleet of airborne surveillance craft, deployed to gather information from the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own.
The incursions have come into focus since the United States identified and shot down the Chinese balloon that had spent days traversing the country. Beijing has protested the balloon’s downing, asserting that it was a civilian ship doing scientific research. But American officials say that the balloon was part of a global surveillance effort targeting the military capabilities of various countries.
