In recent weeks, US officials, including President Biden, claimed that Russia was considering using chemical weapons in Ukraine. But three US officials told NBC News this week that there is no evidence Russia had moved any chemical weapons near Ukraine and that the claims were part of an information war against Moscow.
The US officials said that the Biden administration has been sharing declassified intelligence that wasn’t “rock solid.” The NBC report said that multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon against Russia “even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high.”
The report said the US has used “low confidence” information, like the chemical weapons claims, as a “deterrent effect.” One official told NBC that by sharing the information, the US is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
Another example of the US sharing bad intelligence is the claim that Putin is being misinformed by his advisors about the war in Ukraine, which first surfaced in media reports last week. Two US officials told NBC that the intelligence about Putin’s inner circle lying to him “wasn’t conclusive” and was “based more on analysis than hard evidence.”
In another deceptive intelligence release, the US said Russia would view providing MiG fighter jets to Ukraine as escalatory, which bolstered the Pentagon’s position not to transfer the planes to Kyiv. But two US officials said that was also true for Stinger missiles, which the US and its allies have given to the Ukrainians.
The NBC report said that by declassifying so much intelligence, the Biden administration was able to publicly predict Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But during the lead-up to the invasion and since, Western media reports have been full of other unsubstantiated claims about Russia and Ukraine.
A key witness to the widely publicized incident at the Mariupol maternity hospital has punctured the official narrative of a Russian airstrike on the facility, and raised serious questions about Western media ethics. Meanwhile, news of a massacre in the city of Bucha contains suspicious elements.
On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets.
Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country. NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya.
But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.
The new testimony (watch below) comes on the heels of evidence strongly suggesting that the destruction of a dramatic theater in Mariupol on March 16 was staged by the Azov Battalion, and that nearly all civilians had evacuated a day before. And as we will see below, new reports of a Russian massacre of scores of civilians in the town of Bucha also contain suspicious details suggesting a pattern of information manipulation aimed at triggering Western military intervention.
“They said it was no airstrike. So our opinion got confirmed. We didn’t hear the airplane, they didn’t hear it either.”
At that moment we heard an explosion. Instinctively I personally put a duvet on myself. That’s when we heard the second explosion. I got covered by glass partially. I had small cuts on my nose, under my lips and at the top of my forehead but it was nothing serious…
Mariana Vishegirskaya, a pregnant resident of Donetsk who was present at the maternity hospital during the widely reported incident, has evacuated from Mariupol and is now speaking out. Photos showing a bloodied Vishnevskaya fleeing the building with her personal belongings became a centerpiece of coverage of the attack, along with a photo of another woman being carried away pale and unconscious on a stretcher.
In the wake of the incident, Russian officials falsely claimed the pair were the same person, citing Vishegirskaya’s background as a blogger and Instagram personality as evidence she was a crisis actor and the incident a false flag. Though that assertion was not true, as we shall see, the hospital had been almost completely taken over by the Ukrainian military.
In a video (above) reviewed by The Grayzone which began circulating via Telegram April 1st, Vishegirskaya offers a clear and detailed account of what took place on and in the days leading up to March 9th. The witness begins by noting how many residents of Mariupol attempted to evacuate following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, but says authorities ensured it was “impossible to leave.”…
….While the satellite images of other companies have also made their way into the press coverage of Ukraine, none have been as ubiquitous as Maxar’s. The same photos that appeared on CNN on February 20 appeared in dozens of other outlets, including The New York Post, The New York Times, and Reuters. Since then, hardly a day has gone by without a national outlet featuring Maxar images, most prominently of the bombing of Mariupol (NPR, USA Today, The Guardian) and the destruction of a theater where civilians allegedly were sheltering (NBC News, Business Insider, The Washington Post). Axios has frequently featured Maxar images in its coverage of Ukraine, with stories often bearing the headline “Satellite images show.…” “If you’ve seen high-resolution satellite imagery published in connection with an important story, that image was more than likely taken by a Maxar satellite,” Maxar president and CEO Dan Jablonsky said recently.
….Maxar’s defense capabilities—including satellite imagery, mobile access terminals, precision 3D registration technology, and artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities—were developed with the needs of the U.S. government and its allies in mind. Today, the U.S. government remains a critical Maxar customer. According to Maxar, the company provides 90 percent of the “foundational geospatial intelligence used by the U.S. government for national security.” For nearly a decade, Maxar was the sole supplier of commercial high-resolution satellite imagery for the Defense Department’s National Reconnaissance Office, which paid Maxar $300 million per year for access to its satellites as well as its behemoth image archive.
As a Maxar customer, the Department of Defense isn’t just a passive consumer of Maxar images; it is, in a way, a co-producer of those images. “These satellites don’t just go around and around the world taking pictures and adding them to their archive,” said Laura Kurgan, the director of the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University. Maxar’s satellites often take photos when—and where—they are tasked by the company’s customers to do so. “Once tasked, those images are archived, and anyone can purchase them,” Kurgan said. Maxar can also share those images with the press. But crucially, Kurgan says, the media organizations in Maxar’s News Bureau network will “never know who tasked the image,” including when the tasking customer is the U.S. government. In other words, media outlets can unwittingly funnel images to the public that were specifically ordered by the U.S. government, without those outlets, or the public, knowing it for certain.
According to industry experts, this is not an accidental by-product of the U.S. government’s need for geospatial intelligence but a key benefit of working with commercial providers, since the images the government takes with its own satellites are classified. “What they love about commercial providers is that the images are freely shareable,” Chris Quilty of the market research firm Quilty Analytics told SpaceNews. That’s especially useful in times of war. For instance, Quilty said, “if commercial imagery didn’t exist, you would have had the U.S. administration waving their hands about the Russians massing troops around Ukraine,” and they would have been unable to provide the visual evidence to back up the claim.
But just as the U.S. government can work through commercial satellite imagery companies to reveal information strategically to the public, it can also use its power over those companies to conceal information. One way it can do that is through “checkbook shutter control.” In the fall of 2001, after reports of heavy civilian casualties from American bombing in Afghanistan, the federal government spent millions to buy the rights to all Ikonos image data over the country for two months. Since Ikonos had the only high-resolution photographs of the area on the U.S. market, according to Wired, the government’s purchase made it “functionally impossible for anyone else to use commercial US imagery [to] surveil the area.” The media, like everyone else outside the U.S. intelligence community looking to get a high-resolution satellite view of the war, was largely out of luck. (The Pentagon allowed select Ikonos images to be sold to the media.)
Maxar’s images don’t need to be censored, necessarily, for the company to provide an incomplete view of global conflict to the press. While Maxar’s status as a defense contractor lends its content a certain legitimacy, the images it provides to the media are not, in fact, “as precise or as timely” as the images the U.S. military itself collects, retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis told the Associated Press. When U.S. military and intelligence agencies do turn to Maxar images, they corroborate them with intelligence from human sources, real-time video, and information collected by spy planes. With Maxar images alone, you can “see something on a base that looks like a base that has a lot of activity,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told the AP. “But in terms of what’s being done there, and what the units are—that takes a lot more intel.” News audiences looking to Maxar’s images to understand war will likely never view them in the fuller context to which military analysts are privy.
Those viewers will also never see a complete picture of global military activity. Maxar does not show U.S. troop movements to the public but often releases images of U.S. adversaries like China and Iran. The result is an asymmetrical view of geopolitics—one that, according to Cory Wimberly, an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who wrote a book about corporate propaganda, is a kind of manufactured siege mentality. In this scenario, news consumers are led to believe that the U.S. is constantly under threat and in need of military solutions—which, not incidentally, requires the military to use more of Maxar’s services. Jablonsky has said that the company is “hopeful for a peaceful resolution” in Ukraine. But it is also positioning its offerings to support the Defense Department’s pivot “from anti-terror missions” to confrontations with “large, near-peer adversaries”—namely, Russia and China. “If the way that you make your money is through conflict and war, then you’re going to be looking for opportunities to become involved in conflict and war,” Wimberly said….
Within hours of news Sunday that there had been a massacre at Bucha, a town 63 kms north of the Ukrainian capital, the verdict was in: Russian troops had senselessly slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians as they withdrew from the town, leaving their bodies littering the streets.
Unlike their judicial systems, when it comes to war, Western nations dispense with the need for investigations and evidence and pronounce guilt based on political motives: Russia is guilty. Case closed.
Except the case hasn’t even been opened yet and the sentence is already being proposed. French President Emmanuel Macron, for instance, has called for Russian coal and oil to be banned from Europe. “There are very clear indications of war crimes,” he said on France Inter radio Monday. “What happened in Bucha demands a new round of sanctions and very clear measures, so we will co-ordinate with our European partners, especially with Germany.”
Other voices are now perilously calling for the U.S. to go to war with Russia over the incident.
“This is genocide,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Face the Nation on CBS. “Mothers of Russians should see this. See what bastards you’ve raised. Murderers, looters, butchers,” he added on Telegram.
Russia has categorically denied it had anything to do with the massacre.
Where to Start
If there were to be a serious probe, one of the first places an investigator would begin is to map out a timeline of events.
Last Wednesday, all Russian forces left Bucha, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
This was confirmed on Thursday by a smiling Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, in a video on the Bucha City Council official Facebook page. The translated post accompanying the video says:
“March 31 – the day of the liberation of Bucha. This was announced by Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk. This day will go down in the glorious history of Bucha and the entire Bucha community as a day of liberation by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the Russian occupiers.”
All of the Russian troops are gone and yet there is no mention of a massacre. The beaming Fedoruk says it is a “glorious day” in the history of Bucha, which would hardly be the case if hundreds of dead civilians littered the streets around Fedoruk.
“Russian Defence Ministry denied accusations by the Kiev regime of the alleged killing of civilians in Bucha, Kiev Region. Evidence of crimes in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day after the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of Ukrainian media arrived in the town. All Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and ‘not a single local resident was injured’ during the time when Bucha was under the control of Russian troops,” the Russian MOD said in a post on Telegram.
What Happened Next?
What happened then on Friday and Saturday? As pointed out in a piece by Jason Michael McCann on Standpoint Zero, The New York Times was in Bucha on Saturday and did not report a massacre. Instead, the Times said the withdrawal was completed on Saturday, two days after the mayor said it was, and that the Russians left “behind them dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite images and military analysts.”
The Times said reporters found the bodies of six civilians. “It was unclear under what circumstances they had died, but the discarded packaging of a Russian military ration was lying beside one man who had been shot in the head,” the paper said. It then quoted a Zelensky adviser, who said:
“’The bodies of people with tied hands, who were shot dead by soldiers lie in the streets,’ the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter. ‘These people were not in the military. They had no weapons. They posed no threat.’ He included an image of a scene, photographed by Agence France-Presse, showing three bodies on the side of a road, one with hands apparently tied behind the back. The New York Times was unable to independently verify Mr. Podolyak’s claim the people had been executed.’”
It is possible that on Saturday the full extent of the horror had yet to emerge, and that even the mayor was unaware of it two days before, though photos now show many of the bodies out in the open on the streets of the town, something that presumably would be difficult to miss.
In Bucha, the Times was close to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose soldiers appear in the newspaper’s photographs. In his piece, McCann suggests that Azov may responsible for the killings:
“Something very interesting then happens on [Saturday] 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online [Ukrainian language] site Left Bank announced that:
‘Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.’
The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals. The state authorities would be going through the city searching for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘accomplices of Russian forces.’ Only the day before [Friday], Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed.”
Ukraintsiva was speaking a day after the mayor had said the town was liberated.
By Sunday morning, the world learned of the massacre of hundreds of people. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We strongly condemn apparent atrocities by Kremlin forces in Bucha and across Ukraine. We are pursuing accountability using every tool available, documenting and sharing information to hold accountable those responsible.” President Joe Biden on Monday called for a “war crimes” trial. “This guy is brutal, and what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it. I think it’s a war crime.”
The Bucha incident is a critical moment in the war. An impartial investigation is warranted, which probably only the U.N. could conduct. The Azov Battalion may have perpetrated revenge killings against Russian collaborators, or the Russians carried out this massacre. (Once again the Pentagon is dampening the war hysteria, saying it can’t confirm or deny Russia was responsible.)
A rush to judgment is dangerous, with irresponsible talk of the U.S. directly fighting Russia. But it is a rush to judgment that we are getting.
On March 29, President Erdogan of Turkey hosted a short session of talks at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul between Ukraine Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov and Russian Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky. Before the talks Kyiv tabled a wish list of 15 items summarising how it would be willing to make peace. Some general chat followed (the full meeting lasted three hours), after which the delegates departed to report back to their respective presidents.
Within hours the ten-point list of peace proposals was being described by the Financial Times as a draft peace agreement which had been “discussed in full” before the Istanbul meeting. Russia’s negotiators swiftly rebutted that description. The Financial Times did not claim to have seen the document, and stated that it was reporting on it second hand, based on descriptions provided by four unnamed sources, which are almost certainly senior members of the US State Department who have been briefed by Kyiv.
One named source for the FT article was Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Zelenskiy and who was at Dolmabahce. Podolyak’s summary suggests that the 10-point plan stipulates a full Russian troop withdrawal to the February 24 start lines, offers a commitment from Ukraine never to apply to join Nato, demands the continued existence of Ukrainian land forces and offers a commitment not to host foreign troops or exercises on Ukrainian territory.
Other sources suggest that part of the proposal is some form of security guarantee to be underwritten by one or more third-party states. Another reported provision is a protective guarantee for Russian language use (currently banned from all official business as well as education by the Law on Supporting the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language, which was signed into force in May 2019. The law also requires all citizens of Ukraine to be able to speak fluent Ukrainian).
Kyiv has reportedly included permission for it to join the European Union in due course in its 10 points.
It is very clear that the plan is not acceptable in Moscow. Also clear is that it is not a “draft peace treaty”, but rather a list of items which Kyiv would find acceptable. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov did welcome Kyiv’s willingness to adopt neutrality, saying: “This option is really being discussed now, and is one that can be considered neutral.”
Oddly, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that “absolutely specific wordings” were “close to being agreed” in the negotiations, which probably means that the wording of the parts of the plan that Moscow likes (neutrality, language and foreign bases) is close to agreement, but not much else.
Outside Dolmabahce, descriptions of what is actually happening in Ukraine still divide into two competing narratives, as bne IntelliNews reported three weeks ago, one from the Western powers (“West”) and the other from Moscow (“East”).
The West’s narrative is that Russia’s military campaign continues to be stalled, that Russian forces are being pushed back by Ukrainian counterattacks, that Russian forces are carrying out gross violations of the law of armed conflict by shelling civilians and civilian infrastructure, and that Russia’s economy is on the point of collapse. The West claims that Russian dead number up to 17,000, with twice that number wounded. The West’s picture is illustrated by maps published by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington based think-tank headed by Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s brother-in-law Fred Kagan.
The East’s narrative is quite different. The siege of Mariupol is some 90% complete, that the Azov and Aidar brigades in Mariupol are responsible for preventing civilian evacuations (by shooting or shelling evacuees), that Russian forces are moving steadily north and south behind Ukraine’s Joint Forces Operation (the JFO with 65,000 men on the Donbas border) to trap the JFO and destroy it, that the JFO is unable to move for lack of diesel and gasoline, and is running out of ammunition, and that Russian dead numbered 1,300 at the start of this week. The East tables its own maps, which see little light of day in any European or US media channels.
The East’s narrative continues that Moscow’s plan is to surround the JFO and either destroy it or capture it; that Russian forces have now surrounded Zaporozhye, Dnipro and Kharkiv, and that Ukrainian forces elsewhere in Ukraine are now unable to manoeuvre or fly for lack of fuel, tanks and functioning aircraft. Russian forces poised outside Kyiv and Chernihiv are withdrawing as a trust-building move. The East’s narrative is supported by regular announcements of the capture of named towns and settlements flowing from Moscow’s Ministry of Defence, but not by Russian video reportage.
Both narratives agree that Russian cruise missiles (mostly Kalibr) continue to bombard targets in western Ukraine. In the East’s narrative these are fuel, ammunition and concentrations of soldiers, while in Kyiv’s narrative they are civilians and homes. Both sides also agree that the battle for Mariupol has killed many thousands of civilians. How many is, at present, unknown, but the local authorities previously said over 5,000 citizens had been killed. Many more must have died in the meantime thanks to the heavy shelling.
Russia’s narrative is largely unsupported by corroborating video evidence, but not completely. Two non-Russian sources are currently reporting daily from within Russian-controlled territory. In Kharkiv a Chilean national [Lira Gonzalo – also associated with The Duran – NB] files daily reports which tend to confirm that the city of Kharkiv is peaceful, having been by-passed by Russian forces. In Mariupol and the Donbas an independent American reporter [Patrick Lancaster – NB] also files video reportage daily, sometimes two or three times per day.
Footage filed by this individual from Western Mariupol yesterday showed extensive shell-damage to residential apartment blocks – few blocks in view were un-damaged. In the background of the footage can be clearly heard intense artillery and small-arms fire, described by one interviewee as being 400-500 metres from the filming location in Mariupol’s Zhovtnevyi District. We take this as evidence that Ukrainian forces (probably of the Azov and Aidar brigades) were still holding ground in central Mariupol as late of late April 1. Other reports suggest that Ukrainian forces also still hold ground in the Azovstal steelworks on the left bank of the Kalmius River.
So it seems Mariupol has still not been fully taken by Russian forces. Video reportage from Mariupol strongly corroborates estimates from both sides of civilian deaths in the city at many thousands. Mariupol, with a population of 400,000, is a city of some 4,000 standard Soviet-era apartment blocks, each with a resident population of around a hundred people. Eye-witness reports from areas fought over in the siege consistently tell of multiple mortalities in many, probably most, blocks. Reports of unburied corpses are corroborated by video footage, and accompanied by reports of mass graves hurriedly dug and covered. It appears likely that civilian mortality in Mariupol will top 10,000, and might rise as high as 20,000 people.
The lack of other video reportage from the city is striking, and is a result of Moscow’s strategy to draw Western news teams to Kyiv early in the war.
Eye-witness reports from Dnipro describe the presence of Russian forces outside the city, and it is widely acknowledged that Russian troops are in control of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (NPP).
Each observer is entitled to draw their own conclusions on the competing narratives, but in my opinion the weight of evidence seems to support the East’s as being the correct one.
Moscow is now referring to the start of a “Phase 2” of the war, but it is not clear at all what Phase 2 means in practice, since the initial invasion was not referred to as Phase 1 but as a special military operation with two goals, which are being achieved in parallel. Those goals (denazification and de-militarisation) are sufficiently ambiguous to permit any number of phases, according to choice. So what is Phase 2?
One answer might be the surrounding and capture/destruction of the JFO, but it is more likely that that was the core objective of Phase 1.
Phase 2 might be a new threat – of armed thrusts against one or both of Kyiv and Odesa, or even into the open space of Western Ukraine. The Kyiv thrust at the start of the war advanced for a week and then stopped. Kyiv has consistently claimed that Russian troops have been outfought by Ukrainian defenders, a claim which lacks credibility since it is completely unsupported by any actual footage of major engagements. Instead the reportage that has emerged (from a press corps in Kyiv numbering well into three figures) is of minor skirmishes, occasional shell strikes and no significant movement of forces on either side, all of which is completely inconsistent with a determined attempt to attack Kyiv itself, but entirely consistent with a distracting “poise” on the part of Russian forces. It is also consistent with a lack of Russian offensive action, since to-camera reports from Kyiv rarely, if ever, contain any background evidence of conflict (artillery exchanges, small-arms fire or movements of armoured vehicles or aircraft).
Incidentally, Russian sources claim that much of the actual small-arms fire in and around Kyiv is generated by blue-on-blue engagements between Ukrainian militias, and/or from gang warfare between criminals armed by Ukraine’s government. That may or may not be true, but both are reasonably likely in the known circumstances.
Moscow’s use of second-line, light airborne and militia forces on the Kyiv front is further corroboration of the view that the front is a deliberate maskirovka for objectives elsewhere.
The Odesa front is interesting for its complete lack of reportage and movement. After taking Kherson in the first week of the war Russian forces moved west to take Mikolayev/Nikolayev, and then appeared to stop. Poised north-east of Odesa and less than 100 km from friendly forces in Transnistria, Russian troops sat, appearing to do nothing. While they sat Odesa has fortified itself for an assault, mining roads and beaches and equipping the city with a maze of barbed wire obstacles.
What seems more likely that is that Moscow had no intention of either attacking Odesa or of cutting it off from the rest of Ukraine. If one objective is to halt the flow of grain exports and oil imports through Odesa and Chernomorsk that can be served easily and without casualties by the Russian Navy, which does indeed appear to be blockading the port. At present AIS data shows some 40 ships alongside in Odesa and neighbouring ports and estuaries, and none en route to or from Ukraine via those ports. Ukraine added to the blockade by laying hundreds of sea mines off Odesa, and is now talking to Romania about using Constanta as a grain export route.
Equally unlikely is an attempt by Moscow to occupy the whole of Western Ukraine from its front at Odesa. Apart from the high cost in men and machinery of an attack on Ukraine’s national, and nationalist, heartland, the sheer size of the space to be occupied dwarfs the available manpower. West Ukraine covers 250,000 square kilometres, the size of the whole of the United Kingdom for comparison.
Russia has been here before, painfully. Between 1945 and 1949 Russia occupied West Ukraine in force with some 500,000 men; 49,000 of these were killed in the process by the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN’s forces were much smaller, less well equipped and less well supplied than the present Ukraine army. Pacification of West Ukraine also included the deportation of some 900,000 people to camps in east Russia. Ukrainian nationalist dislike of Russia has deep roots in history.
In light of this experience it seems inconceivable that Moscow would choose to extend its invasion of Ukraine to include Western Ukraine, but it must be said that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not necessarily share a cool rational view of what is inconceivable – the war itself is clear evidence of that. There are evidential straws in the wind, which support the thesis that Phase 2 would be a Russian invasion of West Ukraine. The first of these is the presence of a large Belarusian force poised on the northern border of West Ukraine. Its presence begs the question of “why”? Is the reason for that presence a Russian plan to invade West Ukraine from the north and east? Quite possibly – we have been here before, recently.
The second straw is a military one – an invasion of West Ukraine would take a Russian force of at least 100,000 men. That 100,000 is currently fully occupied surrounding Ukraine’s JFO on the Donbas border. Once the JFO surrenders (perhaps 20 days from now) Russia’s main force would be available for a new campaign in West Ukraine, just 200 km west of its current positions.
The third straw is the lurking threat of supporting attacks by Russian amphibious forces, which might land west of Odesa, and/or from forces in Transnistria. And the fourth straw is visual evidence of the arrival of reinforcements from central Russia on Ukraine’s borders. Add to that mix Putin’s essay last year on the non-status of Ukraine, plus the fact that the heartland of Ukrainian ultra-right nationalism is in Lviv, and an invasion of West Ukraine moves from “inconceivable” to “possible, even likely”.
Combine the physical aspects listed above with the firmly established image of Moscow in the eyes of Western media, politicians and peoples as non-rational, even psychopathic, and the threat that Phase 2 is actually an armed invasion and occupation of West Ukraine becomes a credible possibility to the Western mind.
We simply don’t know the truth. There is a significant probability that Moscow is using its ambiguous reference to Phase 2 to stand up a threat to Western Ukraine just in order to be able to place it on the negotiating table as a major concession towards a peace. The standstill order to forces outside Kyiv could be the first conciliatory step in that direction.
There is a fourth candidate for Phase 2. Moscow has been vague on its plans for Trans-Dnepr Ukraine – the territory between the Dnepr River and the Donbas. The keys to this area (which produces half of Ukraine’s wheat and sunflower oil, and all of its small flow of domestic oil and gas) are two dozen bridges across the Dnepr River. Nine are in Kyiv, blocked in practice by the forces poised east and west of Kyiv. Three, in or near Kherson, are now in Russian hands. Nine more (at Zaporozhye and Dnipro) are probably isolated from territory to the east by Russian forces investing the two cities. That leaves four bridges at Kremenchuk and Cherkassy currently available to Ukraine to move forces and supplies across the Dnepr. Is Phase 2 the capture of those remaining bridges? With Trans-Dnepr Ukraine cut off and the JFO captured, a Russian occupation of the rest of Trans-Dnepr would take only a few days to complete.
Moscow’s intentions for Trans-Dnepr are not entirely obscure. Two weeks ago it announced plans to hold a referendum on independence in Kherson. Kherson city accounts for just under one third of the population of Kherson oblast of 280,000, and the oblast’s territory extends well west of the Dnepr. The referendum announcement triggered immediate protests in Kherson city, which appear to have continued (according to footage hosted by an Indian news channel on April 1). The 2001 census recorded that over 80% of Kherson’s population claimed Ukrainian ethnicity and only 14% Russian, though for many the choice may have been one of convenience over conviction, but a 2014 survey reported that only 10% of the population supported re-unification with Russia.
Given Kherson’s location next door to Crimea and its control over Crimea’s water supply, it is highly likely that Moscow will want to retain possession of Kherson whatever its population thinks, but a referendum in Kherson alone looks unlikely to deliver a vote for independence or unification with Russia.
So, If Phase 2’s objective is to gain a vote for some form of independence, Kherson’s Ukrainian loyalties would have to be diluted within a larger electorate. Russia is unlikely to worry overmuch about the existing Oblast boundaries, many of which either cross or even straddle the Dnepr. A referendum plan which exploits Russian ethnic concentrations further east (Russians to the east of the Dnepr, Ukrainians to the west), refugee flight (ethnic Ukrainians leaving eastern oblasts for shelter in West Ukraine), ethnicity switching (people of mixed ethnicity who are happy with either so long as they can live in peace), financial inducements (significantly better pensions, benefits immediately, plus better economic opportunities for the young in Russia), gerrymandering (ensuring that the more-Russian Zaporozhians vote together with the less-Russian Khersonians) and old fashioned ballot-stuffing might deliver a collective vote for independence east of the Dnepr river.
Kyiv has, of course, publicly stated its red line as the retention of all oblasts other than Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. However, if Russia wins the ground war in east Ukraine (which looks certain at this point) there will be little Kyiv can do to enforce that red line. Evidence that President Zelenskiy knows how weak his prospects are can be found in the fact that it is Kyiv which has asked for peace talks and pre-tabled concessions, and that it is Kyiv which is pleading for a no-fly zone and additional supplies of weapons.
Having fallen on deaf ears among European politicians, both of these pleas have now migrated to glossy advertisements on social media channels aimed at the Western mass audience, which must be the first time in history that a belligerent in a major war has bought popular mass media exposure among neutral states to drum up support.
While we try to work out the meaning of Phase 2, and count the days until the JFO gives up, the East’s political and economic conflict with the West continues. The West’s hopes that Russia’s economy would collapse when its foreign reserves were frozen have proved empty. Indeed, the ruble has returned to its value on the day before the invasion began and Russia is selling oil and gas to both India and China despite US attempts to sanction energy sales. Reports from inside Russia consistently reveal wide popular support for the war, enhanced this week by video reportage (posted apparently by Ukrainians) of Russian prisoners of war lying bound and hooded being mutilated and even murdered by Ukrainian soldiers. Beijing has expressed support for Russia (though not for the war itself) along with a clear intention to ignore US sanctions aimed at dividing Russia and China. Most African nations have declared a firm neutrality.
If Moscow’s Phase 2 is limited to the excision of Trans-Dnepr from Kyiv then the moment of maximum danger for Nato’s European members may have passed. However, if Phase 2 turns out to be an invasion of West Ukraine it will return with a vengeance. Russian troops on the Dnepr is one (perhaps acceptable) thing to Europe. Russian troops on the borders of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Romania quite another. An invasion of West Ukraine could well trigger the Nato/Russia war that we have so far avoided.
