Lt Gen Yakov Rezantsev is the latest Russian officer killed in Ukraine & How Bill Clinton Sealed Ukraine’s Fate

Lt Gen Yakov Rezantsev is the latest Russian officer killed in Ukraine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

How Bill Clinton Sealed Ukraine’s Fate - WSJ ?(bottom)

• Russian troops kill their colonel as seventh general perishes on the battlefield
• Latest estimate is up to 20 Battalion Tactical Groups declared 'combat ineffective' with invaders losing 'enormous numbers'.?
• A seventh Russian general has been killed and a senior commander murdered by his own troops in Ukraine, western officials have reported.?
• As Russian forces continue to suffer setbacks,?Moscow’s defence chiefs?were scrambling to bring in fresh reinforcements to replace heavy losses now estimated at 15,000.?
• Up to 20 of the estimated 115 battalion tactical groups that invaded Ukraine a month ago are now “combat ineffective”, security officials have said with some units forced to amalgamate to create operational forces.

The list of killed senior commanders has been growing over the past two weeks, with it being suggested that western intelligence is assisting Ukraine’s military in helping it find and eliminate officers.

A Ukrainian soldier passes by a destroyed Russian artillery system in Kharkiv. AP

On Friday, it was confirmed that battle-hardened Syria veteran Lt Gen Yakov Rezantsev, commander of the 49th Combined Arms Army, had been killed.

When promoted to his new post, Rezantsev, 48, was described by his commanders as an “experienced combat officer who successfully performed special tasks in Syria”.

His death means that a remarkable 35 per cent of Russia’s 20 operational generals deployed to Ukraine have been killed in combat.

That number grew further on Friday when it was reported that a colonel in charge of the 37th Guards Motorised Rifle Brigade was killed by his own soldiers.

“We believe he was killed by his own troops deliberately as a consequence of the scale of losses that had been taken by his brigade,” a western security official told the media.

“That gives an insight into some of the morale challenges that Russian forces are having.”

The source suggested there had been “really high losses in some of some motor rifle regiments”, meaning that 20 of the battalion tactical groups “are no longer combat effective”. Most units, numbering 800 to 1,000 men, were reportedly either being pulled back to Russia for repairs or reinforcements but the casualties among some were so high that they virtually disappeared.?

“They have just lost enormous numbers of people so that what we've seen is the cannibalising of battalion tactical groups, joining three together to create one,” the official said.?

“A fifth of the force being no longer combat effective is a pretty remarkable sets of statistics.”

Moscow has been rapidly attempting to generate new battalion tactical groups, taking troops form the Eastern Military District, Georgia and Kaliningrad.?

The soldiers were being rushed into battle, potentially unprepared and ill-equipped, the official said.

“If they're brought into the fight quickly then they'll go from being in barracks to being in significant combat in a pretty short space of time,” he said.“Therefore, there is a question over how effective and how prepared they are for those operations.”

With Ukrainian forces pushing back the Russian invaders by up to 35 kilometres beyond Kyiv and retaking some towns, the ability of Russia to continue its broad offensive is in question.

“I’m trying to take a view about Russia's capability to be able to sustain the fight,” the official said.

The additional 10 battalion tactical groups on top of those 115 already deployed was a “pretty significant slice of the Russian combat mass being taken into this operation”.?

“It does give an indication of how all-in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is in terms of this operation,” he added.

Russian troops kill their colonel as seventh general perishes on the battlefield (thenationalnews.com)

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EU steps back from impractical Russia oil embargo: Kemp - Reuters News

-?????????Global oil markets were tight before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with inventories below the pre-pandemic five-year average and trending lower.

-?????????At present, neither Saudi Arabia nor U.S. shale firms appear keen to raise output to offset lost Russian supplies, and the White House has not so far reached agreements to lift sanctions on Iran and Venezuela.

Chartbook: https://tmsnrt.rs/3upVkI8

LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) - EU leaders have stepped back from imposing an immediate embargo on Russian crude and petroleum product imports as the impracticality of the policy has become clear.?

Imposing an immediate embargo on Russia’s fossil fuels “from one day to the next would mean plunging our country and the whole of Europe into a recession,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz told German lawmakers this week.?

Russia’s exports of crude and petroleum products to Europe are the second largest bilateral flow of oil between any two trading partners in the world, behind the United States and Canada, according to data from BP.?

Russia supplied 29% of Europe’s crude imports and 51% of the continent's petroleum product imports in 2019, the last year before the pandemic (“Statistical review of world energy”, BP, 2020).?

No other trading partner came close to Russia’s share, which would make it extremely hard to replace in the short term.?

So even speculation about a possible ban drove oil prices sharply higher this week, as traders weighed the practical difficulties, before prices retreated as it became clear EU policymakers were backing away from the idea.?

NEW OIL ORDER??

Some embargo advocates have suggested the EU could ban Russian petroleum imports, then encourage the redirection of international flows to minimise the net loss of supplies from causing a spike in prices.?

In this scenario, sanctioned Russian crude would be left to buyers in China and India, freeing up crude from the Middle East to be delivered to refineries in Europe.?

On the product side, Russian fuel oil and distillates could be sent to South America, Africa and Asia, while Europe takes more unsanctioned products from the United States, China, India and the Middle East.?

But there are multiple serious obstacles to making this work, which is likely why it has been deferred for the time being.?

For producers and consumers, supply routes would become much longer, increasing the number of freight tonne-miles, pushing up demand for tankers and raising transport costs significantly.?

More importantly, crude oils are only semi-fungible. Most refineries are optimised to work with specific qualities of oil. Swapping Russian and Middle East crudes would reduce efficiency, raising costs and prices.?

Redirecting flows would disrupt long-standing customer and contractual relationships. Middle East marketers have invested time and effort building long-term relationships with refiners in China, India and the rest of Asia.?

Asia is perceived as the growing market of the future, while Europe is the declining market of the past, especially with its plan for an accelerated transmission to net zero emissions.?

Breaking long-term contracts and giving up Asia’s lucrative growth markets to supply refiners in declining Europe, possibly only for a few months or years, would make little strategic sense.?

Similarly, North America’s refiners have lucrative and semi-captive markets in Central and South America they will be reluctant to swap for Russia’s markets in Europe.?

For refiners in Asia, there is little incentive to disrupt long-term relationships with secure Middle East suppliers to become dependent on Russian exporters if those exports might be subject to extraterritorial U.S. and EU sanctions later.?

COMPLEX WEB?

Crude and product flows around the world form a dense interconnected network or matrix. Forcibly reprogramming Russia’s exports via sanctions implies changes to all the other supplier and customer relationships.?

For commercial reasons, most crude exporters and refiners send to the nearest available export market and buy from the nearest suitable source of imports.?

Until now, Russia has overwhelmingly supplied Europe, the nearest major importer, though flows were slowly being reoriented to Asia, the fastest growing market, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.?

For the same reasons of distance, Europe has purchased most of its imported crude and products from Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union.?

The political imperative to end these flows and co-dependence is now in conflict with the commercial and geographical reasons to maintain them. Political imperatives may prevail but they are unlikely to do so quickly.?

In 2019, Russia’s exports to Europe accounted for more than 6% of all the world’s traded crude and more than 8% of all its internationally traded products, according to data from BP.

Reprogramming such an enormous share of world trade in the space of a few weeks or months would create a huge upheaval.?

TIGHT AS A DRUM

Global oil markets were tight before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with inventories below the pre-pandemic five-year average and trending lower.?

Even if the imposition of an embargo or other sanctions caused only a small reduction in Russia’s net exports, to deprive the country of revenue, it would still create a high risk of a price spike.?

Previous embargoes imposed on Iraq in the 1990s and Iran and Venezuela in the 2010s were offset by extra supplies from other producers, reducing their overall impact on prices.?

At present, neither Saudi Arabia nor U.S. shale firms appear keen to raise output to offset lost Russian supplies, and the White House has not so far reached agreements to lift sanctions on Iran and Venezuela.?

With little spare capacity, EU policymakers have concluded the price risks from embargoing Russian petroleum exports are too high, and have backed away from the idea for now.

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Green Rare-Earth Recycling Goes Commercial

Rare earth minerals, precious metals, U.S. economy, green recycling | Homeland Security Newswire?

Rare earths are essential ingredients in the magnets that power many technologies people rely on today, such as cell phones, computers, electric vehicles, and wind turbines. Researchers have?developed a novel way to extract rare earth elements (rare earths) from the high-powered magnets in electronic waste?(e-waste).?

An innovative method of recycling rare earth elements from electronic waste has gone commercial.?

Ikenna Nlebedim, the lead researcher on the recycling project, explained that big companies shred items?like computer hard drives to protect the information on them. Once the drives are shredded, recycling becomes more complex because other recycling methods depend on separating the magnets from other materials. The?CMI’s recycling process is designed to extract the rare earths directly from shredded?e-waste.?

“We take that shredded mix and we put it in solution, but our solution targets the magnet—and it leaves the rest of the components of the mixture undissolved—and dissolves the magnet that contains the rare earths,” said Nlebedim. “So, with the rare earth in solution, we filter off the rest of the e-waste and later pull the rare earth out of the solution. And that’s how we do our recycling. It’s a very efficient and robust?process.”?

This recycling technology has an advantage over other processes because the solution used to dissolve magnets is water-based rather than acid-based. Nlebedim explained that their process begins without acids and the byproducts are treated to eliminate acid-contaminated wastes, which makes it friendlier for the?environment.

Since the solution used in this process is copper based, the processed e-waste ends up infused with copper. This copper can be recovered, or it can be reused in other operations. Copper is the key to making the process economically viable and environmentally?friendly.

“The dissolution process leaves the other materials in the e-waste intact, making it possible for others to extract materials such as gold and platinum from the leftover materials,” said Kevin Stoll, the engineering project manager of?TdVib.?

The technology holds great promise in addressing the limited availability of rare earths for technological applications in the United States.?

Rare earth minerals, precious metals, U.S. economy, green recycling | Homeland Security Newswire

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How Bill Clinton Sealed Ukraine’s Fate

The inside story of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Kyiv returned its nuclear weapons to Russia in return for ‘assurances’ from Moscow and Washington.?

By?George E. Bogden - March 25, 2022 12:33 pm ET?

Immediately after Ukraine signed its final agreement to renounce nuclear weapons in 1994, the country’s first president, Leonid Kravchuk, grimly remarked: “If tomorrow Russia goes into Crimea, no one will raise an eyebrow.” As we now know, that isn’t all Moscow would attempt to reclaim.?

Recently released archival documents demonstrate how American officials, adamant about the country’s denuclearization, ignored the sentiments of Ukraine’s postcommunist leaders, who were desperate to secure their new country.

Presidents Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk sign the agreement on disarming Ukraine in Moscow, Jan. 14, 1994. PHOTO:?GETTY IMAGES

Vladimir Putin’s carnage in Ukraine and threats of nuclear escalation cast a haunting shadow over the Budapest Memorandum, the accord that occasioned Mr. Kravchuk’s remorse. By its terms, Ukraine forfeited an inherited Soviet nuclear arsenal in exchange for Western pledges of aid and “assurances” from Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. that its borders would remain intact. Disarmament experts hailed the pact, but it invited Mr. Putin’s revanchism.

I have spent the past two years reviewing previously sequestered tranches of documents (some released in the past six months) provided by presidential libraries, the United Nations, the National Security Archive and the British National Archives. They pull back the curtain at a critical moment, revealing how the Clinton administration ignored flashing warning signs as it pushed Ukraine hard to accept unilateral disarmament—depriving Kyiv of a deterrent against Russia while providing nothing real to replace it.?

The U.S.-led campaign to denuclearize Ukraine began in 1992. Having strained under the yoke of foreign powers for centuries, Kyiv jealously guarded its nascent independence. Many Russians viewed their neighbor’s sovereignty as anomalous, and Ukraine’s postcommunist leadership feared what they might do about it. Mr. Kravchuk had been born in 1934 under one foreign government, Poland; saw his father die fighting a second, Germany; and lived decades under communist rule. He was determined not to see his nation subjugated again. The inherited Soviet arsenal represented a potent check against future Russian aggression.?

Kravchuk’s government therefore harbored apprehensions about abandoning it. He considered trading this ace for an ironclad territorial guarantee, something akin to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Article 5 umbrella. But Secretary of State James Baker balked. He believed this would result in identical demands from all post-Soviet states. When Ukraine subsequently resisted committing to disarmament through the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Mr. Baker put this defiance to an end with a blistering phone call. “I have never heard one man speak to another in quite that way,” Jim Timbie, an aide who was with Mr. Baker at the time, said in describing the secretary’s side of the conversation to Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. Mr. Baker required that the signing ceremony the next day adjourn without speeches from the parties.

Following U.S. elections that November, Mr. Kravchuk gained an untested negotiating partner but not new leverage. Bill Clinton’s administration proved even less amenable to his concerns. As archival documents show, a new cadre of officials approached the issue with a heightened sense of certainty—and urgency. “Ukraine could not keep nuclear weapons,” Steven Pifer, a State Department official who later served as ambassador to Ukraine (1998-2000), recalled in 2018. “No one in the U.S. government questioned” this objective. A sign in the Office of New Independent States fashioned a Clintonian mantra to match the prevailing view: “It’s the nukes, stupid.”

The full-court press began on the president’s sixth day in office. Teleconference transcripts reveal Mr. Clinton neither waited for the full-scale review of disarmament policy the General Accounting Office recommended in 1993 nor for Ambassador Strobe Talbott’s comprehensive appraisal of existing policies toward post-Soviet states before dialing up the pressure on Kyiv. On his first call with Mr. Kravchuk in office, on Jan. 26, 1993, Mr. Clinton offered $175 million—which grew to $700 million by 1994—in exchange for dismantlement of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal. He also proposed “strong security assurances” from the U.S. to assuage Mr. Kravchuk’s security fears.

A wily former apparatchik, Mr. Kravchuk bet that if he stayed at the table, his country wouldn’t end up on the menu. He relayed his concerns in stark terms. “The fear,” he explained to Mr. Clinton, “is political explosion and the dividing up of Ukraine—autonomy for Donetsk, and Krivoi Rog, and Galicia, and finally the dismemberment of the country.” These warnings, prescient as they seem now, didn’t move Mr. Clinton or his team. National security adviser Anthony Lake, writing to the president in 1993, complained that promised future cooperation had failed “to spur the Ukrainians to see their security as enhanced by eliminating nuclear weapons.” Kyiv didn’t understand its true “long-term interest,” Mr. Lake insisted; only he and his colleagues did.

Top members of the National Security Council acknowledged Ukraine’s anxieties in a regional policy review published in 1994. “Russian territorial ambitions against Ukraine could result from a failure of reform in Russia itself,” they passively observed. “Disputes between Russia and Ukraine, left unattended, will threaten the stability and unity of Europe.” Yet having acknowledged the possibility of what has now become historical fact, the authors threw up their hands—or washed them clean. “At best,” they concluded “we can actively work to encourage Ukraine and Russia to resolve their differences.”

Yet Russian leaders had long telegraphed that they weren’t much interested. Defense Minister Pavel Grachev insisted that Ukraine’s nuclear weapons be given to its former masters in Moscow. His opposition to international control or U.S. monitoring was unyielding. When Mr. Talbott and Defense Secretary Les Aspin chided his “counterproductive” stance at a 1993 meeting in Garmisch, Germany, Grachev retorted that a nuclear-armed Russia was in “no way an adversary to Ukraine.”

Exerting a heavy hand in the trilateral negotiation that preceded the Budapest Memorandum, the U.S. ultimately required little of Russia. Moscow merely reiterated commitments it had already made under the U.N. Charter and the Helsinki Final Act in return for full-scale disarmament of all former satellites. American policy makers never circled back to shore up Ukrainian strength after President Boris Yeltsin declared Russia’s “blood relation” to its former dominions at the U.N. General Assembly, or when he announced a “cold peace” at the same conference where the Budapest Memorandum took effect.

U.S. officials avoided ruffling Russian feathers while recognizing Moscow’s duplicity and doubts about its own disarmament. Weeks before the memorandum was signed, Mr. Talbott reported warnings to Mr. Lake from Russia’s deputy foreign affairs minister: “Advisers and political manipulators, whom [Georgiy] Mamedov calls ‘Iagos,’ have been whispering in Yeltsin’s ear.”

Mr. Mamedov claimed they were poisonously alleging there were “?‘forces’ in the U.S., including in the Administration, that want to ‘contain’ Russia.” In the same document, released this past October, Mr. Talbott noted that “we’re keeping our powder dry for another arms race if necessary.” Amid the urgent effort to denude Ukraine of weapons, he admitted “we don’t believe [Moscow is] reducing their strategic [nuclear] forces fast enough.”

The smoldering rubble in Ukraine may not be prima facie evidence that its post-Soviet government should have insisted on nuclear warheads as its birthright. But it does beckon something more than contrived historical resignation. In his 2018 tract on Ukrainian-American relations, Mr. Pifer ended the chapter on disarmament with a sentence that reads like a stale afterthought: The Clinton administration, he wrote, “could have provided greater military assistance, including some lethal military equipment, to strengthen Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and deter further Russian aggression.”

The legacy of the Budapest Memorandum doesn’t lie in crude conclusions about the desirability of disarmament itself. That straw man obscures insights provided by the vibrant historical record now emerging. Rather, comments like Mr. Pifer’s raise a more pressing question: If Ukraine’s nuclear weapons “had to go,” what means should Kyiv have been provided to halt the historic cycle of domination from Moscow? The flaw of the Budapest Memorandum from its inception—reflected in Ukraine’s immiseration today—is that this question appears to have gone unanswered, if it was seriously considered at all.

Altogether, the archival record paints a picture of a new administration charting what it believed was a benevolent path. Its peerless strength, afforded by Soviet disintegration, produced an undisciplined fixation on disarmament. The first Democrats to govern since Jimmy Carter failed to reckon with the wisdom of the party’s most celebrated strategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire,” he said. “But with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”

Perhaps the administration would have done well to heed the back-channeled common sense conveyed by Mr. Mamedov in 1994. “Many on our side will resent your meddling in something that they believe is none of your business,” he said. “Kyiv will resent your taking away the strongest card in their hand.” Instead, they chose to invent an Esperanto of disarmament, democracy and free markets.

Perhaps they believed these words alone might lead to their adoption from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Nearly 30 years on, it’s clear that they didn’t. It’s hard to accept that the approach that gave us the memorandum can truly provide a defensible framework for U.S. policy making in the future—certainly not with the road to Kyiv as fraught with Russian aggression as in decades before.?

Mr. Bogden is a fellow at the Smith Richardson Foundation and at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., a law clerk at the U.S. Court of International Trade and a senior visiting researcher at Bard College.?

How Bill Clinton Sealed Ukraine’s Fate - WSJ