New Developments on Russias' Invasion of Ukraine
After scaling back its publicly stated ambitions in Ukraine, a senior Russian military commander said on Friday that Moscow wanted complete control of all eastern and southern Ukraine. It was unclear if his comments reflected an official shift in Kremlin policy.
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As ssia refocused its efforts on defeating entrenched and increasingly well-armed Ukrainian forces in the east, a senior Russian military commander suggested on Friday that Moscow’s ambitions are far broader than set out in recent weeks.
The commander, Rustam Minnekayev, said Russia was seeking to take control of a swath of territory that stretches from its own border, across southern Ukraine, to a pro-Russia separatist enclave of Moldova, Ukraine’s neighbor to the southwest.
Skepticism greets a bold Russian claim about war aims, based
When Gen. Rustam Minnekayev made a sweeping statement on Friday that Russia’s next military aim would be to seize Ukraine’s entire southern coast, many analysts were skeptical, based not only on the claim, but on its source.
Why would a relatively obscure military figure announce such a major shift in policy, rather than President Vladimir V. Putin, who usually makes such pronouncements, or Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu, or Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, the chief Russian commander for the war in Ukraine?
General Minnekayev’s official job is the organization of political propaganda work in the army’s central district, which comprises a vast territory from the Volga basin to eastern Siberia. His duties normally would not involve formulating military strategy.
Yet he told a gathering of arms industry representatives in Yekaterinburg — more than 1,000 miles away from the fighting — that Russia was seeking to capture a swath of Ukrainian territory from the Donbas region to Moldova. That would cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, General Minnekayev said, according to Russian news agencies, allowing Russia to “influence critical elements of the Ukrainian economy” and gain “yet another point of access” to the pro-Russian enclave of Moldova known as Transnistria.
According to the defense ministry’s website, General Minnekayev, who is stationed in Yekaterinburg, has been mostly involved in projects unrelated to the invasion, such as discussing the construction of an Orthodox cathedral with the clergy or indoctrinating the country’s youth.
“One of our main goals is the work with the veterans and patriotic upbringing of the new generation,” General Minnekayev told Red Star, the defense ministry’s official newspaper, last April. “We need to tell the youth the truth about the war that our ancestors have not been fighting in vain.”
Yuri Fyodorov, a Russian military analyst, said that, on paper, General Minnekayev’s main line of work is “brainwashing” Russian servicemen. But in reality, he said, the general’s main job is to “collect information about the officers: their views and moods.”
General Minnekayev manages “a system of political control of officers which exists in parallel to military counterintelligence,” Mr. Fyodorov said in an interview.
In Mr. Fyodorov’s view, the commander was probably sanctioned by his superiors to make such a statement, which was then reported by TASS, a state-run news agency.
“Looks like fighting is ongoing among various groups in the higher echelons of power,” he said.
Tatyana Stanovaya, a founder of the political consultancy R. Politik, said that General Minnekayev “is not the person who is supposed to make such statements,” and that it is possible he made it “for propaganda reasons.”
Moscow could not deny the statement, she said in a social media post, because it would make the Russian conservative faction “enraged.” In a regular briefing, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, declined to comment on whether General Minnekayev’s comments reflected Mr. Putin’s thinking.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will meet with AntĂ³nio Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, in Moscow on April 26, the Kremlin said. Mr. Guterres made a request earlier this week for a meeting with Mr. Putin to “discuss urgent steps to bring about peace.”
As soldiers and civilians trapped in bunkers beneath a sprawling steel plant in Mariupol issued desperate pleas for help on Friday, military analysts said that it might take days or even weeks for the heavily battered Russian forces who now control most of the city to regroup and join Moscow’s offensive in the eastern Donbas region.
The Kremlin on Thursday declared “victory” in the now ruined city even though Ukrainian forces still held the Azovstal steel plant near Mariupol’s port. President Vladimir V. Putin ordered his forces not to storm the plant but rather to block it “so that a fly can not pass through.”
BUCHA, Ukraine — The day war broke out, one of Ukraine’s most decorated pilots stepped onto the balcony of his three-story home and felt a pain in his heart.
A battle was raging at a nearby airport, and from where he was standing, the pilot, Oleksandr Halunenko, could see the explosions and feel the shudders. The Russians were invading his country and something very specific worried him.
Mriya.
The plane.
In a hangar a few miles away rested the world’s largest airplane, the Antonov An-225, so special that only one was ever built, in the 1980s. Its name is Mriya, pronounced Mer-EE-ah, which in Ukrainian means The Dream.
With its six jet engines, twin tail fins and a wingspan nearly as long as a football field, Mriya hauled gargantuan amounts of cargo across the world, mesmerizing crowds wherever it landed. It was an airplane celebrity, aviation enthusiasts say, and widely beloved. It was also a cherished symbol of Ukraine.
Mr. Halunenko was Mriya’s first pilot and loved it like a child. He has turned his home into a Mriya shrine — pictures and paintings and models of the aircraft hang in every room.
But that morning, he had a terrible feeling.
“I saw so many bombs and so much smoke,” he said. “I knew Mriya could not survive.”
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