Mar 4: The Saturday Edition
Day 373: Bakhmut Kherson Crimea Wagner Sakharov Bialiatski Moldova Romania $400m USAID Vekselberg Quad Lavrov EU Iran Matovnikov-A&Ps Tallinn Matviyishin OCCRP Kirillova Seskuria Roth-Sauer Kelkar
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…
Russian attacks across 10 Ukrainian oblasts kill 5, injure 24 over past 24 hours. Russian attacks were reported in Donetsk, Kherson, Poltava, Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Luhansk oblasts in the east, south, center, and north of Ukraine.
Reuters: Prigozhin said in a video published on Friday that the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was “practically surrounded” by Russian forces and that Kyiv’s forces had access to only one road out.
UK Defense Ministry: Warm weather limits cross-country movement on Bakhmut front line. Muddy conditions caused by rising temperatures hinder cross-country movement (CCM) on Bakhmut front line in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, which usually gives some advantage to defending forces, the U.K. Defense Ministry reported on March 2.
Governor: 5,000 people, including 37 children, remain in Bakhmut. Donetsk Oblast Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said that around 5,000 people, among them 37 children, still remain in Bakhmut. According to him, most of the remaining residents refuse to leave their homes.
Zelensky appoints new head of Kherson. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree on March 2 appointing former military prosecutor Roman Mrochko as head of the Kherson City Military Administration.
Ukraine has ordered a mandatory evacuation of families and vulnerable residents from the frontline city of Kupiansk and adjacent northeastern territories. The evacuation order was due to the “unstable security situation” caused by Russia’s “constant” shelling of the town and its surroundings, it said.
Two drones reportedly crash on Russian military base in Crimea. Russia previously claimed to have prevented an “attempted massive drone strike” in the peninsula.
Russia’s notorious Wagner Group has reportedly begun trawling schools in a disturbing new recruiting drive. The twisted new recruiting method was captured in a video shared Wednesday by Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer, and ally of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Sobol said a student who’d been present for Wagner’s presentation at a Moscow high school this week reached out and provided the surreptitiously recorded video.
The club is run by former LDPR member Alexander Tronin. The club even featured a speech by United Russia deputy Maria Butira, who was in an American prison in 2018-2019 for espionage in favor of Russia.
WaPo: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wartime purge of liberals and human rights activists has forced the Sakharov Center in Moscow to close as the Kremlin rips up the legacy of rights defenders like Sakharov, who died in 1989, and destroys organizations dedicated to justice and freedom. The center held its final public event last month and now has until the end of April to dismantle its museum exhibition focused on the repressions of the Soviet gulag, and to remove the dissident’s archives and his bust.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Belarus, according to the rights group he helped found. Mr. Bialiatski, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in October for his decades of defending human rights in Belarus, was arrested last year as part of a sweeping and brutal crackdown on dissent there.
Residents living in Ukraine’s east and south faced pressure to accept Russian citizenship for their newborns, including being denied free distribution of diapers and baby food, Reuters reports. Natalia Lukina said, “When we asked for diapers, the Russians told us, ‘If you come without Russian birth certificates, we will not give you diapers’.”
Moldovan parliament approves declaration condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine. The Moldovan parliament approved a declaration on March 2 condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine, reported Newsmaker. The declaration deems Russia's actions in Ukraine as war crimes and a severe breach of international law, urging Russia to end the conflict and remove its forces from the entirety of Ukraine's territory within the borders acknowledged by the international community.
Romania's Defense Ministry has warned that dozens of social-media posts claiming Bucharest has been massing troops and military equipment at its border with Moldova are part of "a fake news" campaign launched by the Kremlin since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. "We remind everyone that the accuracy of such sensationalist and panicky information can best be verified by consulting official sources," the ministry said on February 28.
Foreign ministers of the so-called Quad group, India, Australia, Japan and the United States, denounced Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war as unacceptable, according to a statement issued after a meeting on Friday.
The US has announced a new military aid package of ammunition and other support for Ukraine worth $400m (£333m).
This military assistance package includes more ammunition for U.S.-provided HIMARS and howitzers, which Ukraine is using so effectively to defend itself, as well as ammunition for Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Armored Vehicle Launched Bridges, demolitions munitions and equipment, and other maintenance, training, and support.
CNN: USAID announces new aid for Ukraine's agriculture sector. USAID to invest $44 million for storage and infrastructure expansion in Ukraine's agricultural system. The partnerships seek to boost the country's grain shipping capacity by over 3 million tons annually.
The US has imposed sanctions on a number of Russian individuals connected to the arbitrary detention of the prominent Kremlin critic, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been jailed in Moscow for nearly a year after speaking out against the war in Ukraine.
OCCRP: The U.S. Department of Justice filed two separate cases against a Russian oligarch, in its latest efforts to disrupt money laundering and smuggling networks which support the Russian regime’s war in Ukraine. One of them was a civil forfeiture complaint against six real estate properties worth US$75 million, beneficially owned by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The second case saw Russian national Ilya Balakaev charged with various offenses related to smuggling sensitive devices used in counterintelligence operations from the U.S. to Russia.
Politico: EU sanctions were designed to keep Russia’s state-controlled news network RT off the air. But the Kremlin-backed channel has continued to pump out disinformation about the war in Ukraine from its offices on the outskirts of Paris. “The sanctions did not achieve their goals, to say the least,” said a former RT France employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We banned broadcasting, but not production. The company is still standing, and continued to hire as if nothing had happened.” The company has only begun to feel the pressure in recent months, after the French government blocked its bank accounts following an asset freeze decided by the EU in December. RT France is now facing bankruptcy; it was placed in receivership at the end of February and a hearing is scheduled in April to decide on the way forward.
Switzerland’s defence ministry on Friday said it had received a request from its German counterparts to allow Rheinmetall AG to acquire some of Switzerland’s mothballed Leopard 2 tanks. The request said the tanks would not be sent to Ukraine, but be used to backfill gaps created by the handover of Leopard 2s by Germany and Nato and European Union allies, a ministry spokesperson told Reuters.
Reuters: Two Americans were arrested in Kansas City for allegedly sending U.S. aviation technology to Russia in violation of U.S. export controls, U.S. Commerce Department official Matthew Axelrod said on Thursday.
Reuters: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered improvements to infrastructure and expansion of farmland to ramp up food production, state media said. South Korea has warned of an mounting food crisis in the isolated North, including a recent surge in deaths from hunger in some regions.
Ksenia Kirillova, Why Putin Cannot End His War Against Ukraine- The Jamestown Foundation
Among the many terrible consequences of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine launched by Vladimir Putin a year ago, one should be singled out—that is, the Russian president’s inability to end the conflict as currently constituted. Several primary factors underline this fact.
First, the war has caused an unusually high level of support among the Russian public for the Russian authorities and Putin personally; in recent years, before the invasion, this rating had been steadily declining (Radio Svoboda, May 25, 2019). Even independent sociologists, for example, the scientific director of the Levada Center (labeled as a “foreign agent” in Russia), Lev Gudkov, admit that public support is “not very clearly expressed, but quite tangible for the authorities and the war itself in society.”
According to Gudkov, approval for the war among Russians remains around 70 percent. Yet, at the same time, 50 percent of respondents want the fighting to end. He notes that this duality is partly due to the fact that many Russians are deeply aware of the war’s criminal nature but prefer to isolate themselves from the unpleasant truth and avoid receiving objective information (Eurasia Review, February 17). Another factor that ensures passive support for the war from the majority of the population is the constant stream of propaganda that paints a harrowing future in the case of Russia’s defeat (Readovka, October 6).
Andrew Roth & Pjotr Sauer, ‘Our voices are louder if we stay’: Russian anti-war activists refuse to flee- The Guardian
Despite reaching one of the darkest moments in more than 40 years as a dissident and human rights activist, Oleg Orlov says that he has no plans to flee Russia. “I made a decision a long time ago that I want to live and die in Russia, it’s my country,” Orlov told the Observer. “Even though it’s never been so bad.”
That’s saying something for Orlov, who can recall printing homemade anti-war posters in the late 1970s to protest against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or in support of Poland’s Solidarność movement, and was an observer and negotiator during the bloody war in Chechnya in the 1990s.
He has been arrested three times for holding pickets since late February, when Russian troops launched an assault on Ukraine. And he doesn’t rule out a prison term in his future.
“I understand the high likelihood of a criminal case against me and my colleagues,” he said. “But we have to do something … even if it is just to go out with a picket and speak honestly about what is happening.”
Cover your eyes…
This is real. It’s Oleksandr Matovnikov-he’s putting on the moves, and someone is trying to put the moves on him.
Vivek Y Kelkar, Why China is Recalbrating its BRI Strategy- Money Control
Failure of China’s BRI strategy has led to a shift that now focuses on investments that achieve its global goals but with direct benefits to its domestic economy
China’s BRI strategy was carefully calculated. Beijing saw the world in systemic terms. The international order was a system defined by its nodes—nation-states, companies, and institutional and non-institutional actors like NGOs. Beijing sought to shape each of these nodes through its BRI plans. The economic investments created networks of systemic relationships and dependencies between China and the BRI recipient nations. The bulk of the investment was infrastructure construction directed and meant to direct trade flows to Beijing’s advantage.
Trade networks were to be reshaped to maximize China’s economic and geopolitical interests. The expected outcome was an international order that Beijing could purposefully influence and direct through networked systemic effects in a manner best suited to China’s interests, goals, and values. State-owned Chinese banks would bankroll these infrastructure projects. Chinese companies would execute them. Often Chinese workmen would be sent to build the projects.
If the recipient state could not repay the loans, then China would come to effectively own the projects and gain a measure of influence and leverage over that state. But the strategy isn’t quite working out that way. Projects like the Gwadar port and the CPEC in Pakistan continually face resistance, often violence, from locals with delays mounting. Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port and Kenya’s highways can’t earn their own keep, even if they’re controlled by China. Hambantota, of course, has other advantages for China’s navy. But that alone doesn’t overcome the laws of economics.
The fundamental economics of Africa do not favor a growth model built on massive infrastructure-related investment alone. Loans there are particularly shaky. Countries like Zambia are already willing to repudiate Chinese debt. Pakistan verges on bankruptcy. Sri Lanka is already there. The debt overhang could further cripple nations without the strong income streams that come from all-around economic development. China has now been left with the task of either rolling over the debt perpetually, like in Zambia and Sri Lanka, or forgiving it. Neither option is exactly palatable to Beijing and the Chinese bankers.