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Sunday, March 20, 2022
Russia invades Ukraine 3/20/22
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said failure to support Ukraine now would result in a "new age of intimidation across eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea"
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.
Across the country, many more were trying to escape.
In the basement of a residential building in Kyiv, more than a dozen infants sat in cribs on Sunday afternoon, waiting to be evacuated.
The babies, born to Ukrainian surrogate mothers and bound for U.S. families, have been stranded here since March 4, when a bomb struck near the nursery where they were living. Since then, they have been looked after by a handful of caretakers who juggle feeding bottles and try to keep the distressed infants from falling ill.
“My family and everyone I know was screaming and shouting at me to go home," said Svetlana Stetsiuk, one of the caretakers. “I stayed because these little babies need mothers."
On this cold afternoon, Stetsiuk was preparing to say goodbye to one of her favorite charges, a 3-week-old named Romeo. Two men armed with automatic rifles were preparing to take him and another baby to safety via an evacuating train.
Stetsiuk swaddled Romeo in a blanket and tucked him into an insulated carrier. She whispered in his ear. He responded by touching her face. Then the men with guns carried the children away to an uncertain future.
A satellite image shows Mariupol's Donetsk Regional Theatre of Drama after the area was hit by Russian airstrikes, according to Ukrainian officials. (Associated Press)
© (Associated Press)
A satellite image shows Mariupol's Donetsk Regional Theatre of Drama after the area was hit by Russian airstrikes, according to Ukrainian officials. (Associated Press)
Negotiations to end the conflict have been ongoing, but there was no word on new progress this weekend as the war raged on for a fourth week. The two sides have had several rounds of talks, but the discussions have run aground amid differences on some key issues, among them Russian demands for Ukrainian demilitarization, and various Ukrainian demands for security guarantees.
In a video address early Saturday, Zelensky repeated his desire to hold personal negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“It’s time to meet, time to talk,” Zelensky said.
Kremlin officials have not responded to Zelensky’s requests for a summit with Putin.
Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. supports Zelensky's attempt, but tempered expectations. "The negotiations seem to be one-sided, and the Russians have not leaned into any possibility for a negotiated and diplomatic solution," she told CNN. "But we’re still hopeful that the Ukrainian effort will end this brutal war.”
Zelensky on Sunday continued his tour of virtual speeches to lawmakers around the world, appealing to Israel's Knesset, or Parliament.
Evoking the horrors of the Holocaust, he asked Israel to do more to help Ukraine.
"Our people are now wandering in the world, seeking security ... as you once did," he said.
Israel, which has donated medical equipment but not weapons to Ukraine, has sought to mediate an exit to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently flying to Moscow to meet with Putin.
"It is possible to mediate between countries," Zelensky said in his speech, which was broadcast live on Israeli television, "but not between good and evil.”
Meanwhile, reports rolled in about further war casualties. Ukrainian officials said Sunday that 56 elderly people had been killed in a Russian attack on a home for the elderly March 11 in the city of Luhansk.
There was still no official statement Sunday on the toll from a reported Russian bombing of a military barracks in Mykolaiv, a major Black Sea port and shipbuilding center about 300 miles west of Mariupol.
Rescuers were using shovels and bare hands over the weekend in search of survivors in the rubble of the barracks following a missile strike Friday. Various media organizations have reported dozens of casualties, which would make it among the deadliest Russian airstrikes to date on a military target.
McDonnell reported from Lviv, Yam from Kyiv and Linthicum from Mexico City.
Times staff writers Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta and Erin B. Logan in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Friday, March 18, 2022
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Russia invades Ukraine 3/15/2022
Inside Chernobyl, 200 Exhausted Staff Toil Round the Clock at Russian Gunpoint
Trapped since their shift 3 weeks ago, the Ukrainians keeping the abandoned nuclear plant safe are ill-fed, stressed, and desperate for relief
It was 10 a.m., 16 days into Russia’s war on Ukraine, and a land-line phone rang inside the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The site of the world’s worst nuclear-power disaster had become an impromptu prison, and an increasingly dangerous one.
The signalman on duty lifted the receiver and passed the call to shift supervisor Valentin Heiko, a veteran of the defunct facility. Mr. Heiko told managers on the other end of the line that the 210 technicians and support staff were in a desperate situation, held hostage while keeping watch over thousands of spent fuel rods.
The night before had brought another standoff between the exhausted technicians responsible for safeguarding the nuclear waste and the Russian soldiers who have been holding them on the job at gunpoint since the first hours of the war.
“The psychological situation is deteriorating,” Mr. Heiko said, updating managers in an office 30 miles away, two people on that call recalled. Some technicians, demanding to go home, were threatening to walk out, past the Russian tanks parked outside.
The supervisor, who celebrated his 60th birthday in captivity last week, said it was his duty to toil on as long as required. “Everyone wants to go home, but we know we need to stay.”
Since Feb. 23, Chernobyl’s technicians and support staff have been working nonstop. After arriving at 9 p.m. for a single night shift to monitor electrical transmission levels and the temperature inside the plant’s gigantic sarcophagus housing radioactive waste, they are approaching 500 hours on the job—snatching sleep on chairs in front of beeping machinery and on piles of clothes next to workstations.
Their diet has dwindled to porridge and canned food, prepared by a 70-year-old cook who at one point collapsed from exhaustion. Their phones have been confiscated and they are trailed by Russian soldiers through the nuclear plant’s labyrinth of reinforced-concrete corridors.
For weeks, the world’s nuclear energy regulators have been trying to understand what is happening inside the Chernobyl complex, where the condition of the facility and its crew has been shrouded by competing for Ukrainian and Russian narratives. Russia rallies militias ahead of Ukraine urban assaults
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, claimed on Telegram Monday that he had been in Ukraine alongside Chechen fighters
3 min
Paris (AFP) – A Russian call for fighters from Syria and Chechnya to join its war in Ukraine is motivated by plans to take major cities with urban warfare tactics which will require overwhelmingly superior attacking numbers, Western observers say.
After three weeks of fighting, all of the 150,000 Russian soldiers initially deployed at the Ukrainian border are now inside the country, experts say.
"The Russians have no more reserves in the zone," a source at the French military chiefs of staff told AFP.
But if President Vladimir Putin wants to capture major cities such as Kyiv and the Black Sea port of Odesa, he will have to bolster troops on the ground after an initial campaign phase that has been slower than the Kremlin expected.
This could equate to a numerical superiority of roughly 10 attackers for every Ukrainian soldier defending the urban centers, according to a military source, who asked not to be named.
Local knowledge, mobility, and early occupation of vantage points typically favor defending forces in urban combat, adding the source.
The Kremlin said Friday that volunteers including those from Syria were welcome to fight alongside Russia's military in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, a war monitor said Russia had drawn up lists of 40,000 fighters from the Syrian army and allied militia ranks to be put on standby for deployment in Ukraine.
In a country where soldiers earn between $15 and $35 per month, Russia has promised them a salary of $1,100 to fight in Ukraine, the Observatory reported.
'Massive reinforcements needed'
"Putin needs more troops than he thought he would. And he needs irregular troops because this war is becoming insurrectional," a Western security source said.
After failing to conquer Ukraine quickly, "Russia now needs massive reinforcements in terms of equipment and troops" to continue the war, said Mathieu Boulegue, a research fellow specializing in Russia at Chatham House, a think tank.
Moscow's recourse to Syrian soldiers follows on from Russia's intervention in 2015 in the war-torn country on behalf of the government, helping President Bashar al-Assad clock up decisive victories in the decade-long conflict.
Russia's airforce notably helped Syrian forces during their siege of rebel-held Aleppo.
Syrian fighters have been deployed in foreign theatres before, by both Russia and Turkey in Libya, and by Turkey in Nagorno-Karabakh to help Ankara's ally Azerbaijan.
Putin has ordered his forces "to hold back on any immediate assault on large cities," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday. But, he added, the defense ministry "does not rule out" the possibility of putting large cities "under its full control".
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky slammed the Russian recruitment in Syria, saying Russia was hiring "murderers".
'Guess how close we are
Fighters from Russia's overwhelmingly Muslim southern region of Chechnya are also loyal to the Kremlin and battle-hardened from reported past deployments in Syria and eastern Ukraine.
Numerous videos posted on social media have suggested that they are already present inside Ukraine.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, claimed on his Telegram channel Monday that he had been in Ukraine just outside Kyiv alongside the forces.
"You don't have much time left," he wrote in a taunting message to the Ukrainian leadership. "Better to surrender and join us," he said, adding in gloating aside: "guess how close we are" to Kyiv.
Kadyrov, a devout Muslim who rules the Russian region in the northern Caucasus with an iron fist, is a former rebel turned Kremlin ally with a paramilitary force at his command.
At the start of the Russian offensive, images circulated on social networks showing a square in the Chechen capital Grozny filled with soldiers claiming to be on their way to Ukraine.
Kadyrov's forces are accused by rights activists of numerous abuses in Chechnya, including killings and enforced disappearances.
On Tuesday Kadyrov indicated he was back in Chechnya, welcoming to the region the secretary of Russia's national security council Nikolai Patrushev, a key member of Putin's inner circle.
One Child Becoming A Refugee Every Second In Ukraine, Says UN
Ukraine War: New figures showed over 3 million people have fled Ukraine. Nearly half of them are children
Geneva: Some 1.4 million children have now fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24, meaning nearly one child a second has become a refugee, the UN said Tuesday.
Fresh numbers from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) showed Tuesday that more than three million people have now fled Ukraine. Nearly half of them are thus children.
"On average, every day over the last 20 days in Ukraine, more than 70,000 children have become refugees," James Elder, spokesman for the UN children's agency UNICEF, told reporters in Geneva.
That amounts to around 55 every minute, "so almost one per second," he said, stressing that "this crisis in terms of speed and scale is unprecedented since World War II."
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