Mar 7: Buonasera Mag
Day 377: Bakhmut Zelensky NovaKakhovka Budanov Kara-Murza RUbrainwashing Auchan Manafort ZNPP Cummings Tsikanouvskaya-A&Ps-Vadym ISW Ihnat Eckel Vogel Helsinki Katerji Gic Snyder ForeignOffice
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…
Intense fighting continues in and around Bakhmut as Kyiv and Moscow seemingly struggle with ammunition shortages and mounting casualties. President Zelensky discussed the situation with senior commanders, and two top generals supported continuing to defend the eastern city against Russian forces, Zelensky’s office said on Monday.
The Associated Press reported:
Over the bitterly cold winter months, the fighting has largely been deadlocked. Bakhmut does not have any major strategic value, and analysts say its possible fall is unlikely to bring a turning point in the conflict.
The city’s importance has become psychological - for Russian president Vladimir Putin, a victory there will finally deliver some good news from the battlefield, while for Kyiv the display of grit and defiance reinforces a message that Ukraine is holding on after a year of brutal attacks to cement support among its western allies.
Even so, some analysts questioned the wisdom of the Ukrainian defenders holding out much longer, with others suggesting a tactical withdrawal may already be under way.
Deputy Defense Minister: Russia’s tactics becoming more and more ‘terroristic.’ “The Russians are in despair, due to the lack of success at the front, their tactics are becoming more and more terrorist, they are shelling the regions, killing the civilian population, destroying the infrastructure,” said Oleksandr Pavliuk.
Zelensky: World is strong enough to punish Russia for war against Ukraine. “Step by step, we are moving towards ensuring that the terrorist state is held fully responsible for what has been committed against our state, against our people,” Zelensky said at the United for Justice conference, which was attended by a number of lawyers from Ukraine, Europe, and other countries.
Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, visited Mariupol, in a rare trip to occupied Ukraine by a senior Moscow figure. The Russian defence ministry issued images on Monday of Shoigu “inspecting Russian reconstruction efforts of infrastructure”. During his visit, it said, he was presented with a medical centre, a rescue centre, and a “new microdistrict” of 12 five-storey residential buildings.
General Staff: Russians place air defense systems in residential quarters of Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast. Nova Kakhovka is 50 kilometers northeast of Kherson, the region's capital city. It stands on the east bank of Dnipro River, right across from the Ukrainian-held territories on the west bank.
UK Defense Ministry: Freshly mobilized Russian soldiers ordered to storm Ukrainian positions with ‘firearms and shovels.’ According to the March 5 U.K. Defense Ministry's intelligence update, Russian soldiers are forced into hand-and-hand combat due to lack of ammunition. The reservists were thus ordered by the Russian Command to assault a Ukrainian concrete strong point with only “firearms and shovels.”
Budanov: Russia likely to run out of ‘military tools’ by end of spring. Russia has “wasted huge amounts of human resources, armaments, and materials” during the war in Ukraine, and it will likely run out of offensive potential by late spring.
The Russian Education Ministry has unveiled plans to impose the “Important Conversations” lessons, which are meant to nurture patriotic sentiment, not just on schoolchildren and college students, but on parents and pedagogical university students as well. Novaya-Europe has talked to some parents of different political views to learn what they think on the matter.
Authorities: Russia’s proxies in occupied regions put teenagers on military register. According to the Luhansk Regional Military Administration, boys born in 2006 are now to be put on the military register by Russia's proxies in the occupied regions of Luhansk Oblast.
Novaya Gazeta: Thousands of Russian soldiers have been reported MIA in Ukraine. Russia’s Defence Ministry is not in a hurry to help relatives find the bodies. We explain under what circumstances soldiers go missing and what ends their relatives are forced to go to in order to locate the bodies.
The Insider: “Shortly after the release of the first part of the investigation into the deliveries to the Russian military, the Auchan leadership published a response in which they strongly denied participation in these deliveries, as well as the fact that Auchan's regional stores helped volunteers collecting aid for the mobilized. The Insider cites new evidence (including documents, photos and videos) from which it follows that Auchan not only knew perfectly well where the goods were being delivered, but also took an active part in disguising deliveries to the Ministry of Defense under the usual commercial sale to private companies.”
Belarus sentences Tsikhanouskaya in absentia to 15 years in prison. In response, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said, "I don't think about my own sentence. I think about thousands of innocents, detained & sentenced to real prison terms. I won't stop until each of them is released."
Energy minister: Negotiations on Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant reach ‘dead end.’ Speaking on the national television, Herman Halushchenko called again for demilitarilization of Europe’s largest nuclear plant, as well as for all employees of Russian state-owned nuclear power conglomerate Rosatom to leave the territory.
The EU is edging closer to joint procurement of ammunition to help Ukraine and replenish members’ stockpiles but major questions regarding funding and scale remain to be resolved, Reuters reports. Hanno Pevkur, the defence minister of Estonia – which has led a push for the EU to order millions of shells – said he believed ministers would reach a “political consensus” to pursue joint procurement when they meet in Stockholm on Wednesday.
TVN 24: Ambulances intended for Ukraine set on fire in Poland. A 35-year-old suspect has been arrested. Both ambulances were supposed to depart to Ukraine on March 4 within a humanitarian convoy organized by the Moc Przyszłości Foundation.
Nathalie Vogel, European Values Centre: I have said this before but this is truer than ever: Were we to be blessed and see on day an investigation followed by a subsequent raid over the German MFA... 'Fbi FIFA style', we'd be left with one third of the staff having to be sacked for incompetence, one third landing in jail over charges of corruption and high treason, and we'd be left with the the last third, the janitors and security personnel.
Dominic cumming(s) out of the wood work…
Dominic Cummings was campaign manager for Vote Leave supporting Brexit in the UK. Whistleblowers came forward afterwards testifying that Cummings had hired a Canadian big data firm to target citizens who hadn’t voted in years with misleading and falacious information. Vote Leave won on a stack of lies: an imminent Turkish immigrants invasion, the undemocratic EU, and a barrage of messages aimed at stoking tribal sentiments in those who would take the bait. The Brexit referendum saw Leavers win by a very small margin of votes.
Cummings is known in political circles as a libertarian, and views international relations through the lens of real politik. Others in the same circle, cheering on Putin, are Lex Fridman, Peter Theil, and Elon Musk. One of the seminal non-fiction books written to support the libertarian worldview is “The Sovereign Individual”, written by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father).
David Patrikarakos, Inside Putin’s torture chambers- Unherd
“Let’s call Vladimir Vladimirovich,” the man says with a laugh, as he opens the case and slowly uncoils a wire. Vitaliy Alseryuk can see the TA field telephone and he knows what’s coming. He knows, having served in communications in the army, that the machine carries hundreds of volts. He knows that the wire is about to be connected to his fingers, toes or perhaps his genitals. He knows the pain will be excruciating.
The TA field phone was invented by the Soviets in 1950 and was used by their Army in railways and mining. In post-Soviet times, though, especially during the Russian-Chechen wars, it became more useful as a means of torture. If you want to understand Russia’s gradual regression into brutal atavism, examine the changing uses of its field telephone. The Reckoning Project, a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and researchers who record and verify witness testimonies of war crimes and crimes against humanity, has discovered it in almost every detention site they have visited during the Russian occupation of Ukraine.
According to the The Reckoning Project’s Kharkiv unit, there were at least 27 detention and torture sites in that region alone. The team interviewed more than a dozen former prisoners and discovered that men and women alike were treated in identical manner: taken from their houses without explanations, handcuffed, blindfolded, and then brought into tiny, cold, wet and overcrowded cells. There, men in balaclavas would interrogate them until they acknowledged their connections to the Ukrainian army.
Then they were tortured.
Timothy Snyder, The Making of Modern Ukraine, Lecture 4
One of the features of my class on Ukraine is that I dwelled for quite a while in theory of history and then ancient history. One of the reasons for this is that I wanted to get listeners out from under any myth of eternity: that things are as they must be because they have “always” been such. Another is that the early history if what are now Ukrainian lands is deeply fascinating. Themes that might be familiar in a “western civilization” course, such as ancient Greece, early Christianity, or Vikings, figure here in new forms or with greater prominence. In this lecture I work through the emergence of Europe from the ancient world, but with the Slavs and Ukraine at the center.
Programming note…
Foreign Office Podcast- Michael Weiss- Prigozhin, Wagner and Trolls- Renee DiResta
This was a fascinating listen: Weiss and DiResta are experts in their respective fields. Please make time for this one, and thanks to Nathalie Vogel for the heads up.
