Putin invades ukraine

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and President Vladimir Putin on Monday lauded the country’s special operations units, which the former said had demonstrated “flawless” preparation for Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Shoigu praised the units to mark the Special Operation Forces’ Day, which is celebrated on February 27; the same day that Moscow’s “little green men” invaded Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in 2014 in a prelude to its eventual annexation. Putin decreed in 2020 that the date would henceforth celebrate Russia’s special forces.

Shoigu said Russia’s elite units had performed well in the ongoing invasion , which after a year has punctured many myths of Russia’s assumed military prowess.

“During the special military operation , the servicemen of the Special Operations Forces are displaying flawless training, heroism and courage and are successfully achieving the goals set by the country’s leadership,” Shoigu said—as quoted by the state-run Tass news agency—using the Kremlin’s terminology for the full-scale invasion that began on February 24, 2022.

Putin added his congratulations in a statement published on the Kremlin’s website on Monday.

“All fighters and commanders of the Special Operations Forces are distinguished by the highest level of training, their ability and readiness to act boldly, decisively, with lightning speed in key areas and directions, and to effectively solve the most complex and responsible tasks of strategic importance in any regions of the world where this is required by the security and the national interests of Russia and our people,” the president said.

In Ukraine, specifically, Putin praised special operations units for “following the orders to the end, protecting your comrades, saving women, children and the elderly, defending Russia, our nation and our land from the neo-Nazi threat.” Putin and Russian officials have falsely framed Moscow’s invasion as a crusade against neo-Nazism in Ukraine.

Russia’s special forces have not been spared from the ballooning casualties incurred by Moscow’s units since February 2022. The Russian invaders are thought to have suffered hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded in a year dominated by costly Russian battlefield defeats.

Russia does not release details of its casualty figures, so it can be difficult to ascertain how badly Moscow’s elite troops have been mauled. The fortunes of some individual special forces units, however, are indicative of Russia’s most intense and punishing military operations since World War II.

One European defense official told Newsweek in December that the Pskov-based 2nd Special Purpose Brigade—a Spetsnaz special forces formation and part of the GRU military intelligence agency—is among those that have suffered badly.

The official estimated the brigade had suffered “heavy losses” of 30 to 40 percent casualties. The unit was awarded honorary “Guards” status by Putin in July for its actions in Ukraine.

A BBC investigation published in October suggested a similar fate for the 3rd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade, which it said may have lost up to 75 percent of its reconnaissance company troops. The unit suffered particularly badly around the railway hub of Lyman during Ukraine’s surprise offensive in September, the BBC said.

Western and Ukrainian officials have blamed the apparent poor training and lacking equipment of Russian troops for the high suspected casualty figures, especially since Putin’s September mobilization order.

Russia, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this month, “continues to pour large numbers of additional people into the fight. And those people are ill-trained and ill-equipped, and because of that, we see them incurring a lot of casualties . And we’ll probably continue to see that going forward.”

Newsweek has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry to request comment.

Footage has revealed the devastation unleashed after a drone packed with explosives hit the centre of a Russian town.

The drone left a huge crater after descending on Kireyevsk in the central Tula region, destroying homes and reportedly injuring three people.

Russia ’s TASS news agency, quoting a law enforcement source, alleged the drone had been deployed by Ukrainian forces.

The device hit Kireyevsk, which is about 180 miles away from Russia’s border with Ukraine , on Sunday.

Kyiv has yet to comment, but has previously rebuffed claims by the Kremlin that Ukrainian drones have flown into its territory and caused damage to civilian infrastructure.

The footage, which appears to have been captured on a mobile phone, pans around the crater, reported to measure 15 meters (50 ft) in diameter and five meters deep (16 ft), showing how properties have been reduced to rubble.

A person can be heard saying ‘There is nothing left of the house, everything is smashed.

‘And the crater is so f******g huge, this is awful’.

A voice adds: ‘The main thing is we are alive’ before speculation that the explosion ‘must have been a drone’.

The blast lays bare the carnage caused by Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine – as the Kremlin today said it had plans to base submarines with ‘super torpedoes’ in the Pacific Ocean by early next year.

Moscow said it had produced the first set of Poseidon missiles – said to be a cross between a torpedo and a drone, launched from a nuclear submarine – in January.

The decision was made in response to the West increasing military support for Ukraine, Mr Putin said.

NATO on Sunday criticised the Russian president for what it branded his ‘dangerous and irresponsible’ nuclear rhetoric.

It follows Mr Putin’s announcement on Saturday that tactical nuclear weapons would be stationed in Belarus – which has been taken ‘hostage’ by its ally, according to a top Ukrainian security official.

Mr Putin likened the move to the US stationing weapons in Europe and vowed Russia would not violate its nuclear non-proliferation promises.

But a NATO spokesperson said Russia’s reference to NATO nuclear sharing was ‘totally misleading’, adding: ‘NATO allies act with full respect to their international commitments’.

The announcement is said to represent one of Russia’s most pronounced nuclear signals since the invasion began in February last year, with Kyiv calling for a UN Security Council meeting in response.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry called on the international community to take ‘decisive action’.

‘Russia once again confirms its chronic inability to be a responsible steward of nuclear weapons as a means of deterrence and prevention of war, not as a tool of threats and intimidation,’ it said.

However, a senior advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Mr Putin’s statement was ‘too predictable’.

‘Making a statement about tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, he admits that he is afraid of losing & all he can do is scare with tactics,’ Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter.

But in Washington, the Republican chair of the US House of Representatives foreign affairs committee, Michael McCaul, said he regarded Russia’s plans to store tactical weapons in Belarus as ‘disturbing’.

And the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons warned: ‘In the context of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of miscalculation or misinterpretation is extremely high.

‘Sharing nuclear weapons makes the situation much worse and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences,’ it said on Twitter.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is again reverting to his most effective card as his troops struggle to make significant headway on the devastated frontlines of Ukraine and as Kyiv prepares to turn its new Western weapons against Moscow’s occupying forces.

The Russian president announced this weekend that Moscow would build storage facilities for tactical nuclear weapons —which are designed with a smaller yield and intended for battlefield rather than strategic use—in Belarus and train Belarusian pilots to deliver the warheads from their own Su-24 aircraft.

Putin gave no indication of when the warheads might be sent and how many would be deployed, though he said he expected the necessary storage facility to be completed by July 1. The declaration touched off an international media furor, though officials in the U.S. and elsewhere were more stoic.

“We have not seen any indication he’s made good on this pledge or moved any nuclear weapons around,” National Security Spokesperson John Kirby told CBS .

“We’ve, in fact, seen no indication he has any intention to use nuclear weapons—period—inside Ukraine,” Kirby said. “Obviously, we would agree that no nuclear war should be fought, no nuclear war could be won and clearly that would cross a major threshold.”

Putin is still setting the media agenda, though his apparent intention to put nuclear weapons in Belarus might be a sign of insecurity rather than confidence.

“This is escalation dominance, Putin-style,” Mark Voyger—a former special adviser for Russian and Eurasian affairs to then-commander of the U.S. Army Europe General Ben Hodges—told Newsweek . “He’s trying to achieve a strategic victory of sorts.”

Nuclear Saber Rattling

Oleg Ignatov, the Crisis Group’s senior Russia analyst, concurred, telling Newsweek that Putin’s latest nuclear threat is in keeping with his long-established approach.

“Putin’s policy is manageable escalation,” Ignatov said. “He wants to escalate; he wants to show that he’s ready to escalate more than the West and to make the situation less politically comfortable. It doesn’t mean that he’s going to attack.”

Alex Kokcharov, a risk analyst specializing in Russia and Ukraine, told Newsweek that the weekend announcement “doesn’t mean that the nuclear weapons will necessarily be deployed,” only that the infrastructure to base them in and launch them from Belarus is being put in place.

“I think this is mostly politically motivated, and it indicates that Russia is not doing particularly well on the battlefield,” Kokcharov said. “They are going back to nuclear saber rattling in order to discourage European countries from supporting Ukraine. I don’t think it will work.

“If we look at the last year, Russia was ramping up their nuclear rhetoric when they were not doing particularly well on the battlefield. There was the first spike of these Russian nuclear threats in September, when the Kharkiv counteroffensive was taking place. And then another round was in late October, early November, when the Kherson operation was taking place.”

Still, experts told Newsweek that the expansion of Moscow’s nuclear umbrella cannot be ignored.

“The potential is that NATO would be distracted somewhat by this threat,” said Voyger, who is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Analysis and professor at the American University of Kyiv. “I’m not saying you will work to help Russia win, but it can definitely help them distract the West in a certain way.

“We have to be mindful of all these movements of the Russian leadership, even if they don’t seem directly related to certain tactical situations on the ground.”

Tactical nuclear arms are one area in which Moscow enjoys an edge over its Western rivals, Ignatov said.

“Russia has an advantage in tactical nuclear missiles, because the Western countries have less,” he said. “And the Russians have a lot of them.”

The Lukashenko Factor

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is still trying to somewhat straddle the growing East-West divide. Lukashenko has allowed Belarusian territory to be used to attack Ukraine through the full-scale invasion, including as a jumping-off point for the ill-fated drive toward Kyiv last spring, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Lukashenko is beholden to Putin because of a long-standing economic reliance on Russia but also because the Kremlin effectively saved his regime from being toppled by fierce pro-democracy protests in 2020.

Minsk has so far kept its own troops out of the war, though Moscow is believed to be pushing Lukashenko and his officials to commit fully to the quagmire in Ukraine.

“Lukashenko has always played this game where he is siding with Russia, but then also is trying not to fully follow direction from Moscow, with the hope that there would then be some sort of ability for him to negotiate with the West, and especially with the European Union ,” Viktorija Starych-Samuoliene, the co-founder of the British Council on Geostrategy, told Newsweek .

“He’s in a tough spot,” Starych-Samuoliene said, noting that the U.S. applied additional sanctions to Lukashenko and his allies over the weekend, while the EU is threatening another round of measures related to Minsk’s acceptance of Russian tactical nuclear weapons.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to resist what the Kremlin tells him,” Starych-Samuoliene said. “This might be a sign that unfortunately, he is now fully following what he’s being told.”

The trajectory appears grim for Belarus’s pro-democracy movement. Its exiled leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, wrote on Twitter that the agreement is “further subjugating Belarus” to Russian interests.

“Belarus is getting more and more dependent on Putin, and if there are Russian nuclear weapons there, it means that cooperation between the Russian military and Belarusian military will grow,” Ignatov said. “And cooperation, for the Russians, means more control.

“Before 2021, the Russian military presence in Belarus was quite limited. And now it’s a totally different picture.”

The decision puts Belarus in the direct firing line if the unthinkable— Russia using nuclear weapons— does happen, Voyger warned.

“If anything happens, it will be Belarus that will burn, and not Russia proper,” he said.

Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Foreign Ministry via email for comment.

Vladimir Putin’s hellish torture chambers in Kherson are just the “tip of the iceberg” a leading human rights lawyer has claimed.

Kherson was recaptured by Ukrainian forces from Russian invaders in November 2022, with traces of torture and abuse found littered around the city.

Speaking to the Daily Star, Wayne Jordash KC, a Ukranian war crimes specialist and managing partner at Global Rights Compliance explained how investigations were now already underway.

READ MORE: Russian commander told soldiers ‘kill them all’ before 5,000 civilians murdered in Mariupol

Part of the Global Rights Compliance’s Mobile Justice Team, a group of legal experts on the ground in Ukraine assisting in the gathering of evidence of war crimes, he said the torture chambers were part of a bid to wipe away Ukrainian identity.

“These crimes are part of the Kremlin’s wider pursuit of a criminal plan to extinguish Ukrainian identity, seemingly by any means necessary,” he said.

Mr Jordash explained that the two main things being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) were the “abduction of children and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.”

Russia , he added, had been deploying tactics to instil Russian values in local populations.

“They then focus on detaining, torturing and killing any Ukrainian that might pose a threat to this plan, including local leaders, journalists, human rights activists, volunteers,” Mr Jordash said.

“Thereafter, the remaining population is constantly interrogated and ‘filtrated’ before having Russian imperialistic culture forced upon them.

“It is more Orwellian than Orwell’s famous 1984 novel.”

He explained how Kherson was full of the signs of these actions, most chillingly perhaps, the discovery of many torture chambers in the region.

“These were run by Russian Federal Security Services (FSB), local Kherson FSB and the Russian Prison Service and were functioning at all localities, including both highly organised detention facilities (like former pre-trial detention centres or prisons) but also ordinary residential houses, offices and basements across the city of Kherson.”

Describing the hardships that people in the chambers suffered, he said: “Statements received from over 1,000 torture chamber survivors in Kherson shows that physical beatings, sexual violence, electric shock torture and waterboarding were among the criminal acts used against Ukrainian women and men held in Kherson, part of an effort to eliminate resistance to the occupation.

“Pro-Russian slogans, poems and songs were discovered on cell walls, which prisoners were forced to learn and recite.

“More than 400 people are also reported to have vanished from Kherson torture centres and it remains unknown whether they have been killed or taken to Russian-held territory.”

But while the chambers offer a very chilling, tangible landmark in the discovery of the horror, Mr Jordash explained how they were likely only part of the plan.

“The torture centres are the tip of the iceberg in Russia’s inherently criminal plan to subjugate or destroy Ukrainians.

“They are designed to eliminate and destroy large parts of the Ukrainian population in order to enable the remainder to be enslaved and ‘re-educated’.”

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