Jan 8 The Sunday Edition
Day 319: news, articles and posts about Ukraine, Russia, Iran & Belarus- featured journos- Zabrinsky Pribylov Taylor Halushka Hertling Polovko Gic Davidson Kirillova Garfinkle IranInternational
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.
Stories we’re following…
Russia attacks Kharkiv Oblast, Zaporizhzhia on Jan. 7. Russian forces launched a missile attack on the community of Merefa near Kharkiv on the evening of Jan. 7, wounding one person, reported Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov.
Russian forces may use the potential detonation of the Svatove Reservoir dam as an “excuse to deport the local population” and attempt to accuse Ukraine of blowing up the dam, the National Resistance Center wrote.
Putin’s domestic policy czar Sergey Kiriyenko toured the Donbas again, visiting the troops and praying at a church in Makiivka (where a Ukrainian HIMARS attack recently obliterated a large group of Russian soldiers).
Newsweek: November and December proved the costliest months for Russian troops in Ukraine—per estimated casualty figures published daily by Kyiv—since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February, a Newsweek analysis has found. In November, Ukraine's armed forces claimed to have "liquidated" 17,060 Russian troops, as well as another 17,080 in December; an average of around 560 Russian service-members each day throughout both months.
Ukrainian military intelligence: a new major wave of official mobilization might begin after January 15. Kremlin plans a new mobilization wave for up to 500,000 men to fight in Ukraine starting in mid-January.If so, this one will have to hit major urban center and “bring the war home” and could backfire.
A large explosion has been reported on a section of a gas pipeline in Lutuhyny in the occupied Luhansk region. The RIA Novosti news agency said the explosion late on January 7 resulted in a cutoff of gas service to more than 13,000 customers. Workers have been sent to the site to restore the gas pipeline, said Luhanskgaz. The explosion follows another explosion and fire on December 20 on a pipeline transporting Russian natural gas to Europe that killed three workers.
Russian troops going to Belarus…
Reuters: A Russian hacking team known as Cold River targeted three nuclear research laboratories in the United States this past summer, according to internet records reviewed by Reuters and five cyber security experts. Between August and September, as President Vladimir Putin indicated Russia would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend its territory, Cold River targeted the Brookhaven (BNL), Argonne (ANL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL), according to internet records that showed the hackers creating fake login pages for each institution and emailing nuclear scientists in a bid to make them reveal their passwords.
UK Government: London to host major international meeting on war crimes. Justice ministers from around the world will convene in London in March to support the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigating alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
The meeting at Lancaster House will be hosted by Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab and the Minister of Justice and Security of the Netherlands, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius.
It aims to increase the global financial and practical support being offered to the ICC and coordinate efforts to ensure it has all it needs to carry out investigations and prosecute those responsible.
The group will hear from Prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan KC, on the Court’s work and the role of the international community in supporting its investigations.
Zarina Zabrinsky, Ukrainian Dreams: The Dark Roots of Putin's Nightmare War- Byline Times (must read)
As the war in Ukraine enters a new year, Zarina Zabrisky reports on how the conflict has shaped her own life and the dreams of the Ukrainian people.
When I was growing up, my world was split in two, though I never realised it—it was just the world I lived in.
I spent summers in Ukraine: in Odesa and in Crimea. My grandfather’s parents, Ukrainian Jews, ran a successful business in Uman, a city in central Ukraine, in the early 1900s and moved to the southern seaport of Odesa to give my grandfather a better life. Their own life went downhill from there. They survived Stalin’s Great Purges and man-made Holodomor (“Death by Hunger”) in the 1930s but did not live to tell the tale. Killed by the German Nazis, they were buried in Babyn Yar, a mass grave in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, in 1942.
Stan Pribylov, The Kremlin is moving to a new level of propaganda, trying in vain to hide its failure- VOA
Kremlin Watch, a resource that monitors and analyzes Kremlin propaganda, noted that while “it is still not legally permitted in Russia to call Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a ‘war’ (there is a naming law — ‘special military operation’ — which Putin himself violated in December), the New Year's show on Russian television was a strange mix, like "let's have fun and win the war"".
“Now that the Kremlin has realized that the “short-term special operation” is actually a war, the propaganda machine needs to catch up so as not to lose a domestic audience that needs a plausible explanation for such a sudden change of mood,” Vogel emphasized.
The traditional "Blue Light" - a festive night on the state television channel "Russia-1" was "militarized". People in military uniforms, like veterans of the Second World War during the Soviet era, sat at the festive tables in the studio, and the war correspondents of the TV channel introduced them to the viewers. The actors, musicians and performers who remained in Russia prepared "military-patriotic numbers and songs" for them.
In addition, during the New Year’s hours, the Kremlin’s official website (Kremlin.ru) reported that Putin had “instructed the Russian Ministry of Culture to ensure that before screenings of feature films,” as was the case in cinemas during the Soviet Union, “the screening of documentaries about so-called “special military operation” and instructed the RF Ministry of Defense to provide assistance to Russian documentary filmmakers.”
“The level of self-deception, which seems to have been well cultivated by a few people around [Putin] who were not and remain uninterested in taking risks and telling him the whole truth, leaves Putin in the dark about the reality of the Russian fiasco,” said Natalie Vogel. .
Adam Taylor, For many of the 1,271 Americans under Russian sanctions, it’s a point of pride- WaPo
Politicians, including President Biden, are also on the list, as are executives, such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
But most of the names included are far less familiar, and in some cases, confounding. While some come with descriptions justifying the designation (Freeman, for example, is dubbed a “well-known film actor” who, the Russian Foreign Ministry says, criticized Russia in 2017), three dozen on the list are simply described as “U.S. citizens.”
“To the best of my knowledge … I’m still the only astrophysicist that’s been sanctioned by the Kremlin,” said Benjamin Schmitt, a project development scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Many on the list scoff at its impact.
“It’s generally an honor to be on the sanctions list, so it’s not going to affect me negatively,” said Francis Fukuyama, a public intellectual and senior fellow at Stanford University who had been targeted by Moscow.
Staff, Oligarch Abramovich transferred his foreign assets to children shortly before the war- The Moscow Times
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich transferred billions of dollars of foreign assets to his children three weeks before the start of the war in Ukraine. The Guardian writes about this with reference to the documents of the Cypriot company Meritservus, which managed the assets of the Russian billionaire for many years.
The reorganization procedure ended just on the day the war began - February 24. Abramovich's children received from 51% to 100% of shares in trusts, they became owners of assets worth at least $ 4 billion. The youngest of his children is 9 years old.
Abramovich may have rewritten child trusts to distance himself from assets that could be frozen by the sanctions, a former senior U.S. sanctions enforcement official suggested in an interview with The Guardian.
Kseniya Kirillova, Ukraine — What Will 2023 Bring? CEPA
Now the bad news. Firstly, Russia currently has the resources to continue the military campaign. The economy, flush with large sums gleaned from rising energy prices, has so far withstood innumerable Western sanctions better than expected (analysts expect 2023 will be much tougher for Russia as sanctions slowly take effect and as workers are drafted into the military.) That anticipated new round of mobilization, combined with a possible increase in the draft age and length of service, will nonetheless provide the front with fresh cannon fodder for some time yet.
However, Russian society has become the main resource that provides a “margin of safety” for the Putin regime. It can be said that during the 10 months of the war, combined with previous years of intense propaganda, the majority of Russians formed a so-called altered state of consciousness, whereby many people have some grasp of the terrifying truth, but perceive it as normal.
Indeed, propaganda narratives are becoming more cynical by the month. For example, if at the very beginning of the invasion, propaganda tried to justify it with emotion-inducing stories about the development of nuclear and biological weapons by Ukraine, it now does nothing to hide the fact that Russia started the war in order to solve its internal problems, primarily electoral ones.
Adam Garfinkle, The Age of Spectacle- The Cosmopolitan Globalist
Please don’t miss this essay by Adam Garfinkle.
In Iran…
