Ukraine Briefly

February 17, 2023

Ukraine, Briefly

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This week, Russia said it breached areas of Ukrainian defenses in the eastern Luhansk region, while Ukraine’s military said it had countered most attacks, although admitting the situation remains difficult, Radio Free Europe reported. Fighting intensified on Wednesday as NATO defense ministers gathered for a second day to review the situation even as Ukraine begged Western countries to speed up the supply of weaponry. Meanwhile, as the one-year anniversary of the conflict approaches, Ukraine is bracing for a fresh offensive by the Russians.

Also this week:

• According to a recent report released in the US, at least 6,000 Ukrainian children have spent the past year in Russian “re-education” camps, with hundreds being kept there for months in spite of set return dates, the Guardian wrote.

• Moldovan President Maia Sandu outlined Monday what she described as a plot by Moscow to use external saboteurs to overthrow her country’s government, put the nation “at the disposal of Russia,” and derail its aspirations to join the European Union, the Associated Press reported. Russia rejected the accusations as “completely unfounded and unsubstantiated,” adding that they were based on the “classical techniques often used by the United States, other Western countries and Ukraine,” Newsweek added.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian private military company the Wagner Group, admitted to forming the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an infamous troll farm sanctioned by the US government for interfering in American elections, the Washington Post reported. Prigozhin – who according to US government estimates has sent 50,000 fighters to Ukraine, many of them recruited from prisons – boasted in November that he was intervening in the US midterm congressional elections and intends to do so in the future. Still, there is mounting evidence suggesting that the Kremlin has moved to curb what it sees as the excessive political clout of Prigozhin, including ordering him to desist from criticizing Russia’s defense ministry and stripping him of the right to recruit convicts from prisons, according to Reuters.

• Russia’s state media watchdog has unveiled a program to scour the Internet for banned content, as the government continues its wartime censorship efforts, according to the Moscow Times. The web crawler, nicknamed Oculus, can recognize videos and photographs of demonstrators, “positive depictions” of LGBTQ+ culture, and memes attacking President Vladimir Putin.

• Russia will reduce crude oil production by 500,000 barrels per day starting in March, just two months after the world’s major economies imposed a price cap on the country’s seaborne exports, CNN noted. The reduction is roughly equivalent to five percent of Russian oil output. The reduction in Russian oil supplies will increase competition for barrels from other sources, such as the Middle East, that the EU, the United Kingdom, and other Western countries presently require.

• Meanwhile, the EU added Russia to its tax haven blacklist, the latest in a series of economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed on Moscow since its invasion of Ukraine, Agence France-Presse added. Even so, the Swiss government said on Wednesday that confiscating private Russian assets would violate the Swiss constitution and the existing legal order, citing the findings of a working group formed by the Federal Office of Justice, Reuters noted. Switzerland froze Russian financial assets worth $8.13 billion in December to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.

• Argentina is concerned about the significant number of pregnant Russian women who have recently entered the nation to give birth in order to gain an Argentine passport for their child and accelerate their own claims to citizenship, noting that three Russian spies who were recently arrested in Slovenia were citizens of the South American country, the Associated Press wrote.

This story originally appeared in the February 17, 2023 newsletter, Les Misérables.