Mar 1: Buonasera Mag
Day 370: UASitRep BEL Odesa mines Tuapse FSB Peskov Moldova Irkutsk PrigozhinJr START $1.25Bln Sevastopol Rosbank AmbTracy Sunak A&Ps-Halushka UKDef Miatovic Snyder Felshtinsky Stanovaya Fallon
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…
In his latest video address on Monday President Zelensky acknowledged that the situation was “constantly becoming more difficult”. Bakhmut was “extremely tense”, the commander of Ukrainian ground forces, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, confirmed. The “most prepared assault units” from the Wagner mercenary group were trying to break through and surround the city, he said. bout half of Donetsk oblast in the Donbas region remains under Kyiv’s control, a year after Putin’s full-scale invasion. “Some days are a lot worse, when our guys get injured or killed. The Russians have a lot of artillery. They go quadrant by quadrant. We need more counter-battery fire.”
Ukraine’s military: Additional troops to be sent to Bakhmut. Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine’s Land Forces and Eastern Operational Command, ordered to send more troops to Bakhmut following his trip to the front line on Feb. 25.
German-made Leopard tanks have been spotted near Bakhmut, according to an adviser to the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. Speaking to state broadcaster Russia 1, Yan Gagin said: “Given the muddy weather now, it will make it difficult for heavy vehicles like the Leopard to move. [It] is the same armoured target as all the others.”
Zelensky: Ukraine's allies need to move past their 'aviation taboo.' "Our pilots, our anti-aircraft fighters, all the soldiers and specialists of our Air Force are already doing a great job. But we will be able to fully protect the sky when our partners move past the aviation taboo," he said.
Ukraine to build a mined strip on its borders with Russia and Belarus. Ukraine has been mining parts of its border since last summer.
CNN: US, allies have trained over 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The U.S. has already trained more than 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers since January and over 4,000 since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, CNN reported on Feb. 28.
Olga Lautman: So it looks like Russia's intelligence services are hard at work destabilizing Moldova. Very similar to Ukraine 2013/14.
Ukrenergo restores electricity to Odesa after unexpected power outages. Ukrenergo restored electricity to Odesa on Feb. 27 following an unexpected outage, Ukraine’s private energy company DTEK reported.
A military drone attempted to strike a gas facility in the Moscow region, according to a senior Russian official, and photos of the wreckage suggested it was Ukrainian-made, indicating a rare attempted strike hundreds of miles behind Russian lines. The target was a Gazprom gas compression station in the Moscow suburbs, just over 50 miles south-east of the Kremlin. Photographs of the drone posted to social media indicate it was a Ukrainian-made UJ-22.
Russia’s Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg temporarily suspended all flights earlier today amid unconfirmed media reports of an unidentified object such as a drone being seen nearby. Some flights were diverted back to Moscow while the airport was shut for about an hour. Russia’s defence ministry later announced there had been a training exercise between air defences and civilian aviation authorities.
A hacking attack caused some Russian regional broadcasters to put out a false warning urging people to take shelter from an incoming missile attack, the emergencies ministry said. “As a result of the hacking of servers of radio stations and TV channels, in some regions of the country information about the announcement of an air alert was broadcast. This information is false and does not correspond to reality.”
Putin has told Russia’s FSB security service to step up its intelligence activity and stop “sabotage groups” entering the country. He ordered officials to step up the protection of key Russian infrastructure, and prevent any attempts by western security services to revive what he called “terrorist cells” on Russian territory.
Western intelligence services have traditionally always been actively working in Russia, and now they have thrown additional personnel, technical and other resources against us. We need to respond accordingly.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said that Russia is open to negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine, but insisted Moscow would “never compromise” on what he described as new “territorial realities”. Peskov said:
There are certain realities that have already become an internal factor. I mean the new territories. The constitution of the Russian Federation exists, and cannot be ignored. Russia will never be able to compromise on this. These are important realities.
Russia’s Aerospace Forces augmented with new anti-aircraft units, specialized in combat air defense. Moscow is reportedly changing its air strategy and preparing for aerial warfare over Ukraine.
After Defense Minister Shoigu’s son-in-law likes an antiwar Instagram post by YouTuber Yury Dud, Wagner Group chief Evgeny Prigozhin offers to “catch him and send him to combat”. The son-in-law denies ever “liking” the post in the first place.
Draftees from Irkutsk publish video appeal asking Putin to “deal with lawless and criminal orders” from their commanders, complaining that they’ve been transferred to “DNR” control and sent into combat without support.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may have earned up to $500 million from a brand of vodka using his name, according to an investigation by media outlet Proekt.
Lukashenko has arrived in Beijing for a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.
The Chinese satellite firm Spacety provided satellite images to the Russian mercenary Wagner group, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Daniel Kritenbrink, told a congressional hearing today.
China has “very clearly” taken Russia’s side and has been “anything but an honest broker” in efforts to bring peace to Ukraine, the US department of state spokesperson Ned Price said at a news briefing yesterday. China has provided Russia with “diplomatic support, political support, with economic support, with rhetorical support”, he added.
Ukraine will become a Nato member in the “long term”, the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said. The Nato chief stressed that the immediate priority was Ukraine remaining an independent country in the face of the Russian invasion. He said Finland and Sweden’s bids to join the alliance were a “top priority” and that the Nordic countries have had the “quickest accession process in Nato’s modern history”.
US treasury secretary visits Kyiv, meets Zelensky. According to the press release, Yellen and Zelensky discussed the role of the private sector in rebuilding destroyed Ukrainian infrastructure and Ukraine's relationship with the International Monetary Fund.
Ukraine receives $1.25 billion tranche of $9.9 billion in aid from US. According to the Finance Ministry's press statement, the financial assistance will be directed towards reimbursing the state budget expenses incurred for various purposes, including pension payments, housing subsidies, support for internally displaced persons (IDPs), and payment to employees of first response services.
US, Germany and Poland may hold joint maneuvers. Washington is negotiating with Berlin and Warsaw on conducting joint military exercises in Poland in response to the Russian threat to NATO's eastern border, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on television.
Japan sanctions head of concern Kalashnikov, Rosbank. Japan introduced additional sanctions against 39 Russian individuals, including the head of Russian weapons maker Concern Kalashnikov, 73 Russian companies, and Rosbank, according to a Japanese Foreign Ministry statement published on Feb. 28.
CEO of Ukraine's railway monopoly Ukrzaliznytsia resigns. Oleksandr Kamyshin, CEO of Ukraine's state-owned railway monopoly Ukrzaliznytsia, announced his resignation on Feb. 27. Kamyshin said that he would go on to head Ukrzaliznytsia's European Integration Office.
Hungary’s top diplomat accuses Finland and Sweden of “spreading lies” about the erosion of democracy and says lawmakers in Budapest were justified in delaying approval of their NATO membership.
The Danish parliament on Tuesday urged lawmakers and employees against having TikTok on work phones as a cybersecurity measure, saying "there is a risk of espionage."
Timothy Snyder, Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture 2- Thinking about…The Genesis of Nations
Here the purpose is to investigate the origins of modern nations as such. I review how nations characterize themselves and order the past. I try to make explicit the various forms of the politics of time involved, and how they influence how we see the present and future. Then we shift to scholarly accounts of the origins of nations, which are usually connected to modernization in one form or another. I note how key ideas of these theories themselves arose in a certain time and place, one in which the origin of Ukraine was being debated: the Habsburg monarchy in the late nineteenth century. I try then to show how the emergence of Ukrainian national politics included various competing accounts of the Ukrainian past, and how these affected political choice and vision. I close with the intriguing case of the Rudnyts'kyi family, one of the most important Ukrainian families, one of whose members can take a good deal of credit for the prevalence of the idea of the civic or political national in contemporary discourse.
The lecture can be found here on video or here and here as audio.
Tatiana Stanovaya, A Fight for Survival: What Victory Looks Like to Putin- The Moscow Times
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation address on Feb. 21 was eagerly anticipated inside Russia, yet it shed no light on the question that is foremost on the minds of the Russian elite and public: how Putin intends to win this war.
The result was a somewhat imbalanced speech. Putin spent half an hour discussing the West’s intentions to subjugate Russia, and then another hour talking about day-to-day socioeconomic problems in a tone of optimism, as if nothing in particular was happening.
The main message that Putin wanted to get across to the West in his speech was that “it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.” He was essentially warning that the intention to defeat Russia will make the war a long one, and will bring about the large-scale destabilization of the entire world, but will never end in victory over Russia.
Putin’s state of the nation address effectively suggests that in the growing confrontation with the West, Russia will rely on one sole argument: the nuclear option. In this respect, suspending the New START treaty also sends a warning to non-Western countries of the consequences for the entire world of the West’s anti-Russian policies. Moscow is presenting the global community with a choice between Russia or descending into a nuclear disaster.
Yuri Felshtinsky: the defeat of the Russian Federation will begin with the liberation of Belarus- The Odessa Journal
Is it realistic that 2023 will be a year of victory for Ukraine, or will the war drag on? Russian-American historian Yuri Felshtinsky gave his answers in an interview with Unian.
‘We must first define what victory is. For example, from the point of view of Europe, America. Since February 24, everyone has had the same task – to stop this war, how. And if Eastern Europe supported Ukraine from the first day, Western Europe did not care what conditions the war would end – even if Ukraine capitulated, as long as no one touched them.
At first, everyone thought, they say, well, now they will seize Ukraine in a week, well, there’s nothing to be done, it’s not to start a war because of this. But a week passed, a second, and a month passed. It turned out that Ukraine did not capitulate; secondly, the Russian army was not fighting as well as everyone assumed.
Here everyone perked up and began to help Ukraine, trying to resolve the issue through negotiations. It was impossible to stop the war through negotiations, because Putin needed all of Ukraine and did not want less. But in fact, he also wants Moldova and many, many other things.
The third stage began when everyone understood that the war could be stopped in only one way: through the surrender of the Russian Federation. Now we need to think about how this war should take place for this to happen as a result. What are the options for achieving victory, and what kind of plans does anyone have on this topic?
I have a plan. Although now it seems that he is too frivolous, in the end everything will develop according to this plan, I guarantee you.
In fact, the defeat of the Russian Federation will begin with the liberation of Belarus. Now you can look at it with surprise, but believe me, this is what will happen.
The Belarusian direction is the easiest to defeat Russia. The original goal was to use Belarus as a springboard for an offensive against Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. And with the loss of Belarus, the whole point of Putin’s military campaign is lost. After that, Russian troops will leave Crimea and Donbas alone; fighting for them will be pointless. Belarus is liberated, Lukashenka flies off, and the “government in exile” enters Minsk, which had already been formed long ago. And Russian aggression against Ukraine ends.
This is the easiest and cheapest option. Fewer people will die. At the same time, the war has been going on in the Donbas for 9 years, and there is no progress in military operations there, and there will not be for a long time. This is a positional war, and Russia is interested in it – unlike Ukraine, it does not care how much it puts its soldiers there. Therefore, it is not profitable for Ukraine to conduct a positional war.
