{Page 9} Ukraine Latest} New Surprises Await the Enemy(March/2024)
Civilians should not use the Crimean Bridge. New surprises await the enemy, states Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine.
According to Budanov, we owe the successes of Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea to the inhabitants of the peninsula, whose resistance to the enemy has not ceased over the past ten years of war with Russia.
The DIU chief explained that for successful defense and counteroffensive, Ukraine must control the Black Sea and Crimea.
All previously set tasks have been accomplished. Russia lost a quarter of its ships and was forced to withdraw its fleet to the Caucasus coast. The enemy has also redeployed its aviation, as Crimean airfields and military facilities are constantly under our fire.
"We owe our success to the residents of Ukrainian Crimea, who not only strengthened their resistance to the occupiers but also found the opportunity to monitor the entire operational situation on the peninsula and pass this information to us as soon as possible," Budanov added.
Ukraine has also fulfilled another promise - in 2023, our Special Forces officers visited Crimea.
"New surprises await the enemies, and I would not recommend civilians to use the so-called "Crimean" bridge," the head of Ukrainian intelligence said.
HOW F-16 FIGHTER JETS DOMINATE THE SKY IN UKRAINE(VIDEO)
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Russian forces tortured some Ukrainians to death, U.N. investigators say.
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Russian forces in occupied regions of Ukraine tortured people to death, a United Nations-appointed panel of independent legal experts said on Monday, disclosing further evidence that Russia has committed human rights abuses during the war.
The three-person panel, known as a Commission of Inquiry, released a report in March that concluded that many of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, including willful killings, attacks on civilians and forced deportations of children, amounted to war crimes.
The commission has since collected further evidence that Russian forces have made “widespread and systematic” use of torture in occupied regions of Ukraine, the commission’s chairman, Erik Mose, told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.
The torture has mostly taken place in Russian-controlled detention centers and has been largely aimed at extracting information from people accused of being informants for the Ukrainian Army, Mr. Mose said. He quoted one victim who recounted being given electric shocks for what “felt like an eternity” after every answer “that I didn’t know or didn’t remember something.”
In some cases, Mr. Mose added, “torture was inflicted with such brutality that it caused the death of the victim.”
Russian soldiers in the Kherson region also raped and committed other acts of sexual violence against women ranging from 19 to 83 years old, the commission found.
“Frequently, family members were kept in an adjacent room, thereby forced to hear the violations taking place,” Mr. Mose told the Human Rights Council.
The findings of the commission are based on repeated visits to Ukraine, the most recent of which ended in early September and included stops in Kyiv, the capital, and Uman, a city in central Ukraine where a Russian rocket hit a residential building in April, killing two dozen people.
The commission, which previously identified a “few” cases of violations by Ukrainian forces and urged the Ukrainian authorities to thoroughly investigate, said it had seen “continuous evidence” of Russian war crimes.
The panel is still investigating the scope of Russian abuses — for example, Mr. Mose said, whether torture by Russian forces amounted to a crime against humanity and whether some of the wartime rhetoric from Russian state media constituted incitement to genocide.
All of the commission’s attempts to communicate with Russian authorities remain unanswered, Mr. Mose said.
The New York Times
Image by Valeo Kopysov for Global Voices, used with permission.
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Image by Valeo Kopysov for Global Voices, used with permission.
This story is part of a series of essays and articles written by Ukrainian artists who decided to stay in Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. This series is produced in collaboration with the Folkowisko Association/Rozstaje.art, thanks to co-funding by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through a grant from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
Maksym Chernov, 22, describes himself on Instagram as a queer punk and vegan abolitionist who advocates for the abolition of slavery, both formal and informal. For nine months, he lived in the then-Russian-occupied Kherson and survived because he barely went outside. Some other members of the LGBTQ+ community there were less lucky: during their occupation, Russian forces kidnapped several LGBTQ+ activists, took a lesbian woman to a forest and threatened her, and shot a gay man in the leg after finding the Hornet app (a queer social network) on his smartphone.
‘Those in latex’
Maksym Chernov is a non-binary transgender person (he uses the pronouns he/him) who has repeatedly heard offensive and unfair stereotypes about his gender identity, which often emerge through a lack of knowledge or awareness. Once, before a lecture by a Ukrainian feminist LGBTQ+ charity, Insha (the feminine form of the word “other” in Ukrainian), one of the guests derided transgender people as merely “those who wear latex.” Maksym was outraged by this state of affairs, so he joined Insha to help educate their community.
“I want society not only to know about the existence of transgender people but also understand who they are, that they are normal people,” he said.
In 2019, Chernov started leading discussions at Insha. He does not like the word “lecture” but prefers to offer topics and encourage participants to think and discuss among themselves.
Conversations about transgender people are complicated not only by social stigmatization but also by binary ideas about gender and sexuality. For example, listeners have provided the following arguments: “Gender is innate, natural, physiological” or “A true woman wouldn't want to become a man.”
Together with the Insha team, Chernov planned to expand the educational program, but the full-scale Russian invasion prevented him from putting this idea into motion.
Chernov was used to stockpiling necessary supplies, so he managed to do this before the full-scale war. On the night of February 23, he was working at his computer when he heard explosions. Although he had anticipated the possibility of shelling, the sounds took him by surprise: “It was a shock. My faith in people faltered once again.”
After four days of the offensive, the Russians encircled Kherson.
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Image by Valeo Kopysov for Global Voices, used with permission.
While Ukraine's armed forces were defending the city, the citizens were getting ready “to meet” the enemy in the city: volunteers were preparing Molotov cocktails, and welders were making anti-tank obstacles. Chernov's shock gave way to lethargy. In the beginning, he didn't leave the house: “I could do nothing. I was only thinking that I'll die soon.” Eventually, he reached acceptance: he wouldn't die as soon as he thought, so he needed to live on. When he ventured into a supermarket to replenish his food supplies, all he found were clothespins — the Kherson residents had bought the rest out of panic.
On March 1, there was still fighting in the city streets, but in two days, the Russians took the Kherson Regional State Administration building.
A manhunt
During the occupation, fearing arrests and violence from the Russians, residents tried to avoid leaving their homes. Basic human rights were threatened, so Chernovconsidered it senseless to focus specifically on LGBTQ+ oppression amid the occupation. Amid Russia's human rights violations, “What additional, so to speak, non-basic rights can we talk about?” he asked rhetorically. Knowing the Russian state's homophobic policies, members of the LGBTQ+ community took extra precautions to avoid the occupiers. Chernov said:
In May 2022, the occupants broke into the Insha offices, smashed furniture, stole office equipment, and destroyed LGBTQ-themed paraphernalia. The Ukrainian LGBTQ+ center, Nash Svit (from Ukrainian: “Our World”), wrote in their report that a local resident directed the occupants toward the community center. But Maryna Usmanova from Insha doubts this claim: “We have never been hiding. We have an office in the city center. If you simply google “LGBT Kherson,” our address would pop up.” But Chernov does agree that LGBTQ+ activists were hunted. The Russians collected data and searched for community members, so some of them ended up “in the basement” (a Ukrainian expression referring to Russian fighters and their local collaborators using basements as makeshift prisons to detain and torture dissenters and those with pro-Ukrainian views). In one widely covered case, the Russians kept Oleksiy Polukhin, an LGBTQ+ activist, at a local detention center for two months.
Everyday life under occupation
Chernov was spending all his time at home in the city center: he was knitting, drawing and embroidering, and sometimes posting to social media to maintain contact with the world outside — until the Russians turned off the Ukrainian mobile connection. Chernov hoped the network would be repaired, but weeks passed, and the connection was not restored. Finally, he had to give up and buy a Russian SIM card, but the Russians had blocked Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and almost all the Ukrainian apps.
“I have noticed that I was paying no attention to the reality, losing contact with it. That's why I started to record and write down my observations from the occupied city,” Chernov said.
Despite having the means to occupy himself at home, Chernov wanted a larger purpose. He was always concerned about environmental pollution, and in 2021, he worked at Kherson's first waste sorting center. He assumed that talking about the environment and responsible consumption might be safer than LGBTQ+ activism.
On one of the local Telegram channels, Chernov posted an invitation to a free lecture on environmentally responsible lifestyle. In response, he received a single message: “Are you a fool? What kind of environmental issues matter now?! Join the military.” Maksym asked the person whether he was in the military, but he answered that he had left the city.
The lecture did not happen, but Maksym continued to take care of the environment, just as he did prior to the war, by sorting garbage and composting organic waste.
Evacuation
During the entire occupation, there had not been a single “green corridor” in Kherson. Everyone who wanted to leave did this on their own or with the help of non-government organizations.
The road ran through dozens of Russian checkpoints where those passing were thoroughly searched and questioned. They were asked whether they had relatives or acquaintances in the Ukrainian armed forces, stripped, and searched to determine whether they had patriotic tattoos, which the Russians claimed were evidence of “Nazi” ideals.
The charity Insha evacuated over 200 women and LGBTQ+ people to Ukrainian-controlled territory. The wife of one Ukrainian soldier approached Insha to help her leave after she was gang-raped by a group of Russians. Maryna Usmanova said Insha contacted a local volunteer who was taking people out in a rowing boat. He said he would take her at 1:00 a.m. from one of the piers. Even though it was dangerous to walk the streets at night, everything went well: after some time, the woman informed Insha that she had reached safety.
Chernov was not actively engaged in the evacuation efforts and decided he would not leave the city.
“I knew there were 30–40 checkpoints between Kherson and Mykolayiv. This road was gravely dangerous for an ordinary person, not even to say about transgender people. No one could tell what would come to mind for the Russian soldiers there. It was scary.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine liberated Kherson on November 11, 2022, but the Russians continue shelling the city almost every day from the still-occupied left-bank part of the Kherson region. Maksym Chernov finally left Kherson in March 2023. At first, he lived in Olexandria in the central Kirovohrad region; in June, he moved to Kyiv.
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SMOKE RISES AFTER STRIKE ON RUSSIA’S BLACK SEA FLEET HEADQUARTERS
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Ukraine launched a missile attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea on Friday, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said, the latest strike on the illegally occupied peninsula as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Moscow’s military operations.
Russia’s defense ministry said that air defenses had shot down five missiles but that the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in the city of Sevastopol had sustained damage. One service member was missing after the attack, it added in a statement.
Video footage posted on social networks showed thick black smoke billowing from what appeared to be the headquarters. It was not immediately known whether the building was hit in a direct strike that had evaded air defenses or by fragments of an intercepted missile. The Russian state news agency Tass reported that debris was “scattered hundreds of meters away after the missile strike” and that ambulances were heading to the scene.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was holding meetings with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Friday morning before addressing the country’s Parliament on his first trip to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Mr. Trudeau has been a particularly strong supporter of Ukraine, reflecting a consensus among Canadians. His country has the largest population of expatriate Ukrainians and Mr. Trudeau’s government has provided about $3.7 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine and an additional $1.3 billion in military aid.
The Canadian prime minister greeted Mr. Zelensky at a 19th-century building in Canada’s Parliamentary complex that has become the temporary home of the House of Commons, which is being renovated. Early Friday afternoon, Mr. Zelensky is scheduled to address the House and Canada’s unelected Senate in a joint session in the chamber.
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Russian Submarine Hit By Missile, Rostov-On-Don, Gone
The Russian Navy submarine Rostov-on-Don, which was hit by a missile in Sevastopol on September 13, is likely a total loss. Statements from the Russian Government that it will be returned to service appear wholly unrealistic. Images of the exterior hint at the extent of the internal damage.
Ukraine’s strike on Rostov-on-Don, a Russian Navy Kilo-class submarine, on September 13 was a major event in the naval war so far. In an instant, one of the four Improved Kilo-class submarines in the Black Sea was taken out of action. This submarine was used to launch Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukrainian targets. Nearby a landing ship, Minsk, was also severely damaged.
Images have been shared online which show the extent of the damage. The Russian Ministry of Defense has stated that the submarine will be repaired. This is unrealistic.
The images were shared online by Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), a group specializing in open-source intelligence (OSINT). The images seen, including in this article, have been partially pixelated to protect the source. Naval News has had access to the original unredacted images and can confirm their credibility.
Storm Shadow Strike on Rostov-on-Don
British-supplied Storm Shadow, and the essentially identical French-supplied SCALP-EG, is an air-launched cruise missile. Ukraine has adapted the Soviet-era Su-24 Fencer jet to carry two missiles. Russian sources claim that 10 missiles were employed in the attack with 7 intercepted. What is clear is that at least 3 got through, with 1 hitting the submarine and 2 hitting the landing ship.
Storm Shadow uses the BROACH warhead. This stands for Bomb Royal Ordnance Augmented Charge and means a two-stage delayed explosion. The missile dives into the target and the first charge creates a hole in the structure for the second warhead to pass through. The main detonation then occurs inside or below the target, depending on the fuse settings.
The warhead likely penetrated the forward hull close to the front end of the pressure hull. The Kilo class is a double-hull submarine with an outer casing enclosing the inner pressure hull. The first stage of the tandem warhead, which is designed to penetrate reinforced concrete, probably drove the missile through both the outer and inner hulls. The main warhead would have them explode inside the submarine.
Indications of this are visible in the upper casing of the submarine which is peeled back, consistent with an explosion blowing outward. Although the hit was in the torpedo room, that was likely empty. So the explosion will have been from the missile’s own warhead.
Total Devastation
The wrecked outside is only a hint of the damage done inside. We have not seen images of the interior, but we can infer several things. The detonation of the warhead will have gutted the submarine’s innards. Pipes will have been ripped from their supports, valves broken and surfaces buckled. The smoke seen in the photos rising out of the hole on the hull, is evidence that it started one or more fires. These will have melted and fried electrical systems and further damaged the hull separately to the initial hole.
Smoke will have added to the mess and damage. As will the gallons of harbor water which were likely sprayed through the hole in the hull in an effort to extinguish the fire.
Second Hole Shows Greater Extent Of Damage
There is a second area of visible damage for the aft, on the starboard (right) side. This is another large hole with signs that it was blown outward. Again, smoke can be seen riding out of a large hole in the inner pressure hull. Some rubber tiles, used to make the submarine more stealthy, have been blown off the side.
Although there has been speculation that this could be a second missile, it appears more probable that it is an exit wound. Possibly the missile passed through the submarine. By implications the bulkhead (wall) across the submarine in front of the control room, either wasn’t sealed or didn’t offer much protection. This hole is just ahead of another bulkhead which separates the control room area from the engine room. Possibly this bulkhead was sealed and offered better protection. The explosion may have found a weak point in the side of the submarine.
Another scenario might be that the second hole is the result of a secondary explosion within the submarine. The details of the chain of events is anyway moot. What is clear is that the hole inside of the boat will have been damaged by the explosion, then a fire which burnt and smoldered for hours, and provably by water and fire suppressants. Not just the pressure hull, but many vital internal components will have been wrecked.
Not Realistic To Recover Rostov-on-Don
Despite the Russian Ministry of Defense’s claims to the contrary, it does not appear at all realistic that the submarine will be repaired. Work would be extremely expensive and time consuming. And it would have to be moved to a suitable shipyard, such as the Admiralty yard in St. Petersburg.
If the submarine is moved to a shipyard the hull will need to be patched before it can be towed. But the Russians have begun covering the wreck in nettings, a sign that it might not be going anywhere anytime soon.So Russia’s already serious shortage of dry dock in spaces in the Black Sea just got worse.
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A couple of minutes
One should notice that his crew was not with him on this and when he landed where and according to Ukrainian soldiers, the Russian came out of the helicopter firing. They were eliminated. The pilot is fine and almost rich and the Ukranians have got a helicopter with its weapons worth a couple of million for $half a million and a great pilot. Win, win for Ukraine but there is more, When the news spread out about his safely coming over to the Ukranians and that the Ukranians kept their word and he was more than fine, there were a few hundred Russians who decided to do something. Unfortunately, they did not bring helicopters but as the word goes out openly that it is ok to do it as far as Ukraine is concerned, they should do it. This had happened before but always on the quiet side to avoid problems for the family in Russia and avoid problems so very few details were able released on those cases. As soon as I learn more, I will let you know about this pilot with 'cojones'.I want to make sure that is ok to post him and the helio.
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