An independent inquiry has criticized the State Department for inadequate security at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on the day of the September attack that killed four American government personnel including Ambassador John Christopher Stevens.
The 39-page unclassified report, which also cited intelligence failures, focused much of its attention on the on-site security at the Consulate: “Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”
The report cites the "remarkable heroism shown by American personnel" during the Sept 11 assault, but says the response was inadequate "in the face of a series of attacks that began with the sudden penetration of the Special Mission compound by dozens of armed attackers.”
The Board also cited intelligence failures and a lack of "understanding of extremist militias in Libya and the potential threat they posed to U.S. interests, although some threats were known to exist.”
The report concludes by saying that despite the shortfalls, "no individual U.S. Government employee engaged in misconduct or willfully ignored his or her responsibilities."
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she accepted "every one" of 29 recommendations made by the inquiry and was working to boost global security, according to the AFP.
In a letter to U.S. lawmakers, she said the State Department was partnering with the Pentagon to "dispatch hundreds of additional Marine Security Guards to bolster our posts."
The past several weeks have been marked by Ukrainian retreat in the Donbas. The vast eastern part of Ukraine territory has steadily succumbed to fierce and constant bombardment, after Vladimir Putin had shifted near total Russian focus on the strategic eastern part of the country.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
In late April, we wrote about how important it was for the Kremlin to demonstrate at least some kind of victory, and Putin indeed has the proof to bring back to the Russian public with retreat over the past 24 hours of the Ukrainian army from Lysychansk, the latest major city in the Luhansk region that had remained free of Moscow’s troops.
The Ukrainian media Livy Bereg reported that the Russians outnumbered pro-Kyiv troops in Luhansk oblast ten to one. Kyiv continued to await the arrival of long-range weapons needed to dislodge the enemy, said Serhiy Gaidai, governor of the Luhansk Oblast.
Even on the last day of the Lysychansk defense under heavy fire, medics hospitalized the wounded, firefighters rescued the city, and police recorded crimes. Rusia’s army personnel advantage was offset by the skill of Ukrainian fighters.
The American Institute for War Research (ISW) reported that two Russian generals were in charge of the fighting in Lysychansk: Colonel General Alexander Lapin, commander of the Central Military District, and Army General Sergey Surovikin, commander of the Russian Air and Space Forces. The latter also commands Russia's southern group of troops in Ukraine.
Eye on Kherson
According to ISW analysts, the involvement of two high-ranking officers involved in a single battle on a small section of the front probably indicates that it is essential for Putin to capture Lysychansk and reach the border of Luhansk Oblast.
Still, even as they lose land in the east, Ukrainian troops are regrouping to concentrate on regaining control of territories in southern Ukraine. Kherson, among the first cities to fall after Moscow’s invasion, is still under the control of Russian troops there, where fortifications are being built.
But reports say the Ukrainian army is only a kilometer away from the city, even if there are not yet enough forces close by to capture it. In the next few days, we may expect fierce fighting for Kherson.
Still, the map of military operations now is clearly not laid in Ukraine’s favor. Russia has most of the east and parts of the south. The world also watched as Moscow laid siege to the coastal city of Mariupol, finally forcing the last troops to surrender in late May.
Kyiv must now simultaneously protect other strategic port cities in the south like Odessa and Mykolaiv, while trying to reconquer other targets. Yes, now is the time that the morale of Ukraine needs a victory: All eyes on Kherson.
Lugano Conference Aims To Draw “Marshall Plan” For Ukraine
\u201cUkraine Recovery Conference will start today in \ud83c\udde8\ud83c\udded Lugano. We present the draft Plan of \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 recovery and post-war development. @ZelenskyyUa will join the opening online. Start of #URC2022 - 14:30 (Kyiv Time). Grateful to \ud83c\udde8\ud83c\udded and @ignaziocassis for organizing this Conference.\u201d
Global leaders in the public and private sectors are meeting at the Lugano conference Monday to try to devise a kind of “Marshall plan” to rebuild Ukraine.
The conference in the Swiss town of Lugano, which was planned before Russia invaded Ukraine, will include a video appearance by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
It is estimated that more than 120,000 homes in Ukraine have been destroyed during the war, creating the need for billions in income to restore the country economically. Ukraine’s candidacy to join the European Union was accepted recently, but growing concerns about corruption in the country remain, and will be a condition for any recovery plan.
The Lugano conference will attempt to lay out the principles and priorities for a rebuilding process even as the war continues to rage on.Around 1,000 people were scheduled to participate in the conference, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, several government chiefs and numerous ministers.
According to Synehubov, there were strikes in other areas of Kharkiv, with at least three dead and six injured in the village of Bezruki, Dergachi, a community in the Kharkiv region.
This comes a week after the mall attack in Kremenchuk, amid renewed accusations by Ukrainian authorities that the Kremlin is targeting civilians.
Russian Hockey Player Detained For Allegedly Evading Military Service
Russian goalkeeper Ivan Fedotov was detained in St. Petersburg on the request of the military prosecutor’s office on Friday for evading military service according to Russian media TASS. The 25-year-old Finnish-born Russian signed a one year contract with the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers on May 7 and was meant to go to the U.S. in the near future.
He was detained outside the Ice Arena Kupchino in St. Petersburg and was transported to the military registration office, where he said he was feeling ill and was transported to the hospital, Russian media Fontanka reported.
In Russia, all men between 18 and 27 are required to complete one year of military service and evasion of circonscription can be punishable by heavy fines and sentences of up to two years in prison.
Ukrainians Renounce Russian Language, Like Jews Did With German After World War II
More and more Ukrainians who used to use Russian language in everyday life are giving it up in reaction to Moscow’s invasion, reports German TV channel Deutsche Welle, on their Russian-language channel. Among those who gave up speaking Russian are those forced to flee and now living as displaced migrants — they now see the Russian language directly associated with the aggressor country.
Linguist Irina Zaikovskaya says that it is a very rare phenomenon to abandon a language that was considered a native language and simultaneously switch to another. One example was Jews who fled from Germany refusing to speak German after the Nazi reign. A survey of Ukrainians living in Donbas and southern regions shows an interesting fact: although Russian is the main language of communication for most of them, they consider Ukrainian their native language.
Vladimir Putin has been upfront about his desire to rebuild Russia’s influence in the region. Former Soviet states are watching developments in Ukraine closely, with many trying to ensure futures free of interference by Moscow.
The Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize winner spoke with The Wire's Arfa Khanum Sherwani about how journalists everywhere need to prepare themselves for the worst-case scenario of government-ordered closure and what they should do to face up to such a challenge.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
The martyrdom of Mariupol
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
A daughter of Kyiv
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.
