Ukraine Breaking News Today Live on 05-03-2024

Dr Omar Ashour, Professor of Security & Military Studies at the Doha Institute, delves into the intricate dynamics between the Middle East and the Russian-Ukrainian War.

Kyiv Post intel source confirms a successful cyberattack by Ukrainian hackers on communication networks in one of Russia’s main economic zones of Alabuga, which includes important defense companies.

Ukraine’s Military Intelligence (HUR) is conducting a large-scale cyberattack on internet providers and mobile operators in Russia’s Tatarstan, Kyiv Post sources in intelligence said on Friday, May 3.

The main targets of the cyber operation are communication networks in the special economic zone of Alabuga, where more than 30 industries are located, including important defense industry enterprises.

A step in the right direction on a path that will take years

A senior US official on Thursday said recently passed legislation by the US Congress doubled funding for acquisition of 155mm artillery shells, an ammunition category critically needed by Ukraine in its war with Russia, Washington news reports said.

Doug Bush, the chief weapons buyer for the US military, told the Reuters news agency that the Pentagon had requested Congress allocate $3.1 billion to purchasing 155mm shell manufacturing and investment in production capacity expansion, and that the actual figure allocated by US legislators was $6 billion.

Budanov’s intel deputy, Vadym Skibytsky, gave his thoughts on Russia’s threat to NATO, the Kremlin’s upcoming offensive, and the possibility of peace talks.

Ukraine’s military intelligence service (HUR) deputy chief spoke in an interview with The Economist about upcoming difficulties for Ukraine in Donbas and the Kremlin’s threat to NATO’s Baltic nations.

Vadym Skibitsky, Budanov’s deputy at the HUR, talked about the possibility of Ukraine losing Chasiv Yar and cautioned that May could a difficult month for Ukrainians, with possible Russian gains if it launches offensives in the East.

The document pledges support for key political structures of the Belarusian democratic movement, including Svitlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Svitlana Tsikhanouskaya, leader of the Belarusian Democratic Movement, and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, linked a landmark cooperation agreement on May 3.

The agreement, signed during Tsihanouskaya's visit to Malta, marks the first official consolidation of cooperation between Belarusian democratic forces and a foreign political entity.

United Kingdom and Ukraine preparing to sign an agreement on a 100-year strategic partnership in realms of trade, security and defense, science and technology, education, culture, and more.

During the last visit to Kyiv by British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, Ukraine and the United Kingdom started work on an agreement on a 100-year strategic partnership, reported the UK Embassy to Ukraine on its Facebook page.

The strategic agreement between Ukraine and Britain plans to partner for the next century

Ambitious entrepreneur from Kyiv, Yevhen Parokhod, CEO at Renty.ae, is step-by-step taking the top positions among the players in the UAE luxury car market.

Back in the day, in 2018, Renty.ae was just an idea for a young wannabe entrepreneur from Kyiv, Yevhen Parokhod. Having traveled to the USA, land of opportunities, he came upon the idea of starting his own business. However, he did not know where or with whom to start. Moreover, he didn't realize that his future serious business would be related to luxury cars. 

According to the open-source statistics site, Opendatabot, in 2023, 96 churches switched from the Moscow Patriarchate to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, much that is connected with Russia has become anathema to the average Ukrainian – but a sphere in which the Kremlin is still exerting influence – based on a report Friday, May 3 by the open-source statistics site Opendatabot – would appear to be religion.

According to it, there are 8,097 churches still associated with Moscow.

In an interview with The Economist, Macron said the question of sending Western troops to Ukraine would "legitimately" arise if Russia broke through Ukrainian front lines and Kyiv made such a request.

The Kremlin on Friday slammed fresh comments by French President Emmanuel Macron in which he repeated that the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine should not be ruled out.

In an interview with The Economist published on Thursday, Macron said the question of sending Western troops to Ukraine would "legitimately" arise if Russia broke through Ukrainian front lines and Kyiv made such a request.

The speculation about why Ukraine bought planes from Kazakhstan at cut-rates prices could itself justify the purchases. Do they plan to use the junk? Or is this part of a psy-ops gambit.

Steve Brown, on April 28, broke a story in the Kyiv Post on “Why Did US Buy Old Soviet Aircraft from Kazakhstan?” The purchase of 81 Soviet-era military aircraft, including MiG-31s, MiG-27s, MiG-29s, and Su-24s, is of geopolitical note, as the article probes. The total purchase price is $1.5 million, compared to a Su-24 worth around $25 million in 1997 soon after they finished production. The total payment for all 81 aircraft might have covered one of the Su-24’s two Tumansky R-21 turbojets, if it actually worked. Obviously, it was junk pricing. However, Kazakhstan’s Air Defense Forces continued to operate aircraft of the same models into recent years, some even still. Kazakhstan probably kept obsolete and dysfunctional aircraft in at least good enough condition to provide spare parts. 

The article offers a couple guesses about intended uses: for spare parts or for decoys. 81 of them could make for a lot of both uses. At $18,500 an aircraft, plus costs of shipping and of moving them around to feign operability, they could be a smart investment to force Russia to pay a heavy price in missiles and to support the ground forces or airborne crewed platforms to launch the missiles, only to blow up junk. More crucially, they could save actual operable Ukrainian aircraft from destruction. Speculatively, decoys could even allow some temporary staging of operable aircraft to enable strike missions that would be difficult to stage from safer rearward basing.

The Special Ops operators utilizing attack drones inflicted fire damage on the Russian Buk, prompting Russian servicemen to attempt to extinguish the fire and salvage the equipment.

In a recent development reported via Telegram, the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SSO) destroyed a Russian Buk M-1 anti-aircraft missile launcher using attack drones.

“Operators of one of the SSO divisions discovered the Buk-M1 anti-aircraft missile complex while working in the Sumy sector,” the caption to the released video read.

In history, as in romance, beginnings matter – so what we do now will be crucial in shaping the future

In these times of planetary polycrisis, we try to get our bearings by looking to the past. Are we perhaps in The New Cold War, as Robin Niblett, the former director of the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, proposes in a new book? Is this bringing us towards the brink of a third world war, as the historian Niall Ferguson has argued? Or, as I have found myself suggesting on occasion, is the world beginning to resemble the late 19th-century Europe of competing empires and great powers writ large?

Another way of trying to put our travails into historically comprehensible shape is to label them as an “age of …”, with the words that follow suggesting either a parallel with or a sharp contrast to an earlier age. So the CNN foreign affairs guru Fareed Zakaria suggests in his latest book that we are in a new Age of Revolutions, meaning that we can learn something from the French, Industrial and American revolutions.

Russia has not disclosed information on its casualties. Ukrainian President Zelensky claimed in February that 180,000 Russian troops had been killed in the war.

France has estimated that 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, according to Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne in an interview published on Friday.

In a conversation with the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe, Sejourne stated that Paris assessed the total Russian casualties, including the wounded, at 500,000 since the beginning of the war, now in its third year.

President Zelensky: Ignoring democratic anti-Russian movements in Georgia and Belarus is unworthy of you and the cause you represent. Time to adjust your stance.

The Georgian capital has been experiencing many nights now of large-scale protests against the implicitly pro-Russian government there and its attempts to emulate Russian despotic ways.

With thousands of protestors out on the streets of Tbilisi, and being harshly met by the local security forces, the scenes are reminiscent of the pro-European and anti-Moscow protests in Kyiv in late 2013 and early 2014 that went under the name of the “Euro-Maidan revolt,” or Revolution of Dignity.

What’s needed to protect Ukraine, push Russia back and avoid the West’s defeat.

The aid package finally passed the House, Senate and POTUS desk in late April.  There is a strong inclination to breathe a sigh of relief, assume all will be well and assume now we can seriously think about ending this thing with peace negotiations.  Don’t go there.

Switzerland will host a “Peace Conference” June 15-16 at Kyiv’s request.   The best that can be hoped for at this conference is that a significant number of the 160 invitees will reconfirm a commitment to, and possibly build on, the 10-point peace formula advanced by President Zelenskyy in 2022.

Cameron stated that Ukraine had the right to use the weapons provided by London to strike targets inside Russia, emphasizing that it was up to Kyiv whether to do so.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron has promised £3 billion ($3.74 billion) of annual military aid to Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” stating that London has no objection to the weapons being used inside Russia.

Speaking to Reuters during his visit to Kyiv, Cameron said, “We will give £3 billion every year for as long as is necessary. We’ve just really emptied all we can in terms of giving equipment.”

A Ukrainian serviceman revealed to Kyiv Post that aerial reconnaissance aided Bradley operators in targeting a moving target, which is “the most difficult to eliminate on the battlefield.”

The Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) Ground Forces released a video demonstrating how Ukrainian servicemen destroyed a Russian infantry fighting vehicle with the assistance of an American Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.

The caption of the released video read, “Bradley armored personnel carrier dismantles enemy armored vehicles near Avdiivka.”

The state-owned firm suffered a net loss of 629 billion rubles ($6.9 billion) in 2023 compared to a net profit of 1.23 trillion rubles in 2022.

Russian energy giant Gazprom said Thursday it suffered a record annual loss last year as the European market was practically shut to its gas exports due to sanctions over Moscow's military operation in Ukraine.

The state-owned firm suffered a net loss of 629 billion rubles ($6.9 billion) in 2023 compared to a net profit of 1.23 trillion rubles in 2022.

The conference, scheduled to take place in Lucerne, Switzerland, has been dismissed by Russia as a US-led initiative.

Switzerland has extended invitations to over 160 delegations for next month's Ukraine peace conference, according to the foreign ministry, though Russia is not among the invitees "at this stage".

The conference, scheduled to take place in Lucerne, Switzerland, has been dismissed by Russia as a US-led initiative, AFP reported.

The former Soviet republic of Georgia has been rocked by mass protests over a Russian-style "foreign agent" bill that targets foreign-backed NGOs.

The former Soviet republic of Georgia has been rocked by mass protests over a Russian-style "foreign agent" bill that targets foreign-backed NGOs.

Here are 10 key dates in Georgia's history since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Latest from the Institute for the Study of War.

Key Takeaways from the ISW:

• Ukrainian intelligence officials identified three Russian efforts to destabilize Ukraine and achieve victory, and both Ukrainian and US intelligence officials issued assessments about the battlefield situation that are consistent with prior ISW forecasts that Russian forces may take Chasiv Yar but are very unlikely to seize major Ukrainian cities.
• Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi assessed that Russian forces will likely begin an offensive effort towards Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts at the end of May or start of June 2024 but that Russian forces will not be able to take Kharkiv or Sumy cities.
• Skibitskyi noted that the Kremlin views information operations as a second line of effort to defeat Ukraine and that current Russian information operations heavily focus on undermining Ukrainian mobilization efforts and the legitimacy of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
• Skibitskyi stressed that Russia’s third line of effort to achieve victory in Ukraine is an ongoing campaign to diplomatically isolate Ukraine.
• The US Department of State (DoS) announced on May 1 that it has determined that Russian forces are violating the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which Russia is a signatory.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Tula Oblast Governor and known Wagner Group-affiliate Alexei Dyumin on May 2, further indicating that Putin may be seeking to reduce Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu's power by balancing him with rivals.
• Putin likely deliberately publicized his meeting with Dyumin following the high-profile arrest of Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov on April 24 and before the presidential inauguration on May 7, possibly to punish the Shoigu-led MoD for failing to accomplish the Kremlin’s military goals.
• The Putin-Dyumin meeting suggests that Putin is likely the responsible decision-maker behind Ivanov’s arrest.
• Recent Russian government crackdowns against Central Asian migrants living in and entering Russia following the March 22 Crocus City Hall attack appear to be straining Kyrgyz-Russian relations in addition to Tajik-Russian relations.
• The Georgian parliament passed Georgia’s Russian-style “foreign agents” law in its second reading on May 1 amid continued protests against the law in Tbilisi.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances west of Avdiivka.
• The Russian military may have recruited numerous prisoners with convictions for serious crimes in fall of 2023.