Disinfo: Ukraine destroyed the Minsk agreements
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative aimed at shifting the responsibility from Russia to Ukraine for not fulfilling the agreements, claiming that Ukraine is not willing to implement the Minsk and Normandy agreements, and Ukraine's position is the only obstacle on the way to the peace process in Donbas.
This narrative is part of the support campaign of Russian aggression against Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022. Leaders of the European Union recognized that Moscow's actions should be evaluated as “acts of violence and the violation of international law”. By shifting the blame on Ukraine, this disinformation story aims to deny any Russian responsibility for the situation.
Contrary to the claims, the main impediment to a peace settlement in Donbas is, in fact, Russia and its proxies’ deliberate unwillingness to implement the Minsk agreements. Moreover, Moscow illegally provides weapons to the separatists. This is a well-known fact, although Russia denies it and accuses the US of selling weapons to Kyiv. Ukraine, on the other hand, does not conceal the military aid it receives because it is legal and transparent.
Recently, Russia has completely violated the Minsk agreements by recognising the "independence" of the so-called DPR and LPR. The world leaders, the EU, the UN, and other key international organisations condemned this decision as a gross violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The EU High Representative Josep Borrell strongly condemned Russia's decision as an illegal act: "With the decision to recognise the non-government controlled region of eastern Ukraine as “independent states”, Russia is clearly violating the Minsk agreements, which stipulate the full return of these areas to the control of the Ukrainian government. [It] is a severe breach of international law and international agreements, including the UN Charter, Helsinki Final Act, Paris Charter, and Budapest Memorandum."
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterress defined the decision to recognise the so-called “independence” of certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions as a "direct violation of the Charter of the UN." He also said that "It is a death blow to the Minsk Agreements endorsed by the Security Council."
By making statements alleging that Ukraine has done nothing to implement the Minsk agreements, Moscow and the separatists it backs are delaying a peace settlement and are trying to deflect attention away from this responsibility.
Read more disinformation reports alleging that Ukraine is blocking the peace settlement in Donbas. See also our recent article about 7 frequent myths of Russian disinformation regarding Ukraine and the conflict.
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/ukrain...nsk-agreements
US has made substantive change in weaponry provided to Ukraine, officials say
There has been a “substantive” change in the type of weaponry the US and its allies are providing to Ukraine to meet Kyiv’s requests for firepower, two senior US officials tells CNN.
The US’s latest aid announcement included more offensive weapons, such as Bradley Fighting Vehicles and advanced long-range rocket systems, reflecting the nature of the battlefield in Eastern Ukraine and a belief that Ukraine sees a window to regain territory before Russia regroups, one of the officials said, describing the new weapons systems as giving the Ukrainians “much more capability.”
One US official also noted that Ukraine has abided by limitations on the use of the weapons the West has provided so far, tempering reservations about sending more capable systems.
US officials emphasized that the Ukrainians are developing and following their own strategy, and US moves are intended to support that strategy and meet their needs on the battlefield.
“We are in constant touch with Ukraine about what it needs to defend itself and we believe we are meeting the need. As the situation evolves, so does our assistance,” NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson told CNN.
Last week, in the largest military aid announcement since the war began, the US said it was providing Bradleys, which one top Pentagon official said was meant to bolster Ukraine’s offensive fighting abilities.
Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder also said last week that Bradleys, which are armored vehicles that can carry troops into battle and can be equipped with TOW anti-tank guided missiles, will provide “a level of firepower and armor that will bring advantages on the battlefield as Ukraine continues to defend their homeland.”
‘Iron fist’
Experts agree that the Bradleys provide Kyiv with a significant new offensive capability.
“What I would imagine the Ukrainians will do is take these 50 Bradleys and put most of them in one battalion or one armored brigade … and create an iron fist that would be used to penetrate Russian linear defenses,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army Europe and NATO Allied Land Command and currently a senior adviser for Human Rights First.
“We are positioning Ukraine to be able to move forward and retake territory,” Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Laura Cooper added on Friday.
The Biden administration has thus far emphasized that they are supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russian attacks, particularly air defense, which Ryder said on Friday was still “a top priority.”
The “substantive” change in the weapons they’re providing gives Ukraine more offensive capability compared to early months of the war, one of the US officials said.
The changes, including providing advanced longer-range missile defense systems like the Patriot missile system and armored vehicles such as the Bradley which officials have described as a “tank killer,” follow Ukrainian forces demonstrating they can utilize the systems appropriately by not striking within Russian territory. The US has already provided other long-range systems like the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which Ukraine recently used in a strike against Russian forces in the occupied city of Makiivka.
The US and its partners assess that Ukraine will benefit from expanding offensive operations now, to retake territory before Russia is able to regroup its forces for any of its own offensive operations.
On Friday, Cooper said that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “not given up his aims” of acquiring Ukrainian territory, but that the “reality of Russian weakness … has collided with those aims.” Ryder added that one of those weaknesses is Russia’s ability to defend the territory they’ve taken.
“And so, as you look at the US and the international response by providing the equipment, and importantly now the training that we’re providing, it does afford Ukraine an opportunity to change the equation on the battlefield and gain momentum and not only defend their territory, but hopefully take back territory,” Ryder said.
Advocates for putting more capabilities in the hands of Ukraine’s military say that now is the time to increase the capabilities Washington is providing to Kyiv. In a Washington Post op-ed on Saturday, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates called for a “dramatic increase in military supplies and capability.” And the most important capability they need, Rice and Gates said, is armor.
Since the announcement of the Bradleys to Ukraine, there have been questions surrounding what could come next, namely if the US would consider M1 Abrams tanks. Asked about reluctance to provide Abrams tanks to Ukraine on Friday, Cooper told reporters that the administration is “always looking at what Ukraine needs” but that they have to be “cognizant of maintenance and sustainment considerations with tanks.”
“Certainly we know that the Abrams tank in addition to being a gas guzzler is quite challenging to maintain,” Cooper said.
The US is also conscious of domestic politics, with a GOP-controlled House less supportive of Ukrainian military assistance. House Republicans have long called for increased oversight of aid packages to Ukraine. Some, however, have taken a more aggressive approach and said they would oppose certain weapons packages.
US has made 'substantive' change in weaponry provided to Ukraine, officials say | CNN Politics
Russia is letting prisoners soak up withering Ukrainian fire in a 'savage' battle
Russia is letting prisoners soak up withering Ukrainian fire in a 'savage' battle, 'trading' them and others for bullets, US official says
Russia is using prisoners and freshly mobilized troops to absorb heavy Ukrainian fire along the war's front lines in order to clear the way for its better trained forces to take ground, a US official said, calling the move a classic Russian tactic.
Prisoners recruited by the Wagner Group — a notorious paramilitary organization with close ties to the Kremlin — and others have recently been deployed to the forefront of fighting around eastern Ukraine's war-torn city of Bakhmut, which has become the epicenter of hostilities between Moscow and Kyiv.
These recruits have been forced to "take the brunt" of Ukrainian firepower in the area before they are replaced by "better trained forces" who move in behind them to try and claim territory, a senior US military official told reporters on Monday.
The official added that Moscow's current tactic of "trading individuals for bullets" has been used on the battlefield throughout Russian history. Russia, for example, did this with conscripts who were sent into the Chechnya region during the First Chechen War of the mid-1990s.
The senior military official described fighting in the area around Bakhmut, which had a pre-war population of over 73,000 people, as "really severe and savage." They said rolling exchanges of artillery fire are often followed up with maneuvers by "people that are not their best fighters."
"You're talking about thousands upon thousands of artillery rounds that have been delivered between both sides," the official said. In many cases, they said, there may be "several thousand artillery rounds in a day that are being exchanged."
Britain's defense ministry shared in a Tuesday intelligence update that Russian and Wagner forces have been able to advance into the town of Soledar, just a few miles north of Bakhmut. It added that Moscow is likely to use this access to attempt to approach Bakhmut from the north, though it is unlikely to "imminently" do so because Ukraine has control of its supply routes and has held solid defensive lines.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a nightly address on Monday that Russia has concentrated its "greatest efforts" on Soledar.
"And what did Russia want to gain there? Everything is completely destroyed, there is almost no life left. And thousands of their people were lost," he said. "The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like."
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, wrote in a recent analysis that Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leader of Wagner, has used the mercenary group's achievements in Soledar as a way to demonstrate that it's the one force that is able of finding any success in Ukraine.
Laura Cooper, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, acknowledged at a Friday briefing that Wagner has been able to move at a "more rapid clip" than other units in the Russian military.
However, even Prigozhin has said that capturing Bakhmut will be a challenge. In a video published to social media earlier this month, the Wagner founder said that the city features layers of defense and that his fighters lack the necessary heavy armor and equipment.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russ...fficial-2023-1
Russian artillery fire down nearly 75%, US officials say, in latest sign of struggles
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its 11th month, US and Ukrainian officials tell CNN that Russia’s artillery fire is down dramatically from its wartime high, in some places by as much as 75 percent.
US and Ukrainian officials don’t yet have a clear or singular explanation. Russia may be rationing artillery rounds due to low supplies, or it could be part of a broader reassessment of tactics in the face of successful Ukrainian offenses.
Either way, the striking decline in artillery fire is further evidence of Russia’s increasingly weak position on the battlefield nearly a year into its invasion, US and Ukrainian officials told CNN. It also comes as Ukraine is enjoying increased military support from its western allies, with the US and Germany announcing last week that they will be providing Ukrainian forces for the first time with armored fighting vehicles, as well as another Patriot Defense missile battery that will help protect its skies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is apparently clambering to shore up domestic political support, US intelligence officials believe, for a war he initially would only describe as a limited “special military operation.”
US officials believe the 36-hour ceasefire Putin ordered in Ukraine last week to allow for the observance of Orthodox Christmas was an attempt to pander to Russia’s extensive Christian population, two people familiar with the intelligence told CNN, as well as an opportunity for Putin to blame Ukrainians for breaking it and paint them as heretical heathens.
“The bucket is getting smaller”
Much of the domestic opposition Putin and his generals have faced over the handling of the war has come from one of the Russian leader’s closest allies: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary organization Wagner Group. Prigozhin has complained that the Russian Ministry of Defense has botched the war effort, and that Wagner Group should be given more equipment, authority and autonomy to carry out operations in Ukraine.
But Wagner Group has lost thousands of fighters in Ukraine the last two months alone, a senior US official said.
Russia suffered another setback earlier this month when Ukrainian forces hit a weapons depot in Makiivka in eastern Ukraine, destroying more Russian supplies and killing scores of Russian troops housed nearby. The strike also raised questions among prominent Russian military bloggers about the basic competence of the Russian military brass, which had apparently decided to house hundreds of Russian troops next to an obuvious Ukrainian target.
“Maybe this one strike is a drop in the bucket, but the bucket is getting smaller,” a US defense official said, referring to the Russians’ dwindling stockpiles.
40 year-old shells
To date, questions about Russia’s stockpile of weapons have mostly focused on their precision-guided munitions, such as cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. But US officials said their dramatically reduced rate of artillery fire may indicate that the prolonged and brutal battle has had a significant effect on Russia’s supply of conventional weapons as well.
Last month, a senior US military official said that Russia has had to resort to 40-year-old artillery shells as their supply of new ammo dwindled. To the US, the use of degraded ammunition, as well as the Kremlin’s outreach to countries like North Korea and Iran, was a sign of Russia’s diminished stocks of weaponry.
The rationing of ammunition and lower rate of fire appears to be a departure from Russian military doctrine, which traditionally calls for the heavy bombardment of a target area with massive artillery fire and rocket fire. That strategy played out in cities like Mariupol and Melitopol as Russian forces used the punishing strikes to drive slow, brutal advances in Ukraine.
Officials said the strategy shift could be the doing of the recently installed Russian theater commander, General Sergey Surovikin, who the US believes is more competent than his predecessors.
Ukraine has had little choice but to ration its ammunition since the beginning of the war. Ukrainian troops rapidly burned through their own supply of Soviet-era 152 mm ammunition when the conflict erupted, and while the US and its allies have provided hundreds of thousands of rounds of Western 155 mm ammunition, even this supply has had its limits.
As a result, Ukraine has averaged firing around 4,000-7,000 artillery rounds per day – far fewer than Russia.
“It looks ridiculous now”
The Russians’ declining rate of fire is not linear, one US defense official noted, and there are days when Russians still fire far more artillery rounds – particularly around the eastern Ukrainian cities of Bakhmut and Kreminna, as well as some near Kherson in the south.
US and Ukrainian officials have offered widely different estimates of Russian fire, with US officials saying the rate has dropped from 20,000 rounds per day to around 5,000 per day on average. Ukraine estimates that the rate has dropped from 60,000 to 20,000 per day.
But both estimates point to a similar downward trend.
While Russia still has more artillery ammunition available than Ukraine does, early US assessments vastly overestimated the amount that Russia had its disposal, a US military official said, and underestimated how well the Ukrainians would do at hitting Russian logistics sites.
It appears now that Russia is focused more on bolstering its defense fortifications, particularly in central Zaporizhzhia, the UK Ministry of Defense reported in its regular intelligence update on Sunday. The movements suggest that Moscow is concerned about a potential Ukrainian offensive either there or in Luhansk, the ministry said.
“A major Ukrainian breakthrough in Zaporizhzhia would seriously challenge the viability of Russia’s ‘land-bridge’ linking Russia’s Rostov region and Crimea,” the ministry said, while Ukrainian success in Luhansk would “undermine Russia’s professed war aim of ‘liberating’ the Donbas.”
Ukraine’s counter-offensives last fall targeting Kherson in the south and Kharkiv in the north resulted in humiliating defeats for Russia – and were aided enormously by sophisticated western weaponry like HIMARS rocket launchers, Howitzer artillery systems and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that the US had previously been reluctant to provide.
“The fact of the matter is we have been self-deterring ourselves for over a year now,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army Europe and NATO Allied Land Command and currently a senior advisor for Human Rights First.
“There’s been so much anxiety about the possibility of Russia’s escalation – I mean ten months ago, there was concern about giving Stingers…obviously that’s ridiculous, and it looks ridiculous now.”
Russia’s war with bureaucracy
Tensions between Kremlin defense officials and Wagner Group leaders have also been rising amid public complaints by the mercenaries that they are running low on equipment and reports that their leader, Prigozhin, wants to take control of the lucrative salt mines near Bakhmut.
In a video that ran on Russian state media, Wagner Group fighters complain that they are running low on combat vehicles, artillery shells and ammunition, which is limiting their ability to conquer Bakhmut – shortages Prigozhin then blames on “internal bureaucracy and corruption.”
“This year we will win! But first we will conquer our internal bureaucracy and corruption,” he says in the clip. “Once we conquer our internal bureaucracy and corruption, then we will conquer the Ukrainians and NATO, and then the whole world. The problem now is that the bureaucrats and those engaging in corruption won’t listen to us now because for New Year’s they are all drinking champagne.”
Prigozhin’s ambitions are not limited to greater political power, however, the US believes. There are also indications that he wants to take control over the lucrative salt and gypsum from mines near Bakhmut, a senior administration official tells CNN.
“This is consistent with Wagner’s modus operandi in Africa, where the group’s military activities often function hand in hand with control of mining assets,” the official said, adding that the US believes these monetary incentives are driving Prigozhin and Russia’s “obsession” with taking Bakhmut.
The official also said that Wagner Group has suffered heavy casualties in its operations near Bakhmut since late November.
“Out of its force of nearly 50,000 mercenaries (including 40,000 convicts), the company has sustained over 4,100 killed and 10,000 wounded, including over 1,000 killed between late November and early December near Bakhmut,” the official said, adding that about 90% of those killed were convicts.
The official said that Russia “cannot sustain these kinds of losses.”
“If Russia does eventually seize Bakhmut, Russia will surely characterize this, misleadingly, as a ‘major victory,” the official added. “But we know that is not the case. If the cost for each 36 square miles of Ukraine [the approximate size of Bakhmut] is thousands of Russians over seven months, this is the definition of Pyrrhic victory.”
Russian artillery fire down by nearly 75%, US officials say, in latest sign of struggles for Moscow | CNN Politics
Russian mercenary Wagner group claims capture of Ukraine’s Soledar
Kyiv has not confirmed the seizure of the town
The head of Russia’s mercenary Wagner group Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed late Tuesday that his units took control of Ukraine’s eastern town of Soledar, after days of fierce fighting.
A small salt-mining town close to the strategic city of Bakhmut - currently seen as Russia’s main military objective in Ukraine’s Donbas region - Soledar has been almost completely destroyed by the constant attacks of the Russian army and mercenaries.
"Wagner units took control of the entire territory of Soledar. A cauldron has been formed in the center of the city, in which urban fighting is going on," Prigozhin, who is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said, according to Russian news agencies.
"The number of prisoners will be announced tomorrow," he added.
The Russian state RIA news agency later reported that Wagner group took over Soledar’s salt mines after “fierce fighting.” Washington has previously said Prigozhin may be seeking personal control of the area's mines.
Kyiv has not confirmed the seizure of the town. Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar said just a few hours before Prigozhin’s statement that “heavy fighting is continuing.”
The Ukrainian military's morning summary listed Soledar among other towns that are being shelled in the Donetsk region. Ukraine's Defense Ministry tweeted late Tuesday: "Even after suffering colossal losses, Russia is still maniacally trying to seize Soledar - home to the largest salt mine in Europe."
Britain's Defense Ministry earlier said that Soledar was close to falling to Russia but noted that Moscow was “unlikely” to capture Bakhmut, where Ukraine has “stable defense lines.” The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War in turn said that Prigozhin “will continue to use both confirmed and fabricated Wagner group success in Soledar and Bakhmut to promote the Wagner group as the only Russian force in Ukraine capable of securing tangible gains.”
Russian Mercenary Wagner Group Claims Capture Of Ukraine’s Soledar - I24NEWS
Yet another military reshuffle in Russia
Yet another military reshuffle in Russia, as chief of armed forces is handed the ‘poisoned chalice’
Russia’s Defense Ministry announced yet another realignment of the commanders leading the war in Ukraine on Wednesday, as criticism mounts over its handling of the stalled campaign.
It said that General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, would become the overall commander of the campaign, with the current commander, Sergey Surovikin, becoming one of his three deputies.
Surovikin was only appointed as the overall commander of what the Kremlin euphemistically calls the “Special Military Operation” in October.
In terms of the bureaucratic hierarchy, the announcement is hardly an upheaval. Surovikin already reported to Gerasimov.
“Generals are moved, shuffled from the Front to the Headquarters. From Headquarters to the Front,” Russian television commentator Sergey Markov said Wednesday on Telegram.
“Surovikin is not punished and Gerasimov is not punished. It’s all one team. Well, of course with competition, which always happens among the top dogs.”
But the decision puts Gerasimov, who has been chief of the General Staff for more than a decade, closer to direct supervision of the campaign – and to responsibility for it. While Gerasimov was a key figure in planning the invasion, he appears to have been at arms’ length since, with just one reported visit to the command of the campaign inside Ukraine, though the Defense Ministry did not confirm that either.
Mark Galeotti, senior associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, said “it is a kind of demotion [for Gerasimov] or at least the most poisoned of chalices. It’s now on him, and I suspect Putin has unrealistic expectations again.”
Gerasimov has sometimes gone weeks without public appearances and was not seen at the Victory Day parade in Moscow last year, which at the time led to speculation about his position.
He now combines direct command of the Ukraine campaign with that of chief interlocutor with the United States on issues such as military “de-confliction.”
He last spoke with the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, in November after a Ukrainian air defense missile landed in Poland.
Just why the Russian Defense Ministry has made this move at this moment is unclear. It said there was a “need to organize closer interaction between the branches and arms of the Armed Forces” and improve the support and effectiveness of “command and control of groupings of troops.”
New structure
Gerasimov will have three deputies – Surovikin, the army commander Oleg Salyukov and the Deputy Chief of the General Staff Colonel-General Aleksey Kim.
The new structure implies that Gerasimov’s seniority will improve coordination in a campaign where different branches of the armed forces have frequently seemed less than synchronized.
Some analysts believe the move may also be an attempt by the ministry to exert tighter control over the campaign ahead of a critical few months in which the remainder of the reserve force mobilized in the autumn of 2022 will be deployed after training.
The Ukrainian military has said it expects a fresh Russian offensive in the early spring. The overall military commander in Ukraine, General Valery Zaluzhny, told The Economist in December: “They [Russian forces] are 100% being prepared.”
A major Russian attack could come “in February, at best in March and at worst at the end of January”, he said.
Rob Lee at King’s College London tweeted that Wednesday’s announcement “reasserts the MoD’s position overseeing the war… this may also partially be a response to Wagner’s increasingly influential and public role in the war.”
Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been both vocal and visible on the front lines, as his contract fighters have been prominently involved in the assault on Soledar in the eastern Donetsk region. He has repeatedly said that Wagner mercenaries fighters are exclusively responsible for advances in the Soledar area.
There’s been a long history of tension between Prigozhin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. But Prigozhin has praised General Surovikin for managing an orderly withdrawal of Russian forces in the southern Kherson region, as their position became less and less tenable.
In November, Prigozhin said on his Telegram channel: “Generals have to win victory after victory every day. To whom can Surovikin be compared? Surovikin is honest and principled, he is trusted by the army.”
Some commentators wonder whether the ministry is “circling the wagons” as criticism persists of its handling of the campaign. Wednesday’s announcement follows news that the man who lost his job as commander of the Central Military District in October, Colonel-General Aleksandr Lapin, had been appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces, according to state news agency TASS.
Both Prigozhin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov singled out Lapin for criticism. “It’s not just that Lapin is worthless. It’s the fact that he is covered at the top by the leaders in the General Staff,” Kadyrov wrote on his Telegram channel in October last year.
It is inconceivable that Gerasimov’s appointment would have occurred without President Vladimir Putin’s approval and more likely his order. If Gerasimov turns the tide of the war, it will look like a brilliant move. If he fails, then he will take the blame.
‘Hanging by a thread’
A Russian military analyst who blogs under the pseudonym ‘Rybar,’ and has more than a million followers on Telegram, does not expect the shake-up to be successful – suggesting it’s hoping for “a miracle in the 11th month of the special operation.”
“The sum does not change by moving around its parts,” Rybar wrote.
Dara Massicot, a senior researcher at the Rand Corporation, says the Ministry of Defense is “demoting their most competent senior commander and replacing him with an incompetent one. This is a story that has it all: infighting, power struggles, jealousy “
She says that while Surovikin committed no strategic blunders, Shoigu and Gerasimov are to blame for the poor planning of the campaign. “They flunked it. They signed off on a secret plan, multiple bad assumptions, didn’t tell the majority of their troops. [It] led to big casualties and a partially broken force,” Massicot tweeted.
Galeotti says Gerasimov is “hanging by a thread”, tweeting: “I don’t think this is intended to create a pretext to sack him as the war is too important and Putin can sack who he wants. But he needs some kind of win or a career ends in ignominy.”
Gerasimov is 67 years old and was appointed by Putin in 2012. He gained a profile among western analysts after a speech that was reported in the Russian newspaper Military-Industrial Courier.
Gerasimov said the use of propaganda and subversion meant that “a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.”
The arrival of Russia’s “little green men” on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in the spring of 2014 was seen as a successful example of this approach, sometimes dubbed “hybrid warfare.”
Galeotti says that “what Gerasimov was talking about was the use of subversion to prepare the battlefield before intervention, precisely the kind of operations used in Ukraine [in 2014].
Breaking the chain of command, stirring up local insurrections, jamming communications — these are all classic moves that hardly began in Crimea.”
But now General Gerasimov has to run a real war.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/11/europ...ntl/index.html
Russian prisoners sent to the front lines in Ukraine have been publicly executed
Russian prisoners sent to the front lines in Ukraine have been publicly executed for not charging into enemy fire, captured inmates say
Captured Russian inmates who have been sent to the front lines in Ukraine as part of the Wagner Group, an infamous mercenary organization with ties to the Kremlin, say they've witnessed public executions of deserters and disobedient troops, according to a Tuesday report from Polygon Media and the independent Mozhem Obyasnit news outlet.
"Those who disobey are eliminated — and it's done publicly," Yevgeny Novikov, a former inmate who the report said was recruited by the mercenary group, said, according to a translation of the report from The Daily Beast.
Novikov said there were "squadrons of liquidators" that dealt with troops considered problematic.
In one instance, according to The Beast's translation, Novikov said: "Shelling began, one of the prisoners laid down and didn't cover his own [men]. The shelling stopped, he went back, and the higher-up shouted to him: 'Why didn't you go forward?' And they killed him. The higher-up is killed if his team deserts."
Alexander Drozdov, another former inmate cited in the report, said many of the Russian prisoners sent to the front lines in Ukraine by Wagner had drug addiction and were "completely insane."
While some recruited prisoners may desert or disobey orders, others "are just fucked up and bulldoze their way through," Drozdov said, adding that these fighters "are very different from ordinary mercenaries."
The first batch of prisoners to survive six months of fighting in Ukraine was recently released back into Russia, with the head of the mercenary group celebrating them as heroes deserving of great respect, while advising them not to drink too much, do drugs, rape women, or kill.
The Russian military has suffered staggering losses since Moscow launched an invasion of Ukraine in February last year. In an effort to address issues around dwindling personnel, the Wagner Group has fought alongside the Russian military and has recruited Russian prisoners in the process.
Last month, a top Ukrainian military advisor said Russian prisoners fighting with Wagner were being shoved to the front lines and "killed in big quantities."
A senior US military official told reporters Monday that prisoners and other recently mobilized troops were being used by Russia to "take the brunt" of Ukrainian fire on the front lines to clear a path for "better-trained forces" amid heavy fighting in Ukraine's east.
Russian forces have been pushing hard to take the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region and have managed to make some advances in recent days into the nearby town of Soledar, according to assessments from the US military and British Defense Ministry.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Tuesday there were "heavy bloody battles" being fought over Soledar, The Moscow Times reported.
"On the western outskirts of Soledar there are heavy bloody battles. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are honorably defending the territory of Soledar," Prigozhin said.
In his nightly address Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy painted a grim picture of the situation in the town.
"Everything is completely destroyed. There is almost no life left," Zelenskyy said of the situation in Soledar. "And thousands of their people were lost: The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like."
https://www.businessinsider.com/russ...-report-2023-1
