Tag Archives: Defense Department

World

Russia Moves to Pull Out of Ukraine Grain Deal After Blasts Hit Crimean Port

Leave a comment

Russia said Saturday that it would suspend participation in the export of agricultural products from Ukrainian ports, in response to an attack on the occupied Black Sea port of Sevastopol that it blamed on the government of Ukraine.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement published on Telegram that ships of the Black Sea Fleet and civilian ships involved in ensuring the security of the so-called grain corridor had come under attack. As a result, “the Russian side suspends participation in the implementation of agreements on the export of agricultural products from Ukrainian ports,” the statement said.

The move threatens to derail the United Nations brokered deal that unblocks Ukraine’s vital grain exports through the Black Sea, which is critical to addressing a global hunger crisis and comes a day after U.N. chief

António Guterres

urged Russia and Ukraine to renew the agreement, which is officially set to expire on Nov. 19.

Officials from Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the U.N. signed the grain agreement in July, freeing millions of tons of food products that had been bottled up in the country since the Russian invasion began in February.

The agreement is one of the few diplomatic breakthroughs of the war and helped to bring the global price of wheat down to prewar levels, helping to ease a global hunger crisis that resulted in part from the conflict. Ukraine provided about 10% of the world’s wheat before Russia invaded.

If shipments of Ukrainian grain are halted, the suspension will likely drive up the global price of wheat, corn and other vital food products.

But Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that Ukraine’s armed forces used “the cover of a humanitarian corridor” to launch massive air and sea strikes and as a result Moscow “cannot guarantee the safety of civilian dry cargo ships participating in the Black Sea Initiative and suspends its implementation from today for an indefinite period.” It said appropriate instructions have been given to Russian representatives at the Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul, which controls the transportation of Ukrainian food.

A Turkish official said Turkey hasn’t been officially notified of Russia’s decision to suspend its participation in the deal. Turkish President Recep

Tayyip Erdogan

helped broker the deal.

Oleksandr Kubrakov,

Ukraine’s minister of infrastructure, said his country will continue supplying grains around the world. “The world should not be held hostage to Russia’s whims, hunger cannot be a weapon,” he said in a Tweet.

Russia’s decision to suspend it is also a major blow to Ukraine’s globally important agriculture industry, which returned to a nearly prewar level of grain exports earlier this month, largely due to the deal. Since the agreement was signed, Ukraine exported 9.2 million tons of food products through a safe corridor in the Black Sea, according to the United Nations.

Russian President

Vladimir Putin

has threatened to abandon the deal in recent months, arguing that not enough of Ukraine’s wheat was going to poorer nations and that not enough Russian food and fertilizers were being exported due to sanctions. Around one-quarter of the food shipped through the deal went to low-income countries, according to the U.N. Ukraine also has shipped wheat to crisis-stricken nations including Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen under the agreement.

Stéphane Dujarric,

a spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, on Saturday said, “We’ve seen the reports from the Russian Federation regarding the suspension of their participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative following an attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet. We are in touch with the Russian authorities on this matter.”

“It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative which is a critical humanitarian effort that is clearly having a positive impact on access to food for millions of people around the world,” said Mr. Dujarric.

In Luch, a village near the Kherson front line, a resident plays with her dog in the basement where she has been living during the war.



Photo:

Virginie NGUYEN HOANG for the Wa

Volunteers distribute humanitarian aid in the village.



Photo:

Virginie NGUYEN HOANG for the Wa

When asked about how Russia’s decision would affect the operation of the grain corridor, a representative of the Joint Coordination Center referred to Mr. Dujarric’s statement.

Ukraine’s foreign minister said in a tweet, “We have warned of Russia’s plans to ruin the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Now Moscow uses a false pretext to block the grain corridor which ensures food security for millions of people. I call on all states to demand Russia to stop its hunger games and recommit to its obligations.”

A worker at a Ukrainian power plant repairs equipment damaged in a missile strike.



Photo:

sergei supinsky/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The remains of a house in the southern village of Luch, which has suffered frequent shelling.



Photo:

Virginie NGUYEN HOANG for the Wa

Ukraine President

Volodymyr Zelensky

accused Russia earlier this month of deliberately slowing the passage of vessels through the corridor, creating a backlog of more than 170 vessels waiting to transit. The corridor’s capacity is limited by the number of inspectors from Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the U.N. who must check each ship as it enters and exits the Black Sea.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said nine aerial drones and seven maritime drones were involved in Saturday’s attack. He said the air attacks were repelled, but a sea minesweeper, the Ivan Golubets, sustained minor damage, as did some defensive infrastructure in Yuzhnaya Bay, one of the harbor bays in Sevastopol.

“You could hear explosions coming in from the sea,” said Yevgeni Babalin, a dockworker at the Port of Sevastopol. “There are fears that the Admiral Makarov was hit by an underwater drone.They shot at it from the ship and from a helicopter.”

The Admiral Makarov, a frigate, replaced the Moskva as the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship after the latter was attacked earlier this year.

A broker in Odessa who arranges cargoes from Sevastopol to the Middle East said the situation at the port was tense with residents asked to stay inside by Russian authorities.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol, wrote on his Telegram messaging channel that the attack had caused minimal damage to civilian infrastructure but city services were put on alert. He appealed to residents of the city not to publicize videos or information of the attack that could aid Ukrainian forces “to understand how the defense of our city is built.”

Ukrainian officials haven’t claimed responsibility for previous blasts in Crimea, including a drone strike on the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in August, but rejoiced and vowed to reclaim the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

Crimea has served as a rear base for Moscow’s military occupation of a swath of territory in southern Ukraine, where Kyiv’s forces are now seeking to dislodge Russian forces from part of the Kherson region.

Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the recently appointed commander of Russian troops in Ukraine, has acknowledged that the position in Kherson is challenging and that “difficult decisions” might be called for, without elaborating.

Russian-installed officials in Kherson began telling residents to leave the city earlier this month in what they said was preparation for a Ukrainian assault.

Kirill Stremousov,

deputy head of the Kherson region’s Russian-installed administration on Friday said the evacuation of civilians was complete.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman accused the British Navy on Saturday of being responsible for sabotaging Nord Stream pipelines in late September. Western governments have found that explosions rocked Nord Stream and a parallel pair of pipelines, Nord Stream 2. Investigations are continuing. Some German officials have said they are working under the assumption that Russia was behind the blasts.

The U.K. Defense Ministry said in a tweet on Saturday: “To detract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defence is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale. This invented story, says more about arguments going on inside the Russian Government than it does about the west.”

—Alistair MacDonald and Costas Paris contributed to this article.

Write to Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com, Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8



Read original article here

World

Russia Unleashes Its Biggest Barrage of Strikes on Ukraine Since Invasion

Leave a comment

KYIV, Ukraine—Waves of Russian missiles slammed into Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities in one of the broadest and most intense barrages of the war, in response to a weekend attack Moscow blamed on Ukraine that seriously damaged a bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea.

Ukrainian President

Volodymyr Zelensky

said Russia had carried out dozens of strikes using missiles as well as Iranian-made drones to target the country’s electrical grid and other civilian infrastructure. “They want panic and chaos,” he said in a video address filmed near his office. “They want to destroy our energy system.”

Russian President

Vladimir Putin

on Monday warned of a harsh response if Kyiv were to conduct further “terrorist attacks” following weeks of battlefield losses that culminated in the attack on the strategically important Kerch Strait Bridge.

Of at least 84 missiles that were fired at Ukrainian cities on Monday, 43 were intercepted, the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said, adding that 13 drones were also shot down.

Ukraine’s national police service said 11 people were killed and 87 injured across the country, with most strikes hitting electricity substations and other targets outside city centers, further from civilian homes. Power supply was disrupted in some cities.

Ukrainian officials said the strikes reflected Russia’s growing desperation as the war’s momentum shifts in Kyiv’s favor. In recent weeks, Ukrainian forces have regained thousands of square miles of territory in the east and advanced in the south, fueling doubts in Moscow over the war’s conduct.

Men wounded in the strikes in Kyiv, Ukraine, which were the first missile attacks to reach the center of the capital in months.



Photo:

Serhii Korovayny for The Wall Street Journal



Photo:

Serhii Korovayny for The Wall Street Journal

Monday’s strikes mark an attempt by Russia to spread fear among Ukrainian civilians, having failed to achieve its aims on the battlefield, Ukrainian officials said. By the afternoon, however, life had largely returned to normal in Kyiv and other cities.

The attacks prompted renewed calls from Ukrainian officials for more weapons systems to defend the country against aerial attacks, including from the Iranian drones that Moscow has deployed increasingly widely in recent weeks.

“The best response to Russian missile terror is the supply of antiaircraft and antimissile systems to Ukraine,” said Defense Minister

Oleksii Reznikov.

Ukraine’s supporters across the West pledged to stand by Kyiv, with Mr. Zelensky speaking by phone with the heads of France, Germany and Britain.

“Alongside our allies and partners, we will continue to impose costs on Russia for its aggression, hold Putin and Russia accountable for its atrocities and war crimes, and provide the support necessary for Ukrainian forces to defend their country and their freedom,”

President Biden

said in a statement.

Meanwhile, India and China, which haven’t joined the West’s pressure campaign against Russia and have lent a degree of support for Mr. Putin, both expressed concern about the flare-up in hostilities and called for de-escalation.

Monday’s strikes hit cities including Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Sumy, as well as Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv that are located in the west and had remained relatively insulated from the war raging in the east and south.

Ukrainian Prime Minister

Denys Shmyhal

said 11 key infrastructure facilities in eight separate regions including Kyiv had been damaged, advising residents to be prepared for temporary outages of electricity, water supply and communications.

One of the first strikes in Kyiv hit around rush hour Monday morning as people were on their way to work and school. At the scene of an explosion at an intersection near Kyiv’s Shevchenko Park, a body lay in the street near the mangled remains of several vehicles. Another blast hit a glass bridge in the city that is a popular tourist attraction, though it remained intact.

An hour later, a cruise missile slammed into an office tower near a railway line. An electrical station across the street appeared to have been the target.

The aftermath of the rush-hour attacks on Kyiv.



Photo:

Serhii Korovayny for The Wall Street Journal

A victim of the Kyiv strikes.



Photo:

VALENTYN OGIRENKO/REUTERS

Outside the office building, a man on a stretcher with a tourniquet on his thigh and blood drenching the lower part of his pant leg screamed as he was loaded into an ambulance. Another man on a stretcher wasn’t moving. One woman stood by, her face covered in blood as another woman picked pieces of glass out of her hair.

A strike also hit near a power station in the eastern part of the city, sending huge plumes of black smoke into the sky. There were power outages in some districts.

The European Union’s commissioner for justice,

Didier Reynders,

who was visiting Kyiv, posted a photograph of himself and his team in a basement beneath the hotel where they sought shelter from the blasts.

Authorities in Kyiv briefly suspended trains on all subway lines, with underground stations operating as shelters.

“The capital is under attack from Russian terrorists!” Kyiv Mayor

Vitali Klitschko

wrote on Telegram, appealing to residents of outlying districts to stay away, while emergency services worked to extinguish fires and security forces closed off streets in the city center.

Air-defense systems have helped keep Kyiv relatively secure in recent months, even as missiles landed in other cities. Many residents who had fled in the early days of the invasion had returned to the city after Russian forces pulled back in March.

Saturday’s attack on the Kerch Strait Bridge, which links Russia to Crimea and has been the economic and military lifeblood of the occupying force on the peninsula, dealt a major blow to Moscow.

Smoke rose above buildings in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.



Photo:

yuriy dyachyshyn/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A home damaged by strikes in Slovyansk, in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine.



Photo:

Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press

Ukrainian officials had expected Russia to strike back after the bridge explosion, for which Kyiv hasn’t claimed responsibility. A soldier from Ukraine’s military intelligence said training exercises had been suspended on Monday for the first time in months in anticipation of strikes.

The main intelligence directorate of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Russia had been planning to attack the country’s infrastructure since earlier this month, moving warships and strategic bombers into position.

The attacks across Ukraine come as pressure has built on Mr. Putin to turn around a military campaign that has crumbled, revealing tensions within his own vast security apparatus.

While some of Russia’s right-wing figures have blamed Russia’s Defense Ministry for failures, others have singled out Mr. Putin personally for pursuing the war too timidly. With Russian forces retreating on the ground in Ukraine, some Russia analysts have suggested that a protracted missile campaign could be in the offing, where Moscow will try to bring Kyiv to the negotiating table by systematically destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the strikes had achieved their goal, with all designated targets hit. Despite the escalation, Kremlin spokesman

Dmitry Peskov

said in a call with reporters that no decision had been made to change the status of what Moscow still calls a “special military operation.”

North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General

Jens Stoltenberg

condemned Russia’s “indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure,” writing on Twitter that the Western military alliance would continue supporting Kyiv “for as long as it takes.”

A spokesman for the EU’s foreign-policy chief called Russia’s attacks a war crime. “As always in such cases, the European Union recalls that all those responsible will be held accountable,” spokesman

Peter Stano

said.

Andriy Yermak,

Ukraine’s chief of presidential staff, said Mr. Zelensky had held discussions with German Chancellor

Olaf Scholz

and French President

Emmanuel Macron.

“We agreed to hold a G-7 meeting tomorrow and issue a strong statement regarding support for Ukraine, increasing assistance for closing the sky over Ukraine, and further sanctions,” Mr. Yermak wrote on Telegram.

Announcing the previously scheduled delivery of the first of four Iris-T SLM air-defense systems, Germany Defense Minister

Christine Lambrecht

said the renewed missile fire on Kyiv and other cities underscored the importance of promptly supplying Ukraine with defense systems.

The strikes galvanized a new crowdfunding effort to buy Ukrainian-made drones for the army. Within hours, the campaign launched by comedian and TV host

Serhiy Prytula

had raised more than $3 million.

A missile strike in the city of Dnipro left a crater in the road.



Photo:

dimitar dilkoff/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The attacks on Zaporizhzhia marked the third time it has been pounded in less than a week, with strikes in the city a day earlier killing at least 14 people and injuring more than 70. Zaporizhzhia, which is about 30 miles from the front lines, has become a constant target of Russian shelling in recent days. Kyiv controls the city but Russian forces hold most of the region’s territory.

Oleksandr Starukh,

governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, wrote on Telegram that the latest strikes in the center of the city destroyed a multistory residential building, killing one and wounding five. There could be people under the rubble, he said.

Vladimir Rogov,

the Kremlin-installed leader of the partially occupied region, said the strikes in the city early Monday had targeted “military and civilian infrastructure” used by Ukrainian forces.

Igor Terekhov,

mayor of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, said strikes had knocked out electricity and water supplies in parts of the city. Traffic on the Kharkiv metro was also suspended.

Andriy Sadovyi,

mayor of Lviv in western Ukraine, said part of the city was without electricity, with power generators operating to restore water supplies.

Dmytro Zhyvytskyi,

head of the Sumy regional military administration, said there were power outages in all areas of the region.

“Your attacks provoke only rage and contempt in us! Not fear, not desire to negotiate,” said

Oleksiy Danilov,

secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

—Alan Cullison and Nikita Nikolaienko contributed to this article.

Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com, Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com and Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Read original article here

World

Russia Touts Rapid Mobilization but Faces Dilemma as Ukrainians Advance

Leave a comment

Russia’s defense minister said 200,000 men had entered the army as part of a mobilization drive that began last month as the rapid advance of Ukrainian forces into Russian-occupied territories outpaces Moscow’s ability to pour in reinforcements.

The suggestion that Russia is already two-thirds of the way toward the target the minister,

Sergei Shoigu,

announced last month follows criticism of the call-up process—including from Russian President

Vladimir Putin.

But it raises questions as to whether the depleted Russian military will be able to cope with the sheer numbers of new recruits and use them effectively.

Western military analysts say Moscow faces a dilemma. It could rush ill-prepared troops to the front line to try to stem the losses—with likely little effect on the war’s momentum. Or it could wait until next year and send in better trained and equipped troops that could potentially make a difference on the battlefield. But by that time, Ukrainian forces could have secured significant further gains.

“It’s not going to help the Russians, at least not this winter, and they may well lose ground before that,” said

Lawrence Freedman,

professor emeritus of war studies at Kings College London.

Russian conscripts at a recruiting office in St. Petersburg, Russia.



Photo:

anatoly maltsev/Shutterstock

Oleksiy Danilov,

secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview that Russia had mobilized 200,000 people so far. “Some of them are already on the front, some have already been captured and some have already been destroyed,” he said.

“Mobilized people are already being sent to the front before being outfitted,” he said.

Henry Boyd,

a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said rushing poorly motivated, trained and equipped forces into combat “is about the worst of all possible worlds.”

In the comments, released by Russia’s Defense Ministry, Mr. Shoigu said the new recruits would be trained at 80 training grounds and six training centers.

The Defense Ministry also published videos showing mobilized soldiers arriving in Russian-controlled areas of Luhansk to join the fight, and being greeted by gleeful locals urging the men to “liberate” the region and ensure their safety.

On the face of it, 300,000 new soldiers could make a major difference in the war in Ukraine. Russia sent 150,000 troops into Ukraine at the beginning of the war and tens of thousands of troops as reinforcements since then, according to Western estimates.

Recruits in Russia’s Krasnodar region. Russia’s defense minister said 200,000 men had entered the army as part of a mobilization drive.



Photo:

/Associated Press

Recruits at a firing range in the Krasnodar region.



Photo:

/Associated Press

U.S. estimates suggest as many as 80,000 of the invading force have been killed, injured, or captured—though this likely includes non-Russian army groups such as proxy militias of eastern Ukraine and private military companies. Mr. Shoigu said last month close to 6.000 Russian troops had been killed.

Though evidence from Ukrainian and Russian social-media accounts show that some new recruits have been rushed to the front lines, it isn’t clear on what scale that is happening or whether it is being done systematically. A senior U.S. military official said Monday that the newly mobilized forces hadn’t moved into Ukraine on a large scale.

Dara Massicot,

a senior researcher at Rand Corp., said the partial mobilization—which Mr. Putin had long resisted—suggested that ad-hoc efforts to enlarge the fighting forces, seeking volunteers and recruiting in prisons, are reaching their end.

She said one possible short-term use of the conscripts would be to bring them into noncombat missions, such as manning checkpoints, to allow more seasoned troops to move toward the front.

But she said some evidence indicated that new troops are being moved into formations that are already exhausted. “Reality is suggesting that they are putting these people directly into these broken units where they will not be a value add and will not contribute to combat capability,” she said.

Ukraine’s troops pushed farther east into the strategically important town of Lyman, threatening Moscow’s positions in the Donetsk region. WSJ’s Yaroslav Trofimov reports from the recently liberated town after Russia’s hasty retreat. Photo: Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images

Mr. Danilov said he understood new battalions would be formed “but for these forces you need time to train them, equip them and they need motivation,“ which they don’t have. He cited how new units were formed from volunteers in Russia’s Third Army Corps this year, and how they retreated during Ukrainian forces’ advance in the Kharkiv region earlier this month. ”They don’t have a chance,” he said.

The effectiveness of Russia’s mobilization infrastructure is also in question. Ms. Massicot said the system has been allowed to atrophy for a decade.

“They know they haven’t done anything with it in a decade, not really, and to suddenly expect this system to snap to attention and function well is a highly problematic assumption,” she said.

Mr. Boyd of the IISS said Russian efforts since 2008 to modernize the military put greater emphasis on a professional army with contract soldiers rather than draftees.

“What you’ve got now is the logical consequence of a largely ignored and underfunded mobilization system suddenly being asked to do a lot of very complicated administrative things with a load of local officials who are not necessarily trained or appointed for their capacity to deliver this,” he said.

Analysts said basic training in the Russian military would usually take three to four months, long enough only to obtain rudimentary skills. But many would-be trainers would either have been killed or injured in Ukraine or are still fighting there.

Ms. Massicot said there was “a cascade of missing people in the process because they’re fighting in Ukraine, they’ve been killed in Ukraine.” In some cases, conscripts are likely training conscripts in the field.

Mr. Putin last week acknowledged mistakes in the recruitment process that needed to be corrected, reflecting criticism that non-reservists were being press-ganged into service in places.

A billboard promoting contract army service in St. Petersburg last month.



Photo:

olga maltseva/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

In public comments on Monday, British defense intelligence said Mr. Putin’s “unusually rapid acknowledgment of problems highlights the dysfunction of the mobilization over its first week,” saying local officials are likely unclear on the scope and legal rationale of the campaign.

“As drafted reservists continue to assemble at tented transit camps, Russian officials are likely struggling to provide training and in finding officers to lead new units,” it said.

With the mobilization so far producing only a trickle of reinforcements to Ukraine, officials loyal to Kyiv say Moscow-installed authorities have begun a covert draft of local residents in Russian-occupied areas as they seek to shore up defenses against advancing Ukrainian forces.

“A full-scale mobilization has begun in the city,”

Ivan Fyodorov,

the exiled Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol in the Zaporizhzhia region, said on Monday. “The goal is to have 3,000 volunteers ready by Oct. 10.” Mr. Fyodorov said residents who refuse to fight must offer up people to take their place, though he didn’t provide evidence to back the claim.

Mr. Shoigu also said that Russia’s regular annual conscription would be reduced in size by 7,500 men to 120,000 and delayed by a month until November. “The late start to the cycle is an indication of growing pressures on Russia’s ability to train and equip a large number of new conscripted personnel,” U.K. defense intelligence said Tuesday.

—Ann M. Simmons and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.

Write to Stephen Fidler at stephen.fidler@wsj.com, Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Read original article here

World

Ukraine Gains Full Control of Lyman, Days After Putin Claimed Russia Rules There

Leave a comment

KYIV, Ukraine—Ukrainian President

Volodymyr Zelensky

said the eastern city of Lyman had been cleared of Russian forces and that Ukrainian flags were flying again, scoring a symbolic military and political victory against Moscow on the very territory President

Vladimir Putin

said last week Russia would annex.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it was withdrawing troops from the city following days of advances by Ukrainian forces to surround them, but Moscow kept several thousand troops there, most likely encircled until fighting ended.

“Lyman is cleared completely,” Mr. Zelensky said in a short address to Ukrainians at midday local time on Sunday, shortly after announcing that “the Ukrainian flag is already in Lyman, Donetsk region.”

Kyiv’s victories since the start of September have shifted the battlefield momentum in favor of Ukraine for the first time since the start of Russia’s invasion earlier this year and since Moscow-controlled separatists picked up arms in 2014 to create pro-Moscow statelets in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian advances have unsettled Russian lines of defense in eastern Ukraine. Kyiv’s forces have been chipping away at Russian positions for several weeks there as well as in the country’s south where Ukraine is slowly taking back land with the aim of driving the Russians out of the strategically important city of Kherson on the Dnipro River.

Ukrainian soldiers shot a video in front of the city hall in Lyman over the weekend, celebrating their control over the city, with one of them holding a Ukrainian flag on top of the building and a Russia-occupation flag on the ground.

Roads to Lyman were lined with burned-out hulks of Russian tanks and armored vehicles, with bodies of Russian soldiers lying on the sides. Little remains of nearby villages, with hardly any civilians left. Ukrainian forces, too, have been taking significant casualties.

A church damaged during fighting in Sviatohirsk, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region.



Photo:

STRINGER/REUTERS

Russia’s military setbacks—and the prospect of further lost territories—have raised fears that the Kremlin may resort to nuclear weapons to achieve what it has failed to do with conventional forces. Security analysts say that though the threat of a nuclear strike is higher now than it has been since the Cold War, Russia doesn’t appear poised to deploy one imminently.

In Moscow, Russia’s government was focusing on the formalities around absorbing the Ukrainian territories despite the battlefield setbacks. On Sunday, the country’s Constitutional Court approved integration of the occupied regions. The speaker of Russia’s Duma, or lower house of parliament, said the legislative body would consider laws on the admission of the Ukrainian territories into the Russian Federation on Monday.

Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Putin’s announcement Friday to absorb four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, where Russian troops occupy varying amounts of territory—had backfired for the Kremlin leader. The Ukrainian leader said mounting battlefield losses were causing Russia’s military and political leadership to turn on itself in the hunt for culprits.

“They have already started biting each other there,” Mr. Zelensky said. “They are looking for the culprits, accusing some generals of failures.”

Russian officials and military commentators have cried for Ukraine to pay for a string of defeats they have inflicted on Russia’s armed forces in the past month, starting with a breakthrough offensive in northeastern Ukraine that in a matter of days delivered Kyiv swaths of Ukrainian territory that Russia had spent months fighting to gain earlier in the summer.

Ramzan Kadyrov,

the leader of the predominantly Muslim Russian region of Chechnya, whose own forces are fighting in Ukraine against Kyiv and who has butted heads with the Russian Defense Ministry, urged the firing of Col. Gen. Aleksandr Lapin, commander of Russia’s Central Military District, who oversaw the Lyman area. He also called for harsher measures to execute victories for the Russian military, including a tactical nuclear strike

The formal process of integrating the Ukrainian regions into the territory of Russia has handed Mr. Putin a veneer of victory in a war where his troops have stumbled time and time again. But the Kremlin leader’s promise to defend Russia, including the new territories, with “all weapons at our disposal” has raised fears that Moscow could cross the nuclear threshold to protect its gains against increasingly successful Ukrainian advances.

In the Vatican,

Pope Francis

appealed directly to Mr. Putin to end the “spiral of violence and death,” and warned that the annexations made nuclear war more likely.

The movement on the battlefield came as Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant, severed supplies to Italy, saying it was unable to transport gas because of an administrative issue with an Austrian operator.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense said Lyman was likely being defended by undermanned elements of Russia’s Western and Central Military Districts as well as contingents of voluntarily mobilized reservists.

Elsewhere in the Donetsk region, Ukrainian soldiers work on a howitzer near the city of Siversk.



Photo:

Inna Varenytsia/Associated Press

“Lyman…commands a key road crossing over the Siversky Donets River, behind which Russia has been attempting to consolidate its defenses,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Russian military correspondents said that Ukraine would likely try to keep momentum to attack Kreminna to the east, a strategically important point that could put Ukraine’s forces within range to advance on the Russian stronghold of Severodonetsk, which Moscow captured after a weekslong grinding artillery advance, losing men and ammunition.

Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to the Ukrainian claims, but on Sunday posted videos of soldiers conducting exercises with newly mobilized forces. It said it was continuing attacks on Kupyansk which Ukrainian forces had captured in its breakthrough offensive in Kharkiv region.

—Ann M. Simmons and Francis X. Rocca contributed to this article.

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Read original article here

World

Ukraine Presses U.N. Over ‘Nuclear Blackmail’ at Russian-Occupied Plant

Leave a comment

ODESSA, Ukraine—Ukrainian President

Volodymyr Zelensky

met with the leaders of Turkey and the United Nations on Thursday to discuss food shipments from Ukraine and the increasingly tense situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, as Ukraine continued to hit Russian logistics with artillery strikes.

Following the meetings in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, Mr. Zelensky said he pressed U.N. Secretary-General

António Guterres

about the nuclear plant, which Russia has occupied since the early days of the war. Explosions around the plant in recent days have knocked one reactor off the power grid and sparked fears of a nuclear catastrophe.

“Particular attention was paid to the topic of Russia’s nuclear blackmail at the Zaporizhzhia NPP,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on social media. He said the two men also discussed allegations that Ukrainian citizens were being forcibly deported to Russia and the treatment of captured Ukrainian soldiers.

Russia has said Ukrainian forces threaten the nuclear plant’s security.

After meeting with Turkish President

Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

Mr. Zelensky said they had discussed ways to protect Ukrainian grain that is being exported, as well as other security issues. Ankara helped broker with the U.N. a deal to lift a Russian naval blockade on Ukrainian exports, which had led to food shortages throughout the Middle East and Africa.

“This is a strong message of support from such a powerful country as Turkey,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on Telegram.

The Turkish president has sought to position himself as a mediator in the war, with Turkey hosting two rounds of unsuccessful peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. Mr. Erdogan has said he hopes the U.N.-backed initiative that led to the resumption of Ukraine’s Black Sea grain exports earlier this month could be a starting point for a broader peace between Russia and Ukraine.

At a news conference following the talks, he said he had “reiterated our support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.” He added: “I have been preserving my belief that the war would come to an end at the negotiation table.”

Ukraine has exported 622,000 tons of grain and other food products from the three ports covered by the export agreement, the Turkish defense ministry said Thursday.

During the news conference, Mr. Guterres said “there is no solution to the global food crisis without insuring full global access to Ukraine’s food products and Russian food and fertilizer.” Global wheat prices, he said, have fallen up to 8% since the accord was signed.

Turkish military officers are helping to monitor implementation of the agreement alongside their Ukrainian and Russian counterparts and U.N. officials stationed at a control center that was set up in Istanbul in July. Four more ships loaded with agricultural products sailed from Ukrainian ports on Wednesday under the deal, according to Turkish officials.

Mr. Erdogan is increasingly posing as a friend to both sides in the Ukraine conflict. Turkey has delivered weapons to Ukraine, including armed drones that have been instrumental in Ukraine’s battle against the Russian invasion. In February, Turkey also invoked its rights under an international treaty to bar additional Russian warships from the Black Sea.

The leaders of the United Nations and Turkey met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in western Ukraine on Thursday. The group discussed food shipments and rising tensions at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Photo: Handout/AFP/Getty Images

His visit to Ukraine comes less than two weeks after a visit to Russia where he held talks on the Ukraine war and the grain initiative with Russia’s President

Vladimir Putin.

“This will be another opportunity for Mr. Erdogan to be active in this mediation process,” said

Aydin Sezer,

a former diplomat who served in Turkey’s embassy in Moscow. “Erdogan is now the only person who is credited by the Kremlin when it comes to Ukrainian business.”

Turkish and Ukrainian officials also signed a memorandum of understanding calling for Turkey to participate in Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. The first project being considered under the agreement is the reconstruction of a bridge connecting Kyiv with the towns of Irpin and Bucha, where Russian soldiers carried out mass killings in March, the Ukrainian presidency said.

“Turkey is our strategic ally. We are grateful to our Turkish partners for their willingness to cooperate in the recovery of the infrastructure destroyed by Russia,” said Ukraine’s Infrastructure Minister

Oleksandr Kubrakov

according to the Ukrainian president’s office.

Earlier on Thursday, the Ukrainian military’s Southern Command said that it had struck an ammunition depot in the village of Bilohirka, near the front line of fighting in the Kherson region. The rocket strike is the latest in a series of attacks that have targeted logistics in the Russian-occupied south—part of a strategy to starve Russian troops in the region of supplies and force them to withdraw from the territory they are holding west of the Dnipro River.

Unidentified civilians exhumed from a mass grave after Russia’s occupation of Bucha, near Kyiv, were reburied Wednesday.



Photo:

Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

Emergency workers preparing for a potential nuclear disaster in Zaporizhzhia took part in a presentation watched by Ukrainian officials.



Photo:

Justyna Mielnikiewicz/MAPS for The Wall Street Journal

A day earlier, the Ukrainian military posted video to social media that appeared to show the aftermath of a long-range rocket strike on Nova Kakhovka, also in the Kherson region. And on Tuesday, pro-Ukrainian saboteurs destroyed an ammunition depot in Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014. Video on social media Thursday also showed large explosions overnight in Russian-occupied Amvrosiivka, in the eastern Donetsk region; Ukrainian officials didn’t immediately comment on the cause.

As Ukrainian strikes inside Russian-held territory increase, Russian forces are attempting to crack down on pro-Ukrainian insurgents. A Ukrainian army veteran was arrested in the Kherson region on suspicion of sending locations of Russian troops and bases to Ukrainian forces, Russian state-run news agencies reported on Thursday. In addition, Russia’s FSB intelligence agency on Wednesday said it had detained six Russian citizens in Crimea who belonged to a cell that spread what it called terrorist ideology with the support of Ukrainian emissaries, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

Russia has said it would give International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors access to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant—but only if they come via Russian-controlled territory and not through Kyiv, a plan that Ukraine opposes.

The Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday said Ukraine was planning a false flag provocation for Friday at the plant to frame the occupying forces. Maj. Gen.

Igor Konashenkov,

a Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, didn’t provide evidence to support the claim. The Russian-installed head of the occupied territories of Zaporizhzhia, meanwhile, said a plan was in place to evacuate residents in case of an attack on the plant. Kyiv didn’t immediately respond to the claim.


Russia’s Defense Ministry also said Thursday that Moscow would consider shutting down the plant if the situation surrounding the facility continues to deteriorate.

The Ukrainian government, international nuclear-power watchdogs and the plant’s staff have accused Russia of stealing Zaporizhzhia’s power by severing its connection to Ukraine’s remaining territory.

In Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, a Russian missile hit a residential building in the Saltivka neighborhood on Wednesday night, killing seven people and injuring at least 17 more, according to the city’s mayor. More missiles launched from Russia hit the city early Thursday morning, killing two more people. Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces were targeting foreign fighters.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Thursday it has deployed three MiG-31 combat jets armed with hypersonic Kinzhal ballistic missiles to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a chunk of Russia wedged between North Atlantic Treaty Organization members Lithuania and Poland, according to Russian state news agencies. Such missiles, when fired from jets, have farther reach than the ground-launched missiles already deployed in Kaliningrad.

—Nikita Nikolaienko contributed to this article.

Ukrainian fighters took part in a military drill on the country’s south coast.



Photo:

oleksandr gimanov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com, Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Evan Gershkovich at evan.gershkovich@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Read original article here

World

China Defense Minister Says Nuclear Buildup Is Justified

Leave a comment

SINGAPORE—China’s defense minister said the country is developing its nuclear arsenal—a move he said was appropriate given the state of international security—and warned that Beijing would fight to block Taiwanese independence.

Gen.

Wei Fenghe’s

comments Sunday at a conference in Singapore hewed to China’s previously stated official lines. But the timing of the riposte was a direct pushback to Washington, which is seeking to bolster its own influence in Asia.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday that China was taking a more aggressive approach to territorial claims and that its military was increasingly engaging in provocative behavior, including around Taiwan, where Chinese warplanes have been probing the island’s air defenses.

On Sunday, Gen. Wei responded, saying it was U.S. strategy in the Asia-Pacific region that was propelling the two sides toward confrontation. On Taiwan, he issued a defiant message often voiced by Beijing. “No one should ever underestimate the resolve and ability of the Chinese military to safeguard its territorial integrity,” he said.

Gen. Wei and Mr. Austin had their first face-to-face meeting last week ahead of the Shangri-la Dialogue, a gathering of high-level military officers and defense officials that has often provided an opportunity for contacts between the American and Chinese sides.

Chinese Dongfeng-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles on parade in 2019.



Photo:

Xu Yu/Zuma Press

This year’s discussions came amid elevated tensions over Taiwan and a war in Europe that have both highlighted military divisions between the U.S. and China. They followed remarks by President Biden during a visit to Tokyo in May saying the U.S. would respond militarily to any Chinese effort to take Taiwan by force.

In Gen. Wei’s speech Sunday, he said U.S. moves in the region—including its alliance with Australia, Japan and India, informally known as the Quad—could create conflicts by encouraging Asian countries to target China. He also addressed Beijing’s stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—another point of tension with the U.S.—by repeating previous assurances that China isn’t providing Russia with any weapons.

Gen. Wei also spoke about China’s nuclear arsenal, saying it was purely for defensive purposes and reiterating Beijing’s pledge never to strike first with such weapons.

“China is developing nuclear capabilities at a moderate and appropriate level,” Gen. Wei said. “That means being able to protect our nation’s security so that we can avoid the catastrophe of a war, especially the catastrophe of a nuclear war.”

While Gen. Wei didn’t characterize the size of expansion of the nuclear arsenal while responding to a question about the weapons after his formal speech, it was a rare public comment by a top Chinese military official about a program that the U.S. says is growing and should be subject to arms-control talks.

Gen. Wei, who previously commanded China’s missile force, said the country’s military modernization has included the deployment of all new weapons displayed in a 2019 military parade in Beijing. Among those featured in the parade were the Dongfeng-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, which can carry multiple nuclear warheads and has the range to hit the continental U.S.

Gen. Wei stopped short of linking the issue of nuclear weapons and Beijing’s stand toward Taiwan, but he reiterated China’s long-held positions that it intends to control the self-governed island and will forcefully oppose efforts to promote its independence from mainland China.

Beijing’s nuclear-weapons program has trailed far behind those of the U.S. and Russia for decades. In recent years, China has begun to rapidly expand its nuclear arsenal, according to U.S. intelligence estimates. People familiar with the Chinese leadership’s thinking say the buildup is driven by an assessment that the U.S. may be more willing to challenge it militarily, including in a possible clash over Taiwan.

China has declined to provide any clarity on its nuclear program and has rejected U.S. moves to start arms-control talks. Japanese Prime Minister

Fumio Kishida

criticized Beijing’s nuclear secrecy at the conference on Friday and said it should engage in talks with Washington.

The Pentagon forecasts China may have around 1,000 nuclear warheads by the end of this decade, compared with a few hundred now. The U.S. and Russia each have around 4,000 nuclear warheads.

Beijing has also developed and deployed more missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Satellite images suggest construction has accelerated this year on more than 100 suspected missile silos in China’s remote western region that could house Dongfeng-41 missiles.

China is building missile launch sites in deserts and adding an aircraft carrier to its naval fleet. WSJ spoke to military experts and analyzed satellite images to reveal Beijing’s pursuit of becoming a global military power that can take on the U.S. and its allies. Photos: Maxar; Planet Labs PBC

At the Singapore conference, Gen. Wei didn’t answer a question about the suspected silos, but he reaffirmed Beijing’s stance that it wouldn’t initiate a nuclear conflict. Some U.S. officials and analysts doubt those reassurances.

Tensions between Washington and Beijing over the issue of Taiwan flared in May when Mr. Biden said that the American military would respond militarily to defend Taiwan if China invaded, the third time he has made such a statement. U.S. administrations have long maintained a policy of not stating whether its military would help to defend Taiwan from attack, while selling the island weapons to defend itself. Mr. Biden later said the U.S. position was unchanged.

An increase in Chinese military flights near Taiwan this year has elevated concerns among Taiwanese and American government officials of Beijing’s intentions. China has also held military exercises simulating an amphibious assault that military experts say would likely be part of any invasion. China says the self-ruled island is part of its territory and hasn’t ruled out the use of force to bring it under its control.

In a meeting on Friday that was dominated by the issue of Taiwan, Mr. Austin told Gen. Wei that U.S. policy toward the island hadn’t changed, according to the U.S. side. The Chinese defense minister said Beijing’s military would fight to prevent any move for independence by the island, according to a spokesman, but both sides gave accounts of the meeting that suggested a cooling off of friction, and each side emphasized the need to keep open lines of communication to head off crises.

Write to Keith Zhai at keith.zhai@wsj.com and Alastair Gale at alastair.gale@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Read original article here

Science

Now Even NASA Wants to Talk About UFOs

Leave a comment

UFOs? After years of avoiding any serious discussion of such things, NASA is on it.

The space agency announced yesterday that it will form a team dedicated to studying unidentified aerial phenomena “that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.” Starting this fall, the team will examine existing data on these objects and brainstorm new ways to collect future data. All the work, which NASA expects will last nine months, will be done from “a science perspective.”

This is quite the turn of events. Sure, there may have been, in people’s mind, an association between the space agency and unidentified flying objects: The term UFO has been synonymous with alien spaceships since the day it was coined in the 1950s, and one of NASA’s missions is to find signs of life beyond Earth. But today’s announcement marked the first time that NASA has waded so publicly—and this meaningfully—into the broader UFO discussion in the agency’s 64-year history. Not only has NASA changed its approach to reports of mysterious sightings in the sky, but it will build a UFO research team led by a respected astrophysicist and have public meetings about its results.

“We have the tools and teams who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown, and we are prepared to use these powerful tools of scientific discovery in this case,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science missions, told reporters in a press conference. “Unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere are of interest for many reasons. Frankly, I think there’s new science to be discovered. And there’s been many times where something that looked almost magical turned out to be a new scientific effect.”

Read: What the UFO discussion really needs

As NASA itself said today, there is still no evidence that UAPs (the government’s preferred term, meaning “unidentified aerial phenomena”) have alien origins; the agency is much more interested in looking for life deep in the solar system and well beyond. So why take such a formal interest now? For the same reason, it appears, that American lawmakers recently held the first congressional hearing about UAPs in 50 years: Everyone is talking about them. After The New York Times published a story in 2017 about a secret Pentagon program devoted to cataloging UAPs, lawmakers asked the Defense Department and U.S. intelligence agencies in 2020 to compile a report on all of their UAP data. The following summer, as the government prepared to release this highly anticipated report, a reporter asked Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, what the agency was doing about UAPs. Nelson, a former senator who was privy to classified information, said he’d talked with pilots who had spotted UAPs and were convinced they’d seen something that merited investigation. “So I have talked to [Zurbuchen] about what specifically we could do from a science perspective, in addition to an intel perspective, to try to bring any additional light to this,” Nelson said in 2021.

What exactly is the “science perspective” or the “new science” NASA hopes to unwind? David Spergel, the astrophysicist leading the new team, said in a statement that the group’s first task is to “gather the most robust set of data that we can,” including existing data “from civilians, government, non-profits, companies.” Zurbuchen, in a presentation to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine today, suggested that the group would also consider data from astronomy and Earth-observation missions. “We are looking at the sky all the time. We are looking at Earth all the time,” Zurbuchen said. “What types of scientific data currently collected and archived by NASA or civilian government entities should be set aside and analyzed?” And what new data should NASA gather to help understand the nature of UAPs?

NASA leadership is aware of how all of this sounds. Zurbuchen said that a dedicated UAP-research effort poses a “reputational risk” for the agency. “It’s clear that in a traditional type of science environment, talking about some of these issues may be considered selling out or talking about things that are not actual science,” Zurbuchen told reporters. “I just really vehemently oppose that.”

This is indeed unusual ground for NASA, an agency that has spent years trying to gently counter claims that the moon landings were faked. A scientist who works on a spacecraft currently orbiting the moon once told me that she carries pictures taken by the robotic mission of the Apollo landing sites, just in case she runs into a nonbeliever. The agency also took pains to set the record straight after Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, said in a television interview in 2005 that the Apollo 11 crew had seen unidentified objects on the way to the moon. The raised eyebrows that followed nearly hit the stratosphere. Some UFO believers thought Aldrin had intentionally withheld this information. But NASA had cracked the mystery back in 1969, and the culprit wasn’t alien: It was the sunlight reflecting off the panels of their spacecraft. NASA had just never made those details public—which Aldrin didn’t realize.

Read: If aliens are out there, they’re way out there

Surely the agency must understand that, even now, raising the subject of UAPs means treading carefully between national-security concerns and more, shall we say, creative theories. Unfortunately, NASA leadership is already wandering off the safest path through. The officials today said that the new UAP-research work is unrelated to NASA’s programs to find alien life beyond Earth but spoke of both efforts in the same breath. Zurbuchen even opened the press conference by talking up the very real ways NASA is searching for extraterrestrial life: A rover is currently looking for fossilized microbes buried in the surface of Mars. One NASA telescope is trying to discover new exoplanets, and another will soon peer into their atmosphere, searching for molecules associated with life. The space agency is planning to send a probe to a moon of Jupiter with an entire ocean beneath its icy crust. NASA is even serious about searching for signs of technologically advanced civilizations out there. And when officials discuss UAPs alongside their other search-for-alien-life programs, they’re planting a seed in people’s mind. Even as they assert that there’s no extraterrestrial explanation for UAPs, they lend credence to the claim that some connection exists.

NASA said today that in addition to “the science interest” surrounding UAPs, the agency is concerned with the safety of aircraft in our skies. Fair enough: The first A in NASA stands for aeronautics, after all. But today’s announcement came from NASA’s science department, not the aeronautics division, and so will the funding for this effort. And the work will be led by a Princeton theoretical astrophysicist whose interests, according to his academic bio, range from “the search for planets around nearby stars to the shape of the universe”—a much dreamier ambition than aircraft safety. On a very basic level, NASA now has to take UFO claims seriously—and anyone with a new sighting to report will know that.

The modern UAP story has been populated by quite an ensemble: lawmakers, defense officials, UFO activists, the Blink-182 rock star Tom DeLonge. Now the cast includes the world’s top space agency and its arsenal of sophisticated telescopes and space probes. NASA officials said they would make all of their findings available for anyone to see. No secrets! But that doesn’t mean that NASA will be able to control the public narrative surrounding this effort, or any discoveries. Once NASA starts talking about UFOs—well, like it or not, it’s a whole different conversation.

Read original article here

World

U.S. Proposes Helping Israel, Arab States Harden Air Defenses Against Iran

Leave a comment

The Pentagon would work with Israel and several Arab states to integrate air defenses to thwart threats from Iran, under proposed bipartisan legislation introduced in Congress on Thursday.

The bill is the latest attempt by the U.S. to bolster defense cooperation between Israel and the broader Middle East following normalization of relations with several Arab states. Once hostile toward Israel, those governments have been edging closer to the majority Jewish state. The proposal aims to prod them to better coordinate across the region, congressional aides said.

Under the bill, the Pentagon must submit a strategy that identifies an “approach to an integrated air and missile defense system” within 180 days of when the measure becomes law, according to a draft of the bill reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Such defenses would better protect Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the four other  members of the Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Egypt, Iraq, Israel and Jordan, “from cruise and ballistic missiles, manned and unmanned aerial systems, and rocket attacks from Iran, and for other purposes,” according to the draft.

In March, Houthi rebels from Yemen attacked an oil depot in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.



Photo:

Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel decades ago, while council members Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates established diplomatic relations in a series of U.S.-brokered deals in 2020 known as the Abraham Accords. Iraq and the rest of the council don’t formally recognize Israel, but many of the countries have informal contacts, in large part to help counter Iranian activities.

“Going forward, America’s cooperation with our allies and partners in the region must evolve as violent extremists change their tactics and onboard new capabilities capable of catastrophic damage against civilian targets,” said Sen.

Joni Ernst

(R., Iowa), who is sponsoring the bill along with Sen.

Jacky Rosen

(D., Nev.) and others, during a news conference Thursday.

Six representatives also co-sponsored a similar bill on the House side.

There has long been support on Capitol Hill for increased defense cooperation between Arab nations and Israel, particularly since the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia is expanding its secretive talks with Israel to build business ties and create new security arrangements, the Journal has reported.

Initial efforts are under way to find common areas for defense integration over shared concerns about Iran. Earlier this year, the U.A.E. and Israel accelerated their security and intelligence cooperation efforts in the wake of a series of attacks on Abu Dhabi by Tehran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. Bahrain and Israel signed an agreement designed to be the framework for future cooperation.

Greater cooperation between Israel and the Arab states is driving lawmakers to look for ways to change how the U.S. military operates in the region, said

Jon Alterman,

a senior vice president at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The 10 countries named in the bill are partners or allies of Washington. And while the U.S. supplies most of their militaries with significant air-defense capabilities and helps operate them, there isn’t regular coordination between the sovereign states. Closer cooperation, security experts say, would provide a better early warning system for the nations involved.

One potential outcome, should the bill pass, is that the U.S. would help the Arab states and Israel agree to share radar, one congressional aide said.

Write to Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com and Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the June 10, 2022, print edition as ‘U.S. Aims to Help Integrate Israeli, Arab Air Defenses.’

Read original article here

World

Three Foreigners Fighting Alongside Ukrainian Forces Sentenced to Death

Leave a comment

Latest
  • A Russia-backed court sentenced three men to death for fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. The court said the men, two from the U.K. and one from Morocco, were guilty of acting as mercenaries.
  • Russian troops shelled Kharkiv and other border towns in Ukraine overnight, bringing fresh violence to a region trying to rebuild and highlighting a problem for Ukraine of how to respond.
  • Fighting continued in the eastern Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk. Ukrainian troops aided by special forces have launched counterstrikes to prevent Russian forces from taking the city entirely.

KYIV, Ukraine—Three foreigners fighting alongside Ukrainian forces against Russian-backed troops near Mariupol were sentenced to death Thursday by authorities in a Moscow-backed separatist region of Ukraine, in the first move undertaken by Russian proxy forces aiming to punish non-Ukrainians in the conflict.

A court in the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic, which broke away from Ukraine with Russian arms and financing in 2014, said the three men—two from the U.K., both of whom had lived for years in Ukraine before the conflict, and one from Morocco—were guilty of working as mercenaries.

Read original article here

US

What the UFO Discussion Really Needs

Leave a comment

This week, a House of Representatives subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism gathered to discuss unidentified aerial phenomena. This was, on one level, a very unusual event—the rare congressional hearing about UFOs, the first in more than 50 years. And yet it proceeded as many others do on Capitol Hill: dryly, politely, and uneventfully. Which seemed odd. Shouldn’t there have been a little more to it? You know, alien stuff?

The hearing featured more than an hour of congressional probing of two very important people, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security and the deputy director of naval intelligence, before moving to a closed, classified setting. There was footage of mysterious objects moving around in the sky. Yet a comment on a livestream summed up the whole affair quite nicely: “Well, this all seems rather anticlimactic,” the viewer wrote. “Are they trying to make it boring?”

The witnesses did mention aliens—but only to say that American military officials had found no proof of them in the 400 modern-day reports of UFO sightings that they currently have on the books, from military pilots and some civilians. This week’s hearing was not about disclosing, once and for all, incontrovertible visual evidence of extraterrestrial craft whizzing through Earth’s atmosphere. It was meant to check in on the progress of a task force that the Department of Defense formed in 2020 “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs”—unidentified aerial phenomena—“that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

And yet, when we hear something like the first congressional hearing on UFOs in half a century, we, the viewers, might expect more. Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the intelligence subcommittee, called the hearing’s subject “one of the world’s most enduring mysteries”—at least give us a new and spooky clue, then! If casual observers have outsize expectations for an event like this, it’s because they’re being exposed to it without any real context.

And this story desperately needs context. Without it, we can miss important details, believe information when we should be skeptical, and see things that aren’t really there.

Read: Just don’t call them UFOs

There’s no way around the fact that, in popular usage, the term UFO—unidentified flying object—is synonymous with alien spaceships and has been for decades. The assumption that UFOs could represent something truly otherworldly is right there in the language that people use to scrutinize alleged footage; they “debunk” initial sightings, suggesting that, before close examination, they could be the real deal. (The government has tried to tiptoe away from the grabbiest version of UFO discourse, preferring to use the term UAP instead, which somehow sounds even more mysterious.)

But the reality is that unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena, are just that, and there’s no reason to assume, right away, that they’re something all that interesting. In the same way that astronomers must run through a checklist of possible explanations for a strange new phenomenon in space before considering the extraterrestrial option, aviation experts have a number of more mundane culprits at their disposal: drones, experimental aircraft, weather events, birds, balloons—even the planet Venus, appearing extra bright and ethereal through the haze of our planet’s atmosphere. The alternatives to aliens are certainly more boring, but the alternatives are out there, and they always have been. The report at the center of the previous UFO hearing, in the late 1960s, found that the lights observed over a military base were birds and weather conditions.

Indeed, the mysterious objects in one of the videos shown at this week’s hearing, glowing triangles in the night sky, turned out to be the result of an artifact of the camera equipment that captured the footage. Most of the reports that have been brought to the Pentagon task force remain unexplained, but Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, said that doesn’t mean that the answer must be something extraordinary. “We have insufficient data either on the event itself [or] the object itself,” Moultrie said at this week’s hearing. “So it’s a data issue that we’re facing.”

Read: If aliens are out there, they’re way out there

The next point of context, often missing, is why anyone is talking about aliens at all in the year 2022. The latest spike in UFO interest began in 2017, when The New York Times published a story headlined “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program,” about a shadowy government effort to catalog UAPs, along with two Navy videos featuring UAPs. But the breathlessness of the coverage in the past few years hasn’t matched the breadth of the evidence for an extraterrestrial explanation, of which there isn’t much. (One of those videos would later go on to be explained away by an independent video analyst, and eventually, by Pentagon officials.) Plenty of outlets followed the Times’ lead, letting the thrill of writing about UFOs with a big wink overtake their normal sense of propriety. “Reporters have taken sources at their word without corroborating data, let documented contradictions slide by, and glossed over the motivations of both outside agitators and government insiders,” Sarah Scoles, a science journalist and the author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, wrote in The Atlantic last year. “If these stories did not outright say the word aliens, many indulged in what-if-ing, while glazing over the limits of the actual facts available.”

Many of the stories, Scoles said, took certain people’s credentials—say, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program—as face-value evidence that their claims about the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs were true. Similarly, part of the reason that the astrophysicist Avi Loeb receives so much coverage for his alien-tinged discussion of weird-shaped interstellar objects is because he is a tenured Harvard professor. So when people see a UFO story in The New York Times, they’re inclined to trust the paper. But these articles appear without much-needed context:  The Times’ go-to reporters on the UFO beat, who broke the story on the Pentagon’s previously undisclosed program, are long-time UFO activists who have advocated for the idea that such objects might have extraterrestrial explanations.

People might read the latest news that the government has 400 reports of UFOs and imagine a recent explosion in sightings. After all, when the Pentagon and UFOs made headlines last summer, defense officials said they were taking a look at just 144 reports! Context matters here too. The increase is because the Defense Department solicited reports from service members in a more deliberate way, and vowed, at least publicly, to take their accounts seriously. Unexplainable things in the sky are indeed matters of national security; an unrecognizable technology could belong to an adversarial nation. Expect the Pentagon to report higher numbers, but understand why those numbers are higher. “The implication will be, ‘Oh my God, they were hiding something. I knew it!’ as if that means ‘These things are aliens’ as opposed to ‘The military is secretive, and now you know it was secretive,’” Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University who works in the field of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, told me in an interview last year.

Whenever I see a news story or TV interview about UFOs that cries out for more context, I think of Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force officer who worked on one of the Pentagon’s earliest efforts to understand strange, fast-moving stuff in the sky. Ruppelt came up with the term UFO in the early 1950s. In 1956, Ruppelt wrote a book-length report on UFOs. No one asked him to do it, but he was frustrated with the “secrecy and confusion” and wanted the public to have all the facts. He ended the document on a hopeful note. “I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what the final outcome of the UFO investigation will be, but I am sure that within a few years there will be a proven answer.” Within a few years! Sorry, Ruppelt.

Read original article here