While I’m on break (till tomorrow) I am republishing my Ukraine daily summary here. Please follow my Facebook page at facebook.com/nycjayjay to receive those updates in your feed regularly (or to directly to my page if you don’t see them in the morning).
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Russian missiles fired at a military training base in western Ukraine located near the border with Poland have killed at least 35 and wounded 147 in one of the deadliest barrages of the war so far, according to Ukrainian officials.
President Zelenskyy warned Saturday of a “new stage of terror” by Russian forces after the kidnapping of the mayor of Melitopol in the south as well as a new round of airstrikes in the area around the capital. Cruise missiles struck an airport south of Kyiv, setting fire to an oil terminal and an ammunition depot. Russian air strikes also hit suburbs to the east and west of the city and a drone crashed in the center after being shot down, setting fire to a bank. A record number of warning sirens were activated across the country as Russia intensified its bombardments.
Moscow also signaled it could soon up the political stakes of the war. First, it threatened to sweep other nations into the conflict, warning the U.S. that it would consider convoys sending weapons to Ukraine as “legitimate targets.” If it carries out this threat, this could comprise direct confrontation between NATO and Russian forces and could trigger Article 5 if a fellow NATO member such as Poland has its territory or forces attacked.
Second, Russia plans to hold a “referendum” in the captured city of Kherson to transform it into a breakaway republic. “Given zero popular support, it will be fully staged,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stated, warning of a repeat of 2014 when Russian-backed separatists held a phony referendum to create the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine.
President Zelenskyy stated that 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed so far by Russia. This is the first time the Ukrainian leader mentioned his countries’ estimated military casualties. U.S. officials put the unverified number of Russian soldiers killed at three times that or more, while Ukrainian figures claim 12,000 Russian dead.
The U.S. and its allies have received troubling intelligence that Russia may also be preparing to use chemical weapons against Ukraine, particularly as Moscow reels from its shaky military offensive and deploys increasingly brutal assaults on civilian centers. Officials declined to detail the intelligence but warned the Kremlin may seek to carry out a “false-flag” attack to pin the blame on Ukrainians or perhaps Western leaders. Russia recently repeated baseless claims that the U.S. and Ukraine were operating secret biological weapons labs in Eastern Europe. The Biden administration dismissed the claim as “total nonsense” and “outright lies.”
Any use of poison gas in Ukraine would violate long standing international treaty, but there is precedent for such violations already. Officials noted that Russia, which held vast stockpiles of such weapons during the Cold War, has twice used banned nerve agents in assassination attempts against foes of the Kremlin in the past three years alone, including once outside its borders.
On the refugee crisis, officials in Poland’s two largest cities warned that they can no longer absorb the huge numbers who are fleeing the war in Ukraine. The mayors of Warsaw and Krakow said that they are struggling to accommodate the waves of arrivals and urged the United Nations and EU to help. Over 2.5 million refugees have now fled Ukraine to other nations.
Cracks are showing within top Kremlin leadership. Details emerged of the house arrest of a Russian spy chief as Putin seeks to blame his security services for the bungled early days of the invasion. Sergey Beseda, head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, was arrested along with Anatoly Bolyukh, his deputy. Andrei Soldatov, co-founder and editor an investigative website that monitors the FSB and other agencies, said that his sources from within FSB had confirmed the detention of both men.
The final reports produced by the FSB on Ukraine in the run-up to the invasion were “simply not right, which is part of the reason as to why things have gone so badly for Russia,” Soldatov said. Their assessments of popular support among Ukrainians for a Russian invasion, for example, and the extent to which the country would resist, were “terribly miscalculated.” He added, “The problem is that it is too risky for superiors to tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear, so they tailor their information. We can’t rule out the fact that the intelligence they gathered on the ground was in fact very good” but was sugar-coated in some way.
This intelligence failure echoes what happened to Russia during its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Said one paper at the time, reporting on Russian soldiers who went begging for food, “They expected to be welcomed with open arms, for they had been told they were liberating the Czechs from invading Germans. Instead they have met nothing but hostility and hatred.”
The media rift between Russia and the West has expanded to include social media. YouTube announced it will immediately block access globally to channels linked with Russian state-funded media. And Russia said it would begin to restrict access to Instagram this week. It earlier has blocked most access to Facebook.
President Zelenskyy cast a sober tone with to reporters over the state of the war as Russia presses forward. “You are asking me how’s the situation on the front line … there’s a front line everywhere. A few small towns just don’t exist anymore. And this is a tragedy. They are just gone. And people are also gone. They are gone forever. So we are all on the front line.“
To the Ukrainian people, he sounded a note of strength and courage, defiance with a dose of reality. “The Russian invaders cannot conquer us. They do not have such strength. They do not have such spirit. They rely only on violence. Only on terror. Only on weapons, of which they have a lot.”
Sources:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-strikes-intensify-near-kyiv-as-ukraines-president-foresees-new-stage-of-terror-11647080618
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-03-12/russia-intensifies-bombardment-of-ukraine-warns-weapons-sent-to-ukraine-legitimate-targets
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/11/intelligence-russian-chemical-attack/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/11/ukraine-refugees-poland-warsaw-krakow/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-11/russia-media-divide-deepens-youtube-drops-rt-instagram-blocked
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kremlin-arrests-fsb-chiefs-in-fallout-from-ukraine-invasion-chaos-92w0829c5
Hmmmmm. "The problem is that it is too risky for superiors to tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear, so they tailor their information." Remind anyone of what happened, and is still happening here?
Once again, thank you Jay for the details ... excruciating as those details are in the Real World not on my computer screen.