January 30, 2024: Russian Digest

CIA director: Not passing Ukraine aid would be a mistake ‘of historic proportions’

Western allies must continue providing assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia this year, or risk a mistake “of historic proportions,” CIA Director William Burns wrote in a column published Tuesday.

Burns laid out his case in a Foreign Affairs column, noting that less than 5 percent of the U.S. defense budget — “a relatively modest investment with significant geopolitical returns” — is all that Washington sends to Kyiv.

Russia has established secret oil supplies to Europe through Turkey

The Russian authorities insist on the need to sever political, economic, and cultural ties with the West, but for some reason, they persistently continue to invent ways to sell their oil to it.

Before the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the Turkish oil terminal Dörtyol in the city of the same name usually received Iraqi oil by rail and transferred it to tankers. From March to June 2022, only three oil tankers approached it by sea - from Israel, Egypt, and Greece. But then everything changed - when the first sanctions against Russia began to affect its supplies of oil and petroleum products.

Tankers with cargo from Russia began to arrive at Dörtyol one after another, and a significant part of them was then sent to Europe. Including after it introduced an embargo in the winter of 2022–2023, writes the Financial Times.

Türkiye has become one of the main buyers of oil and petroleum products from Russia. In some cases, it used Russian fuel, which had become sold at a discount, to sell and export its more expensive diesel on the domestic market. In others, as in the Dörtyol story, petroleum products were simply sent to Europe without any processing.

From January to November 2023, 10.5 million barrels were delivered to the terminal by sea, of which 9.2 million, or almost 90%, came from Russia, according to data from analytics company Kpler provided to the FT. Meanwhile, for the entire 2021, 583,870 barrels arrived from Russia, and in 2022 - 3.7 million. During the first year of the war, the volume of products accepted by the terminal from Russia amounted to 38% of all sea cargo, and in the second - 67%.

“Historically, Dörtyol was a crude oil export terminal. But come 2022, everything changed,” said Kpler analyst Victor Katona.

Istanbul-based Global Terminal Services (GTS), which owns the terminal, says it operates as an “independent storage terminal” for oil and petroleum products and it has “neither the right nor the obligation” to check where it is subsequently sent. According to GTS data, based on information from the Turkish Customs Administration, Russian products accounted for 20% of “total loading activity” in 2022 and 10% in 2023.

This means that one of the terminal’s clients provided customs officers with false information about the country of origin of the oil, Katona believes. Kpler, meanwhile, tracks the movement of tankers from the port of loading to the port of delivery, so there can be no doubt about the source of supplies, the FT notes.

However, no one prohibits Turkey from buying oil and petroleum products from Russia. What's more interesting is what happens to them next. In 2022, about 53% of oil arriving from Russia was sent to the EU, and in 2023 - 85%, mainly to Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands. In the case of petroleum products, almost the entire volume may go to the EU. Thus, from January to November 2023, Dörtyol received 2.7 million barrels of vacuum gas oil from Russia and sent 2.5 million to Europe, mainly to Greece.

EU sanctions rules allow the purchase of products from Russian oil if they have been significantly processed (Indian refineries, in particular, take advantage of this). However, Dörtyol does not have processing facilities. It serves as a transshipment center for storing the received oil and its further shipment to purchasing countries.

Katona argues:

If the Greeks buy this, then there must be a document that says that this oil product is not of Russian origin. And if there is such a document, who wrote it?

Some petroleum products were supplied to the Greek refinery company Motor Oil Hellas. It had contracts with the Pentagon, so it officially stopped working with Russian raw materials after the US imposed an embargo in March 2022. However, as The Washington Post found out last year, Russian oil products continued to flow into the company's refineries, changing owners along the way and mixing in Dörtyol storage facilities with fuel from other countries.

As a result, Russian barrels were poured into American warships and aircraft at European bases.

Via Moscow Times: https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/01/30/rossiya-naladila-tainie-postavki-nefti-v-evropu-cherez-turtsiyu-a119992

Tusk: EU will find way to pass Ukraine aid funding 'with or without Orban'

The European Union will find a way to pass a proposed 50 billion euro ($54 billion) aid package for Ukraine "with or without" the support of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk concluded at a press conference on Jan. 30.

Tusk's comments come ahead of the Feb. 1 special summit of the European Council, where EU leaders will resume talks about aid for Ukraine. The Hungarian prime minister, broadly seen as the most pro-Russian in the EU, blocked the decision on the EU’s financial assistance for Kyiv last December.

"Viktor Orban was left alone on the battlefield, he is the only politician who is so clearly anti-Ukrainian," Tusk said on Tuesday, adding that Orban faces a stark decision in the coming days as to whether or not to support funding.

Tusk, the former president of the European Council and a staunch supporter of Ukraine, also expressed optimism in eventually reaching an agreement on funding.

"Everything indicates that one way or another, we will find some solution to support Ukraine – with or without Orban."

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said earlier in January that the EU will pass the package with 26 members, implying it was possible to do so without Hungary's consent. She added that she "strongly preferred" having the aid pass with the approval of all 27 member states.

Russia is forming the Afrika Korps to replace Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC

The laurels of the USSR haunt the Kremlin regarding not only the territories of the former Soviet empire but also Africa. In the last century, Africa was one of the arenas of the struggle that Moscow waged with capitalist countries. Now, in a new round of confrontation with the West, the ideological struggle and financing of national liberation movements have been replaced by the exploitation of natural resources received in exchange for the support of military regimes.

The Ministry of Defense is forming the Afrika Korps from former members of the Wagner PMC, left ownerless after the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin in August, and by recruiting new fighters. It is planned to be formed by the middle of the year to deploy military personnel in at least five countries with regimes friendly to Russia - Burkina Faso, Mali, the Central African Republic (CAR), Libya and Niger.

The strength of the Afrika Korps should be 20,000 people, a person close to the Russian Ministry of Defense told Bloomberg. It is unclear, however, where it intends to get so many professional military personnel. Even Wagner had only a few thousand fighters in Africa, and Russia's main recruiting efforts were to send troops to Ukraine, where they died in the thousands, including during "meat assaults."

In addition to supporting friendly regimes, the Afrika Korps is expected to continue to engage in lucrative business, such as in the Central African Republic, where in exchange for the brutal suppression of opponents of President Faustin-Archange Touadera, Wagner received the right to develop diamond and gold mines, Western officials and experts say. This will give Russia an additional source of income to finance the war in Ukraine. Louis Osborne, an analyst at the Wagner investigative consortium All Eyes on Wagner, told Bloomberg:

This may still look like a renaming operation, but it has already given the Russians excellent results. Suddenly they left Wagner, which the West had spent great efforts trying to contain, and now the hydra has grown new heads, and it is now called the Afrika Korps.

(It is not known whether Moscow deliberately chose this name, but it coincides with the name of the German Afrika Korps, which was created in Hitler’s Wehrmacht in 1941. However, the Kremlin has already made similar miscalculations: for example, the name of the youth movement created in the 2000s “Ours” coincides with the name of the revolutionary circle from Dostoevsky’s novel “Demons.”)

Patrick Bida Kouyagbele, a senior adviser to CAR President Touadera, told Bloomberg that a military base would be built in the country for Russian fighters. Another sign of “strengthening” cooperation with Russia in the security sphere is that the number of its military personnel in the CAR has almost doubled - to 2000 - since September 2023 (after the death of Prigozhin, when the Ministry of Defense and intelligence services began to take control of Wagner’s operations in Africa ).

The Afrika Korps will report directly to the Ministry of Defense, and will be supervised by Deputy Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, Vedomosti wrote, citing a source close to the military department. Yevkurov first went to the region in September, and amid negotiations between his delegation and the authorities of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, they formed the “Alliance of Sahel States” with the aim of creating collective defense institutions. All three countries have seen military coups in recent years. Yevkurov visited them again in December, and last week they withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which they had been members of for almost half a century.

“ECOWAS, under the influence of foreign powers […] has become a threat to its member states and the people whose happiness it is supposed to ensure,” they said.

Via Moscow Times: https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/01/30/rossiya-formiruet-afrikanskii-korpus-na-zamenu-chvk-vagner-prigozhina-a119937

Uncovering the secret African mission of Viktor Orbán’s son

The son of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has tried to hide his involvement in the planned Hungarian military mission in Chad in an almost comical way. The government was also secretive, but when they discovered that Direkt36 and the French newspaper Le Monde had obtained evidence of Gáspár Orbán’s involvement in the Chad military project, they were quick to make it public. Here is the story of the revelation.

Read the investigation at Direkt36: https://www.direkt36.hu/en/hiaba-alcazta-magat-orban-gaspar-igy-is-leleplezodott-titkos-afrikai-kuldetese/

Mass Blackout Takes Russian Internet Offline

Hundreds of websites on the Russian-speaking internet were inaccessible Tuesday evening as a DNSSEC failure took the .ru and .рф domains offline.

Users both inside and outside Russia complained of outages of major web-based platforms like Tinkoff Bank, online marketplaces Avito and Wildberries, search engine Yandex, and telecoms provider MTS.

The Moscow Times' Russian service was among the websites impacted by the blackout.

The national administrator for the .ru and .рф domains said at 10:21 p.m. Moscow time that it had resolved the DNSSEC failure, some two hours after it said it was working to fix the problem.

Via Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/01/30/mass-blackout-takes-russian-internet-offline-a83919

3 NATO countries sign deal to speed up military deployments to eastern flank

Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands approved a deal aimed at speeding up the process of cross-border movement of troops and weapons along one of the main corridors leading from the North Sea to NATO's eastern flank, Reuters reported on Jan. 30.

NATO militaries have strengthened their capacity and preparedness since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While the prospect of the war escalating to an all-out clash between the alliance and Russia has so far been averted, there are concerns that the West has not accepted that it may still be a possibility.

NATO is currently conducting its largest military drills since the Cold War in operation Steadfast Defender, involving more than 90,000 troops. The exercises include simulated deployments of U.S. personnel to European countries on the alliance's eastern flank, as well as on-the-ground training.

Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren emphasized the importance of creating conditions that would allow for swift military deployments ahead of any potential conflict.

"The geography is what it is. That means you have to be able to move quickly from the Netherlands through Germany to Poland," Ollongren said.

Russia to Deploy New Weapons on Disputed Kuril Islands

Russia plans to deploy new weapons on islands that are at the center of a decades-long territorial dispute with Japan, according to former President Dmitry Medvedev, who’s the current deputy head of the country’s Security Council.

The strategic role of the Kuril Islands will increase “including stationing new weapons there,” Medvedev said Tuesday on the X social-media platform. “We don’t give a damn about the ‘feelings of the Japanese’ concerning the so-called ‘Northern territories’. These are not ‘disputed territories,’ but Russia.”

Code Red: How Russia Conquers the Baltics

A leaked German defense ministry paper outlining the start of a full-scale Russian attack on the Baltic states and Poland — and thereby NATO — is artfully imagined.

The scenario begins with the Putin regime mobilizing as many as 200,000 new conscripts in February. This would aim to raise pressure on Ukraine, while Russia’s army initiated a quiet build-up on the borders of Poland and Lithuania near the Suwałki Corridor. The German paper suggests this would trigger a NATO buildup, and be followed by a Russian attack at the year’s end, just as Donald Trump returns to office (US voters allowing.)

How might it go after that? The old military maxim states that if you want to understand your adversary, put yourself in his shoes. So I have followed the scenario to its likely conclusion.

Russian generals would need to start war planning immediately. The Kremlin loves a mighty name on a war plan, much like their American counterparts, who spend a lot of energy and time to come up with the most appealing name.

Given the old Soviet-era war plan “Seven days to the Rhine,” the proposed operational name will be “Plan Red — Three Days to Paldiski (a small community on the Baltic Sea just west of the Estonian capital, Tallinn.) This name was adopted the moment it hit the desk of Vladimir Putin, who admired its historical echoes.

HUR specialists "put down" the special communications server of the Ministry of Defense of Russia

Specialists of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine "put down" the server of the Ministry of Defense of the aggressor state of Russia, which was used for special communications. This was reported by the press service of the HUR.

"As a result of the cyber attack, the exchange of information between the units of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which used the indicated server located in Moscow, was stopped. The software on the attacked server was approved by the FSB of the Russian Federation as meeting the state information protection standards," the State Security Service reported.

It is noted that the corresponding software was installed at various strategic objects of the Russian public sector, in particular - military ones.

Via InfoResist: https://inforesist.org/ua/fahivczi-gur-poklali-server-speczzv%ca%bcyazku-ministerstva-oboroni-rosii/

New US-made longer-range bomb expected to arrive as soon as Wednesday in Ukraine

The Pentagon has successfully tested a new long-range precision bomb for Ukraine that is expected to arrive on the battlefield as soon as Wednesday, according to two U.S. officials and two other people with knowledge of the talks.

Ukraine will receive its first batch of Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs, a brand new long-range weapon made by Boeing that even the U.S. doesn’t have in its inventory, according to the four people, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss matters ahead of an announcement.

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