Top U.S. General Visits Troops in Poland, Reviews U.S. Troops’ Security
Russian jets strike terrorist positions in Syria’s militant-held Idlib region: Defense ministry
Monday, 19 September 2022 5:12 AM??[?Last Update:?Monday, 19 September 2022 5:30 AM?]
The Russian Defense Ministry says the country’s fighter jets have carried out a series of airstrikes on the positions of the members of the Takfiri?Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?(HTS) terrorist outfit?in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, killing dozens of terrorists in the process.
Deputy head of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, Major General Oleg Yegorov, said the air attacks destroyed three camps of the terrorists in Sheikh Yousef?village, which lies in the Armanaz sub-district of the province.
He added that weapons depots and warehouses of the militants were destroyed as a result. More than 45 militants, including field commanders Bilal Saeed and Abu Dujan al-Diri, were also killed.
The development took place more than a week after Russian fighter jets killed the leader of the so-called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad?terrorist group, Sirajuddin Mukhtarov, in an airstrike against a militant camp in Idlib province on September 8.
Yegorov said at the time that Mukhtarov was responsible for organizing terror attacks on Syrian government forces and civil infrastructure facilities.
He added that more than 20 high-ranking HTS terrorists were also killed in the aerial attack.
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WSJ: Top U.S. General Visits Troops in Poland, Reviews U.S. Troops’ Security
Gen. Mark Milley’s visit comes amid uncertainty about how Russia will respond to its biggest setbacks of its war in Ukraine
WARSAW—The top U.S. military commander visited a military base in Poland on Sunday and reviewed security measures for U.S. forces supporting Ukraine amid uncertainty about how Russia could respond to?its biggest battlefield losses of the war.
“I’m particularly interested in checking things like force protection, to ensure that [U.S. forces] are in an adequate state of readiness in the event of anything ever happening,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Warsaw, after visiting the base. “That is not an indicator that something might happen [or] an increased level of threat against U.S. forces.”
The general has said that since Ukraine reclaimed roughly 3,500 square miles of its territory from Russian forces, Moscow has been on the defensive, particularly around Kharkiv and Kherson.
“And because of that, we have to very closely watch what Russia’s reactions to that will be,” Gen. Milley said.
The base, which reporters traveling with Gen. Milley weren’t allowed to identify for security reasons, is protected by several air defenses including two Patriot battery systems. Sunday’s visit was Gen. Milley’s second since Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24.
The visit came as allies said they had seen one pattern in Russia’s military response. The U.K.’s Ministry of Defense said Sunday that Russian strikes had increasingly picked out civilian targets over the past week, even when no immediate military benefit could be perceived. The aim, it said, is to “undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government,” which has been buoyed by?the success of a recent offensive?in the northeast of the country.
The base, erected shortly before the invasion, is home to allied troops and has been a key hub for delivering weapons and other supplies to Ukraine. The base is also one of several training sites for Ukrainian troops by allied partners.?And because of that, U.S. officials have said it is a potential target by Russia.
Troops stationed at the base said they have confronted threats toward the base and in at least one instance had to shoot down a drone flying nearby. The U.S. military concluded the drone didn’t pose a serious threat. Reporters weren’t allowed to identify the troops stationed at the base.
In all,?the U.S. has sent more than $15 billion in military and security aid?to Ukraine this year.
Since the invasion, the U.S. has added roughly 10,000 troops in Europe, many based in North Atlantic Treaty Organization states that border Russia, like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.?In June, the Army said roughly 4,700 troops from the 101st Airborne Division based out of Fort Campbell, Ky., would be deployed to Europe.
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WSJ: Ukraine Forces Take Control of Key River Bank, Extending Advance in East
Bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Oskil River brings Kyiv closer to occupied Luhansk region
Ukrainian forces said they now control the eastern bank of the Oskil River in the Kharkiv region, while Moscow continues to launch attacks against civilian infrastructure in Ukraine following its military setbacks in the country’s east.
Strategic Command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces posted a video on social media on Sunday that appeared to show an armored vehicle crossing the river, along with the message, “Ukraine controls the left bank.”
The claim suggests?Ukraine’s push east is continuing?after its forces seized about 3,500 square miles of territory?in the northeastern Kharkiv region?in a lightning offensive earlier this month that?put Moscow on the back foot.
Ukrainian troops are now within about 20 miles of the Luhansk region, which Moscow captured months ago and whose seizure the Kremlin has repeatedly called one of its priorities for the war in Ukraine.
In a video address posted online late Sunday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed to continue fighting until all Ukrainian territory had been retaken, including areas of the eastern Donbas region and Crimea that Russia seized in 2014.
“Ukraine must be free—the whole of it,” Mr. Zelensky said, naming a list of cities currently under Russian occupation that he vowed to win back.
Some analysts have asked whether Ukrainian forces may be overextending themselves after their speedy advance, but Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, said the potential threat in the area might come from Russian territory, though he doubted Moscow could launch an offensive from Belgorod, a Russian city close to Ukraine, without Kyiv being aware of it ahead of time.
Lt. Gen. Hodges said the Ukrainians were trying to keep pressure on the Russians to prevent them establishing a strong new defensive line.
“If you’re launching a counteroffensive and having great success, the two things in the front of your mind are, how do I keep up momentum and are my flanks exposed?” he said. “Wherever they can find a flank or a key intersection necessary for logistics to support Russian forces, they’re going to try to [target] that.”
Russian forces, meanwhile, had established a new defensive line between the river and the town of Svatove in the Luhansk region over the weekend, according to the British Ministry of Defense. The ministry said Russia would likely?defend the area aggressively?after suffering a swift rout in the Kharkiv region, allowing Ukrainian forces to seize huge swaths of land in just a few days.
Battlefield setbacks have continued for Moscow. The British Ministry of Defense said Russia had lost at least four combat jets in Ukraine within the last 10 days, for a total loss of around 55 jets since the start of the invasion.
“There is a realistic possibility that this uptick in losses is partially a result of the Russian air force accepting greater risk as it attempts to provide close air support to Russian ground forces under pressure from Ukrainian advances,” the ministry wrote on?Twitter.?“Russia’s continued lack of air superiority remains one of the most important factors underpinning the fragility of its operational design in Ukraine.”
The top U.S. military commander warned allies late Sunday that Russia’s losses in Ukraine could lead Moscow to respond with strikes outside the country.
“I’m particularly interested in checking things like force protection, to ensure that [U.S. forces] are in an adequate state of readiness in the event of anything ever happening,” said Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Warsaw late on Sunday after visiting a U.S. military base in Poland.
Gen. Milley stressed that he had no indication that Russia was planning to strike North Atlantic Treaty Organization territories but that there was some uncertainty as to how it would react to Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive in the country’s east.
“And because of that, we have to very closely watch what Russia’s reactions to that will be,” he said.
For now, Moscow’s response has focused on attacking Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. Early Monday morning, Ukrainian officials said, a Russian airstrike hit the Pivdennoukrainsk nuclear power plant in Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv region.
A Russian missile struck the ground about 300 yards from the South Ukraine nuclear power plant, forcing a brief shutdown, Ukraine’s state-owned atomic energy corporation Energoatom said.
The nuclear plant, Ukraine’s second-biggest, is far from the front lines. It sits about 150 miles from the larger?Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, a Russian-occupied facility which has been the center of global efforts to prevent the continuing war from causing a nuclear disaster.
Energoatom officials said the strike had caused minimal damage. Still, it showed Russia’s willingness to hit critical electrical infrastructure, including those near and around nuclear plants, Ukrainian officials said.
“Russia endangers the whole world,” a statement from Energoatom said. “We have to stop it before it’s too late.”
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Since the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkiv region, Russia has knocked out electricity to much of the area and hit a dam in Kryvyi Rih, Mr. Zelensky’s hometown, which caused flooding in the city.
The Kremlin didn’t immediately comment on the strike on the nuclear facility.
Russian President?Vladimir Putin?is facing growing pressure at home, seeing an invasion he pitched as a swift military operation now approaching its seventh month of grinding warfare.
Alla Pugacheva, a famous singer in Russia, has become the most recognizable Russian to publicly criticize the war. In a post Sunday on Instagram, where she has 3.4 million followers, Ms. Pugacheva wrote that Russians were dying in Ukraine for “illusory aims” and that the war is turning Russia into a “pariah and worsening the lives of our citizens.”
Ms. Pugacheva, 73 years old, is one of Russia’s most famous celebrities, who first became well-known during the Soviet era. She is adored by a broad swath of Russian society and was feted by Mr. Putin in 2014, when he awarded her an Order for Merit to the Fatherland.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to respond to questions from reporters on Ms. Pugacheva’s criticism on Monday. On Sunday evening, Pyotr Tolstoy, a lawmaker, wrote on his Telegram channel that the singer had “lost touch with reality.”
A court in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic in Ukraine sentenced Dmitry Shabanov and Maxim Petrov, representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to 13 years in prison for high treason, according to Russian state media.
In a statement, the OSCE called for the immediate release of Mr. Petkov, Mr. Shabanov and a third Ukrainian member who is also being held.
“Our colleagues remain OSCE staff members and had been performing official duties” in Ukraine, said OSCE Secretary-General Helga Schmid.
The organization’s chairman-in-office, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau said, “Our mission members have been held unjustifiably for more than five months in unknown conditions for nothing but pure political theater. It is inhumane and repugnant.”
The OSCE deployed unarmed civilian monitors in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. The mission paused its activities on March 7 following Russia’s renewed invasion and Moscow later blocked the renewal of its mandate. The organization had over 1,300 monitors in Ukraine at the start of 2022, including 680 international monitors and 476 national staff.
In a sign of Moscow’s increasing international isolation, a deadline for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to?close their borders to Russian tourists—even if they hold a visa from a member of Europe’s Schengen document-free travel area—expired on Monday.
The sights of numerous Russian tourists visiting European countries from Finland to Spain in the midst of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor caused an uproar on the continent over the summer, sparking calls for a crackdown on Russians traveling in the bloc.
“That is why we have also been advocating for the tourist visa ban. So that the St. Petersburg and Muscovite elite that have some sort of influence over the Kremlin will feel that is also affecting their lives, that the war is going on,” Estonia’s prime minister, Kaja Kallas, told The Wall Street Journal last week in Tallinn. “Every citizen is still responsible for their country’s deeds.”
The ban, announced on Sept. 8, doesn’t apply to Russians visiting relatives in the affected countries or those requiring humanitarian assistance, including dissidents.
Earlier this month, the European Union issued new guidelines suspending fast-track visa approval for Russian tourists, making visa applications lengthier and more expensive.
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WSJ: Vladimir Putin’s Energy War With Europe Seems to Falter
Russia curbed natural-gas supplies to undermine European support for Ukraine, but the economic strategy is struggling
Vladimir Putin’s economic campaign to force European governments to abandon support for Ukraine by sharply curbing their natural-gas supplies looks to be faltering as gas prices fall, Russian government finances deteriorate and the continent sets plans to ease the pressure on households and businesses.
Russia’s long-term success in the economic fight with Europe is seen as critical by both sides in deciding the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine. But signs that Mr. Putin’s economic strategy is struggling are coinciding with serious reverses on the battlefield as?Ukrainian forces regain swaths of Russian-occupied territory?and as the Russian president has been forced to acknowledge?the concerns of the Chinese and Indian leaders?about the invasion.
European governments say Mr. Putin’s gambit is to cut natural-gas supplies to inflict pain on European households and businesses so populations turn against current government policies of sanctions against Russia and support for Ukraine with weapons and financial aid.
Russia isn’t yet sure to lose this economic fight. But a growing consensus among officials, energy specialists and economists suggests that, although Russian actions will cause serious hardship in many places, Mr. Putin will likely fail and that Europe should ride out the winter without running out of gas. Once this winter is over, Mr. Putin’s sway over Europe’s energy supplies will have withered critically, they say.
Mr. Putin played his biggest energy card in late August when?he stopped shipments of natural gas to Europe indefinitely?through the Nord Stream pipeline. “This is his time. This is his point of maximum leverage and he’s all in,” said energy historian Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global.
Ukraine’s successes on the battlefield have made it harder for European governments to change course, strategists say. “If people felt that there was sort of an indefinite stalemate, then they’d look for a way out,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. For now, Prof. Freedman added, “nobody in power is suggesting that the only response to this is to concede” to Mr. Putin.
Russia’s energy bonanza deriving from the Ukraine war—when prices of its oil and natural-gas exports surged—appears to be petering out as gas exports have dropped sharply and oil prices have fallen. Brent crude, the global benchmark, is down from more than $120 a barrel in June to about $90 a barrel, which means Russia gets about $65 for each of its barrels.
Russian government data released Monday showed the government veered into a big budget deficit in August. It reported the budget surplus narrowed to 137 billion rubles, or $2.3 billion, for the first eight months of the year, from about 481 billion rubles in July since the start of the year.
European governments have succeeded in securing extra natural-gas supplies to replace some of the lost Russian gas. Gas usage is also likely to fall in what economists call demand destruction, or the closure of factories and reductions in household consumption because of high prices.
Last week, the European Union laid out proposals—yet to be agreed to by governments—to ease pressure on consumers, including mandatory curbs on electricity usage. Some energy specialists worry that direct government subsidies for energy will thwart efforts to curb demand.
The coming winter is the period of maximum vulnerability for European governments. If the season is harsher than usual, leading to increased energy consumption, optimism could evaporate. Maintaining European unity through the winter also might require some countries to share their stored gas with others.
One cost for Russia is its hard-won reputation that goes back to the days of the Soviet Union as a reliable supplier that never used gas as a political weapon. “Now they’re using it, not just as a political weapon, but as a weapon of war…It completely obliterates their credibility as a reliable supplier,” Mr. Yergin said.
In a sign that Russian influence is already waning, gas and electricity prices, which surged after the Nord Stream announcement last month, quickly reversed.
On Friday, wholesale gas traded at roughly 185 euros—about the same in dollars—a megawatt-hour. That is almost three times as high as a year ago, and more than double the level at the start of June, when?Moscow began to throttle supplies through Nord Stream. Still, it is down more than 45% from the record closing high on Aug. 26 and back to levels from late July.
Electricity prices have almost halved from their peak. “It looks like the situation is stabilizing,” said David den Hollander, co-founder of Dutch power-trading company DC Energy Trading, pointing to near-full gas stores in central Europe, the closure of energy-guzzling smelters and fertilizer plants, and the installation of import terminals in the Netherlands and elsewhere for liquefied natural gas.
The new terminals are among the steps European governments have put in place to diversify from Russian supplies so that they would never again be at Moscow’s mercy.
Alternatives to Russian supplies—including LNG from the U.S. and other countries—are helping to plug some of the gap caused by Russia closing down Nord Stream. Gas storage underground has reached 85% of capacity, exceeding the EU target of 80% by the end of October.
Simon Quijano-Evans, chief economist at Gemcorp Capital LLC, a London-based investment fund, said that even with a complete stop to Russian supplies—Russia has continued to export about 80 million cubic meters a day to the EU through Ukraine and the TurkStream pipeline since it shut down Nord Stream—the EU would probably have enough gas for the winter. “It’s going to be a challenge and weather-dependent, but it is absolutely doable,” he said.
He calculates average EU consumption of natural gas in October through March from 2018 to 2021 at 256 billion cubic meters. He estimates sources of gas—from places other than Russia and 92 bcm drawn down from storage—to equal 242 bcm. The difference is likely to be made up with savings—cutting central-heating thermostats by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) should save 10 bcm—and possible other sources.
With the EU and national governments such as the U.K. taking action to soften the blow to consumers and businesses, “I don’t see the kind of social unrest that will force governments to give in to Putin,” said Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian diplomat and foreign-policy adviser to former President Giorgio Napolitano.
He said Italy, where elections will be held on Sept. 25 and opinion polls suggest a center-right government led by Giorgia Meloni will take office, is unlikely to be disruptive, even though some right-wing party leaders such as Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, likely to be in the ruling coalition, are close to Mr. Putin.
One other factor suggesting European governments won’t back down, Prof. Freedman said, is that the Russian president—who has tied resumption of gas supplies to a lifting of sanctions—hasn’t given European governments an easy off-ramp.
Evidence suggesting widespread abuses of civilians by Russian forces in Ukraine has hardened European attitudes, he said. Mr. Putin hasn’t offered the Europeans a deal that they can realistically support either. “It isn’t obvious what he expects Europe to do,” he said.
If Europe doesn’t change course, “then it actually ends up diminishing Russia,” he said.
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