Nov 18 Buonasera Mag
Day 268: Kherson, power restored, Ilovaisk, IAEA, NASAMs, ROM, Moldova, Chibrin, Iran, MH17, POL, FIN, CND, RU oil cap-A&Ps-Gershchenko, X-Soviet, Weiss, Zabrinsky, Kofman, NIchols, Sington
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…
A Ukrainian ombudsperson, Dmytro Lubynets, has described the scale of torture that has been discovered in Kherson city as “horrific”. Authorities have found “torture chambers” in the recently liberated southern Ukrainian city, where dozens of people have been reportedly been tortured, he said.
Power has been restored nearly everywhere in Ukraine after more than 10 million customers were disconnected Thursday, according to Oleksandr Kharchenko, the director of the Energy Industry Research Center.
Ukrainian forces targeted railways near Ilovaisk with precision strikes in order to disrupt logistics of Russian forces.
ISW said in its latest assessment that Ukrainian troops continued targeting Russian military assets and concentration areas on the east bank of Kherson Oblast and in the rear areas of Zaporizhia Oblast, VOANews reports.
General Staff: Ukraine repels Russian advances near 9 settlements in east. Over the past 24 hours, Ukraine's military repelled Russian attacks near Novoselivske and Stelmakhivka in Luhansk Oblast and Bilohorivka, Verkhniokamianske, Spirne, Opytne, Pervomaiske, Vodiane, and Novomykhailivka in Donetsk Oblast, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported.
IAEA board again demands Russians to withdraw from Ukraine's nuclear facilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed its third resolution since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, calling on Moscow to "end all actions at Ukrainian nuclear facilities," Reuters reported.
Kuleba talks to Blinken, asks for Patriot missile systems. “NASAMS have proved their efficiency already. I am also convinced that the time for Patriots has come,” said Kuleba, who was talking to Blinken during Russia’s mass air attack on Ukraine on the morning of Nov. 17.
There is unconfirmed information that Romania secretly handed over to Ukraine the BTR TAB-71M (analogue of the BTR-60). The number is unknown.
Putin discussed the idea of creating a Turkish “gas hub” with President Erdogan, the Kremlin said on Friday. “Particular attention is paid to the prospects of implementing the initiative, launched by the Russian president in October and supported by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to create a major gas hub in Turkey,” the Kremlin said.
Ministers of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) group has said in a joint statement that some members condemned the war in Ukraine and also pledged to keep supply chains and markets open. “There were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions,” the statement read, adding that Apec was not the forum to resolve security issues.
A member of Russia’s armed forces, Nikita Chibrin, who took part in the invasion of Ukraine has requested political asylum after landing in Madrid. He said he spent more than four months in Ukraine as part of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, a unit accused of committing war crimes in the Kyiv region in March. Chibrin landed in the Spanish capital on Tuesday and was being held at the airport’s immigration centre. He said he was eager to testify in an international court about his experiences in Ukraine. “I have nothing to hide. This is a criminal war that Russia started. I want to do everything I can to make it stop.” he said.
Sec of State Anthony Blinken: “The United States is taking further action to disrupt sanctions evasion efforts involving the sale of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products. Specifically, the Department of the Treasury is imposing sanctions on companies based in multiple jurisdictions for their involvement in petrochemical sales involving previously designated entities, including Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Commercial Co., Triliance Petrochemical Co. Ltd., the National Iranian Oil Company, and Naftiran Intertrade Company.”
The Dutch government will summon the Russian ambassador in the Netherlands over Russia’s response to the verdict in the trial over the downing of passenger flight MH17, news agency ANP reported, citing foreign minister Wopke Hoekstra. Russia said on Thursday the Dutch court’s decision to convict two former Russian intelligence agents and a Ukrainian separatist leader over the 2014 downing of the Malaysian airliner “neglected impartiality”.
Poland will not grant a Russian delegation visas to attend an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) meeting in Lodz on 1-2 December, a foreign ministry spokesman said. “We are not giving them visas,” Lukasz Jasina said.
Construction of a planned barbed-wired fence along Finland’s long border with Russia will start early next year, Finnish border guard officials said, amid concerns in the Nordic country over the changing security environment in Europe.
Reuters reports the Bank of Canada will issue a five-year, $500m bond that will offer Canadians the opportunity to directly support Ukraine. The bond, called the “Ukraine Sovereignty Bond,” will be denominated in Canadian dollars and issued in late November, the bank said is a statement.
The Biden administration declared Saudi Arabia's crown prince should be shielded from lawsuits for his role in the killing of a U.S.-based journalist reports Associated Press. That's a big contrast with President Joe Biden's campaign trail denunciations of the prince.
UN chief urges N. Korea to 'immediately desist' from provocations after ICBM test: statement.
Attorney General Merrick Garland plans to announce Friday that he has appointed a special counsel to oversee investigations into the retention of national defense information at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and key aspects of the criminal investigation into January 6, 2021, according to a senior Justice Department official.
Capping Russian oil
An oil price cap could have slashed Russia’s earnings by some 23 percent between July and October, according to new data by Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “We estimate that since the beginning of July, effective rice caps could have slashed Russia’s earnings by almost one quarter — by €20 billion. And they would have had an even stronger impact on the revenue of the Russian Federal Government,” he said during a webinar Wednesday.
If Western allies were to effectively target the oil sector, this could “have a major impact on Russia’s ability to sustain the brutal war,” Myllyvirta said. “Russia’s earnings from fossil fuels are still strong, but all other types of earnings for the Russian government are collapsing. So Russia is more dependent on revenue from fossil fuels than ever.” Russia is in recession, after GDP fell by 4 percent in the third quarter, according to estimates from stats agency Rosstat released on Wednesday. The economy had contracted by 4 percent in the second quarter.
Michael Weiss, Ex-Russian spy flees to the NATO country that captured him, delivering another embarrassing blow to Moscow- Yahoo News
“The Russians have no idea,” Alexander Toots, the head of Estonian counterintelligence, tells me, laughing. “They have absolutely no idea he is here. You can be the one to tell them.”
Toots was referring to the defection of a Russian spy to Estonia. But Artem Zinchenko isn’t just any spy. He was the first agent of Russia’s military intelligence arrested by Estonia, in 2017, then traded back to Moscow a year later for an Estonian citizen in Russian custody. Zinchenko has now sought asylum from the very NATO country that unmasked and imprisoned him for spying against it.
Zinchenko’s defection has not been publicly disclosed by either side until now, in what must count as a humiliating blow not only to the Kremlin but also to his onetime masters in the GRU, as the former Soviet military intelligence service is still known.
Zarina Zabrinsky, The Kremlin’s Hybrid War in Moldova- Byline Times
On 6 November, at 2:30pm, the protestors converged on the wide central street in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. According to the police, the rally was attended by 1,700; the organisers claimed that 50,000 took part.
The demographics appeared to be strikingly homogenous. About 80% were women in their 60s to 80s, wearing ethnic headscarves common in villages and unusual for residents of the capital. The police blocked the main street, preventing the rally afrom moving further. No violence was observed.
Participants and speakers addressed the crowd in Romanian – the official language of Moldova – and Russian, which is recognised as “the language of communication” by the laws of the country, a former Soviet republic.
This is the Ukrainian air defence at work- stunning!
Michael Kofman: 'After Kherson, gains for Ukraine may come at slower pace'- The Kyiv Independent
The KI: Now that the Ukrainian forces have retaken Kherson, what prospects does it open for the counteroffensive? How can Ukraine use this momentum?
Michael Kofman: I think Ukraine has the initiative, and from the standpoint of morale it does have momentum. Ukraine may now shift the bulk of the forces there to a different front, but they likely need rest and refit. The fighting in Kherson was grinding and costly.
As winter approaches, November and December in particular are difficult months to conduct offensives. Russian forces will seek to entrench for the winter, using the Dnieper (Dnipro River) as a natural defensive barrier in the south. In the east their position remains vulnerable, trying to retain a defensive line between Troitske, Svatove, Kreminna. It may be smart for Ukraine to keep pushing now, before mobilization can increase Russian manpower availability in 3-4 months, but weather conditions and force availability may make that unsound. The short answer is, it depends.
Tom Nichols, Lance the Boil- The Atlantic
Trump is back. Twice impeached, facing a slew of legal and financial issues, the disgraced former president made good on his threat to run in 2024 in a weird and draggy hour-long mess of a speech to the faithful last night at Mar-a-Lago. The announcement was everything you’d expect from a Trump performance: the accordion hands, the singsong voice, the tussle with the teleprompter as if the machine were a hostile headmaster testing him on Latin declensions.
