War in Ukraine: No Breakthroughs But Peace Talks Spark Hope

Well, don't get your hopes up. Moscow's just pulling back from Kyiv to reposition its forces and bide time for further gains in other parts of the country. Putin's campaign to "topple" Kyiv has been a complete disaster, and in my mind, it raises questions about Russia's great power status. I mean, Russia's like a Third World petrostate with nukes. 

No matter. The country's a threat to Europe, and by extension to the U.S. through our alliance commitments. 

At the Washington Post, "Ukraine-Russia talks in Turkey stir optimism, but Western allies urge caution":

ISTANBUL — Ukrainian negotiators in Turkey said Tuesday they had offered a detailed peace proposal to their Russian counterparts, exchanging military neutrality for security guarantees, as Moscow said it would “drastically reduce” military activity near the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv “to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations.”

The declarations from the two sides followed hours of negotiations hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in an ornate palace on the Bosporus strait. They signaled a rare moment of optimism after weeks of halting negotiations that have done nothing to slow the bloody invasion.

But U.S. and other Western leaders were skeptical, saying they would judge Russia by its actions and not its words. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said there were continued strikes Tuesday on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. “We’re not convince that the threat to the capital city has been radically diminished,” he said.

Russia, whose forces have bombarded Ukrainian cities for weeks, said in a statement that Tuesday’s talks had focused on “humanitarian issues." The Kremlin also signaled it will keep fighting for Mariupol, a key southern port city, saying that unless “Ukrainian nationalist militants” stop resisting and lay down their arms, it will be difficult to “resolve the acute humanitarian situation” there.

The centerpiece of the Ukrainian proposal was a pledge that the country would give up its bid to join NATO in exchange for a security system guaranteed by international partners including the United States, Turkey and others. Ukrainian negotiators likened the offer to Article 5 of NATO’s charter, which ensures the alliance’s collective defense.

The guarantor parties — including European countries, Canada and Israel — would provide Ukraine with military assistance and weapons if it were attacked, the negotiators said. Ukraine, in turn, would ensure it remained “nonaligned and nonnuclear,” although it would retain the right to join the European Union.

The Ukrainian proposal also offered a 15-year timeline for negotiations with Russia over the status of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.

Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s lead negotiator, characterized the talks to reporters afterward as a “substantive conversation.” Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, said the discussions amounted to “the most meaningful progress since the start of negotiations."

Reaction from the United States was mixed, even as Moscow’s pledge to reduce military activity boosted U.S. stock markets on Tuesday morning. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed skepticism about the talks in Turkey, saying Moscow’s brutal, month-old military offensive leaves little room for optimism...

Keep reading.

Natural-Gas Industry Gets Boost as Biden Shifts Stance

Baby steps. Baby steps.

At WSJ, "Shares of large U.S. natural-gas companies rose as Biden softened position against fossil fuels":

President Biden’s pledge to boost U.S. liquefied natural-gas exports to Europe marks a further retreat from his hard-line stance against fossil fuels, sending share prices surging for natural-gas companies.

The president, who campaigned on a platform to transition the U.S. to cleaner energy, said Friday the U.S. is working to ship 50 billion cubic meters of LNG to Europe annually through at least 2030 to help the continent wean itself from dependence on Russian supplies.

The announcement came a day after Democrats on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission backtracked on new environmental policies, suspending implementation of heightened requirements on reviews that industry officials and Republicans said would impede gas-pipeline development.

Shares of large U.S. natural-gas companies rose 9% on average Friday as major stock indexes were mixed. Shares of EQT Corp and Southwestern Energy Co., two large producers, shot up to close about 12% and 16% higher.

Cheniere Energy Inc., LNG 5.46% the top U.S. exporter, was up about 5.5%. Tellurian Inc., which is seeking financing for an LNG project, soared 21%.

The gas industry’s prospects have been a concern among the sector’s executives because of Mr. Biden’s stance against fossil fuels. But the president has softened some of his positions in the wake of rising energy costs, which have been driven in part by the economic rebound from Covid-19, and more recently by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The White House pivot has also put the U.S. and its vast oil and gas reserves in shale rock back at the center of a global scramble for energy resources as a bulwark against petrostates and authoritarian regimes. The U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer.

Daniel Yergin, the vice chairman of S&P Global and a noted oil-industry historian, called recent developments “a huge turn.”

“There’s a recognition now that shale—and particularly LNG—is a real geopolitical asset,” Mr. Yergin said.

Mr. Biden and his advisers have said they are still committed to ending the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, including gas, and will continue to fund renewable energy as part of their work with European allies. But they also acknowledged the need to deal with the reliance that exists today.

“While gas is still a substantial part of the energy mix, we want to make sure that the Europeans do not have to source that gas from Russia,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Friday.

Toby Rice, chief executive of top U.S. natural-gas producer EQT, said the Biden administration’s shift is an extremely encouraging political signal that natural gas will play a key role in the world’s future energy mix.

Mr. Rice said the U.S. could sharply increase LNG exports over time if companies build thousands of miles of new pipelines and billions worth of new LNG facilities. But unleashing that will require broader support for that infrastructure and speeding up the sluggish permitting process, he said.

“The problem we face is it takes longer to permit something than it takes us to build it,” Mr. Rice said. “The faster we move, the faster we move toward achieving our climate goals and providing energy security for people around the world.” Shippers of LNG have already sent most U.S. cargoes to European destinations this year, as prices have skyrocketed following Russia’s invasion. American exporters are moving cargoes as fast as physically possible and are on pace to send a record 11.4 billion cubic feet a day of LNG overseas this month, with more than 60% bound for Europe, according to market intelligence firm Kpler.

FERC has approved 13 LNG facilities across the U.S. that have remained unbuilt with the combined capacity to export about 25 billion cubic feet each day, according to FERC’s February update. Companies haven’t begun construction on those largely because they haven’t yet gathered enough supply agreements with customers overseas to finance the construction of those facilities.

Part of the arrangement between the U.S. and Europe is to ensure that European countries also come through to show they can take more U.S. gas. They are to build out their infrastructure to accept up to 50 billion cubic meters of additional U.S. supply a year between now and 2030, Mr. Sullivan said.

Before the Russian invasion, Biden administration officials had been hesitant about putting U.S. development money into fossil-fuel projects abroad...

 

Ukraine Strikes Russian Navy in Occupied Port City (VIDEO)

Huge moral booster. Watch at the Telegraph U.K., "'We f------ hit them!' Moment Ukraine strikes Russian warship in Odesa," and the Guardian U.K., "Russian ship destroyed in port of Berdiansk, says Ukrainian navy."

The story's at the Wall Street Journal, "Ukraine Strikes Russian Navy as War Enters Second Month: NATO agreed to help Ukraine protect itself against potential biochemical warfare during an emergency meeting in Brussels":

Ukraine said it struck the Russian-occupied port facilities in the Azov Sea city of Berdyansk on Thursday, setting off a large fire and hitting a Russian warship as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization pledged additional help for Kyiv.

Seized by Russia in the first week of the war that began a month ago, Berdyansk has become a major logistics hub for Russian forces. Footage from the area showed smoke billowing from the berthing area and secondary explosions from detonating ammunition.

The attack in Berdyansk—which is 50 miles west of the besieged port of Mariupol and nearly 100 miles from the main front line in southern Ukraine—is a sign Kyiv has retained significant military capabilities as it pursues a large-scale conventional war against Russian forces.

President Biden met with NATO leaders in Brussels on Thursday to agree on new measures to help Ukraine battle Russia’s invasion and address growing concerns Moscow might use chemical, biological or other unconventional weapons in its monthlong war.

“Allies agreed to supply equipment to help Ukraine protect against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said after the summit. That includes equipment to detect such weapons, protect against them, medical support and decontamination equipment, he said.

NATO, he said, also has activated chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense forces. “We are taking measures both to support Ukraine but also to defend ourselves,” he said.

Russian officials didn’t immediately confirm the attack in Berdyansk. Kyiv initially said the strike destroyed the Russian navy landing ship, Orsk. Later Ukrainian news reports from Berdyansk named the targeted ship as Saratov, the same class of large landing ship as Orsk. The Ukrainian military followed up with a statement that it had hit Russian landing ships in Berdyansk, and that one of them was engulfed in fire. It didn’t provide the name.

Footage from Berdyansk also showed two smaller Russian ships fleeing the port after the explosions, one of them on fire.

Berdyansk, where pro-Ukrainian protests erupt regularly, is one of a handful of Ukrainian cities captured by Moscow in the month since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian officials haven’t disclosed how Ukraine carried out the attack. Ukraine’s new Neptune antiship missiles have a range of about 200 miles and haven’t been used in the conflict so far. Ukraine also has ballistic missiles with a known range of some 75 miles, though there may be modifications with a longer range.

Andrii Ryzhenko, a former Ukrainian Navy captain now with the Center for Defense Strategies, a Kyiv think tank with close ties to the military, said he believed Ukraine used one or more Tochka-U ballistic missiles to dent Russia’s supply chain along the Azov Sea coast.

“For the Russians, this is the easiest way to bring and feed their contingent,” Mr. Ryzhenko said. “These ships, they can carry a significant amount of cargo. Our specialists say that at least for a few weeks, Berdyansk is closed for them for resupply because of damage to the port.”

Mariupol, another Azov Sea port city, has been surrounded by Russian forces and pummeled with artillery and airstrikes for weeks. Thousands of civilians there have been killed, and most of the city has been destroyed, according to local officials. While Russian troops have entered the eastern side of Mariupol in recent days, Ukrainian forces continue to keep most of the city from falling into Russian hands.

Before Thursday’s strike, Ukraine managed to inflict severe damage on the Russian navy personnel in the Azov area. Moscow has acknowledged that Ukrainian troops killed the deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Navy Capt. Andrey Paliy, and the commander of the fleet’s 810th Marine Infantry Brigade, Col. Aleksey Sharov, both of whom were recently operating in the Mariupol area.

The combat performance of the Ukrainian army and the failure of Russian forces to make significant advances have caught U.S. and allied officials by surprise. Weapons supplied to Ukraine before the invasion were tailored to fuel an insurgency campaign, with U.S. officials expecting Russia to seize the capital Kyiv in as little as three days.

However, Ukraine has managed to push Russia’s much bigger and better equipped military to a standstill, at least for now. Western nations are rushing to get more military supplies across Ukraine’s western borders as Kyiv says it risks running short of ammunition.

In Thursday’s address to the NATO summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the alliance to do more to help Ukraine defend itself. “Ukraine needs military assistance—without limitations. Just as Russia is using all of its arsenal against us without limitations,” he said...

 

Biden's State Department Not Rising to the Call of the Hour

At Issues & Insights, "The State Department Should Rise to the Call of the Hour":

The U.S. Department of State's official mission is to lead America's foreign policy through diplomacy, advocacy, and assistance by advancing the American people's interests, safety, and economic prosperity.

For a situation that is bringing us closer to World War III and the worst inflation in 40 years, partly triggered by global events, the State Department is failing to lead in its core mission. Secretary Antony Blinken sounds like a cross between a media analyst and a military general rather than the lead diplomat of the free world.

During his March 17th remarks to the press, Blinken chided Russia as he has been doing for weeks. Switching hats, he then announced a laundry list of weapons to assist Ukraine. He sounded more like Lloyd Austen, the Secretary of Defense: "We're also helping Ukraine acquire longer-range anti-aircraft systems and munitions at President Zelenskyy's request." There was no mention of the State Department leading diplomatically, other than a vague promise: "We'll support Ukraine's diplomatic efforts however we can."

Leaving rookie Ukraine, whose leader has been in political office for fewer than three years, to negotiate peace with wily Russia will not cut it. For weeks, the parties have been talking while Russia mercilessly attacks Ukrainian civilian targets. Each hour's delay brings about additional carnage.

Blinken has been relentlessly pursuing a strategy to strangle Putin, isolate Russia, and inflict so much pain that Putin would initiate serious diplomatic overtures. "I have not seen any meaningful efforts by Russia to bring this war to a conclusion through diplomacy," Blinken said to news media this week.

But this "lead-from-behind" approach, relying on Russia to bell the diplomatic cat, makes no sense. History has repeatedly shown us that pariahs do not initiate peace talks. Even the appearance of conceding defeat would spell the death knell for them back home.

If anything, Putin's speech in Moscow shows that he feels vindicated by his actions in Ukraine. Putin has upped the ante by firing hypersonic missiles, which can travel at ten times the speed of sound. Russia is a powerful country spanning nine time zones and boasting a larger nuclear arsenal than any other country. It is more likely that Putin will dig in rather than bail out; take risks than ask for help.

This is where American diplomacy can make a difference...

Keep reading.

 

How Russia and Right-Wing Americans Converged on War in Ukraine (VIDEO)

Following-up from yesterday, "Putin's Challenge to the American Right (VIDEO)."

At NYT, "Some conservatives have echoed the Kremlin’s misleading claims about the war and vice versa, giving each other’s assertions a sheen of credibility":

Candace Owens @RealCandaceO reacts to the New York Times asking her why she spread the idea that Ukraine is a corrupt country, even though she got the information from their publication. pic.twitter.com/kjj6k5zMRf

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 23, 2022

After President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed that action against Ukraine was taken in self-defense, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the conservative commentator Candace Owens repeated the assertion. When Mr. Putin insisted he was trying to “denazify” Ukraine, Joe Oltmann, a far-right podcaster, and Lara Logan, another right-wing commentator, mirrored the idea.

The echoing went the other way, too. Some far-right American news sites, like Infowars, stoked a longtime, unfounded Russian claim that the United States funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine. Russian officials seized on the chatter, with the Kremlin contending it had documentation of bioweapons programs that justified its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

As war has raged, the Kremlin’s talking points and some right-wing discourse in the United States — fueled by those on the far right — have coalesced. On social media, podcasts and television, falsehoods about the invasion of Ukraine have flowed both ways, with Americans amplifying lies from Russians and the Kremlin spreading fabrications that festered in American forums online.

By reinforcing and feeding each other’s messaging, some right-wing Americans have given credibility to Russia’s assertions and vice versa. Together, they have created an alternate reality, recasting the Western bloc of allies as provokers, blunderers and liars, which has bolstered Mr. Putin.

The war initially threw some conservatives — who had insisted no invasion would happen — for a loop. Many criticized Mr. Putin and Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Some have since gone on to urge more support for Ukraine.

But in recent days, several far-right commentators have again gravitated to narratives favorable to Mr. Putin’s cause. The main one has been the bioweapons conspiracy theory, which has provided a way to talk about the war while focusing criticism on President Biden and the U.S. government instead of Mr. Putin and the Kremlin.

“People are asking if the far right in the U.S. is influencing Russia or if Russia is influencing the far right, but the truth is they are influencing each other,” said Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies Russian information warfare. “They are pushing the same narratives.”

Their intersecting comments could have far-reaching implications, potentially exacerbating polarization in the United States and influencing the midterm elections in November. They could also create a wedge among the right, with those who are pro-Russia at odds with the Republicans who have become vocal champions for the United States to ramp up its military response in Ukraine.

“The question is how much the far-right figures are going to impact the broader media discussion, or push their party,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington nonprofit. “It serves them, and Russia, to muddy the waters and confuse Americans.”

Many of their misleading war narratives, which are sometimes indirect and contradictory, have reached millions. While Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms limited the reach of Russian state media online after the war began, a variety of far-right Telegram channels, blogs and podcasts took up the task of spreading the Kremlin’s claims. Inside Russia, state media has in turn reflected what some far-right Americans have said.

Mentions of bioweapons labs related to war in Ukraine, for example, have more than doubled — to more than 1,000 a day — since early March on both Russian- and English-language social media, cable TV, and print and online outlets, according to the media tracking company Zignal Labs.

The unsubstantiated idea began trending in English-language media late last month, according to Zignal’s analysis. Interest faded by early March as images of injured Ukrainians and bombed cities spread across the internet.

 

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy Faces Down the Russians

 At Der Spiegel, "The Role of a Lifetime":

Vladmir Putin thought he would roll into Kyiv almost unchallenged. But the Ukrainians refuse to give it – led by a man who seems perfectly adapted to the role history has asked him to fill: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

It often seems these days like there isn’t just one Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but many of them. The Ukrainian president can be seen addressing the European Parliament, he can be seen speaking to cheering masses of peace demonstrators from the big screen in Prague or Frankfurt, and he can be seen delivering video addresses – as he did this week – to lawmakers in Ottawa, Washington and

Berlin. And his speeches are tailored perfectly for his target audience. In London, he deployed a modified version of a quote from Winston Churchill, the World War II hero who is deeply venerated in the United Kingdom, saying: "We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets."

In his address to parliamentarians in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, he beseeched Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to imagine that it was his country that was being attacked: "Imagine that at 4 a.m., each of you start hearing bomb explosions. Severe explosions. Justin, can you imagine hearing it? You, your children hear all these severe explosions: … bombing of Ottawa airport, tens of other cities of your wonderful country. Can you imagine that?”

In Washington, he compared Ukraine’s situation with the trauma of the U.S. after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War II and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He then showed a video clip of falling bombs, of people fleeing, of dead and injured children. It was such a moving and disturbing film, that some of the members of Congress could be seen wiping tears from their eyes and the broadcaster CNN apologized afterwards for not having warned its viewers of the drastic images.

In a video speech to the Bundestag in Berlin, Zelenskyy adopted a more severe tone and scolded Germany for its overly cozy economic relations with the Putin regime. "We saw how many ties your companies still have with Russia," Zelenskyy said. His government, he added, issued plenty of warnings to Germany that Moscow could use the natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 as a weapon and to prepare for war. "We heard in response that it was an economy after all. Economy. Economy. But it was cement for a new wall."

He then addressed Chancellor Olaf Scholz directly: "Chancellor Scholz! Tear down this wall. Give Germany the leadership you deserve." That, too, was a historical reference, this time to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s famous Berlin Wall speech from 1987, when he demanded that then-Kremlin boss Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall.

A Global Audience

Zelenskyy’s message to the West is clear: Help us. You must do much more.

In the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, meanwhile, antitank obstacles are blocking the streets of Kyiv, missiles are slamming into residential buildings and people are crowding into subway stations to find shelter from the onslaught.

Zelenskyy has become a hero essentially overnight, the David who is fighting against Goliath. Good against evil. The unlikely war president, a Churchill dressed in an olive-green T-shirt and fleece jacket, a man who was ridiculed as a political clown until just recently. Now, he has catapulted himself onto the world stage and is reaching a global audience.

Zelenskyy is far from being the only one who is standing up to the Russian invasion. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are fighting the invaders, including members of the Territorial Defense Forces, doctors, first responders, logisticians, cooks, helpers and an army of volunteers. There is the mayor of the country’s second-largest city of Kharkiv, under attack by Russian troops. He speaks no Ukrainian, only Russian, but he has left no doubt that his city belongs to Ukraine. There is the young administrator in the city of Mykolaiv in the country’s embattled south who has become a media star in his own right with his regular video appearances. There is the mayor of the town of Melitopol, who was taken prisoner by the Russians, only to be freed by the Ukrainians. "There is something like a collective Zelenskyy," says Kyiv-based political scientist Volodymyr Fessenko.

And then, of course, there is Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxer who was elected mayor of Kyiv in 2014. Together with his brother Vladimir, Klitschko has made clear that he will not leave the city and intends to fight to the end. He has been a constant presence in the city the Russians are striving to encircle as he visits destroyed buildings and encourages aid workers and other volunteers.

But it is Volodymyr Zelenskyy who has become the face of the resistance against Russia’s aggression.

How Russia's Revamped Military Fumbled the Invasion of Ukraine

Things aren't going well. 

At. All.

At WSJ, "How Russia’s Revamped Military Fumbled the Invasion of Ukraine":

For over a decade, Russia spent hundreds of billions of dollars restructuring its military into a smaller, better equipped and more-professional force that could face off against the West.

Three weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its first big test, the armed forces have floundered. Western estimates, while highly uncertain, suggest as many as 7,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed.

The dead included four Russian generals—one-fifth of the number estimated to be in Ukraine—along with other senior commanders, according to a Western official and Ukrainian military reports. The generals were close to the front lines, some Western officials said, a sign that lower ranks in forward units were likely unable to make decisions or fearful of advancing.

Russian troops turned to using open telephone and analog radios following the failure of encrypted communications systems, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has said, making them vulnerable to intercept or jamming. Russian officers were likely targeted after their positions were exposed by their use of open communications, Western military analysts said.

In the strategically located town of Voznesensk, Ukrainian forces comprising local volunteers and the professional military drove off an attack early this month, in one of the most comprehensive routs Russian forces have suffered since invading Ukraine.

Russia’s failings appear to trace to factors ranging from the Kremlin’s wrong assumptions about Ukrainian resistance to the use of poorly motivated conscript soldiers. They suggest that Russia and the West overestimated Moscow’s overhauls of its armed forces, which some military analysts say appear to have been undermined by graft and misreporting.

The military’s previous outings in staged maneuvers and smaller operations in Syria didn’t prepare it for a multipronged attack into a country with a military fiercely defending its homeland, said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a nonprofit research organization based in Arlington, Va.

“The failures that we’re seeing now is them having to work with a larger force than they’ve ever employed in real combat conditions as opposed to an exercise,” he said. “These exercises that we’ve been shown over the years are very scripted events and closer to theater than anything else.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment on analyses of its performance. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an address to regional authorities on Wednesday, praised the war efforts, which in Russia are described only as a special military operation.

“The operation is being carried out successfully, strictly in accordance with previously laid-out plans,” he said. “And our boys and soldiers and officers are showing courage and heroism and are doing everything to avoid losses among the civilian population.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week said Ukraine had lost around 1,300 soldiers since the start of the invasion. A senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization official said losses were likely on par with the Russians’.

Insurgent Tactics

For sure, Russia’s forces have taken territory, mainly in the south and east of the country against a smaller, less well-equipped adversary. Russian military commanders may also learn from their mistakes as they reposition their forces in readiness for a new offensive.

Western defense analysts say that even if Moscow’s military overcomes Ukraine’s armed forces eventually, they doubt that would end hostilities and merely mark the beginning of an insurgency that could tie up Russian forces for years. Moscow’s declared military objectives of replacing the government and establishing effective Russian control over a submissive population look remote.

But for now, Ukrainian forces have beaten back Russian paratroopers trying to secure airfields, and miles-long convoys of tanks and support trucks have stalled on highways out of fuel, Ukrainian soldiers’ videos and satellite imagery show. Hundreds of Russian military vehicles have been destroyed and others abandoned, sometimes because of mechanical breakdowns and poor-quality equipment, said Western officials and military analysts closely following the campaign.

Ukraine says its forces have downed more than 80 fixed-wing aircraft and 100 helicopters, though many fewer have been independently verified. Western officials have expressed surprise that Russia failed to use its superior air power to establish dominance of the skies, which left Ukraine’s much smaller air force operating.

Still, Russian warplanes flying over Ukraine continue to inflict heavy damage, including against civilians. The mayor of Mariupol said Russia’s air force had bombed the city’s drama theater Wednesday, killing an unknown number of people who had taken shelter there. Russia has denied responsibility. Mr. Zelensky in his video address to U.S. Congress on Wednesday said Ukraine is experiencing terror from the airstrikes every day, as he pressed for further military assistance. Ukrainians have continued to attack long columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles on open roads in formations making them vulnerable to Ukraine’s Turkish Bayraktar drones and its Territorial Defense units that use insurgent tactics to destroy fuel trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers, videos posted by the Ukrainian military show.

In one such attack last week, Ukrainian drone footage posted on the Ukrainian armed forces’ YouTube channel showed the confusion caused by a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column of dozens of tanks and armored vehicles approaching Brovary on the northeastern outskirts of Kyiv. The convoy suffers apparent drone hits at the front and the rear, trapping vehicles between them.

As soldiers escape their blazing vehicles, further explosions envelop them. Other tanks turn in panic, their tracks churning the road surface, before they retreat. Later footage shows tanks, apparently nearby, destroyed by an antitank weapon fired from a roadside position.

The movement of troops in bumper-to-bumper convoys is a clear sign of “soldiers who are untrained or undisciplined,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe and now chair in strategic studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. “You need sergeants or NCOs constantly telling them to spread out. It’s a human instinct to huddle together when you’re in danger,” he said. “I feel terrible for the young soldiers in the Russian army.”

The NATO official said the Russians’ fighting style surprised Western observers because it didn’t follow the Russian military’s doctrine of using mobile units called battalion tactical groups and a consolidated system to command troops, which would have allowed the military to be nimbler against the enemy without extending supply lines dangerously inside Ukrainian territory.

“For now, they just can’t move,” the official said, adding that Russia has been trying to resupply the army by moving “trash”—civilian trucks and cars—across the country to the front line where they can be used by the military...

There's some dispute on Russia's fatalities numbers. Check Newsweek, "Report of 10,000 Russian Deaths Immediately Deleted by Pro-Putin Tabloid."

As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin's Leadership

At the New York Times, "Military losses have mounted, progress has slowed, and a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war":

In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be “pointless and extremely dangerous.” It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten “the existence of Russia itself as a state.”

To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. Reached by phone this week, the retired general who authored the declaration, Leonid Ivashov, said he stood by it, though he could not speak freely given Russia’s wartime censorship: “I do not disavow what I said.”

In Russia, the slow going and the heavy toll of President Vladimir V. Putin’s war on Ukraine are setting off questions about his military’s planning capability, his confidence in his top spies and loyal defense minister, and the quality of the intelligence that reaches him. It also shows the pitfalls of Mr. Putin’s top-down governance, in which officials and military officers have little leeway to make their own decisions and adapt to developments in real time.

The failures of Mr. Putin’s campaign are apparent in the striking number of senior military commanders believed to have been killed in the fighting. Ukraine says it has killed at least six Russian generals, while Russia acknowledges one of their deaths, along with that of the deputy commander of its Black Sea fleet. American officials say they cannot confirm the number of Russian troop deaths, but that Russia’s invasion plan appears to have been stymied by bad intelligence.

The lack of progress is so apparent that a blame game has begun among some Russian supporters of the war — even as Russian propaganda claims that the slog is a consequence of the military’s care to avoid harming civilians. Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophically incorrect assessment” of Ukraine’s forces.

“The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” Mr. Girkin said.

The Russian forces’ poor performance has also surprised analysts, who predicted at the start of the war that Russia’s massive, technologically advanced military would make short work of Ukraine. Mr. Putin himself seems to have counted on his troops quickly seizing major cities, including the capital, Kyiv, decapitating the government and installing a puppet regime under the Kremlin’s control.

“Take power into your own hands,” Mr. Putin urged Ukrainian soldiers on the second day of the invasion, apparently hoping Ukraine would go down without a fight.

Instead, Ukraine fought back. Nearly a month has passed, and Russian troops appear bogged down in the face of relentless attacks from a much weaker, though far more maneuverable, Ukrainian military. “There was probably the hope that they wouldn’t resist so intensely,” Yevgeny Buzhinsky, ​​a retired lieutenant general and a regular Russian state television commentator, said of Ukraine’s forces. “They were expected to be more reasonable.”

As if responding to criticism, Mr. Putin has said repeatedly in his public comments about the war that it is going “according to plan.”

“We can definitively say that nothing is going to plan,” countered Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies have seen such great losses in such a short period of time.”

Russia last announced its combat losses three weeks ago — 498 deaths as of March 2. American officials now say that a conservative estimate puts the Russian military death toll at 7,000. Russia says it lost a total of 11,000 service members in nearly a decade of fighting in Chechnya.

The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russia’s military and security services...

 

Putin's Challenge to the American Right (VIDEO)

From Andrew Sullivan, at the Weekly Dish, "An invasion in Europe has exposed the flimsiness of post-liberalism":

It would perhaps be too glorious an irony if it were Vladimir Putin who finally buzz-killed the American and European right’s infatuation with post-liberalism. But, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine staggers shambolically and criminally forward, it’s no longer unthinkable. The icon of the West’s new right is in serious trouble now — and it might tarnish all of those who only yesterday were idolizing his reactionary zeal.

It’s not so much Putin’s trashing of international law, his unhinged rehashing of post-Soviet grievances, his next-level Covid paranoia, the foul murders of his opponents, or his brazen embrace of shelling hospitals that has so deepened the damage to the Putin brand among the West’s new Russophiles. These atrocities and madnesses they have long found ways to live with. No, it’s Putin’s failure — thus far — to actually win the war he started that’s so damning. It’s one thing for a dictator to be deemed cruel; and quite another — and far more dangerous — thing for him to be seen as incompetent.

And it’s happened so fast. The love letters had been flowing for years now before this unfortunate interruption. “Russia is like, I mean they’re really hot stuff,” Donald Trump chortled in April 2014, adding that “now you have people in the Ukraine — who knows, set up or not — but it can’t all be set up, I mean they’re marching in favor of joining Russia.” Two weeks ago, in the face of Putin’s pre-invasion posturing over the Donbas region, Trump marveled:

How smart is that? I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful … And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. … There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. … Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

“They’re gonna keep peace all right.” Think of the depth of the cynical callousness that has to lie behind such a smirk. Notice that for Trump, Putin is not just a thug but a smart one, and the possibility of his brutal incursion into a sovereign neighbor state was, in Trump’s mind, “wonderful.” And cheap: “He’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.” With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain.

Even those on the far right who had long had to acknowledge that, yes, well, Putin was a bit of a sociopath, nonetheless professed to admire his skill, if not his motives. Nigel Farage, the well-nicotined Brexit pioneer, called Putin one of the world leaders he most admired, hurriedly hedging with “as an operator, particularly the way he managed to stop the West from getting militarily involved in Syria.” He later reiterated: “He’s a very canny, very sharp, very clever political operator.” Eric Zemmour, the dynamic far-right leader in France, also spoke highly of Putin, calling him “the last bastion against the hurricane of the politically correct which, starting in America, has destroyed all the traditional structures of family, religion and nation.” He later added, “I dream of a French Putin emerging, but there is none.”

Putin’s Russia, like Orban’s Hungary, appealed to many post-liberal conservatives in the West for obvious reasons. Part of it was the shamelessness of the strongmen’s ethnically-homogeneous nationalism, compared with what was seen as the simpering, multicultural globalism of EU types; part was hatred of Obama, who was always deemed weak in contrast with, er, anyone; and part was a more amorphous but nonetheless profound view of Putin and Orban as cultural traditionalists, standing up to Western decadence, as it staggers into its Drag Queen Story Hour hellscape. For besieged social conservatives and Christianists in America, Putin loomed like some phantasm of strange hope.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.” Congressman Madison Cawthorn took it further: “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt, and it is incredibly evil, and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” That plucky little Zelensky, speaking live to the British House of Commons as bombs rained down on his country’s cities? An “incredibly evil” “thug.” Our old friend Dinesh D’Souza, in his usual temperate style, sees the Democrats as posing “a far greater threat to our freedom and safety than Putin.” And Bannon is still urging his minions to give “zero dollars to Ukraine,” even as the corpses of children lie on the streets. There’s an alt-right edginess to this moral perversity.

And over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016. Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative...

Still more.

 

Ukrainians Flee Mariupol as Russian Forces Push to Take Port City

Another day of war. Thursday will mark exactly one month since Putin's invasion.

At WSJ, "Russian airstrikes, artillery and mortar rounds have gutted entire neighborhoods in the strategically important Ukrainian city":

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine—The battle for the southern port city of Mariupol intensified Tuesday with fleeing civilians describing Russian and Ukrainian forces locked in street-by-street warfare through the city’s downtown as Moscow’s airstrikes gutted entire neighborhoods.

Nearly a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, it is on the verge of taking Mariupol in what would be the first major city to fall under its control. But Mariupol is a shattered prize.

“Everything fell apart,” Natalia Poluiko said Tuesday, hours after arriving in Zaporizhzhia, about 150 miles to the west, with her 8-year-old daughter and five other relatives. “We had a choice to wait there until a bomb fell on our building, or risk trying to get out.”

The family fled Mariupol in two vehicles with belongings strapped to the roof and a religious icon on the dashboard, praying for safe passage on the approach to each Russian checkpoint.

Hundreds of people from Mariupol now arrive daily in Zaporizhzhia in a grim procession of cars, with shattered windshields and shrapnel damage speaking to the ordeal endured by their passengers.

The wider battle lines across Ukraine have shifted little in recent days. Ukrainian forces said they were regaining ground in some areas. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday its troops had made progress battling for towns along its lines of attack.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, maintained his busy schedule of trying to rally international support on Tuesday, speaking with the pope and, separately, the Italian parliament.

President Biden heads to Europe on Wednesday for talks with allies about the war and is preparing to roll out new sanctions on most members of Russia’s State Duma, the lower house of parliament, U.S. officials said.

The fighting around Mariupol has been under way since the opening days of Russia’s assault that began Feb. 24. The city has seen stepped-up levels of attack for about the past two weeks and as the battle moved closer to the city.

Mariupol has been a focus of the Russian offensive because it is a strategically important city linking Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine with a swath of territory Moscow has captured in the south, and creating an arc containing much of the country’s Russian-speaking population.

Streams of cars from Mariupol pull into the parking lot of a hardware store on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia—now a way station for people fleeing to safety further west, or abroad—part of the more than 10 million people uprooted by the fighting. Taped to the windows are homemade signs reading “children” in Russian, and strips of white material tied to the door handles, scant protection from the war raging over their city.

More than a dozen residents who fled since last week described a desperate struggle to stay alive in a city where venturing outside meant exposure to being shot, shredded by artillery fire or obliterated in an airstrike.

“They are basically wiping the city from the face of the earth,” said Andriy, 37, who took his chances during a lull in the bombardment on Monday and fled Mariupol with his wife and two children. Andriy, who declined to give his full name, said his ears had yet to adjust to the absence of constant shelling in the city he left behind. “It’s as though I’ve come back to life.”

Although Mariupol was always likely to be a target of Russia’s invasion, many residents stayed because they couldn’t believe the situation would get so bad. By the time they realized what was unfolding, it was too late.

The bombardment of the city of between 350,000 to 400,000 residents was growing heavier and closer by the day. Local officials say Russia has rained 50 to 100 bombs a day on Mariupol, destroying between 80% and 90% of the city. Ukraine rejected a Russian ultimatum to surrender the city this week.

Ukrainian military officials said Tuesday that those defending the town were able to destroy a Russian patrol boat operating close to the city, as well as a Russian radio complex...

 

General David Petraeus: 'Russia's Command and Control Has Broken Down' (VIDEO)

Five Russian generals have been taken out. It's very uncommon, explains General Petraeus. 

At CNN: 

Long Bloody Battle for Kyiv Looms (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "The Battle for Kyiv Looms as a Long and Bloody Conflict":

Ukraine’s capital is the biggest prize of all for the Russian military. If Russia tries to take control, it could lead to one of the biggest urban conflicts since World War II.

KYIV, Ukraine — The city of Kyiv covers 325 square miles and is divided by a broad river. It has about 500,000 structures — factories, ornate churches and high-rise apartments — many on narrow, winding streets. Roughly two million people remain after extensive evacuations of women and children.

To the northwest and to the east, tens of thousands of Russian troops are pressing toward the city, Ukraine’s capital, backed by columns of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery. Inside Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers and civilian volunteers are fortifying the downtown with barriers, anti-tank mines and artillery.

Kyiv remains the biggest prize of all for the Russian military; it is the seat of government and ingrained in both Russian and Ukrainian identity. But capturing it, military analysts say, would require a furious and bloody conflict that could be the world’s biggest urban battle in 80 years.

“What we are looking at in Kyiv would dwarf anything we’ve seen since World War II,” said David Kilcullen, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army who has extensively studied urban combat. “If they really, really want to level Kyiv, they can,” he said of the Russian leadership. “But the level of political and economic damage would be tremendous.”

For comparison, one of the largest urban battles this century was the nine-month siege of Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 and 2017 to oust its Islamic State occupiers. Mosul covers 70 square miles and had a wartime population of about 750,000 people — a fraction of the numbers for Kyiv, where the metropolitan area’s prewar population was 3.6 million.

Negotiations over a cease-fire are continuing, and a long, heated battle over Kyiv is not inevitable. Despite superior numbers and firepower, Russia has not achieved a breakthrough. A Western official, in a briefing with reporters this past week, said the Russians had taken heavy casualties, been unable to establish any meaningful off-road presence, and — perhaps most surprising — failed to achieve dominance in the air.

But the first stages of the battle have already begun, with cruise missile bombardments, troop movements to encircle the city and a fight to gain air superiority. Savage, street-by-street gunfights akin to guerrilla warfare have broken out in northwestern suburbs like Irpin, an important gateway into the city. It could be the beginning of a long, drawn-out siege using hunger and street fighting to advance toward the city center.

After three weeks of fighting in the suburbs, Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers, who are operating in loosely organized small units and relying heavily on ambushes, are growing more confident in the city’s defense. Part of their strategy is to make the assault so costly for the Russian army in lives that it will exhaust or demoralize its troops before they reach the city center.

“There’s no talk of capitulation for Kyiv,” said Lt. Tetiana Chornovol, the commander of an anti-tank missile unit operating on the outskirts of the city. “Everything is going far better than we thought.”

Lieutenant Chornovol, 42, is a former activist in Ukraine’s street protest movement who sent her two children to safety before reporting for duty as a reserve officer. She commands two teams of a half-dozen or so people each, firing Ukrainian-made, tripod-mounted missiles, which they transport to ambush positions in their personal cars.

Lieutenant Chornovol drives a red Chevy Volt electric hatchback, which she calls an “ecologically clean killing machine.”

Interviewed beside a burning grocery warehouse in the suburban town of Brovary, the lieutenant popped the hatchback to reveal a beige tube, holding a Stugna-P missile. It has a range of three miles and hits a target within a diameter of one foot.

Seemingly unfazed by combat, Lieutenant Chornovol described the Ukrainian tactic of ambushes that has defined the early phases of the battle for the capital. Last week, she said, she blew up a Russian tank a few miles east of Brovary on the M01 highway.

“We look for firing positions where we can see a stretch of road,” Lieutenant Chornovol said, adding that “we know a column will drive on the road” eventually. With her car parked some distance away, covered in camouflage, she and her team lay in wait in a tree line for three days before a Russian column came rumbling down the road...

Keep reading.

 

 

Institute for the Study of War

It's like these cats were put in deep-freeze since the surge in Iraq. And now? A go-to resource on the "Russian Campaign Offensive."

If there are "neocons" pushing for war in Ukraine, it would be these people. Yet besides daily updates on the Russia's campaign --- which are being cited by the New York Times, of all outlets --- there's been no Kaganite pro-war media blitz to plant U.S. forces in Lviv.

Nope, now Glenn Greenwald's warning against the "Bush/Cheney" cabal reincarnated in --- David Frum? Okay. *Shrugs.*

In any event, from ISW: 

NEW: Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial #Russian campaign of this war. Its culmination is creating conditions of stalemate throughout most of #Ukraine.

Read the latest Russian offensive campaign assessment from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats: https://t.co/EtMCrMbAjO pic.twitter.com/4XrCCj5Gnj

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 19, 2022

REPORT: Russia Has Empowered Neo-Nazi Factions in Zelensky's Army

There's some debate over this here, and I'm sure lots more on Twitter and elsewhere.

Nazis in the Ukraine army? This is way beyond my knowledge. I'll keep my eyes peeled for more on this. 

At UnHerd, "The truth about Ukraine’s far-Right militias":

Like any war, but perhaps more than most, the war in Ukraine has seen a bewildering barrage of claims and counter-claims made by the online supporters of each side. Truth, partial truths and outright lies compete for dominance in the media narrative. Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia invaded Ukraine to “de-Nazify” the country is surely one of the clearest examples. The Russian claim that the Maidan revolution of 2014 was a “fascist coup” and that Ukraine is a Nazi state has been used for years by Putin and his supporters to justify his occupation of Crimea and support for Russian-speaking separatists in the country’s east, winning many online adherents.

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free elections that produce significant changes of power, including the election, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a Nazi state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests.

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports Nazis”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing militias, including neo-Nazi ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future.

Indeed, some of the best coverage of Ukraine’s extreme Right-wing groups has come from the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, which is not known for a favourable attitude towards Russian propaganda. Bellingcat’s excellent reporting of this under-discussed topic over the past few years has largely focused on the Azov movement, Ukraine’s most powerful extreme Right-wing group, and the one most favoured by the state’s largesse.

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-Nazi black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric Nazism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role translating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance...

Keep reading.

 

The Annihilation of Mariupol (VIDEO)

At the Financial Times, "‘Hell on earth’: survivors recount Mariupol’s annihilation under Russian bombs":

Residents who escaped from besieged Ukrainian port depict harrowing conditions for civilians.

In the besieged city of Mariupol, scene of the heaviest fighting in Russia’s three-week war on Ukraine, people are now so hungry they are killing stray dogs for food.

Dmytro, a businessman who left the city on Tuesday, said friends told him they resorted to this desperate measure in the past few days after their supplies ran out.

“You hear the words but it’s impossible to really take them in, to believe this is happening,” he said. “It is hell on earth.”

Once one of Ukraine’s most important ports, Mariupol is now a charnel house, a city of ghosts. For more than two weeks it has been subjected to a Russian bombardment of such intensity that it has turned whole neighbourhoods into piles of smouldering rubble.

After days of punishing aerial and artillery assaults that broke Mariupol’s three lines of defensive fortifications, Russian troops have now entered the city centre, with heavy fighting reported on some of its main shopping streets and near Theatre Square, a key landmark.

On Sunday night, Russia gave Ukraine until 5am local time to decide whether to surrender Mariupol. Its defence ministry said it would allow Ukrainian troops to leave the city, but only if they lay down their arms. 

Russian forces are already in control of Livoberezhnyi Raion, or left-bank district, in the east of the city, as well as Mikroraiony 17-23, a string of residential neighbourhoods in the north-east, said Anna Romanenko, a Ukrainian journalist who is in close contact with Ukrainian forces there. “The front line runs right through Mariupol now,” she said.

Dmytro, who declined to give his surname, was one of a number of Mariupol residents the Financial Times contacted by phone after they had been evacuated over the past week to the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, about 230km to the west. All described an assault so brutal it has destroyed the city, killed and maimed countless civilians and left deep scars on the survivors.

Mykola Osichenko, chief executive of Mariupol TV, said his abiding memory of the past three weeks was the feeling of utter powerlessness. “When the bombs fell, I would routinely cover my son with my body,” he said. “But I knew that I couldn’t really protect him, that it was an act of desperation.”

Strategically located on the Sea of Azov, the gateway to the Black Sea, Mariupol was in Russia’s crosshairs from the start of the war. From just a few days in, its forces started launching missiles at the city in an onslaught that severed its electricity, gas and water supplies and left its 400,000 residents cowering in freezing shelters, hugging for warmth. Mariupol authorities said 2,400 residents of the city had been killed since Russia launched its invasion.

Survivors described desperate attempts to stock up on supplies while bombs exploded around them. Dmytro said he visited the central market last Sunday after it had been flattened by a Russian artillery attack.

“Everything was burning, there were corpses everywhere, and I was just walking through, picking up a cabbage here, a carrot there, knowing it meant my family would live another day or two,” he said. “You become completely desensitised.”

Witnesses depicted post-apocalyptic scenes of stray dogs eating the remains of bombing victims who lay unburied on the street. Civilian casualties have been placed in mass graves or buried in the courtyards of houses: proper funerals are too dangerous...

 Still more.

Ukraine Blasts Kremlin for Bombing Civilians, Alleged Forced Removal of Ukrainians to Russia

Russia can't win on the battlefield, so Putin will level the cities and terrorize the civilian population, attempting to demoralize Kyiv and force a negotiated win at the bargaining table.

Putin will never go before the Hague. He's kill himself first. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "Ukraine accuses Russia of bombing shelter, deporting citizens":

LVIV, Ukraine — Amid a growing consensus that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is morphing into a bloody stalemate that could last months, Ukrainian officials on Sunday blamed the Kremlin for a new spate of deadly attacks on civilian targets, including the bombing of an art school in the embattled port city of Mariupol where hundreds had taken shelter. Ukrainian officials also accused Russian forces of seizing several thousand Mariupol residents and deporting them against their will to “remote cities in Russia.”

Ukraine’s human rights spokesperson, Lyudmyla Denisova, said on Telegram that residents were being transported across the border to a Russian city about 60 miles from Mariupol and then sent by train farther into the Russian interior.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko likened the alleged deportations to the expulsion and slaughter of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, a theme also evoked Sunday by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a virtual address to lawmakers in Israel. “What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II,” Boychenko said.

The reports of forced removals could not be independently verified given that few journalists or humanitarian aid workers have been able to enter Mariupol, where machine-gun battles rage daily between Russian forces and Ukrainian defenders. The Kremlin has not responded to the allegations, although Russian state media reported that buses filled with what they described as refugees have been arriving from Ukraine in recent days.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN on Sunday that she could not confirm the reports but added it would be “unconscionable for Russia to force Ukrainian citizens into Russia and put them in what will basically be concentration and prisoner camps.”

Mariupol, a strategic city of some 400,000 on the Sea of Azov, has become a vivid symbol of the devastation wrought by the unprovoked invasion, with massive craters opened by bombs and artillery shells and 90% of the city’s buildings reportedly damaged or destroyed.

The apparent bombing early Sunday of Art School Number 12, where some 400 people were said to be sheltering, follows a similar bombing Wednesday of a large Mariupol theater where more than 1,000 people were apparently hiding.

As in the attack on the theater, officials said there appeared to be people trapped under the debris at the school. “It is known that the building was demolished and there are still peaceful people under the rubble,” the Mariupol city council said on Telegram.

Zelensky said Sunday that Moscow’s relentless assault on the city “will go down in history” as a war crime.

“The terror the occupiers did to the peaceful city will be remembered for centuries to come,” Zelensky said in his daily address, marking the 25th day since Russia invaded Ukraine. “And the more Ukrainians tell the world about it, the more support we find.”

Despite reports of widespread destruction in Mariupol, there were growing signs that Moscow’s apparent hopes for a quick war and rapid Ukrainian capitulation have faded against unexpectedly fierce resistance and what many call miscalculations and missteps by Russian military planners.

In a new assessment of the war in Ukraine, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said that the protracted siege on Mariupol, while devastating, “is costing the Russian military time, initiative, and combat power.”

It said Russia’s failures to quickly seize control of Kyiv and other major cities have created the conditions for a “bloody stalemate that could last for weeks or months.” The U.K. Ministry of Defense has issued a similar appraisal, saying Russia, after failing to win control of Ukraine’s skies, has adopted a “strategy of attrition” aimed at wearing down Ukrainian forces to the point of collapse. The agency predicted an increase in Russia’s “indiscriminate use of firepower” and warned of civilian casualties, the destruction of key Ukrainian infrastructure and a growing humanitarian crisis.

At least 847 civilians have been killed in the war, the United Nations says, although it warns the real toll may be much higher given that many parts of the country remain inaccessible.

At least 6.5 million people have been internally displaced, according to U.N., and more than 3.3 million people have fled Ukraine...

 

How the U.S. and EU Cut Russia Off From the Global Economy

This is extremely fascinating to me. For all the talk of U.S. relative decline, the administration's actions have displayed the brute power of economic sanctions to wield havoc on strategic rivals. The Russians have just begun to hurt. 

At WSJ, "Unprecedented coordination from late November set the stage for aggressive sanctions when Ukraine was invaded":

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with senior officials in the White House Situation Room to discuss a Russian troop buildup on the border of Ukraine. The meeting included top intelligence advisers, defense officials and diplomats, who concluded Russia might be preparing to invade.

Ms. Yellen said she would contact counterparts in Europe and elsewhere to urge them to begin preparations for an economic response, according to people familiar with the meeting, and she started making calls to coordinate after the holiday.

That meeting marked the launch of an unprecedented financial sanctions program by the West aimed at a major economy. In the war between Russia and Ukraine that program, along with massive arms shipments, were the front lines of the West’s engagement. It is a strategy designed to steer clear of direct combat between Russia and members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization while crippling Russia’s economy to ensure that any military victory is pyrrhic.

“We’re using economic statecraft to fight for democracy and take on autocracy,” said Mark Gitenstein, U.S. ambassador to the European Union.

It remains unclear whether the campaign will achieve its goal of deterring President Vladimir Putin or altering his calculus on the battlefield. So far, Russia’s military progress has been slower than many anticipated and Ukraine’s resistance stronger, but Mr. Putin has shown little interest in de-escalating the crisis.

Some observers also note that such sweeping Western measures could cause collateral damage by shocking commodities markets that countries around the globe rely on for energy, metals and food.

“The risk now is that these sanctions have a grave impact on the world economy because of their size and the role of the Russian economy in global markets,” said Nicholas Mulder, a historian at Cornell University who studies the history of sanctions. “It is going to be a pretty serious drag on global growth and could lead to recession.” As a shock to the Russian economy, however, the program to cut off Russia’s access to international finance appears to have met with early success even though the U.S. and Europe have continued to allow Russia to collect hundreds of millions of dollars a day in payments for its energy exports to Europe. Many global companies—such as Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft Corp. and McDonald’s Corp. —amplified government efforts to isolate Russia by abandoning or scaling back operations there.

Russia’s currency, the ruble, is down 13% since the invasion started on Feb. 24. Russians have lined up to withdraw their savings from the country’s banks and Russian factories have been crippled. Assets held internationally by a host of Russian oligarchs viewed as close to Mr. Putin have been frozen. Russia’s stock market has been closed for weeks.

Russia calls the actions aggression. “The United States has unconditionally declared economic war on Russia, and they are waging this war,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this month.

The campaign also took the drastic step of isolating Russia’s central bank by freezing the reserves it holds at central banks around the world—denominated in dollars, euros and other currencies. Those assets help authorities manage the economy and are a resource for Russian companies that do business internationally.

As of June 2021, the Russian central bank had 16.4% of its reserves in U.S. dollar assets, 32.3% of its reserves in euro-denominated assets and much else in China, gold and other places. Together, U.S. and EU officials have blocked Russia’s access to nearly half of its global funds.

In recent years, the U.S. and Europe at times have been at odds over how far to go in financial deterrents. U.S. and European officials squabbled in the past when the U.S. imposed sanctions on foes such as Iran or North Korea and threatened European companies with repercussions if they didn’t comply.

When faced with Russian aggression toward Ukraine, the two sides worked with an unprecedented level of cooperation and scope between Treasury, the White House, the Commerce Department and the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, according to several of the participants.

They brought together elements of other sanctions and measures that among them they have launched in recent years against Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, as well as Russia over its 2014 seizure of Crimea, and Chinese telecommunication-equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co.

As the war grinds on, Ms. Yellen has said the West isn’t done seeking out economic responses. The Biden administration has since banned imports of Russian oil into the U.S. and sought to sever normal trade ties with Russia.

“The atrocities that they’re committing against civilians seem to be intensifying,” Ms. Yellen said last week in a public forum. “So it’s certainly appropriate for us to be working with our allies to consider further sanctions.”

After the pre-Thanksgiving meeting, senior Treasury officials including Ms. Yellen’s deputy, Wally Adeyemo, who oversees the day-to-day sanctions operation at the Treasury Department, and Elizabeth Rosenberg, assistant secretary on terror financing issues, led the coordination effort from Washington.

The central point of contact at the White House was Daleep Singh, a former Federal Reserve and Treasury official now at the National Security Council. He in turn was in regular contact with Björn Seibert, a former German defense official who serves as head of cabinet to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, coordinating EU policies.

Messrs. Singh and Seibert began talking about sanctions in December. Among the hurdles: Each element could blow back differently on the U.S. and the EU’s 27 national economies. The two focused on sanctioning Russia’s government-owned banks and imposing export controls, which would cut off Russian businesses from global suppliers.

For that, U.S. officials turned to the Foreign Direct Product Rule, a regulation they read as enabling Washington to block exports to Russia of potentially any product, including foreign goods made using U.S. equipment, software or blueprints. The rule has enabled the U.S. to hobble Huawei.

Many EU officials were hesitant, according to people involved in the talks. The EU exported about $100 billion of goods to Russia last year, while the U.S. exported directly less than $10 billion...

Still more.

 

Survivors Emerge From Bombed Ukrainian Theater (VIDEO)

At WSJ, "Survivors Emerge From Ukrainian Theater Bombed in Russian Airstrike":

Rescuers freed 130 people from the building in Mariupol and hundreds more remained trapped, as Russian forces continued shelling in Ukraine.

LVIV, Ukraine—Rescuers in Mariupol evacuated 130 people from the wreckage of a theater hit by an airstrike this week and searched for more survivors, as Russia expanded its air assaults on Ukraine’s west, striking an aircraft-repair facility near the Polish border, officials said.

“Hundreds of Mariupol residents are still under the debris,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during an address to the nation. “Despite the shelling, despite all the difficulties, we will continue rescue work.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to press on with his invasion of Ukraine in a rare public appearance before a crowd of tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters in a Moscow stadium, and President Biden warned Chinese leader Xi Jinping during a call on Friday that Beijing would face repercussions if it provided assistance to Russia in its military assault.

In Mariupol, about 1,300 people remained trapped in the basement of the theater where residents had sought shelter from Russian shelling, said Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human-rights commissioner, adding that it was difficult to be certain of the number of survivors. She didn’t confirm any casualties.

“We hope that they will be alive but as of now we have no information about them,” she said in a local television interview. The building was hit during an attack on Wednesday.

Efforts to sort through the wreckage and rescue any survivors are being hampered because rescue services have been nearly wiped out by the attack on the southern port city.

Getting medical treatment to those injured could be difficult, because “a lot of doctors have been killed,” former Gov. Sergiy Taruta said overnight.

More than 9,000 people were evacuated from Mariupol, Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address. He said that more than 180,000 Ukrainians have been rescued and tons of essential supplies have been delivered. Still, he said, aside from seven humanitarian corridors that have been opened, Russian forces “continue to block the supply of humanitarian aid to the besieged cities in most areas.”

Mr. Zelensky called on Russia to negotiate and said that in the coming days he will address other nations like Switzerland, Israel, Italy and Japan, just like he did the U.S., Canada and Germany. “It’s time to meet. Time to talk. It is time to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise, Russia’s losses will be so huge that several generations will not be enough to rebound,” he said. “Ukraine’s proposals are on the table.”

Russian missiles hit an aircraft-repair facility in the western part of the country on Friday, in a long-range strike far from the heaviest fighting while attacks continued on other cities.

The Ukrainian air force said Russia fired six cruise missiles from the Black Sea. Two were intercepted, preventing them from reaching their target near the airport in the western city of Lviv, about 50 miles from the Polish border.

Polish immigration authorities said Friday that the number of people who have fled Ukraine for Poland has now surpassed two million. More than three million Ukrainians have fled the country since the war began, according to the United Nations refugee agency. A building at the air facility was destroyed, according to Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, who said work at the facility had been suspended before the strike. One person was wounded, and rescue workers were on site putting out a fire, said Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the Lviv regional military administration.

Friday’s strike on the Lviv facility followed a Sunday air attack on a similar location in Lutsk, also in western Ukraine. Workers at each site repair and modernize Ukrainian combat aircraft of various types. Oleg Zhdanov, a reserve colonel in the Ukrainian army and a military analyst, said the strikes showed that Ukraine’s air fleet, modest and aging, continued to frustrate the Russian war machine.

“This can only mean that our aviation is becoming a big problem for Russia,” he said.

Most of the fighting between the invading Russian forces and Ukrainian troops has been concentrated further east and south. In the eastern city of Kramatorsk, at least one missile hit a residential building overnight, killing two people and wounding 16, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the regional military administration in the eastern region of Donetsk...

 

Ukraine Could Win

From James Holmes, at 1945, "Yes, Ukraine Could Beat Russia":

Which antagonist—if either—will prevail in Ukraine?

The longevity and success of Russia’s offensive is a hot topic of debate among foreign-policy practitioners and the commentariat. Nor is it an idle topic. But beware of too-confident assessments. Canvassing military history indicates that campaigns tend to sputter over time. A campaign may stagnate, and reversals of fortune are far from rare. It takes not just a proficient military machine but leadership possessed of ingenuity and force of character to keep the momentum going, or regain it if it slips way.

So Russia isn’t predestined to be the victor over Ukraine even though it’s the stronger combatant—by far—by the numbers. Indeed, the Russian offensive has shown signs of faltering since day one. A lesser combatant that makes maximum use of its latent combat power can stymie an opponent that wastes its potential.

Ukraine has a chance...

Still more.

 

Biden Warns China of 'Consequences' if It Aids Russian War

We'll see. I'd love to see China shut down with a barrage of sanctions to match or exceed those imposed on Russia. Hoo boy, that would be something.

At the New York Times, "Biden Tells Xi There Would Be Consequences to Helping Russia":

Russian forces extended their bombardments into a relatively unscathed part of western Ukraine on Friday, striking a warplane repair plant about 50 miles from the Polish border, as President Biden warned President Xi Jinping of China not to provide military aid to Russia amid a scramble of diplomatic efforts to end the violence engulfing Ukraine.

During a nearly two-hour video call, Mr. Biden warned Mr. Xi, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that there would be “implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians,” according to the White House.

But a senior administration official declined to discuss what kind of penalties the United States would impose on China if it provided Moscow with military hardware or offered it financial relief. The official also declined to say how Mr. Xi responded to Mr. Biden’s warning.

“We will continue to watch until we see what actions they take or don’t,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said...

Keep reading.