RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Trump fumes over ‘embarrassment’ for US
Trading a high-profile prisoner for a basketball player while leaving a Marine in a Russian prison is an embarrassing and stupid deal, former US president Donald Trump said on Thursday, as the ruling Democrats praised the swap as a triumph for black and LGBT Americans.
“What kind of a deal is it to swap Brittney Griner, a basketball player who openly hates our Country, for the man known as ‘The Merchant of Death,’ who is one of the biggest arms dealers anywhere in the World, and responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and horrific injuries,” Trump said in a post on his website Truth Social.
“Why wasn't former Marine Paul Whelan included in this totally one-sided transaction? He would have been let out for the asking. What a ‘stupid’ and unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA!!!” the 45th president added.
Russian national Viktor Bout was seized by US agents in Thailand in 2008 and convicted in 2012 of weapons trafficking. Griner was arrested at a Moscow airport in early February, and sentenced in August for drug trafficking. Both were pardoned ahead of the exchange, which took place in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday.
A video of the exchange, made on the tarmac in Dubai, was published on Thursday evening, with the faces of participating US and Russian officials blurred out for privacy.
Griner was traveling to Russia to moonlight for a basketball club there. During her regular WNBA season, she was one of the athletes who would kneel for the national anthem at games to protest racism towards African-Americans. Trump has criticized their protests as unpatriotic.
Whelan is a retired US Marine who was convicted of espionage in 2020 and sentenced to 16 years in a Russian penal colony. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday afternoon that the Joe Biden administration considers the Russian charges against Whelan “totally illegitimate,” but was presented with the choice to bring back Griner “or no one.”
“On a personal note, Brittney is more than an athlete, more than an Olympian, she is an important role model, an inspiration to millions of Americans, particularly the LGBTQI+ Americans and women of color,” added Jean-Pierre, the first black lesbian to speak for the White House.
Griner was “free to go home to her wife on the same day that we passed the Marriage Protection Act,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, told reporters. The bill is a major win for the Democrats, who wanted to pass it to ensure same-sex marriage in the US is no longer a matter of judicial precedent.
** The Ukrainian military is taking massive casualties in the battle for Artyomovsk (known as Bakhmut by Kiev), which is the lynchpin of the Donetsk frontline, the US Mozart Group has revealed to Newsweek.
The retired Marine who heads the group, which claims charity status but also trains Ukraine’s military, alleges that some units are seeing casualty rates of 70% and more.
With the Ukrainian military tightly controlling media access to the front, Mozart is notable for regularly posting photos and videos of what is going on, “which is an absolute annihilation of Ukrainian frontline towns to an extent that I have not seen in the media,” Andrew Milburn, who was a colonel in the US Marines, told the magazine.
“Bakhmut is like Dresden, and the countryside looks like Passchendaele,” he said, in reference to a German city destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII and an infamous mud-soaked WWI battlefield, respectively.
The few references to Artyomovsk in Ukrainian media, both legacy and social, have described the battle as a “meat grinder” with many dead and wounded, though official casualty figures have not been released.
The Russian Defense Ministry has not posted detailed claims of Ukrainian casualties in Artyomovsk, but has reported on advances both north and south of the city, threatening its encirclement.
Ukrainian units training with Mozart “have been taking extraordinarily high casualties,” Milburn told Newsweek. “The numbers you are reading in the media about 70 percent and above casualties being routine are not exaggerated.”
Ukrainians are struggling to get new recruits into the line to replace the losses, Milburn admitted, noting that about 80% of the people sent to Mozart for training have never fired a weapon before.
While admitting Mozart is giving Ukrainian troops combat training, Milburn insists his “volunteers” have a “higher emotional intelligence” and don’t actually engage in the fighting. Mozart is a registered tax-free charity “that's doing mostly humanitarian work,” he told Newsweek. Their name is a deliberate counterpoint to the Russian Wagner Group, a private military company heavily involved in the fighting around Bakhmut.
** Time magazine’s decision to pick Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky as the ‘2022 Person of the Year’ fits into Europe’s overall Russophobic sentiments, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday.
"Time magazine employs its own criteria, which we can go on with or disagree, and it is their own editorial policy," the spokesman said.
"However, in this case the magazine’s editorial directives remain within the boundaries of the pan-European mainstream, which is totally short-sighted, anti-Russian and vehemently Russophobic," Peskov told journalists.
Time, the American news magazine, has named Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky ‘Person of the Year’ 2022 and the ‘spirit of Ukraine.’
Time magazine has chosen Person of the Year annually since 1927. In 2021, billionaire Elon Musk was awarded this title by the renowned publication.
This title was first awarded in 1927 to the US pilot Charles Lindbergh, who performed a solo flight across the Atlantic for the first time in history. More than 70 times, the person of the year title went to political and public figures, among them Mahatma Gandhi (1930), Winston Churchill (1940, 1949), Elizabeth II (1952), Charles de Gaulle (1958), Martin Luther King (1963), Henry Kissinger (1972), Deng Xiaoping (1978, 1985), Ayatollah Khomeini (1979), Lech Walesa (1981), Pope John Paul II (1994), Pope Francis (2013), and Angela Merkel (2015).
The title was received by all US presidents, starting from Franklin Roosevelt, with the exception of Gerald Ford. Roosevelt was the only one to be awarded this title thrice: in 1932, 1934 and 1941. Among the holders of this title were five leaders of the USSR and Russia: Joseph Stalin (1939, 1942), Nikita Khrushchev (1957), Yury Andropov (1983, alongside US President Ronald Reagan), Mikhail Gorbachev (1987, 1989) and Vladimir Putin (2007).
WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Russian forces shelled the entire front line of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, Ukrainian officials said, part of what appeared to be the Kremlin's scaled-back ambition to secure only the bulk of lands it has claimed.
The fiercest fighting was near the towns of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, the region's governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in a TV interview. Artillery slammed into the town of Toretsk southwest of Bakhmut, killing one civilian and damaging 12 buildings, Kyrylenko said.
He said "the entire front line is being shelled" and Russian troops were also trying to advance near Lyman, which was recaptured by Ukrainian forces in November, one of a number of setbacks suffered by Russia since invading its neighbour in February.
In Bakhmut and other parts of the Donetsk region that neighbours Luhansk province, Ukrainian forces countered with barrages from rocket launchers, Reuters witnessed.
Ukraine's military command said Russian artillery attacked civilian infrastructure in the towns of Kupiansk and Zolochiv in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, and Ochakiv in the Mykolaiv region. Ukrainian anti-aircraft units downed several of the missiles trained on Kharkiv region on Thursday evening, governor Oleh Synehubov said on the Telegram messaging app.
Reuters was not able to verify battlefield reports.
U.S.-RUSSIA PRISONER SWAP
In a reminder that, despite the hostilities, Russia maintains lines of communication with the West, Washington said Moscow had freed U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner in return for the release of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
The White House said the prisoner swap would not change its commitment to the people of Ukraine.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a defence bill on Thursday that provides Ukraine at least $800 million in additional security assistance next year.
Separately, a U.S. citizen ordered deported by a Russian court over a domestic dispute left Russia late on Thursday.
In Rome, Pope Francis broke down and cried as he mentioned the suffering of Ukrainians during a traditional prayer.
"Immaculate Virgin, today I would have wanted to bring you the thanks of the Ukrainian people (for peace)," he said before being overwhelmed by emotion and having to stop.
Francis, who was later able to continue speaking, has mentioned Ukraine in nearly all his public appearances since the invasion and has grown increasingly critical of Russia.
WAR AIMS CHANGED?
President Vladimir Putin has given conflicting statements on the goals of the war but is now clear the aims include some expansion of Russia's borders, in contrast with comments made at the start of the "special military operation," when he said Moscow's plans did not include the occupation of Ukrainian land.
The Kremlin said on Thursday it was still set on securing at least the bulk of the territories in east and south Ukraine that Moscow has declared part of Russia, but appeared to give up on seizing other territory in the west and northeast that Ukraine has recaptured.
Moscow proclaimed in October that it had annexed four provinces - which it calls the "new territories" - shortly after holding so-called referendums that were rejected as bogus and illegal by Ukraine, the West and most countries at the United Nations.
While Moscow made clear it wanted to take full control of Donetsk and Luhansk - two largely Russian-speaking regions collectively known as the Donbas - it left unclear how much of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson it was annexing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says his troops will eventually drive Russia from all the captured territory, including the Crimea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 that sits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
KHERSON MINED
In the settlement of Posad-Pokrovske in the southern region of Kherson, retaken by Ukraine, some villagers have returned to homes damaged or reduced to rubble by Russian shells, set in a landscape of downed utility poles and spent munitions.
Zelenskiy in his Thursday night video address paid tribute to four policemen killed by landmines in Kherson province.
"This is perhaps even fiercer and more devious than missile terror," said Zelenksiy, whose country has faced barrages of Russian missile and drone strikes. "For there is no system against mines that could destroy at least part of the threat as our anti-aircraft systems do."
He accused Russian forces of deliberately leaving behind buried landmines, tripwire mines, mined buildings, cars and infrastructure in places they abandoned under Ukrainian military pressure.
On Thursday, Russian naval forces shot down a Ukrainian drone over the Black Sea, according to the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol, an important port and the largest city in Crimea.
RT/TASS/Reuters
