Jan 2 Buonasera Mag
Day 312: Kyiv Makiivka Shahad Sumy Kherson Bakhmut Zaporizhzhia Dzhanoi BUL EE UKLng G7 CH-RU Croatia J6-A&P- Reznikov Zelensky UKDef Rosenberg Davis Malikzada Kennedy Cheney
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.
Poll: Most Ukrainians against territorial concessions. A poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in December said 85% of Ukrainians believe that no territorial concessions to Russia are acceptable, “even if because of this the war may last longer.”
Stories we’re following…
Ukrainian military says it killed 400 Russian soldiers in occupied Makiivka. A Russian military base in occupied Makiivka, Donetsk Oblast, was hit on New Year’s night, killing 400 soldiers and injuring at least 300, the Strategic Communications Department reported.
Russia fires missiles at Ukrainian cities on New Year's Eve, killing at least 1, injuring 28. Russia launched a fresh barrage of missiles across Ukraine on Dec. 31, killing at least one person and wounding at least 28, on New Year’s Eve. According to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, a journalist from Japan is among the wounded.
During the night, Russia attacked Kyiv, Kyiv Oblast, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Mykolaiv Oblast with UAVs Shahed. Energy infrastructure objects were damaged. Emergency power shotdowns are being used. People have to suffer electricity cuts at the holidays period. - Ukrenergo
Several waves of Russian drones targeted critical infrastructure in Kyiv and surrounding areas early on Monday morning. Air raid alerts were issued in Kyiv and across eastern Ukraine, beginning just before midnight and still wailing hours later. Debris from a destroyed drone hit Kyiv’s northeastern Desnianskiy district, wounding a 19-year-old man who was later taken to hospital, the city’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
Russia hit Sumy Oblast more than 110 times over past 24 hours. Sumy Governor Dmytro Zhyvytsky said on Jan.1 that the Russian military fired 114 times at five settlements. Although there were no civilian casualties, the Russians damaged a church, a cultural center, and a local gathering place.
General Staff: Russian army shells Kherson Oblast to force Ukrainians to flee. The Russian army has been shelling the non-occupied part of the southern Kherson Oblast and the city of Kherson daily.
ISW: Lack of ammo likely to slow down Russian offensives in Bakhmut and elsewhere. The depletion of the Russian military’s artillery ammunition stocks will likely impact their ability to conduct a high pace of operations near Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast, and elsewhere in Ukraine, according to the latest update by the Institute for the Study of War.
Russian strike leaves 1,750 homes without power in Zaporizhzhia following New Year's Eve attack. Russia launched a fresh barrage of missiles across Ukraine on Dec. 31, killing at least one person and wounding over 30, on New Year’s Eve. At least two people were injured in Zaporizhzhia.
Media: Explosions reported in Dzhankoi airport in Russian-occupied Crimea. The Dzhankoi airport is a military airbase currently operated by Russian occupying forces.
General Staff: Several Russian missiles fall in Russia amid New Year’s Eve strike. Ukraine’s General Staff reported that Russia had launched about 20 missiles at Ukraine on Dec. 31, but an unspecified number of them fell in Russia instead of reaching their targets. Air defense shot down 12 missiles, Ukraine’s military reported.
Emergency Service: Estonia supplies Ukraine with demining equipment. The Estonian Rescue Council has provided demining equipment to Ukraine and trained emergency workers on its use, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported on Jan. 2.
UK stops importing Russian LNG on Jan. 1. The U.K. stopped all imports of Russian liquified natural gas on Jan. 1, said the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office said.
EU Ambassador says union decreased Russian oil supplies by 90% in 2022. The European Union cut down Russian oil imports by 90% before the end of 2022, “radically reducing” energy dependence on Russia, the EU Ambassador to Ukraine Matti Maasikas told Ukrinform.
US concerned about China's 'alignment with Russia' amid war in Ukraine. “Beijing claims to be neutral, but its behavior makes clear it is still investing in close ties to Russia,” the U.S. State Department spokesperson told CNN, following a phone call between Russian and Chinese leaders Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
The Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and former heads of government Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schröder are the only EU politicians who have received Christmas and New Year's well-wishes from Putin this year.
Steve Rosenberg, New year in Putin’s Russia - nothing is normal- BBC News
The clock in the Kremlin's Spassky Tower strikes midnight.
The Russian national anthem plays.
Then Channel One TV kicks off 2023 with a pop song: "I'm Russian and I will go all the way…I'm Russian, to spite the world."
Next on Top of the (patriotic) Pops: "I was born in the Soviet Union, I was made in the USSR!"
I change channels. At the Russia-1 New Year party, one of the station's most famous war correspondents is holding a champagne glass, toasting 2023 and wishing for "more good news than bad from the front line".
Sitting with him are men in military fatigues. A Moscow-installed official from Russian-occupied Ukraine declares: "I wish us all peace. But peace will only come after our victory."
You get the gist. This year's festive extravaganzas on Russian TV are a strange mixture of let's party and let's win on the battlefield.
“Like it or not, Russia is expanding!”
I’m used to these New Years’ Eve variety bonanza shows: the Italian broadcaster, RAIUno, features stars dressed in glitzy costumes belting out their hits from yester year. Julia Davis’s clip from Russian state TV was nontheless shocking. I almost thought it was a parody show.
Mara Hvistendahl, Alexey Kovalev, Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement with China- The Intercept
In 2021, government officials and media executives from Russia and China discussed the exchange of news and social content.
VGTRK’s email system was hacked earlier this year when, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hackers targeted more than 50 Russian companies and government agencies. The transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets has published more than 13 terabytes of documents from the hacks on its website. The Intercept and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project formed a consortium of news organizations to examine the files; previous stories that emerged from the documents include articles on Putin associate Evgeny Prigozhin, who founded and runs the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization that is fighting in Ukraine.
The signatories of the 2021 agreement include large state media outlets as well as online media companies and businesses in the private sector. Among those who signed were the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which has a streaming service; Migu Video, a gaming company under the state-run China Mobile; and SPB TV, a streaming service headquartered in Switzerland and owned by a Russian national.
The agreement lists 64 joint media projects that had either been launched or were in development. Some of these are lighthearted. In early 2021, CCTV and Riki Group launched a saccharine cartoon called “Panda and Krash,” about a panda and a rabbit in a toy store who zip off on adventures with a robot and an elephant in tow. “I encourage you and you help me,” they sing.
Liam Kennedy, Is Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine the First Tik-Tok War?- EA Worldview
TikTok is estimated to have 1.2 billion active monthly users worldwide, with about 85 million in the United States. Two-thirds of its users are under 30. It is associated more with viral teenage dancing videos than with hard news of global conflicts. But that is changing, catalysed by the war in Ukraine.
What might this mean for how we see and understand war? More particularly, what might it mean for how Americans – traditionally largely indifferent to foreign affairs – see and understand war?
In the US the war in Ukraine is being intensively covered or tracked via multiple media – TV, podcasts, Twitter feeds, and Instagram and TikTok videos. The effect is an immersive spectacle of war in which the conflict feels proximate and urgent.
Kyle Cheney, Inside the Jan. 6 committee’s massive new evidence trove- Politico
The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.
The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win. Much of the evidence has never been seen before and, in some cases, adds extraordinary new elements to the case the select committee presented in public — from voluminous phone records to contemporaneous text messages and emails.