Feb 16: Buonasera Mag
Day 357: stamps Luhansk Lviv Leopards ammo EUsanctions Hungary Switzerland KILLNET Surkov HARM Ponomarenko IKEA Ocheretnaya-A&Ps-Avdeeva Cohen Scherba Lautman Lister Bell Applebaum Zeihan Tokariuk
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…
Russian forces are mounting “round-the-clock” attacks on Ukrainian positions in the east of the country, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar has said. “The enemy’s offensive continues in the east, (with) round-the-clock attacks. The situation is tense. Yes, it is difficult for us,” Maliar posted to Telegram. The situation in Luhansk remains difficult, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office said earlier on Wednesday, without mentioning any retreats in eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces strike critical infrastructure in Lviv Oblast. Russian forces struck critical infrastructure in Lviv Oblast in the early hours of Feb. 16, regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyi reported on Telegram. There are no casualties, according to the governor.
CNN: Western officials say new Russian offensive 'more aspirational than realistic.' The U.S., U.K., and Ukraine do not believe that Russia has amassed the resources to make meaningful gains in its new offensive in eastern Ukraine, officials from the countries told CNN.
ISW: Putin is unlikely to announce new Russian mobilization initiatives in his address on Feb. 21. Vladimir Putin is unlikely to announce measures for further escalation of the war in Ukraine or major Russian mobilization initiatives in his address to the Federal Assembly.
General Staff: 20 trucks full of wounded Russian soldiers reported arriving at hospital in Starobilsk. The surgical department of the hospital in the Russian-occupied town of Starobilsk in Luhansk Oblast is closed off to the public as it houses dozens if not hundreds of wounded Russian soldiers, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on Feb. 15.
FM Cohen: “I have now arrived in Kiev, for the first visit of an Israeli minister to Ukraine since the beginning of the war. I will meet with President Zelensky and Foreign Minister Kuleba, I will reopen the Israeli embassy in Kyiv, which will return to continuous and full activity, and I will visit Bucha and Babi Yar. I came to say: Israel stands by Ukraine and by the Ukrainian people in their difficult time.”
Norway’s parliament has announced it will donate 75 billion kroner (£6.1bn) to Ukraine as part of a five-year support package, making the oil-rich country one of the world’s biggest donors to Kyiv.
German defense minister says Ukraine to receive fewer Leopard tanks than promised. Western allies will not be able to supply Ukraine with two full battalions of Leopard 2 tanks as they previously promised, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Feb. 15, according to Bloomberg.
Netherlands to provide Ukraine with ammunition for Leopard 2 tanks. The Netherlands will supply Ukraine with ammunition and spare parts for Leopard 2 main battle tanks, as well as participate in the training of Ukrainian tank crews, the Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren told De Telegraaf.
Politico: The EU plans to sanction several Iranian companies for supplying armed drones to Russia, EU Commission President von der Leyen said Wednesday. Iran's Revolutionary Guards had given Russia drones "to attack civilian infrastructure in Ukraine," von der Leyen said in a press statement. "This is why, for the first time ever, we are adding third-country entities to the Russian dual use sanctions." The EU will also target Russian disinformation and impose more trade restrictions on industrial and dual-use products, von der Leyen said, and ban the export of more electric components that can be used in Russian weapons systems. "With this, we have banned all tech products found on the battlefield," she said.
EU Sanctions: “This miscellaneous list includes "bidets, lavatory pans, flushing cisterns and similar sanitary ware", as well as LEDs, hemp yarn, fork-lift trucks, mail-sorting machines, chimney pots, bricks, tyres, and even "pen nibs and nib points".”
Toilets became a symbol of how Russian president Vladimir Putin's 24-year rule has done nothing to improve Russian people's lives when Russian soldiers began looting them, first in Georgia in 2008, and now in Ukraine — because one in five Russian homes still don't have them. "Let them take the toilet bowls — they'll need them on the road — and go back home," Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky said in a speech in January. "You know they [Russians] used to talk about their biggest dream, to see Paris and die ... their dream now is to steal a toilet and die," he also said last April.
The EU sanctions are designed to enter into force by 24 February — the first anniversary of the war.
Hungary’s foreign minister said that the German government was “blocking” a permit to allow Siemens Energy to ship control equipment for the new reactors Russia’s Rosatom is building at Hungary’s Paks nuclear power plant.
The Federal Council has instructed the Swiss Federal Department of Finance to initiate proceedings to confiscate the assets of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his entourage. The assets in question amount to more than 130 million Swiss francs. The assets are reported to remain frozen until the final decision of the Swiss administrative justice system. Any property finally confiscated will be returned to the Ukrainian people following an international agreement.
The Russian hacker group KILLNET took responsibility for the failure of the information system of the German airline Lufthansa yesterday. All Luftansa flights were either cancelled or postponed in Germany due to violations in the system of registration, boarding.
Surkov clarified that he is “satisfied with the current expansion of the western borders of the Russian Federation”, considers the actions of the occupying army effective, and, in his opinion, relations between Russia and the West, “will they normalize in the foreseeable future.”
Switzerland refuses to confiscate frozen Russian assets. The Swiss government said confiscating Russian assets was against the country's constitution and could “violate Switzerland’s international obligations,” the European Pravda media outlet reported on Feb. 15.
Led by Senator Ben Cardin and Senator Roger Wicker, a group of U.S. senators said on February 15 that they would try again to pass legislation that would require the State Department to designate the Russian mercenary company Wagner Group as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). The senators said they had reintroduced the Holding Accountable Russian Mercenaries (HARM) act, seeking to hold Wagner accountable for human rights violations in Ukraine and elsewhere by adding it to the FTO blacklist.
A poll has revealed that one year after Russia began its war of aggression against Ukraine, 61 percent of Europeans believe that Ukraine will be successful.
One year into the war in Ukraine, 61% of Europeans believe that the country will prevail. Germans, however, are not quite so optimistic, although a 55% majority believes in a Ukrainian victory. These are the findings of the EU-wide survey conducted by eupinions. It is published in cooperation with the Belgian King Baudouin Foundation.
Siberian journalist Maria Ponomarenko is sentenced to six years on “disinformation” charges for posting online about Russia’s Mariupol theater strike. She previously cut her own wrists in pretrial detention, saying that her remand-prison conditions were intolerable.
A Russian government commission has approved the sale of IKEA's three factories in Russia to two local buyers, paving the way for a deal to be struck, a government official was quoted as saying on February 16.
European Parliament: Ex-President Saakashvili's death in custody would be blow to Georgia's democracy. Georgia's continued failure to improve Saakashvili's situation in prison is putting its reputation and EU aspirations at risk, the European Parliament said in a resolution passed on Feb. 15.
Mini-thread: Olga Lautman
I saw Russian media spewing this garbage earlier in the week and didn’t bother posting it but now that Western media decided to pick up on it am addressing it. There are signs Russia is preparing an attack domestically and have been laying the groundwork for it.
Also there is a video floating of a Ukrainian soldier w someone standing behind him w an IS patch. That person also has a patch of a german security company above the IS patch. It’s not a coincidence this appeared today & days after the SVR BS LIE. Russia is laying the groundwork
Western media must do better and not post headlines like this because many will see the headline and not bother reading the full article. And this is how Russian disinformation gets laundered into the West. This is too dangerous of a lie to post with such headlines
Back to Russia there has been a strange shift since last month and it feels@like they are planning something to raise support for their assault on Ukraine and try to get recruits by presenting a threat on domestic soil. This is what Putin knows and how he got into power.
Bell & Semple, Meet a mother who fought the Russian army with small acts of resistance- Global News
A petite mother of three wearing a gray Pokémon hat, Liliia Aleksandrova may not look like the stereotype of a partisan, but she could not stand by while Russia stole her city.
Aleksandrova lives in an apartment block on a wide boulevard in Kherson. During the occupation, military vehicles roared past her window and Russian soldiers drank at a bar on the corner.
Before long, propaganda billboards went up at the intersection. Moscow was trying to Russify the Ukrainian city and absorb it, and Aleksandrova didn’t like it.
Someone needed to strike back, but what could she do? After watching Russian troops suppress a protest at Kherson’s central square, she heard about a group called Yellow Ribbon and reached out.
With their guidance, she began venturing out at night to brand the neighbourhood, painting the horizontal blue and yellow bars of Ukraine’s flag on the street outside her apartment.
Anne Applebaum & Natalia Gumenyuk, ‘THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING, BUT JUST SPOILED PEOPLE’S LIVES’- The Atlantic
How Russian invaders unleashed violence on small-town residents
On the night of february 24, 2022, the sound of missiles jolted Viktor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke; then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with leaders of other nearby villages to discuss their options. They quickly realized that they were already too late to connect with the Ukrainian army. Their region was cut off. They were occupied.
Occupied. Marunyak had been expecting the war to break out, but he had no sense of what a Russian occupation of his village might mean. Like his colleagues, Marunyak is an elected official—genuinely elected, since 2006, under Ukrainian laws giving real power to local governments, not appointed following a falsified plebiscite, as a similar official might have been in the Soviet era or might be in modern Russia. That meant that when the occupation began, he felt an enormous responsibility to stay in Stara Zburjivka and help his constituents cope with a cascade of emergencies. “Already, within a few days, there were families lacking food,” he recalls. “There was no bread or flour, so I was trying to buy grain from the farmers … Many residents began contributing the food they could share, and so we created a fund, providing assistance on demand.”
Similar plans were made to locate and distribute medications. Because the Ukrainian police had ceased to function, citizens formed nighttime security patrols staffed with local volunteers. Marunyak prepared to negotiate with whoever the Russians sent to Stara Zburjivka. “I told people not to be afraid, saying, when the Russians would come, I’ll be the first to talk to them.”
He was. And he paid a horrific price for it.
Programming Note…
