Mar 3: Buonasera Mag
Day 372: Bahkmut Prigozhin Izyum Kherson Stavropol LITH Lavrov G20 Modi NATO Baerbock Johnson Kuleba Greece Bryansk-A&Ps-Zelenska EUvsDisinfo Lautman Davis Komarnychyj Nickel FBI RUmagicians
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.
Olena Zelenska at the soft power summit in London: Russia has violated the world’s very principle of soft power, and the world must decide “whether the language of aggression is acceptable to them”.
Russia attacked not only Ukraine but all world principles of peaceful coexistence, human rights and the progress we have made. Why negotiate when you can launch missiles?
Stories we’re following…
Ukrainian forces hung on to their positions in the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut early on Thursday under constant attack from Russian troops seeking to claim their first major victory for more than half a year. Russia says seizing Bakhmut would open the way to fully controlling the rest of the strategic Donbas industrial region bordering Russia, one of the main objectives of its invasion a year ago on 24 February. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has nevertheless put up fierce resistance. Not everyone in Ukraine is convinced that defending Bakhmut can go on indefinitely.
We’ve been in Kupiansk for the last two days which has seen increasing shell fire from Russian. We saw a lot of damage there, but coming south past Izium there are villages and towns that have been smashed to pieces. Extraordinary damage. We stopped in one place, where every building was damaged, some reduced to rubble, including what appeared to be a monastery or church.
All along this section of the road there are mine warning signs. At one point we were surprised by an explosion ahead of us, a puff of grey smoke above the road. We could see soldiers who seemed unconcerned, so came closer and could see they were blowing up unexploded ordinance right by the road.
Yahoo News: Under the guise of conducting Ukrainian military training, he collected intelligence on the deployment of the defense forces’ units in the southern regions. Russian special services tasked him with identifying the deployment sites of foreign weapons and warehouses with ammunition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to the investigation, the traitor turned to the FSB on his own initiative and offered his help in the war against Ukraine. During searches at the suspect’s place of residence, law enforcers found a mobile phone with evidence of the suspect’s correspondence with Russian supervisors, as well as weapons and ammunition.
Prigozhin has published a video that he said shows his fighters in the key eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In a post on Telegram, uniformed men are seen lifting a Wagner banner on top of a heavily damaged building. The video has been geolocated to the east of Bakhmut, about 1.2 miles from the city centre, where Wagner fighters have been for a while.
On Thursday, Putin has cancelled a planned trip to Stavropol amid reports of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Bryansk region. Russian media has claimed that two villages near the border with Ukraine have been attacked, with at least one person killed.
On Thursday Sergei Lavrov said that many leaders from the west had turned the agenda of a G20 meeting in India “into a farce”. The Russian FM told a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi that “a number of western delegations has turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian federation”.
Russian federal censor blocks the stock image provider Shutterstock for hosting “destructive materials, including suicide and pro-drug content”.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken accused Moscow of repressing domestic critics and called on UN-mandated investigators to keep documenting Russia’s alleged abuses in the Ukraine war in a speech to the Human Rights Council on Thursday.
Reuters: The United States will announce a new military aid package for Ukraine on Friday, worth roughly $400 million and comprised mainly of ammunition, two officials and a person familiar with the package said.
Swiss prosecutors charge four bankers with helping to hide Vladimir Putin’s millions. Employees of Gazprombank’s subsidiary accused of helping Kremlin-connected figure open accounts. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. According to an indictment — a copy of which was provided to the Financial Times by a court in Zurich — the bankers were criminally negligent in allowing accounts to be opened in Switzerland on behalf of Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and the godfather to Putin’s daughter, without questioning the origin of the funds flowing through them.
PM Modi called for common ground on global issues as he inaugurated a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi that looks set to be dominated by the war in Ukraine. European and U.S. delegates have reiterated that they hold Russia responsible.
German FM Annalena Baerbock, met with her Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, before the G20 meeting in India, the German foreign ministry said on Twitter on Thursday. “In the face of Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine and the UN Charter, neutrality rewards the aggressor,” Reuters reports the ministry added in the tweet.
Boris Johnson is delivering the keynote address at London’s soft power summit, where he says democracy matters because Vladimir Putin would never have made “the catastrophic mistake of invading Ukraine”.
[Putin] would have known that the Ukrainians are a great unpatriotic people and that they would fight for every inch of their land.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has been speaking at a soft power summit in London, where he was asked by the journalist Mishal Husain about the “striking difference” in polls showing support for Ukraine between western countries and countries such as India and Turkey., Kuleba says there is a broad notion that the countries in the Global South “is against Ukraine”, but the reality is “far more nuanced”.
What really works is just to say, are you ready to concede a square kilometre of your own country to your neighbour, simply because your neighbour decided to take the square kilometre away from you?
The answer is always no.
UkrInform: Chancellor Olaf Scholz announces more Gepard and Iris-Т systems for Ukraine. Germany and its partners will continue to help Ukraine's Armed Forces with both weapons and training, he added.
Rescuers resumed a search for victims of Greece's deadliest train crash, combing through the buckled and crushed remains of carriages. Disbelief turned to despair and anger after at least 46 people were killed in the disaster.
US intelligence community cannot link ‘Havana Syndrome’ cases to a foreign adversary- CNN
The US intelligence community cannot link any cases of the mysterious ailment known as “Havana Syndrome’ to a foreign adversary, ruling it unlikely that the unexplained illness was the result of a targeted campaign by an enemy of the US, according to US intelligence officials familiar with the assessment.
The latest conclusion comes years after the so-called syndrome first emerged and defies a theory that it was the result of a targeted campaign by an enemy of the US.
The new assessment echoes an interim report from the CIA last year that found it unlikely that the “anomalous health incidents,” as they are formally known, were the caused by “a sustained worldwide campaign” by Russia or any other foreign actor.
Fake 'fact-checks' seek to obscure Russian role in war- France24
A Russian missile smashed a Ukrainian apartment complex, killing dozens. Pro-Russian propagandists offered a slick counter-narrative that shifted the blame away from Moscow -- using pseudo fact-checking as a tool of disinformation.
Last month, at least 46 people were killed when a residential building in the city of Dnipro was struck by what Ukrainian officials and experts including the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said was a Russian Kh-22 cruise missile.
The battered nine-story building came to epitomize one of the deadliest single attacks in Ukraine since the Russian invasion.
But a website called "War on Fakes" -- which disseminates what experts identify as Russian propaganda -- claimed in an "exclusive" that the building had been destroyed by a Ukrainian air defense missile.
Akin to professional fact-checkers, it used visuals with the word "fake" stamped across them in bold red letters, alongside open-source material including a dashcam video and a graphic that used complex trigonometry to make its case.
"Since Russia's invasion, the 'War On Fakes' initiative has become a powerhouse of spreading false debunks," Roman Osadchuk, from the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, told AFP.
Kherson torture centres were planned by Russian state, say lawyers- The Guardian
Evidence collected from Kherson in southern Ukraine shows Russian torture centres were not “random” but instead planned and directly financed by the Russian state, according to a team of Ukrainian and international lawyers headed by a UK barrister.
The city was under Russian control for eight months, from 2 March last year until Ukrainian forces entered the city on 11 November.
The evidence collected by Ukrainian prosecutors and analysed by the Mobile Justice Team includes plans used by Vladimir Putin’s occupying forces to establish, manage and finance the 20 torture centres in Kherson.
“The mass torture chambers, financed by the Russian state, are not random but rather part of a carefully thought-out and financed blueprint with a clear objective to eliminate Ukrainian national and cultural identity,” said the British barrister Wayne Jordash, who is leading the team.
The centres were run by the Russian security services, the FSB, as well as the Russian prison service and local collaborators, according to the lawyers, and were designed to subjugate, re-educate or kill Ukrainian civic leaders and ordinary dissenters.
In Ukraine, the reports were quickly interpreted as a “false flag” attack launched by Russia to discredit the Ukrainian armed forces. “The story about [the Ukrainian] sabotage group in [Russia] is a classic deliberate provocation,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser. There was no immediate video or photo of the fighting to confirm the reports of deaths.
Via Stephen Komarnyckyj: source Glavcom.UA
"None of the fighters have been captured yet. Everyone has a grenade just in case."
The Russian Volunteer Corps is one of the most mysterious units in the Territorial Defense. It consists of volunteers originally from Russia, who went through the Revolution of Dignity, fought in the ATO and OOS, and fought in their homeland against Putin's regime. After a full-scale invasion, these soldiers decided to unite into one unit and now perform combat tasks as part of the 98th battalion of the Teroborona "Azov-Dnipro" of the 108th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Up-date Olga Lautman: “This Bryansk attack is beginning to make sense thanks to the fake Ukrainian ‘supporters’ that in timely fashion come and in synchronization come out to peddle nazi stuff. Can see where this is going and what Russia is trying to achieve w the propaganda building inside.”
Julia Davis: Some highlights from the latest installment of the docuseries centering around the head of RT, Margarita Simonyan. She pines for the restoration of the USSR and says that Russia's "operation" should stop "wherever the people are glad to have them."
Rod Nickel, Soils of war: The toxic legacy for Ukraine's breadbasket- Reuters
Scientists looking at soil samples taken from the recaptured Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine found that high concentrations of toxins such as mercury and arsenic from munitions and fuel are polluting the ground.
Using the samples and satellite imagery, scientists at Ukraine's Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry Research estimated that the war has degraded at least 10.5 million hectares of agricultural land across Ukraine so far, according to the research shared with Reuters.
That's a quarter of the agricultural land, including territory still occupied by Russian forces, in a country described as the breadbasket of Europe.
"For our region, it's a very big problem. This good soil, we cannot reproduce it," said Povod, 27, walking around his farm near Bilozerka in southeast Ukraine, about 10 km (6 miles) from the Dnipro River that is one of the war's front lines.
Leonnig, Barrett, Stein & Davis, Showdown before the raid: FBI agents and prosecutors argued over Trump- The Washington Post
An exclusive look at behind-the-scenes deliberations as both sides wrestled with a national security case that has potentially far-reaching political consequences
This account reveals for the first time the degree of tension among law enforcement officials and behind-the-scenes deliberations as they wrestled with a national security case that has potentially far-reaching political consequences.
The disagreements stemmed in large part from worries among officials that whatever steps they took in investigating a former president would face intense scrutiny and second-guessing by people inside and outside the government. However, the agents, who typically perform the bulk of the investigative work in cases, and the prosecutors, who guide agents’ work and decide on criminal charges, ultimately focused on very different pitfalls, according to people familiar with their discussions.
The FBI agents’ caution also was rooted in the fact that mistakes in prior probes of Hillary Clinton and Trump had proved damaging to the FBI, and the cases subjected the bureau to sustained public attacks from partisans, the people said.
Prosecutors countered that the FBI failing to treat Trump as it had other government employees who were not truthful about classified records could threaten the nation’s security. As evidence surfaced suggesting that Trump or his team was holding back sensitive records, the prosecutors pushed for quick action to recover them, according to the people familiar with the discussions.