Quotes of the Day:
"If there is no Ukrainian strong army, there will be no Ukraine, and that will be the case when everyone will understand... it's not the war in Ukraine, it's the war in Europe. We are defending our country, our land. We are not attacking anyone, because that is immoral."
- Volodymyr Zelensky
"We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
- Winston Churchill
"Ukraine is a generous country and people. We give Russians two Easter’s to perish on our land."
- Ukrainian-American Special Forces Soldier
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 16 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. The Mozart Group
3. U.S., allies plan for long-term isolation of Russia
4. 'Inclined Toward Treason': More And More Russian Soldiers Reportedly Refusing To Fight In Ukraine
5. Ukraine’s warning to Russia as war shifts east: ‘We are not going to give up a millimeter of our Motherland’
6. GUY ADAMS reveals how Ukrainians are holding out beneath Mariupol
7. Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers
8. The New Democratic Alliance May Not Outlast the Ukraine War
9. Russia Crisis Military Assessment: How Ukraine can take the fight to Russia
10. Russia and China nightmare as UK scientists analyse secrets of Putin's prized fighter jet
11. What other weapons could the West wheel out?
12. Putin’s Ukraine Gamble Pivots to a Very Different Battlefield
13. 'A family tradition': Special Forces candidates train across North Carolina for Robin Sage
14. Putin Has A Problem: NATO Is Sending Artillery and Tanks to Ukraine
15. US Army using lessons from Ukraine war to aid own training
16. Russia Loses Another General, Vows ‘Elimination’ of Resistance
17. More Than 1,500 Books Have Been Banned in Public Schools, and a U.S. House Panel Asks Why
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 16 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 16 (putin's war)
Frederick W. Kagan, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Karolina Hird
April 16, 5:00 pm ET
Ukraine’s sinking of the Moskva was a significant event that has likely triggered intensified Russian air and missile attacks in retaliation, but the decisive operations of this phase of the war will still be conducted on the ground in eastern Ukraine. The commitment of the Black Sea Fleet’s naval infantry to the fight around Mariupol some weeks ago meant that Russian naval operations would play a supporting role in the conflict. Increased Russian air and missile attacks are also unlikely to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war, since there is no reason to assess that Russia has been holding enough air and missile capability in reserve to tip the balance if it is now committed. This report, and likely future reports as well, will thus remain focused on the ground operations, especially those in eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces continued to amass troops around Izyum in preparation for continuing offensive operations in eastern Ukraine. The Russians continued small-scale attacks in the vicinities of Izyum, Popasna, and the area around Rubizhne and Severodonetsk—sometimes with artillery, sometimes with mechanized forces. These attacks have not made significant gains so far. It is unclear if they are part of a rolling offensive operation into which Russian reinforcements will be fed as they become available or if they are setting conditions for a larger-scale, better-coordinated offensive that will start soon.
The specific terrain on which battles in eastern Ukraine will be fought may constrain the Russians’ ability to take advantage of the number of forces they are amassing for the attack. Eastern Ukraine is famous for being superb terrain for large-scale mechanized maneuver because of the World War II campaigns of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. It is far from clear, however, that Russian forces will find it much more conducive to rapid decisive mechanized operations than other parts of the theater. The Russians have struggled repeatedly to seize built-up areas rapidly or even to reduce them once encircled. They will have to seize several significant population centers to achieve their apparent objectives in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, however, including Severodonetsk, Rubizhne, Lysychansk, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk, as well as several smaller towns. The difficulties they have encountered taking Rubizhne do not bode well for their rapid success against other built-up areas. The ground itself is also challenging as it is crisscrossed by many small water features and, at the moment, still very muddy. The reinforcements the Russians are bringing into this part of the theater will help, of course, but large numbers of much fresher Russian troops struggled to take relatively small population centers north, west, and northeast of Kyiv even before getting into the Kyiv suburbs proper. The Russians must take the major population centers in Donetsk and Luhansk, however, if they are to achieve the operation’s stated goals.
Russian forces will likely continue operating along three primary axes of advance in Donbas: from Izyum south via Slovyansk toward Russian-controlled Donetsk Oblast near Debaltseve; from Rubizhne and Severodonetsk southwest toward the Izyum-Debaltseve highway; and from Popasna west toward that highway. They may open an additional axis of advance from near Donetsk City to the north toward Kramatorsk as well, according to the Ukrainian General Staff.[1] The Russian main effort currently appears to be from Izyum southeast along the highway to Slovyansk. The drive west from Popasna is presumably meant to reach the Izyum-Debaltseve highway, possibly setting conditions to encircle or drive off Ukrainian forces defending against a Russian advance from the Debaltseve area to the northwest. The purpose of the direct assaults on Severodonetsk and Rubizhne is less clear. The Russians may be trying to seize those cities as part of the objective to seize Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, rather than waiting until they have been encircled and trying to reduce them at that point. They may alternatively be seeking to fix Ukrainian forces in that northeastern sector of the salient the Russians intend to encircle. The general pattern of operations and apparent movements of Russian reinforcements suggest that the drive from Izyum to the southwest will be the main effort in this part of the theater but that the Russians will continue to attack on multiple axes that are not immediately mutually supporting.
Ukrainian officials report that Russia has concentrated as many as 22 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in the vicinity of Izyum, but the Russians will struggle to take advantage of that force concentration if they cannot open up parallel axes of advance—something they have notably struggled to do in other parts of the theater. Russian forces are apparently attempting to drive southwest from Izyum toward Barvinkove, which could allow them to open up an axis of advance in addition to the main Izyum-Slovyansk highway. But Barvinkove is a large enough settlement to delay the Russian advance if Ukrainian forces hold it, and the route from Izyum to Barvinkove is not really parallel to the Izyum-Slovyansk highway—Barvinkove is roughly 50 kilometers west of Slovyansk. Taking Barvinkove does not cut the only Ukrainian ground line of communication (GLOC) to Slovyansk, moreover, as another main GLOC to Slovyansk from the west runs through Kramatorsk, about 45 kilometers southeast of Barvinkove.
The individual Russian offensives in the east are thus unlikely to proceed dramatically more successfully than similar operations around Kyiv unless the Russians change their operational patterns significantly. The Russians could overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders by the sheer number of different axes of advance forcing the Ukrainians to spread themselves too thinly. But the Ukrainians’ demonstrated will and ability to hold much larger Russian forces at bay in built-up areas for a considerable time suggests that many if not most or even all of these Russian drives will stall. This discussion does not take account of the quality and physical and psychological state of the Russian forces, which we have considered in detail in previous reports, and which makes a sudden dramatic Russian offensive success even less likely.
Key Takeaways
- The Russians and their proxies appear to be preparing to declare victory in the Battle of Mariupol, as Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) head Denis Pushilin opened a United Russia party office in the city.
- Russian reinforcements drawn from troops that had fought around Kyiv have appeared in eastern Ukraine. Those reinforcements have not received sufficient time to recover physically or mentally from their losses and defeat around Kyiv and are unlikely to generate combat power proportionate to their numbers.
- Ukrainian officials claim that the Russians canceled the deployment to Syria of one of the last combat units that had not previously seen combat in Ukraine and sent that unit toward Donbas.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time:
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate supporting efforts);
- Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv and Izyum;
- Supporting effort 2—Southern axis;
- Supporting effort 3—Sumy and northeastern Ukraine.
Main effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate main effort—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian forces continued their slow advance through Mariupol on April 16. Elements of Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) forces arrived at the central Mariupol beach from the north.[2] Fighting continued in central Mariupol itself.[3] Russian forces entered the base of the Ukrainian National Guard’s 12th Operations Brigade and DNR forces seized a police station in central Mariupol relatively close to the beach.[4] Ukrainian forces continued to defend in pockets but especially in the Azovstal plant, which Russian and proxy forces continued attacking heavily.[5] The Russians' use of Tu-22M Backfire bombers to attack to Azovstal plant may suggest that they intend to end the battle soon by devastating the remaining defenders with firepower.[6]
Ukrainian advisor to the mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushenko claimed that DNR head Denis Pushilin opened an office of the United Russia party in Mariupol on April 15.[7] This action likely indicates that the DNR is preparing to begin governing Mariupol (or what remains of it) soon. Andryushenko further claimed that Russian “filtration” measures are reaching a crescendo in Mariupol and that the Russians have announced a complete lockdown of the city on Monday, April 18, to allow them to complete the “filtration” process.[8] The Battle of Mariupol and the fight in Donbas generally have cost the Russians and proxies dearly, however. Social media confirmed that the funeral of the deputy commander of the Russian 8th Combined Arms Army, Major General Vladimir Petrovich Frolov, was held on April 16.[9]
Subordinate main effort—Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian troops continued shelling Severodonetsk, Rubizhne, and Popasna, and Russian troops made small tactical attacks around Popasna on April 15.[10] The shelling has destroyed much of the cities’ infrastructure.[11] Russian forces made no significant territorial gains in these areas in the past 24 hours, however.
The Ukrainian General Staff reported artillery strikes in and around Avdiivka on April 16, possibly in preparation for an offensive operation in that area.[12] Avdiivka is just north of Donetsk City on the N20 highway toward Kramatorsk, which lies about 70 kilometers to the northwest. A Russian advance along this axis could complement the drive from Izyum to the southeast via Slovyansk toward Debaltseve.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv and Izyum: (Russian objective: Advance southeast to support Russian operations in Luhansk Oblast, and fix Ukrainian forces around Kharkiv in place)
Russian forces continued their build-up in and around Izyum over the last 24 hours, including deploying elements of units that had fought around Kyiv into the area. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that elements of the 6th and 20th Combined Arms Armies as well as of the 1st Guards Tank Army that had been operating in the Kharkiv and eastern Ukraine area for some time were being reinforced by elements of the 35th and 36th Combined Arms Armies and the 106th Airborne Division, all of which fought and suffered heavy losses around Kyiv.[13] The General Staff claimed that elements of the 68th Army Corps of the Eastern Military District were also operating in eastern Ukraine. The forces of the 68th Corps likely came from the 39th Separate Motorized Rifle brigade, based on Sakhalin Island.[14] Those troops likely have not previously participated in the fighting in Ukraine, as the Ukrainian General Staff claimed that their scheduled rotation into Syria was canceled to facilitate their entry into the war.[15] The Ukrainian General Staff claims that Russian forces have amassed as many as 22 BTGs around Izyum for operations toward Slovyansk and Barvinkove.[16]
Actual combat activity on the Izyum axis was limited, however, with the Ukrainian General Staff reporting one significant attempt to drive on the village of Dovgenske, roughly 20 kilometers south of Izyum on the Slovyansk highway, that the Ukrainians claim to have repulsed.[17]
Russian forces around Kharkiv City generally held their positions, although the commander of Ukraine’s Joint Operational Headquarters claimed on April 16 that Ukrainian forces regained some territory around the city.[18]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern axis: (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
There has been no significant change around Kherson in the past 24 hours.
Supporting Effort #3—Sumy and Northeastern Ukraine: (Russian objective: Withdraw combat power in good order for redeployment to eastern Ukraine)
There was no significant change in this area in the past 24 hours.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces concentrating around Izyum will continue small-scale offensive operations to the southeast and southwest and may begin larger-scale offensives.
- Russia and its proxies may declare victory in the Battle of Mariupol.
- Russian forces could launch a new offensive operation from Donetsk City to the north through Avdiivka toward Kramatorsk.
- Russian attacks on Severodonetsk, Popasna, and Rubizhne will continue.
[6] Russian Bombers Just Carpet-Bombed Mariupol (forbes.com); https://t dot me/andriyshTime/292
[14] 68th Army Corps - Coastal Missile-Artillery Forces (BRAV) (globalsecurity.org); [“The winners of tank biathlon in Sakhalin given rental house keys,”] Sakhalin.info, August 21, 2017, https://sakhalin.info/news/137455; [“39th motorized rifle brigade conducted large-scale military exercises in Sakhalin,”] ACTB, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfk2n2zGI0; [“2017 Day of the Motor Troops,”] Ok Group, https://ok.ru/video/39848380978; [“39th separate motorized rifle brigade - Military Unit 35390,”] Russian Military Units, https://voinskayachast.net/suhoputnie-voyska/motostrelkovie/vch35390; [“39th separate motorized rifle brigade - Military Unit 35390,”] Russian Military Units, https://voinskayachast.net/suhoputnie-voyska/motostrelkovie/vch35390; [“39th Independent Motorized Rifle Red Banner Brigade (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk),”] Wikimapia, http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=46.888662&lon=142.757592&z=16&m=b&show...я-отдельная-мотострелковая-Краснознамённая-бригада&search=sakhalin
2. The Mozart Group
Join us in the fight for Ukraine
Our mission is to build sustainable capacity in the Ukraine military that will enable it to evict Russian troops from Ukrainian soil while undermining Russia’s military and national resolve to continue the war. We do this through training, equipping, and advising Ukraine SOF and Resistance units
A vital component of our mission is battlefield clearance — removing the tons of un-expended ordnance, mines and booby traps that litter the area previously occupied by Russian troops. Our goal is to enable the people of Ukraine to return to their homes and begin rebuilding their lives, free from threat.
Additionally, we are expanding our activities to include comprehensive military information support operations designed to inform and influence frontline Russian troops of the realities of fighting an illegal war in Ukraine.
The Group conducts a continuous assessment of Ukrainian and Russian techniques, tactics and procedures to ensure that its support keeps pace with dynamic conditions in the field.
Delivering critical capabilities to Ukrainian frontline units
3. U.S., allies plan for long-term isolation of Russia
I would say plan for as long as Putin remains in power.
U.S., allies plan for long-term isolation of Russia
A new strategy would mark a return to containment after years of seeking cooperation and coexistence with Moscow
Yesterday at 7:28 p.m. EDT
Nearly two months into Vladimir Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine, the Biden administration and its European allies have begun planning for a far different world, in which they no longer try to coexist and cooperate with Russia, but actively seek to isolate and weaken it as a matter of long-term strategy.
At NATO and the European Union, and at the State Department, the Pentagon and allied ministries, blueprints are being drawn up to enshrine new policies across virtually every aspect of the West’s posture toward Moscow, from defense and finance to trade and international diplomacy.
Outrage is most immediately directed at Putin himself, who President Biden said last month “can’t remain in power.” While “we don’t say regime change,” said a senior E.U. diplomat, “it is difficult to imagine a stable scenario with Putin acting the way he is.”
But the nascent new strategy goes far beyond the Kremlin leader, as planners are continuing to revise seminal documents that are to be presented in the coming months. Biden’s first National Security Strategy, legally required last year but still uncompleted, is likely to be significantly altered from initial expectations it would concentrate almost exclusively on China and domestic renewal. The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, sent last month in classified form to Congress, prioritizes what a brief Pentagon summary called “the Russia challenge in Europe,” as well as the China threat.
NATO’s first Strategic Concept document since 2010, when it sought a “true strategic partnership” with Russia, will be unveiled at the alliance summit in June. “Meaningful dialogue, as we strived for before, is not an option for Russia,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a news conference early this month.
The European Union has drawn up plans to cut its heavy dependency on Russian gas by two-thirds by the end of this year, and end all fossil fuel imports from Russia before 2030. “It is not so much about sanctions, but it is about articulating a path to zero, making sure that we become independent of Russian gas and oil,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said in a forum Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“For some, that will be a trajectory of months. For others, it might be years. But the Netherlands and other countries are dead serious about this,” Hoekstra said. “Never again the same mistake.”
Allies have announced major defense budget increases stretching far into the future. Finland and Sweden are expected to apply for NATO membership ahead of the June summit in Madrid, a significant shift in the balance of European security that would also sharply increase the alliance’s military presence near Russia.
A week ago, Biden signed bills ending normal trade relations with Russia and codifying his U.S. ban on Russian oil imports. Last week, the United Nations General Assembly voted to suspend Russia’s membership from the U.N. Human Rights Council, and a long-simmering movement to revise the membership and powers of the Security Council, where Russia freely uses its veto power, gained new impetus.
Few Western leaders are willing to venture a guess as to when, and how, the Ukraine crisis will play out. Many of the proposed changes “can’t be fully decided until we know how this conflict ends,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, senior Pentagon official and deputy NATO secretary general. “Does it end?” Or does it drag on with an uneasy cease-fire, with “no war, no peace, for several years?”
But the long-term strategy is being drawn up even as the allies address the immediate crisis with escalating sanctions against Moscow, weapons aid to Ukraine, and the deployment of tens of thousands of their own troops to NATO’s eastern border. Many of those measures and more are now expected to stay permanently in place, according to public leader statements and conversations with eight senior U.S. and foreign officials, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door planning.
“At the end of the day, what we want to see is a free and independent Ukraine, a weakened and isolated Russia and a stronger, more unified, more determined West,” Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan said last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We believe that all three of those objectives are in sight.”
Some have questioned both the wisdom of the plans and the staying power of the West, advising against a return to the “containment” policy that governed relations with the Soviet Union. Others have said the Ukraine crisis, and its profound effect on Europe, offer an opportunity for the United States to withdraw from at least some of its expensive, self-assumed responsibilities to defend the free world.
“If anything,” historian Stephen Wertheim argued this month in Foreign Affairs magazine, “the war has strengthened the case for strategic discipline, by offering a chance to encourage Europe to balance against Russia while the United States concentrates on security in Asia and renewal at home.”
Not everyone favors the long-term isolation of Moscow. In France, where President Emmanuel Macron is locked in a surprisingly close reelection race with the surging candidacy of Marine Le Pen, she has called for reconciliation between NATO and Russia and has reiterated a pledge to pull France out of the alliance’s integrated command. And there are voices in Germany in favor of keeping the door open to dialogue with the Kremlin to facilitate an eventual rapprochement.
In the United States, the issue is one of the few in which Biden has strong bipartisan support. Backing for a tough line against Russia appears also to have subdued Republican disdain for NATO, a hallmark of the Trump administration, as alliance members from Washington to Russia’s western border insist that the need for, and the reality of, a common stand is higher than ever before.
But if the immediacy of Ukraine dissipates, along with daily images of new horrors there, disagreements inevitably will arise over increased defense spending, the need to engage with Russia on issues such as nonproliferation, charges that attention is being pulled away from China, and disruptions of trade that bring rising prices at home that disrupt the president’s domestic agenda.
“We must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul,” Biden said during a visit to Warsaw last month, outlining the fight as one between democracy and autocracy. “We must remain unified today and tomorrow and the day after and for the years and decades to come. It will not be easy. There will be costs.”
The last major overhaul of relations with Russia, guiding hopes after the collapse of the Soviet Union, came in 1997, when NATO leaders and Moscow approved the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security.” Reflecting “the changing security environment in Europe, … in which the confrontation of the Cold War has been replaced with the promise of closer cooperation among former adversaries,” it said they would act together to build “a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic Area.”
As it sought to tie Russia to interdependency, the Founding Act included specific commitments to respect states’ sovereignty, peacefully settle disputes, and, on NATO’s part, an intention to avoid any additional permanent stationing of “substantial combat forces” on Russia’s borders. It also specifically said it was not intended to “delay, limit or dilute NATO’s opening for the accession of new members.”
In subsequent years, those commitments were often tested, most recently before the current crisis by Russian’s 2014 invasion of parts of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, and resulting Western sanctions. But even after those events, Europe and the United States eased back into a relationship with Russia, either out of economic imperatives, as with Europe’s energy imports, or out of desire, as when former president Donald Trump bragged about his deep bond with Putin.
But at an emergency NATO summit last month, “leaders agreed to reset our deterrence and defense for the long term,” Stoltenberg said. “To face a new security reality” with substantially more forces in the east, more jets in the skies and more ships at sea. Russia has “walked away” from the Founding Act, he said later. “That doesn’t exist any more.”
A senior European official said that “the one lesson we take away from a Russian aggression that many thought could not be possible, is that here is a country that is ready to do something that no security guarantee or even plausible expectation [can ensure] that it can’t happen again.”
“We thought interdependence, connectiveness, would be conducive to stability because we had correlating interests. Now, we’ve seen this is not the case. Russia was highly connected with Europe, a globalized country.” the official said. “Interdependence, we’ve now seen, can entail severe risks, if a country is ruthless enough. … We have to adapt to a situation that is absolutely new.”
Several European policymakers said their current calculations are shaped by two major factors. The first is the expectation that any truce in Ukraine is likely to be temporary. Even if Putin agrees to lay down arms for the moment, many Europeans believe he will seek to regroup, rebuild the Russian military and attack again once he feels ready.
The second is a deep horror at the Russian military’s atrocities against civilians that have come to light since its forces pulled back toward eastern Ukraine in the past two weeks. Many believe Putin himself may need to face war crimes charges in front of international tribunals.
The combination means many Europeans feel their continent will be unstable and insecure so long as Putin is in the Kremlin. And if they are not yet willing to embrace an active effort to oust his regime, support is growing there, as well as in the United States, to permanently cut off his country.
“There is growing realization that this is a long-term situation and that a strategy of containment, a strategy of defense, is forming,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said in an interview. “Support Ukraine as much as you can, sanction Russia as much as you can, do as much as you can do to reduce dependence on Russia however you can and finally, yes, put more emphasis on military defense.”
Rinkevics was among the E.U. foreign ministers who had breakfast in Luxembourg this week with the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to discuss war crimes.
“When it comes to the investigation of all the war crimes, it cannot stop at the field commander, and in Russia, the ultimate commander in chief is the president of the Russian Federation,” Rinkevics said. “The feeling after Bucha,” the Kyiv suburb where withdrawing Russian troops left scores of dead civilians in the streets, some apparently tortured and executed, “is that it will be very difficult to speak with Putin or anyone in the Russian government without remembering what happened.”
Apparently strong backing for the war among Russians has also caused a recalculation among allied policymakers about a long-standing effort to draw a distinction between the country’s population and its leadership, said Lithuanian Vice Defense Minister Margiris Abukevicius. Russians appear to have the leaders they want, he said — another reason to dig in and prepare for a long standoff.
“There is collective responsibility,” Abukevicius said. “At the beginning, we were saying ‘Putin’s war.’ Now, we are more and more saying ‘Russia’s war.’”
4. 'Inclined Toward Treason': More And More Russian Soldiers Reportedly Refusing To Fight In Ukraine
For the strategic influence campaign. Good reporting from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
But how about the last line of the excerpt. Must be the equivalent of a bullet on your military evaluation report (NCOER/OER/FITREP, etc)
Excerpts:
“Citizens have the right to refuse to go to a foreign war and kill people,” said Agora lawyer Mikhail Benyash, who is providing legal services to some soldiers who have refused. “And they also have the right not to participate in a ‘special military operation.’ By definition, only special forces troops with training for such operations are sent [on ‘special military operations’]….”
An unknown number of soldiers, however, have been discharged from military service for refusing to fight in Ukraine, wrote rights lawyer Maksim Grebenyuk on Telegram. He said the question of “what are the consequences of refusing to serve in the ‘special military operation,’” as Moscow insists that its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine be euphemistically called, has become “the most frequent query” he has received in the last few weeks.
Grebenyuk also posted a photograph of a stamp that was purportedly placed in the military-service booklet of one soldier who refused to serve in Ukraine, whose name Grebenyuk withheld, but who reportedly served in the 136th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade.
“Inclined toward treason, lies, and deception,” the official-looking stamp reads.
'Inclined Toward Treason': More And More Russian Soldiers Reportedly Refusing To Fight In Ukraine
April 16, 2022 17:49 GMT
“They called me one morning from the office of the division commander in Amur Oblast, where Pavlik served,” said a woman from Russia’s Tambov region who asked to be identified only by her first name, Yelena. “The man said: ‘Do you know that they are searching for your son, that he is AWOL?’ Pavlik was supposed to board a troop train, but he didn’t. And five other soldiers were with him.”
Yelena’s son, Pavel, was serving in the Far Eastern Amur region when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Almost immediately, his unit was sent to the front, and he served almost 40 days in combat. Then his unit was sent back to Russia to regroup, Yelena told RFE/RL’s North.Realities. When his unit was preparing to return to Ukraine, Pavel refused.
“If he doesn’t want to go back, am I supposed to push him, to tell him, ‘Grab your weapon and go,’” Yelena said. “Those who haven’t been there have no right judge those who have.”
Yelena’s son is one of a significant but unknown number of Russian contract soldiers who have refused to either fight in Ukraine in the first place or who have fought and do not want to return.
Lawyer Pavel Chikov, founder of the Agora legal-aid NGO, has written on Telegram that more than 1,000 military personnel and National Guard troops from at least seven regions have refused to go to Ukraine.
A Ukrainian soldier steps on signs that used to point in the direction of Russian cities that were removed from use in Odesa amid Moscow's invasion of Ukraine on April 14.
Ruslan Leviyev, the founder of the Conflict Intelligence Team, a Russian NGO that monitors open-source information about the Russian military, told Current Time that the actual number of these cases might be considerably larger and that the refusals could be severely hampering Russia’s efforts to regroup and renew its military operations in eastern Ukraine.
“The phenomenon of refusal is becoming systemic,” Leviyev said. “Such soldiers are found in practically every unit that has returned from Ukraine. According to our estimates, from 20 to 40 percent of the contract servicemen that returned from Ukraine and that are being readied to be sent back are refusing to return to combat.”
Leviyev said most of these soldiers are not deserters but could face legal ramifications for refusing to obey orders. To convict, however, prosecutors must demonstrate that the order was lawful and that the refusal to obey caused “substantial harm” to the military
“From the cases we have seen, they are being intimidated with threats of prosecution and being worked over by military prosecutors,” he said. “But so far no one has been prosecuted, according to what we have seen.”
Rights lawyers say the government’s unwillingness to call the invasion of Ukraine a “war” or to declare war or martial law could give dissenting servicemen some protection from the worst consequences of refusing to fight.
Destroyed Russian military vehicles on a street in the town of Bucha in the Kyiv region on March 1.
“Citizens have the right to refuse to go to a foreign war and kill people,” said Agora lawyer Mikhail Benyash, who is providing legal services to some soldiers who have refused. “And they also have the right not to participate in a ‘special military operation.’ By definition, only special forces troops with training for such operations are sent [on ‘special military operations’]….”
An unknown number of soldiers, however, have been discharged from military service for refusing to fight in Ukraine, wrote rights lawyer Maksim Grebenyuk on Telegram. He said the question of “what are the consequences of refusing to serve in the ‘special military operation,’” as Moscow insists that its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine be euphemistically called, has become “the most frequent query” he has received in the last few weeks.
Grebenyuk also posted a photograph of a stamp that was purportedly placed in the military-service booklet of one soldier who refused to serve in Ukraine, whose name Grebenyuk withheld, but who reportedly served in the 136th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade.
“Inclined toward treason, lies, and deception,” the official-looking stamp reads.
“Refused to participate in the special military operation on the territory of the LNR, DNR, and Ukraine,” it continued, using the abbreviations adopted by the Moscow-backed separatists in parts of eastern Ukraine to designate the territory they claim and which Moscow has recognized as sovereign countries.
The bodies of dead Russian soldiers are seen atop a Russian APC in the Kyiv region early in the fighting.
Grebenyuk said the soldier told him he had served seven months in Syria and had been granted “rest and rehabilitation leave,” which was rescinded when he was ordered to go to Ukraine.
In a post on Twitter, Leonid Volkov, a top aide to imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, wrote: “They had a stamp made? That means it is a mass phenomenon. Good.”
Such a stamp in one’s military-service booklet could make it difficult for a serviceman to find a job or enroll in higher education.
The Russian military insists its war in Ukraine is largely proceeding according to plan, but Western intelligence analysts have documented significant lapses in supply, communications, preparation, and other areas that have hampered its operations. Moscow has said 1,351 servicemen have been killed since the war was launched on February 24, but other sources say the real figure is much higher. The Ukrainian military estimates that more than 18,000 Russian troops have been killed.
A Ukrainian soldier holds up the emblem of an elite unit of Russia's armed forces near destroyed Russian tanks in the village of Dmytrivka, close to Kyiv, on April 2.
Agora lawyer Benyash said he believes the number of such refusals to fight will increase as the human costs of the war become clearer in Russia.
“I think that as more zinc coffins come back from Ukraine, the more people there will be in Russia who have no desire to be next,” he said.
“Such a position will become socially acceptable, understood, and accepted,” he added. “The mood in society is changing. Earlier, a soldier had to make such a decision alone, at their own risk. But now there are already examples and people can see the consequences. They aren’t being shot; they don’t face tribunals; they aren’t being sent to prison.”
Written by Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RL’s North.Realities and Russian Service and Current Time.
5. Ukraine’s warning to Russia as war shifts east: ‘We are not going to give up a millimeter of our Motherland’
Resolve. Resistance. Resilience.
The resistance/Territorial Defense Forces have acquitted themselves very well and made important contributions so far. However, the fight in the east is going to take strong conventional capabilities - artillery, armored and mechanized forces, and airpower. Citizen's resistance will still be important, especially in urban areas but Ukraine will need advanced conventional capabilities to maneuver and to defeat the maneuver forces of Russia.
Ukraine’s warning to Russia as war shifts east: ‘We are not going to give up a millimeter of our Motherland’
The Territorial Defense Forces have been critical to the Ukrainian resistance. One of their leaders spoke with Grid about the coming battle for the east.
The focus in the war in Ukraine is shifting to the country’s east as Russian President Vladimir Putin says negotiations are at a “dead end” and the Russian military redeploys troops and equipment from areas closer to the capital, Kyiv. After struggling — and ultimately failing — to capture Kyiv, Moscow’s forces are regrouping in territory they already know well: in and around the Donbas region, the focus of the Russian incursion in 2014. Addressing his nation this past weekend, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that “Russian troops will move to even larger operations in the east of our state.” On Monday, a senior U.S. defense official, speaking to the Associated Press, warned of a long Russian convoy heading in the direction of the eastern Ukrainian city, Izium; it is said to be armed with reinforcements — artillery, as well as air and infantry support. Satellite imagery matches the American account.
Maxar satellite imagery collected on April 8 identified a large military convoy consisting of hundreds of vehicles (including armored vehicles, trucks with towed artillery and support equipment) that extends for at least 8 miles moving south through the Ukrainian town of Velykyi Burluk. (Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies.)
A critical part of the Ukrainian resistance, as it gears up for this new phase in the fighting, are the country’s Territorial Defense Forces. Comprised of civilians — some with pervious military training, some without — and called up to join the country’s armed forces, they have been a key factor in Ukraine’s effort to repel the Russian invasion. Their strength has swelled as the conflict drags on and currently stands at around 110,000, according to Ukrainian authorities. They, too, are now focusing on the threat in the east, according to Major Andriy Shulga, the spokesman for the Territorial Defense Forces deployed around the country’s eastern belt. Speaking to Grid from an undisclosed location, he said the biggest concern was for the safety of civilians.
“The Russian army does not respect any rules of war,” he said.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Grid: As both Ukrainian and Western officials warn of a new Russian offensive in the eastern part of your country, which particular regions or cities do you feel are most under threat?
Andriy Shulga: All the places close to the contact line — Ukraine’s de facto border with the breakaway eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which since 2014, have been under the control of pro-Russian separatists — are under threat. Zaporizhzhia, the Dnipro region, the Kharkiv region — the list is long, and I cannot name them all. We are getting reports that there is a growing accumulation of Russian forces around the entire region, from the north and the south.
Our main concern right now is the safety of civilians. We are working in cities, in villages, and we are also protecting infrastructure. We have been fighting the Russians since the end of February now, and it is clear that the Russian army does not respect any rules of war. It is obvious from the start. They lack dignity and honor. We will fight them, and we are ready for any new attacks, but we are really worried for the safety of the Ukrainian people.
People walk past a damaged building in Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 9. (Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
G: There is a general sense, certainly from the outside, that the Russian military has been poorly organized, and that it has made many strategic mistakes during the war. What is your view from what you have seen?
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AS: They did not expect us to fight back in the way that we have. We do not communicate with them, but what we know from the Russian soldiers that we have captured is that they expected to walk into Ukraine and be greeted with a warm welcome. It is clear that they are now demoralized.
From a military point of view, it seems like they are following old Soviet playbooks from decades ago. They are moving long columns of armored vehicles. For us, that makes it easier to target them.
G: As you gear up for what could turn out to be a phase of intense fighting, could you tell us about your greatest needs in terms of equipment?
AS: We are actually quite well equipped in Territorial Defense units with small arms, anti-tank weapons and portable missile systems. Recently we were also given permission to use more heavy weapons, as well as armored vehicles and heavy artillery. That was a new thing for our units. But we have been preparing and are ready for the next fight.
G: And other supplies — food, medical equipment, communications gear?
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AS: It was hard at the start of the war. That is when we have problems with supplies. For us, it was because of the number of people who were joining the Territorial Defense. The armed forces were fully prepared, but we had so many people coming that there were some delays in food supplies and in getting protective equipment like helmets. We needed a substantial amount of supplies in a very short period. But those problems have ended, which is really thanks to Ukrainian volunteers who have worked very hard to support everyone who is fighting to defend Ukraine. People are sharing food, and where we can as well, we are sharing with people whatever we have, food and other supplies that they need. We are one nation.
G: You are in the east — and among the most horrific images and reports, in the litany of horrors that we have witnessed in recent weeks, have been coming from Mariupol, the port city in southeastern Ukraine. What can you tell us about the situation there?
AS: The civilians and the forces there, both, are the true heroes. We did have Territorial Defense units deployed there, but I cannot say much to you about them because we lost contact with them because of the intensity of the attacks. Several units had to leave as well because of that.
Our government and leadership are focused on solving the most difficult problem there right now, which is evacuating civilians from the area and also bringing supplies. We are trying open safe corridors and doing everything we can.
A woman walks along a destroyed street in Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 9. (SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett)
G: Could you elaborate on the civilian evacuations from the east, which appear to have been chaotic and difficult amid continued Russian attacks?
AS: We have been working with everyone in the armed forces and the police to try and evacuate people and give priority to humanitarian convoys. If people need food, medical help, we provide whatever we can. We also provide shelter whenever we can across the region. Mariupol is a problematic area here because of the level of the fighting. In other areas, Dnipro has become a huge humanitarian hub for people from the region. They have food and shelter there, and many from there are moving farther away to the west of Ukraine.
G: Amid such devastation and against the backdrop of another round of intense fighting, especially where you are in the east, how would you describe the mood among your forces?
AS: We have Cossack spirit in our souls. We are not going to give up a millimeter of our Motherland. Ukraine is bound to win.
6. GUY ADAMS reveals how Ukrainians are holding out beneath Mariupol
If you are religiously inclined, please pray for the fighters and survivors in Mariupol.
GUY ADAMS reveals how Ukrainians are holding out beneath Mariupol
Fighting to the last man: GUY ADAMS reveals how, deep in a network of tunnels beneath the smoking ruins of Mariupol, a diminishing band of bruised and bloodied Ukrainian soldiers is still holding out against Russian savagery
- In Mariupol tunnels, a band of bloodied Ukrainian soldiers are fighting on
- The bruised and bloodied soldiers are still holding out against Russian savagery
- The heroics reflect the critical nature of the unbelievable struggle for Mariupol
PUBLISHED: 18:12 EDT, 15 April 2022 | UPDATED: 19:44 EDT, 15 April 2022
Daily Mail · by Guy Adams for the Daily Mail · April 15, 2022
Occupying a sprawling network of Cold War-era bunkers, connected by mile after mile of dimly lit passageways, the remnants of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade prepare to mount a desperate last stand.
Pale, unshaven, exhausted after seven weeks of non-stop combat that has reduced the surrounding city of Mariupol to smoking ruins, they find themselves in a perilous position: outgunned, outnumbered and completely surrounded.
Maybe a third of their brothers-in-arms have already been killed or wounded, with roughly the same number taken captive by the Russians whose advance they so far have managed, against extraordinary odds, to frustrate. Food, water and ammunition are running scarce. The chances seem insurmountable. The situation hopeless. Yet they refuse to surrender.
‘We are the protectors of Ukraine in Mariupol, the 36th Marine Brigade, who will protect this city to the end,’ was how one of the 1,500 or so surviving fighters put it, in a video message this week.
Occupying a sprawling network of Cold War-era bunkers, connected by mile after mile of dimly lit passageways, the remnants of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade prepare to mount a desperate last stand
‘We did not give up our positions. We held every piece of this city for as long as we could, but the reality is that the city ended up blockaded, and so we could not receive any arms back-ups, or any food supplies. We thank every Ukrainian who believed in, and continues to believe in, the marines.
‘We’ve survived on this hope for a very long time and continue to survive. Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes!’
A second fighter, who produced a separate film showing roughly a dozen defiant-looking comrades holed up in a small windowless room deep below the Azovstal iron and steel works, declared: ‘Ukrainians must remember the cost of this struggle and believe that we will do the task until the end. Ukraine, Europe, world — we’re loyal to the end!’
The footage, shared via the messaging app Telegram on Wednesday, lays bare the remarkable fortitude that has allowed Ukrainian forces to cling on to parts of central Mariupol since the early stages of this war, despite the ferocious efforts of around 15,000 Russian troops whose political masters have for weeks assumed that the city’s fall is imminent.
The soldiers, one of them female, appear in one of the short films to be in various stages of physical exhaustion. One, with his feet swathed in bandages, reclines on an armchair next to a set of crutches. Another toys with a walkie-talkie. A third fiddles with his telephone. Those not asleep drum their feet, restlessly. A young man waves blearily at the camera.
As their haunted stares attest, it has been a terrible struggle that will almost certainly end with yet more pain. In a post on its official Facebook page, the brigade this week offered an insight into the scale of the suffering they have endured as the Russian stranglehold on Mariupol choked the ability of Ukraine’s air force to fly in food, ammunition and replacement weapons for their troops.
‘The enemy gradually pushed us back. They surrounded us with fire and are now trying to destroy us. For more than a month, the marines have fought without refilling ammunition, without food, without water, aside from the dregs of puddles, and have died in packs,’ it read.
‘The mountain of wounded now makes up almost half of the crew. Those whose limbs are not torn off can return to battle. Our infantry have all died and gunfighters are now led by cooks, contacts of our drivers and police officers. Even members of our orchestra. We are dying but fighting. But gradually we are coming to an end.’
The heroics reflect the critical nature of the unbelievable struggle for Mariupol, an industrial city on the Gulf of Azov which, prior to Putin’s invasion, was home to 450,000 people.
An essential strategic city, which would allow Russia to establish a ‘land bridge’ to the Crimea, the region Putin annexed in 2014, it came under heavy bombardment from the opening days of the war, which began on February 24, and has remained at the centre of hostilities ever since.
Drone footage shows that barely a building has survived undamaged and swathes of the blackened metropolis, which stands eight miles across and boasts a deep-sea port through which around a quarter of Ukraine’s exports normally flow, have been reduced to rubble and smoking ruins. Corpses and twisted wrecks of vehicles and tanks litter the streets.
According to the city’s mayor, Vadym Boichenko, 21,000 civilians have already been killed during the bombardment. Earlier this month, he said Russian forces had brought mobile cremation equipment to the city to dispose of the corpses and were taking bodies to a shopping centre where there are storage facilities and refrigerators.
Yesterday, Mariupol City Council repeated claims from residents that Russian troops were digging up bodies previously buried in residential courtyards and not allowing any new burials of those killed by the invading army.
‘A watchman has been assigned to each courtyard and is not allowing Mariupol residents to lay to rest dead relatives or friends,’ according to an unverified statement on the Telegram app. ‘Why the exhumation is being carried out... is unknown.’ Some have suggested the reason is to dispose of the evidence of war crimes.
The city has seen constant attacks on hospitals, schools, and, in mid-March, a theatre in which hundreds of women and children were sheltering. More than 300 died that night, in what the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe has said was ‘most likely... an egregious violation’ of humanitarian law. Around 100,000 more residents have yet to be evacuated.
Escaping Mariupol has been difficult and dangerous for refugees since the first week of the conflict, when Russian troops were able to largely surround the city to the north, east and west, while naval vessels were stationed to the south, allowing artillery fire to rain down from every direction.
Those who have escaped describe the carnage of the battlefield they left behind.
‘It’s like a horror movie. There’s nothing,’ said Oksana, who left with her three sons, sister, brother-in-law and two nieces. ‘Everything is bombed.’
Many tried several times to leave the basements where they were sheltering, but the fighting was too fierce. ‘It was so scary to come out; everything was exploding. We got back into the basement and tried again later,’ said Maryna.
Fortunately for the soldiers left behind to defend it, Ukrainian helicopters were initially able to fly in supplies, including large quantities of ammunition.
The troops defending its outskirts were among the best and most battle-hardened in Ukraine, many of them veterans of an eight-year conflict against separatist rebels loyal to Russia in the nearby regions of Luhansk.
They included not just the 36th Marine Brigade but also the Azov Battalion, an elite unit originally formed by a motley selection of football hooligans and far-Right activists in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Although it has since been subsumed into Ukraine’s national guard, and somewhat de-toxified, Azov’s unlovely history is central to the Kremlin’s rationale for pursuing the invasion, which posits that it’s a ‘special military operation’ designed to ‘liberate’ the country from neo-Nazis backed by Western powers.
Aiding this narrative — which has added to the strategic importance of securing Mariupol — several foreign volunteers also serve in Azov’s ranks, including a former care worker from Newark named Aiden Aslin, who fought in Syria and posts to social media under the alias Cossack Gundi. He was captured this week by Russians, who promptly released footage of him in handcuffs, having apparently been heavily beaten.
Yet Azov has proved hugely effective in combat against the conscripts of Russia’s regular army. In mid-March, it was credited with killing Major-General Oleg Mityaev, 47, commander of Russia’s feared 150th Motorised Rifle Division, in an ambush.
It wasn’t until March 24, a month after the start of the war, that Russian troops were finally able to penetrate the outskirts of the city. Since then, the Russians have been forced to fight for the city street by street, building by building, in an offensive that bears eerie similarities to Stalingrad, the World War II battle which saw German forces bogged down in the Soviet city for five bloody months of guerrilla warfare. Around two million died in what became one of the bloodiest encounters in warfare history.
Russia — for whom Stalingrad remains a source of immense national pride — now finds itself in the role of hostile invader, while Ukranian troops are the ruthless defenders of their homeland.
What’s more, Putin’s troops face a fiercely motivated opponent which boasts extensive local knowledge and an apparent desire to never give up.
By the start of this week, Ukrainian resistance had nonetheless been slowly but surely pushed back to three areas of the Mariupol: part of the city’s port, held by remnants of the country’s 56th Motorized Brigade and 10th Mountain Assault Brigade, the Ilyich Metallurgical Plant, where Azov’s forces were stationed, and that stronghold of the 36th Marine Brigade at the Azovstal steel and iron works, one of the largest industrial facilities in Europe, which measures three miles across and is often described as a ‘city within the city’.
Analysts believed around 4,000 troops remained, meaning the city’s defenders were outnumbered by around four to one. However the ensuing days saw around 1,000 Ukrainians surrender, having apparently run out of ammunition — helicopters bearing supplies have not been able to break through for several weeks — while the port was almost entirely over-run. The remainder of the Azov Battalion appears to have then managed to retreat to link up with the 36th Marine Brigade, holed up at the Azovstal works.
On Thursday morning, the commanders of both brigades released a video announcing that they will now jointly defend the huge facility. Effectively it will be where the battle for Mariupol is either finally lost or — against all conceivable odds — somehow won.
‘Long live Ukraine!’ said one. ‘We will continue to carry out combat tasks. Our morale is strong. We know what we’re doing and why we’re here. We will do whatever it takes to successfully complete our combat mission.’
His colleague described their remaining troops as ‘real soldiers. Heroes who stayed true to their oath. Loyal to the Ukrainian people and who continue to share the city with us. These are real men who have chosen the path of war.’
For the remaining Ukrainians, the steelworks where they are now digging in are almost tailor-made for guerrilla warfare. On the surface are mile after mile of warehouses, furnaces, power plants and chimneys, providing cover for occupying troops. And deep underground is a vast network of bunkers and tunnels, built under Soviet rule during the Cold War to safeguard the plant’s roughly 40,000 workers in the event of a nuclear attack.
The maze-like system — thought to contain around 1,500 Ukrainian troops — is highly secure and stretches to six storeys underground.
It’s believed to be almost impossible to penetrate by bombing from above and highly dangerous to clear out via man-to-man combat. ‘They can try, but they’ll be slaughtered because the defenders of the tunnel will absolutely have the tactical upper hand,’ says Alexander Grinberg, analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.
‘Perhaps the only reliable way to clear the place out would be to use a chemical weapon, or chlorine gas, but that would be quite complicated to funnel into the system and obviously would risk escalating the wider conflict.
‘It’s up to the Ukrainians whether they choose to surrender or instead fight until the very last man. So far, from what we have seen, they do seem to be choosing to fight to the last man.’
Analysts point out that such a resistance could continue for some time. Outnumbered fighters have in previous conflicts used tunnel systems to great effect. Most famously, Soviets used underground passages and sewers to get behind German lines in Stalingrad.
At Azovstal, the sheer size of the tunnel system potentially now allows Ukraine’s soldiers to mount guerrilla raids across a swathe of Mariupol, according to Michael Clarke, Visiting Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London.
‘For the occupants, the essence is not to have to fight in the tunnels but instead to use them to get around and pop up and carry out raids, to attack troops or vehicles and make a general nuisance of themselves. Russia will try to screen themselves from the plant and get on with occupying the city and maybe think they can starve them out.’
The outcome may hinge on how long supplies of food and water will allow occupants of the tunnels to survive. Either way, Clarke describes the last stand at the steel works as an ‘Alamo moment’ in which the Ukrainians are almost certain to eventually perish, but may be able to exert a seismic impact on the wider war.
‘They are going to go down fighting and the longer they can hold out the more they will stop Russians being able to redeploy north, which is what Putin really wants them to be doing,’ he says.
‘They can be a real nuisance and the more this continues, the more it becomes a Pyrrhic victory for Russia.’
Putin, meanwhile, is believed to be desperate to declare ‘victory’ in Ukraine by May 9, a national holiday when Russia celebrates the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Taking Mariupol and destroying the alleged Nazis of the Azov Battalion may allow him to do that.
But first, he must find a way to break a heroic collection of battle-hardened soldiers who, against massive odds, continue to ‘hold every piece of this city’ and seem set to remain there until the bitter end.
Daily Mail · by Guy Adams for the Daily Mail · April 15, 2022
7. Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers
Social media and the internet and software certainly add a new dimension to modern warfare. Crossing the line? How is this interpreted within the Law of Armed Conflict? Looking for international law experts to weigh in with legal analysis.
There may be ways to do this with dignity and provide a "service" to the families of the lost. They could provide an "accounting" that the Russian might not be doing but they would need to do this in a respectful way.. But the Ukrainians must fear and consider the potential and likely blowback - both the counterpropaganda from Russia (as noted below - Russians say see how the Ukrainians are abusing Russian soldiers) and the reaction of the international community. Ukraine must maintain the moral high ground to sustain international support. US diplomats and advisors, if they were present, need to advise and influence the Ukrainians on this.
Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers
Ukrainian officials say the use of facial recognition software could help end the brutal war. But some experts call it ‘classic psychological warfare’ that sets a gruesome precedent.
April 15, 2022 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow’s invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.
The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.
The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.
But some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers who may be thousands of miles from the drivers of the Kremlin’s war machine.
The West’s solidarity with Ukraine makes it tempting to support such a radical act designed to capitalize on family grief, said Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London. But contacting soldiers’ parents, she said, is “classic psychological warfare” and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts.
“If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s barbaric,’ ” she said. “And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: ‘Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?’ ”
Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.
Clearview employees now hold weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access. Ton-That recounted several “‘oh, wow’ moments” as the Ukrainians witnessed how much data — including family photos, social media posts and relationship details — they could gather from a single cadaver scan.
Some of them are using Clearview’s mobile app to scan faces while on the battlefield, he said. Others have logged in for training while stationed at a checkpoint or out on patrol, the night sky visible behind their faces.
“They’re so enthusiastic,” Ton-That said. “Their energy is really high. They say they’re going to win, every call.”
The company, Ton-That said, first offered its services last month to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense after he saw Russian propaganda claiming that soldiers captured there were actors or frauds.
The system had primarily been used by police officers and federal investigators in the United States to see whether a photo of a suspect or witness matched any others in their database of 20 billion images taken from social media and the public Internet.
But about 10 percent of the database has come from Russia’s biggest social network, VKontakte, known as VK, making it a potentially useful tool for battlefield scans, Ton-That said.
Clearview shared with The Post emails from three Ukrainian agencies — the National Police, the Defense Ministry and a third agency that asked the company to remain confidential — confirming the software was in use. Officials at those agencies and the IT Army declined to comment further or did not respond to requests for comment. Clearview declined to identify two other Ukrainian agencies it said were currently using its software.
In emails that Clearview shared with The Post, a representative of the Defense Ministry said it had tested Clearview by scanning photos of dead soldiers’ faces and were “pleasantly surprised” when the tool returned links to the Russians’ VK and Instagram accounts.
With the military’s encouragement, other agencies tested the technology, too, Ton-That said. A National Police official said in emails shared with The Post that the agency scanned the face of an unidentified body found in Kharkiv with its head caved in and was pointed to the VK profile of a 32-year-old man who had been photographed with supporters of the Kharkiv People’s Republic, a separatist group.
Ukrainian agencies, Ton-That said, have used the app to confirm the identities of people at military checkpoints and to check whether a Ukrainian is a possible Russian infiltrator or saboteur. He argued that the system could deter Russian soldiers from committing war crimes, for fear of being identified, and said the Ukrainians are considering using the tool to verify the identities of Ukrainian refugees and their hosts as they flee for safety.
A video that the IT Army posted to Telegram this month showed snippets of what the group characterized as conversations with Russian soldiers’ relatives. In one chat, someone who was sent photos of a Russian soldier’s bloodied face responded, “It’s photoshop!!! THIS CAN’T BE.” The sender wrote back, according to the footage: “This is what happens when you send people to war.”
In another conversation, a stranger sent a message to a Russian mother saying her son was dead, alongside a photo showing a man’s body in the dirt — face grimacing and mouth agape. The recipient responded with disbelief, saying it wasn’t him, before the sender passed along another photo showing a gloved hand holding the man’s military documents.
“Why are you doing this?” the recipient wrote back. “Do you want me to die? I already don’t live. You must be enjoying this.”
The stranger responded that young men were already dying, by the thousands. This is “the only way to stop all this madness,” the sender wrote. “How many more people must die?”
The Post could not independently verify the conversations, and attempts to reach the mother were unsuccessful. But other elements of the same video show Clearview’s facial recognition search interface alongside names of Russian soldiers. In one clip, the search of one corpse’s face reveals the VK profile of a man photographed standing on a beach. The man’s profile, which remains online, shows he followed online groups devoted to the Russian army as well as fitness, fishing and barbecue.
Beyond scanning corpses, Ukraine also is using facial recognition to identify Russian soldiers caught on camera looting Ukrainian homes and storefronts, an official with Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Ministry told The Post.
Mykhailo Fedorov, the head of that ministry, this month shared on Twitter and Instagram the name, hometown and personal photo of a man he said was recorded shipping hundreds of pounds of looted clothes from a Belarus post office to his home in eastern Russia. “Our technology will find all of them,” he wrote.
An official at the agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Clearview that it has used the system to identify people who had been detained in the country and check their social media for anything suspicious, including their “range of contacts.” More than 1,000 such searches were run within the first few weeks, the official said in an email that Clearview shared with The Post.
Some analysts said Ukraine could use the advanced technology to draw a contrast with Russia’s more rudimentary military equipment or to pursue humanitarian uses in a conflict marred by horrific Russian attacks.
But facial recognition search results are imperfect, and some experts worry that a misidentification could lead to the wrong person being told their child had died — or in the frenzy of war, could mean the difference between life or death. Privacy International, a digital-rights group, has called on Clearview to end its work in Ukraine, saying “the potential consequences would be too atrocious to be tolerated — such as mistaking civilians for soldiers.” (Ton-That has said Clearview’s search tool is accurate, including in cases of severe “facial damage.”)
The U.S. military used biometric scanners to collect the fingerprints, eye scans and face photos of people during the Afghanistan war, believing it could help confirm allies and identify threats. But during the troops’ rapid withdrawal last year, some of the devices were abandoned, raising fears that the sensitive data could be misused. (Clearview’s online system, Ton-That said, allows the company to quickly sever access if an account falls into the wrong hands.)
Clearview has stirred international controversy for years because of the way it gathered photos for its database, harvesting massive amounts from social media companies and other Internet sites without owners’ consent. The company has faced government investigations, ongoing lawsuits and demands from countries to delete their citizens’ data. Members of Congress have proposed blocking federal money from going to Clearview on the basis that its images have been illegitimately obtained.
In an investor presentation first revealed in February by The Post, the company said it wanted to raise $50 million to expand its offerings to private-industry clients and boost its data-collection powers so that “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable.”
Ukraine’s aggressive use of Clearview searches have pushed the private company onto the front lines of a diplomatically fraught conflict — one that even the U.S. government has engaged cautiously in, for fear of triggering a global war. Hare, the researcher, said the company appeared eager to use its Ukraine work as a way to advertise itself to government clients around the world and “cash in on tragedy.”
Ton-That said the company’s sole ambition is to help defend a besieged country. But he also acknowledged the war has helped provide a “good example for other parts of the U.S. government to see how these use cases work.”
“This is a new war,” he said. And the Ukrainians are “very creative with what they’ve been able to do.”
Jeanne Whalen in Riga, Latvia, and Magda Jean-Louis in Washington contributed to this report.
8. The New Democratic Alliance May Not Outlast the Ukraine War
A warning. We must work to keep the coalition together.
The New Democratic Alliance May Not Outlast the Ukraine War
The U.S. and Europe have rallied to support Kyiv — but cracks in the solidarity are already becoming apparent.
April 17, 2022, 3:00 AM EDT
Russia has invaded and devastated Ukraine without the smallest provocation. Most North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations, led thank goodness by the U.S. — two years ago, we could have expected nothing from the White House — join in condemning President Vladimir Putin’s aggression. Some are supplying military aid.
Yet there is nothing like unanimity in Europe, never mind elsewhere, about appropriate policy responses. The old Cold War certainties, the meticulously prepared plans to make common cause in confrontation scenarios between the Soviet Union and the West, no longer exist.
France seems dangerously close to electing a president, Marine Le Pen, who has openly admired Putin and last week called for rapprochement with Russia once the Ukraine war is over. Heading into a runoff election with President Emmanuel Macron, she has reportedly talked of removing France from NATO’s integrated military, and refuses to endorse Western claims of Russian atrocities in Ukraine.
Hungary’s newly re-elected prime minister, Viktor Orban, is fiercely critical of the Kyiv government. Germany claims to back NATO action, but has yet to provide meaningful military aid, and is funding Putin’s war effort by continuing to buy his gas and oil.
Elsewhere, Israel conspicuously distances itself from NATO because it deems its defense relationship with Russia too important to hazard. India is enthusiastically buying discounted Russian energy and refuses to take a stand alongside the West, despite its alleged adherence to the U.S.-led Quad alliance to contain China.
Pakistan, which seldom agrees with India about whether it is Monday or Tuesday, likewise rejects the NATO line. Imran Khan, now the ex-prime minister, had demanded stridently of Western ambassadors, “Are we your slaves, to follow your orders?”
South Africa has defended Russia. Brazil and Mexico have declined to join in imposing sanctions, with the latter’s president offering the anodyne justification “we want to have good relations with all the governments in the world.”
China, wholly unwilling to break with Russia, has never wavered in its declared commitment to the option of using force to pursue core national interests.
The old global order hinged upon two superpowers exercising an influence over a host of clients, which trended toward authority. The U.S. had an armlock on most of Latin America, as the Soviet Union did on its Eastern European empire and some Middle Eastern states. Until the late 20th century, such middle-ranking powers as Britain and France could count on the governments of many of their old colonial possessions to support their foreign-policy objectives.
Today, such influence and even dialogue are drastically diminished. The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the odious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is disgusted by Western criticism of his human-rights record, and refuses to increase his country’s oil production to assuage the energy crisis.
Another autocrat, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supported the United Nations condemnation of Russia for invading Ukraine, but declines to participate in sanctions. In part, of course, this reflects the complex Turkish relationship with Russia in handling Syria, and the Turks’ purchase of Russian S-400 ground-to-air missiles.
The message of all this equivocation is that the pack of cards, the array of nations that stacked up tidily on either side of the Cold War, today drifts on the wind. It is difficult to anticipate which nations will adopt what attitudes on any given international issue.
Though our politicians and media emphasize “the world’s” condemnation of Russia’s latest aggression, far more nations than we like to admit dislike and resent perceived Western arrogance — we prefer to call it confidence, founded upon achievement. More than a few care nothing for Ukraine and admire Putin for defying Western hegemony, just as they are happy to traffic with China, indifferent to its dreadful human-rights record.
The world has moved a long way, and not in a direction most of us welcome, since the White House’s 2002 National Security Strategy. At that high point of post-Cold War hubris, the U.S. declared that there was “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.”
President George W. Bush’s administration urged that the promotion of free institutions offered “the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually preparing for war.”
That aspiration was admirable. We have since discovered, however, that while it suited those societies that prosper mightily from freedom, technology, entrepreneurialism and liberalism, it has absolutely not suited those that lack such skills or reject such liberties.
Statisticians tell us that the world is becoming a less-violent place, measured by the toll of people dying in conflicts. This may be true, but such numbers take no account of the hundreds of millions obliged to bow to oppression by an institutionalized threat of violence.
We have entered an era of global disorder, a multipolar universe, as was the norm for much of history before World War II but vanished amid the adversarial nuclear stability created by the Cold War.
The great Yale historian Paul Kennedy, author of “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” observes in a new book on the 1939-45 struggle at sea that there has never been such a kaleidoscopic period of change in international relationships as that which occurred between June 1940 and December 1941.
At its outset, France and Britain were at war with Germany, while Stalin was Hitler’s effective partner in crime. Then France dropped out and Italy dropped in, to confront Britain. Then Germany attacked the Soviet Union, which abruptly became Britain’s ally. Then Japan attacked the U.S. and European empires, resulting in what Winston Churchill called “the Grand Alliance.”
This uneasy partnership, which caused the old prime minister ruefully to observe that the only thing worse than fighting with allies was to fight without them, survived until Italy, Germany and Japan were defeated.
Then the Soviet Union became the enemy of the West, and remained so until 1991, accompanied in large measure by China. This situation could scarcely be described as happy or friendly, because the world lived in the shadow of Armageddon. But it generated a stability many modern statesmen and commanders view with nostalgia.
Today, old alliances wobble and new partnerships form, in a fashion less predictable and thus more dangerous than at any time since World War II. The greatest change since the Soviet Union’s collapse is, of course, the decline in the acknowledged dominance of the U.S.
Back in 1992, I mused to Ray Seitz, then the brilliant U.S. ambassador in London, that I wondered how we were going to find life in a world with only one superpower. He responded presciently: “Your question presupposes that the United States is willing to fulfill that role.”
Moreover, in the ensuing three decades, while U.S. military strength has remained undiminished, other nations have grown dramatically stronger. Questions are asked that were unthinkable at the millennium, about both American means and will to prevail.
In 2018, the U.S. National Defense Strategy committee acknowledged that “regional military balances in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific have shifted in decidedly adverse ways. These trends are undermining deterrence of U.S. adversaries and the confidence of American allies. The U.S. military … might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia.”
Brad Roberts, director of the Center for Global Security Research, wrote in 2020: “The credibility of U.S. promises to defend its allies from attack and to respond as necessary, perhaps even with nuclear weapons if the vital interests of those allies are put at risk, has eroded in recent years.”
Yet while there is little good news to be derived from the Russian destruction in Ukraine, we can be cheered by the fashion in which it has awoken many governments to the indispensability of alliances.
Even some Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump, instinctive isolationists who have questioned the merits of NATO, seem more willing to acknowledge that our security — even narrowly American security — must hinge on relationships with other nations that share at least a modicum of U.S. values.
Henry Kissinger has written: “World order cannot be achieved by any one country acting alone … its components, while maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is global, structural and juridical … the goal of our era must be to achieve that equilibrium while restraining the dogs of war.”
The British, since the Ukraine crisis began, are heartened by finding themselves once more holding conversations with their U.S. counterparts, especially in the field of intelligence, more intimate than they have enjoyed since the Cold War. American Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency chiefs feel confident that the bosses of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service and Government Communications Headquarters will keep their secrets safe, and vice versa.
Three years ago, when Emmanuel Macron told an interviewer “what we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” many of us agreed with him. No European nations save the U.K. and France were sustaining serious armed forces, and even those were losing mass at an alarming rate.
Today, almost every European power is clinging to NATO, pledging a drastic reinforcement of its defenses, with a fervor unthinkable before Ukraine. Finland and Sweden, after generations of neutrality, are considering joining the alliance, perhaps as early as this summer. The Germans, who effectively disarmed themselves after 1991, have hastily committed to a massive defense-budget increase.
All this is welcome to those of us who take security seriously, though it will require years to make Europe’s armies battleworthy once more. The cash promised so far will suffice only to repair the most glaring deficiencies in existing establishments of soldiers, tanks, planes and other weapons systems. It will not increase capabilities.
Moreover, a big question persists about whether European unity and strength of purpose will hold up as the Ukraine conflict drags on and the global energy crisis persists. Putin views Western societies with contempt, because he believes us decadent, in contrast to the Russian virility so vividly displayed in the devastation of Chechnya, Syria and now Ukraine.
He seems thus far right, that many of us are spoiled. Unlike our forebears, accustomed to suffering and sacrifice, we have long regarded comfort, safety and prosperity as our birthrights. The idea of being obliged to struggle — worse still, to resort to arms in a great-power conflict — to preserve our way of life is outside modern Western experience.
We need once more to acknowledge the towering truth of the old saw that the price of peace is perpetual vigilance, together with a willingness to fight, kill and if necessary die — or at least commit others to do so — to defend our vital interests.
In the wake of World War II, a cluster of international institutions were created — the UN, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, later followed by the World Trade Organization — to assist the peaceful resolution of disputes, promote free trade and encourage global commerce. Looking back, it is remarkable how much these bodies have achieved, and for how long their moral and economic authority was exercised to do good.
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But the old postwar order is gone, and cannot be reassembled. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has written: “Around the world, countries are increasingly resisting U.S. primacy … People are asserting their national identities in the face of forces over which they feel they have little control and by which they feel threatened, be it economically, culturally or politically.”
Yet, while this is impossible to dispute, it does not seem naive for those of us committed to freedom and democracy to emphasize our yearning for American leadership. It is still indispensable, to provide the muscle to get things done in our wicked world.
Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry wrote recently in the International Institute for Strategic Studies journal:
The ultimate survival of democracy, in America and more broadly, will depend on the forging of a new political core to confront and overcome the anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces that Trumpism has tapped. A broad majority of Americans will need to set aside their internal quarrels over different freedoms and restraints, and establish another version of the “vital center” that … was established in the late 1940s to counter the fascist right and the communist left.
The historian David Kaiser asserts the obvious when he says, “a Second World War solution to the problems of Russia and China — their conquest — is obviously impossible.” But he adds: “We must figure out what we can do, and what we are willing to do militarily, to stop their expansion.”
We must view the new world with prudent apprehension, because it is a more dangerous place. As a historian, however, I am cheered by the reflection that great liberal states have an extraordinary record of success in creating strategies to overcome tyrannies, most conspicuously in World War II and the Cold War.
Both China and Russia will require more incentives to behave better abroad, even if there is scant prospect that at home they will become less oppressive societies. To mix metaphors, some of the bones that must be thrown will stick in liberal throats, but the U.S. and its allies no longer have the power to attain more than a portion of what we want, anywhere in the world.
Western diplomacy should strive to avoid forcing the two autocracies into a shared pariahs’ corner: They are far too big and dangerous for us morally to indulge ourselves in such a fashion. Painful though this must be amid the carnage of Ukraine, it is indispensable to keep talking to Moscow as well as Beijing.
The planet has been a geopolitical mess for most of its civilized history, and maybe reversion to that condition will not prove as bad as we fear. It is merely a surpassing tragedy that renewed confrontation with superpower enemies will inflict vast injury upon what should be the common challenge for mankind: to work together to prevent climate change from destroying our descendants as certainly, if more slowly, than nuclear conflict.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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9. Russia Crisis Military Assessment: How Ukraine can take the fight to Russia
Excerpt:
We assess that Russian operations are now centered on the consolidation of gains in the eastern Donbas region and the completion of a land bridge from there to Crimea, which would give Russian diplomats a stronger hand in peace negotiations. If Russian forces gain complete control of the Donbas, not just separatist-held portions, they are in a better position to demand autonomy for the entire region—which then would become a protectorate of the Union State of Russia and Belarus. Controlling the Donbas would also provide Russian President Vladimir Putin ground to claim that his “special military operation” was a success, protecting ethnic Russians in the region and expanding their living space.
Russia Crisis Military Assessment: How Ukraine can take the fight to Russia
In light of the ongoing Russia crisis, the Scowcroft Center’s Forward Defense (FD) practice will share regular assessments of the latest force developments surrounding Ukraine, leveraging the expert perspectives of our senior military fellows. The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied here are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or any other US government agency.
The bottom line
On March 25, Russia was forced to announce a major shift in strategy due to unsustainable losses in northern Ukraine. Since then, it has removed many of its forces from the area—including all those surrounding Kyiv—to Belarus and Russia to refit and reequip. We assess that Russian operations are now centered on the consolidation of gains in the eastern Donbas region and the completion of a land bridge from there to Crimea, which would give Russian diplomats a stronger hand in peace negotiations. If Russian forces gain complete control of the Donbas, not just separatist-held portions, they are in a better position to demand autonomy for the entire region—which then would become a protectorate of the Union State of Russia and Belarus. Controlling the Donbas would also provide Russian President Vladimir Putin ground to claim that his “special military operation” was a success, protecting ethnic Russians in the region and expanding their living space.
We have determined two immediate focus areas of the Russian offensive. First, the Kremlin wants to take control of (or annihilate) Mariupol, effectively ending Ukrainian opposition to a land bridge connecting Crimea to the Donbas. Second, the Russians are likely to conduct an offensive against the city of Izyum, which lies south of Kharkiv and just north of the Donbas. In response to Russia’s strategic shift, the Ukrainian effort has adapted, becoming more offensive with counterattacks and smaller-scale harassment of withdrawing Russian forces. As Ukraine prepares for a larger fight against Russian forces in the east, its military is in urgent need of weapons that will support an offensive to dislodge Russian forces from Donetsk and Luhansk.
The Donbas campaign
Thousands of front-line troops have departed Ukraine for Belarus and southern Russia, where they are likely reorganizing, reequipping, and preparing for the Donbas campaign. Some have begun their move toward the region, and another long convoy of Russian armor has developed—this time repositioning forces from the Kharkiv area to Izyum.
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Battle for Izyum. A town of approximately forty thousand people in Kharkiv Oblast, Izyum’s location between Kharkiv and the Donbas makes it strategically vital as a location to stage and supply the fight. In late March, Russia consolidated control of the town after an extended and brutal battle. Currently, Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting in rural areas around it, and a major engagement for control of the town (and the lines of communication running through it) seems likely in the next two weeks. On April 3, video and photographs emerged of a Russian Su-35S fighter jet crashing near Izyum, marking the most advanced aircraft the Russians have ever lost in combat. Aside from the real impact of losing a Su-35S, the location of the loss indicates that the fight for air superiority is shifting to the Donbas.
- Battle of attrition in the Donbas. Ukraine was very successful in the defensive battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv, blunting Russian advances outside of those major cities, attacking logistics supply and reinforcement convoys, and using ground and air fires to destroy Russian equipment and personnel, thereby forcing a withdrawal. But many of the advantages Ukraine harnessed in the battle for northern cities will not be available to them in the Donbas. Not only will Ukrainian forces need to blunt Russian advances, but they will need to dislodge Russian forces from their entrenched positions. We believe this type of battle would lead to a bloody war of attrition, with the line of control moving incrementally.
- Nationwide air and missile strikes. Despite the focus on the east, Russia will continue air and missile strikes across the country to prevent Ukrainian air defenses from focusing solely on the Donbas, inflict physical damage throughout the country, and broadcast a threat to the United States and its European allies and partners not to expand their intervention in the conflict.
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The Ukrainian offensive
What Ukraine needs. As the conflict shifts from Ukrainian defense of key terrain—a situation that favors the defender—to fighting along a well-established line of control, Ukraine’s capability needs will shift from defensive to offensive in nature. This does not mean that Ukraine no longer needs the anti-tank and air-defense systems that have been so effective thus far; in addition to these, the Ukrainians will need offensive weapons to counter a Russian offensive in the Donbas region and enable a counter-offensive of their own.
- Ground-based fires. As Ukraine looks to prevail in open terrain, it will also need to root out Russian forces from dug-in and well-defended positions—particularly through indirect fires or air and missile strikes. Ukrainian forces will need much more long-range artillery, multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), and mortars. If deployed in significant numbers, these types of weapons can keep the Russian forces under withering attack, stalling their offensive momentum and potentially dislodging them from dug-in positions.
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Offensive air systems. As the main Russian effort transfers from Kyiv to the Donbas, the Ukrainians must not just contest control of the skies, but also use air power offensively. While the deal for the delivery of MiG-29s from Poland and other NATO nations to Ukraine remains stalled, it appears Slovakia may be willing to donate its MiG-29s to Ukraine (and the United States seems willing to approve). In addition to MiG-29s which can contest Russian air superiority, Ukraine needs aircraft that can be used more offensively, including the ground-attack Su-25 fighter jet and the Mi-24 Hind ground-attack helicopter, both of which are operated by former Soviet NATO members.
- Armored vehicles. As Ukrainian forces transition from a primarily defensive to offensive posture, they will need more armored vehicles to protect their forces and bring mobile fires to the front lines.
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Anti-ship systems. Russia still controls the northern Black Sea, cutting off Ukraine from resupply by sea and allowing the Russian Navy the ability to target coastal cities, including Odesa. Last weekend, the United Kingdom announced its decision to transfer Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Ukraine. While that’s a good start, Ukraine needs many more anti-ship missiles, as well as naval mines.
Can Ukraine capitalize on the Kremlin’s mistakes? Russia has been plagued by several serious issues—primarily logistics, unity of command, and low troop morale—throughout its campaign. But it has attempted several solutions. First, by concentrating forces in eastern Ukraine, Russia can shorten its supply lines. Second, appointing General Aleksandr Dvornikov, who led the military’s southern campaign (its only real success thus far), as overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine addresses the leadership issue. Third, a consolidated campaign allows the Russian Army to put its greener, lower performing units in defensive positions in Russian-held portions of the Donbas. There, they will have the advantages of defense that Ukraine enjoyed in the initial stages of the invasion. This is why Ukrainian forces must seize an advantage before it’s too late.
To counter Russia’s newfound solutions, Ukraine needs to employ a mix of fire and maneuver to push Russian forces from Mariupol, preventing the completion of the land bridge from the Donbas to Crimea and liberating its occupied territory west and north of Donetsk before the Russians can consolidate gains. Ukrainian attacks against Crimea and the occupied areas of the Donbas should be primarily indirect fire and air strikes. Ukrainian forces must also avoid indiscriminate artillery shelling to protect their own citizens and to draw a stark contrast between their conduct and that of the Russians; Ukraine has the moral high ground and must strive to maintain it. So far, its proficient use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) has demonstrated its ability in precision fires, and it should continue to use UAS as aerial spotters. But if Ukrainian forces attempt a counteroffensive into Crimea or the Russian-occupied areas of Donbas, Ukraine risks overextending itself like Russia did in its overly ambitious multi-axis invasion plan.
US, allied, and partner support
US announces security aid already delivered to Ukraine. On April 7, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released a fact sheet documenting all military aid to Ukraine—which totals $1.7 billion since the start of the war and $2.4 billion in the past fourteen months. Highlights included:
- More than twelve thousand anti-armor systems, including more than five thousand of the FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile, which has reportedly proven effective against Russian armor
- More than fourteen hundred of the FIM-92 Stinger man-portable air defense systems, which have already destroyed multiple Russian planes and helicopters in the war
- More than seven thousand small arms and fifty million rounds of ammunition
- Hundreds of Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems, which is known as the kamikaze or suicide drone, as it flies to its target and detonates a small explosive device, and RQ-20 Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems, hand-launched, small UASs used for battlefield intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Though DoD had previously announced the transfer of UASs, it had not previously disclosed the type and numbers.
As the conflict continues, the United States and its allies and partners will need to continue providing security assistance at this level. The demand for anti-armor and anti-aircraft systems will be nearly insatiable, and those weapons are inflicting devastating losses on both Russian equipment and personnel. DoD has only just begun to send more offensive systems, such as the Switchblade and Puma UASs, but they have the potential to play a pivotal role in expanding Ukraine’s ability to find, identify, and destroy Russian military equipment. To that end, on April 13, US President Joe Biden announced another $800 million in military aid to Ukraine, including “artillery systems, artillery rounds, and armored personnel carriers,” as well as helicopters.
Slovakia transfers S-300 to Ukraine. On April 8, Slovakian Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad confirmed his nation was transferring its S-300 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system to Ukraine, and that the United States was going to deploy a Patriot SAM battery to Slovakia. The S-300 is an extremely capable high-altitude and long-range SAM that is capable of engaging aircraft and missiles and has reportedly been very successful throughout the war so far. The S-300 can be used in conjunction with lower altitude shoulder-fired man-portable air defense system (MANPADS) like the Stinger and the British Starstreak. The high risk posed by the proliferation of MANPADS across Ukrainian forces is driving Russian aircraft to higher altitudes—where they’ll now be more susceptible to the S-300. Because of Ukraine’s familiarity with operating the S-300, the integration of this system has likely already occurred. As the focus of air operations turns east, Ukraine will need to reposition its air defenses to that region and beef them up; more S-300s will allow it to do just that.
FD’s conclusion
The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase: the campaign for control of the Donbas. We predict that this phase of the conflict will be distinct from phase one, with a greater focus on offensives against dug-in combatants as opposed to Ukrainian defense against a large attacking force. The campaign is likely to become a bloody war of attrition with limited territorial gains on either side. This requires a change in the Ukrainian arsenal: In addition to anti-armor and anti-aircraft missiles, which Ukraine still needs in large numbers, offensive weapons—including armored vehicles, ground-based fires, and offensive air systems—will be critical to Ukrainian success.
Check out these military moves and more on our military assessment map here.
Meet the FD team
Today’s briefing is brought to you by senior US Air Force fellow Lt Col Tyson Wetzel and senior US Marine Corps fellow Col J.B. Barranco. The Scowcroft Center Military Fellows Program, housed by the Forward Defense practice, hosts military fellows from participating branches of the US military and the armed forces of US allies and partners each year as part of a twelve-month fellowship program.
10. Russia and China nightmare as UK scientists analyse secrets of Putin's prized fighter jet
Of course this is also the rationale for why we cannot provide our most advanced weapons to Ukraine or any other foriegn military.
Excerpts:
The Flanker is Russia’s equivalent to the F-35 fifth generation multirole fighter which is currently used by the RAF and 14 other Nato nations - though it does not possess stealth technology.
And the prospect of Nato powers examining its sophisticated inner workings will cause consternation among air force chiefs in Russia, which operates 47 of them.
It has also sent shockwaves in China which, as Russia’s biggest defence partner, now boasts the world’s second largest fleet having signed a $2bn deal for 24 of the fighters in 2015.
Though the aircraft was heavily-damaged, sources say enough remained of the targeting system for detailed analysis.
Russia and China nightmare as UK scientists analyse secrets of Putin's prized fighter jet
BRITISH and American scientists are analysing the secret long-range targeting mechanism of Russia's most advanced fighter jet, sources confirmed last night.
09:03, Sun, Apr 17, 2022 | UPDATED: 09:41, Sun, Apr 17, 2022
Express · by Marco Giannangeli – Sunday Express Defence Editor · April 17, 2022
Ukraine: Footage appears to show Russian jet being shot down
And their findings could make a "huge difference" in how the West conducts air-to-air combat with both Russia and China. Ukrainian troops shot down the Sukhoi Su-35S using short-range missiles two weeks ago. Specialists with the Ukrainian Air Force were able to retrieve vital and hitherto classified elements from its burnt-out remains and informed British intelligence.
The systems were transported to the Government’s Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down, in Wiltshire, where boffins, joined by two experts from the US Air Force, have spent the ten days examining them.
The initial assessment was deemed so promising that the systems have now been flown to Nevada, USA, for more forensic examination.
Dubbed “Flanker” by Nato, the fighter jet was conducting a so-called Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD) operation when it was unexpectedly shot down near Izium, some 75 miles from Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine on April 3.
Its pilot was captured after safely ejecting.
The Flanker is Russia’s equivalent to the F-35 fifth generation multirole fighter which is currently used by the RAF and 14 other Nato nations - though it does not possess stealth technology.
And the prospect of Nato powers examining its sophisticated inner workings will cause consternation among air force chiefs in Russia, which operates 47 of them.
It has also sent shockwaves in China which, as Russia’s biggest defence partner, now boasts the world’s second largest fleet having signed a $2bn deal for 24 of the fighters in 2015.
Though the aircraft was heavily-damaged, sources say enough remained of the targeting system for detailed analysis.
FORMIDABLE: The Su-35S is Russia's most advanced jet (Image: GETTY)
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This will be made easier by the discovery that the system - which, on paper, boasts the capability of spotting Nato's stealth aircraft 350 miles away - has many similarities to the F-35s, making it more easy to fully explore.
The capture of tech is proving to be a spectacular own-goal for premier Vladimir Putin following the disastrous performance of Russian forces in the seven-week war.
Not only can it leave systems vulnerable to Nato counter-measures, but so too could it jeopardise future arms sales to supplicant countries - a vital revenue stream for cash-starved Russia.
Scientists at the DSTL are also examining remains of a T-90 - Russia’s most advanced battle tank, which fitted with an explosive reactive armour and a unique defensive Shtora-1 aids system- a Buk missile system, used to down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, and a Tor surface to air missile system.
India operates 2,000 T-90s of different variants as well as the Buk, while Iran used a Tor to shoot down Ukrainian flight 752 in January 2020.
But it is the £50m fighter jet which was the cause of most excitement.
Justin Bronk, air power and technology expert at the RUSI think tank, said: “ Any potential opportunity to examine the radar components or electronic warfare pods on the downed SU-35 would be valuable as, even damaged, such components can confirm or undermine existing intelligence assessments about how they work.”
Trending
Prof Alessio Patalano of the Department of war Studies at King’s College, London, said:"While this war has been predominantly a land campaign which has focussed on the least advanced and modernised elements of Russia’s military, we need to remember that Russia still has capabilities that contain the technological edge of great interest to the West.
“The SU-35S isn’t a simple drone - it is a sophisticated and very advanced piece of machinery which took decades to develop. Once its tech is stolen, it isn’t easily fixable and you can be sure that, depending on what the UK and US discover, Russia will be worried."
And that concern will be felt beyond Moscow, he said
“Examining this system won’t just allow Nato to understand Russian capabilities. China has been worried since the beginning of operations in Ukraine precisely because this could happen,' he added.
“Because China reverse engineers everything Russian sells it, it is likely to have included elements from the SU-35 in its other, indigenous, J-Class fighters such as its superior Chengdu J-20.
“The West doesn’t have much insight into Chinese technology so, in terms of command and control and long range capabilities, this is a unique opportunity which could, potentially, make a huge difference.
“If you know the frequency a system operates on, for instance, you can disrupt it.”
Express · by Marco Giannangeli – Sunday Express Defence Editor · April 17, 2022
11. What other weapons could the West wheel out?
Secondary Sanctions.
Excerpts:
Support for secondary sanctions is strongest in America’s Congress. Its lawmakers are keen to “get back on the game” after leaving sanctions policy mostly to Mr Biden so far, says another sanctions lawyer. More than a dozen sanctions-related bills are circulating on Capitol Hill. Several could become law in the weeks after Congress returns from Easter recess. But when America imposed secondary sanctions on Iran, they were controversial: Europe even created a legal mechanism to try to neutralise them (which failed). With the outrage over Russian war crimes as strong in Brussels as in Washington, however, this time is different.
Such sanctions could be imposed in one of two ways, says Mr Smith: explicitly, through official measures, or implicitly, by leaning on other countries. American officials are understood to have raised the issue on a recent visit to India. “The threat could be sanctions, or curbs on correspondent banking, or increased red tape such as enhanced checks on investment and trade,” reckons Mr Smith. “Iran is still fresh in minds. When America says to other countries, ‘Be careful’, they know what it is talking about.”
The big question with secondary sanctions is how China would react. It has circumvented Western sanctions on Iran and North Korea by trading with them through small Chinese banks with no connections to Western financial centres—and which are thus less exposed to sanctions. Whether it could do the same with Russia’s much larger, more globally connected economy is unclear. The stakes would be a lot higher, for both China and the West.
What other weapons could the West wheel out?
The debate turns to escrow accounts and secondary sanctions
Apr 16th 2022
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has promised to “ratchet up the pain” for Vladimir Putin over Russian atrocities in Ukraine. The EU vows wave after wave of “rolling sanctions”. Momentum is growing in the West to fire the two big economic weapons that have so far been kept largely locked in the arsenal: an embargo on Russian oil and gas, and “secondary” sanctions, which would penalise people and entities from other countries that trade with Russia.
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The European Commission is pushing hard for the EU to curb Russian energy imports, payments for which help fund Russia’s armed forces. So far, however, the bloc has banned just coal, which makes up only around 5% of Russian hydrocarbon exports to the EU—and with a four-month phase-out. Big importers, including Germany and Italy, remain wary of an immediate ban on oil or gas. Hungary, whose support is needed because of the EU’s unanimity principle, is more strongly opposed, and has called the issue a “red line”.
However, pressure is growing on the foot-draggers to accept some sort of blockade. A former adviser to Mr Putin has said a full oil-and-gas embargo could end the war. Ukraine’s president has stepped up criticism of Germany for its coyness. Paul Krugman, an economist and commentator, has contrasted Germany’s reluctance to accept sharp economic pain with its insistence that Greece and other countries do just that in the euro-zone crisis of 2009-12. An energy embargo was not formally discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on April 11th. But several ideas short of an outright ban are percolating.
One is to impose tariffs on Russian hydrocarbons. Another, emanating from America, is to take a page out of the Iran playbook. When several allies complained that sanctions against the Islamic Republic a decade ago would leave them short of oil, America developed a workaround. Other countries could continue to buy Iranian oil if they pledged to reduce reliance on it over time. The payments went into escrow accounts. Iran agreed to this arrangement in part because it was permitted to use a chunk of the parked money for non-sensitive goods like consumables. “It functioned like pocket money,” says Adam M. Smith of Gibson Dunn, a law firm.
Russia would almost certainly reject such an arrangement. But Mr Smith thinks it could be tempted by sweeteners. One might be to allow it to use some of the cash in escrow to buy high-tech items that have been hit with Western export controls.
Support for secondary sanctions is strongest in America’s Congress. Its lawmakers are keen to “get back on the game” after leaving sanctions policy mostly to Mr Biden so far, says another sanctions lawyer. More than a dozen sanctions-related bills are circulating on Capitol Hill. Several could become law in the weeks after Congress returns from Easter recess. But when America imposed secondary sanctions on Iran, they were controversial: Europe even created a legal mechanism to try to neutralise them (which failed). With the outrage over Russian war crimes as strong in Brussels as in Washington, however, this time is different.
Such sanctions could be imposed in one of two ways, says Mr Smith: explicitly, through official measures, or implicitly, by leaning on other countries. American officials are understood to have raised the issue on a recent visit to India. “The threat could be sanctions, or curbs on correspondent banking, or increased red tape such as enhanced checks on investment and trade,” reckons Mr Smith. “Iran is still fresh in minds. When America says to other countries, ‘Be careful’, they know what it is talking about.”
The big question with secondary sanctions is how China would react. It has circumvented Western sanctions on Iran and North Korea by trading with them through small Chinese banks with no connections to Western financial centres—and which are thus less exposed to sanctions. Whether it could do the same with Russia’s much larger, more globally connected economy is unclear. The stakes would be a lot higher, for both China and the West. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. And for more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis, visit our dedicated hub.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "The ordnance in the arsenal"
12. Putin’s Ukraine Gamble Pivots to a Very Different Battlefield
Excerpts:
“It’s going to be a really ugly, slow-moving war, in which the front lines don’t move for weeks,” said a senior Biden administration official, insisting on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Still, the Russian military appears to have learned from mistakes it made in the Kyiv suburbs and along the Azov and Black Sea coasts. Hampered by a top-down structure that allowed battlefield officers little autonomy, the Kremlin has now designated a single theater commander, Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, a former commander of the Russian army in Syria known for brutal tactics there.
And the fight in the east will begin closer to supply lines stretching back to the Russian border; that could be key for a mechanized Russian army advancing in a major conventional assault across the countryside.
“They are now prepared to fight the war that they really want,” the retired Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, a former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, said of the Russians. “They want to meet force on force in open fields and go at it.”
Putin’s Ukraine Gamble Pivots to a Very Different Battlefield
April 16, 2022
After Russian forces were mauled in cities and towns in northern Ukraine, Vladimir V. Putin is shifting the focus of his invasion to the flatlands of Donbas, in the east.
A Ukrainian soldier in February in Trokhizbenka, in the Luhansk region.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
April 16, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine — There are fields instead of city streets, farmsteads instead of apartment buildings. Open highways stretch to the horizon.
The battles in the north that Ukraine won over the past seven weeks raged in towns and densely populated suburbs around the capital, Kyiv, but the war is about to take a hard turn to the southeast and into a vast expanse of wide-open flatland, fundamentally changing the nature of the combat, the weapons at play and the strategies that might bring victory.
Military analysts, Ukrainian commanders, soldiers and even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, acknowledge that a wider war that began with a failed attempt to capture the capital will now be waged in the eastern Donbas region.
With few natural barriers, the armies can try to flank and surround each other, firing fierce barrages of artillery from a distance to soften enemy positions.
“What we’re talking about is, no kidding, a conventional, very lethal battle of maneuvers where Russian forces are going to attack Ukraine’s fixed positions on ground that is more open,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.
An armored convoy last month in a Russia-controlled area on the road to Mariupol, Ukraine, on the southern edge of the Donbas region.Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
Donbas is an area the size of New Hampshire, with a front line stretching hundreds of miles; Russia borders it in an arc to the north and east, and most residents speak Russian. Named for the rich Donets Basin of coal seams just below the surface, the region is dotted with Soviet-era mining and factory towns across the sprawl of sunflower fields and grassy plains.
Before Russia invaded in February, Ukraine had been fighting Russia-backed separatists there since 2014, when Moscow fomented an uprising and sent in forces to support it. That war had settled into a stalemate, with each side controlling territory and neither gaining much ground.
Now, what may be the decisive phase of Mr. Putin’s latest war is returning to that same region, blighted by eight years of conflict and littered with land mines and trenches, as he tries to conquer the portion of Donbas still held by Ukraine. Neither side has made a major move in recent days, and analysts say it will most likely require a long and bloody conflict for either one to prevail.
The plains would seem to favor Russia’s raw advantage in weaponry. But as a defending force, Ukraine has an advantage in striking from entrenched positions at Russian troops as they advance over open ground and into artillery range.
Both sides are mustering troops for a major battle, with the Russian forces regrouping after being battered and driven from Kyiv, their units fragmented by heavy casualties and equipment losses.
Overall, Russia has increased the number of battalion fighting groups in the east to 40 — as many as 40,000 troops — from 30 this month, with more reinforcements on the way, Pentagon officials said. Moscow has withdrawn as many as 40,000 troops from northern Ukraine to reorganize, rearm and resupply them in Russia and Belarus, and is expected to move at least some to the east by driving through Russia in the next few weeks.
A Ukrainian Army front-line position in February in Novozvanivka, in the Luhansk region.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Ukraine’s army in the east had been estimated at about 30,000 troops before Russia invaded. After repelling the Russian assault on Kyiv, the military’s elite units redeployed to eastern Ukraine, but estimating the size and strength of Ukrainian forces there now is difficult. The units are smaller and more mobile than Russia’s, and the government has revealed no details of their movements.
In this new phase of the war, the Ukrainians will need a new arsenal of weapons — particularly long-range artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems. They will also require more armored vehicles to protect their forces and to tow artillery pieces to the front lines.
Western countries are responding to this need. Slovakia this week provided Ukraine with a potent, long-range antiaircraft missile system, the S-300. And on Wednesday, President Biden announced an $800 million military aid package to Ukraine that for the first time included more-powerful weaponry, including 18 155-millimeter howitzers, 40,000 rounds of artillery ammunition and 200 armored personnel carriers.
Perhaps the biggest difference from the northern phase of the war, fought among towns, woods and hills, will be the terrain. Military analysts are forecasting an all-out, bloody battle on the steppe.
“There’s nowhere to hide,” said Maksim Finogin, a veteran of Ukraine’s conflict in Donbas.
A satellite image showing a military convoy moving south through farmland near Velykyi Burluk, east of Kharkiv, this month.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Reuters
The narrow tree lines provide scant cover for small units, but not much more, he said. “And we can be seen from above, by aviation and by drones,” Mr. Finogin added. “Artillery can strike at any moment.”
Anton Gerashchenko, Ukraine’s deputy interior minister, who has been pressing Western nations to quickly provide more weaponry, said, “It’s like fighting in Kansas.”
Both sides will try encirclements, military analysts say. It will become an artillery war, fought at distances of dozens of miles, where Ukraine’s edge in the motivation and morale of its soldiers could be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Russian artillery pieces, tanks and attack helicopters. Moscow is expected to use this heavy firepower to batter enemy positions before sending in ground troops to try to seize them.
Donbas has been a target for years for Mr. Putin, who claims it is really a part of Russia and has justified the war with the false narrative that he needs to liberate the region from genocidal Nazi oppressors. Ukrainians soundly reject that claim as they fight fiercely for their territory.
But invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, trying to capture large swaths of the country and topple its government, was a high-stakes gambit that turned much of the world against Mr. Putin. And after failing to take Kyiv and being forced to scale back his hopes of seizing the length of the southern coast, Mr. Putin has set his sights, for now, on the east.
“Our goal is to help the people who live in Donbas, who feel their unbreakable bond with Russia,” he said this week.
Mr. Putin’s true intentions are rarely clear, however, and his assertion of Russia’s more limited war aims cannot be taken at face value. In the past, Russia has lied about its troops’ presence in Donbas and Crimea, and it stated repeatedly in the weeks before the current war that it had no intention of invading.
Ukrainian troops demonstrating military tactics and vehicles in February, just days before the Russian invasion.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
For soldiers, artillery battles on the open plains can bring instant death or become drawn-out, harrowing ordeals.
Both the Russians and Ukrainians use Soviet-designed heavy artillery systems, named for flowers or trees — the Acacia 152-millimeter self-propelled gun, the Tulip 240-millimenter mortar, the Carnation 122-millimeter howitzer. Their incongruous labels belie their lethal abilities; they can saturate areas the size of football fields with shrapnel.
The strategy on the steppe, now as in wars past, has been to outflank and surround enemy forces, then pummel them with artillery, as the Soviets did over this same terrain in World War II. After defeating Nazi forces at Stalingrad, the Red Army went on the offensive across the plains in 1943, punching through Axis lines. It then encircled German troops in ever smaller pockets of territory, killing them with artillery.
Lesha, 43, a Ukrainian soldier who asked to be identified by only his first name for safety reasons, endured an encirclement in the town of Ilovaisk while fighting Russian troops who had intervened in Donbas in 2014.
“The surrounding forces draw in closer, tighten the flanks and then methodically destroy” those trapped inside with artillery, he said, recalling a strategy that nearly cost him his life.
The town of Trostianets was heavily damaged by artillery fire from both sides.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
During that siege in Ilovaisk, which lasted about five days, Ukrainian soldiers lay in shallow trenches or root cellars, he said, covering their ears with their hands and opening their mouths, to better endure the pressure waves of Grad rocket artillery landing yards away.
About 300 Ukrainian soldiers died in a retreat from the town after Russian forces reneged on a cease-fire agreement. Lesha was captured and eventually freed in a prisoner exchange.
However tragic, he said, Ilovaisk and similar battles taught the army and political leadership hard-won lessons. Ukrainian units are now resilient under fire, he said. Commanders pay no heed to local Russian cease-fire offers. And above all, he said, the army learned the need for long-range weapons to fight back in open spaces.
Despite the Russian advantage in troop numbers and armaments, open terrain offers at least one benefit to the Ukrainian defenders, analysts said: Whatever is trying to advance, whether a platoon of 30 soldiers or a battalion flanked by armored vehicles, will have to cross exposed areas.
And as Ukrainian forces have already shown, their willingness to destroy their own infrastructure, like dams to cause flooding or bridges to close roads, has proved effective in stalling Russian forces, leaving them vulnerable to counterattack.
In Donbas, it will be no different. Bridges, roads and fields all can be mined and possibly destroyed to channel Russian forces toward Ukrainian soldiers who are dug into defensive positions. They will be armed with anti-tank guided missiles and backed by artillery already pre-sighted on important pieces of terrain like road intersections.
When Ukrainian forces retook Trostianets in northeastern Ukraine in March, for example, their artillery successfully destroyed the Russian artillery battery placed in the town, opening the way for a counterattack with tanks and infantry.
A damaged Russian self-propelled howitzer this month in Trostianets.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
It may be weeks before the sides join in a major battle, and it also may instead become a series of incremental, lethal encounters lasting months, according to American, British and Ukrainian officials and military analysts.
“It’s going to be a really ugly, slow-moving war, in which the front lines don’t move for weeks,” said a senior Biden administration official, insisting on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Still, the Russian military appears to have learned from mistakes it made in the Kyiv suburbs and along the Azov and Black Sea coasts. Hampered by a top-down structure that allowed battlefield officers little autonomy, the Kremlin has now designated a single theater commander, Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, a former commander of the Russian army in Syria known for brutal tactics there.
And the fight in the east will begin closer to supply lines stretching back to the Russian border; that could be key for a mechanized Russian army advancing in a major conventional assault across the countryside.
“They are now prepared to fight the war that they really want,” the retired Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, a former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, said of the Russians. “They want to meet force on force in open fields and go at it.”
A Ukrainian Army front-line position in February near the separatist-controlled settlement of Slovianoserbsk, in the Luhansk region.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kyiv, Ukraine; Eric Schmitt from Washington; Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kharkiv, Ukraine; and Michael Schwirtz from Lviv, Ukraine.
13. 'A family tradition': Special Forces candidates train across North Carolina for Robin Sage
Thanks to all the North Carolina residents who have supported this important exercise for years/decades. I also commend the podcast, the Pineland Underground (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pineland-underground/id1561156398). It has a feeling of listening to the banter that takes place in an SF team room. And kudos to Stu Farris for explaining Robin Sage and unconventional warfare and how the name Robin Sage was derived.
'A family tradition': Special Forces candidates train across North Carolina for Robin Sage
| The Fayetteville Observer
Special Forces candidates will participate in a two-week training exercise that spans several counties over the next two weeks.
Known as Robin Sage, the exercise began Friday and continues through April 29, according to a news release from the Bladen County Sheriff’s Office.
The training exercise is the final test for soldiers going through the Special Forces Qualification Course before moving on to an assignment with one of the Army's Special Forces units.
The news release said the training will be held in Cumberland, Harnett, Hoke, Lee, Moore and Robeson counties.
Other North Carolina counties for the exercise are Alamance, Anson, Brunswick, Cabarrus, Chatham, Columbus, Davidson, Guilford, Montgomery, New Hanover, Randolph, Richmond, Rowan, Sampson, Scotland, Stanly, Union, and Wake counties.
Residents in those counties may see soldiers, bearing nonlethal weapons and wearing Army combat uniforms with a shoulder band reading "Robin Sage," officials said.
Some participants will be in either black uniforms wearing blue bands that say "ISC" or civilian clothing and a shoulder band reading "ghost."
'Fatal misunderstanding'
On Feb. 23, 2002, in what officials called a "fatal misunderstanding," a Moore County deputy who said he was not notified about the exercise shot two Robin Sage participants dressed in civilian clothing, killing one. Army First Lt. Tallas Tomeny was killed and Sgt. Stephen Phelps was injured.
Tomeny’s estate settled a lawsuit against the Moore County Sheriff's Office in October 2009. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
According to the suit, the soldiers believed the deputy was part of the Robin Sage exercise, and the deputy, unaware of the exercise, shot Tomeny during a struggle and Phelps as he tried to flee.
A civil jury awarded Phelps $750,000 in a verdict that found the deputy used excessive force.
As a result, all of the exercise’s movements are coordinated with public safety officials within the towns and counties hosting the training now.
The origin of Robin Sage
According to the “Pineland Underground” podcast released last month by the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Robin Sage is held four times a year.
According to the Army, the unconventional warfare exercise was first called Robin Sage in 1974 and replaced earlier exercises known as Operation Snowdrop, Cherokee Trail and Gobbler’s Woods.
Col. Stuart Farris, chief of staff of the JFK Special Warfare Center, said in the podcast that the training associated with Robin Sage has been around for 70 years.
Farris said the name comes from Col. Jerry Sage and was part of the first exercise held in Robbins in 1952.
Podcast cohost Maj. Bobby Tuttle said that Col. Sage served during World War II and was a prisoner of war held by the Nazis. Sage spent time in the Office of Strategic Services and later commanded the 10th Special Forces Group.
Generations of North Carolina families have volunteered their time and land for the exercise as they portray guerilla fighters, Farris said.
During the exercise, Special Forces candidates are placed in an environment that simulates “political instability characterized by armed conflict,” to force the soldiers “to analyze and solve problems to meet the challenges.
Military and civilian support personnel and community volunteers participate or provide support, along with other Fort Bragg service members.
The service members act as realistic opposing forces and guerrilla freedom fighters in a fictional country known as "Pineland."
“It’s like a family tradition,” Farris said. “That’s what makes it just so incredible and so unique … It’s been 70 years in the making. You can’t just recreate that overnight.”
Unconventional warfare
Farris said he thinks that unconventional warfare, which the exercise teaches, started during World War II as the Nazis took over most of Western Europe.
Any time a foreign power occupies another country and tries to change the way of life or government, Farris said, there will be internal resistance.
“Nobody likes people from a foreign country coming into your country and trying to tell you how to do business,” he said.
Farris said the forefathers of special warfare recognized that the American military can use that resistance to train the resisters into guerilla fighters behind enemy lines to disrupt the overall more traditional ground combat of occupying powers.
Retired Master Sgt. Chris Rogers, who served as a Green Beret and is a survival, evasion, resistance and escape instructor at Fort Bragg, was also a guest on the podcast.
Rogers said soldiers involved in unconventional warfare don’t have access to the logistics or supplies they would during more conventional warfare.
“You’re relying more on the local population and the underground resistance people trying to help procure things for you,” Rogers said.
Rogers said soldiers have to be innovative problem solvers who think outside of the box.
Tuttle said Special Forces candidates put into practice what they’ve learned in their 18 months of training in order to work with simulated indigenous populations who are the resistance force that Farris described.
Farris said candidates are placed into environments and scenarios across North Carolina that simulate a decentralized operation while working with partner forces.
Rogers said he applied what he learning during the 1999 Robin Sage exercise when foreign commandos wanted to leave American troops in 2010.
He said he talked to the commandos and build up their courage without insulting them.
He also told the commandos that if they left, assets like planes that were keeping them safe would stay with American troops.
Farris said the thing that he thinks makes Robin Sage “timeless,” is that it’s about soldiers navigating uncertain situations.
Rogers said he thinks the best part of the exercise is that it pushes soldiers to think critically.
He said candidates can be in a situation where they receive information that affects their plans and they have to come up with a new plan, move forward with the mission and communicate the new plan to everyone else on the team.
“It's just problem solving on the fly,” he said.
Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.
14. Putin Has A Problem: NATO Is Sending Artillery and Tanks to Ukraine
Ukraine needs artillery and tanks, (and counterfire radars, missile defense, aircraft (fast movers and helicopters unmanned aerial systems, and more).
We must arm Ukraine for success and victory not merely for leverage at the negotiating table.
Putin Has A Problem: NATO Is Sending Artillery and Tanks to Ukraine
Russia’s war on Ukraine entered a new phase early in April as Putin belatedly recognized the failure of his assaults on Kyiv. The decimated survivors of that ill-fated campaign are now being transported by rail to eastern Ukraine to pursue what Moscow hopes is a more achievable war aim: the capture of the entire Donbas region of Ukraine and the destruction of the elite Ukrainian mechanized brigades defending it.
Kyiv has won a momentous victory by defeating Putin’s ambition to capture of the Ukrainian capital, decapitate its government, and subjugate all of Ukraine under a puppet regime. But for the Donbas campaign, Kyiv needs mechanized units with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) to seize and defend ground. Infantry on foot, even armed with advanced Western portable missile launchers, cannot accomplish as much in Donbas’s open terrain as in the suburbs and forested areas surrounding Kyiv.
That’s why Ukraine’s President Zelensky has been requesting heavier weapons recently, particularly the hundreds of Soviet-built armored vehicles, notably T-72 tanks, and BMP IFVs, still in service with NATO’s eastern members. These are relatively inexpensive and familiar to Ukraine’s military, and therefore can be integrated immediately.
Through March, NATO leaders were hesitant. Tanks are more expensive, complicated and logistically challenging than portable missiles. Moreover, many feared tank deliveries would provoke Moscow more than anti-tank missiles.
But by mid-April, NATO armor and artillery first began trickling and then pouring in to reinforce Ukraine’s war effort. At least 200 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles have been delivered so far, a number which may rise in the coming weeks.
This article will survey the tanks and infantry vehicles being delivered to Ukraine—or being considered for delivery. Companion pieces will soon detail transfers of artillery and vehicles aimed at enhancing the mobility of Ukrainian forces.
140+ T-72M1s from Poland and the Czech Republic
While Ukraine has traditionally operated indigenous, higher-quality T-64 tanks after Russia’s incursions in 2014 Kyiv began reactivating T-72 and T-80 tanks from storage. Ukraine is even fielding uniquely upgraded T-72 models.
The Soviet-designed 45 to 50-ton T-72 has a crew of three and is armed with a 125-millimeter gun. Ubiquitous across the globe, it’s smaller, lighter, and less heavily armored than Western contemporaries, and thus easier to maintain and deploy. However, it’s prone to catastrophically blowing its top off when penetrated due to shell storage in the turret.
While T-64s and T-80s are scarce abroad, NATO member states happen to have hundreds of T-72s in service and storage which may mysteriously find their way into Ukrainian hands.
The Czechs led the pack furnishing “up to 40” or “dozens” of export-model T-72M1s early in April, out of 66 T-72M1s it held in storage.
But the big news is confirmation that Poland has dispatched at least 100 of its T-72M1s too, including some upgraded T-72M1Rs.
Together, that is more than enough T-72s for four tank battalions, or a full tank brigade.
#Ukraine: The first images of some of the armour that the Polish Government is supplying to the Ukrainian Army- up to 100 T-72M1/M1R (M1R has minor upgrades), quantities of BWP-1 IFV.
The M1R modernization replaces the base T-72M1’s Luna infrared searchlight with a passive (ie. non-detectable) KLW-1 Asteria thermal camera, digital engine controls and communication systems, GPS navigation, and addition of a storage ‘bustle’ on the rear turret. The KLW-1 can acquire targets 7.45 miles away using narrow-field view or 2.85 miles for widefield view.
Poland only began receiving its first M1Rs in 2019, with reportedly 67 delivered by 2021 and entering service with the tank battalion of the 19th Lublin Mechanized Brigade. The total planned upgrade of at least 230 tanks costs 1.749 billion zloty (ie $409.6 million), or $1.7 million per tank.
BMP-1s from Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden and Poland
Infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) are designed to both transport infantry into battle and provide fire support with formidable armament. The Soviet BMP-1, paraded in Moscow in 1967, was the original take on the IFV—a troop carrier bristling with a cannon and anti-tank missiles.
By 2021, Ukraine had 219 BMP-1s and 115 radar-equipped BRM-1K reconnaissance vehicles—and it’s receiving dozens more from four different countries. These outdated vehicles were reintroduced into Ukrainian service in 2014.
Like many pioneering designs, the BMP-1 was a flawed first draft. Limited by excessively thin armor susceptible to machine gun fire and cramped and unsafe passenger accommodations, its armament proved more effective in theory than practice. Its 2A28 Grom low-pressure gun spat out 73-millimeter rocket-propelled shells with limited accuracy beyond 500 meters, while the Malyutka missile-launcher on its turret, capable of long-range (max 3 kilometers) tank busting, was awkward to use.
The subsequent BMP-2 model, armed with a rapid-firing cannon and newer semi-automatically guided AT-4 missiles, proved far more practical. But still thousands of BMP-1s remained in many country’s arsenals when the Soviet Union dissolved.
The Czech Republic license-built thousands of BMPs (which they called BVPs), and in 1991 had 768 BVP-1s in inventory. These were consigned in favor of BVP-2s, 120 of which remain operationally deployed. By 2020, the Czechs had in storage 65 BVP-2s and least 98 BVP-1s. Early in April, Prague revealed it had transferred an unknown number of BVPs to Ukraine.
The Czechs are involved in another BMP-1 transfer also involving Germany and Sweden. Following German unification, Berlin inherited 1,112 East German BMP-1s and BMP-1(P)s. These served in six Homeland Security Brigades formed by Berlin in 1991.
But the Soviet IFVs didn’t meet German safety standards and many were refit to the BMP-1A1 Ost model with new headlights, armaments racks and asbestos removal. These only served for a few years before being retired.
Next, the Swedes snatched up 431 of the cheap ex-German BMPs and paid a Czech company to modify 350 with additional health/safety and ergonomic improvements, and remove the outdated Malyutka missile launchers. Re-designated the Pbv-501 by the Swedes, these also were retired after a few year’s service.
Late in March, Sweden finally secured permission from Germany to transfer 56 of its Pbv-501s to Ukraine out of Czech storage facilities—enough to outfit an entire mechanized battalion.
Poland also retained a whopping 1,100 Czech-built BMP-1s (designated BWP-1s in Polish service) per a 2021 report, and unknown quantity of which have been transferred to Ukraine.
Poland can spare some BWPs as it plans to replace them with new Borsuk IFVs, though it may still interim upgrade some, as the process may take beyond 2030.
Overall, the BMP-1 remains poorly armored, awkwardly armed and ergonomically unpleasant. But it still can blast enemy positions and knock out lighter armored vehicles with its cannon and protect embarked infantry from small arms fire as they move to contact with enemy forces.
Can Ukraine Get Away with Marders?
Meanwhile, German chancellor Scholz has been bellyaching over whether to donate Marder (“Marten”) tracked infantry fighting vehicles, 100 of which have been requested by Ukraine. After successful service in Afghanistan, these were retired in favor of new Puma IFVs.
Scholz argued that sending ready-to-use Marders to Ukraine would deprive the Bundeswehr of necessary ready reserve stocks to meet NATO obligations, though manufacturer Rheinmetall has offered to backfill any Marders delivered to Ukraine with refurbished vehicles by the end of the year.
If Berlin balks at donating its ready inventory of Marders, Rheinmetall has also offered to sell 70-80 refurbished Marders to Kyiv with deliveries completed by the end of 2022.
The Marder has a crew of three, and can carry just six infantrymen. Though similar in concept to the BMP, it weighs nearly twice as much and is better armored, particularly against the BMP-2’s 30-millimeter gun. The Marder’s smaller 20-millimeter RH202 high-velocity cannon can penetration substantial armor for its size and has a high rate of fire, and its MILAN guided missile launcher allows it to threaten tanks at long range.
On the downside, Ukraine’s military has never operated Marders before and only recently acquired a small batch of MILAN missiles from France.
Leopard 1s back in the fray?
The CEO of German manufacturer Rheinmetall told trade journal Handelsblatt it was preparing to deliver 50 retired Leopard 1A5 tanks to Ukraine. If the sale is approved, he claims the first 10-20 Leopards could arrive in Ukraine in six weeks, with the rest following over three months. The CEO claimed Ukrainian personnel could learn to operate the unfamiliar new tank “within a few days.”
The original 40-ton Leopard 1 was designed in the late 1950s when armor-piercing shell technology seemed to hopelessly outpace improvements to armor. Thus, unlike the modern Leopard 2, the Leopard 1 featured minimal armor (maximum of 70 millimeters, slightly less than a World War II Sherman tank) and instead emphasized accurate hitting power and mobility.
Despite weak armor, the Leopard 1 proved popular, and was widely exported. Canada even deployed up-armored Leopards 1s in combat in Bosnia and Afghanistan. The ultimate 1A5 model has moderately improved armor, but more importantly integrates a state-of-the-art EMES-18 fire control computers with day/night thermal imager and laser range-finder.
Undoubtedly, Leopard 1s would remain vulnerable even to light anti-armor weapons, and its rifled 105-millimeter L7A3 guns, though well-respected, may struggle to reliably penetrate the frontal armor of more modern Russian tanks like the T-72B3 and T-90.
Still, any mobile platform that can deliver accurate fire support has intrinsic value; perhaps Ukraine could use these tanks in supporting roles. How readily Ukraine could create the infrastructure to support the Western design, however, is uncertain.
Other potential donors?
Bulgaria in particular has hundreds of Soviet tanks and BMPs in storage it could contribute. Turkey has a huge back inventory of hundreds of dated Western tanks which have been modernized to varying degrees, including M48 and M60 Pattons and Leopard 1s. But those designs would be unfamiliar to Ukraine’s military, are mostly are outgunned by T-72s, and require new supply chains of 105-millimeter ammunition.
Sébastien Roblin writes on the technical, historical, and political aspects of international security and conflict for publications including The National Interest, NBC News, Forbes.com, War is Boring and 19FortyFive, where he is Defense-in-Depth editor. He holds a Master’s degree from Georgetown University and served with the Peace Corps in China. You can follow his articles on Twitter.
15. US Army using lessons from Ukraine war to aid own training
Lesson from which point of view Russians or Ukrainians?(or hopefully both).
US Army using lessons from Ukraine war to aid own training
AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · April 16, 2022
FORT IRWIN, Calif. (AP) — In the dusty California desert, U.S. Army trainers are already using lessons learned from Russia’s war against Ukraine as they prepare soldiers for future fights against a major adversary such as Russia or China.
The role-players in this month’s exercise at the National Training Center speak Russian. The enemy force that controls the fictional town of Ujen is using a steady stream of social media posts to make false accusations against the American brigade preparing to attack.
In the coming weeks, the planned training scenario for the next brigade coming in will focus on how to battle an enemy willing to destroy a city with rocket and missile fire in order to conquer it.
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“I think right now the whole Army is really looking at what’s happening in Ukraine and trying to learn lessons,” said Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. Those lessons, she said, range from Russia’s equipment and logistics troubles to communications and use of the internet.
“The Russia-Ukraine experience is a very powerful illustration for our Army of how important the information domain is going to be,” said Wormuth, who spent two days at the training center in the Mojave Desert watching an Army brigade wage war against the fictional “Denovian” forces.
“We’ve been talking about that for about five years. But really seeing it and seeing the way Zelenskyy has been incredibly powerful. ... This is a world war that the actual world can see and watch in real time. ”
At the center, the commander, Brig. Gen. Curt Taylor, and his staff have ripped pages out of the Russian playbook to ensure that U.S. soldiers are ready to fight and win against a sophisticated near-peer enemy.
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It’s a common tool. For example, his base and the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana both shifted to counterinsurgency training during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And the military services have focused other training on how to fight in cold weather — mimicking conditions in Russia or North Korea. But these latest changes have happened quickly in the early months after Russia invaded Ukraine.
About 4,500 soldiers from 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, based at Fort Hood, Texas, are out in the vast desert training area at Fort Irwin, where they will spend two weeks fighting the NTC’s resident 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, which acts as the enemy military. Soldiers from the regiment — known as Blackhorse — are arrayed in and around Ujen, which also includes role-players acting as the locals.
As the sun was rising earlier this past week, Army Col. Ian Palmer, the brigade commander, stood on Crash Hill, on the outskirts of the town, preparing his soldiers to launch an attack. Lines of tanks spread out in the distance. Heavy winds the night before hampered his progress, so the attack was a bit behind.
He said the exercise is using more drones by the friendly and enemy forces, both for surveillance and attacks. So his forces are trying to use camouflage and tuck into the terrain to stay out of sight. “You know if you can be seen, you can be shot, where ever you are,” he said.
Down in the makeshift town, the opposition forces are confident they can hold off Palmer’s brigade despite the size difference. The Denovians only have about 1,350 forces, but they are throwing everything they have at the brigade, from jamming and other electronic warfare to insurgency attacks and propaganda.
The role-players have their phones ready to film and post quickly to social media.
The Denovian forces want to portray the unit in the worst possible light, said Taylor, and constantly twist the narrative on social media so Palmer’s troops realize they are in a battle for the truth.
That’s a challenge, he said, because “when I’ve got a bunch of casualties and I’m getting overrun on my left flank and my supply trains aren’t where they need to be and I can’t find the bulldozers, it’s hard to think about something that someone said about me on Twitter.”
The training goal, said Taylor, is teaching the brigades that come in how to fuse all elements of their combat power into a coordinated assault.
“Everyone can play an instrument, but it’s about making music — bringing it all together in a synchronized fashion. And what you saw today was the artillery was doing the artillery thing, the aviation was doing the aviation thing and the maneuver guys were doing the maneuver thing. But part of the delay in their assault on the town was they couldn’t synchronize those three,” he said.
Again, they can look to Ukraine to see how Russia failed to do that in the early weeks of the war. U.S. leaders repeatedly noted that in Russia’s initial multipronged assault in Ukraine, commanders consistently failed to provide the airstrikes and support their ground troops needed to move into key cities such as Kyiv.
That failure led to Russian troops bombing the cities from the outskirts, hitting hospitals, apartment buildings and other structures, and killing civilians.
So when the next brigade arrives as the training center, Taylor said it will face an enemy on board with doing just that.
“We will be very focused on how to fight against an adversary that is willing to destroy infrastructure because that’s how we think our adversaries will fight,” Taylor said. “We’ve got to be prepared for urban combat where we have an adversary that is indiscriminately firing artillery.”
Wormuth, the Army secretary, said seeing the training also underscored other lessons the U.S. is taking from the war in Ukraine.
“As we’re watching what’s happening to the Russians now, it’s informative for us to think about what is right, from a modernization standpoint,” she said, noting that some U.S. tanks are very heavy and the terrain in Europe is muddier, not like the hard-packed sand of the desert.
The Army, she said, has to determine “what’s the right balance between the mobility of a tank, the survivability of a tank and the lethality of a tank? If you want to make it more mobile, you make it lighter, but that makes it less survivable. And so you have to decide where you’re going to take risks.”
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Follow Lolita C. Baldor on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lbaldor
AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR · April 16, 2022
16. Russia Loses Another General, Vows ‘Elimination’ of Resistance
A Russian scorched earth policy?
Russia Loses Another General, Vows ‘Elimination’ of Resistance
RELENTLESS
Russia was on the brink of capturing the strategic port city of Mariupol on Sunday despite suffering more losses on Saturday.
Barbie Latza Nadeau
Vladyslav Musiienko/Reuters
The dawn deadline Russia gave determined Ukrainian soldiers to surrender and lay down their weapons in Mariupol passed without incident on Sunday morning, as Vladimir Putin’s increasingly sloppy troops closed in on the strategic port city.
Russia’s defense ministry, still reeling from the loss of 8th Army Major General Vladimir Frolov in combat on Saturday, was just as determined, threatening to “eliminate” any Ukrainian and foreign troops trying to hold on to the battered city.
Russia has made considerable gains on the city after spending weeks trying to wipe it off the map. Western intelligence officials said it could fall to Russia soon, providing a key land bridge between Crimea and the eastern separatist regions it so desperately wants to take.
President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that his fighters had only a small part of the city under their control. “The situation is very difficult in Mariupol,” he said overnight Sunday, according to CNN. “Our soldiers are blocked, the wounded are blocked. There is a humanitarian crisis ... Nevertheless, the guys are defending themselves.”
Russia warned in a statement Sunday that there were “up to 400 foreign mercenaries who joined the Ukrainian forces” huddling inside a steel plant, including many Europeans and Canadians who had come to support Ukrainian troops. “In case of further resistance, all of them will be eliminated,” the statement said.
Further north, heavy bombardment on Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv killed and injured dozens of emergency workers and civilians, according to CNN which cited Kharkiv Regional Military Administration head Oleg Sinegubov. “They are currently receiving treatment in the hospital.” Sineguboy wrote on Telegram. “Thirty-one people were injured in Russian shelling, including four children.”
He also wrote that Russian forces were using aerial bombardment, after being pushed back on land. “The enemy cannot approach Kharkiv as our armed forces are holding strong positions and are even advancing in some directions,” he said. “Therefore, Russians resort to shameful shelling of residential neighborhoods.”
Bolstered by the gains in Mariupol and undeterred by the losses, Russian troops renewed efforts on Kyiv early Sunday, striking Brovary to the east. On Saturday, attacks on strategic targets further west in largely untouched Lviv also signaled that the war is at a turning point. Citing the Institute for the Study of War, the Washington Post reported Sunday that Russian troops were likely “setting conditions for a larger-scale, better-coordinated offensive.” Simply put, the worst may be yet to come.
17. More Than 1,500 Books Have Been Banned in Public Schools, and a U.S. House Panel Asks Why
That is a terrible statistic. What is the matter with us? We need to stop this.
More Than 1,500 Books Have Been Banned in Public Schools, and a U.S. House Panel Asks Why
TALKING POINTS
A U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee panel on April 7 examined why thousands of books, predominantly written by marginalized authors, have been banned from public schools, and the impact of those actions on students and teachers.
“Most books being targeted for censorship are books that introduce ideas about diversity or our common humanity, books that teach children to recognize and respect humanity in one another,” said the chair of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, cited a new report by PEN America — an organization that advocates for the protection of free speech — that found from July 2021 to the end of March this year, more than 1,500 books were banned in 86 school districts in 26 states.
The report found that of the banned books, 467 — or 41% — contained main or secondary characters of color; 247, or 22%, addressed racism; and 379, or 33%, of books contained LGBTQ+ themes.
Raskin held up a children’s book that administrators have tried to remove from school libraries. The book was written by Ruby Bridges, a civil rights icon who was the first Black child to desegregate an all-white Louisiana school. Bridges, who was 6 years old at the time, was a witness at the hearing.
“The truth is that rarely do children of color or immigrants see themselves in these textbooks we are forced to use,” Bridges said. “I write because I want them to understand the contributions their ancestors have made to our great country, whether that contribution was made as slaves or volunteers.”
Her book, “This Is Your Time,” is being reviewed for possible removal in a school district in Texas. Books written about her story have been banned in classrooms in Pennsylvania.
High school students speak out
The hearing began with testimony from several high school students.
Olivia Pituch and Christina Ellis, of York, Pennsylvania, said it is important for students to see books written by authors who are people of color, LGBTQ+, Black and Indigenous, and with characters from marginalized groups.
Pituch, who identifies with the LGBTQ+ community, said that if she had been able to have access to books with queer representation, she would have “been able to embrace and love myself a lot earlier on.”
“I deserve to walk into my school library and find a book with someone like me,” she said.
Ellis, who is Black, said that books that center on characters who are people of color also benefit white students, so those students are educated about different cultures.
She talked about how growing up, classmates would make fun of the Caribbean food she brought from home and how her classmates and sometimes teachers would touch her hair.
“Books that highlight our differences, and that teach others how to address diversity, are crucial,” she said. “Books can help kids educate themselves on various cultures and ways of life.”
Mindy Freeman, a parent from Pennsylvania, said a book called “George (Now Melissa)” was able to help her daughter, in fourth grade at the time, understand what she was going through as a transgender girl. Freeman said her daughter’s access to an age-appropriate book provided her the support and visibility she needed.
“No book made my child become transgender any more than a book could have turned her eyes from brown to blue,” Freedman said.
Freedom of speech on campus
Republicans on the panel, Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, focused on freedom of speech on college campuses, and argued that these places were not welcoming to conservatives.
Biggs asked the Republican witness, Jonathan Pidluzny, what action should be taken so that conservatives are not barred from speaking on college campuses. Pidluzny is the vice president of academic affairs for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is an organization that supports free speech across universities.
“We need to learn to tolerate the speech we abhor,” Pidluzny said.
Two Republicans, Reps. Byron Donalds of Florida and ranking member Nancy Mace of South Carolina, asked witnesses about district decisions about school curriculum and school administrators’ decisions to ban books.
“Taxpayers should have the ability to review that material because they pay for it,” Donalds said.
He, along with Mace, argued that there were other ways that students could get books, such as buying them or going to a public library.
“They can get a book from a lot of different places,” Mace said. “Is there anything that prevents a kid from going to a public library?”
Two of the witnesses, Samantha Hull, a librarian from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Jessica Berg, a teacher from Loudoun County, Virginia, said not every student has the financial means to buy books or has adequate access to transportation to visit public libraries to read books where they see themselves represented.
Berg said visceral attacks on education from Republicans almost caused her to quit her job. She said she has received death threats from members of her own community as well as continued questioning of her expertise.
“Books … offer a mirror to readers so they can see themselves reflected in some way, be it their gender, race, culture, identity or experience, and it makes them feel less alone in the world,” she said. “When I think about the books frequently being challenged, the only connection I see between them is that they are the books that give voice to the most marginalized in our society.”
Mace agreed that history, especially “problematic chapters in our history,” should be taught in schools, but said books dealing with adult topics expose young kids to inappropriate topics.
“We should be teaching critical thinking skills,” Mace said, adding that she’s disturbed by reports of colleges “stifling speech to coddle young adults.”
Tennessee book banning
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, held up a graphic novel about the Holocaust that was the latest book to be banned in Tennessee classrooms, “Maus.” She said with the rise in white nationalism, antisemitism and racism, books like “Maus” are now more important than ever.
“We know that bigotry is learned,” Wasserman Schultz said, adding that “we also know it can be unlearned.”
She asked Hall what removing books like “Maus” and ones that have diverse characters does to students.
“It’s my opinion when books are removed … students are erased,” Hall said. “They feel their identities are not valued in the school and outside the school.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., did not ask any of the witnesses questions but expressed the fear of discrimination her two Muslim sons might face growing up.
“Our children, they just simply want to exist as they are,” she said.
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V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
