February 18, 2024: Russian Digest
Top weekend stories I'm keeping an eye on!
February 18, 2024
Call to Action for my U.S. subscribers: Please call your Congress representatives and tell them to pass the weapons and aid package to Ukraine and to stop endangering U.S. national security by using domestic weaknesses for political purposes…
Zelensky: Ukraine made new military aid, security agreements at Munich conference
Ukraine has made additional security and military aid agreements during the Munich Security Conference, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Feb. 18.
Ukraine has already signed security agreements this year with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Additional security agreements have been made in talks during the conference in Munich, Zelensky said, without specifying details, in an interview broadcast on the government-run TV marathon.
These agreements provide an alternative to relying on help from the United States, Zelensky said.
“Currently, there are no security guarantees from the U.S. The teams are currently working, there have already been two stages of discussions,” Zelensky said, adding that he expects positive progress in the near future.
Read More at Kyiv Independent
Avdiivka’s Fall Intensifies Reactions Over US Aid Package for Ukraine
The fall of the front-line Ukrainian city of Avdiivka to Russian forces has intensified U.S. reactions from Democrats and Republicans alike on whether $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine — stalled in Congress — could allow Kyiv to push back Russian advances and steal Moscow’s momentum.
A White House statement said President Joe Biden tied the loss of the stronghold of Avdiivka in the southeastern Donetsk region to the stalled U.S. aid for Ukraine in a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday.
The Ukrainian withdrawal from Avdiivka — almost two years to the day since Russia invaded Ukraine — came "after Ukrainian soldiers had to ration ammunition due to dwindling supplies as a result of congressional inaction, resulting in Russia's first notable gains in months," the statement read.
Read More at Voice of America
Russians likely executed six wounded Ukrainian POWs in Avdiivka
Relatives have identified the bodies of shot Ukrainian soldiers in Avdiivka as wounded soldiers who were taken as POWs
Russian troops likely executed wounded Ukrainian soldiers who were taken captive during the defense of Avdiivka, video evidence and relative testimonies suggest.
The executions follow a pattern of Russian contempt for the Geneva Conventions: reports of executions of Ukrainian POWs, including by such gruesome methods as castration, have sadly become commonplace.
The six wounded POWs were left behind in the Zenit plant, which was nearly fully encircled by Russian troops already for several days (striped in the tweet below). Orders to retreat from Zenit were given on 16 February, but it was already too late for many Ukrainian troops.
Read More at EuroMaidan Press
Operating in the production of Shahed-136 UAVs and other weapons of the Russian Federation: Allied Mineral Products, LLC is included in the list of international sponsors of war
The National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) has added Allied Mineral Products, LLC, a US-based manufacturer of refractory products, to the list of international sponsors of war. The company continues to operate in Russia, maintain its production facilities there and pay hundreds of thousands of US dollars in taxes to the aggressor's budget.
Allied Mineral Products, LLC, is represented in Russia by Allied Mineral Products Rus LLC. In 2022, it paid taxes totaling USD 772 thousand to the Russian budget and imported products worth USD 3.5 million to Russia since April 2022.
In addition to continuing to operate in the Russian Federation, the production facilities of Allied Mineral Products Rus LLC are located in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone (Tatarstan, Russia). This special economic zone is a cluster for the production of Shahed-136 UAVs.
Read More at the National Agency on Corruption Prevention
Kremlin runs disinformation campaign to undermine Zelensky, documents show
When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.
“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration ordered a group of Russian political strategists to use social media and fake news articles to push the theme that Zelensky “is hysterical and weak. … He fears that he will be pushed aside, therefore he is getting rid of the dangerous ones.”
The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”
Read More at the Washington Post
Ukraine’s Allies Are Gaming Out a World in Which the US Retreats
Leaders, defense officials met at Munich security conference
Stalled US aid to Ukraine added to the meeting’s pessimism
NATO members now talk privately about a Russian attack on one of them as a danger that demands an urgent response, as they grow to doubt that the US will maintain its traditional role of protecting Europe as part of the alliance.
On Friday President Joe Biden did his best to rule out the word ‘panic,’ but in tip-toeing around it did more than anyone else to describe Europe’s mood.
Read More at Bloomberg
British intelligence commented on the resignation of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation Sokolov
The resignation of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, Admiral Sokolov, is probably connected with the loss of many ships of the fleet. This is stated in the intelligence review of the British Ministry of Defense.
The intelligence officers noted that the decision about Sokolov's resignation announced in the Russian mass media is obviously connected with the great successes of Ukraine in dealing with the losses of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation, the last of which was the defeat of the "Cesar Kunikov" VDC.
Intelligence recalled that Sokolov's predecessor in this position, Igor Osypov, was dismissed from his position immediately after the sinking of the cruiser "Moskva", according to rumors. Analysts also assume that Sokolov's "management style" was one of the reasons for his resignation.
"Although this has not been confirmed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, Sokolov was probably replaced in his position by his former deputy, Vice Admiral Serhii Pinchuk, as a temporary acting officer, for the duration of the internal investigation into the sinking of the amphibious assault ship "Cesar Kunikov" on February 15," the intelligence agency notes.
The review refrained from clarifying whether they are sure that Sokolov is alive, despite his disappearance from the information field after the successful Ukrainian attack on the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation in Sevastopol and rumors of his death.
Via InfoResist and the British Ministry of Defence
Denmark transferred all its artillery to Ukraine
Denmark has transferred all its artillery to Ukraine, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at the Munich Security Conference. As the Jyllands-Posten newspaper reports, she criticized the EU countries for not doing enough for Kyiv.
Frederiksen noted that various European countries still have large stockpiles of ammunition and other military equipment. She called for the equipment to be used to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.
“On our side, we sacrificed all our artillery. “I’m sorry to say this, friends, but there is still ammunition in stockpiles in Europe,” Frederiksen said.
“We must ensure that on Saturday, the second anniversary of the start of the war, Ukraine will receive more supplies. Specific deliveries on land,” she said. We are talking about ammunition, artillery, long-range missiles, drones, F-16 fighters.
The Danish Prime Minister believes that in the short term, the European Union should give Ukraine what it needs, “and in the long term, Ukraine needs to be welcomed into the EU and the NATO defense alliance.”
On February 17, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Alexander Syrsky announced the surrender of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region. At the same time, US President Joe Biden, in a conversation with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, linked the seizure of Avdiivka with the inaction of Congress, in which party differences prevented the allocation of $60 billion in military aid for Kyiv.
Via Moscow Times
Hungary Snubs U.S. Senators Pushing for Sweden’s Entry Into NATO
Officials in Budapest declined to meet with a bipartisan group of American lawmakers who favor expanding the military alliance.
Hungary, the last holdout blocking Sweden’s entry into NATO, thumbed its nose over the weekend at the United States, declining to meet with a bipartisan delegation of senators who had come to press the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban to swiftly approve the Nordic nation’s entry into the military alliance.
The snub, which Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, described on Sunday as “strange and concerning,” represented the latest effort by Mr. Orban, a stalwart champion of national sovereignty, to show he will not submit to outside pressure over NATO’s long-stalled expansion.
Despite having only 10 million people and accounting for only 1 percent of the European Union’s economic output, Hungary under Mr. Orban has made defiance of more powerful countries its guiding philosophy. “Hungary before all else,” Mr. Orban said on Saturday at the end of a state of the nation address in which he said Europe’s policy of supporting Ukraine had “failed spectacularly.”
Legislators from Mr. Orban’s governing Fidesz party and government ministers all declined to meet with the visiting American senators, all of whom are robust supporters of Ukraine.
Read More at the New York Times
Canada’s UN ambassador on Putin’s hit list: ‘This is a regime that murders its opponents’
Bob Rae says Alexei Navalny’s death underscores need to redouble efforts against the Russia.
Canada’s ambassador to the U.N. says the tragic death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny underscores the corruption and ruthlessness of Vladimir Putin.
“It’s a terrible reflection on Putin and on the Russian regime,” Bob Rae tells POLITICO, adding that allies of Ukraine must “redouble” their efforts because a Russian win would setback global democracy.
Rae said Navalny’s death sends a “critical message” to global leaders gathering in Munch for an annual defense conference this weekend that a “horrendously destructive tyrant remains in charge of a significant government in the world.”
Read More at Politico
Microsoft says it caught hackers from China, Russia and Iran using its AI tools
State-backed hackers from Russia, China, and Iran have been using tools from Microsoft-backed OpenAI to hone their skills and trick their targets, according to a report published on Wednesday.
Microsoft said in its report it had tracked hacking groups affiliated with Russian military intelligence, Iran's Revolutionary Guard, and the Chinese and North Korean governments as they tried to perfect their hacking campaigns using large language models. Those computer programs, often called artificial intelligence, draw on massive amounts of text to generate human-sounding responses.
Read More at Reuters
Here's an "off the wall" comment -- do you think there is any possibility that substantial private money could be raised to help Ukraine?? (no idea how much is needed) But when I think of the progressive billionaires in this country, enormous wealth everywhere -- what if women like Melinda Gates and others decided to help this cause -- AND if every concerned citizen chipped in whatever they could -- could we make a dent?? Maybe to ease the suffering if nothing else??
Can you imagine a GoFundMe for Ukraine? -- calling all compassionate billionaires! Just a thought...