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Referendums are ‘propaganda show’ – Ukraine official
Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of Ukraine’s president, has tweeted to reiterate Ukraine’s position on the “referendums” that have started today under Russian control in occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. He has tweeted:
Today, there is no legal action called a “referendum” in the occupied territories. There is only – 1. Propaganda show for z-conscription. 2. The territory of Ukraine that needs an immediate release.
Key events
Dan Sabbagh
This is from Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor:
Western officials believe that Russia “will face major challenges” to mobilise 300,000 more people to its armed forces and that the country’s military will struggle to train and equip any new recruits unless the Kremlin waits several months before deploying them on the front line in Ukraine.
The intelligence experts acknowledged that the true recruitment target could be higher, but although some reports have suggested the Kremlin’s real goal is to mobilise 1million, the officials reiterated in a briefing on Friday that it was their belief it will be very hard for Russia to reach 300,000, never mind any larger figure.
When pressed, one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that 300,000 was “an immense number of people to then try to get in any sense of semblance to be able to fight in Ukraine”. The official added: “The authorities will face major challenges even in mustering this number of personnel.”
Russia has faced problems with training and equipment throughout the conflict so far, and the officials said that would almost certainly extend to newly pressed recruits. “We think that they will be very challenged in training, let alone equipping such a large force quickly,” the official said. Recruits will likely be issued “old stuff and unreliable equipment,” they said.
Western officials believe there was a clear regional bias in Russian recruitment, focusing on poor and minority areas in the country’s east – and avoiding the country’s middle class urban centres. “We are not as yet seeing at the moment, recruiting teams in St. Petersburg or Moscow,” an official said.
Western officials are not keen to engage particularly with recent nuclear threats issued by Vladimir Putin, but they did say they believed that it was not necessarily the case that any Ukrainian territory annexed in the coming days through so-called referendums and weeks would be deemed as covered by its nuclear umbrella.
“Russian red lines are not necessarily where they say they are,” the official said, and that “there are parts of the territory that Russia now controls which are of greater strategic significance to Moscow than others”. Although the locations were not spelled out, the Kremlin has long placed a high value on Crimea as well as the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces occupied since 2014.
The Russian central bank has issued a statement welcoming the announcement earlier that key workers in the financial, IT and communications sectors are to be excluded from Russia’s partial mobilisation by the ministry of defence. [See 10.16am]
Reuters quotes the statement saying:
Employees who are engaged in critical areas will remain in their positions so the financial system can continue to work smoothly, people can receive their salaries, pensions and social benefits on time, card payments and transfers work and new loans can be issued.
Reuters is carrying a little more detail on those quotes from Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov. It quotes him saying:
We are not threatening anyone with nuclear weapons. The criteria for their use are outlined in Russia’s military doctrine. We hope the Biden administration is also aware of the danger of an uncontrolled escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.
Reuters notes that under Russia’s nuclear doctrine, use of nuclear weapons is permitted if Moscow feels it faces as “existential threat”.
Here are the words – in translation – that Vladimir Putin said in his address.
Nuclear blackmail was also launched. We are talking not only about the shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is encouraged by the west, which threatens a nuclear catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading Nato states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia – nuclear weapons.
For those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the Nato countries.
And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff. And those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the weathervane can turn and point towards them.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow was not threatening anybody with nuclear weapons, Russian state media reported.
Ryabkov was also cited as saying that open confrontation with the US and Nato alliance was not in Russia’s interests.
A video shows Russian men who have been called up as part of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation being told by an officer that the “games are over”.
The officer is heard telling the draftees that they will receive two weeks of training before they are sent to the front.
436 bodies exhumed from mass burial site in Izium, says official
The governor of the Kharkiv region Oleh Synyehubov has said 436 bodies have been exhumed from a mass burial site in the eastern city of Izium.
Thirty of the bodies bore visible signs of torture in the burial site in Kharkiv, a region held largely by Russian forces before a Ukrainian counteroffensive this month, Synyehubov told reporters alongside the region’s police chief, Volodymyr Tymoshko.
Three more grave sites have been located in areas retaken by Ukrainian forces, he added.
Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, has condemned the “sham referenda” in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops.
The outcome of these “referendums” in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces on whether to declare independence and join Russia has been “almost certainly already decided”, Simmons wrote on Twitter.
She described the polls, which have been widely condemned in the west as illegitimate, as “a media exercise designed to pursue further an illegal invasion by Russia”.
Olga Chyzh, an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Toronto, writes for us today about how Vladimir Putin needs nothing short of a miracle to avoid a devastating defeat in Ukraine.
Desperate times call for desperate measures and Putin did not disappoint when he announced a partial military mobilisation earlier this week, she writes. At the same time, the self-proclaimed leaders of the occupied Ukrainian territories have rushed to schedule the dates of the sham referendums on whether to join Russia.
If mobilising more troops is key to winning the war, then why has Putin waited this long? Why didn’t he declare mobilisation at the first sign that his “three-day war” plan had hit snags? He waited so long that a longtime member of his inner circle, Ramzan Kadyrov, went on the record calling on him to escalate.
Putin has been hesitant because he knows mobilisation is risky. If all goes to plan, mobilisation could help quickly replenish Russian troops in occupied territories and stop Ukrainian advances. In the medium-to-long term, it could significantly increase Russia’s capacity for a new successful offensive, and with that, force Ukraine to accept peace on Russia’s terms.
Read the full opinion piece here:
Traffic into Finland across its south-eastern border with Russia continues to be busy following President Vladimir Putin’s order for a partial military mobilisation.
The Finnish border force has published figures showing the number of Russian citizens entering the country at border crossings on Finland’s eastern border.
Six thousand four hundred and 70 Russians arrived in Finland across the land border on Thursday, it said.
Andrew Roth
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