U.S. does not have "absolute certainty" about Putin's long-term plans for Ukraine: senior U.S. defense official

Putin could simply declare victory in Donbas or use further control of the region to stage a further attack. The U.S. isn't sure that the Kremlin has given up on Kyiv.

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) May 10, 2022

UPDATE 1810 GMT:

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he had a “meaningful meeting” with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra: “Support from your countries is important and valuable to us. Thank you for being in solidarity with the Ukrainian people today.”

Speaking alongside Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba, Baerbock said Ukraine should become a full member of the European Union while emphasizing that there cannot be a shortcut to membership.

She pledged that Germany will reduce its imports of Russian energy supplies to zero “and that will stay that way forever”.

We will remain vigilant and monitor every aspect of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. With tensions this high, there is always an enhanced potential for miscalculation, unintended escalation, which we hope our intelligence can help to mitigate.

UPDATE 1350 GMT:

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has summarized Russia’s damage of 390 buildings in the capital, including 222 apartment buildings, 75 educational institutions, 17 health care facilities, 11 cultural facilities.

Klitschko said the cost of renovation is $74 million.

UPDATE 1345 GMT:

Lithuania’s Parliament has voted unanimously to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine as “genocide” and “terrorism”, calling for an international tribunal to prosecute suspected war crimes.

The motion cited the deliberate killing of civilians, mass rape, forcible relocation of Ukrainian citizens to Russia and the destruction of economic infrastructure, and cultural sites.

UPDATE 1339 GMT:

The European Union and the UK have claimed a Russian cyber-attack against a satellite internet network an hour before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

The EU said the attack on Viasat’s KA-SAT network knocked out thousands of modems, with a “significant impact” in “indiscriminate communication outages and disruptions across several public authorities, businesses, and users in Ukraine, as well as affecting several EU member states”.

The UK’s national cyber-security center concluded that Russian military intelligence was almost certainly involved in the February 24 attack, as well in attacks om January 13 Ukrainian Government websites.

UPDATE 1109 GMT:

In today’s announcement of forthcoming legislation, the UK has given its most detailed list to date of military assistance to Ukraine.

Britain has provided £450m in arms for Ukraine, says Queen's Speech briefing, incl over 5,000 anti-tank weapons (mostly NLAWs), five air defence systems (Starstreak) with 50 missiles, 1,360 anti-structure munitions + 4.5 tonnes of explosive. Most detailed list I have seen

— Dan Sabbagh (@dansabbagh) May 10, 2022

UPDATE 0818 GMT:

OVD-Info reports that 125 people were detained on Russia’s Victory Day — 82 for anti-war protests and 43 “for preventative purposes”.

UPDATE 0814 GMT:

Japan has expanded sanctions against Russia, freezing the assets of 141 people including Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

Among those sanctioned are eight Russians — including Mishustin, oligarch Vladimir Bogdanov, and the family members of the oligarch Gennady Timshenko — and 133 members of the Russian proxies “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” in eastern Ukraine.

Japan also added 71 Russian organizations, including manufacturers and research institutes, to the sanctions list.

Tokyo has now sanctioned more than 700 Russians, Belarusians, and Russian proxy members and more than 200 Russian companies and organizations. There are export prohibitions on more than 300 items, and the assets of several Russian banks are frozen.

UPDATE 0809 GMT:

Ukraine’s military claims that 26,000 Russian troops have been killed during Vladimir Putin’s invasion, including about 350 in the past 24 hours.

The General Staff said Russia has lost 1,170 tanks, 2,808 armored vehicles, 199 planes, and 158 helicopters.

UPDATE 0801 GMT:

The bodies of 44 civilians have reportedly been found in the rubble of a five-story building in Izyum, near Kharkiv, that was destroyed by Russian shelling in March.

Kharkiv Governor Oleh Synehubov said, “This is another horrible war crime of the Russian occupiers against the civilian population.

UPDATE 0718 GMT:

Women among 2 million Ukrainian refugees in Poland are facing the mental and physical damage of Polish laws restricting abortion.

The women, some of whom have endured rape by occupying Russian forces, are now in a country where the procedure is almost completely outlawed and access to contraception is the worst in Europe.

Gynecologist Myroslava Marchenko and her patient, due to have an abortion after prenatal tests showed a high chance of Down’s Syndrome, fled to Poland. They encountered the law banning abortions due to foetal abnormalities.

Marchenko advised her patient to leave Poland for the Czech Republic, where she could be treated.

Oxana Lytvynenko, a Ukrainian reproductive rights activist, explains:

[Ukrainian refugees] are completely unprepared for the situation here, they don’t know the law. Even if someone has read an article somewhere about abortion in Poland, they still think, “OK, so they don’t do abortion on demand, but if there is a good reason then they will do it.”

It’s difficult because you don’t want to re-traumatize these women just after they are so happy to be safe again. It doesn’t feel like the right moment to tell them the truth….

If women in need of abortion pills cross the border, it really depends who they are met by. If it is someone progressive, feminist, then they’ll be able to put them in touch with right people. But if it is some random man, or someone religious, then no way. They’ll either not care or they’ll say it is God’s angel and you need to keep it.

For Ukraine’s Women Refugees, Surviving Rape and Facing Poland’s Anti-Abortion Laws

UPDATE 0706 GMT:

Seeking a removal of Hungary’s objection to a European Union cutoff of Russian oil supplies, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest on Monday.

Von der Leyen said after the meeting with Orban, who is close to Vladimir Putin, that the discussion “made progress, but further work is needed”. She said she will convene another meeting with Hungary and other central European countries via video conference “to strengthen regional cooperation on oil infrastructure”.

The Hungarian Government maintained its line. Spokesman Zoltan Kovacs tweeted:

FM Szijjártó on PM Orbán's talks with @vonderleyen: We have made it clear that Hungary cannot support the sanctions package against as long as it does not provide a solution for HU's concerns. In its current form, the sanctions would be like an atomic bomb for HU's economy. pic.twitter.com/YPCxnXyKLM

— Zoltan Kovacs (@zoltanspox) May 9, 2022

The EU is likely to address the concerns by providing temporary exemptions from the cutoff for Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, all of whom have a significant dependence on Russian oil.

UPDATE 0652 GMT:

Russian forces have again fired missiles on the Black Sea city of Odesa in southern Ukraine.

The Russians attacked during the day and again at night. THey struck tourist sites, killing one person and injuring five, destroying five buildings, and setting a shopping center on fire.

A Ukrainian military official said the nighttime assault included three hypersonic missiles.

The daytime missiles struck as European Council President Charles Michel was meeting Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in the port city. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy joined the talks by video conference, discussing with Michel “the importance of taking immediate measures to unblock Ukraine’s ports for grain exports”.

Zelenskiy later urged the international community to take immediate steps to end Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports: “Without our agricultural exports, dozens of countries in different parts of the world are already on the brink of food shortages.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Unable to point to victory in his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day appearance in Moscow’s Red Square on Monday was an anti-climactic speech inadvertently pointing to Russian difficulties.

The Kremlin had hoped to celebrate the conquering of all of Mariupol in southern Ukraine, at the cost of tens of thousands of slain civilians and fighters. But with the defenders of the Azovstal steel plant still holding out against more than 10 weeks of bombardment and siege, Putin could not highlight an expansion of the Russian-occupied coastal corridor — the only notable territory seized by Moscow in the invasion.

The Russian leader could not refer to triumph over Kyiv and the Zelenskiy Government, having failed to seize the capital and detain or kill Ukraine’s leaders. And even in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, there has been no significant expansion of Russian proxy areas.

The biggest absentee from Putin's speech, though, was any actual "victory." He said Russian troops were fighting heroically in the Donbas, but didn't mention Mariupol or any other territories Russia has captured. And nor was there a sign when the invasion might actually end

— max seddon (@maxseddon) May 9, 2022

So Putin could only call for more effort and sacrifice by linking the troubled invasion with Russia’s victory over Germany in World War II, telling the troops of the military parade: “It is the same now. You are fighting for our people in Donbas, for the security of our motherland….You are fighting for the homeland, for its future, for no one to forget the lessons of World War II.”

At the same time, he avoided any escalation betraying the fiction of his “special military operation”. There was no shift to the term “war” or “invasion” and no declaration of a general mobilization, possibly because it would tip off the failures of the Russian offensives to achieve their objectives.

Instead, Putin played the victim, lying that he acted because the West was preparing to attack Donbas and Russian-occupied Crimea. He added the falsehood that there were calls by Ukraine’s leaders for nuclear weapons creating “an unacceptable threat right on our border”.

Putin had to partially lift the Kremlin’s curtain on Russian losses by referring to “the death of each of our soldiers and officers [as] a grief for all of us and an irreparable loss for relatives and friends”. He said he had signed a law that “will provide special support to the children of the dead and wounded comrades”.

Yet even his ceremony undermined him. Across Russia, the aerial portion of the parades was cancelled because of “cloudy weather”, even though there was no sign of clouds over Moscow. In Red Square, there was no formation of 77 aircraft, marking the 77th anniversary of Germany’s surrender, with eight in the shape of the letter “Z” — the symbol for the invasion.

There were individual acts of anti-war defiance in Moscow and other Russian cities. At an Immortal Regiment parade outside the capital, a woman was arrested for carrying a sign with a picture of her veteran relative: “He didn’t want to repeat [the war]. He fought for peace! Our grandfathers said, ‘If only there’s no war!’”

A man in Moscow was seized for sitting on a bench with a sign, “No to war!”

In Nizhny Novgorod, activists placed a banner on a building opposite the city’s police headquarters with imagery for “Fuck war!”

Police in Ufa today detained a woman for marking Victory Day by standing beside the city’s monument to human rights with a sign that read, “My grandpa fought against fascism.” https://t.co/bcl6lldXiG pic.twitter.com/TlAz1hh0Lc

— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) May 9, 2022

A Victory Day Speech…in Kyiv

The more successful Victory Day speech was in Kyiv, where Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy — standing by himself in a quiet square, with no military parade or trappings of power — said:

We are fighting for our children’s freedom and therefore we will win. We will never forget what our ancestors did in World War II, which killed more than eight million Ukrainians. Very soon there will be two victory days in Ukraine. And someone won’t have any.

In Washington, US President Joe Biden made his own World War II reference — with much more significance than Putin’s — in the signature of the Ukraine Democracy Defence Lend-Lease Act of 2022.

Invoking American economic assistance to allies such as the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany, the 2022 version streamlines supply of US weapons and other materiel to Ukraine and eastern European countries.

The Biden Administration has provided $3.8 million in military assistance to Kyiv so far, including heavy artillery, armored vehicles, and high-tech attack drones.

Biden said in a statement:

I have nearly exhausted the resources given to me by a bipartisan majority in Congress to support Ukraine’s fighters. This aid has been critical to Ukraine’s success on the battlefield. We cannot allow our shipments of assistance to stop while we await further Congressional action. We are approximately ten days from hitting this critical deadline.

Having provided $13 billion in supplemental funding in March, US Congressional Democrats have agreed to another $39.8 billion, expanding Biden’s request for $33 billion for economic, humanitarian, and military aid.