Sept 19 Buonasera Mag
Day 208: Izyum, Pivdennoukrainsk NPP, Bilohorivka, Strelechya, Milley, 3.7m tonnes, NATO, Switzerland, Hungary, Modi. A&Ps-Africk, Avdeeva, Kreko, Pomerantsev, Theiner, Shekhovtsov, Lautman, Kurvov
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…
Russia launched missiles at the 'Pivdennoukrainsk' NPP, near Mykolaiv, that fell 300 meters from the nuclear reactors last night. The building of the NPP was damaged by the shock wave, hydroelectric unit of the Ukrainian energy complex was shut down. The blast took place 300 metres away from the reactors and damaged power plant buildings shortly after midnight, Energoatom said in a statement. The attack has also damaged a nearby hydroelectric power plant and transmission lines.
General Staff: Ukrainian military hits Russian strongholds, control points, air defense systems. Since Saturday, Ukraine's Air Force has carried out 20 airstrikes, successfully hitting 15 Russian strongholds and four sites with its air defense systems.
Serhiy Haiday reports that the Bilohorivka settlement, Luhansk oblast, was liberated by Ukrainian Armed Forces.
UK Min of Defense: Russia has highly likely lost at least four combat jets in Ukraine within the last 10 days, taking its attrition to approximately 55 since the start of the invasion. Russia’s continued lack of air superiority remains one of the most important factors underpinning the fragility of its operational design in Ukraine.
Four medics have been killed and two patients injured after Russian forces fired at a psychiatric hospital in the village of Strelechya, the governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov, has said.
Putin has vowed to continue his attack on Ukraine and warned that Moscow could ramp up its strikes on the country’s vital infrastructure if Ukrainian forces targeted facilities in Russia. Putin said the “liberation” of Ukraine’s entire eastern Donbas region remained Russia’s main military goal and that he saw no need to revise it. “We aren’t in a rush,” he said, after the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Samarkand.
Forbes: New Russian 3rd Army Corps lasts only few days in Ukraine. Forbes writes that after the 3rd Army Corps rushed to Kharkiv Oblast last week, “the corps just melted away” due to the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Russia has reacted to its military setbacks in the past week by increasing its missile attacks on civilian infrastructure even if they do not have any military impact, according to the latest intelligence report from the British Ministry of Defence.
Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has cautioned that it is still unclear how Russia might react to the latest battlefield setbacks in Ukraine, calling for vigilance among US troops during a visit to a military base in Poland aiding Ukraine’s war effort. “The war is not going too well for Russia right now. So it’s incumbent upon all of us to maintain high states of readiness, alert”.
A total of 165 ships with 3.7 m tonnes of agricultural products onboard have left Ukraine under a deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey to unblock Ukrainian sea ports, the Ukrainian infrastructure ministry has said.
NATO: Sanctions begin to harm Russia's military industry. Western sanctions are starting to hurt Russia's ability to make advanced weaponry for the war in Ukraine, Rob Bauer, who chairs NATO's Military Committee, told Reuters.
Switzerland: “Switzerland is deeply disturbed by the new reports of mass graves in an until recently Russian-occupied territory, this time in Izyum. The willful killing of protected persons is a grave breach of International Humanitarian Law. Switerzland calls for an indepedent and thorough investigation while taking care of the right and needs of the victims and their relatives. We recall the existing jurisdiction of national authorities and the International Criminal Court. Impunity must end.”
Activists from environmental group Greenpeace on Saturday blocked a shipment of Russian gas from unloading at a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in northern Finland, the terminal owner and Greenpeace said.
Indian PM Modi told Putin that “today’s time is not a time for war” when the pair met during a regional Asia summit in Uzbekistan. Putin told Modi he knew of India’s “concerns” about the conflict, echoing language he had used with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, the day before.
Large majority of EU Parliament voted to refer to Hungary as “No longer a democracy,” calling Orban’s electoral autocracy a threat to European values. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League voted against the resolution, thus supporting Orban, Putin’s proxy in the EU.
Arkady Ostrovsky: Alla Pugachaeva, the single most famous Soviet and post Soviet pop diva, an icon across the former Soviet space and particularly among the generation of Putin supporters speaks out clearly and simply against the war. This is an important count-down moment. “Pugacheva is as close to universally loved national royalty as it gets—admired as much or more by otherwise apolitical, war-ignoring masses across the country than urban intelligentsia.”
Germany’s Die Linke could split into two parties over the Ukraine war, as the ailing leftwing outfit’s indecisive stance over economic sanctions against Russia triggered a series of high-profile resignations this week.
Simona Mangiante, wife of Trump adviser George Papadopoulos (the convicted felon who pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications w Russia) is running for office in Italy- her platform: pro-Putin/ItalyExit. Papadopoulous endorsed her by denying she is a Russian agent.
Sovereign Italy is headed by a group of politicians who had been very vocal after Russia renewed its attack on Ukraine on February 24. They were often invited on Italian TV political programmes, pushing Russian narratives. In July 2022 they created this coalition of anti-American, anti-Nato, and pro-Kremlin ‘parties’.
Peter Pomerantsev, Despite his defeats, Putin still shapes our perceptions. Let’s fight him at his own game
The Ukrainians have (again) done what nobody believed they could. They have (again) defeated the supposedly mighty Russia on the battlefield, shown up the underlying incompetence and moral rot of the Putin system. It took them just six days to take back whole swaths of territory in north-eastern Ukraine that it took Russia six months to conquer. The Russian military, political and propaganda elites are all blaming each other: rifts that usually rumble under the surface are now visible to all. Putin looks shaken.
Thomas C. Theiner, Germany is holding back its Panzers
Just a saw a German Panzer commander tweet that it takes years to fully master the Leopard 2. True... if you are in the German Panzer troops, not one of whom has seen actual combat. All they do is 3-4 meek exercises a year.
Meanwhile ALL Ukrainian tank troopers have 100s of hours of combat experience. They have destroyed hundreds of russian tanks in combat, stormed russian positions, fought off russian attacks.
The Ukrainians are masters of their craft, while the Germans are just theorists. Give the Ukrainians all your Leopards you clowns.
Andrey Kurkov: dispatches from a country under siege- The Guardian
In Diary of an Invasion, the Ukrainian novelist has documented Russia’s attack on his homeland. In these extracts, he recounts the first weeks of the conflict.
6 March 2022
I never thought that so many things could happen in a week, so many terrible things.
On 24 February 2022, the first Russian missiles fell on Kyiv. At five in the morning, my wife and I were awakened by the sound of explosions. It was very hard to believe that the war had begun. That is, it was already clear that it had, but I did not want to believe this. You have to get used psychologically to the idea that war has begun. Because from that moment on, war determines your way of life, your way of thinking, your way of making decisions.
Olga Lautman, The Bewilderment of Kremlin Propagandists- Cepa
The signs that the Russian regime’s facade was cracking emerged in June, when Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, used a televised meeting with Putin at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum to state that Crimea and Donbas weren’t Russian territory, a statement all the more extraordinary because in January Tokayev’s tottering presidency was saved from a popular uprising by Russian troops.
Biden unequivocal…
Queen Elizabeth II- Funeral
