Jan 9: E-Stories
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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.
Ukrainian forces destroyed 18 out of 51 missiles launched during a wave of Russian air strikes on Monday, Ukraine’s air force said. It said Russia had launched 32 cruise missiles overnight as well as eight “Shahed” drones, and that all the drones had been downed. “Critical infrastructure facilities, industrial civilian and military facilities were attacked,” the air force said, according to Reuters.
Stories we’re following…
Jan 8: Governor: 2 injured in Russia’s morning attack on Zaporizhzhia. Five explosions were heard in Zaporizhzhia at around 7 a.m. local time, with missiles hitting open areas and near residential buildings, the regional governor reported.
Noel Report: The Russian forces destroyed a shopping mall with a cruise missile attack in Kryvyi Rih. Russia launched a large-scale missile attack across Ukraine at the start of peak morning hours today, hitting residential and industrial facilities and injuring several people.
The emergency services report that around 30 people have been injured and one person has died as a result of the morning attacks across Ukraine. The video shows the work of the State Emergency Service in the town of Zmiiv, Kharkiv region.
Russian attacks on Donetsk Oblast cut power off in 2 mines with 18 workers inside. Russian attacks in Donetsk Oblast caused power outages at two mines while 18 workers were inside, Ukraine's Energy Ministry reported on Jan. 7. Russia began intensifying its attacks against Ukraine's cities and critical infrastructure as the temperatures dropped at the end of 2023, mirroring its strategy from last year. Over the winter of 2022-2023, Russia engaged in a persistent campaign to target Ukraine's energy infrastructure, causing large-scale outages and damage to the grid.
Jan 7: Overnight, Russia launched 28 Shahed drones of which 21 were shot down. Primarily in the southern regions.
Jan 7: Russian attacks kill 3, injure 4 in Kharkiv and Kherson Oblast. Russian attacks on settlements near Kupiansk in Kharkiv Oblast on Jan. 7 killed one person and injured two, including a teenager, Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s Office reported. Russian shelling of Kherson killed two people and injured two more on Jan. 7, Roman Mrochko, the head of the city's military administration, reported.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, said this in a post on Facebook, Ukrinform reports:
"In the past 24 hours, the enemy launched 131 shelling attacks and fired 670 shells from mortars, artillery, Grads, tanks, UAVs and aircraft, including one missile attack. The enemy fired 16 shells at the city of Kherson,” the post says.
Five children were among the 11 people killed by a Russian missile strike that hit in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, the governor of the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk region has said.
A hospital was hit by a Russian missile in the morning Jan 7.
Air Force: Ukraine downs 7 drones over Dnipro. The Ukrainian Air Force downed seven drones during a Russian attack on Dnipro during the evening hours of Jan. 6, Governor Serhii Lysak reported on Telegram.
Yarem Dukh: "Where are your poets, Ukrainians?" Young poet Maksym Kryvtsov was killed by Russian forces today. Russia has been deliberately killing Ukrainian intelligentsia from the 17th century and now on...
Ukraine World: People fled the Russian occupation of their villages on bicycles; transported their ill neighbors on wheelchairs. Some of them were detained by Russian soldiers and forced to work for them as slaves. We have heard many other stories in Zelenodolsk, southeastern part of Ukraine.
Combat Situation Update
CDS Report: General conclusion:
The adversary struggles to enhance its capability to plan and coordinate offensive operations, considering their ongoing costly and disorganized efforts near Avdiivka.
Defense forces are conducting a multi-day campaign of air strikes on Russian military targets in occupied Crimea and have successfully hit several targets on the peninsula.
There is only one combat-ready large landing ship "Nikolay Filchenkov" in Sevastopol. The restoration of the LLS “Minsk” will take several years, but it does not seem economically feasible.
Russian forces made confirmed advances west and southwest of Donetsk City amid continued positional engagements along the front.
A section of railroad near the city of Nizhny Tagil in Russia’s Urals region was hit by a “bang”, Tass and RBC news agencies reported. Baza, a Russian media outlet, said the blast on the railway took place near the station of San-Donato, near an oil depot.
ISW: Head of the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill of Moscow stated that Russia cannot reject Russian citizens who “understand they made a mistake” by fleeing Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and now want to return home.
Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated on Jan. 7 that Russia has pushed back the deadline for the establishment of the new Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts for at least the second time due to weapons and personnel shortages and bureaucratic issues.
American combat medic Rebekah M training Ukrainian recruits to apply tourniquettes and other first aid procedures.
On Jan 6, Ukrainian forces destroyed a half-built railway bridge, fuel tanks and engineering transport in the area of the village of Hranitne north of Mariupol, advisor to the mayor of Mariupol, Petro Andryushchenko, said. These are strategic strikes aimed at knocking out as much logistics support as possible. In a WSJ article, it was estimated that the Russians are currently using up to 10,000 artillery shells per day: the Russians are using private trucking companies and rail routes. These strikes are not as spectacular as the strikes against the Kerch Bridge or elsewhere but extremely important.
Logistics is essential in this war as in every war. The Russians are transporting roughly 10000 artillery shells per day to the front. That amounts to 500 metric tonnes/day or roughly 25 standard containers. In this video, the ammo is transported by truck to the front, and the Ukrainians were able to knock it out.
New "military enlistment offices" have been set up to facilitate force mobilization efforts in the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts under Russian occupation. They are headed by military personnel brought in from Russia. Mobilization lists include doctors, educators, employees of municipal enterprises, as well as teenagers starting from the age of 17, as reported by the National Resistance Center of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
Behind the Lines
In Russia, more than 100 residents of the Russian border city of Belgorod have evacuated to an area farther from Ukraine, local officials said. Belgorod is just over half an hour’s drive from the border with Ukraine, making it a vital stop in Russian supply lines. The city has come under extensive shelling and drone attacks for months.
BBC News: Atesh, the group spying on Russians in occupied Crimea. Please see the article below.
Polish government reaches deal with farmers to suspend border blockade. Polish farmers have agreed to suspend their border blockade at the Shehyni-Medyka crossing after reaching an agreement with government representatives, the Polish Agriculture Ministry announced on Jan. 6.
Agence France Presse: North Korea conducting live-fire drills near maritime border with South: Yonhap news agency.
Lithuanian journalists have confirmed that Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s son Arkady renewed his Lithuanian passport in the fall of 2023, roughly a year and a half after the E.U. sanctioned his father over ties to the Kremlin and the invasion of Ukraine. Both Arkady Abramovich and his sister Anna have Lithuanian citizenship (she last renewed her passport in 2021). In January 2023, an investigation by The Guardian revealed that Roman Abramovich transferred several billion dollars of his wealth to his seven children weeks before the full-scale invasion began in an apparent move to protect his fortune in the West from possible seizure.
An oligarch, Sergey Kolesnikov, who has supplied building materials to the Russian military machine and for construction in occupied areas of Ukraine is being assisted by Morgan Stanley and Allen & Overy in his attempt to gain control of a huge Russian oil asset, the Guardian can reveal.
Sergey Kolesnikov, originally from Russia but now a Maltese citizen under its “golden passport” scheme, is estimated to be worth $1.2bn (£940m) as a result of the building materials business he co-founded.
Only Poland has imposed sanctions on the 51-year-old but Ukraine has included him on its list of people against whom it wants the EU to use sanctions.
Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, and Allen & Overy, one of the elite “magic circle” law firms headquartered in London, have been helping Kolesnikov as he attempts to take ownership of the Verbluzhye oilfield, said to contain 100m barrels of oil, in Astrakhan in southern Russia.
The Ukrainian hacker group KibOrg has made the entire client database of Alfa Bank publicly available, writes “Important Stories”.
Hackers gained access to this data back in October 2023, publishing information about 44 thousand clients. Now they have leaked personal data into the network, including full names, dates of birth, phone numbers, cards and accounts of more than 24 million individuals - bank clients and more than 13 million data on legal entities.
Alfa Bank publicly denies the hack. KibOrg claims that a Ukrainian prankster under the pseudonym Evgeniy Volnov was able to reach one of the owners of the bank, Mikhail Fridman, and he commented on the hack with the words “Well, let it go.”
The GUR said it obtained 100 Gigabytes of classified Russian data worth up to $1.5 billion from the Russian company Special Technology Center which produces military equipment for the Russian army, in particular Orlan UAVs and a wide range of EW-equipment
Meanwhile in Russia
Several regions in across the Russian Federation are under an extreme cold snap. In Moscow they’ve hit -30C. I’ve grown up in those kinds of temperatures, so this isn’t significant in terms of the weather conditions, It’s significant because so many regions don’t have heating. In Moscow alone more than 20,000 people suffered heating outages.
The video shows apartment buildings in Podolsk just outside Moscow. As I’ve said before, once you step out of certain areas in Moscow, the services are almost non-existent. Besides the lack of heating, videos are circulating about Chinese car parts that are not standing up to the cold temperatures: over 80% of the car market in Russia is currently dominated by Chinese imports.
From the VchK-ogpu Channel: “The Moscow region is freezing. One after another, houses and neighbourhoods in the region are left without heat and electricity. The plundered housing and utilities sector is collapsing before our eyes, the authorities can do nothing, and the governor has been in the middle of nowhere these days.
Some of the money that could have gone to the housing and utilities sector was spent on a flashy event at the Moscow Country Club with the loud title: "ENERGY AND COMMUNAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE MOSCOW REGION: ACHIEVEMENTS, TASKS AND PROSPECTS". Participants - all persons responsible for heat and light in the homes of residents of the Moscow region: Governor Vorobyev, Deputy Minister of Housing and Utilities Konstantin Mikhailik, Vice-Governor Evgeny Khromushin, etc.
Videos also circulating on the conditions of the subway system in Moscow that have turned into fridges, and some residents are making bonfires outdoors to keep warm. The municipal workers haven’t been able to restore services.
SMERSH (“Death to Spies”) detachments existed in the USSR from 1943 to 1946. At the beginning of December 2023, a member of the State Duma Committee on Defense, Lieutenant General Andrei Gurulev, said that Moscow had created similar detachments in the occupied territories of Ukraine.
Indoctrination starts when you’re young: "Our victories are made not only on battlefield but they are made starting from kindergartens and schools. They are made in youth groups where people think about future and country. And church continues this special mission. God bless, we will become stronger to serve our Motherland and if needed, die for it". - Patriarch Kirill. For more information about Kirill’s ties to Putin and the KGB, please read Olga Lautman’s article “An Unorthodox Vision of Heaven and Hell” (Jan 2023): here’s a snippet.
Some critics have suggested that the Russian Orthodox Church has little option but to support Putin, but this is surely over-generous. Kirill, a Soviet-era cleric with extensive ties to the KGB, the President’s former employer, is absolutely dependent on the state, politically and financially. This does not seem to cause him much discomfort. Kirill was granted a Kremlin residence in 2004, the government in 2010 returned huge swaths of land and other property seized by the Soviet Union, and the state makes grants in the hundreds of millions of dollars to the organization. In June, his deputy, the intellectually impressive Metropolitan Hilarion, often described as the church’s foreign minister, was removed from his post by Putin after failing to endorse the invasion.
Those who do conform are blessed. The pro-Kremlin Orthodox billionaire, Konstantin Malofeev, runs the country’s largest private charity, the St Basil’s Foundation. His ties to Putin are unclear — he is certainly a close friend to his spiritual adviser — but he has been sanctioned by the US for his role in the 2014 invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
Wives of Russian soliders: "I am standing outside the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation with a solitary picket in the hope that we will be heard, that the wives and mothers of the mobilized will be heard, that they will hear our pain, our requests to bring our husbands back, to bring our boys home. They are tired. They have been in the zone of the special military operation for a year and four months without rotation."
Ramzan Kadyrov offers to release Ukrainian prisoners of war in exchange for sanctions relief for his family.
“We have prisoners of war who we captured in Donetsk, Luhansk. […] If they lift sanctions from my mother, my daughters, completely innocent people, horses […] then we’ll hand over these people,” TASS quotes Kadyrov as saying during U.S. writer Scott Ritter’s visit to the Chechen city of Grozny.
According to TASS, Kadyrov showed Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector and convicted sex offender, a video of the Ukrainian soldiers, in which they said that 20 military personnel would return home if sanctions were lifted from Kadyrov’s associates, planes, and horses.
Jacopo Iacoboni: Something is moving within the Russian services, and there are no signs of particular balance in the Russian system. According to a Tass source (let's remember: the official Kremlin agency), three officers of the anti-corruption department "M" of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) have been accused of taking bribes totaling over 5 billion rubles. There are many interesting things in this story. Meanwhile, the department accused of corruption is the one whose tasks include counter-espionage support and the fight against corruption.
According to him, the Investigative Committee is investigating the case against intelligence officers Alexei Tsarev, Sergei Manyshkin and Alexander Ushakov. The first two made a deal with the investigation and testified against accomplices in the crime. In turn, Ushakov, in addition to being charged with attempted bribery, is accused of organizing a criminal community using his official position (Part 3 of Article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), the source noted.
Directorate “M” was created in the FSB in 1999–2000. It is engaged in counterintelligence support and combating corruption in the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the Investigative Committee and other law enforcement agencies.
Allied Support
The German Bundeswehr constantly sights drones over its locations. It suspects Moscow is behind the drone flights but can't prove it because it didn't manage to take a single drone down. It particularly affected locations where Ukrainians are trained.
According to CSU leader and Prime Minister of Bavaria Markus Söder, Germany and the EU would face a 'veritable security problem' if Russia wins the war. The only way out is to deliver Taurus missiles to Ukraine and upgrade the Bundeswehr, he said.
Me: I’m glad that German law-makers are beginning to understand what security risk Russia poses to Europe.
Japan will allocate $37 million to the NATO fund as additional aid to Ukraine. According to the statement of the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Yoko Kamikawa, these funds will be directed to the purchase of anti-drone systems.
The Finnish government says it plans to suspend Russian liquefied natural gas imports in 2025. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish state company Gasum has continued to honor its long-term contract with Gazprom by making minimum LNG purchases. As Europe has imported less Russian pipeline gas since February, its consumption of Russian LNG has grown, though Finland says its Russian imports remain “insignificant.”
The primary task of Sweden’s foreign policy in the coming years will be the support to Ukraine, Sweden’s foreign minister, Tobias Billstrom, told a defence conference.
The Swedish prime minister announced that Sweden will send troops to Latvia next year as part of a Canadian-led force to deter Russia from attack – despite not yet being a full member of Nato.
Both Democrats and Republicans have reached an agreement on the overall spending level for the remainder of 2024, avoiding a government shutdown. The $1.59 trillion deal includes $886 billion for defense and $704 billion for non-defense spending.
Noel Report: "If we allow Russia to reach their objectives in Ukraine, they will invade Moldova, perhaps the Baltic states or others. Ukraine needs only a small part of our own military budget. We must help Ukraine to win," General and ex-CIA director David Petraeus said.
Italian FM: EU should have common army. The EU should have its own army, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said in an interview with the Italian media outlet La Stampa published on Jan. 7. Calls for an EU army have been floated as far back as 1950 but have never come to fruition. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced defense issues back onto the agenda and seen public opinion shift, as well as the expansion of NATO.
Me: this is a debate circulating in Europe at the moment. Tajani doesn’t pull much weight, and neither does Italy, so his view doesn’t impact decision-making at the EU level. The opponents believe that we already have a security architecture in place under NATO, so there’s no need for overlap. All the member states need to do is increase their military production and output to keep to the promises they have undersigned. I don’t know enough about both positions to express which has more merit. What I do see is that member states are not increasing their production levels of armaments and ammunition to make good on the promises the EU has made towards Ukraine. Perhaps that should be done first and stick to maintaining NATO a strong deterrent force.
Charles Michel has announced he will step down early as European Council president after running in the European parliament elections set for June. The surprise move means EU leaders will have to swiftly agree on a successor to take up his vacated council post, and could pave the way for Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to exert more influence over EU policymaking.
Feeling emboldened, North Korea has fired into the disputed western maritime buffer zone for the third day in a row, forcing the evacuation of thousands of South Koreans.
European Commission condemns Russia's use of North Korean missiles against Ukraine. "Potential arms deliveries from North Korea to Russia might also constitute a violation of UN Security Council resolutions and UN sanctions, so of course we take this very seriously," EU Spokesman said.
SUCCESS: Due to public pressure on Best Western, the hotel will not host the event that was organised by Vento dell’Est, which would have had Alexander Dugin as a guest speaker.
Over the past few days, some Italian activists, including myself, have been raising awareness about the Vento dell’Est association, which runs Russian propaganda. Lorenzo Guerini, the chairman of the Italian Intelligence Oversight Committee for the Italian parliament also reiterated the danger of this association and their aims on social media. The Italian counterintelligence community is aware of the people involved, and most likely who is behind the operation.
This evening some other great news: Anonomyous Italy hacked the association’s website, where the association publicised its events.
The Atesh partisan movement stated that its agents penetrated the Dzerzhynsky division in Balashikha, Moscow region in Russia, and obtained personal data of military personnel participating in the war against Ukraine. Their data has been forwarded to the relevant authorities.
BBC News: Atesh, the group spying on Russians in occupied Crimea.
"I had a hunch that someone was watching me. My heart was pounding."
A man, who we're calling Agent One, takes photos as he crouches down in some bushes.
He tells us he's part of a group called Atesh - a word that means fire in Crimean Tatar.
And via a messaging app, he describes his secret life to the BBC: spying on Russian forces in occupied Crimea.
"For probably two weeks, I planned in my head how and what I would do," he says. "Planned the route, the main backup, what I should say in case I was noticed."
Agent One is thorough. He takes multiple shots from multiple angles.
But it's dangerous - potentially deadly - work. On one occasion, moments after investigating a site, he noticed a group of Russian servicemen nearby.
"[That] was a terrible moment," he says. "I managed to lean down [by a] car and pretended that I had a problem with the wheel."
"Miraculously, they just didn't talk to me."
Atesh says it collects information on Russian military movements - mostly in Crimea but also in other occupied areas and even inside Russia itself.
Operatives say their information has aided high-profile Ukrainian strikes on Crimea, such as hits on a Russian landing ship and submarine - the Minsk and Rostov-on-Don - and an attack on the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in September 2023.
Most recently, Atesh said it had carried out reconnaissance work this week after a Ukrainian strike on a possible radar station in Yevpatoria.
Military bloggers in Russia dismiss the network as an online invention of Ukrainian intelligence, designed to overstate levels of resistance.
Yet Russian media also report that Atesh is a terrorist organisation, banned by the Kremlin.
The agents say they're willing to speak to us because they want to show there is an active resistance movement.
"Crimeans are not all zombies and [are] ready to resist even in conditions of total censorship," Agent One says.
The Russian serviceman who the BBC spoke to - Agent Five - knows his double life is dangerous.
"The stakes are very high - no one wants to go to jail." Those caught face treason charges and long prison sentences.
"Everything must be approached carefully and with your head. Mistakes in such activities are simply unacceptable."
Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, eight years before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ethnic Russians have for many decades made up the majority of the population, but significant Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar minorities remain. [continue]