Jan 9 Buonasera Mag
Day 320: Bakhmut Soledar Shevchenkove KinburnSpit RU Rice ZNPP 300UAchildren $3B UKtanks Austria Italy Brazil-A&P-UADef MacKay Greenway UATV Patrikarakos Fink Kendzior Mitcha Tortoise Lucas Aslund
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…
Zelensky: Bakhmut and Soledar ‘hold on in spite of everything,’ more units to be sent to defense of key cities. Zelensky also reported that Ivan Syrskyi, commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, visited both Bakhmut and Soledar on Jan.8, giving out medals to soldiers and taking steps to improve the defense of both cities.
Kinburn Spit at Dnipro delta "remains front line", islands contested. According to Ukrainian military spokesperson Natalia Humeniuk, a 40-kilometer long and up to 12-kilometer wide part of the Kinburn peninsula between the Dnipro-Buzka estuary and the Black Sea, is currently “this is the demarcation line, the front line, where the battles are going on.”
A top Ukrainian cyber official has said Russia’s cyberattacks on Ukrainian critical and civilian infrastructure could amount to war crimes. Speaking with Politico, Victor Zhora, chief digital transformation officer at the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection (SSSCIP) of Ukraine said Russia’s cyberattacks amount to war crimes against Ukrainian citizens.
Russia and Belarus have expanded their joint military training exercises in Belarus, the country’s defence TV channel said on Sunday, as concern grows that Moscow is pressuring its closest ally to join the war in Ukraine.
General Staff: Russian national guard shoots own soldiers for planning to surrender to Ukraine. On Jan. 5, Russia employed a unit of the country's national guard Rosgvardiia to shoot six Russian troops who had signaled their intention to surrender to Ukrinian forces near Chistopillia in the southern Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine's General Staff reported in its daily evening briefing.
Condoleezza Rice – former secretary of state and Robert M Gates, former secretary of defense, write in a WaPo Op-Ed on Sunday:
Both of us have dealt with Putin on a number of occasions, and we are convinced he believes time is on his side: that he can wear down the Ukrainians and that U.S. and European unity and support for Ukraine will eventually erode and fracture. To be sure, the Russian economy and people will suffer as the war continues, but Russians have endured far worse.
The Ukrainian uplink is much stronger than the Russian one, fooling the Russian satellite into relaying the Ukrainian uplink instead - Ukraine has also given the individual TV channels on the "fake" mux the same IDs as on the Russian one.
UK Defense Ministry: Russia boosts defenses in Zaporizhzhia as fears over Ukraine’s counteroffensive mount. “A major Ukrainian breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia would seriously challenge the viability of Russia’s ‘land bridge’ linking Russia’s Rostov region and Crimea.”
Russian invasion forces have abducted by force almost 300 children from Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, taking them to Moscow under the pretext that they need “medical treatment”, Luhansk Oblast Military Administration said in a post on Facebook on Jan. 7. However the child “patients” that Russian forces abducted from Ukraine had no serious medical issues, Luhansk administration officials said.
Putin submitted to the State Duma a bill on Russia's denunciation of the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption and the country's withdrawal from the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO). The corresponding document was published in the database of the State Duma. The proposal is connected with the decision of the Council of Europe to terminate Russia's full membership in GRECO, by which the Russian Federation was deprived of the right to vote in the group, but retained a number of obligations.
Defence One: The Defense Department on Friday announced its largest aid package to Ukraine to date, a reflection in scale and content of Ukrainian advances in proficiency and territory. Valued at more than $3 billion, the package includes 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 100 M113 armored personnel carriers, 18 self-propelled howitzers, missiles, munitions and more.
President Biden is set to meet with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau tomorrow to discuss joint commitment to standing up for shared values around the world, including supporting the people of Ukraine as they defend themselves against Russia’s brutal war, White House says.
The UK is considering supplying Ukraine with British battle tanks for the first time to help its army fight Russia, according to a report. Discussions have been taking place “for a few weeks” about delivering a number of the British army’s Challenger 2 main battle tank, Sky News has cited a western source with knowledge of the conversations as saying.
SBU seizes $2 million worth of property of former Education Minister suspected of high treason. Security Service (SBU) reported it had seized $2 million worth of property belonging to Dmytro Tabachnyk, former Education Minister under ousted pro-Kremlin President Yanukovych.
Austria's Raiffeisen bank recognizes so-called Donetsk and Luhansk "Peoples Republics" and provides favorable loan terms to Russian invaders in Ukraine. The Raiffeisen bank has the highest Russian exposure among foreign banks still operating in Russia, where it made more than half of its profit in 2022.
Italy will not make a decision on supplying new arms to Ukraine until next month due to political tensions, cost considerations and military shortages, according to a report. Italy stopped its arms deliveries to Ukraine in October. PM Meloni had spoken with President Zelensky and at that time reassured him of Italy’s support, but her government has not delivered on its promises and is now procrastinating due to internal political pressure from Berlusconi and Salvini’s ranks, her coalition partners.
Ilario Piagnerelli: “After planting mines everywhere, the Russian embassy accuses Rome of alleged Italian mines found by its bomb squad "in Ukrainian territory", thus acknowledging that not only does Ukraine exist, but that the occupied areas are Ukrainian land.”
The energy ministers of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan have signed an agreement on the construction of the Kambar-Ata-1 hydropower plant in Kyrgyzstan. Construction is expected to begin in 2024 and last four years. It will be the biggest hydropower plant in Kyrgyzstan and provide the three nations with electricity, the ministers said after signing the agreement.
Brazil’s January 6: Police have arrested hundreds of people at the presidential grounds in Brasília after supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed their country’s congress, presidential palace and the supreme court in scenes reminiscent of the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol. As of this morning, authorities said they had managed to retake the three government buildings. Brasília’s Governor Ibaneis Rocha said at least 400 people had been arrested — before he himself was suspended from his job.
Repubblica reports that Bolsonaro’s children, Fulvio and Eduardo, are seeking Italian citizenship. The Bolsonaro family has Italian roots. Will Meloni’s government concede it?
David Patrikarakos, New Year in a Ukrainian trench- Unherd
The sun rises on 2023. Its rays light up the trench, an unwelcoming black void into which we gratefully disappear to take cover from the artillery, rockets and Iranian Shahid drones that are launched daily from the Russian positions just kilometres across the water. All around, the landscape is ragged and torn. This is the emergent topography of southern Ukraine, a land sundered by violence. Nearby, a cat wanders across an expanse of concrete — unperturbed by it all.
To enter a trench on the frontlines of a war is to go both deep into the earth and back in time. I arrive as the war enters its ninth year, just before New Year’s Eve; the mood seems strangely familiar. Inside the sleeping quarters, at the end of a narrow corridor strewn with coats, shoes, helmets, and automatic weapons, a line comes to me from Isaac Rosenberg’s great First World War poem, Break of Day in the Trenches. We are, I realise, now “sprawled in the bowels of the earth”.
Irene Kenyon, New Year, Same Issues- Into the Void
It has been a tough year, but Russia will not only remain the top sanctions target for 2023, but I think it will also be the top threat actor in the illicit financial sphere, as it teams up with Iran and North Korea, with a bit of financial help from China to continue pouring money into Putin’s pocket.
As most current and former colleagues confirm, the US government’s focus will almost certainly be on sanctions enforcement. Sanctions against Russia cannot be effective if bad Russian actors are using gatekeepers and other facilitators to access not just the global financial system, but also tools and technologies from which they are legally restricted.
Enforcement actions will not only involve significant fines, but also additional designations against facilitators and those who act on behalf of malign Russian (and other) actors.
Russian donors in the US- the Democratic Party
Russian influence through donations to political parties is an issue that needs to be faced in most Western nations, the US included. I often focus on eco-political capture in Italy and write about Salvini’s Lega and the Five Star Movement’s ties to Russian elites and business. There is little attention paid to actors on the far left and left-leaning parties. More on this in future posts.
Andrew A Michta, Numbers Game: 2023 Could Be A Decisive Year For Ukraine- 1945
But the Ukraine war is fast becoming a war of numbers. Simply put: “It’s about the ammo, stupid!” And this applies to both the Russians and the Ukrainians. The vaunted Russian stocks are being depleted at rates only Soviet-era planners could stipulate in the event of an all-out war against NATO. At the height of the summer, when Moscow took a page from the Soviet playbook to substitute a massive artillery hammer for maneuver, the Russians were firing some 60,000 rounds per day, occasionally more. Today the Russians shoot at most 20,000 rounds a day – often fewer, and they are digging deep into their own residual stockpiles to sustain even that limited rate. All the while, Russia is shopping around the world for munitions, including in Iran and North Korea.
To make the situation even more difficult for Moscow, the stockpiles of ammunition that Russia brought in from Belarus appear nearly all but used up. And Russia’s limited capacity to replenish them raises the question of whether a “Soviet way of war” is something its military-industrial complex can sustain.
But the Ukrainians are feeling the pinch as well. European stockpiles are running dry while most European governments have yet to move to wartime production to make up for Ukraine’s weapons and ammunition expenditure rates. Even the United States is beginning to feel that it needs to prioritize. For instance, when it comes to 155mm howitzer ammunition, the U.S. produces approximately 14,000 rounds per month, though reporting from Ukraine shows that its forces fire on average about 5,000 rounds per day.
The Pentagon recently announced plans to increase production to 20,000 155mm shells per month by spring, and to triple it by 2025. Today no other issue is as critical as munitions for Ukraine, for if its forces are to sustain their defenses and build up momentum to strike again and liberate more national territory, they need to have stockpiles for at least twice that of their daily rate.
Lauren Wolfe, Russia Is Afraid of Western Psychic Attacks- Foreign Affairs
Pseudoscience and mysticism are common among the Moscow elite.
There are plenty of reasons these days to wonder if Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies are off their rockers. But a recently leaked memo from the Kremlin reveals that those in charge of the Russian government are farther down the rabbit hole than most of us realized.
The memo, published by the Insider, a Russian news outlet in exile, outlines how the Russian Federal Guard Service (FSO), which protects high-ranking officials such as Putin, would handle the invasion of Ukraine — or any other war — spilling over onto the country’s own soil. It focuses on psychological preparedness, ensuring that FSO officers would have the “moral and psychological support” needed to resist what the memo calls a potential “massive ideological attack.” But the Russians aren’t simply worried about the usual wartime propaganda, like sneaky radio broadcasts or underground newspapers. Instead, the Kremlin is mounting preparations for what it calls the “psychological infection of personnel” by an enemy who would manipulate them through hypnosis—as well as through unknown mystical and psychic powers. The memo warns of “psi-generators” and “hypnotic abilities” used by foreign personnel.
Belief in mystic powers is relatively common in Russia, where roughly 20 percent of people have visited a psychic and more than 60 percent believe in some form of magic. Natalia Antonova, a Washington-based writer and Russia expert who spent seven years reporting from Moscow, said “This issue of hypnosis and telekinesis, whatever it is that they’re attempting to do, I think the Russians truly believe it. Most of us are still trying to exist in the real world, and [the Russian leadership] are not. They’re not trying anymore.”
Programming Note…
Listen into Scott’s analysis of Kevin McCarthy’s election as Speaker and what it means for Congress and the work it will be doing in the run up to the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. Skip ahead to the 1 pm mark.
