Jan 4 Buonasera Mag
Day 314: Sevastopol Tomsk Makiivka Bakhmut Crimea Romanovsky BlackSea Milley ZNPP Kuleba GER Meta BerlinSpies ThePeople'sFight- A&P- Browder Lautman UKDef Greene UCMC Davidson OCCRP Prince Liubakova
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…
Explosions reported in Black Sea port of Sevastopol. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on Telegram that explosions were heard in Sevastopol overnight on Jan. 4. Petro Andriushchenko, an advisor to the mayor of Mariupol, reported that air defense has been activated in Sevastopol at least twice.
Russian attacks across 8 Ukrainian oblasts kill 3, injure at least 11 over past 24 hours. Russia launched attacks on Ukrainian oblasts in the east, south, and north, using missiles, artillery, mortars, and tanks, according to local authorities.
The city administration in Kyiv has said that 160 million passengers used the city’s subway in 2022, compared to 319 million passengers the previous year. It also said that about 5.200 people used the network for shelter on new year’s eve.
Losses of the assault groups of Russia's occupying forces in Bakhmut, Donetsk region, reach 80%. The wounded are left to die. – V.Nazarenko, Deputy Commander of the 3rd Freedom Battalion of the 4th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, NV reports.
Intelligence chief: Ukraine planning major counter-offensive in spring. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, said in an interview with ABC News that he expects the fighting to be the “hottest” in March.
Intelligence: Russia deploys new military units to northern part of Crimea. Russia is deploying new military units to the northern part of occupied Crimea, reported Andrii Cherniak, a representative of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate.
Local authorities: Russian forces block village in Luhansk Oblast for ‘filtration.’ Russian troops are conducting “filtration measures” in the occupied village of Polovynkyne in Luhansk Oblast due to the alleged local residents’ assistance to Ukraine’s military, Luhansk Oblast Military Administration reported on Jan. 3.
Putin ordered his government Tuesday to ensure by February the screening in cinemas of documentary films dedicated to the invasion of Ukraine and the fight against "neo-Nazi" ideology. The Kremlin said in a statement that the Culture Ministry had until Feb. 1 to implement the order.
ISW: Putin confirms Russia is using different social schemes to justify transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia. In his annual New Year's speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked Russians for their efforts to send children from occupied Ukrainian territory on “holidays,” the Institute for the Study of War said in its recent update.
Putin sent a frigate to the Atlantic Ocean reportedly armed with new generation hypersonic cruise missiles on January 4. Russia, China, and the United States are in a race to develop hypersonic weapons to gain an edge over any adversary because of their speed -- above five times the speed of sound -- and maneuverability.
In a message posted to Facebook, Ukraine’s navy has claimed that Russia has three combat ready ships in action in the Black Sea, and that it continues to “violate the International convention for the protection of human life at sea 1974 (Solas), disabling auto identification systems on civilian vessels in the Azov Sea.”
Ukraine’s efforts to increase exports under the Black Sea grain deal with Russia are currently focused on securing faster inspections of ships rather than including more ports in the initiative, a senior Ukrainian official said on Wednesday, Reuters reports.
Zaluzhnyi, Milley discuss Ukraine’s military needs in first phone call of 2023. “I highly appreciate General Milley’s leadership in providing military aid to Ukraine. Mutual trust and common vision help to increase the Ukrainian army’s ability to defend our country’s peaceful cities and villages, which is a guarantee of security in all of Europe,” Zaluzhnyi wrote on Facebook.
Ukraine wants the United Nations to send peacekeepers to the Zaporizhzhia NPP even without a deal with Russia to establish a safety zone there, the head of Ukraine’s state nuclear power company said.
Deposit Guarantee Fund files $1.2 billion lawsuit against billionaire Zhevago. Ukraine’s Deposit Guarantee Fund said on Jan. 4 that it had filed a Hr 46 billion ($1.2 billion) lawsuit against Kostiantyn Zhevago, the former owner of Finance & Credit Bank.
HR/VP Josep Borrell invited MFA Dmytro Kuleba to participate in the first meeting of the Council of the EU in 2023, which will be held on January 23.
German’s FM Annalena Baerbock said on Wednesday that the European Union had tried everything to stop the war in Ukraine but that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had nothing on his mind but to destroy the neighbouring country.
Germany is looking for further ways to help Ukraine protect its people and infrastructure, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said on Wednesday, stressing that any dip in Europe’s resolve on the issue would serve as a boon to Moscow, Reuters reports.
President Biden will hold talks with Japanese PM, Fumio Kishida, at the White House on 13 January to discuss North Korea, Ukraine, China’s tensions with Taiwan, and a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, the White House said on Tuesday.
A former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was convicted Thursday after being found guilty of helping funnel illegal foreign campaign contributions from a Russian national into former President Trump's 2016 campaign
Polina Nikolskaya, Mari Saito, Maria Tsvetkova & Anton Zverev, Pro-Putin operatives in Germany work to turn Berlin against Ukraine- Reuters (must read)
In a square beneath the twin spires of Cologne’s gothic cathedral, around 2,000 protesters gathered in September to urge Germany’s government to break with the Western coalition backing Ukraine and make peace with Russia.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags.
A lean man in camouflage trousers stood at the side of the stage, obscured from the crowd by a tarpaulin. A few metres away, a burly man in dark sunglasses stood guard. The rally’s organisers did not welcome questions. Most declined to speak when approached by a Reuters reporter. One protester tried to persuade a police officer to arrest the reporter as a Ukrainian spy.
The rally was just one of many occasions - online and on the streets - where people have clamoured that Berlin should reconsider its support for Ukraine. That message taps into deep connections between Germany and Russia, with several million Russian speakers living in Germany, a legacy of Soviet ties to Communist east Germany, and decades of German dependency on Russian gas.
Russian propagandists should be on trial together with war criminals - Matviychuk- Ukrinform
Russian propagandists - both those who work in the media and those who work in the Russian church - should be on trial together with war criminals.
Oleksandra Matviychuk, Head of the Center for Civil Liberties, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, said this in an interview with Ukrinform."Russian propagandists, both those who work in the mass media and those who work in the Russian church, should be there. Because this is not journalism.
Talking of the so-called Russian mass media, it has been obvious to me over these years that it is part of Russia’s military and industrial complex. They work exclusively for military purposes, they incite hatred, they program people to kill, they create an image of the enemy," she said.
Matviychuk cited as an example the case of political prisoner Serhii Lytvynov, an unemployed man from the Luhansk region's village of Komyshne, who came to Russia for dental treatment. "They decided that the man was perfect for their television image and accused him of raping and killing about 30 women there, at the instruction of the head of the region, with the aim of 'genocide of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas,' although he himself spoke Russian. Thus, this is simply beyond the bounds, these are not journalists, this is not freedom of speech, this is a legitimized lie that is used as a weapon. Even before 2014, Shoigu openly wrote that we live at a time when information, words and videos become the weapons of mass destruction, and this is exactly how they see it," she said."Therefore, I know that Russian propagandists will be on trial, and I am already waiting for Skabeeva, Solovyov and others to claim, like Nazi propagandists did, that 'our words should not be taken literally', 'in fact, we meant not what you heard but something completely different'," the human rights activist said.
While citing and using any materials on the Internet, links to the website ukrinform.net not lower than the first paragraph are mandatory. In addition, citing the translated materials of foreign media outlets is possible only if there is a link to the website ukrinform.net and to the website of a foreign media outlet. Citing and using materials in offline media, mobile apps, Smart TV are allowed only with written permission from Ukrinform. News and publications marked as "Advertisement" and "PR" and articles in the section "Releases" include promoted content, and an advertiser is responsible for the content.
Todd Prince, Moscow's Invasion Of Ukraine Triggers 'Soul-Searching' At Western Universities As Scholars Rethink Russian Studies- RFE/RL
The war is forcing scholars, departments, and university officials to question how they teach the history of Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the region, what textbooks and sources they use, whom they hire, which archives they mine for information, and even what departments should be named.
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) has made "decolonization" -- which it describes as "a profoundly political act of re-evaluating long-established and often internalized hierarchies, of relinquishing and taking back power" -- the theme of its 2023 conference.
"Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to widespread calls for the reassessment and transformation of Russo-centric relationships of power and hierarchy both in the region and in how we study it," the association says in a notice on the convention.
Interview with Vladislav Davidson, "Zelenskyj is a hero with street credibility”- Profil
Journalist Vladislav Davidzon personally met Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In the profil podcast he describes a dinner with a humorous politician.
