Mar 14: Buonasera Mag
Day 384: Donetsk Bakhmut Abrikosivka Belarus Moldova Georgia ICC China fertilizer migrants Spain Czechia Swiss SVB SaudiaArabia A&P Ronzheimer Kuleba ISW Liubakova Shukla Maçães Luce
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…
Russia launches 48 attacks against civilians in Donetsk Oblast over the past day. The police said 15 communities, including Bakhmut, Konstyantynivka, and Avdiivka, came under Russian attack. Donetsk Oblast Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in his daily briefing that two civilians were killed and four were wounded over the past day.
ISW: No confirmed advances by Russian forces in Bakhmut. On March 11, Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesperson for the eastern grouping of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, stated that Russian forces lost more than 500 troops over the past day in Bakhmut. The casualties included 221 killed and 314 wounded, according to Cherevaty.
National Resistance Center: Partisans destroy railway track in Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast. Members of the Atesh partisan movement blew up the railway track between the occupied settlements of Abrikosivka and Radensk in Ukraine's southern Kherson Oblast, the Ukrainian military's National Resistance Center reported on March 12.
Belarus training grounds ready to host additional forces, Ukrainian top general says. The Commander of Ukraine's Joint Forces, Serhii Naev, stated that Belarus might be preparing to host additional forces from Russia. "Now there is information that tent camps were left in Belarus at four training grounds meant to host additional forces," said Naev.
Military: Low risk of Russia invading Ukraine from Belarus. The risk of Russian forces launching a renewed ground offensive from Belarus against Ukraine is "low" at the moment, Lieutenant General Serhiy Naiev said on March 12.
Moldovan police said on Sunday they had thwarted an effort by Russian-backed agents who were seeking to cause mass unrest at protests organized by the political opposition. The group included "diversionists," some Russian citizens, who had been promised $10,000 (€9,380) to organize "mass disorder," according to the police. "People came from Russia with a very specific training role," Cernauteanu said.
Georgian PM calls on Ukrainian leadership not to ‘interfere’ in Georgian politics. Irakli Garibashvili called the appeals of Ukrainian politicians, including Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko and chief of the Servant of the People parliamentary bloc David Arakhamia, to stand with democratic values a “direct intervention” in Georgia’s internal politics.
Pro-Western former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili 'close to death' after alleged prison poisoning. Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who led the 2003 revolution against Soviet rule, claims he was poisoned in prison. The current governing Georgian Dream Party denies that possibility, claiming he has not eaten sufficient food. Georgian authorities reject that possibility, and will not let him be transferred for treatment in Europe.
The prosecutor at the international criminal court will formally open two war crimes cases and issue arrest warrants for several Russians deemed responsible for the mass abduction of Ukrainian children and the targeting of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, according to reports on Monday.
Julia Davis: “Meanwhile in Russia- state TV enjoys Tucker and Tulsi's useful soundbites about Nord Stream and NATO's potential disintegration. Russians opine that either Trump or DeSantis would suit them fine, since both of them dislike Ukraine.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning to travel to Russia to meet with his counterpart, Vladimir Putin, as soon as next week, people familiar with the matter said, which would be sooner than previously expected. Plans for a visit come as China has been offering to broker peace in Ukraine, an effort that has been met with skepticism in the West.
Growing foothold: how Russia donates fertiliser to deepen African alliances. Malawi is at the centre of a diplomatic tussle for influence, but as a food crisis looms, farmers are happy to accept desperately needed shipments.
The Italian government has said Russian mercenary group Wagner is behind a surge in migrant boats trying to cross the central Mediterranean as part of Moscow’s strategy to retaliate against countries supporting Ukraine, Reuters reports. In a statement, defence minister Guido Crosetto said:
I think it is now safe to say that the exponential increase in the migratory phenomenon departing from African shores is also, to a not insignificant extent, part of a clear strategy of hybrid warfare that the Wagner division is implementing, using its considerable weight in some African countries.
Dozens of Ukrainian soldiers on Monday wrapped up a four-week training in Spain on how to operate the Leopard 2A4 battle tank, of which Madrid is set to deliver six mothballed units to Kyiv this spring.
Zelensky speaks with new Czech president, asks for more military aid. Zelensky said that he discussed the front-line situation with former NATO general Petr Pavel, as well as Ukraine's ongoing security needs.
Swiss President reiterates support for Ukraine arms ban. Swiss President Alain Berset reiterated his support for Switzerland’s ban on supplying Ukraine with Swiss-made weapons. “Swiss weapons must not be used in wars,” he told NZZ am Sonntag on March 12.
Luxembourg sends 14 armored ambulances to Ukraine. Luxembourg has sent 14 armored ambulances to Ukraine, and they will soon arrive on the front line, Ukraine's embassy in Belgium said on March 12 in a Facebook post.
Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco reported a record annual net profit of $161.1 billion for 2022, up 46% from the previous year on higher energy prices, increased volumes sold and improved margins for refined products. Oil prices swung wildly in 2022, climbing on geopolitical worries amid the war in Ukraine, then sliding on weaker demand from top importer China and worries of a global economic contraction, Reuters reports.
Reuters: US authorities launched emergency measures to shore up confidence in the banking system after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank threatened to trigger a broader financial crisis. Regulators said the failed bank’s customers will have access to all their deposits. The World News Podcast talks to tech reporter Jeffrey Dastin about the panic among startups.
Shukla, Marquardt & Hak, ‘The heart of the war’: Inside the secret talks with Putin’s generals that ended the siege of Mariupol- CNN
Their involvement shines a spotlight on the importance that Putin placed on resolving the Azovstal impasse and seizing Mariupol, securing his long-sought land bridge between Crimea and Russia – one of the biggest prizes of the Russian invasion.
It also illustrates a much-reported but hard-to-prove narrative right at the top of Moscow’s command of the Ukraine war – that the Russian president took control over the brutal conflict from the country’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and placed it in the hands of the military spies, the GRU.
“Since last summer military intelligence generals assumed a more prominent role as it dawned on Putin it was not a ‘special operation’ anymore but a conventional war,” Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and intelligence expert now in exile in London, told CNN. “Unfortunately, it means Putin’s readying the country for a long conventional war.”
For years, Ukraine had been part of the FSB portfolio; handing control of the war to the GRU marked a seismic shift in how Putin viewed the service.
Bruno Maçães, Dmytro Kuleba: “Russian victory will ruin everything the West stands for”- The New Statesman
The Ukrainian foreign minister on China, Donald Trump and how the war ends.
Dmytro Kuleba learned that full-scale war in Ukraine had started while he was in mid-air. On 24 February 2022 the Ukrainian foreign minister was flying from New York to Istanbul, having met Joe Biden in Washington days before. With Ukrainian airspace closed, Kuleba was forced to return to Kyiv by land.
Since then he has been tasked with leading the diplomatic efforts of a country at war, for which global outreach is an existential need. The demands of his job have thrown him into global prominence, responsible for leading Ukraine’s urgent foreign policy campaigns in Washington and in European capitals, as well as in Africa, China, Turkey and beyond.
Only 41, he is Ukraine’s youngest foreign minister and a career diplomat, as well as the son of a career diplomat. But when I spoke to him by video link on 9 March he was blunt and direct with his answers, though he never strayed too far from his role. When I asked him if the war would end with a military victory or diplomacy, his first instinct was to reply, “Russian defeat”, but he quickly reverted back to diplomat in chief.
Edward Luce, Vladimir Putin is much more broke than we think- FT
If you torture the statistics long enough, eventually they’ll confess. On that timeless maxim, Vladimir Putin managed to conjure a minor 2.1 per cent contraction in Russia’s economy last year against the double digits that we were expecting. The bizarre thing is that we believed him!
The IMF and World Bank dutifully recycled Moscow’s official 2022 growth numbers, prompting soul-searching about Russia’s resilience. If Russia could withstand the most sweeping western sanctions since the days of South African apartheid, perhaps we needed to rethink. I am no statistician. I do know, however, that there are deep grounds to mistrust Russia’s official data about anything.
As Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, doyen of the Yale School of Management, points out, Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency, has been through a leadership flux in the past year and was already a badly compromised agency. At any rate, Putin got the numbers he wanted. Rosstat predicts that Russia will grow by 0.3 per cent in 2023. I predict that this will be nonsense.
A vassal state the size of Russia is all well and good until you have to start paying the bills. The bad news is that Putin will be increasingly tempted to take desperate measures to bring this war to a favourable conclusion. This week’s salvo of Russian nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles targeted at key Ukrainian infrastructure was a worrying indicator of what a cornered Putin might do. We can certainly expect a cash-strapped Russia to hurl ever more human waves of badly trained conscripts to their deaths on the front lines.
Information warfare notes…
