Jan 10: 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.
Kira Rudik’s address to the EU Parliament: I want to make it very clear: confiscating russian money stored in democratic countries would act as one of the best peace-building measure. To survive, we should be firm and decisive.
Stories we’re following…
President Zelensky authorized Deputy Minister of Justice Iryna Mudra to sign the Ljubljana-Hague Convention that will allow Ukraine to more effectively prosecute and punish Russians who have committed crimes under international law on Ukrainian territory.
CDS Report: According to information provided by the Situation Center of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Russian troops shelled 9 regions of Ukraine over the past day. A total of 100 towns and villages and 23 infrastructure objects were attacked with various types of weapons. The number of casualties is being updated/clarified.
In the de-occupied area of Kherson Oblast, over 24.5% of the territory has been cleared of mines, as reported by Alexander Prokudin, the head of the Kherson Oblast Military Administration. He mentioned that over 800 deminers examine the region daily, a stark contrast to 80 deminers in March of the previous year.
Ukraine’s power grid operator said severe winter weather has left more than 1,000 towns and villages without electricity in nine regions, as the energy system has been weakened by Russian strikes, Reuters reports.
Ukrenergo, the state-owned electricity transmission system operator, said electricity consumption was at this week’s highest levels as temperatures fell to about -15 C in many parts of the country.
“The consumption level continues to grow due to the considerable drop in temperature across the country,” it wrote on Telegram.
Minister: Nearly 15 million tons of cargo exported via temporary Black Sea corridor. "In the five months of the corridor's operation, 469 new vessels arrived at our Ukrainian ports to receive cargo," Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said, according to his Facebook channel.
Combat Situation Update
CDS Report: situation on the ground
Kupyansk direction: the Ukrainian Defense Forces repelled 5 Russian attacks near Synkivka. The situation in the Kupyansk sector remains difficult, but Ukrainian troops have good control over the situation.
Lyman direction: they repelled 2 Russian attacks east of Terny. On the Bakhmut direction, Ukrainian troops repelled 2 enemy attacks in the areas of Klishchiivka and Andriivka.
Avdiivka direction: the Ukrainian Defense Forces keep holding back the occupying forces that persist in attempts to encircle Avdiivka. Ukrainian troops steadfastly maintain the defense, inflicting losses on the enemy forces.
Zaporizhzhia direction: the Ukrainian troops repelled 7 Russian attacks south of Chervone, west of Verbove and north of Novoprokopivka.
Kherson direction: the Ukrainian Defense Forces persist in expanding their bridgehead. Despite significant losses, the adversary persists in attempts to dislodge Ukrainian units from their positions. During the past 24 hours, the adversary conducted 12 unsuccessful assault attempts.
ISW: Russian authorities continue efforts to consolidate control over the Russian information space ahead of the March presidential elections. Russian opposition outlet Verstka reported on January 8 that recent polling shows decreased domestic support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine ahead of the March 2024 Russian presidential elections.
The BBC’s Russian Service reported on January 8 that Russian authorities have detained thousands of Ukrainian civilians in penal colonies and pre-trial detention centers in Russia and occupied Ukraine for “opposing the ‘special military operation.’
Russian official claims Ukrainian attack on Belgorod Oblast, 3 injured. Several buildings and cars were also reportedly damaged, said Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.
Media: Explosions reported on railway by oil depot in Russia. The Russian state-run media outlet TASS, citing local authorities, said there was an explosion on the tracks but that there were no casualties or damage to infrastructure.
Military: Russia keeps 19,000 troops on Ukraine's northern border. "This number has not changed for several months, so there is no need to discuss signs of the enemy forming any strike groups," the spokesperson of Ukraine's northern forces, Yurii Povkh, said on television.
Ukraine has a deficit of anti-aircraft guided missiles, air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat has been quoted as saying.
“Ukraine has spent a considerable reserve on those three attacks that took place,” Ihnat told Ukrainian TV, according to Reuters. “It is clear that there is a deficit of anti-aircraft guided missiles.”
Ihnat said he hoped delays over western aid packages would be resolved soon as Ukraine depended on western supplies for a range of defensive needs.
“We have more and more western equipment today and, accordingly, it needs maintenance, repair, updating, replenishment, and corresponding ammunition,” he said.
In the city of Oryol, a kamikaze drone reportedly attacked Oryolnefteprodukt. A fuel tank was hit, but according to local sources the damage would be minor.
Zaluzhnyi planned to launch a counteroffensive in 2022 to isolate the Russians in occupied Crimea, but the US did not support the plan. "We thought that if they bit off more than they can chew in the South, they would get routed," the official said.
During discussions with Western partners of plans for a 2022 counteroffensive, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Zaluzhny, his top general, both advocated for a push down to the Sea of Azov through the Zaporizhzhia region. At that point, Russia had not constructed the extensive minefields and fortifications that would hinder the 2023 counteroffensive there, lightening the breaching demands.
Such an approach would have still been a daunting challenge and a gamble. The penetration would need to not only be deep but also sufficiently wide to prevent the Russians from counterattacking and threatening the flanks of the advancing force.
But if the Ukrainian move worked, it might have allowed the Ukrainians to capitalize on their momentum after the battle for Kyiv and Russian losses elsewhere and, as Trofimov writes, "deprive Moscow of its biggest prize in the war."
Behind the Lines
Ukraine, allies initiate proceedings against Iran over airplane downing. Ukraine, Sweden, Canada, and the U.K. issued a joint statement on Jan. 8 announcing the initiation of dispute settlement proceedings with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) over Iran's shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020. Flight 752 was a civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Kyiv that was hit by two missiles shortly after takeoff, with all 176 people on board being killed.
Ex-defense officials charged with embezzling $25 million through bulletproof vest purchases. According to New Voice, the first two suspects are ex-Deputy Defense Minister Viacheslav Shapovalov and former State Procurement Department Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, who are currently in custody on other corruption charges.
They are killing our artists, but they will never be able to erase Ukrainian culture. They are taking the lives of our people, but they will never take Ukraine's.
We remember everyone. We defend Ukraine. We destroy the Russian occupiers.
Ukraine must win!—United24
Hungary has indicated that it might lift its veto over EU aid to Ukraine if the funding is reviewed each year, Politico reports.
Viktor Orbán blocked a €50bn EU aid package for Ukraine last month, with the Hungarian prime minister refusing to green light funding to help Ukraine’s government over the next four years.
Three EU diplomatic sources said Budapest indicated it might withdraw its opposition if the European Council unanimously approves the funding on a yearly basis, meaning Orbán could extract concessions from the bloc.
Jakub Bielamowicz: Shameful footage from Banja Luka where Putin’s Night Wolves are marching in the illegal paramilitary parade glorifying the onset of the Bosnian Genocide. Today, Milorad Dodik decorated Prime Minister Viktor Orban with the same ‘Republika Srpska distinction’ that Putin received last year. Note that the Night Wolves is a paramilitary group that was initiated by Putin.
Putin grants citizenship to Bosnian Serb accused of war crimes. Ratko Samac, a former Bosnian Serb soldier, is accused of participating in atrocities during the mass expulsion of civilians from the western Bosnian town of Kljuc during the war in the 1990s, in which at least 150 Bosniak civilians were killed. Samac has also been suspected by Bosnia's justice ministry of murdering three Bosniak civilians in 1993.
Meanwhile in Russia
Russia’s national elections commission has registered the Communist party’s candidate to compete with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in the March election, the Associated Press reports. Nikolai Kharitonov, a member of the lower house of parliament, joins two other candidates who were approved for the ballot last week.
Me: This makes absolutely no difference. It’s for show and so the Kremlin can say that the elections were ‘legal’. It’s interesting that they have to keep up the facade.
Residents in the Moscow region are increasingly taking to social media to post appeals to Putin to turn on the heat! Putin’s new election slogan: vote for me and get eggs and heating.
Steve Rosenberg for the BBC in Russia: When you read in your morning paper that “Repressions are inevitable, unavoidable…they are not carried out against the innocent, but against internal enemies” it makes you want to check the date of the newspaper. It sounds very 1930s.
Meduza: A source familiar with Putin’s Orthodox Christmas Eve meeting with the widows and children of several fallen Russian soldiers told The Insider that the president cut their church service short and announced dinner before anyone was able to receive communion. Putin’s early meal call apparently confused two guests, leading to a brief confrontation with Federal Protective Service officers.
The Insider’s source also claims that the families were treated to private tours of several local attractions and dressed in new clothes at no charge before arriving at Putin’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence. All individuals supposedly surrendered blood samples on the first day of the trip and completed daily coronavirus tests thereafter.
Meduza: Riddle columnist Pavel Luzin describes a grim future for Russia’s capacities in military production and contract-based recruitment. Luzin sees Russia’s “gradual organizational, material, and technical degradation” and “general progressive military depletion,” arguing that “figures on paper” about the number of contract soldiers now enlisted in Russia “have ultimately diverged from the actual number of people in Russian troops.”
Luzin bases this conclusion on incongruities in the military’s public data — for example, he suspects the same men are signing multiple short-term contracts and being counted repeatedly, and he points out that recruitment claims contradict frontline soldiers’ complaints about a lack of rotation.
The military’s main reason for misrepresenting its strength, says Luzin, is to maintain its “greatly augmented military budget regardless of the situation on the battlefield.” Luzin also argues that indirect data on industrial production suggests that the Russian military-industrial sector’s production growth was only modest in 2023 and likely exhausted its potential for sudden expansion.
In Ussuriysk the authorities had promised a project to heat public bus stops.
Finnish MEP Petri Sarvamaa has initiated a petition to revoke Hungary's voting rights in the European Council.
"EU's decision-making machinery is stuck because of Orbán. The only way to make it work is to deprive Orbán of his right to vote," he said.
Allied Support
Belgian PM: EU to scale up its support to Ukraine. The European Union "will further scale up its support to Ukraine," Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo said on X on Jan. 9, after Belgium started its term leading the European Council.
Ukraine Foreign Ministry: The EU continues resisting Russia and imposes new sanctions against the terrorist state. This time, new restrictions were imposed against the largest Russian diamond mining company, Alrosa, and its CEO. Alrosa is responsible for over 90% of the Russian diamond market.
US Representatives met with the heads of the US military-industrial complex yesterday to discuss the production of weapons for Ukraine. Focused on a number of systems such as (countering) UAVs as well as on solving the problem of demining.
German defense company Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft (FFG) started construction of an armored vehicle service center in Ukraine.
Japan, UNFPA buy 70 tons of medicines for almost 100 maternity hospitals across Ukraine. The Government of Japan and the Representative Office of the United Nations Population Fund in Ukraine jointly purchased 70 tons of medical supplies for 93 maternity hospitals in Ukraine.
Scholz criticizes EU for providing insufficient military aid to Ukraine. "As significant as the German contribution is, it will not be enough to ensure Ukraine's security in the long run," said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
President Zelensky to deliver a “special address” to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos next week, the WEP says. Zelensky, who has made speeches to the WEF via video link in the past, will deliver the speech and meet CEOs, the WEF’s president, Borge Brende, said.
“It is taking place against the most complicated geopolitical and geo-economic backdrop in decades,” Brende told a virtual press conference.
This year, the annual forum, being held between 15 and 19 January in the Swiss alps, will be under the theme “Rebuilding Trust” and is due to feature Russia’s war in Ukraine in the talks again, AFP reports.
It will be attended by numerous world leaders and senior politcians, including Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, Argentina’s newly elected president, Javier Milei, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken.
The European Commission wants Google, Meta, and other big tech companies to help dissident Belarusian media by promoting their stories over pro-regime outlets, which existing search algorithms favor, say opposition journalists. For example, Google downgrades banned media outlets in Belarus as “broken links,” a Lithuanian MEP explained to The Financial Times.
Julia Davis: During Vladimir Solovyov's show, propagandists admitted that many in Russia are hoping for a civil war in America — and Donald Fredovych Trump is their best bet at making it happen.
Julia Davis: Shocking Reality of Ukraine Blowback Hammers Putin at Home
For years, Russian government officials and state media propagandists have been claiming that Western sanctions don’t cause any real harm to their economy and to the contrary, actually help it develop. But the main industry that seems to be thriving despite the sanctions is the country’s military-industrial complex. As for everyday people, their lives are progressively getting worse.
During Russia’s New Year’s show The Little Blue Light 12 months ago, one of its hosts, Dmitry Guberniev assured the viewers that victory in Ukraine was near. He said, “Life is like a biathlon or ski racing. If you’re having a hard time, then the finish line is near.” During the same program, comedian Yevgeny Petrosyan claimed that the West had tried to destroy Russia but instead was forced to freeze and suffer without Russian gas supplies. He boasted: “Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!”
The mood was markedly different during this year’s festivities. Instead of laughing at the West, Petrosyan wished fellow Russians to have “barns and cellars that are fully stocked and regularly replenished with patience and optimism.”
This tempering of expectations is not coincidental. Russian President Vladimir Putin—who is running for re-election in March—and a bevy of state-funded propagandists insist that the invasion of Ukraine will not stop until Moscow’s goals are achieved. This also means there will be no relief from the impact of sanctions within Russia itself.
The relative stability of the Russian economy is ensured by injections of trillions of rubles from the budget, secured through the National Welfare Fund (NWF). Since the beginning of the invasion, half of this stash has already been spent. Analysts say that the remaining liquid part of the National Wealth Fund, $52 billion, wouldn’t be enough to handle another crisis.
The Russian ruble showed its strongest decline since 2015 and became one of the three weakest currencies of developing countries tracked by Bloomberg. This comes at the same time as a “demographic catastrophe” bemoaned by Russian experts and commentators, which has seen migration exacerbate a natural population decline in almost half of the regions. Migrants from the CIS nations are also less inclined to work and live in Russia, due in part to a weakening ruble and also because police raids, rounding up migrants for military mobilization, have become so frequent.
In 2023, therapists reported an increase in complaints about permanent stress and financial worries. The poorest Russians, including pensioners, suffer the most. Just in time for the holidays, the price of eggs in Russia shot up by 40 percent or more and their availability greatly diminished. Some regions started to limit the number of eggs an individual could buy, with some stores even selling them individually. This was an especially sensitive issue, since a traditional New Year’s salad, the Olivier, requires eggs as one of its main ingredients. During his annual televised event, Direct Line, Putin had to apologize for the rising egg prices—a fact that even state TV propagandists described as “shocking.”
Experts on TV show The Meeting Place blamed the sanctions and economist Alexey Zubets suggested that people can switch from eggs to “better sources of protein, like beef.” Even hosts, Ivan Trushkin and Andrey Norkin, seemed shocked by his callous attitude, which resembled Marie Antoinette’s legendary “Let them eat cake.”
Egg shortages prompted Russia to step up imports from other countries, including Turkey and Azerbaijan. Chicken is also disappearing from grocery store shelves.
Russian State Duma Deputy Speaker Vladislav Davankov, who filed his paperwork to the Central Election Commission to take part in the 2024 presidential campaign, accused the Federal State Statistics Service of fudging the numbers “to make it seem that all is well with the prices.” He said that prices on many items, including rice, grains, and butter, are rising 10-30 percent faster than officials claim. “When statistics diverge from reality, it is impossible to make effective decisions to curb prices,” Davankov added.
According to official statistics, basic food products sharply rose in price: eggs by 59 percent, tomatoes by 52 percent, bananas by 46.5 percent, cabbage by 29 percent, poultry by 27.7 percent, and apples by 20.7 percent.
Polls reveal that two-thirds of Russians complain about the prices rising at a faster pace—and that Russians in general are tired of war, with over 50 percent of participants hoping for the end of the so-called “special military operation” as their biggest wish for 2024. Witnessing Western hesitation to continue aid to Ukraine, Putin is unlikely to grant the wish of his own citizens anytime soon. Russian lawmakers and other state TV propagandists promise an expanded agenda, with all of Ukraine on the menu. Encouraged by the disarray in the U.S., they hope for a civil war in America that will permanently distract the country from helping Moscow’s intended victims.
With Putin’s unrelenting grip on power, the suffering of his own people seems inconsequential, as opposed to the illusory “greatness” of conquering other nations. The escalating brutality with which the Kremlin welcomed the New Year in 2024 shows that many challenges lie ahead for Ukraine and its global allies, but Russia is certainly not escaping the economic and demographic consequences of its own actions.