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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

Did Putin Tip Off Dam Attack With A Veiled Nuclear Threat Last Week?

After significant sections of the Nova Kakhovka dam were destroyed in a Russian-controlled part of southern Ukraine, independent Russian media Agents.Media has pieced together Vladimir Putin declarations on May 30 that may have been a warning of a false-flag attack.

The torrent of water unleashed after the attack of the Nova Kakhovka dam has flooded several nearby villages and sparked widespread evacuations. But it has also prompted fears for the security of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which depends on water from the river for cooling.

The proximity to the plant is, however, not the only link to a possible nuclear risk. After the breach of the dam, the Russian secret service FSB claimed to have thwarted a planned dirty bomb attack on Russian soil. The FSB claim comes exactly a week after Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the specter of a dirty bomb attack and threats to the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is just upstream from the Nova Kakhovka dam.

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Commentators have interpreted Putin’s statements as a veiled threat directed towards Ukraine, and the latest allusion to a possible Russian "false flag" operation that is used as a pretext for a major attack in response.

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Nova Kakhovka Attack — Dams Are A Favorite Target Of War

Stunning images of the attack of Nova Kakhovka dam, which had been described as a strategically important target, serve as a reminder that military forces in past wars have set off similar disasters to take out dams' power.

A major dam and hydro-electric power plant in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine was destroyed on Tuesday, prompting fear and mass evacuations as Ukraine accused Russian forces of committing an act of “ecocide.”

Videos posted to social media showed the destroyed dam and torrents of water flowing out into the river and flooding populated areas downstream, where people were forced to evacuate.

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As stunning as the images are, the attack of Nova Kakhovka is not a complete surprise. The dam had been described as a strategically important target since the beginning of the war, and the Ukrainian government warned in 2022 that destroying it would cause a "large-scale disaster."

Indeed, the attack is just the most recent example of military forces seeing the massive potential energy stored behind hydroelectric dams as an offensive weapon. Destroying these critical pieces of infrastructure can destroy cities and spread terror, as well as disrupt agriculture and industry, and cripple power generation.

Here are some of the most notable wartime dam attacks in history:

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The Dam Attack Adds To Ukraine's Huge Environmental Toll, Already Estimated At $54 Billion

The blowing up of the Nova Kakhovka dam has unleashed massive flooding in southern Ukraine. The damage is sure to be staggering, which will add to the huge toll the government estimated in March that takes into account land, air, and water pollution, burned-down forests, and destroyed natural resources.

-This article was updated on June 6, 2023 at 2 p.m. local time-

The blowing up of a large Soviet-era dam on the Dnipro river, which has sparked massive flooding, may turn out to be the most environmentally damaging of the Ukraine war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has blamed Russia for the attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam, calling it "ecocide," with the flooding already estimated to affect over 16,000 people in surrounding villages, many of whom have been told to evacuate immediately. So far, eight villages have been flooded completely by water from the dam's reservoirs.

Moscow, meanwhile, says Kyiv is behind the blast in occupied areas of Ukraine. But even before knowing who is to blame, environmental experts note that is just the latest ecological casualty in the 15-month-long conflict.

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In March, for the first time, there was an estimate of the cost of the environmental damage of the war on Ukraine: $54 billion.

Ruslan Strilets, Ukraine’s Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, explained that experts have applied a new methodology based on environmental inspection to tally the cost.

“This includes land, air, and water pollution, burned-down forests, and destroyed natural resources,” he said. “Our main goal is to show these figures to everyone so that they can be seen in Europe and the world so that everyone understands the price of this environmental damage and how to restore it to Ukraine.”

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Blue-Yellow Visions, Bioweapon Warnings: The Face Of Russian Paranoia

Today's Russia is similar to Stalin's USSR in more and more ways, including the constant search for enemies and the paranoia of betrayal. Some examples of this panic may be funny, but also help inform what Moscow might do next.

Some compare the regime of Vladimir Putin to the regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Sometimes the comparison holds, sometimes it doesn't. But one thing they share is a sense of social panic — and paranoia.

The nature of panic and paranoia often makes it ripe for jokes, though in the end there is little to laugh at in a totalitarian regime. We have gathered some recent signs of the paranoid state of Russian society.

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Take Olga Z., a resident of the Moscow neighborhood, who was taking the metro when a neighbor caught her eye. He wore a yellow jacket with a blue sweatshirt peeking out from underneath. She was also concerned that a man who was a lookalike of Ukrainian nationalist Dmytro Yarosh was sitting beside the suspicious citizen in yellow and blue. She immediately informed the police.

Then there's Svetlana Sharkova, a 60-year-old retiree from the village of Lashino near Moscow, who complained to the police that a local plant nursery was selling seedlings of the Ukrainian apple variety "Glory to the Victors."

Police in the central Russian city of Pyt-Yakh, are investigating a report from the local school principal that a student wore blue and yellow ribbons in her hair.

On a bus traveling from Dzhankoy to Sevastopol in Crimea, a retiree reported to police that he saw a passenger with a tattoo on his leg of Stepan Bandera, the noted World War II-era Ukrainian political lead. The tattoo turned out to be Irish actor Cillian Murphy in the role of Thomas Shelby, a character in the gangster series Peaky Blinders.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
РЕДАКЦИЯ

A First Look At Russia's Ukraine War Veterans, Struggling Back On The Homefront

Hundreds of thousands of Russians have taken part in the war. On returning, many face difficulties to return to normal life and finding work, as independent Russian news outlet Vazhnyye Istorii/Important Stories reports.

MOSCOW — Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians have taken part in the war. They range from professional soldiers, National Guardsmen, reservists and conscripts to mercenaries of illegal armed groups, including former prisoners.

The exact number of those who survived and returned home is unknown. In the past year alone, about 50,000 citizens received the status “combat veteran”. The actual number of returnees from the front is far higher, but it is often extremely difficult to obtain veteran status and veteran benefits.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya

They Tracked Down Ukraine's Missing Children In Russia, But Can't Get Them Home

An investigation by Russian independent news outlet Vazhnyye IstoriiImportant Stories found nearly 2,500 orphaned children who may have been forcibly deported from Ukraine and are being raised as Russians. There is no mechanism set up for their return.

MOSCOW — Russia has a state database on orphans and children left without parental care, which publishes profiles of children available for adoption. Russian independent news outlet Vazhnyye Istorii/Important Stories found that children deported from Ukraine appeared in the database.

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The number of Ukrainian children openly sought for foster care by Russian authorities may be almost 2,500. The system does not facilitate searching for Ukrainian relatives of these children, nor does Russia provide the children with an opportunity to remain in Ukraine.

"Brushes, paints, an album — everything you need. I like it very much," says the boy as he examines the school kit donated by the volunteers. He has a cap on his head with "Together with Russia" written on it. He is 9-year-old Alexander Chizhkov, referred to in the TV report as a "forced migrant." Russian authorities removed him along with other orphaned children from Donetsk.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Pierre Haski

Too Soon, Too Late: What’s Really Blocking Ukraine’s Entry To NATO?

Volodymyr Zelensky has made his demand clear: full NATO membership for Ukraine, perhaps as soon as this year. Yet member countries, from the U.S. to top European allies, are still stuck in the mindset of not “provoking” Russia. But if not now, when?

-Analysis-

PARIS — Volodymyr Zelensky knows what he wants, and he’s not afraid to say it loud and say it clear. Yesterday in Chisinau, Moldova, before the leaders of 47 European states, the Ukrainian President demanded that NATO open its doors to Ukraine — and to do it as early as 2023.

"This is the year of decision", he added before an impressive array of heads of state and government gathered in Moldova, just across the border from his war-torn country.

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But it’s not that simple. Several of the Alliance's heavyweights, starting with its leader, the United States, are more than reluctant to let a country at war join an organization whose charter includes Article 5. This is the article that defines automatic solidarity with a member state under attack.

And beyond the United States, also Germany, and until recently France, which has begun to take action, fear being drawn unwittingly into a direct confrontation with Russia. For the past 15 months, they have been careful to calibrate their involvement so as not to become "co-belligerent," though that has not prevented them from arming Ukraine.

Between now and next month’s NATO summit in Vilnius, the U.S and its allies must find an answer to the pressing demands of Ukraine and its friends in Eastern Europe.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Khodorkovsky: Don't Count On A Swift End To The War In Ukraine

The West is deceiving itself if it hopes for a quick end to the Ukraine war. Above all, it must consistently implement an energy transition — otherwise, it will remain at Putin's mercy, writes prominent Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in German daily Die Welt.

-OpEd-

LONDON — In the spring of 2014, I went to Kyiv with a large group of Russians representing the European part of the Russian cultural and social elite to express our solidarity with the Maidan protests in Ukraine, and our disapproval of the Russian annexation of Crimea.

Many of us then flew to Kharkiv and Donetsk to meet with Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine who were concerned about what was happening.

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In Donetsk, among others, I had a conversation with the leaders of those who stormed the regional administration, including Denis Vladimirovich Pushilin, the current head of the "Donetsk People's Republic." Since then, it has been absurd for me to listen to those who still do not understand that the destabilization of eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea were a "special operation" of the Kremlin from the very beginning.

It is amazing that there are still people who do not understand that Putin is not simply riding the wave of an imperial renaissance in Russia. He is consistently pushing this wave himself, helped by clever propaganda and the direct financing of imperialist-minded national patriots. At the same time, he is suppressing the voices of the sane part of society.

Putin has already used war to solve domestic problems four times (1999 in Chechnya, 2008 in Georgia, 2014 and 2022 in Ukraine) — if you don't count the war in Syria and the de facto annexation of Transnistria, a region in Moldova, which did not "catch on" with public opinion. Putin's main goal is to stay in power, although in recent years there has been a shift toward "legacy." This means a partial restoration of the empire and its influence.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Anna Akage

The Real Purpose Of The Drone Strikes Inside Russia? A Decoy For Ukraine's Counterattack

Putin is hesitant to mobilize troops for political reasons. And the Ukrainian military command is well aware that the key to a successful offensive lies in creating new front lines, where Russia will have to relocate troops from Ukraine and thus weaken the existing front.

This article was updated at 8 p.m. local time May 31 with reports of new strikes inside Russia

-Analysis-

On the night of May 30, military drones attacked the Russian capital. There were no casualties – just broken windows and minor damage to homes. Ukraine claims it had nothing to do with the attack, and it is instead the frenzied artificial intelligence of military machines that do not understand why they are sent to Kyiv.

While the Ukrainian president’s office jokes that someone in Russia has again been smoking somewhere they shouldn’t, analysts are placing bets on the real reasons for the Moscow strikes. Many believe that Kyiv's real military target can by no means be the capital of Russia itself: it is too far from the front and too well defended – and strikes on Russia, at least with Western weapons, run counter to Ukraine’s agreements with allies, who have said that their weapons cannot be used to attack inside Russia.

Eight apartment buildings, four homes, a school and two administrative buildings were damaged during the shelling in Shebekino, a village in the border region of Belgorod, its governor said, as the oblast increasingly becomes a hotbed of straying violence.

On Wednesday, new reports of a “massive” shelling attack inside Russia's borders that injured at least four people in Belgorod and a drone sparked a fire at an oil refinery further south.

If the goal is not directly military, maybe it is psychological: to scare the residents of the capital, who live in a parallel reality and have no idea how life feels for Ukrainian civilians. Forcing people to live with this reality could push the Kremlin to retreat, or at least make concessions and negotiate with Kyiv. If neither sanctions nor the elite could sober Vladimir Putin up, could angry Muscovites?

But neither Russia's military command nor its political leadership depends on the opinion of citizens. And there are enough special forces in Moscow to crush any mass protest.

Laying bare Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inability to guarantee his country's security, in front of Russia’s remaining international partners or among the country’s elites, is also an unlikely goal. The Russian army has already seen such embarrassing failures that a few drone strikes on the Kremlin can’t possibly change how Putin is seen as a leader, or Russia as a state. So why would Kyiv launch attacks on Moscow?

Let's go back to the date of the shelling: May 29 is Kyiv Day, a holiday in the Ukrainian capital. It was also the 16th attack on Kyiv in May alone, unprecedented in its scale, even compared to the winter months when Russia had still hoped to cut off Ukrainian electricity and leave Kyiv residents, or even the whole country, freezing in the dark.

The backdrop: the Ukrainian counter-offensive to liberate the occupied territories, which is in the works, if not already launched.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Pierre Haski

Drones On Moscow: Vladimir Putin On The Defensive Like Never Before

In another scenario, Putin could be bragging about Russia's control of Bakhmut after nearly a year of fighting, and the bombing of the Ukrainian Intelligence’s headquarters, which was recently acknowledged by Kyiv. But instead he must retreat to the ultimate home front after drone attacks in the capital.

-Analysis-

PARIS — In February of last year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin dubbed his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation,” he was telling Russians that it would be over quickly. Now, 15 months later, drones are striking apartment buildings in Moscow, bringing a whiff of war to inhabitants of the Russian capital, who had so far thought they’d been spared.

The psychological shock is far greater than the military impact.

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It is a symbol of the failure of the Russian president’s Ukraine campaign. Pro-war nationalist bloggers were quick to criticize the lack of air defense, which allowed the drones to strike Moscow. But if they had really wanted to taunt the government, they could have compared it with the performance of the Ukrainian air defense which, thanks to Western equipment, knocks down most of the Russian drones and missiles fired at Kyiv.

In the same vein, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the mercenary outfit Wagner and rival to Russia's military commanders, commented on his Telegram channel: “The people have a right to ask these questions," and, in a message aimed at the military establishment, added a pointed note: “May your houses burn."

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Bohdan Myroshnichenko

The Foreign And Domestic Forces That Keep Russia's Military-Industrial Complex Turning

The continuing heavy shelling of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities shows that Russia still has more missiles than Ukrainians would have hoped. The look through the web of Kremlin diktats and murky international commerce that keeps the Russian military churning out hardware that drives the war in Ukraine

The continuing heavy shelling of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities shows that Russia still has more missiles than Ukrainians would have hoped.

For more than a year, Russia has denied that it has transitioned to a full war-time economy, pretending instead that the so-called "special military operation" is going according to plan. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is scrounging for every possible resource to support the war, spending record amounts to strengthen the army.

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Western sanctions were supposed to make this impossible – or at least complicated. But so far, Russia is still increasing its military spending and arms production, and finding ways to import prohibited components.

How is the Russian military-industrial complex increasing its capacity – and how much is the government spending on war?

In 2023, Russia will spend a record $357 billion from the federal budget on army and security forces – a 60% increase compared to 2021. Every third ruble from the federal budget goes to the war in Ukraine or to support the regime.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg: part of the war spending has been disguised in the budgets for education, social programs and support to individual regions and the economy overall.

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War
Hannelore Crolly, Ricarda Breyton

Belarus May Be Pushing Migrants Into The EU Again — This Time With Russian Help

In 2021, Belarus strongman Lukashenko triggered a migration crisis when he actively drove asylum seekers to the EU. According to the German government, those numbers are on the rise again.

-Analysis-

BERLIN — In the nine months between July 2022 and March 2023 alone, Germany's Federal Police registered 8,687 people who entered Germany undocumented after a Belarus connection. This has emerged from the Ministry of the Interior's response to an inquiry by MP Andrea Lindholz, deputy chair of the Christian Social Union (CSU) parliamentary group, which was made available to Die Welt.

The migration pressure on the Belarus route — which was now supposedly closed after a huge crisis in 2021 that saw Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko threatening to "flood" the EU with drugs and migrants — has thus increased significantly again.

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"Apparently, about half of the people who enter the EU illegally every month via the German-Polish border enter the EU via Belarus," Lindholz told Die Welt. In an autocratic state like this, border crossings on this scale are certainly no coincidence, she said. "It is obvious that these illegal entries are part of a strategy to destabilize the EU."

In addition to flexible controls at the border with Poland, stationary ones are also needed, said Lindholz. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser should agree on a concrete roadmap with Poland "on how to significantly reduce illegal entries into Germany." Lindholz also called on the German government to revoke landing permits for airlines that facilitate illegal migration via Russia and Belarus.

The Belarus route had already caused concern throughout the EU in 2021. At that time, sometimes highly dramatic scenes took place at the border with Poland. Thousands of migrants tried to enter the EU undocumented — many of them transported there by soldiers or border guards of Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko. Poland even feared an attempt to break through the border en masse.

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