Jan 30 Buonasera Mag
Day 341: Zelensky Kherson Blahodatne Peskov electronics Lith NATO Challenger drones FR-AUS UK Isfahan BND-A&P-UKDef ISW Seddon Macguire Shagina Lautman Plichta Fink Jukes Davidzon Cosmopod Dickinson
Catching up
Hop over the Scott Lucas’s EA Worldview for the latest up-dates from the US and the Middle East as well as Europe.
Top tweet…
Stories we’re following…
Russia ‘hopes to drag out war,’ exhaust Ukrainian forces. President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that it is essential for Ukraine to continue receiving military support from partners at the same pace, as Russia seeks to "prolong the war, exhaust our forces." "Speed of (military assistance) supply was and will be one of the key factors in this war," Zelensky said.
Russian shelling of residential areas in Kherson left at least three people dead and 10 injured, local authorities said. The Kherson regional military administration said on its Telegram channel that Russian forces targeted a hospital, school, bus station, post office, bank and residential buildings in a strike on Sunday.
Wagner forces claim Russian capture of Blahodatne near Bakhmut, Ukraine denies. Russia has claimed to have captured the village of Blahodatne in Donetsk Oblast, implying a successful crossing of a strategic river and a significant step towards the encirclement of the embattled city of Bakhmut.
Stefano Sannino, Secretary General of the EU’s European External Action Service, said Friday that Russia has taken its war against Ukraine to “a different stage” by making indiscriminate attacks on civilians and non-military targets, while criticizing Moscow for triggering recent moves by Germany and the United States to send advanced tanks to Ukraine. Putin had “moved from a concept of special operation to a concept now of a war against NATO and the West, “ he said at a conference in Tokyo.
ISW: Russian authorities are continuing to set conditions for a second wave of mobilization. Head of the State Duma Committee on Defense Andrey Kartapolov stated on January 28 that the committee is reviewing over 20 laws regarding mobilization deferrals.
Intelligence: Prigozhin doesn’t command Wagner Group’s military operations. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Russian state-backed mercenary Wagner Group, doesn't command combat units fighting in the war against Ukraine, according to Andriy Yusov, a representative of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Intelligence.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said the west’s supplying of further weapons to Ukraine will only lead to “significant escalation” of the conflict.
How Russia is using U.S. electronics to attack Ukraine: “U.S. sanctions and export controls are intended to prevent rivals from obtaining semiconductors and other sensitive electronics, yet dozens of weapon systems Russia has deployed against Ukraine are loaded with — and can’t function without — U.S. and Western electronics, according to a U.K. think tank. Jack Watling a fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, presented his findings during a Jan. 26 presentation at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington, D.C. While many of the systems they analyzed were legacy systems, some electronics components were from 2021, he noted.” (Continue reading National Defense article)
Reuters: Stoltenberg urges South Korea to step up military support for Ukraine. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urged South Korea to increase military support to Ukraine, citing other countries that have changed their policy of not providing weapons to countries at war after Russia's invasion.
Ukrainian tank crews arrive to begin training on Challengers. "Ukrainian tank crews have arrived in the U.K. to begin training for their continued fight against Russia," the U.K. Defense Ministry wrote on Jan. 29.
German weapon manufacturer Rheinmetall ready to boost arms production, build HIMARS. Rheinmetall is reportedly in talks with Lockheed Martin, the U.S. company manufacturing the HIMARS, to kick off their production in Germany, the company’s CEO Armin Papperger told Reuters.
Defense Ministry to allocate over $500 million to buy drones in 2023. The mass use of drones will make it possible to advance more quickly during offensive actions, significantly reduce Russia’s combat potential and stop the enemy from conducting its own offensives, Commander of the Joint Forces of Ukraine Serhii Naev said.
French defence minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said France and Australia had agreed to cooperate to make “several thousands” of 155-millimetre shells to help Ukraine, which he hoped could start being delivered in the first quarter of this year.
US officials meet with deputy PM, check aid spending. Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov, head of Ukraine's infrastructure projects, said on Jan. 29 that Ukraine proposed creating an aid audit mechanism to "ensure transparency in the use of partners' aid."
Boris Johnson says Putin threatened him with missile strike in run-up to Russia's invasion. Boris Johnson has said Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile strike after he warned the war would be an "utter catastrophe" during a "very long" call in February 2022.
President Erdoğan signalled that Turkey may agree to Finland joining Nato without Sweden, amid growing tensions with Stockholm. “We may deliver Finland a different message [on their Nato application] and Sweden would be shocked when they see our message. But Finland should not make the same mistake Sweden did,” Erdoğan said in a televised speech aired on Sunday.
Reports infer that the attack on the Isfahan military factory was an action meant to serve the security interests of Israel; Israel's Mossad appears to have been behind an overnight drone attack on an Iranian defense factory in Isfahan's central city, a U.S. official told the New York Times on Sunday. The intelligence sources, including those familiar with the dialogue between Israel and the U.S., said that the targeted facility's purpose was not clear, and neither was how much damage the strike caused. However, it is clear that Isfahan is a major center of missile production, research, and development for Iran, including the assembly of many of its Shahab medium-range missiles, which can reach Israel and beyond.
Up-dating information about the German intelligence spy scandal:
The suspect, identified in Germany only as Carsten L. is a 52-year-old married father and colonel in the German military who, since 2010, was assigned to the Federal Intelligence Service, or BND. This arrest has set off alarm bells far beyond Berlin. Not only is Linke a senior intelligence official, but the BND, which in American terms is the CIA and NSA combined, has a close relationship with multiple Western intelligence agencies. Worse, Linke held a top job inside the BND’s technical intelligence office, which handles signals intelligence, or SIGINT. Since Linke’s arrest, the NSA, GCHQ, and several other Western intelligence agencies have commenced a large-scale joint assessment to determine what damage the rogue colonel did to his own agency and its NATO partners.
Marcel Plichta, Swarm of Tanks Is Just the Start of Putin’s New Nightmare- The Daily Beast
Ukraine will definitely benefit from a fleet of modern tanks, but it may take some time. Much like when the U.S. and Europe pledged donations of advanced air defenses, there will be a lag time between announcements that tanks are coming and their debut on the battlefield. Crews will need to be trained, supply chains organized, and potentially new units formed for the Ukrainians to make full use of their new weapons.
Still, a clear trend is emerging in this conflict: Ukraine’s military is getting newer and better equipment, while Russia falls back on weapons built in the 1960s. If things keep moving in that direction, it becomes more and more feasible for Ukraine to blunt Putin’s attacks—and start eyeing up territory it hasn’t controlled since the first Russian invasion in 2014.
Peter Dickinson, Putin is facing defeat in the information war- Atlantic Council
As the world prepares to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the European Union has accused Russia of “trampling on the memory” of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. This rebuke came following controversial recent comments by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who compared Western support for Ukraine to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry.
The international backlash over Lavrov’s blunders illustrates the limitations of the propaganda narratives developed by Moscow to justify the invasion of Ukraine. While captive audiences inside Russia have been largely convinced by attempts to blame hostilities on “Ukrainian Nazis” and the “Russophobic West,” these unsubstantiated arguments have proven far less persuasive internationally and have served to further undermine the Kremlin’s dwindling credibility.
It is still far too early for Ukraine to declare victory in the information war. Russian disinformation narratives continue to resonate on the vocal fringes of Western society while also appealing to widespread anti-Western sentiment in much of Asia, Africa, and South America. Nevertheless, the wholesale revulsion over Lavrov’s recent Holocaust remarks is a timely reminder of the increasingly unbridgeable gap separating Russia’s alternative reality from the real world.
Olga Lautman, Western Elites —Rubles Bought (Some of) the Best- CEPA
(one of the best overviews of how Russia has penetrated Western institutions. A must read.)
In the past weeks there has been a whirlwind of stories exposing the Kremlin’s successful post-Cold War infiltration of the West. Arrests, jailings, and news stories have highlighted allegations of the involvement of high-profile individuals and institutions (sometimes unwittingly) to assist Russian intelligence and Kremlin-linked oligarchs. Taken as a whole, it paints a picture of a West subverted by cash.
In back-to-back breaking stories, a former senior FBI official was arrested over his dealings with Oleg Deripaska, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarchs; a German was held on suspicion of passing intelligence to Russia; and questions were asked in Parliament in London about reports that the government had helped Wagner Mercenary Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin bypass its own sanctions so he could sue a critical journalist.
The events offer a snapshot into the decades of Russian influence operations that have infiltrated sensitive institutions and sought to embrace and compromise high-profile Western figures.
Peter Jukes & Caroline Orr, The Steele Dossier, the Indicted FBI Officer & The ‘Most Consequential Investigations in US History’- Byline Times
News that a senior FBI official Charles McGonigal has been indicted for taking payments from sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and then trying to conceal those payments, raises deeply disturbing questions about the investigations he oversaw as head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York Field Office during the tumultuous 2016 presidential election,
The case, which is still unfolding, has particularly concerned the former British intelligence officer and Russia expert, Christopher Steele, author of the ‘Steele Dossier’ on Donald Trump and his Kremlin connections which was passed on to the FBI’s New York in the summer of 2016.
Steele told Byline Times that McGonigal had the opportunity to influence both “Trump-Russia and the (re-opened) Hillary Clinton email investigations in 2016, arguably two of the most politically consequential ones in US history.”
