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2022/06/01 | Two Telling Numbers | In the Opinion section, President Biden has published an essay explaining that his administration will continue to send weapons to Ukraine but not troops. In the essay, he announces that the U.S. will send longer-range missiles to Ukraine than it previously has.
Alongside those pieces, we’re using today’s newsletter to give you an overview of the war.
A Russian pincer
The big question over the next several weeks — according to our colleague Julian Barnes, who covers U.S. intelligence agencies — will be whether Russia can encircle Ukraine’s forces in Donbas. If Russia can, the Ukrainian troops could be cut off from the rest of the country and suffer heavy losses. Russia might then be in position to take control of nearly all of Donbas.
“Intelligence officials have repeatedly said, both publicly and privately, that this next phase is going to be very important in setting the tenor for the war in the months to come,” Julian said. “It will determine whether we stay in something approximating a stalemate or if one side gets the upper hand.”
In the war’s early weeks, Russia tried to move quickly and capture large sections of territory. Its military proved incapable of doing so, rebuffed by Ukrainian troops, with help from weapons provided by the U.S., E.U. and other allies. In the war’s current phase, Russia has emphasized a strategy from other recent wars, in Syria and Chechnya: using missiles and other heavy artillery to bombard cities and towns and eventually take them over. |
2022/05/31 | U.S. to Send Ukraine $700 Million in Military Aid, Including Advanced Rockets | That has proved to be a tricky line to walk for the president and his advisers since Mr. Putin sent his troops into Ukraine nearly 100 days ago.
In his article on Tuesday, Mr. Biden described his administration’s resolve to support Ukraine in its attempts to repel Russian invaders. But Mr. Biden also offered specific assurances for Mr. Putin that the United States does not intend to provoke a wider conflict or the use of weapons of mass destruction.
“We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”
Mr. Biden stated bluntly in his article that he did not seek to overthrow Mr. Putin, despite his off-the-cuff remarks during a speech in Poland earlier this year, when he said the Russian president “cannot remain in power.” On Tuesday, Mr. Biden presented a different view. |
2022/05/28 | Diplomats Fear Russia May Use Syrian Aid as Bargaining Chip in Ukraine | An international pressure campaign to keep the route open is now underway. The United States is presiding over the Security Council this month and has held a series of meetings touching on the plight of Syrians who have become homeless or otherwise need assistance to survive.
Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said Moscow had not decided how it would vote. But in an interview on Friday, he said that under the current system, the aid was vulnerable to extremists in Idlib.
“I do not deny that it goes to refugees as well, but the terrorist groups — they benefit from this,” he said, adding that the extremists had attacked deliveries.
Mr. Polyanskiy would not discuss negotiations to keep the corridor open, except to say that talks between Russia and the United States were stagnant, given “current geopolitical circumstances.”
“Frankly, we don’t have very many things to make us optimistic at this stage,” he said.
But three foreign diplomats said Russia had sent vague signals suggesting it might try to use the vote to gain concessions in the standoff over Ukraine. The United States and European countries have imposed a variety of sanctions on Russia to punish the country for invading its neighbor.
The diplomats would not describe the signals in detail and said Moscow had stopped short of directly tying the corridor’s fate to the war in Ukraine. But they said they believed Moscow would lean on countries that would be directly affected by a new wave of refugees for help in evading the sanctions. |
2022/05/30 | For NATO, Turkey Is a Disruptive Ally | WASHINGTON — When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey threatened this month to block NATO membership for Finland and Sweden, Western officials were exasperated — but not shocked.
Within an alliance that operates by consensus, the Turkish strongman has come to be seen as something of a stickup artist. In 2009, he blocked the appointment of a new NATO chief from Denmark, complaining that the country was too tolerant of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and too sympathetic to “Kurdish terrorists” based in Turkey. It took hours of cajoling by Western leaders, and a face-to-face promise from President Barack Obama that NATO would appoint a Turk to a leadership position, to satisfy Mr. Erdogan.
After a rupture in relations between Turkey and Israel the next year, Mr. Erdogan prevented the alliance from working with the Jewish state for six years. A few years later, Mr. Erdogan delayed for months a NATO plan to fortify Eastern European countries against Russia, again citing Kurdish militants and demanding that the alliance declare ones operating in Syria to be terrorists. In 2020, Mr. Erdogan sent a gas-exploration ship backed by fighter jets close to Greek waters, causing France to send ships in support of Greece, also a NATO member. |
2022/05/27 | Why the Once-Hawkish Heritage Foundation Opposed Aid to Ukraine | On Thursday, Mr. Roberts published a podcast interview with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of only 11 Senate Republicans to oppose the Ukraine aid package and the author of a recent op-ed entitled “No to Neoconservatism.”
“Neither you, nor we, intend any opposition to an aid package to be dismissive of the heroism that we’ve seen in Ukraine,” Mr. Roberts told Mr. Hawley. “But I can at least speak for Heritage and say, ‘We’ve had enough of business as usual.’”
The core tenets of the organization have long been grounded in promoting free enterprise, limited government and strong national defense. But it has increasingly fed off the rising populism in the party, first during the ascent of the Tea Party and then during the Trump administration, stocking some of the most prominent members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet and boasting that nearly two-thirds of its ideas had been carried out or embraced by his White House during his first year in office.
“What was so surprising about this moment was Heritage, which has always been tough on Russia, strong on NATO and guided by the mantra of ‘What Would Reagan Do?’ took a very odd turn,” said Eric Sayers, a current nonresident at the American Enterprise Institute who began his career at Heritage as a junior staff member.
The move, Mr. Sayers said, reflected the ascendancy in the organization “of more populist forces focused more on following the right than leading it.”
Mr. Roberts, who referred to himself in an interview as a “recovering neocon,” said Heritage’s stance on the aid package reflected “a real skepticism among the conservative grass-roots about the entrenched conservative foreign policy leadership.” |
2022/05/19 | U.S. Aims to Cripple Russian Oil Industry, Officials Say | But sanctions have a mixed record. Severe economic isolation has done little to change the behavior of governments from Iran to North Korea to Cuba and Venezuela.
One measure American officials are discussing would require foreign companies to pay a below-market price for Russian oil — or suffer U.S. sanctions. Washington would assign a price for Russian oil that is well under the global market value, which is currently more than $100 per barrel. Russia’s last budget set a break-even price for its oil above $40. A price cap would reduce Russia’s profits without increasing global energy costs.
The U.S. government could also cut off most Russian access to payments for oil. Washington would do this by issuing a regulation that requires foreign banks dealing in payments to put the money in an escrow account if they want to avoid sanctions. Russia would be able to access the money only to purchase essential goods like food and medicine.
And as those mechanisms are put in place, U.S. officials would press nations to gradually decrease their purchases of Russian oil, as they did with Iranian oil.
“There wouldn’t be a ban on Russian oil and gas per se,” said Maria Snegovaya, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who has studied sanctions on Russia. “Partly this is because that would send the price skyrocketing. Russia can benefit from a skyrocketing price.”
But enforcing escrow payments or price caps globally could be difficult. Under the new measures, the United States would have to confront nations that are not part of the existing sanctions coalition and, like India and China, want to maintain good relations with Russia. |
2022/05/19 | Chinese Hackers Tried to Steal Russian Defense Data, Report Says | Under China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, Beijing has refined its approach to cyberspying, transforming over the past decade into a far more sophisticated actor. China’s premier spy agency, borrowing a page from Russia, has recruited beyond its ranks, pulling from the country’s growing pool of tech workers. The strategy has made its attacks more scattershot and unpredictable, but analysts say it has also helped strengthen the country’s efforts, enabling spies to run stealthy attacks that target intellectual property as well as political and military intelligence around the world.
Mr. Xi has made improving China’s scientific and technical capabilities a priority in the coming years, with ambitions of becoming a global leader in high-tech fields such as robotics, medical equipment and aviation. The campaign targeting Russian defense research institutes “might serve as more evidence of the use of espionage in a systematic and long-term effort to achieve Chinese strategic objectives in technological superiority and military power,” Check Point’s report said.
More recently, hackers based in China, like their counterparts elsewhere, have taken advantage of the war in Ukraine to break into the computer systems of organizations across Europe. Hackers have preyed upon heightened anxiety about the invasion, tricking their victims into downloading documents that falsely claim to contain information about the war or pose as aid organizations raising money for charity.
Many of the attacks originating from China appear to be focused on gathering information and intellectual property, rather than on causing chaos or disruption that could sway the conflict in favor of Ukraine or Russia, security researchers said.
In late March, Chinese hackers began going after Ukrainian organizations, according to security researchers and an announcement from Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency. A hacking team known as Scarab sent a document to Ukrainian organizations that offered instructions on how to film evidence of Russian war crimes but also contained malware that could extract information from infected computer systems, researchers at the security firm SentinelOne said.
Also in March, another hacking team affiliated with China, which security researchers have called Mustang Panda, created documents that purported to be European Union reports on conditions at the borders of Ukraine and Belarus, and emailed them to potential targets in Europe. But the documents contained malware, and victims who were tricked into opening them inadvertently allowed the hackers to infiltrate their networks, researchers at Google and the security firm Cisco Talos said. |
2022/05/20 | On Ukraine, McConnell Tries to Show the World This Isn’t Trump’s G.O.P. | This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Why did you decide to make the trip to Europe last weekend?
One was to try to convey to the Europeans that skepticism about NATO itself, expressed by the previous president, was not the view of Republicans in the Senate. And I also was trying to minimize the vote against the package in my own party.
We have sort of an isolationist wing, and I think some of the Trump supporters are sort of linked up with the isolationists — a lot of talk out in the primaries about this sort of thing. And I felt this would help diminish the number of votes against the package. I think that worked out well.
I’d had a private dinner with the president of Finland back in March, right after the invasion, so we’d sort of developed a relationship. So we decided to head up to Stockholm and Helsinki. These are incredibly important admissions to NATO. They both have great militaries. They’re both independent of Russian energy. If anybody’s ready to be a part of NATO, these two countries are, so it was exciting to be there.
I think the trip helped convince Europeans that Republicans are the way we used to be on NATO.
Did you personally lobby individual senators to try to allay some of their concerns about the aid bill?
I certainly was talking about it for the last two weeks to my own colleagues. I said, No. 1, this is a pittance compared to the $2 trillion the Democrats dumped on the economy last year, producing 40-year-high inflation. If ever there were a reason where for an expenditure of this amount, this is it. And if the Russians succeeded, it would cost us a lot more. So yes, I was arguing for support for the package. |
2022/05/20 | G7 nations pledge $20 billion to Ukraine. | KÖNIGSWINTER, Germany — The Group of 7 economic powers agreed on Friday to provide nearly $20 billion to support Ukraine’s economy over the coming months to help keep the country’s government running while it fights to repel a Russian invasion.
In a joint statement after two days of meetings, finance ministers from the Group of 7 affirmed their commitment to help Ukraine with a mix of grants and loans. Ukraine needs approximately $5 billion per month to maintain basic government services, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The $19.8 billion of financing was agreed on after the United States, which is contributing more than $9 billion in short-term financing, pressed its allies to do more to help secure Ukraine’s future. The statement did not break down how much the other Group of 7 nations will contribute. |
2022/05/19 | Biden Seeks Swift Effort to Bring Finland and Sweden Into NATO | Under an agreement with the Soviet Union, Finland stayed outside the alliance, which was created to contain Russia after World War II. It remained independent in the post-Soviet era even after joining the European Union and growing ever closer with the West. Until now, Sweden had kept to more than 200 years of neutrality.
But that posture has been quickly abandoned after Mr. Putin’s decision in February to invade Ukraine, which is not a NATO member. Both Finland and Sweden suddenly realized that the threat from Russia had changed and that their status as a bystander to great-power conflict was now a huge risk.
The speed of the reversal has been so great that there has been virtually none of the debate that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when even some of Washington’s most experienced Cold War diplomats warned that the more Russia felt encircled, the higher the chances that it might eventually lash out, especially if the effort to integrate the country with the West failed.
On Wednesday, Mr. Sullivan said that Mr. Biden had asked his national security officials whether they backed the addition of Finland and Sweden to the alliance and that they had “emphatically supported” the move in a unanimous fashion.
The Rose Garden ceremony deliberately contained echoes of a state visit, complete with a military band. Mr. Biden characterized the move to usher Finland and Sweden into the alliance as almost a formality, noting that both countries had contributed forces to conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq — the major NATO commitments of the past 20 years — and that they were strong democracies that “meet every NATO requirement and then some.”
Mr. Biden argued that the two countries would add to the alliance’s firepower.
Finland has a sophisticated military that runs complex operations to track Russian activity in the seas of Northern Europe and spends heavily on modern equipment. Sweden is a more difficult case: It dismantled some of its military power and, as Ms. Andersson conceded, would have to reorient its budget to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, the target for NATO members. |
2022/05/19 | The Senate overwhelmingly approves $40 billion in aid to Ukraine, sending it to Biden. | Determined to project strong bipartisan support for Kyiv, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, worked for days leading up to the vote to tamp down on the anti-interventionist strain in his party, arguing both privately and publicly to his colleagues that the United States needed to aid a young democracy standing between Russian aggression and the Western world.
The pinnacle of that effort came over the weekend, when Mr. McConnell traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine, Stockholm and Helsinki, Finland, in what he said was partly a bid to push back on former President Donald J. Trump’s hostility toward NATO and the aid legislation itself. When Mr. Trump announced his opposition to the $40 billion package, Mr. McConnell said, he worried that he “could lose a lot more than 11” Republican votes.
The trip was designed “to convey to the Europeans that skepticism about NATO itself, expressed by the previous president, was not the view of Republicans in the Senate,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview. “And I also was trying to minimize the vote against the package in my own party.”
“We have a sort of an isolationist wing,” he continued. “And I think some of the Trump supporters have sort of linked up with the isolationists — a lot of talk out in the primaries about this sort of thing. I felt this would help diminish the number of votes against the package. I think that worked out well.”
Most of the Republicans regarded as presidential prospects in 2024 — Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida — backed the legislation even in the face of opposition from right-wing organizations.
In a 24-minute speech on the Senate floor, announcing his vote on Wednesday night, Mr. Cruz said he had carefully listened to a litany of arguments against the aid bill, including that it was too expensive and bloated with provisions unrelated to military aid, and that it was not in America’s security interest to counter Russia’s campaign when there were so many domestic problems at home. |
2022/05/19 | The Senate is expected to pass a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, sending it to Biden. | The Senate is set on Thursday to give final approval to a $40 billion emergency military and humanitarian aid package for Ukraine, as the United States deepens its support for an increasingly costly and protracted fight against a Russian invasion.
The measure is the largest foreign aid package passed by Congress in at least two decades, and its enactment would bring the American investment in the war to roughly $54 billion in just over two months. The Senate was expected to approve it overwhelmingly, in the latest reflection of the remarkable bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for a massive investment in Ukraine’s war effort, which propelled the spending package through the House last week.
President Biden was expected to quickly sign it into law. His administration and Ukrainian leaders have pressed hard for its swift enactment, warning that they would run out of aid by Thursday if Congress failed to act. |
2022/05/19 | G7 Finance Ministers Race to Secure More Ukraine Aid | KÖNIGSWINTER, Germany — Top economic officials from the world’s advanced economies moved closer toward agreement on a global rescue package for Ukraine on Thursday, with finance leaders negotiating the details of a multibillion-dollar plan to keep the Ukrainian government operating amid Russia’s onslaught.
Finance ministers of the Group of 7 nations expressed optimism about the emergency financing deal on the first day of a two-day summit, where they are focused on how to provide aid to Ukraine and exert pressure on Russia while avoiding economic blowback that will slow the global economy. Officials have been consumed with how to contain rising food and energy prices that have some economists worrying about a global recession.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said at the end of the first day of meetings that the G7 was prepared to spend what is necessary to help Ukraine. |
2022/07/29 | Brittney Griner and the Total Lopsidedness of Prisoner Swaps with Russia | Reports are circulating that the United States is negotiating with Russia to exchange two Americans being held in Russian prisons for a notorious arms dealer serving time in America. The deal is totally lopsided: The two Americans — the basketball star Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, a security company executive — are not criminals and certainly not remotely comparable to Viktor Bout, a notorious purveyor of arms to terrorists once known as the “Merchant of Death.”
But if that’s the way to get American citizens out of a Russian prison, do it. The only caveat, an urgent one, would be to include in the deal Marc Fogel, an American teacher sentenced to an absurd 14 years in prison for taking marijuana into Russia. His infractions are similar to the ones Ms. Griner, 31, is charged with. She was detained in February with two hashish oil vape cartridges in her luggage; Mr. Fogel, 61, was carrying 14 vape cartridges of marijuana and some cannabis buds.
Both say they need cannabis for dealing with injuries and pain. But for reasons the State Department has not clarified, the U.S. government has designated Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan as “wrongfully detained” but not Mr. Fogel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not mention this third American prisoner during a recent news conference, in which he said he intended to take up the matter of a swap for Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia. |
2022/07/27 | The U.S. and Russia Need to Start Talking Before It’s Too Late | Starting talks while the fighting rages would be politically risky and would require significant diplomatic efforts, particularly with Ukraine — and success is anything but guaranteed. But talking can reveal the possible space for compromise and identify a way out of the spiral. Otherwise, this war could eventually bring Russia and NATO into direct conflict.
The current U.S. approach assumes that would happen only if the Ukrainians are given particular systems or capabilities that cross a Russian red line. So when President Biden recently announced his decision to provide Ukraine with the multiple-launch rocket system that Kyiv says it desperately needs, he deliberately withheld the longest-range munitions that could strike Russia. The premise of the decision was that Moscow will escalate — i.e., launch an attack against NATO — only if certain types of weapons are provided or if they are used to target Russian territory. The goal is to be careful to stop short of that line while giving the Ukrainians what they need to “defend their territory from Russian advances,” as Mr. Biden said in a statement in June.
The logic is dubious. The Kremlin’s focus is precisely on making advances on Ukrainian territory. The problem is not that providing Ukraine with some specific weapon could cause escalation but rather that if the West’s support of Ukraine succeeded in stemming Russia’s advance, that would constitute an unacceptable defeat for the Kremlin. And a Russian battlefield victory is equally unacceptable to the West.
If Russia continues to push farther into Ukraine, Western partners would likely provide yet more and better weapons. If those weapons allow Ukraine to reverse Russia’s gains, Moscow may feel compelled to double down — and if it is really losing, it might well consider direct attacks against NATO. In other words, there’s no mutually acceptable outcome right now. But talks could help identify the compromises needed to find one. |
2022/07/26 | A Maestro and His Musicians Face Scrutiny Over Ties to Russia | “He belongs to the system of Putin,” Vasyl Khymynets, the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, said in an interview. “He hasn’t criticized this brutal war, yet he has the chance to be presented on one of the most famous stages in Europe and probably in the world.”
The esteemed pianist Evgeny Kissin, a frequent performer in Salzburg, said that while he would not object if Currentzis appeared with a Western orchestra, MusicAeterna’s ties to the Russian government were problematic.
“In the current situation, groups funded by the Russian state should not be allowed to perform in the civilized world,” said Kissin, who was born in Moscow and is now based in Prague, citing Russia’s “criminal war in Ukraine.”
Currentzis, through his representatives, declined to comment.
Since founding MusicAeterna in Siberia in 2004, Currentzis has sought to defy labels. He is known as an uncompromising classical musician but has also earned a reputation as a punk, a goth and an anarchist. Born in Athens, he went to Russia in his 20s to study music and now carries a Russian passport. (Putin awarded him citizenship by presidential decree in 2014, the Russia news media reported.)
Currentzis began his career as an outsider trying to build artistic centers away from the traditional bases of Moscow and St. Petersburg, including at the Novosibirsk State Opera in Siberia and in the industrial city of Perm. He stood up to the Russian authorities, including in 2017, when his friend and collaborator Kirill Serebrennikov, one of Russia’s most prominent theater directors, was detained in Moscow, a move seen as retribution for his critical portrayals of life under Putin. |
2022/07/29 | Russian National Charged With Spreading Propaganda Through U.S. Groups | MIAMI — The Russian man with a trim beard and patterned T-shirt appeared in a Florida political group’s YouTube livestream in March, less than three weeks after his country had invaded Ukraine, and falsely claimed that what had happened was not an invasion.
“I would like to address the free people around the world to tell you that Western propaganda is lying when they say that Russia invaded Ukraine,” he said through an interpreter.
His name was Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, and he described himself as a “human rights activist.”
But federal authorities say he was working for the Russian government, orchestrating a yearslong influence campaign to use American political groups to spread Russian propaganda and interfere with U.S. elections. On Friday, the Justice Department revealed that it had charged Mr. Ionov with conspiring to have American citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government. |
2022/07/29 | Blinken Resists Push to Label Russia a Terrorist State | WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate supports it unanimously. So does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the Ukrainian Parliament.
But Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is not so sure.
For weeks, pressure has mounted on Mr. Blinken to formally declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, a label currently reserved for North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Iran. But despite the emotional appeal, Mr. Blinken is resisting a move that could force him to sanction U.S. allies that do business with Russia and might snuff out the remaining vestiges of diplomacy between Washington and Moscow.
Amid outrage over Russia’s brutal military campaign in Ukraine, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution calling on Mr. Blinken to designate Russia as a terrorism sponsor for its attacks in Ukraine, as well as in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, that resulted “in the deaths of countless innocent men, women and children.” |
2022/07/27 | Russia Cuts Natural Gas Flow to Germany Yet Again | Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, followed through on Wednesday with its announcement earlier this week that it would further restrict the flows of natural gas to Germany and other European countries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. It also blamed Siemens Energy, the German maker of turbines used on the pipeline, for causing the cutbacks, prompting a sharp retort from the company.
News of the reduced flows of natural gas caused a jump in the already-high price for natural gas in Europe, to heights not seen since the days immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Prices later moderated, but remained about double what they were in mid-June, when Russia began a series of restrictions on flows through the pipeline.
Data from Nord Stream showed that flows were reduced to about 20 percent of the pipeline’s capacity.
Gazprom said maintenance issues concerning turbines supplied by Siemens Energy were to blame for diminished output. German officials dispute this claim, and European officials say Russia is cutting back its gas deliveries to punish Europe for its opposition to the war in Ukraine. |
2022/07/29 | Russia Is Making Heaps of Money From Oil, but There Is a Way to Stop That | It is an audacious and untested idea. It also appears to be the best available option. If it works, it could deprive Russia of revenue without devastating the economies of nations that are trying to support Ukraine.
Constructing a cartel is not easy. The United States has already secured the agreement in principle of the other members of the Group of 7, a coordinating body for the major democratic economic powers. American officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, are working with their counterparts to hammer out the details. The buyers’ cartel would be strengthened if other big buyers of Russian oil, notably India and China, could be persuaded to participate. That seems unlikely. But U.S. officials argue the cartel could still increase pressure on Russia by allowing nations that are not participating to extract larger discounts, too.
Maintaining a cartel is also hard. Because the participants can benefit by cheating on the price ceiling, policing a price-fixing agreement is notoriously difficult. But in this case, there may be a plausible enforcement mechanism. A key piece of the new sanctions by the European Union and Britain is a ban on insuring tankers that carry Russian oil. Shippers need insurance to navigate canals and to enter harbors. European companies dominate the market; in April and May, 68 percent of Russian oil exports traveled on tankers insured by European businesses. That measure could be modified to ban insurance for tankers with oil purchased at a price above the cartel’s ceiling.
The Russian government has sought to forestall the plan by warning that it would refuse to go along with it. “As far as I understand, we won’t be supplying oil to those countries which would impose such a cap, and our oil, oil products will be redirected to the countries which are ready to cooperate with us,” Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank, said at a news conference last week. Analysts, however, say that if a cartel is established, Russia’s real choice would be between accepting its terms and leaving a large share of current oil production in the ground. |
2022/07/26 | Europe Weans Itself Off Russian Gas | Before the meeting, President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of waging “an overt gas war” against “a united Europe” and urged leaders not to give in to Russian threats. Russian gas accounts for 40 percent of E.U. consumption, and gas is a leading source of energy for homes and businesses.
All of the E.U.’s 27 member states supported the move, except for Hungary, which voted against the agreement but couldn’t veto it. Some exemptions were given to Ireland, Cyprus and Malta, which have little flexibility to seek alternative energy sources, as well as to the Baltic States that have electricity grids connected to Russia’s.
The bloc’s gas storage tanks, usually almost full before winter, are currently at 66 percent capacity, according to the E.U.’s energy commissioner, Kadri Simson.
The stakes are particularly high for Germany, which relied on Russia to supply 55 percent of its natural gas before the invasion. It has cut that share to 30 percent over the past months but is scrambling to ensure that it will have sufficient fuel in storage to last the winter. |
2022/07/26 | Russia Says It Will Quit the International Space Station After 2024 | Mr. Putin’s response: “Good.”
With tensions between Washington and Moscow rising after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Russian space officials including Dmitry Rogozin, Mr. Borisov’s predecessor, had made declarations in recent months that Russia was planning to leave. But they all left ambiguity about when it would happen or whether a final decision had been made.
If Russia follows through, it could accelerate the end of a project that NASA has spent about $100 billion on over the last quarter-century and set off a scrambling over what to do next. The space station, a partnership with Russia that also involves Canada, Europe and Japan, is key to studying the effects of weightlessness and radiation on human health — research that is still unfinished but needed before astronauts embark on longer voyages to Mars. It has also turned into a proving ground for commercial use of space, including visits by wealthy private citizens and the manufacturing of high-purity optical fibers.
An official at the White House said the United States had not received any formal notification from Russia that it would withdraw from the space station, although officials have seen the public comments.
“We are exploring options to mitigate any potential impacts on the I.S.S. beyond 2024 if in fact Russia withdraws,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council. |
2022/07/27 | U.S. Offers to Swap Russian Arms Dealer for Griner and Whelan | In an interview last month, however, the judge who sentenced Mr. Bout, Shira A. Scheindlin, said that Mr. Bout “was not a terrorist, in my opinion. He was a businessman.” She added that she felt the mandatory 25-year sentence she was forced to impose was too high and that a trade of Mr. Bout for Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan would be reasonable.
A White House national security spokesman, John F. Kirby, declined to provide more specifics about the U.S. proposal.
“I’m sure you can all understand that it’s not going to help us get them home if we’re negotiating publicly,” Mr. Kirby told reporters. But he seemed to welcome the opportunity to say something beyond months of past official assurances that the administration was working quietly behind the scenes.
“What I will say is that the president and his team are willing to take extraordinary steps to bring our people home,” Mr. Kirby said. “We believe it’s important for the American people to know how hard President Biden is working to get Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan home. We think it’s important for their families to know how hard we’re working on this.”
A senior administration official said Justice Department lawyers, who have long argued against releasing Mr. Bout, part of an institutional reluctance to trade away federal prisoners, voiced initial opposition to the deal but were overruled by Mr. Biden.
Mr. Blinken disclosed the existence of the proposal hours after Ms. Griner testified for the first time about her arrest, telling a Russian courtroom that she had been tossed into a bewildering legal system with little explanation of what was happening and what she might do to try to defend herself. |
2022/07/28 | Russians, Risking Isolation in the South, Build Up for Ukrainian Attack | In Kherson, which the Russians captured quickly after invading in February, they have had months to fortify their defensive lines, and the Ukrainians have yet to launch any major land-based counteroffensive.
“Of course, we are waiting for the command to attack, but it’s not really that simple,” said Senior Sgt. Oleksandr Babynets, 28, a member of the Ukrainian 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which is dug in along the Kherson region’s western border.
“The Russians have organized defensive lines, dug in and deployed a lot of weaponry,” he said. “We don’t just want to go ahead and die just like that. We need to work intelligently.”
In the last month, with most Russian forces tied down in the battles far to the east, in the Donbas region, Ukrainian forces in the south have managed to force Moscow’s troops back a few miles in the direction of Kherson. At their closest, along the Kherson region’s western border, they are about 30 miles from the city. There, the lines have largely frozen as each army jockeys for advantage.
As the counteroffensive brews, Russia has renewed attacks on the north, launching strikes from the Black Sea, Belarus and Russia that injured at least 15 people in the region of the capital, Kyiv, the Ukrainian authorities said on Thursday. The attacks were the first in weeks to hit the capital region, which the initial Russian offensive failed to capture early in the war. |
2022/07/26 | Brittney Griner’s Lawyers Argue for Leniency in Russian Court | Wearing a black and gray sweatshirt with the slogan “Black lives for peace” printed on the back, Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star who has been detained in Russia on drug charges, appeared in a court near Moscow on Tuesday as her defense team continued to present evidence that she had not intended to break the law.
She was escorted to a courtroom by a group of police officers, one of them wearing a balaklava, and stood in a metal cage, holding photographs of her relatives, teammates and friends, according to video footage from the scene published by Russian state television.
After being detained in a Moscow airport one week before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Ms. Griner has become an unlikely pawn in a diplomatic game between Moscow and Washington. With her guilty plea making the verdict seem a foregone conclusion, experts said that her best hope was that the Biden administration could find a way to swap her for a high-profile Russian being held by the United States. |
2022/07/24 | Russia Tells Famine-Fearing Africa It’s Not to Blame for Food Shortage | CAIRO — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia likes to cast himself as the leader of a global movement rising up against domination by the United States and its allies. On Sunday, his top diplomat brought that message directly to Africa, hoping to turn the hunger and social strife across the continent to Russia’s advantage.
He is likely to find a receptive audience.
Even before setting out on his four-country tour, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov made clear he would use the trip to blame the West for the grain shortages tied to the war in Ukraine that are raising fears of famine in African countries and to paint Russia as the continent’s faithful ally.
Ahead of the trip, Russia acquiesced to an agreement that allows Ukraine to resume exporting critically needed grain that has been blocked in Black Sea ports by the fighting, a sign of Mr. Putin’s apparent concern for public opinion across the developing world. |
2022/07/27 | Brittney Griner Describes Her Legal Ordeal to Russian Court | The authorities detained Ms. Griner, 31, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who plays for the Phoenix Mercury, about a week before President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine in February. She was accused of having two vape cartridges of hashish oil in her luggage when she arrived at an airport near Moscow on her way to Yekaterinburg, where she plays for a team in the W.N.B.A. off-season.
Russia did not make her detention public until after the invasion began.
Earlier this month, Ms. Griner pleaded guilty, saying that she had unintentionally carried a banned substance into Russia because she had packed in a hurry. In Russia, a guilty plea does not end a trial and the proceedings are expected to continue into August. She faces a possible 10-year sentence.
Ms. Griner’s lawyers have said they hope her guilty plea will make the court more lenient, but experts say that her best hope is that the Biden administration finds a way to swap her for a high-profile Russian who is being held by the United States.
On Wednesday, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said the United States had “put a substantial proposal on the table weeks ago” to gain the release of Ms. Griner and Paul Whelan, a former Marine who was sentenced last year to 16 years in prison on espionage charges. He declined to discuss details of the offer. |
2022/07/25 | Russia Cuts Gas Flow to Europe, Intensifying Fears It Is Weaponizing Fuel | BERLIN — On the eve of a European Union emergency meeting on cutting natural gas consumption, Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly said Monday that it would slash gas deliveries to Germany, as President Vladimir V. Putin once again showed his unpredictability and his power to inflict pain on the bloc for backing Ukraine.
E.U. energy ministers are set to meet Tuesday to weigh a 15 percent reduction in gas use, specifically because of fears that the Kremlin could create artificial shortages threatening heat and power generation over the winter. As if to confirm such worries, Gazprom, the Russian company, on Monday said it would cut by half the flow through its pipeline to Germany to just 20 percent of capacity — less than a week after resuming limited flows following a maintenance shutdown.
Western officials dismissed the Russian explanation of equipment troubles — coincidentally or not, with German equipment — as nothing but a cover for its manipulation. “Based on our information, there is no technical reason for a reduction in deliveries,” the German Economy Ministry said in a statement. |
2022/07/29 | Blinken Speaks to Russia’s Foreign Minister, Seeking Deal for Griner and Whelan | Ms. Griner, a W.N.B.A. star who had been playing for a Russian team during the off-season, is on trial in a Russian court and faces a sentence of up to 10 years in prison on drug charges. The 31-year-old athlete was detained in a Moscow airport about a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, after customs officials discovered hashish oil in her luggage.
Mr. Whelan, a former Marine and corporate security executive, was detained in 2018 in a Moscow hotel, where he had been staying for a friend’s wedding. In 2020, a Russian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison for espionage, a charge that he and his family have denied.
The State Department has classified both Mr. Whelan and Ms. Griner as “wrongfully detained.”
According to a person briefed on the matter, the Biden administration offered last month to trade the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who is currently serving a 25-year federal prison sentence in the United States, for Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan.
Mr. Blinken also said he had pressed Mr. Lavrov to make good on a recent Russian agreement to allow the passage of Ukrainian grain from Black Sea ports, and told him that the world would never accept the further Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory. |
2022/07/22 | Bucking the global trend, Russia lowers interest rates again. | Moving in the opposite direction to much of the rest of the world, Russia’s central bank lowered its interest rate 1.5 percentage points to 8 percent on Friday, taking it even lower than it was before the country invaded Ukraine.
The bank said inflation, which fell to 15.9 percent last month from about 17 percent in May, was slowing in the country because of “subdued” consumer demand and the strength of the ruble, which reached a seven-year high against the dollar last month. The rate cut was larger than economists had expected.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, energy and food prices across the globe have soared as the war has disrupted the export of wheat and other commodities, while nations can no longer be assured of the security of Russia’s supply of natural gas. |
2022/07/25 | Russia Announces Deeper Cuts in Natural Gas Flows to Germany | BERLIN — Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom, said on Monday that it would further reduce the amount of natural gas it sends to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, less than a week after it resumed limited flows after an annual maintenance shutdown.
Flows had already been cut back to 40 percent of capacity, but Gazprom said that it would crimp them to 20 percent starting Wednesday, citing problems with one of the powerful turbines that are manufactured by the German company Siemens Energy. The turbines build pressure within the pipeline to ship the gas long distances.
In mid-June Russia started cutting the amount of gas shipped through the 760-mile undersea pipeline, blaming the reduction on a missing turbine that had been shipped to Canada for repairs. |
2022/07/21 | Russia Restarts Gas Shipments Through Pipeline, but Keeps Germany Guessing | Russia’s decision to restart the flow of natural gas through a vital pipeline on Thursday brought a moment of relief to Germany, which uses the fuel to power its most important industries and heat half its homes. But it is unlikely to be much more than that.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made clear that he intends to use his country’s energy exports as a cudgel, and even a weapon, to punish and divide European leaders — loosening or tightening the taps as it suits him and his war aims in Ukraine.
He is counting on that uncertainty to impose heavy economic and political costs on European leaders. Those elected officials are under growing pressure to bring down energy prices and avoid gas rationing that might force factories and government buildings to close and require people to lower thermostats in winter. Leaders in some nations, like Spain and Greece, are already chafing at a European Union plan to have every member country cut its gas use, arguing that they are already much less reliant on Russia than Germany. |
2022/07/21 | Russia Moves to Close Agency Handling Emigration to Israel | The Jewish Agency official said that Russian disgruntlement with Israel over a variety of other matters might also help explain the new Russian pressure. These include Israeli military activities in Syria and a dispute over church property in Jerusalem.
Israeli officials have also become increasingly outspoken in their criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine, after initially trying to tread a diplomatic middle path. Last week, Israel began providing helmets and other protective equipment to Ukrainian rescue forces and civilian organizations after earlier refusing to do so, and Mr. Lapid signed a joint declaration with President Biden expressing “concerns regarding the ongoing attacks against Ukraine.”
“The attempt to punish the Jewish Agency for Israel’s stance on the war is deplorable and offensive,” Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, Nachman Shai, said in a statement on Thursday. “The Jews of Russia cannot be detached from their historical and emotional connection to the State of Israel.”
The Jewish Agency, founded nearly a century ago as the Jewish Agency for Palestine, was instrumental in helping establish Israel in 1948, and has facilitated the emigration of millions of Jews from around the globe. It describes itself as the largest Jewish nonprofit organization in the world, and runs social programs in Israel and for Jewish communities abroad.
The agency was banned in the Soviet Union, where Jews faced pervasive discrimination, until its final years. About a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union arrived in Israel from the late 1980s to the end of the 1990s. The agency now helps Russians with Jewish roots move to Israel and runs Sunday schools and Hebrew classes across Russia. |
2022/07/22 | Russia Agrees to Let Ukraine Ship Grain, Easing World Food Shortage | BRUSSELS — After three months of talks that often seemed doomed, Russia and Ukraine signed an agreement on Friday to free more than 20 million tons of grain stuck in Ukraine’s blockaded Black Sea ports, a deal with global implications for bringing down high food prices and alleviating shortages and a mounting hunger crisis.
Senior United Nations officials said that the first shipments out of Odesa and neighboring ports were only weeks away and could quickly bring five million tons of Ukrainian food to the world market each month, freeing up storage space for Ukraine’s fresh harvests. The difference might be felt most powerfully in the drought-stricken Horn of Africa, which relies heavily on Ukrainian and Russian grain.
The breakthrough, brokered with the help of the United Nations and Turkey, is the most significant compromise between the warring nations since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but it moves them no closer to peace. While government ministers signed the agreement in an ornate room in Istanbul, with their countries’ flags lined up together, a few hundred miles away their troops continued to kill and maim each other. |
2022/07/23 | Russia Strikes Odesa Port, Stirring Doubts on Deal to Export Grain | ODESA, Ukraine — A string of explosions rocked Ukraine’s southern city of Odesa on Saturday, hitting one of the country’s most important ports less than 24 hours after Russia and Ukraine signed a deal to secure the transit of millions of tons of grain through Black Sea routes.
The strikes raised concerns about Russia’s commitment to the agreement, which was brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, before it could even be put into action. The deal is seen as critical for shoring up global supplies after a steep drop in Ukrainian grain exports raised fears of food shortages in poorer nations.
The string of explosions were also grim reminders of Russia’s violent fulcrum of the five month old war: signals from Moscow that it can rain destruction on any part of Ukraine at random, no matter the military situation on the front lines or diplomatic breakthroughs elsewhere. |
2022/07/29 | With Russia using energy as leverage, the quest in many parts of Europe is to shrink demand. | But European nations can hardly wait to see how the weather turns out.
Seeking to speed up its energy independence from Russia, Italy has looked to Algeria as a potential new supplier of gas, ramped up renewable energy sources and burned more coal to keep homes lighted and businesses running.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has warned that the country should brace itself for a total cutoff of Russian natural gas, has said that to tackle the gas shortage, the government would prepare a measured conservation plan to limit energy use. He has also noted that France’s large nuclear power industry makes it less vulnerable than some of its European neighbors.
“Russia is using energy, like it is using food, as a weapon of war,” Mr. Macron said earlier this month.
Élisabeth Borne, the French prime minister, told lawmakers in early July that France would renationalize its state-backed electricity giant, Électricité de France, which produces most of the country’s electricity and operates all of its nuclear plants. |
2022/07/20 | Russia Signals That It May Want a Bigger Chunk of Ukraine | Russia’s top diplomat said Wednesday that his country’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine might broaden, as European leaders warned their citizens to prepare for sacrifices in the face of a conflict that shows no sign of ending any time soon.
In recent months, Russian forces have concentrated their assault on eastern Ukraine, which by all indications Russia appears determined to annex as it did Crimea in 2014. But on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov told the Russian state news agency that Moscow was now casting its gaze on a swath of Ukraine’s south, as well, specifically naming the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as well as “a number of other territories.”
“This is an ongoing process,” Mr. Lavrov said in an interview with RIA Novosti.
In comments reminiscent of the justification offered for the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin, who said Western military aggression had left him no choice, Mr. Lavrov said Ukraine’s allies were to blame if Russia expanded its military objectives. |
2022/07/30 | As Ukraine defends in the east and south, a U.S. official says Russia’s war effort is failing. | Although Russia’s forces are trying to push deeper into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, they have not been able to break through Ukrainian defenses, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.
“Throughout July, the occupiers have been trying to storm Donetsk region,” Serhii Haidai, the head of the military administration in neighboring Luhansk Province, said in a statement. But unlike with the Russians’ push in the spring and early summer, when they could use their significant artillery advantage to flatten areas before advancing, Mr. Haidai said the Ukrainians’ destruction of Russian ammunition depots had “made it much more difficult for them to replenish arms stocks and maneuver.”
Still, he said, Russian forces continued “to destroy settlements, employing barrel and jet artillery.” At least six civilians were killed and 15 others were injured by Russian shelling in the Donetsk region on Friday, local Ukrainian officials said.
On the southern front, at least one civilian in the port city of Mykolaiv died when a Russian missile struck a high-rise building overnight, according to Vitalii Kim, the local governor. |
2022/07/30 | How the Kremlin Is Forcing Ukrainians to Adopt Russian Life | Mr. Konstantinov, a longtime pro-Russia politician in Crimea, sat next to Mr. Putin at the Kremlin when the Russian president signed the document annexing the peninsula to Russia. He also helped organize the Crimean “referendum” in which 97 percent voted in favor of joining Russia — a result widely rejected by the international community as a sham.
Now, Mr. Konstantinov said, he is in constant touch with the Russian-imposed occupying authorities in the neighboring Kherson region, which Russian troops captured early in the war. He said that the authorities had told him a few days ago that they had started printing ballots, with the aim of holding a vote in September.
Kherson is one of four regions in which officials are signaling planned referendums, along with Zaporizhzhia in the south and Luhansk and Donetsk in the east. While the Kremlin claims it will be up to the area’s residents to “determine their own future,” Mr. Putin last month hinted he expected to annex the regions outright: he compared the war in Ukraine with Peter the Great’s wars of conquest in the 18th century and said that, like the Russian czar, “it has also fallen to us to return” lost Russian territory.
At the same time, the Kremlin appears to be keeping its options open by offering few specifics. Aleksei Chesnakov, a Moscow political consultant who has advised the Kremlin on Ukraine policy, said Moscow viewed referendums on joining Russia as its “base scenario” — though preparations for a potential vote were not yet complete. He declined to say whether he was involved in the process himself. |
2022/07/29 | A Ukrainian appeals court reduces the life sentence of a Russian soldier tried for war crimes. | His case became a milestone of Ukrainian justice as the war raged on: Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian soldier, was sentenced in May to life in prison after pleading guilty to shooting a 62-year-old riding a bicycle in northeastern Ukraine.
On Friday, the Kyiv Court of Appeals reduced his sentence to 15 years, saying it would provide the reasoning for its decision on Aug. 3. His lawyers had argued that he had not intended to kill the victim, Oleksandar Shelipov, when he shot him in the northern region of Sumy in the early days of the war.
Ukraine’s justice system has come under criticism in the past from human rights advocates for imposing life sentences in which the only possibility for release was terminal illness or a presidential pardon. |
2022/07/24 | ‘An abyss of fear’: A report accuses Russia of further abuses against civilians. | Russian forces have tortured and beaten civilians in the areas of southern Ukraine that they control, part of a series of abuses that may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said this weekend in a report that further undermined the public case repeatedly made by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for the invasion.
Atrocities committed by Russian forces north of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, have already drawn global outrage and have been the subject of war crimes trials by Ukrainian prosecutors, but the report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nonprofit, casts a spotlight on the south of the country, where the Russian occupation forces tightly control access and information.
Starting in February, Russian forces pushed north from Crimea, a region of Ukraine that Moscow seized in 2014, and took control of territory along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coasts including in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Provinces. |
2022/07/29 | Russia’s foreign minister says he will propose a time for a phone call about a prisoner exchange. | During a trip to Uzbekistan on Friday, Mr. Lavrov said that he had learned about Mr. Blinken’s statement from television during a visit to Africa this week. He said that any phone conversation between the two men would have to be conducted from his office and that Russia had asked the American side “to clarify the questions they want to discuss.”
Mr. Lavrov said that the question of prisoner exchanges had been discussed during a January meeting in Geneva between President Biden and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and both leaders ordered their government agencies to discuss it further. Mr. Lavrov said that his ministry was not involved in that discussion, but that he would listen to what Mr. Blinken has to say.
The American government has come under increased pressure from relatives of U.S. citizens to get them released from Russian prisons.
Ms. Griner, a W.N.B.A. star who had been playing for a Russian team during the off-season, is on trial in a Russian court and faces a sentence of up to 10 years in prison on drug charges. The 31-year-old athlete was detained in a Moscow airport about a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and customs officials discovered hashish oil in her luggage. |
2022/07/26 | Ukraine Is the Next Act in Putin’s Empire of Humiliation | Mr. Putin’s manipulation of the cycle of humiliation and aggression is integral to his psychological grip on Russia. That manipulation can look like legislating to criminalize opposition to the war while also appealing for solidarity in the fight against the West. As the impact of economic sanctions rolls across Russia, Kremlin propaganda has called for Russians to show how tough they are: Haven’t they survived great trials in the past? These calls for toughness can resonate — people can learn to define themselves through surviving pain to the point of getting a certain satisfaction from it.
The Kremlin, of course, avoids any suggestion that it is the source of any pain, now or in the past. There are no major public memorials in Russia, in the shape of museums or movies, statues or open archives, that stand as a record of how the Soviet Union sadistically slaughtered its citizens in the gulags and colonized and repressed other territories and peoples. Some school textbooks in Russia celebrate Stalin as an “effective manager.”
Certainly, Russia is not the only country with a history of colonialism and internal repression. But in other countries these histories are usually part of an active debate. In Russia there seems to be nothing in the mainstream discourse that tries to make sense of the past, take responsibility for it or imagine a different path forward.
For Russia to have a chance to come to terms with itself, it will be necessary to confront this history and bring it into the public consciousness — via TV shows or public memorials and educational projects. But admitting one’s own role in this cycle of humiliation and aggression is stymied by the very culture of humiliation: The humiliated feel they have no agency, so why should they feel responsible?
Meanwhile, the threat Russia poses — to Ukraine and to the world — must be mitigated now.
Mr. Putin recently declared that there are only two types of countries: “Either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony,” he said. This is the logic of internal humiliation projected onto geopolitics. For those who are chronically humiliated and humiliate others in turn, the idea that countries large and small alike could have rights is impossible: The world is split into those who dominate and those who are dominated.
Mr. Putin is not just trying to break Ukraine; he is using energy dependency to get Europeans to kneel to Russia’s demands and until recently was holding hostage in Ukrainian ports more than 22 million tons of grain that the world needs. In the face of such threats, it can be tempting to try to placate Russia. The editorial board of The New York Times has said that Ukraine will most likely have to accept territorial compromises. Mr. Macron has said that the West should avoid humiliating Russia. Such proposals are fundamentally misguided: Russia’s sense of humiliation is internal, not imposed upon it. To coddle the Putin regime is merely to participate in the cycle. If you yearn for sustainable security and freedom, abusive partners and predators cannot be indulged. The only option is to limit the sources of dependency. |
2022/07/20 | With Russian Cutoff Feared, Europeans Are Told to Curb Natural Gas Use | The main argument to get all E.U nations on board, despite their different levels of vulnerability, is that the bloc’s economies are so interconnected that a blow to one is a blow to all.
“The choice we have today is triggering solidarity now or waiting for an emergency that will force solidarity upon us,” said Frans Timmermans, a senior Dutch politician who is the commission’s energy and climate czar.
He said savings in gas around the E.U. would create spare capacity to direct to the countries most in need in the wintertime, ensuring that no member state goes into economic shock because of the lack of power.
Ms. von der Leyen, putting a political spin on a seemingly economic issue, said this approach would deliver a blow to Mr. Putin, who wants to sow discord within the European Union, undermining the bloc and its most powerful countries economically and politically. Determined to make that backfire on him, European leaders have drawn closer together since the war began and have taken the first step toward possibly making Ukraine an E.U. member — something Mr. Putin set out to prevent.
“Putin is trying to push us around this winter and he will dramatically fail if we stick together,” Ms. von der Leyen said.
With Russia having slashed or completely cut gas supply to a dozen E.U. countries already, and the looming threat that it will not fully reconnect an important pipeline on Thursday that has been offline for maintenance, the bloc’s alternatives are few. Mr. Putin suggested late Tuesday that natural gas would resume flowing to Europe through the pipeline, but warned that supplies may be severely curtailed. |
2022/07/27 | Ukraine hits a key bridge in Kherson as Russia steps up missile strikes across the south. | Explosions lit up the sky over the southern city of Kherson overnight, and as dawn broke on Wednesday it was clear that Ukrainian long-range missiles had once again found their target: a bridge that is critical in the Russian effort to resupply the forces charged with holding the port city.
At the same time, dozens of Russian missiles struck targets across the southern regions of Odesa and Mykolaiv, hitting port and transport infrastructure, two leisure centers, houses, a parking lot and two restaurants, according to Ukraine’s southern military command.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said its forces struck Ukrainian military strongholds, killing scores of soldiers, and other key Ukrainian infrastructure. The claims could not be verified. But it was clear that both armies were trying to limit their opponents’ logistical operations. |
2022/07/21 | Russia restarts gas shipments through a key pipeline to Germany. | BERLIN — Russia resumed flows of natural gas to Germany early Thursday, easing fears in Europe that a key pipeline would become the latest target in the escalating confrontation between Moscow and the West as the war in Ukraine stretches into its fifth month.
A steady stream of weapons from Western allies that are being used by Ukraine to increasingly devastating effect against Russian forces had raised the suspense around whether Moscow would resume gas deliveries after a 10-day hiatus for annual maintenance. The tensions served as a stark reminder of how dangerously dependent Germany — Europe’s largest economy — and several of its neighbors remain on energy from Russia.
The Ukrainian military said on Thursday that over the past 24 hours it had conducted 10 strikes across southern Ukraine using attack helicopters and fighter jets, targeting five Russian strongholds. They also targeted six Russian ammunition depots and several command posts with missile and artillery strikes against more than 200 Russian targets. |
2022/07/19 | Leading Russian Tennis Player Criticizes War in Ukraine | Kasatkina’s comments come as Russian players have returned to the top level of professional tennis following a forced hiatus.
In April, acting at the behest of the British government, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which runs Wimbledon, and the Lawn Tennis Association, which oversees the other annual spring and summer tournaments in England, barred Russian and Belarusian players from their tournaments.
“The U.K. government has set out directional guidance for sporting bodies and events in the U.K., with the specific aim of limiting Russia’s influence,” said Ian Hewitt, the chairman of the All England Club. “We have taken that directional guidance into account, as we must as a high-profile event and leading British institution.”
He said the combination of the scale and severity of Russia’s invasion of a sovereign state, the condemnation by over 140 nations through the United Nations and the “specific and directive guidance to address matters” made this a “very, very exceptional situation.”
The move was popular in Britain, according to opinion polls, but received significant pushback from the men’s and women’s tennis tours. They condemned it as discriminatory and decided to withhold rankings points for any victories at Wimbledon. It also represented a dramatic break with precedents of not letting politics interfere with individual athletes’ participation in sports and of limiting punishments taken in reaction to the war to barring Russian and Belarusian teams or any flags or other symbols of the countries from competitions.
In a twist of irony, Elena Rybakina, who was born in Russia but opted to represent Kazakhstan four years ago in exchange for funding from that country’s tennis federation, won the Wimbledon women’s singles title. Rybakina, whose parents still live in Russia and who still spends time there, deferred when asked about the war, claiming her English skills were limited, despite holding lengthy news conferences in English on a variety of subjects throughout the tournament. |
2022/07/29 | Explosion Kills Dozens of Ukrainian Captives at Russian-Held Prison | ODESA, Ukraine — For the Russians, the Ukrainian fighters held prisoner at Correctional Colony No. 120 are a trophy. For the Ukrainians, they are war heroes.
Why either side would want any of them dead is a mystery, but that is the question that hung over the fighting in Ukraine on Friday after another deadly episode, with each side accusing the other of committing a war crime.
What is known is that an explosion ripped through a barracks of the prison camp in the Russian-occupied town of Olenivka in southeastern Ukraine early Friday morning, killing at least 50 captured fighters and maiming dozens more, according to both Ukrainian and Russian officials. Videos posted by Russian war bloggers show twisted metal bunk beds and the charred bodies of their former occupants. |
2022/07/19 | Why Russia Believes It Cannot Lose the War in Ukraine | Sergey Karaganov is a prominent Russian political scientist whom I have known for almost 20 years in covering Russia and have interviewed many times as a window into Kremlin thinking. The academic director of the faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics and honorary chairman of Russia’s premier nongovernmental think tank, Mr. Karaganov warned for years about a potential conflict in Ukraine over NATO expansion. Since the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February, he has written articles and given interviews in broad support of President Vladimir Putin, so I interviewed him to better understand Mr. Putin’s aims in the conflict. Ukraine continues to suffer, and those who hope to support Ukraine must understand those aims as it tries to confront Russia’s aggression.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In your articles and interviews, you have said, as President Putin has, that the war against Ukraine is existential for Russia. Why? In February 2022, there was no more talk of Ukraine joining NATO, Ukraine was posing no economic risk to Russia, the United States was far more concerned with China and the Middle East than with Russia. Where was the existential threat that required an all-out invasion?
When the military conflict started, we saw how deep Ukraine’s involvement with NATO was — a lot of arms, training. Ukraine was being turned into a spearhead aimed at the heart of Russia. Also we saw that the West was collapsing in economic, moral, political terms. This decline was especially painful after its peak in the 1990s. Problems within the West, and globally, were not solved. That was a classic prewar situation. The belligerence against Russia has been rapidly growing since the late 2000s. The conflict was seen as more and more imminent. So probably Moscow decided to pre-empt and to dictate the terms of the conflict. |
2022/07/25 | Eyeing a City Captured by Russia, Ukraine Prepares an Ambitious Counterattack | After losing control over most of the region in the war’s first weeks, Ukrainian troops have now liberated 44 towns and villages along the border areas, about 15 percent of the territory, according to the region’s military governor, Dmytro Butrii. Ukraine’s top officials have given no clear timeline for retaking Kherson, but the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has made clear it is a top priority.
“Our forces are moving into the region step by step,” Mr. Zelensky said this week.
Ukraine’s planned counteroffensive in the south has created debate among Western officials and some analysts about whether Ukraine was ready for such a big effort, or if it is the best use of resources when Russian advances have come mostly in the Donbas.
Still, Ukrainian officials and several Western intelligence officials said it was important that Ukraine try to launch a counterattack. They say that the Russian military is in a relatively weaker position, having expended weapons and personnel in their Donbas offensive. Richard Moore, the chief of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, predicted that the Russians would be forced to take a pause, offering an opening to Ukrainian forces. |
2022/07/20 | Ukraine steps up attacks on key Russian targets in the south. | “Ukraine and its Western partners may have a narrowing window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory,” said the spokesman, John Kirby.
Since April, Ukrainian forces have effectively been locked into a defensive posture as they gradually retreated from an onslaught of Russian artillery in the eastern Donbas region. The Russians have not seized new territory in weeks, and the Ukrainians say their defensive positions have stabilized.
But the purpose of the longer-range missile systems that Ukraine has been pleading for, and that Western countries have increasingly started to supply to its government, is not just to forestall Russia’s advance, but also to win back lost territory.
“We all strive to liberate Ukraine from the enemy,” the spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern forces, Natalia Humeniuk, said on Tuesday. “We have a single goal.” |
2022/07/18 | Zelensky Takes Aim at Hidden Enemy: Ukrainians Aiding Russia | KYIV, Ukraine — Even as it engages in fierce fighting with Russia on the battlefield, Ukraine is also waging war on a different, more shadowy front: rooting out spies and collaborators in government and society who are providing crucial help to the invading forces.
While Ukrainian society as a whole has rallied to the country’s defense, Russian sympathizers are reporting the locations of Ukrainian targets like garrisons or ammunition depots, Ukraine’s officials say. Priests have sheltered Russian officers and informed on Ukrainian activists in Russian-occupied areas. One official said collaborators had removed explosives from bridges, allowing Russian troops to cross.
The issue was cast into sharp relief on Sunday night when President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed two senior law enforcement officials, saying they had not been nearly aggressive enough in weeding out traitors. It was the first major reshuffle of his brain trust since the war began. |
2022/07/19 | Intelligence Agencies Say Russia Election Threat Persists Amid Ukraine War | His agency, General Nakasone said, was anticipating “all that and other things that will be disruptive.”
In recent years, U.S. intelligence analysts and officials have been divided over the threat China poses — and whether it is undertaking the same kind of influence operation that Russia is. Some believe Beijing is more focused on shaping debate over the United States’ policy toward Hong Kong and Taiwan.
But others say China is as grave a threat as Russia in trying to influence the election. Part of the problem has been that intelligence analysts working on China and Russia do not share a common definition of influence operations, something intelligence officials have been trying to remedy over the past 18 months.
In an interview Tuesday with The New York Times, Mr. Wray said China has a “policy of trying to influence our policies and politics.”
“It’s not a straight election issue, but sometimes that strays into election issues,” he said, adding that “it’s more focused on the overall stance of the United States.”
“Elections are just a piece of a much bigger mosaic for them,” he continued.
He added that the Chinese “care more about being caught, which may contribute to their calculus in terms of how they go about what they are doing.” |
2022/07/25 | A U.S. intelligence report finds that Russia’s use of ‘filtration centers’ to detain and deport Ukrainians has intensified. | The analysis outlined three possible fates for those who pass through the centers.
“Those who are deemed nonthreatening may be issued documentation and permitted to remain in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, or in some cases forcefully deported to Russia,” the agency reported. “Others deemed less threatening, but still potentially resistant to Russian occupation, face forcible deportation to Russia and are subject to additional screening. Those deemed most threatening during the filtration process, particularly anyone with affiliation to the military or security services, probably are detained in prisons in eastern Ukraine and Russia, though little is known about their fates.”
The New York Times interviewed some of the people who were processed through the centers and managed to escape to Estonia. They described the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that went along with being forced from their homes by war and then being pressured to accept Russian citizenship.
A report released earlier this month by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe warned of abuses at the detention centers, including executions.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this month that “tens of thousands of people” were being held in the centers. “Young women disappear there,” he said. “I think you all understand what is happening with them there.” |
2022/07/29 | Blinken and Lavrov Discuss Griner in Their First Call of the War | Russia routinely denies well-documented atrocities, its own losses and even its role as the aggressor. It outlawed any negative description of its “special military operation,” including calling it a war. Within Russia, the Kremlin has near-total control of information, with independent news outlets having shut down rather than face prosecution.
Novaya Gazeta, one of the most prominent and last remaining of those outlets, reported Thursday that the Russian authorities have gone to court to strip its license. Novaya Gazeta — whose editor, Dmitri A. Muratov, shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year for defending free expression — suspended operations in March rather than face prosecution, but unlike many others, it did not dissolve.
Western officials have repeatedly accused Russia of using food as leverage in the war, a claim the Kremlin denies. In addition to blockading ports, the main conduit for Ukrainian food exports, Russian forces have struck farms and food storage facilities, and seized grain. Russia’s own food exports have fallen sharply, too, which it blames on Western sanctions dissuading companies from carrying or insuring Russian shipments.
The resulting shortages helped drive food prices up sharply. This spring the price of wheat futures were more than double what they were a year earlier, though they have since declined somewhat. |
2022/07/20 | Seeking ‘Axis of Good’ Against U.S., Russia Taps Allies of Convenience | With Western sanctions having a “colossal” impact on Russia, in Mr. Putin’s own words, Moscow needs places to do business, especially as the sanctions bite harder over time. Iran, isolated by even tougher American economic sanctions over its nuclear program, is happy to do business with Russia, Mr. Kupchan said.
Russia also needs more surveillance of the battleground in Ukraine, and Washington has revealed Moscow’s interest in buying both armed drones and observation drones from Tehran.
Russia and Iran have a long and complicated history. Ties and trade improved after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was the first country to recognize the Islamic Republic after the country’s 1979 revolution, though Moscow went on to back Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. In general, the two countries have had a mutual interest in pushing back American power in places such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
Relations improved with the deterioration of Russia’s ties to the West and the steady imposition of sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2021, mutual trade hit record levels, though at a relatively modest amount of about $3.5 billion. |
2022/07/28 | Russian Arms Dealer in Proposed Swap for Brittney Griner Has Notorious History | Shortly after his conviction in 2011 on charges including conspiring to kill American citizens, the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout relayed a defiant message through his lawyer, even though he faced the prospect of decades in prison.
Mr. Bout, his lawyer said, “believes this is not the end.”
More than a decade later, Mr. Bout, 55, may be nearing a chance for a new beginning even though he has served less than half of his 25-year prison sentence.
The United States, trying to negotiate the release of two Americans imprisoned in Russia — the basketball star Brittney Griner and a former Marine, Paul Whelan — proposed exchanging them last month for Mr. Bout, according to a person briefed on the negotiations. |
2022/07/28 | U.S. Offer to Swap Russian Arms Dealer for Griner Highlights Uncomfortable Choices | “I take a pretty hard line on it,” said John R. Bolton, a former U.N. ambassador and national security adviser. “It’s one thing to exchange prisoners of war. It’s one thing to exchange spies when you know that’s going on.” But “negotiations and exchanges with terrorists or with authoritarian governments” become dangerous “because then you’re just putting a price on the next American hostage.”
Ms. Griner’s case has commanded attention not just because she is a star player in the W.N.B.A. but also because her arrest came a week before Russia invaded Ukraine and seemed to be a brazen attempt by Moscow to gain a bargaining chip. Mr. Biden has come under enormous pressure to find a way to free her and approved the offer of Mr. Bout over the concerns of the Justice Department, which often takes a dim view of horse trading the criminals it puts away.
Mr. Bout, a former Soviet military officer, was once one of the world’s most wanted men, accused of selling weapons to Al Qaeda, the Taliban and various governments and militants in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Algeria. The movie “Lord of War,” starring Nicolas Cage and released in 2005, was based on his case. American agencies hunted him down for years until finally catching up with him in Bangkok in 2008 and extraditing him in 2010.
Why the Russians would be so intent on freeing Mr. Bout so long after his capture is something of a mystery. Any secret information Moscow may have worried about him revealing presumably was spilled long ago or is certainly dated by now. But it may simply be a feeling of solidarity on the part of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former K.G.B. officer.
“There are lots of hints in Bout’s biography, even on his Wikipedia page, which suggests that he had close ties with Soviet and Russian intelligence,” said Michael A. McFaul, a former American ambassador to Moscow. “You know who else does? Putin. My guess is that Putin wants to liberate his comrade. Loyalty among these folks, the Chekists, runs deep.”
Still, even after the U.S. offered up Mr. Bout, Russia seemed to be playing hard to get. After Mr. Blinken said he was ready to talk with Mr. Lavrov for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials indicated they were in no hurry. Mr. Lavrov “will pay attention to this request when time permits,” his spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said on Thursday. “Now he has a busy schedule of international contacts.” |
2022/07/27 | Looming Question for Putin Opponents: Can You Change Russia From Jail? | Mr. Gudkov went into exile after what he described as “credible threats” that a criminal case against him would result in jail time. He said he had encouraged Mr. Yashin, a longtime friend, to go into exile as well.
Yevgenia M. Albats, a journalist and friend of Mr. Yashin who also decided to stay, took the opposite view, saying it was impossible to engage in politics seriously from abroad.
“You cannot be a Russian politician in New York, in Manhattan,” Ms. Albats said in a phone interview from Moscow. “You cannot call yourself a Russian politician and be in London.” Still, she conceded, “The risks are very high and they are getting higher.”
Mr. Yashin acknowledged as much in the YouTube interview posted shortly before his arrest, with the Russian journalist Yuri Dud. “I understand that each day could be my last one as a free man,” he said.
He later wrote on social media that he believed it was his clear refusal to leave, expressed in that interview, that resulted in his arrest. |
2022/07/18 | Russia fines Google for failing to remove news it calls ‘fake.’ | A Russian court fined Google about $360 million (21.1 billion rubles) on Monday for failing to remove content the country deems illegal, including coverage of the war in Ukraine.
The forbidden content includes clips encouraging Russian citizens to participate in protests and news Moscow considers “fake.”
Censorship on Russian social media channels is not new, but efforts have ramped up since the war in Ukraine began. Four months ago, President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law effectively criminalizing any public opposition to the war as an attempt to silence critics while spotlighting pro-Kremlin media. Under this law, even the use of the word “war” is off limits. |
2022/05/13 | Treasury Warns Foreign Banks Against Helping Russia Evade Sanctions | The Biden administration is urging international banks not to help Russia evade sanctions, warning that firms risk losing access to markets in the United States and Europe if they support Russian businesses or oligarchs that are facing financial restrictions as a result of the war in Ukraine.
The admonition by a senior Treasury official highlights U.S. efforts to exert pressure on the Russian economy through American financial power and underscores the broad view that the Biden administration is taking of its ability to enforce sanctions as it looks to isolate Russia from the global economy.
In private meetings on Friday with representatives of international banks in New York, Adewale Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, laid out the consequences of helping Russians flout sanctions. He pointed to the “material support provision” that dictates that even if a financial institution is based in a country that has not imposed sanctions on Russia, the company can still face consequences for violating U.S. or European restrictions, including being cut off from those financial systems. |
2022/07/19 | Germany Is on Edge Waiting for Russia to Restart the Gas on Nord Stream 1 | Months of brinkmanship by Russia over the flow of natural gas to Germany and the rest of Europe could reach a high point later this week, when a temporary shutdown of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is scheduled to end.
Nord Stream 1, the main pipeline connecting Germany and Russia, is operated by Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy giant. Gazprom, which recently warned European buyers of its gas that it might cut off flows, shut down the pipeline on July 11 for annual maintenance. Gazprom is scheduled to restart the pipeline after about 10 days, as it has done in past years.
But this year the closure has raised concerns that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will keep the pipeline shut to punish Germany and the rest of Europe for their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Other pipelines, running through Poland and Ukraine, are not being used as alternative links to send gas as they were in past years during the temporary shutdown, Germany’s pipeline regulator said. |
2022/07/15 | In Space, U.S.-Russian Cooperation Finds a Way Forward | In April, Mr. Rogozin demanded that economic sanctions against Russia be lifted and said that he had submitted a proposal urging the Russian government to leave the space station.
This week, after the European Space Agency formally pulled out of a collaboration with Russia on sending a robotic rover to Mars, Mr. Rogozin said Russian astronauts on the space station would stop using a robotic arm built by the Europeans and lobbed disparaging words at Josef Aschbacher, the director general of the European Space agency, and Josep Borrell Fontelles, a top European Union foreign policy official.
“I, in turn, give a command to our crew on the ISS to stop working with the European ERA manipulator,” Mr. Rogozin wrote on his Telegram channel. “Let Aschbacher himself and his boss Borrell fly into space and do at least something useful in their lives.”
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, insisted that the move had nothing to do with Mr. Rogozin’s performance and promised that the former director would soon be employed again. |
2022/07/16 | As Biden Reaches Out to Mideast Dictators, His Eyes Are on China and Russia | JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — During his painful encounters with a series of Arab strongmen here in Saudi Arabia this weekend, President Biden kept returning to a single reason for renewing his relationship with American allies who fall on the wrong side of the struggle he often describes as a battle between “democracy and autocracy.”
“We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran,” Mr. Biden said at a session on Saturday with nine Arab leaders in a cavernous hotel ballroom in this ancient port on the Red Sea. “And we’ll seek to build on this moment with active, principled American leadership.”
Mr. Biden’s framing of America’s mission as part of a renewed form of superpower competition was revealing. For decades, American presidents largely saw the Middle East as a hotbed of strife and instability, a place the United States needed a presence largely to keep oil flowing and eliminate terrorist havens. Now, more than 20 years after a group of Saudis left this country to stage terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and strike the Pentagon, Mr. Biden is driven by a new concern: That his forced dance with dictators, while distasteful, is the only choice if his larger goal is to contain Russia and outmaneuver China. |
2022/07/26 | Facing ‘Putin’s Energy Blackmail,’ Europe Agrees to Cut Russian Gas Use | The European Commission’s original proposal last week presented a less flexible plan to urgently cut use of the fuel across the bloc. It foresaw fewer exceptions, and put the Commission itself in charge of calling an emergency and triggering mandatory natural gas curbs.
Controversially, the proposal asked even those countries that are less dependent on Russian gas or have already started ambitious energy-saving plans to equally share the burden of cutting consumption, to help those who are more dependent.
Critics saw the proposal as primarily benefiting the bloc’s biggest economy and de facto leader, Germany, which is very dependent on Russian natural gas imports.
The German vulnerability turned the tables on an old European script; in previous financial crises, the Germans pointed the finger at weaker countries, especially in the continent’s south, for being irresponsible. Now southern countries, among them Greece, Spain and Italy, were able to take the moral high ground.
But the complexities of curbing gas use in Europe go far beyond cliché cleavages between north and south. Ultimately, the modus operandi of resolving the disagreements was entirely different from the old E.U. playbook, normally characterized by fruitless, late-night meetings and public disparagement.
Instead, E.U. energy ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday morning were out of their talks five hours later, with a compromise that seemed to address individual concerns without diluting the policy goal — to cut gas use and defang Mr. Putin’s energy threats. |
2022/07/17 | As Russia Runs Low on Drones, Iran Plans to Step In, U.S. Officials Say | WASHINGTON — The White House disclosure last week that Russia is seeking hundreds of armed and unarmed surveillance drones from Iran to use in the war in Ukraine reflects Moscow’s need to both fill a critical battlefield gap and find a long-term supplier of a crucial combat technology, U.S. intelligence, military and independent analysts say.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, offered few details about the intelligence assessment he revealed to reporters last Monday, including whether the shipments had started. But other U.S. officials said Iran was preparing to provide as many as 300 remotely piloted aircraft and would start training Russian troops on how to use them as early as this month.
Russia has exhausted most of its precision-guided weapons as well as many of the drones it has used to help long-range artillery strike targets in its monthslong bombardment of Ukraine. Meantime, the first batches of American truck-mounted, multiple-rocket launchers have destroyed more than two dozen Russian ammunition depots, air defense sites and command posts, according to two U.S. officials, making Moscow’s need to counter the new, advanced Western arms more urgent. |
2022/05/13 | Russian Shipping Traffic Remains Strong as Sanctions Take Time to Bite | Data from MarineTraffic, for example, a platform that shows the live location of ships around the world using those on-ship tracking systems, indicates that traffic from Russia’s major ports declined after the invasion but did not plummet. The number of container ships, tankers and bulkers — the three main types of vessels that move energy and consumer products — arriving and leaving Russian ports was down about 23 percent in March and April compared with the year earlier.
“The reality is that the sanctions haven’t been so difficult to maneuver around,” said Georgios Hatzimanolis, who analyzes global shipping for MarineTraffic.
Tracking by Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a maritime information service, shows similar trends. The number of bulk carriers, which transport loose cargo like grain, coal and fertilizer, that sailed from Russian ports in the five weeks after the invasion was down only 6 percent from the five-week period before the invasion, according to the service.
In the weeks following the invasion, Russia’s trade with China and Japan was broadly stable, while the number of bulk carriers headed to South Korea, Egypt and Turkey actually increased, their data showed.
“There’s still a lot of traffic back and forth,” said Sebastian Villyn, the head of risk and compliance data at Lloyd’s List Intelligence. “We haven’t really seen a drop.”
Those figures contrast somewhat with statements from global leaders, who have emphasized the crippling nature of the sanctions. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Thursday that the Russian economy was “absolutely reeling,” pointing to estimates that it faces a contraction of 10 percent this year and double-digit inflation. |
2022/07/22 | Germany bails out Uniper, a crucial gas provider squeezed by Russia. | As part of the rescue, the German government expanded the credit it granted Uniper to 9 billion euros ($9.2 billion), from €2 billion before, and offered up to €8 billion in equity. The government also announced that it would allow energy suppliers to begin passing on increased costs to private and business consumers to spread the burden as broadly as possible beginning Oct. 1.
“We will do everything that matters, today and for as long as necessary,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters in Berlin, announcing the bailout as part of a wider package of measures to combat the energy crisis.
“We will make sure that nobody is overwhelmed in the current situation,” Mr. Scholz said.
Uniper’s share price veered wildly after the announcement, jumping at first but later crashing as details of the rescue sank in. The company has lost about 80 percent of its value this year, making it worth less than €3 billion, a sum far overshadowed by the money the government deemed necessary to bail it out.
The Berlin government deliberately made the terms of the deal tough on shareholders and the company, based on a model that it used to keep the German airline Lufthansa afloat two years ago. It will require Uniper to use its own capital and operating profit before the government support will kick in. |
2022/07/18 | U.S. aid chief criticizes China’s ‘absence’ in a food crisis stoked by Russia’s invasion. | Nations that have refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine risk accelerating a global food crisis, the United States international aid agency’s chief said on Monday, singling out China for hoarding fertilizer and grain while millions of people in East Africa face starvation.
Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, also criticized China for contributing only $3 million to the United Nations’ World Food Program in 2022 — compared with $2.7 billion donated by the United States — despite predictions of an “explosion of child deaths” in the Horn of Africa because of food shortages. The shortages started with a devastating drought and spiraled after Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Ms. Power’s comments highlighted the increasing anger of the United States and its allies over China’s tacit support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his war to control Ukraine. |
2022/07/14 | Priests Once Aligned With Russia Come Under Suspicion in Ukraine | RIVNE, Ukraine — A priest doused in green dye during a Sunday liturgy. Another yanked out of his western Ukrainian church as the police stood by watching. A church attacked by vandals, who filled it with foam, plastered the walls with portraits of Stalin and later set it on fire.
For centuries, the Orthodox Church has been a dominant spiritual force in the country. Now the church is increasingly an object of distrust, largely because its spiritual leadership — at least until May — was in Moscow, rather than Kyiv.
Government officials once courted church leaders. Now they speak openly about suspicions that some priests are collaborating with Moscow and worry that the broader church could be a Trojan horse for pro-Russian views and more. |
2022/07/22 | Turkey says a deal between Ukraine and Russia to unblock grain exports will be signed on Friday. | The United Nations said on Thursday that its secretary general, António Guterres, had landed in Istanbul as part of his effort “to ensure full global access to Ukraine’s food product and Russian food fertilizer.”
“The situation remains a little bit fluid, so I can’t really say when something will be signed,” said the United Nations deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, earlier on Thursday. “But as you can see from the fact that he is traveling to Istanbul, we are moving ahead with this.”
Last week, after meeting in Istanbul with negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and Turkey, Mr. Guterres told reporters that a deal was “technically done” and that he would interrupt his vacation and travel to Istanbul for the signing of it.
Until now, one of the major hurdles to an agreement were the mines Ukraine had placed in its ports on the Black Sea Coast to deter Russia’s warships. In late June, Mr. Guterres outlined the primary elements of a deal proposed by the United Nations and Turkey that would solve that problem. |
2022/07/17 | Family Members Mourn a 4-Year-Old Girl Killed in Russian Missile Attack | The family and friends of Liza Dmytriyeva brushed away tears on Sunday as four men carried her coffin into the cathedral, where a photo of the smiling girl was nestled between roses and teddy bears three days after she was killed by a Russian cruise missile strike.
The death of Liza, a 4-year-old with Down syndrome whose family nicknamed her Sunny Flower, encapsulated the brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
She had been on a walk with her mother, pushing her own baby carriage through a park on Thursday when a flash of fire and metallic shrapnel erupted near them in Vinnytsia, a central Ukrainian town far from the front lines where some sense of normalcy had still seemed possible. |
2022/07/20 | Ukraine’s first lady tells the U.S. Congress that ‘Russia is destroying our people.’ | Ukraine’s first lady met her future husband, Volodymyr Zelensky, when they were still students at different universities in their hometown, the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. She later became a script writer at Kvartal 95, the production company that Mr. Zelensky founded before he traded comic acting for the presidency — and then became a wartime president.
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ms. Zelenska, 44, focused on issues of female empowerment, literacy and culture in Ukraine. But the war has thrust her into the global spotlight. In recent weeks, she has stepped forward more on social media, and has used her profile to raise awareness about Russian crimes against children and older citizens.
During her speech, she also described a 4-year-old girl killed in the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, in a missile attack that left 25 people dead; a 5-year-old who died in a shopping mall attack; and a 3-year-old boy who lost his legs and is learning to use a prosthesis.
She asked members of Congress for more weapons, including air defense systems, before they leave for their August recess, so that “our kids are not going to be killed.” |
2022/07/14 | Janet Yellen Says It’s in Russia’s Interest to Go Along With an Oil Price Cap | On the eve of a meeting of finance chiefs from the world’s major economies in Bali, Indonesia, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen continued to push for a price cap on Russian oil, calling it “one of our most powerful tools” to alleviate the painful leaps in energy and food prices.
Ms. Yellen said at a news conference on Thursday that imposing a price limit on Russian oil would not only reduce President Vladimir V. Putin’s ability to continue waging a brutal war in Ukraine and shrink the Russian economy but also lower global oil prices.
Russia could still export oil at a profitable price if there was a cap, she said, and maintain access to markets that have restricted imports of Russian energy as part of sanctions against Moscow. At the same time, consumers around the world, including in India and China, which have been buying more Russian crude, would get some relief at the gas pump and grocery store. |
2022/07/14 | Strikes on Civilians Deep in Ukraine Show Russia’s Lethal Reach | VINNYTSIA, Ukraine — A volley of missiles hit a shopping center, a dance studio and a wedding hall in central Ukraine on Thursday, killing at least 23 people and setting off a frantic search for dozens more missing in the rubble, in the latest strike to hit civilian targets far from the front line.
Seventy-one people, including three children, were hospitalized after three missiles hit the center of Vinnytsia, a typically sleepy provincial capital, leaving behind a harrowing scene of smoking ruins.
The attack used cruise missiles fired by a Russian submarine in the Black Sea, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office said. It said three children were among those killed in the strike on Vinnytsia, about 240 miles inland from the coast. |
2022/07/20 | Seeking Leverage Over Europe, Putin Says Russian Gas Flow Will Resume | BERLIN — When the main natural gas artery between Russia and Germany, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, was taken off-line last week for 10 days of scheduled maintenance, European leaders began bracing for the possibility that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would not switch it back on as retaliation for opposing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
But Mr. Putin has suggested that the gas will resume flowing to Europe after the work on the pipeline — controlled by Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom — finishes on Thursday, though he warned that supplies might be further curtailed.
The European Commission called on the bloc’s 27 members to immediately begin taking steps to reduce gas consumption by 15 percent. “Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the commission, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday. |
2022/07/19 | Kharkiv Tried to Return to Normal. Russian Shelling Wouldn’t Let It. | Ukraine repelled the effort to capture its second-largest city, but the artillery attacks did not stop. Many residents who left have returned but fear that a new offensive is imminent.
Jane Arraf and
KHARKIV, Ukraine — Alina Titova fell to her knees on the steps of the central railway station at her first glimpse of her home city after arriving back on the train.
“I want to kiss these steps,” Ms. Titova, 35, told the two friends who had come to meet her. It was her first trip back to Kharkiv since she left the besieged city in March, ending up in Germany with her three young children.
It was hardly an uplifting return. Ms. Titova was staying only long enough to take care of some business matters and to try to persuade her parents to leave their nearby village before winter set in. |
2022/07/12 | U.N. Yields to Russia’s Limits on Aid Mission in Syria | WASHINGTON — World powers agreed on Tuesday to continue a United Nations aid mission to northwest Syria for six more months, bending to a deadline demanded by Russia that will, for now, avoid shutting down lifesaving deliveries for about four million people living amid an 11-year civil war.
Just days earlier, Russia had vetoed a plan at the U.N. Security Council to keep the humanitarian aid corridor, from Bab al-Hawa on the Turkish border into Idlib Province, open for one more year. In response, Western diplomats had then rejected a Russian proposal to instead allow the mission to remain for six months, calling it too short and unacceptable, given that the food, medicine and other supplies would be cut in the middle of winter, when the aid is needed the most.
But with little alternative to help war-weary Syrians — more than one million of whom have been living in tents during the conflict that began in 2011 — the council adopted the six-month mission as officials consider how to assist after it ends. |
2022/07/08 | Despite a Wimbledon Ban on Russian Players, a Russian Woman Might Win | WIMBLEDON, England — After all the debate over whether to bar Russian and Belarusian players from Wimbledon, and under pressure from the British government, the women’s singles title may be won on Saturday by a player born in Russia after all.
Elena Rybakina is the 23rd-ranked player in the world, and before this week she had never advanced past the quarterfinal of a Grand Slam tournament. She is tall (6 feet) and powerful, an imposing presence on the tennis court. She has long appeared to lack the consistency required to win the six consecutive matches needed to contend for one of the most important titles, and in her late teens, her national tennis federation told her she was going to have to make it on her own.
That tennis federation was Russia’s. Rybakina was born in Russia and spent her first 18 years there. Her parents still live in Russia. |
2022/07/18 | Pulitzer Board Rejects Trump Request to Toss Out Wins for Russia Coverage | The board of the Pulitzer Prizes, the most prestigious award in journalism, on Monday rejected an appeal by former President Donald J. Trump to rescind a prize given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election and Russian ties to Mr. Trump’s campaign and members of his administration.
The board said in a statement that two independent reviews had found nothing to discredit the prize entries, for which the two news organizations shared the 2018 Pulitzer for national reporting.
The reviews, part of the formal process that the Pulitzers use to examine complaints about winning entries, were conducted after the board heard from Mr. Trump and other complainants. |
2022/07/17 | More accounts of abuses in so-called Russian filtration camps in new report add to international concern. | International concern is growing over reports of abuses involving Russia’s so-called filtration camps, including the eventual executions of some detainees, according to a new report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The international security agency’s report was released Thursday, a day after a statement by the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, that said Russian authorities have “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, from their homes into distant Russian territory.
Russia has acknowledged that 1.5 million Ukrainians are now in Russia, but has asserted that they were evacuated for their own safety. |
2022/07/11 | Putin extends a fast-track Russian citizenship process to all Ukrainians. | President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday signed a decree offering a simplified path to Russian citizenship for all Ukrainians, an effort to broaden Moscow’s appeal and solidify its presence in the country.
Mr. Putin’s decision indicated that Russia might seek to establish permanent control of the Ukrainian territories currently occupied by Moscow’s forces, and that the Kremlin is also interested in extending its presence beyond them.
Since 2019, Russia has been offering a fast-track citizenship process to residents of the self-proclaimed breakaway republics in Ukraine’s east. In May, Russia extended that option to Ukrainians in the southeastern Kherson and Zaporizka regions, parts of which have been occupied by Moscow — along with other measures, like giving newborns automatic Russian citizenship. |
2022/07/11 | Russia Steps Up Attacks on Civilian Areas, Even With Advance Paused | Russia and Ukraine keep the numbers of battlefield dead and wounded careful secrets, but the British military recently estimated the number of dead Russians at 25,000, with tens of thousands more wounded or simply exhausted after almost five months of war. That is far more than the roughly 15,000 the Soviet Union lost in its nine-year war in Afghanistan.
Even by conservative estimates, tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers have died.
Ukraine also faces a manpower problem, but its officials have pleaded loudest for help with their primary disadvantage: heavy weapons and ammunition to counter Russia’s strategy of long-range strikes on homes, malls and transit centers, as well as troops.
In Chasiv Yar, where the apartment building was hit, one young man was trapped for more than 20 hours, pinned under the rubble. On Sunday evening, he was pulled out by rescuers, who quickly covered him with a blue blanket and gently placed him on a stretcher.
He was one of nine people saved from the complex so far, officials said. It was unclear whether anyone else was alive.
“My grandmother was here,” one neighbor said, before pointing into the pile of rubble.
“That’s her bed,” he said. “I hope they will find her, and I can give her a funeral.”
Carlotta Gall and Kamila Hrabchuk reported from Bakhmut, Ukraine, and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London. Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Alan Yuhas from New York. |
2022/07/17 | German’s Biggest Importer of Russian Gas Runs Through Its Credit Line | One of Germany’s largest energy providers, Uniper, has used up a 2 billion-euro credit line from the German state-owned investment bank and has applied for more money, it said Monday, increasing the pressure on Berlin to bail out the company.
Uniper, which is also Germany’s largest importer of Russian gas, has racked up daily losses of tens of million of euros since Russia cut gas flows to Germany last month, forcing it to buy gas from other sources at much higher prices. The company has been forced to begin drawing down its own natural gas reserves that were set aside for winter, and has informed customers that gas prices may rise, steps it described as “emergency measures.”
Flows of natural gas through Nord Stream 1, the main pipeline connecting Germany and Russia, have stopped for annual maintenance. The routine shutdown has raised concerns that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will keep the pipeline closed to punish Germany and the rest of Europe for their opposition to the war in Ukraine. |
2022/07/14 | Witnesses testify in Brittney Griner’s defense as her drug trial continues in Russia. | Witnesses for the defense praised Brittney Griner’s athletic prowess and character on Thursday in a courtroom outside Moscow, where the American basketball star — now one of the world’s most famous prisoners — is facing a possible 10-year sentence on drug charges.
Maksim Ryabkov, the director of UMMC Yekaterinburg, the professional Russian team that Ms. Griner has played for, testified to her “outstanding abilities as a player and personal contribution to the strengthening the team’s spirit,” said Ms. Griner’s lawyer, Maria Blagovolina, a partner with the firm Rybalkin, Gortsunyan, Dyakin and Partners.
Ms. Griner’s trial resumed a week after she pleaded guilty to drug charges. The Russian authorities accused her of having a vape cartridge with hashish oil in her luggage at an airport near Moscow on Feb. 17, where she had traveled to play with UMMC Yekaterinburg during the W.N.B.A. off-season. In the Russian justice system, trials go on even when defendants plead guilty, but Ms. Griner’s lawyers have said they hoped her plea would make the court more lenient. |
2022/07/15 | Brittney Griner’s lawyers say she had a doctor’s note for the drug she mistakenly carried into Russia. | Brittney Griner’s lawyers argued on Friday that the American basketball star had a doctor’s note recommending the drug that she mistakenly carried into Russia, where she has been detained for nearly five months amid Moscow’s escalating tensions with Washington over the war in Ukraine.
As Ms. Griner’s trial on drug charges resumed at a courtroom outside Moscow, her defense team provided medical documents showing that she had a medical note recommending cannabis for chronic pain, according to Reuters.
The Russian authorities accused Ms. Griner in February of having two vape cartridges with hashish oil — a cannabis derivative — in her luggage at an airport near Moscow. The 31-year-old Phoenix Mercury star and two-time Olympic gold medalist had traveled there to play with UMMC Yekaterinburg, a Russian team, during the W.N.B.A. off-season. |
2022/07/10 | Desperate for Recruits, Russia Launches a ‘Stealth Mobilization’ | “Mostly, of course, it is a way of earning money,” said Sergei Krivenko, director of the Russian human rights organization Citizen Army Law. Many, especially older volunteers, have substantial debts, he and others said. A May law scrapped the age limit of 40 for contract soldiers.
Such piecemeal efforts sustain the war, but do not address the fundamental manpower deficit, analysts said. While Ukraine faces similar problems, what it lacks in professional soldiers it compensates for in enthusiastic volunteers, they said.
The online Russian ads avoid mentioning Ukraine, and the short-term offers, often three months, are meant to play down the risks of never coming home. “It may be that it is necessary to get them into the army, and when they are already in the army, figure out what to do,” said Mr. Galeev.
The high death toll among soldiers from poorer republics populated by ethnic minorities, like Dagestan in the Caucasus and Buryatia in southern Siberia, indicate that they fill the front ranks in disproportionate numbers. Statistics, compiled by MediaZona, an independent news outlet, from public sources, show 225 dead in Dagestan through June, along with 185 in Buryatia, compared to nine from Moscow and 30 from St. Petersburg.
Minority conscripts in particular are pressured to sign contracts. “They tell them that if they return to their hometown, they will not find any job, so it is better to stay in the army to earn money,” said Vladimir Budaev, a spokesman for the Free Buryatia Foundation, an antiwar group abroad for the Buryats, an Indigenous minority. |
2022/07/12 | The European Space Agency cuts ties with Russia on its Mars mission. | The European Space Agency is formally ending its partnership with Russia on a rover mission to explore the surface of Mars, the agency’s chief said on Tuesday, citing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
ESA, an intergovernmental organization with 22 member nations, paused cooperation with Roscosmos, Russia’s state space agency, in March to comply with Western sanctions, after ESA’s leadership council agreed unanimously on the “impossibility” of continuing to work together under the circumstances.
As an intergovernmental organization whose mandate was to develop and implement space programs “in full respect with European values,” the agency said in a news release at the time, “we deeply deplore the human casualties and tragic consequences of the aggression towards Ukraine.” |
2022/07/15 | Germany Hopes to Outrace a Russian Gas Cutoff and Bone Cold Winter | Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, agreed. Germany’s industrial success is based on added value more than cheap energy, he said. Most German exports, he said, are “highly specialized products — that gives them an advantage and makes them competitive.”
Labor policy, too, will have an impact.
Wage negotiations for the industrial sector are scheduled to begin in September. The powerful I.G. Metall union will seek an 8 percent wage increase for its 3.9 million members. And starting Oct. 1, a new minimum wage law will establish for the first time a single national rate — 12 euros an hour.
For now, supply chain breakdowns are still causing headaches, and businesses that were only beginning to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic are busy devising contingency plans for gas shortages.
Beiersdorf, maker of skin care products including Nivea, has had a crisis team in place since May to draw up backup plans — including readying diesel generators — to ensure production keeps running.
At Schmees, high costs have already forced the shutdown of one furnace, cutting into the foundry’s ability to meet deadlines. Customers waiting for deliveries of stainless steel include companies that run massive turbines used in icebreaker ships and artists who use it in their sculptures.
Mr. Schmees, an energetic man who prides himself on having nurtured a strong company culture, is planning to ask his employees to work a six-day week through the end of the year, to ensure that he can fill all of the firm’s orders by December. That is how long he’s betting that Germany’s natural gas supplies will hold if Russia cuts off the flow entirely. |
2022/07/12 | A hail of Russian strikes brings terror to Ukraine’s east. | Russian strikes killed at least eight people in eastern Ukraine in 24 hours and the death toll from an apartment complex hit by Russian rockets grew as well, local officials said on Monday, a chilling reminder of the devastation Russia has inflicted on civilians, even as its military pauses its drive to seize Ukrainian territory.
While the Russian military regroups and resupplies, its attacks on civilian targets and morale have intensified in recent days. In one town after another in eastern Ukraine, a hail of seemingly random Russian strikes, delivered by warplanes, artillery and missiles, has killed, maimed and terrified residents.
The attacks have ramped up in particular in Donetsk, an eastern province increasingly in Moscow’s cross hairs after Russian forces seized the last major city in neighboring Luhansk Province this month. |
2022/07/12 | Jockeying in oil markets may strain Russia’s relations with Venezuela — and Iran. | As Russia pushes to find new buyers for its oil to skirt ever tougher Western sanctions, it is cutting into the market share of two of its allies — Iran and Venezuela — and setting off a price war that could hurt them all.
The competition for sales to Asia has already forced Venezuela and Iran to sharply discount their crude to try to hang onto the few available outlets for their own sanctioned exports, according to oil analysts and traders.
And although both Iran and Venezuela publicly remain close to Russia, experts expect that if the oil battle intensifies it will raise tensions with the Kremlin even as its leader, Vladimir V. Putin, is working to shore up his alliances. On Tuesday, his government announced he would make a rare trip outside the country next week to Tehran. |
2022/07/11 | Ukrainian Medic’s Months in Russian Cell: Cold, Dirty and Used as a Prop | KYIV, Ukraine — During the siege of Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, Russians pounded the city with artillery and blocked civilian escape routes, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises of the war. As Ukrainian soldiers holed up in the Azovstal steel plant, the medic Yulia Paievska took on the dangerous work of evacuating families from a city under constant assault.
Ms. Paievska, 53, was already well known in Ukraine as Taira, a nickname she first used in the video game World of Warcraft. Her all-female volunteer medic group, called Taira’s Angels, had become famous in Ukraine during the earlier war in the eastern Donbas region.
So when Russian soldiers captured her on March 16 as she was evacuating a group from Mariupol, they knew exactly who she was. Held for three months, unable to communicate with her husband and daughter, she became a symbol of Ukrainian bravery and self-sacrifice. |
2022/07/12 | Ukraine says its forces hit a Russian ammunition depot in the Kherson region. | Ukrainian forces fighting to recapture territory in the south of the country said they had blown up a Russian ammunition depot in the Kherson region overnight, the latest in a series of missile attacks that Kyiv has claimed on Russian military infrastructure.
Officials loyal to the government in Moscow said the strike, in Nova Kakhovka, instead hit a warehouse containing saltpeter — sometimes used to make fertilizer or gunpowder — resulting in a large explosion that Russia said had damaged residential buildings, a hospital, a market and a humanitarian aid center. At least seven people were killed and dozens more wounded, the Russian state news agency Tass reported, citing a local official.
The competing claims could not be independently verified. Satellite imagery released on Tuesday morning by Planet Labs PBC, an American satellite imagery company, showed a notable impact crater where a missile appears to have struck, surrounded by destroyed buildings and warehouses. |
2022/07/10 | In Eastern Ukraine, Attacks Intensify as Russia Readies New Offensive | The Ukrainian police guard the last checkpoint on the edge of the town of Sloviansk, hunkered down in the woods just a few miles from the front line. Police officers edged toward their bunker midday Saturday as a Ukrainian multiple rocket launcher roared into action nearby, firing a volley toward Russian positions.
Villages beyond the checkpoint remain in Ukrainian hands but have come under blistering bombardment for weeks. Russian artillery hit the area Saturday morning, setting fire to trees and undergrowth flanking the main highway. The fields were still smoldering midday Saturday when New York Times journalists drove through.
President Vladimir V. Putin has said his aim is to bring Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk under Russian control. Parts of the two provinces have been under the control of pro-Russian separatists since 2014, and Russia’s invasion forces have concentrated their efforts on the remaining area since they pulled back from around Kyiv at the end of March.
Russia has announced an operational pause as its troops regroup after the intense battles for two cities to the east in Luhansk, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk. But Ukrainian officials and civilians said heavy fighting was continuing in the frontline villages as Russian forces pursued their push westward, and Ukrainian troops remained determined to make them fight for every inch of land. |
2022/07/11 | Russia is seeking surveillance drones from Iran, a top Biden aide says. | WASHINGTON — President Biden’s national security adviser said on Monday that Russia was seeking hundreds of surveillance drones from Iran, including those capable of firing missiles, to use in the war in Ukraine.
The official, Jake Sullivan, said that it was unclear whether Iran had already sent any of the remotely piloted systems to Russia, but that the United States had information that indicated Iran was preparing to train Russian troops to use them as soon as this month.
“Our information indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred U.A.V.s, including weapons-capable U.A.V.s on an expedited timeline,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters at the White House, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles. |
2022/07/08 | As Russia Looms, a Ukrainian City’s Loyalties Divide | He said the pro-Russian portion of the population remained a minority, perhaps half of the 23,000 still remaining out of a prewar population of 100,000.
“These are, apparently, the people who are waiting for the arrival of the Russian Army and the L.D.N.R.,” he said, using a shorthand term for the areas of Luhansk and Donetsk under separatist control. “They already have an ingrained opinion.”
Mr. Lyakh was once seen as a pro-Russian politician. He entered politics as a member of the pro-Russian party of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych and opposed the democracy protests that overthrew him in 2014. He is serving his second term as mayor of Sloviansk, as a member of an opposition bloc that was formed from the remnants of Mr. Yanukovich’s party. The bloc has been banned since the Russian invasion in February.
Yet, appointed by President Volodymyr Zelensky as the head of the civil-military administration in his region, Mr. Lyakh insists there is no question of his loyalty to Ukraine.
Other residents of Sloviansk, however, revealed deeply conflicted views in conversations. Many residents lived through the period under the separatist government in 2014 and said they could do so again.
Russian rule would be no better or worse than Ukrainian, said another man who gave his name as Serhii. “It was at least stable,” he said, sitting outside the only working supermarket in town. “They rounded up the drunks and the drug addicts.” |
2022/07/09 | Behind Russia’s ‘pause’ are signs of a troubled effort to regroup. | With Russian forces in the middle of a purported “operational pause,” some Ukrainians in the country’s battered eastern frontline regions are questioning what that means at a time when their towns are still coming under continued shelling.
Military analysts say they have indeed observed a Russian pause — an effort to regroup and prepare reinforcements for a renewed assault on cities in Donetsk Province.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia warned this month that his forces had yet to unleash their fiercest efforts on Ukraine. But according to some assessments, as well as information trickling out about Russia’s scramble to send more troops into the offensive, some analysts are questioning the effectiveness of the units that Russia is moving up. |
2022/07/08 | Russia sentences a lawmaker to seven years in prison for denouncing the war. | A court in Moscow on Friday sentenced an opposition lawmaker to seven years in prison for denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine, handing down the first prison term for what the government made a crime shortly after the invasion.
The sentence is likely to have a chilling effect on Russian society by further raising the stakes for anyone who publicly opposes the war that President Vladimir V. Putin began in late February. While thousands of people protested across Russia in the first weeks of the conflict, the dissent was quickly suppressed amid police violence and the passage of draconian laws that limited free speech.
The opposition lawmaker, Aleksei Gorinov, a municipal deputy in Moscow’s Krasnoselsky district, was found guilty of spreading false information about the Russian Army and its activities, the Tverskoy Court said in a statement on Friday. It said Mr. Gorinov had conspired with others and had used his public office to commit that crime. |
2022/07/13 | After Ukraine-Russia Meeting, U.N. Sees ‘a Ray of Hope’ to Free Grain | The strategy by Ukrainian forces was still in its early days, and it was not yet clear whether it was allowing them to disrupt Russian artillery attacks and offensive operations.
Some Ukrainian officials argued that the Russians were being forced to move supply hubs farther from the front, a claim that could not be verified.
“The Russian army has not stopped shelling, but it is likely preserving its existing supplies of ammunition because these provisions have been disrupted by the work of our new long-range weapons,” said Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk region’s military administration.
Crucial to this effort, Ukrainian officials say, has been the arrival of new long-range weapons systems and artillery units, particularly the truck-mounted, multiple rocket launchers from the United States known as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems or HIMARS, and similar systems from other NATO countries.
Those rocket launchers, which began arriving in Ukraine in June, are proving effective at targeting Russian military bases and ammunition supply depots far behind enemy lines. The systems fire satellite-guided rockets, whose range of more than 40 miles is greater than anything else Ukrainian troops have in their arsenal.
Ukrainian officials said a strike by such rockets last week on a Russian military base and ammunition depot in the Kherson Region had killed as many as 100 Russian servicemen and wiped out an antiaircraft installation. |
2022/07/29 | A Disputed Blast Kills P.O.W.s | Each side accused the other of committing a war crime. At least 40 captured fighters were killed and dozens more were maimed, according to both Ukrainian and Russian officials.
Russia’s defense minister claimed that Ukraine had used a U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, to strike the prison. Ukraine’s motive, Russia said, was to intimidate Ukrainian soldiers who might consider surrendering.
Ukraine rejected the claim, accusing Russia of bombing the facility to hide evidence of torture and extrajudicial executions and calling it a false-flag operation to discredit Ukraine.
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, the S.B.U., published an audio recording of what it claimed were two Russian-backed separatist fighters discussing the explosion over the phone. In the call, which could not be independently verified, one person said that there was no sound of any rocket before the explosion, and that Russian forces had likely blown up the barracks themselves. |