RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
The West’s military support for Kiev has accentuated the risk of weapons falling into the wrong hands, Daniel Kovalik, professor of international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Friday.
And even when these arms are successfully delivered to Ukrainian forces, they are often used to shell civilians in Donbass, he added.
Speaking at a UNSC meeting to discuss Western arms shipments to Ukraine, Kovalik claimed that the weapons are at risk of falling into the possession of unintended users, including criminals.
However, “even when the arms are going to the right people, it is not necessarily ending up in the right places,” he said, noting that Kiev had begun shelling the Donbass republics as long ago as 2014.
The professor said he had just spent a week in the city of Donetsk and witnessed Ukrainian attacks on civilian targets involving the use of Western weapons that, apparently, had been delivered “into the right hands.”
The lawyer recalled that he had seen with his own eyes how Kiev forces had shelled a local school, a stadium, and a water facilities site. “Of course, the water is at a premium in Donetsk,” he said, adding that the city’s water filtration system had been destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
He also referred to open-source material, including reports by leading American news outlets, which outlined concerns that Western weapons shipped to Ukraine could create a spike in illicit arms trafficking.
In particular, Kovalik referred to a CNN article from April 2022, which claimed that the US had decided to take “a conscious risk” by arming Ukraine. The outlet quoted American officials who had admitted that some of the Western-supplied weapons “may wind up in the hands of other militaries” that the US had no plans to arm.
“It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time,” a CNN source said at the time.
Kovalik also cited the head of Interpol, Jurgen Stock, who warned in June that the weapons sent to Ukraine were expected to “be trafficked not only to neighboring countries but to other continents.”
According to Kovalik, the issue warrants international oversight. However, “the US isn’t going to do that,” he added, noting that Congress had voted down a resolution just days ago calling for US aid to Ukraine to be audited.
“Who is watching the watchmen?” he asked, adding that this was the responsibility of the UNSC.
His remarks come as Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, warned the West of the legal “consequences” of sending arms to Ukraine, which are subsequently used to kill civilians in Donbass.
VICTOR BOUT
** In his first major interview since his release, Viktor Bout, whom the US claimed was an arms dealer, spoke to RT on Saturday. Bout was returned to Russia in a high-profile prisoner swap for basketball player Brittney Griner on Thursday.
During the conversation, the businessman revealed his techniques to stay sane while behind bars, spoke about the conflict in Ukraine and on whether he believed the US might be on the verge of an uprising.
Arming the Taliban
Bout served 12 years in American prisons on arms-trafficking charges that he denies. Despite evading Taliban captivity in the mid-1990s, several American media outlets reported this week that he supplied up to 200 Soviet T-90 tanks to the Afghan Islamists. This claim apparently originated in an anonymously-sourced report by Germany’s Der Spiegel in 2002.
“No, I did not have any relations with the Taliban,” he told RT. “The Taliban put a bounty on my head. How can anyone say I worked with the Taliban?”
Regarding the supposed delivery of tanks to the militants, Bout asked how he could have possibly pulled off “200 flights to Afghanistan” and hammered the US media for not providing any evidence to back up this claim.
“Even Soviet propaganda understood that there are some limits,” he said. “You had to at least say some truths."
The plea deal
While Bout maintains his innocence, he said that he accepted a plea deal to serve 25 years because “what was one supposed to do?” However, he said that his attempts to switch lawyers before signing the deal were thwarted by his public defender, who misled him into sticking with her and admitting guilt.
“How can you trust this system when it works against you?” he argued.
Prison conditions
Bout said that guards would withhold food from troublesome inmates and leave harsh cell lighting on overnight, all in what he called a Nazi-inspired bid to “break a person’s will.” He described the quality of food served to prisoners as “inhuman”and said that he “lost a lot of weight” while incarcerated in the US.
However, the “biggest challenge” he faced behind bars was being granted only a single phone call every month.
The prison population
Bout spent much of his time at the United States Penitentiary, Marion in Illinois in solitary confinement, before he was housed with the general population of the facility from 2016 onwards.
The majority of inmates were African-American and Hispanic, Bout told RT. He added that “mostly my fellow inmates were sympathetic towards Russia. Or at least if they knew nothing about it, they would ask me questions.”
Bout passed the time by reading and learning several foreign languages, but recalled that drug use was rife among his fellow prisoners. “If it happens in a prison, just imagine what is happening out there on the street,” he said.
On Ukraine
Bout told RT that he sees the sanctions placed against him by the US as an“experiment,” and a warning to his fellow Russians. As such he was not surprised when the West responded to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine with economic penalties.
“I fully support the special military operation,” he stated, arguing that Russia should have sent its troops into Donbass in 2014.
“If I could, I would share the skills I have and I would readily volunteer,” he declared.
Meeting Griner
When Bout learned of Griner’s arrest on television, he recalled that an inmate approached him and told him “this is your ticket back home.” While the businessman said that he didn’t get his hopes up, the two would meet on the tarmac in Abu Dhabi on Thursday during the exchange.
“She wanted to shake my hand,” Bout said of Griner. “You could feel that she was really positive.”
An American revolution?
Asked whether he’d prefer to see Joe Biden or Donald Trump in the White House, Bout compared the two to “Coke Zero and Diet Pepsi,” adding that Russians “pay too much attention to US politics.”
“I don’t believe they’ll have a revolution in the United States,” he said, referring to political division in the country. Bout elaborated, arguing that excessive drug use is making young Americans too passive “to do anything,” while Washington ruthlessly punishes dissent, as it did when it jailed the Trump supporters who protested against Biden’s electoral victory on Capitol Hill last January.
** France’s weapons deliveries to Ukraine while its own arms stockpiles are running low are insane, politician Florian Philippot, the leader of the Patriots party, said on Twitter on Saturday commenting on an article in the Opinion newspaper.
It published a report by the French Institute of International Relations which indicated that Paris decreased its arms delivery rates to Kiev due to depleted weapon supplies. "Let’s stop this complete madness!" the politician wrote.
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address that in response to a request by the heads of the Donbass republics he had made a decision to carry out a special military operation in order to protect people "who have been suffering from abuse and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years." Following this, the US and its allies announced the introduction of sweeping sanctions against Russia and stepped up arms deliveries to Kiev.
WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Russian forces have turned the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut into ruins, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, while Ukraine’s military on Saturday reported missile, rocket and air strikes in multiple parts of the country that Moscow is trying to conquer after months of resistance.
The latest battles of Russia’s 9 1/2 month war in Ukraine have centered on four provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin triumphantly — and illegally — claimed to have annexed in late September. The fighting indicates Russia’s struggle to establish control of those regions and Ukraine’s persistence to reclaim them.
Zelenskyy said the situation “remains very difficult” in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Together, the provinces make up the Donbas, an expansive industrial region bordering Russia that Putin identified as a focus from the war’s outset and where Moscow-backed separatists have fought since 2014.
“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address, naming cities that have again found themselves in the crosshairs. “The occupiers actually destroyed Bakhmut, another Donbas city that the Russian army turned into burnt ruins.”
Some buildings remain standing in Bakhmut, and the remaining residents still mill about the streets. But like Mariupol and other contested cities, it endured a long siege and spent weeks without water and power even before Moscow launched massive strikes to take out public utilities across Ukraine.
The Donetsk region’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, estimated seven weeks ago that 90% of the city’s prewar population of over 70,000 had fled in the months since Moscow focused on seizing the entire Donbas.
The Ukrainian military General Staff reported missile attacks, about 20 airstrikes and more than 60 rocket attacks across Ukraine between Friday and Saturday. Spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun said the most active fighting was in the Bakhmut district, where more than 20 populated places came under fire. He said Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk.
Russia’s grinding eastern offensive succeeded in capturing almost all of Luhansk during the summer. Donetsk eluded the same fate, and the Russian military in recent weeks has poured manpower and resources around Bakhmut in an attempt to encircle the city, analysts and Ukrainian officials have said.
After Ukrainian forces recaptured the southern city of Kherson nearly a month ago, the battle heated up around Bakhmut, demonstrating Putin’s desire for visible gains following weeks of clear setbacks in Ukraine.
Taking Bakhmut would rupture Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for Russian forces to press on toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, key Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk. Russia has battered Bakhmut with rockets for more than half of the year. A ground assault accelerated after its troops forced the Ukrainians to withdraw from Luhansk in July.
But some analysts have questioned Russia’s strategic logic in the relentless pursuit to take Bakhmut and surrounding areas that also came under intense shelling in the past weeks, and where Ukrainian officials reported that some residents were living in damp basements.
“The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around #Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the #Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank in Washington, posted on its Twitter feed on Thursday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russian troops also pressed their Donbas offensive in the direction of the Donetsk city of Lyman, which is 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of Bakhmut. According to the ministry, they “managed to take more advantageous positions for further advancement.”
Russia’s forces first occupied the city in May but withdrew in early October. Ukrainian authorities said at the time they found mines on the bodies of dead Russian soldiers that were set to explode when someone tried to clear the corpses, as well as the bodies of civilian residents killed by shelling or who had died from a lack of food and medicine.
On Friday, Putin lashed out at recent comments by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said a 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine negotiated by France and Germany had bought time for Ukraine to prepare for war with Russia this year.
That deal was aimed to cool tensions after pro-Russia separatists seized territory in the Donbas a year earlier, sparking a war with Ukrainian forces that ballooned into a war with Russia itself after the Feb. 24 full-scale invasion.
Ukraine’s military on Saturday also reported strikes in other provinces: Kharkiv and Sumy in the northeast, central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia in the southeast and Kherson in the south. The latter two, along with Donetsk and Luhansk, are the four regions Putin claims are now Russian territory.
A month ago, Russian troops withdrew from the western side of the Dniper River where it cuts through Kherson province, allowing Ukrainians forces to declare the region’s capital city liberated. But the Russians still occupy a majority of the province and have continued to attack from their news positions across the river.
Writing on Telegram, the deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said two civilians died and another eight were wounded during dozens of mortar, rocket and artillery attacks over the previous day. Residential areas, a hospital, shops, warehouses and critical infrastructure in the Kherson region were damaged, he said.
To the west, drone attacks overnight left much of Odesa province, including its namesake Black Sea port city, without electricity, regional Gov. Maxim Marchenko said. Several energy facilities were destroyed at once, leaving all customers except hospitals, maternity homes, boiler plants and pumping stations were without power, electric company DTEK said Saturday.
The Odesa regional administration’s energy department said late Saturday that fully restoring electricity could take as long as three months and it urged families whose homes are without power to leave the region if possible.
** The head of NATO expressed worry that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a war between Russia and NATO, according to an interview released Friday.
“If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in remarks to Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
“It is a terrible war in Ukraine. It is also a war that can become a full-fledged war that spreads into a major war between NATO and Russia,” he said. “We are working on that every day to avoid that.”
Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, said in the interview that “there is no doubt that a full-fledged war is a possibility,” adding that it was important to avoid a conflict “that involves more countries in Europe and becomes a full-fledged war in Europe.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly accused NATO allies of effectively becoming a party to the conflict by providing Ukraine with weapons, training its troops and feeding military intelligence to attack Russian forces.
In comments that reflected soaring tensions between Russia and the West, President Vladimir Putin suggested Moscow might think about using what he described as the U.S. concept of a preemptive strike.
AP/RT/TASS
