May 2: E-Stories

Georgia RUattacksUA Odesa Nikopol CombatSit BehindLines InRussia Allies A&P Noel UKDef ISW CDS KyivIndie Avdeeva Zelensky Lautman VchKOGPU Voichuk Gilli EuroMaidan Vaga United24

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.

Tblisi, Georgia, May 1, 2024. After last night’s violent pushback by the riot police, the protest keeps growing. The parliamentarians who voted in the second reading of the foreign agents’ bill are barricaded inside the building. Georgians are going to fight this to the end.

Stories we’re following…

In total, Russian attacks against Ukraine kill 7, injure at least 36 over one day. Russia targeted a total of 10 Ukrainian oblasts — Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv, Mykolaiv, Luhansk, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Odesa, Kherson, Kharkiv, and Donetsk. Casualties were reported in the latter four regions.

Russia reportedly hit a warehouse of Nova Poshta in Odesa. Preliminary info states there are injured and probably dead. Waiting for official confirmation, but this is yet another terror attack.

Russian attack on Nikopol in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast injures 4. Russia carried out the attack with artillery and launched a "kamikaze" drone, according to local governor Serhii Lysak.

Prosecutor General: Russia using cluster munition against Odesa points to deliberate targeting of civilians. "This (cluster munition) is an indiscriminate weapon, the use of which can lead to significant casualties among the civilian population," the Prosecutor General's Office said on Telegram, citing Andrii Kostin. The latest Russian attack has killed 3 people and injured 3.

Business Insider: Russia has increasingly relied on glide-bomb strikes to hammer Ukrainian positions in recent months. These munitions are particularly difficult to intercept because they have short flight times, small radar signatures, and non-ballistic trajectories.

Glide bombs have flight control surfaces and are known as standoff weapons, meaning that Russian warplanes can release them at a distance beyond the range of Ukraine's air-defense systems. Shooting down the planes before they release the weapon or striking them on the ground are really the only ways to defeat the threat. Destroying the bombs before they get in the air is an option as well.

Zelensky: Ukraine will join NATO only after defeating Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes that the win against Russia will help to reach a perfect agreement among all NATO member states on Ukraine's membership.

Maria Avdeeva: Bombs and disinformation: Russia’s campaign to depopulate Kharkiv—Atlantic Council

Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, is currently the Kremlin’s number one target. Since the start of 2024, Kharkiv has been the primary focus of a Russian bombing campaign that has sought to capitalize of Ukraine’s dwindling supplies of air defense ammunition in order to terrorize the civilian population and destroy vital infrastructure.

The Kremlin’s goal is to make Kharkiv “unlivable” and force a large percentage of its approximately 1.3 million residents to flee. Moscow hopes this will demoralize Ukraine and pave the way for the city’s capture by Russian forces during a widely anticipated summer offensive in the coming months.

VchK OGPU: In the Ryazan and Voronezh regions, drones attacked several sites. As a result of a nighttime UAV attack, the Ryazan oil refinery was hit. A heavy fire started there.

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Combat Situation Update

Ukrainian forces defending the strategic eastern stronghold of Chasiv Yar say they are still waiting for fresh ammunition, amid intensifying attacks from Russian troops and drones. Russian forces are assaulting the town using airdropped glide bombs to pound Ukrainian positions.

• Moscow’s army is advancing west of Avdiivka, and its troops have reached the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, another major objective that would allow them to command higher ground and target towns and cities further to the west.

• Russian forces recently made a confirmed advance in Robotyne, western Zaporizhia Oblast.

• CDS reports that the Ukrainian Defense Forces will likely have to withdraw from positions in Kyslivka and Kotlyarivka, as the enemy has bypassed the latter both from the north through Kyslivka and from the south along the Svatove-Kupyansk road.

• The pace and scope of the enemy's advance northwest of Avdiivka are steadily escalating. "Tavriya" OSG forces on this direction are simply exhausted.

• In the preceding month, Russian authorities ceased fuel transit across the Kerch Strait owing to the Ukrainian Defense Forces' strike threat.

The Russian military has attacked the command headquarters of the Ukrainian army’s southern grouping, Russia’s defence ministry has said, according to Reuters.

State Border Guard Service establishes new brigade on Ukraine's Border Guard Day. The State Border Guard Service founded its third combat brigade, "Hart" (a Ukrainian word for "to harden"), on April 30 on the occasion of Ukraine's Border Guard Day, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko announced on his Telegram channel.

Reuters is reporting that the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has ordered more, and swifter, delivery of weapons for Moscow’s war in Ukraine. At a meeting Gerasimov, who is in charge of the operation, delivered a report to Shoigu, the Russian defence ministry wrote on Telegram.

“To maintain the required pace of the offensive … it is necessary to increase the volume and quality of weapons and military equipment supplied to the troops, primarily weapons,” it cited Shoigu as saying in a statement posted on Telegram.

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Behind the Lines

Source: SBU carries out searches at metropolitan of Moscow-linked church. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is carrying out searches on May 1 at Metropolitan Luka (Andrii Kovalenko) of the Moscow-linked Ukrainian church, a source in law enforcement agencies confirmed for the Kyiv Independent on May 1.

Officials who went to work in the occupied regions of Ukraine at the call of the Kremlin are trying to leave their posts to continue their careers in Russia, Meduza writes , citing sources in the presidential administration (AP).

On April 26, it became known about  the dismissal of  Alexander Kostomarov,  the first deputy head of the administration of the governor of the self-proclaimed DPR Denis Pushilin. Sources in the AP called the official “local Sergei Kiriyenko,” who is the curator of the Kremlin’s internal policy. In the “DPR”, Kostomarov was involved in organizing the “referendum” on joining Russia and the subsequent “elections”, and before that  he worked in similar positions in the Ulyanovsk and Lipetsk regions, as well as in the Moscow region.

Following Kostomarov, the vice-governor of the occupied part of the Zaporozhye region, Sergei Tolmachev, will leave his post, two sources in the AP said. Before that, he held a similar position in annexed Sevastopol and led the campaigns of United Russia and its candidates in the regions of the Russian Federation.

Bloomberg: Macron hopes to convince Xi to sway Putin toward ending invasion of Ukraine. Xi Jinping will travel to the European Union for the first time in five years. The Chinese president will begin his five-day trip to France, Serbia, and Hungary on May 5, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

FT: Europe 'sleep walking' into dependence on Russian fertilizer, producer says. Eurostat, the EU's statistics agency, said that the import of Russian urea, a typical fertilizer, had doubled from the previous year up to June 2023.

Media: Slovakia grants temporary protection to man accused of running pro-Russian propaganda network. Ukrainian-Israeli citizen Artem Marchevskyi, accused by Czech authorities of running a pro-Russian propaganda network from Prague, has been granted temporary protection in neighboring Slovakia, the Czech news outlet Denik N reported on April 30, citing its undisclosed sources.

BBC News: A former National Security Agency employee was sentenced Monday to nearly 22 years in prison for attempting to sell classified information to Russia. Jareh Dalke, 32, pleaded guilty last year to six counts of attempting to transmit classified National Defense Information to an individual he believed to be a Russian agent, the U.S. Justice Department reported on Monday. That person was an FBI online covert employee. Dalke requested $85,000 in return. The FBI arrested Dalke in September 2023, moments after he transmitted five files, four of which contained top-secret information.

The Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service’s registry of “terrorists and extremists,” which includes not just convicts but also mere suspects and defendants, now includes more than 14,500 people (as well as more than 550 organizations), each facing enormous restrictions (such as spending limits and frozen bank accounts) and serious consequences (job loss, liability for normally legal speech, and so on).

Media Initiative for Human Rights: Where is Russia hiding civilians abducted in the occupied territories of Ukraine? (English subtitles)

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Meanwhile in Russia

Russian media: Russian official in Urals region arrested on suspicion of bribery. TASS and other media outlets that reported on Andrey Kislitsyn's arrest did not provide any other details on the charges, but mentioned that he was sentenced to at least two months of pre-trial detention.

After the arrest of Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin may become the main developer of occupied Mariupol, the Dossier center writes , citing sources in the military construction complex.

At the same time, construction in Mariupol was carried out by the “Single Customer”, created on the initiative of Khusnullin in 2021. For example, the company completed ten multi-storey buildings on Gogol Street - in  April 2024, the block  was shown  to Putin via video link. And now  he is building  seven high-rise buildings on the site of previously demolished houses. In addition to construction, the state-owned company is also engaged in the repair and restoration of buildings damaged by shelling,  claiming that by the end of the year it will restore 4,000 apartments in them. 

Meduza: An article about five Russian military officers who disappeared after refusing to fight in Ukraine has vanished from Telegram’s long-form blogging platform Telegraph. Journalists at Astra Press released the report in December 2022 and say they didn’t delete the text from Telegraph. Telegram has not commented on the unpublished article. Astra’s story describes how five officers were moved to a secret camp for conscientious objectors and never heard from again. For its report, Astra spoke to soldiers who have survived the camp and to the five officers’ mothers.

Journalists at Holod Media report that illegal military arms trafficking has spiked in Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and has become the target of regular Ukrainian shelling and occasional incursions from Ukraine.

Russia’s federal censor has blocked the website of a project to support politician prisoners launched by the Memorial human rights group. The project’s website became inaccessible without a VPN in Russia on April 30, though regulators haven’t yet formally added it to their registry of blocked websites.

Media: Lukashenko building luxury residence near Sochi. The residence is reportedly being built in the elite Russian resort town of Krasnaya Polyana on a plot of more than 97,000 square meters.

Reuters: Austrian authorities warn Raiffeisen Bank over deal with Russian oligarch Deripaska. Raiffeisen has been interested in buying a 1.5 billion euro ($1.6 billion) stake in the construction company Strabag, which is linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

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Allied Support

Latvian FM: Some countries have provided Ukraine weapons with no restrictions on strikes in Russia. Some of Ukraine's allies have sent weapons to Kyiv with no restrictions on strikes inside Russia, Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braze said in an interview with European Pravda published on May 1.

Estonian MP Kristo Enn Vaga: The war is just a bike ride away. To illustrate that I am riding my bike from Tallinn to Kyiv. My objective is to gather donations for UA army. We must not forget that a full scale war is ongoing in our neighborhood.

Icelandic parliament adopts resolution on long-term support for Ukraine. The resolution aims to support the independence, sovereignty, borders, the safety of civilians, humanitarian aid, and reconstruction work in Ukraine, the statement read.

Austin says US urging other partners to provide Patriots to Ukraine. The U.S. continues to encourage other countries to provide Ukraine with Patriot air defense systems, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 30.

President Zelensky’s evening address about new security architecture:

We are preparing seven new security documents for our country – bilateral security agreements, including one with the United States. Weapons, finance, political cooperation – today I worked with the team on specific details of these documents, and we already have preliminary texts of some of these agreements. Each of them will support us this year and the next ones – this is our security architecture for the period until we join NATO. We are filling the draft agreements with stronger opportunities for Ukraine and for our common security with partners. Obviously, any means of increasing our protection against Russian terror are given special priority.

US Senate approves ban on Russian uranium imports. The U.S. Senate on April 30 voted unanimously to approve legislation banning imports of enriched uranium from Russia. The legislation will now advance to the White House, where U.S. President Joe Biden must sign the bill in order for it to become law.

Ukrainian lawmaker Kira Rudik writes for the Atlantic Council, Washington did something else significant.

“While most attention has so far focused on the military aspects of this new US aid package, the bill passed in Washington DC also includes an important step toward holding Russia financially accountable for the invasion of Ukraine,” Rudik writes. “The Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunities for Ukrainians Act, or REPO Act, paves the way for seizures of Russian Central Bank holdings that have been frozen in the United States for more than two years, while also setting the stage for a more global approach to confiscating Russian assets.”

Armenia and NATO have agreed  on a military cooperation program for 2024 and outlined new areas of cooperation, the republic’s Ministry of Defense reported . The parties held consultations during the visit of Deputy Chief of the General Staff of Armenia Artur Yeroyan to the alliance headquarters in Brussels.

“The results of the support provided to military educational institutions and training centers in Armenia within the framework of the program were discussed, and new areas of cooperation were outlined,” the Ministry of Defense noted, adding that they discussed, in particular, the possibilities of interaction in 2025.

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Message from our friends in Georgia: Chairman of Georgia's main opposition party, United National Movement, Levan Khabeishvili, who was abducted by riot police and severely beaten on April 30. During the night, riot police pepper-sprayed and beat protesters at the national parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue. More than 60 protesters have been arrested.

On Wednesday, the foreign agents’ law passed the second reading in parliament, thanks to the expulsion of 16 opposition members. The bill works the same way as it does in Russia, and will be used as a tool for the surveillance and control of the opposition and dissent in Georgia. If organisations and individuals are deemed ‘foreign agents’ their access to jobs and funds are curtailed, and they can be jailed.

This was the reaction of the protesters outside the national parliament when they received notice of the passing of the bill. There is a third reading and then the president can veto it. (Video: Marika Mikiashvili)

Georgia has been taking the road to authoritariansim for quite some time, putting its pro-Western and pro-EU allegiances at risk. The Georgian Dream party, headed by Russian-aligned oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has demonstrated its willingness towards Russian policies by re-activating flights to Moscow, and other measures aiding Russia’s war effort, such as relaxed cross-border transportation of goods and other materials.

It also comes after the VIII International Scientific and Practical Conference “Russia and the World: Dialogues – 2024. Forces of Attraction” was held in Tbilisi. The participants were Russian and Georgian representatives from diverse sectors of the economy and civil society, and the round-table discussions covered five fields of so-called ‘humanitarian’ topics.

The Georgian people have protested each of these measures and reiterated their desire to stay with the EU and the Western alliance system. The current protests have lasted 15 days and there is no sign of them letting up. Like the Ukrainians, the Georgians are ready to defend their future, which they see alongside their European brothers and sisters.

CNN: Greene says she will force a vote to oust Speaker Johnson next week

GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced Wednesday she will trigger a motion to vacate against House Speaker Mike Johnson next week to force members to put their position on the record – a move that comes after Democrats have said they will vote to kill the effort and ensure Johnson doesn’t lose his job.

“I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may and so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate. Absolutely calling it,” she said at a news conference.

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