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In Armenia, demonstraters gathered Wednesday night to protest
👋 Sannu!*
Welcome to Thursday, where Russian troops have unleashed an all-out assault on the strategic city of Severodonetsk, Ukraine’s president lashes out at Henry Kissinger for “Munich” stance and the writer of a notable “How to” essay is convicted of murder. We also look at how the plague of school shootings is not exclusive to the United States.
[*Hausa - Nigeria]
💡 SPOTLIGHT
Russia's Military Failures Are Really About Its Soldiers
No doubt, strategic errors and corruption at the highest ranks in the Kremlin are partly to blame for the Russian military's stunning difficulties in Ukraine. But the roots run deeper, writes Anna Akage, where the ordinary recruits come from, how they are exploited, how they react:
To the great relief of Ukraine and the great surprise of the rest of the world, the Russian army — considered until February 24, the second strongest in the world — is now eminently beatable on the battlefield against Ukrainian forces operating with vastly inferior firepower.
After renouncing the original ambitions to take Kyiv and unseat the Ukrainian government, the focus turned to the southeastern region of Donbas, where a would-be great battle on a scale comparable to World War II Soviet victories has turned into a quagmire peppered with laughable updates by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov on TikTok.
The Russians have not managed to occupy a single significant Ukrainian city, except Kherson, which they partially destroyed and now find difficult to hold. Meanwhile, Ukrainian civilians are left to suffer the bombing of cities and villages from Lviv to Odessa, with looting, torture and assorted war crimes.
The reasons for both the poor performance and atrocities are many, and include deep-seated corruption and lack of professionalism up through the highest ranks, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who had never served in the army, and arrived in his position only because of his loyalty to the No. 1 man in the Kremlin.
Putin himself, who also has no military education or experience, has been giving orders on operational and tactical decisions during the war in Ukraine that are usually taken by an officer "at the level of a colonel or a brigadier general," according to British intelligence reports.
Still, the reason that the Russian army is reeling goes deeper than Putin's follies — and lies directly in the nature, origin and economics of its military manpower. It's about the Russian soldiers.
Currently, the core of the Russian army in Ukraine is made up of conscripts and contract soldiers from the depressed, poorest "national republics" of the Russian Federation, most of them from the republics of Buryatia and Dagestan. These regions are infinitely distant from both the cultural references and standard of living of residents of Moscow or St. Petersburg. They are, in other words, invisible, and thus easily expendable for the Kremlin.
Renowned Russian journalist Ilya Varlamov spent his entire career traveling around the far-flung regions of Russia, meeting with locals trying to find out why life there is so woefully poor and hopeless. And everywhere he got the same answer: Because there is no money. Last week, he released a new video in which he again showed footage of ordinary Russian towns and cities complaining about budget deficits.
"I travel a lot around the country and sometimes I manage to meet with the mayor or governor and almost always hear the same story," Varlamov says. "I ask why there are no normal roads, why people still live in rotten huts, and what problems they have with garbage and so on, and I am told that the city simply does not have money."
He recounts the sites of his travels: In Omsk, there's only enough money to pay state employees; in Chita people dump the garbage right outside their homes or bury it in pits; in Khabarovsk people defecate and pour the sewage into pits in the street. Even in one of the richer faraway regions — the Krasnodar Territory — even in the new neighborhoods, there are simply no roads.
Varlamov continues: "And now I look at these very mayors and these very governors, many of whom I have personally met, and I see how in a fit of patriotism they rename their towns with the letter Z, how some of them try to persuade their countrymen to volunteer for the war, and how they persecute those who dare to speak against this war," he says.
Another factor, no less important, is the moral character of a typical Russian soldier. With the collapse of the USSR, the army gradually grew corrupt and violent, hazing and poverty inside the army intensified each other until the conscription became a terrible ordeal for an ordinary Russian, and a whole system of draft evasion developed in the country.
Every family and every mother tried to buy their son out of military service, which was all fertile ground for the growing corruption. As a result, the army became a receptacle for the most disadvantaged and marginalized strata of society.
The indifference of the state to its citizens in Russia, particularly its distant territories, has reached the level where the President is pleased to boast about rockets but does not have the slightest idea about the people who launch them. The Russian army was built over the past decades to intimidate the world, but it was never on the professionalism of its personnel.
War is never clean or correct, and it could not have been so this time either. The irony is that the Ukrainian army was lucky that the Russians did not arrive with a professional army, while Ukrainians civilians were unlucky — too many have become victims of immoral and impoverished soldiers abandoned by their own homeland as expendable material to wage this brutal and senseless war.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Russia hones in on Severodonetsk: Fighting is increasingly concentrated in the industrial city of Severodonetsk, reports the Ukrainian presidential administration, with Russian shelling of the town having “increased exponentially” in the past few hours. Moscow appears intent on encircling the city with tactics similar to those in the siege of Mariupol in order to secure that last major city in the eastern Luhansk region.
• World Bank president warns of global recession: The head of the World Bank, David Malpass, has warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will continue to cause soaring food and energy prices, making a global recession more likely. Malpass also said that the strict lockdowns in China due to the Covid-19 pandemic are increasing the chance of a recession.
• Fire in Senegal kills 11 newborns: Eleven newborn babies in the western Senegalese city of Tivaouane died in a fire that broke out in the neonatal department of a local hospital.
• Texas shooting update: The gunman responsible for the school shooting that killed 21 in Uvalde, Texas, sent out messages on social media just prior to his attack. U.S. President Joe Biden announced that he will be traveling to Texas “in the coming days” to visit the families mourning the loss of loved ones, who included 19 children and two teachers.
•BoJo defiant after government report on lockdown parties: Boris Johnson insisted he will remain Britain’s Prime Minister despite Sue Gray’s report on the parties held in Downing Street during the Covid pandemic. Several members of Johnson’s own Tory party have demanded his resignation.
• Probe finds slain Palestinian journalist was likely targeted by Israeli forces: An in-depth CNN investigation has found evidence that the West Bank killing earlier this month of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was not an accident. Israeli forces shot Abu Akleh, a veteran correspondent, in the head, but claimed she was caught in crossfire. CNN gathered videos, along with testimonies from eyewitnesses, that suggest that Abu Akleh was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces aware that there were journalists in their cross-hairs.
• How to murder your husband author convicted of murdering her husband: A jury in the U.S. state of Oregon has found the author of a self-published essay titled “How to Murder Your Husband” guilty of second-degree murder for shooting her husband to death four years ago.
🗞️ FRONT PAGE
The Manila Times dedicates its front page today to the proclamation of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as the new president of the Philippines after winning this month’s election with an impressive 59% of the vote. The son of the country’s late former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, was flanked at Wednesday’s ceremony at the national Congress by his family, including his controversial mother Imelda Marcos.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
62
Latin America is confirmed as the world’s prime “crime hotspot”, with 62 of the world’s 100 most dangerous cities located in the region, according to risk analysis firm Verisk Maplecroft. The data of their Cities@Risk Security Index, which ranks 579 urban centers with a population over 1 million on their exposure to a range of threats, shows that Kabul, Afghanistan is the riskiest city overall. Joining Kabul at the top of the list are Mogadishu, Somalia and Cali, Colombia.
Eight of the 62 cities located in Latin America record the highest possible risk scores. These include Chihuahua, Mexico, San Salvador, El Salvador and Medellín, Colombia. Although believed to have turned a corner, a recent crime surge in Medellín is what helped Latin America reach the top of the list, according to the Guardian
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Uvalde And The World: School Shootings Spread Beyond The U.S.
The killing Tuesday of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, adds to the United States’ long, sad list of mass shootings. It is the deadliest school attack in the country since the Dec. 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead — and comes just 10 days after a gunman killed 10 at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
🇺🇸 🪦 There is no doubt that mass shootings, particularly at schools, is a distinctly American plague. According to the independent organization Gun Violence Archive, 200 mass shootings have occurred so far this year in the U.S., with 27 school shootings resulting in deaths or injuries.
🌎 🏫 Still, the rest of the world is not immune to the phenomenon. Is this global spread of these senseless shootings associated with the influence of American culture, media coverage and social media, inspiring copycats to commit similar crimes? Are school shootings linkable to places with lax gun-control laws? While research on this phenomenon continues, we take a look at places around the world that have grappled with comparable tragedies in recent years.
🇷🇺 🇧🇷 🇨🇦 Worldcrunch gathered reports of some of the recent school shootings that occurred around the world, from Russia to Brazil to Canada.
➡️ Read the full article on Worldcrunch.com
📣 VERBATIM
“It seems that Mr. Kissinger’s calendar is not 2022 but 1938, and he thought he was talking to an audience not in Davos but in what was then Munich.”
— Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky lashes out at former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s comments made at the Davos summit earlier this week, suggesting that Kyiv should cede territory to Russia in order to bring the war to an end.
📸 PHOTO DU JOUR
In Yerevan, Armenia, demonstraters gathered Wednesday night, alluminating flashlights of their mobile phones, to protest ongoing talks between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and leaders of Azerbaijan and the European Union over the contested region of Nagorno Karabakh. Pashinyan's opponents have called for his resignation, accusing him of ceding too much of Nagorno Karabakh, the Armenian-speaking enclave within Azerbaijan territory that was the cause of a brief but deadly war in 2020 that claimed more than 6,500 lives. — Photo: Alexander Patrin/TASS via ZUMA Press
✍️ Newsletter by Emma Albright and Meike Eijsberg
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When the world gets closer, we help you see farther
- Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.
- Stories from the best international journalists.
- Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries
