The New York Times Ukraine-Russia News - January 30, 2023

 

January 30, 2023

By Carole Landry Editor/Writer, Briefings Team

Welcome to the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing, your guide to the latest news and analysis about the conflict.

Ukraine ramped up pressure on the International Olympic Committee to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes from the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. Britain’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, said that President Vladimir Putin made a veiled threat to fire a missile at him. The Kremlin called his claim “a lie.” NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, urged South Korea to increase its support for Ukraine. Get the latest updates here.

Ukrainian soldiers headed to battle in eastern Ukraine on Saturday.Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

First, tanks; next, fighter jets?

President Volodymyr Zelensky is imploring Ukraine’s allies to speed up deliveries of tanks and other promised weapons, even as his government pushes for more sophisticated weaponry — including long-range missiles and fighter jets.

Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said that more advanced weapons were at the top of the military’s wish list. “For me, everything that’s impossible today will be possible tomorrow,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The appeals come as Russia is intensifying its assaults in the Donbas region, with the fighting over the weekend centered on villages near the city of Bakhmut, which Russia has been trying to capture for months.

Both sides are expected to launch new attacks in the coming months. Ukraine wants to use the heavy weapons recently sent from allies, while Russia is expected to deploy the huge numbers of men it drafted last year.

“The speed of supply has been and will be one of the key factors in this war,” Zelensky said in an address late Sunday. “Russia hopes to drag out the war, to exhaust our forces. So, we have to make time our weapon. We must speed up the events, speed up the supply and opening of new necessary weaponry options for Ukraine.”

In a speech on Saturday, Zelensky expressed gratitude for the latest promises of military aid, but said that his country’s allies should still do more.

“Ukraine needs long-range missiles, in particular, to remove this possibility of the occupiers to place their missile launchers somewhere far from the front line and destroy Ukrainian cities with them,” he said.

Western allies have not publicly indicated if they will provide fighter jets.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said today that he wouldn’t rule out sending fighter jets to Ukraine under several conditions, including a ban on using them to strike targets within Russia.

European nations with American-made jets could decide to transfer theirs to Ukraine, but only if Washington approves those transactions. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany said over the weekend that Berlin would not send fighter jets to Ukraine.

A Biden administration official said on MSNBC last week that the U.S. would discuss fighter jets “very carefully” with Kyiv and its allies, Reuters reported.

The American-made F-16, the most commonly discussed jet that the U.S. could send to Ukraine, is one of the most advanced weapons in America’s arsenal. Like the M1 Abrams tank, the F-16 takes months to learn how to use and requires complex infrastructure and maintenance.

F-16s are also much older than stealth U.S. fighter jets like the F-22s or F-35s, and providing them to Ukraine would perhaps be considered less escalatory. “Let’s face it, a nuclear war isn’t going to happen over F-16s,” one defense official told Politico.

Nevertheless, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, warned today that further supplies of Western weaponry to Ukraine would lead to a “significant escalation.”

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Graves of Wagner group fighters, most of them prison conscripts, in a cemetery near the village of Bakinskaya, Russia, this month.Reuters

Russia’s convict fighters

In July, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s largest private military group, Wagner, started arriving via helicopter at prisons around the country with an offer to the inmates: Pay your debt to society by joining a private army in Ukraine.

Prigozhin promised the prisoners they would receive 100,000 rubles a month — the equivalent of $1,700 at the time, and nearly double Russia’s average monthly wage. He also offered bravery bonuses, $80,000 death payouts and, should they fulfill the six-month contract, freedom in the form of a presidential pardon.

Those who ran away, used drugs or alcohol or had sexual relations, he warned, would be killed.

My colleagues Anatoly Kurmanaev, Alina Lobzina and Ekaterina Bodyagina reported on the recruitment drive and the return to Russia of some convict fighters after they fulfilled the contract.

“These are psychologically broken people who are returning with a sense of righteousness, a belief that they have killed to defend the Motherland,” said Yana Gelmel, a Russian prisoner rights lawyer who works with enlisted inmates. “These can be very dangerous people.”

Since July, around 40,000 inmates have joined the Russian forces, according to Western intelligence agencies, the Ukrainian government and a prisoners’ rights association. Ukraine claims that nearly 30,000 have deserted or been killed or wounded, mostly in the fighting around the eastern city of Bakhmut, though that figure is difficult to confirm.

A former inmate himself, Prigozhin showed that he understood prison culture, skillfully combining a threat of punishment with a promise of a new, dignified life, according to rights activists and families.

“I needed your criminal talents to kill the enemy in the war,” Prigozhin said in one video. “Those who want to return, we are waiting for you to come back. Those who want to get married, get baptized, study — go ahead with a blessing.”

Most of the enlisted men were serving time for petty crimes like robbery and theft, but records from one penal colony seen by The New York Times show that the recruits also included men convicted of aggravated rape and multiple murders.

“There are no more crimes and no more punishments,” Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, said. “Anything is permissible now, and this brings very far-reaching consequences for any country.”

What else we’re following

To provide comprehensive coverage of the war, we often link to outside sources. Some of these require a subscription.

In Ukraine

There are signs that Russian forces are regrouping for a new offensive that could once again threaten Kharkiv. Two British volunteers who were killed in the Donetsk region in early January were mourned during a service in Kyiv.

Around the world

Hopes that Turkey would soon ratify the NATO memberships of Sweden and Finland have faded as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, fights for re-election. Aryna Sabalenka from Belarus held a trophy in triumph at the Australian Open on Saturday while the war remained a brutal reality.

We also recommend

As Gen. Valery Gerasimov takes over the command of Russia’s military, there is no sign that it has begun to fix its fundamental problems. Western-made tanks alone won’t turn the tide of the war, but officials and analysts say they will help substantially when they begin to arrive in late March in Ukraine. Two men set out from Russia, hoping a small fishing boat could carry them to asylum on U.S. soil. Their quest for freedom did not go as planned.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back Wednesday. — Carole

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