The Russian War with the West: Why Russia is Fighting in the Sunday Broadcasting of World Warfare and What Russia Wants to Do

“Russia will be sovereign if Ukraine is either allied to it or is part of it,” Mr. Dugin told the host, Dmitri Kiselyov, who has been under sanctions from the European Union and Britain since 2014. “This is the condition for our sovereignty. This is when we’ll be reckoned with. Russia must win and win in order to respond symmetrically to the terrorist attack.

After more than an hour of glorious coverage of Russia’s annexation of most of the world’s world view is illegal, the fall of Lyman was not even mentioned on Russia’s flagship Sunday political show.

A day earlier, two powerful Putin supporters railed against the Kremlin and called for using harsher fighting methods because Lyman had fallen just as Moscow was declaring that the illegally annexed region it lies in would be Russian forever.

But the soldiers interviewed on the Sunday broadcast said they had been forced to retreat because they were fighting not only with Ukrainians, but with NATO soldiers.

The Institute for the Study of War said that Russian battlefield setbacks were fundamentally changing the Russian information space. Kadyrov and other men of power have faced robust criticism from those in the military who provide a realistic view of battlefield realities for Russian forces.

It was intended to convince Russians that even if they have doubts about the war, they should not be blamed for hardship caused by the West, as it is bent on destroying Russia.

In an interview with the father of a prominent nationalist commentator who lost his daughter in a car bombing, it was shown that Russia is fighting a broader campaign.

Mr. Dugin, like Mr. Putin, has accused Western countries of damaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which ruptured after underwater explosions last month in what both European and Russian leaders have called an act of sabotage.

He said that the west accuses them of blowing up the gas line. The war with the West is on the scale and extent it is unfolding, so we need to understand it. We have to join this battle with a mortal enemy who is going to use any means to destroy us.

The campaign is working at the moment. A senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that Russians feel threatened by the West.

He said in a phone interview that there is an idea to hide and flee, but it is not against Putin. “Part of the anger, even among those avoiding mobilization, is against the West, or Ukrainians.”

Russians were told that they could forget about the conflict in Ukraine if they decided to participate in the campaign. Draftees, he promised falsely, would not fight, and military operations would be left to the professionals. Talking points were quickly parroted by Russian state television when Putin’s Ministry of Defense talked about progress on the battlefield.

A provocative statement, perhaps – Stremousov might perhaps be mindful of the fact that troublesome leaders of Russian-backed separatist entities have a habit of dying violently – but some of this criticism is not new. Chechnya’s strongman Ramzan Kadyrov urged the Russian military to expand its campaign, implying that Moscow’s approach was not brutal enough after they launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The head of the defense committee in Russia’s State legislature demanded during an interview that officials stop lying and level with the Russians.

The Ministry of Defense was lying about Ukrainian cross-border strikes in Russian regions, according to Kartapolov.

The assessment said that seeking a quick advance, the Russian Army was “wasting the fresh supply of mobilized personnel on marginal gains” by attacking before massing sufficient soldiers to ensure success. The attacks have been directed at several places.

Valuyki is in Russia’s Belgorod region, near the border with Ukraine. Kyiv has generally adopted a neither-confirm-nor-deny stance when it comes to striking Russian targets across the border.

Russian quislings have been criticized for being installed by Moscow to run occupied regions of Ukraine. In a recent four-minute rant, the Russian deputy leader of the occupied Kherson region lambasted Russian military commanders for allowing gaps on the battlefield that allowed the Ukrainian military to make advances.

“There is no need to somehow cast a shadow over the entire Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation because of some, I do not say traitors, but incompetent commanders, who did not bother, and were not accountable, for the processes and gaps that exist today,” Stremousov said. “Indeed, many say that the Minister of Defense [Sergei Shoigu], who allowed this situation to happen, could, as an officer, shoot himself. But, you know, the word officer is an unfamiliar word for many.”

Kadyrov has been more willing to blame Russian commanders now that they have retreated from the strategic Ukrainian city of Lyman.

Writing on Telegram, Kadyrov personally blamed Colonel-General Aleksandr Lapin, the commander of Russia’s Central Military District, for the debacle, accusing him of moving his headquarters away from his subordinates and failing to adequately provide for his troops.

The Kremlin and the Russian MoD used to say that things were under control, but that’s not true anymore, according to a recent analysis.

The Great Patriotic War is known in Russia as the fetish for World War II and is one of the features of Putinism. The Red Army sometimes used punishment battalions, sending soldiers accused of desertions, cowardice or wavering against German positions as cannon fodder, in order to fight Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

For almost 15 years, I have a good relationship with Sergei. I can definitely say he is a real general and warrior, experienced, headstrong and foresighted commander who always takes patriotism, honor and respect above all,” Kadyrov posted on social media, following news of Surovikin’s appointment last Saturday. “The united army group is now in safe hands,” he added.

Kadyrov said he would invoke martial law across the country and use any weapon because they were at war with the NATO bloc.

Russian missiles damaged a glass-bottomed footbridge in Kyiv that is a popular tourist site, tore into intersections at rush hour and crashed down near a children’s playground on Monday. It was in places that the terror inflicted on civilians by the invasion was still seen but it had largely faded by the time the power went out.

The attacks snatched away the semblance of normality that city dwellers, who spent months earlier in the war in subways turned into air raid shelters, have managed to restore to their lives and raised fears of new strikes.

The change of stance was a sign that the pressure on Russia had become too much for President Putin to ignore, and that he believed that a brutal show of force was necessary.

But the targets on Monday also had little military value and, if anything, served to reflect Putin’s need to find new targets because of his inability to inflict defeats on Ukraine on the battlefield.

The bombing of power installations seemed to be a hint of misery the Russian President could cause during winter as his forces retreat in the face of Ukrainian troops using Western arms.

The attacks on civilians, which killed at least 14 people, also drove new attention to what next steps the US and its allies must take to respond, after already sending billions of dollars of arms and kits to Ukraine in an effective proxy war with Moscow.

The Impact of Monday’s “Bridge-Breaking” Attack on Ukrainian Infrastructure and Cities: An Interview with Putin, the White House, and the West

President Joe Biden Monday spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and offered advanced air systems that would help defend against Russian air attacks, but the White House did not specify exactly what might be sent.

John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, suggested Washington was looking favorably on Ukraine’s requests and was in touch with the government in Kyiv almost every day. “We do the best we can in subsequent packages to meet those needs,” he told CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

Kirby couldn’t say if Putin was changing his strategy from a battlefield war to a campaign to wreak havoc onUkrainian cities and infrastructure, though he suggested it was already in the works.

“It likely was something that they had been planning for quite some time. Kirby says that it’s not to say that the explosion on the bridge might have accelerated their planning.

Colonel General Sergey Surovikin, then-commander of the Russian forces in Syria, speaks at a briefing in the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow, on June 9, 2017.

The rain of fire against Ukrainian civilians on Monday was also chilling, given that it occurred following Putin’s latest nuclear threats and days of debate over whether he might use a tactical nuclear weapon. If he doesn’t, it seems unlikely that any decision he makes would be motivated by the desire to spare innocents from such a terrible weapon. Kirby said that there was no indication that Russia was using nuclear arms or the US needed to change its nuclear posture.

The president of France pointed out to the western world that Mondays rush hour attacks in Ukraine may be the beginning of another pivot in the conflict.

“He was telegraphing about where he is going to go as we get into the winter. Vindman stated on CNN that he is going to try to force the Ukrainian population to give up territory by going after the infrastructure.

The chief diplomatic adviser to Zelensky told CNN that Ukraine shot down more than 60 missiles and drones that had been fired by Russia in a revenge attack for the bridge explosion.

“So imagine if we had modern equipment, we probably could raise the number of those drones and missiles downed and not kill innocent civilians or wound and injure Ukrainians,” Zhovkva said.

Any prolonged campaign by Putin against civilians would be aimed at breaking Ukrainian morale and possibly unleashing a new flood of refugees into Western Europe that might open divisions among NATO allies that are supporting Ukraine.

The lesson of the horrible war is that even though Putin didn’t like what he saw, he was able to unify the nation.

Olena Gnes, a mother of three who is documenting the war on YouTube, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper live from her basement in Ukraine on Monday that she was angry at the return of fear and violence to the lives of Ukrainians from a new round of Russian “terror.”

She said that this is a threat to scare people in other countries and to show that he’s still a bloody tyrant, and that we can arrange fireworks.

We need to get the war going as fast as possible since we won’t have peace until Russia is defeated, and then we’ll have peace again.

For months, the state media in Russia has insisted that their country was hitting only military targets in Ukraine, leaving out the suffering caused by the invasion.

On Monday, state television glamorized and reported on the suffering. It showed plumes of smoke and carnage in central Kyiv, along with empty store shelves and a long-range forecast promising months of freezing temperatures there.

Sergey Surovikin, the commander of Russian operations in Ukraine, speaks out against Putin and his military counterpart Irisov: a frustrated and angry general with no political ambitions

After Russia’s army was outmaneuvered by Ukrainian forces in the last six months, Russia’s Ministry of Defense appointed Sergey surovikin to be its new commander for the war.

He was involved in the Russian’s operations in Syria, during which Russian combat aircraft wreaked havoc in rebel-held areas.

He said Surovikin was “very close to Putin’s regime” and “never had any political ambitions, so always executed a plan exactly as ​the government wanted.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Russian Armed Forces service personnel who took part in operations in Syria, including Sergey Surovikin, at the Kremlin on December 28, 2017.

He says that he personally signed the resignation papers for his colleague Irisov. Now, Irisov sees him put in charge of operations in Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine – but what impact the general will or can have is not yet clear.

“Everything changed” on February 24, 2022, when Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began and TASS received orders from the FSB security service and defense ministry “that everyone will be prosecuted if they don’t execute the propaganda scheme,” Irisov said.

He told CNN he knew nothing could justify this war because his family hid in bomb shelters. He knew from his military contacts that there were many casualties in the first days of the war.

While serving at Latakia air base in Syria in 2019 and 2020, the 31-year-old says he worked on aviation safety and air traffic control, coordinating flights with Damascus’ civilian airlines. He ​says he saw Surovikin several times during some missions and spoke to high-ranking officers under him.

“He made a lot of people very angry – they hated him,” Irisov said, describing how the “direct” and “straight” general was disliked at headquarters because of the way he tried to implement his infantry experience into the air force.

A private military company owned by the Kremlin has operated in Syria.

In 2004, according to Russian media accounts and at least two think tanks, he berated a subordinate so severely that the subordinate took his own life.

A book by the think tank the Washington DC-based Jamestown Foundation says that during a failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991, soldiers under his command killed three protesters, and that he spent at least six months in prison.

In a 2020 report, Human Rights Watch named him as a person who may have to take responsibility for the many air and ground attacks on civilians in violation of the laws of war. ​The attacks killed at least 1,600 ​civilians and forced the displacement of an estimated 1.4 million people, according to HRW​​, which cites UN figures.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/15/europe/russian-general-surovikin-profile-intl-cmd/index.html

Vladimir Putin, the ‘butcher of Aleppo,’ and the role of the Russian Air Forces in fighting in Ukraine: Implications for the stability and security of the Kremlin regime

Vladimir Putin (left) toasts with then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev next to Sergey Surovikin after a ceremony to bestow state awards on military personnel who fought in Syria, on December 28, 2017.

In February this year, Surovikin was sanctioned by the European Union in his capacity as head of the Aerospace Forces “for actively supporting and implementing actions and policies that undermine and threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine as well as the stability or security in Ukraine.”

But Clark, from the ISW, suggests the general’s promotion is “more of a framing thing to inject new blood into the Russian command system” and “put on this tough nationalist face.”

His appointment was applauded by various Russian military writers as well as Yevgeny, the financer of theWagner Group.

He believes what’s happening now is a reflection of what happened in April, when another commander, Alexander Dvornikov, was appointed overall commander of the operations in Ukraine.

“Similarly, he before then was a commander of one of the groupings of Russian forces and had sort of a master reputation in Syria much like Surovikin for brutality, earning this sort of name of the ‘butcher of Aleppo,’” Clark said.

If Putin decides that he is not up to the task, then there isn’t a good Kremlin option. It will lead to a further degradation of the Russian war effort since there are no other senior Russian officers.

They join an army already degraded in quality and capability. The composition of Russia’s military force in Ukraine — as much of its prewar active duty personnel has been wounded or killed and its best equipment destroyed or captured — has radically altered over the course of the war. Russian military leadership doesn’t know how the force will react when confronted with cold and exhausting combat conditions or rumors of Ukrainian assaults. The recent experience suggests these troops might abandon their positions in panic as they did in the Kharkiv region in September.

Grisly videos filmed by Ukrainian drones showing Russian infantry being struck by artillery in poorly prepared positions have partly supported those assertions, as has reporting in Russian news media of mobilized soldiers telling relatives about high casualty rates. The videos have not been independently verified and their exact location on the front line could not be determined.

The commander of the Ukrainian military stated in a statement that Russian forces had tripled their intensity of attacks along some parts of the front. He did not say what the time frame was or where the attacks were coming from.

General Zaluzhnyi wrote that they discussed the situation at the front. He told his U.S colleague that the Ukrainian forces were fighting back and that they had thecourage and skills to do so.

An assessment from the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based analytical group, also said that the increase in infantry in the Donbas region in the east had not resulted in Russia’s gaining new ground.

The institute said that if there had been enough mobilized personnel, Russian forces might have had more success in the offensive operations.

In its two counteroffensives in the northeast and the south, the Ukrainian military has reported step-by-step gains in cutting supply lines and targeting Russian ammunition and fuel depots with long-range rockets and artillery.

In the south, where Ukrainian troops are advancing toward the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, the Ukrainian military said Friday morning that its artillery battalions had fired more than 160 times at Russian positions over the past 24 hours, but it also reported Russian return fire into Ukrainian positions.

With Russian and Ukrainian forces apparently preparing for battle in Kherson, and conflicting signals over what may be coming, the remaining residents of the city have been stocking up on food and fuel to survive combat.

Special project curator at the Ukrainian Institute London, and associate lecturer in Ukranian at the School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, University College London, has an Editor’s Note. She obtained her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from University of London. She has time between the UK and Ukranian. She works for the IWM project Documenting Ukraine. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The Christmas Fairy Tale of a Displaced Ukrainian Woman: Birth, Death, and the Death of Denys in Bakhmut

December is the month of fairy tales where we look into the darkness, only to be reassured of the happily ever after.

A long time ago, we pretended that our life was like a fairy tale with a happy ending. And now it’s over,” says Ievheniia, a displaced Ukrainian woman in Poland who this December is nursing her two-month-old son – and raw grief for the child’s father.

On November 18, Ievheniia’s husband Denys was killed in action while defending Ukraine against Russian aggression. The 47-year-old died at the site of some of the war’s heaviest fighting, near the city of Bakhmut in the east of the country. Ukrainian forces have been holding the line there for months; soldiers waist-deep in mud amid trenches, bomb craters and charred trees.

In the Ukrainian fairy tale there are crucial moments, from marriage ceremony to funeral, that take place via video link. This is what love looks like when war is raging and the plot is disrupted.

I was on a video call with Ievheniia, a 36-year-old PhD candidate working as an IT consultant. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of the Ukranians, thousands of soldiers have died, and she trusted a stranger with her pain to raise awareness.

The festive season in the streets of Warsaw is well underway. The Christmas season is about to start. People don’t want to be reminded that someone somewhere is suffering,” Ievheniia said. The fight is unfolding right next to them.

After driving westwards across the country under Russian bombardment, Ievheniia finally arrived at an enlistment office. She was interviewed on a Friday and told to return the following Monday to sign a contract with the Armed Forces.

She took a pregnancy test over the weekend, just in case. “With war and evacuation, the ground was slipping under one’s feet,” she said with a laugh. “On top of that, it turned out that I was pregnant.”

The pregnancy test provided that plot twist: the woman who planned to defend her homeland instead joined the flow of refugees looking for safety in Poland.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/opinions/ukraine-christmas-fairy-tales-death-dovzhyk/index.html

A video call from Kiev to Ukraine: The birth of Ievheniia and Denys, the father of a family member, was killed in the hospital

Ievheniia and Denys wanted to show their partnership to the state after the war was over. Ukrainian servicemen are able to marry via video call now that the country at war is at work. “Instead of (by) boring civil servants, we got married remotely by a handsome man in a uniform. I had nothing to complain about,” Ievheniia said.

Denys kept the magic alive with flower deliveries and professional photoshoots ordered for Ievheniia from the trenches.

When one morning she did not pick up the phone, Denys raised the alarm all over Warsaw and a rescue squad found Ievheniia unconscious in her rented flat. It could have been fatal if there had been a delay. The Caesarean section ended. Because the baby was born two months early, the father was able to meet his new son.

Ukrainian men are not allowed to leave the country under martial law. Denys was given permission to cross the border, and was allowed to stay with his family for five days.

The time was filled with all kinds of mundane things like shopping and registration with a doctor. He left. It was his birthday on November 17 and we sent him greetings,” Ievheniia remembered. “The next day he was killed.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/opinions/ukraine-christmas-fairy-tales-death-dovzhyk/index.html

“Fantasytale”: Why Ukrainian troops need military aid for the war against Russia and why Ukraine is a “consolatory fairy tale”

Italo Calvino, the celebrated journalist and editor of folktales, called them a “consolatory fable” because a rare fairy tale ends badly. The time to be consoled has not yet arrived if it does. It’s time to act.

We should not be deceived by the narrative logic of a fairy tale. The wily kid will not defeat the monster with the aid of magic. Ukrainians need military aid to win the war against Russia and not just prolong it. Ukrainian victory depends on our collective effort.

I was a teenager when I read a lot of fantasy books, and I wondered how I would fight against evil. Would I be able to turn away and proceed with my daily life?” Ievheniia told me. “Today, all of us have a chance to find out.”

Despite the fact that the Kremlin has denied needing more recruits to fight in Ukraine, Moscow has begun a new campaign to get Russians to join the armed forces.

Video of the Russian Army Combating the First World War I. The Crisis of the Front Lines and the Crisis in the Military Regime

One of the videos that was posted on December 14 was about a guy who decided to fight instead of partying with his male friends and then bought himself a car when he made enough money to pay for his military service.

In a video on December 15, the girl who was once with the soldier asked him to get back together because she was impressed by his courage. A man who left a factory job so that he could sign his military contract and go to the front, is an example.

Another of the videos shows a group of 30-something, well-off Russian men loading a car as they are asked by elderly women where are they going. One of the men replies: “To Georgia. You are forever. Men rush to help a woman who spills groceries, while younger men go to the car to pick up the groceries. “The boys have left, the men stayed,” one of the elderly women concludes.

Many of the videos portray the war as an escape for men from a bleak daily reality of drinking vodka, poverty and helplessness. There are reports of serious shortages of equipment and provisions in the Russian military.

Russian President Putin told mothers of the mobilized in November that it was better to die for the motherland than to consume alcohol.

Putin tried to assure the public at a news conference that there were no plans to mobilize.

Putin stated that the issue of military equipment shortfalls on the front lines was being resolved and that he was working with the Russian defense ministry.