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MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia declared martial law on Wednesday in four regions of Ukraine that Moscow recently annexed but that it does not fully control, a move that would allow the pro-Russian authorities to impose even tighter restrictions, including forced relocations, as Moscow fights to hold off Ukraine’s military advances.
Separately, Mr. Putin said he was handing more power to regional governors in areas of Russia, which would allow for significantly more restrictive measures to be introduced at home.
A presidential decree announced martial law in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions — whose annexation by Russia last month has been condemned internationally as illegal. Russia has suffered weeks of setbacks on the battlefield, and its proxies in the southern region of Kherson have begun relocating civilians in apparent anticipation of a major fight for the regional capital.
Moscow has been ordering residents of the region living west of the Dnipro River to evacuate before a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive, a move that Kyiv has dismissed as scaremongering. Just before Mr. Putin’s speech, videos released on Russian media showed lines of civilians apparently boarding ferries at a river port to evacuate.
“I signed a decree on the introduction of martial law in these four constituent entities of the Russian Federation,” Mr. Putin said at the start of a meeting of his Security Council via videoconference, referring to the four Ukrainian regions that the Kremlin unilaterally declared to be part of Russia. “In addition, in the current situation, I consider it necessary to give additional powers to the leaders of all Russian regions.”
As of late last month, the Russian Army controlled most of the Luhansk and Kherson regions and about half of the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions.
Martial law in the four annexed territories would allow the authorities to impose curfews, seize property, forcibly resettle residents to another region, imprison undocumented immigrants, establish checkpoints and detain people for up to 30 days.
Mr. Putin also ordered the creation of territorial defense forces, a type of civilian militia, in the four annexed regions, raising the possibility that Moscow’s forces may try to conscript Ukrainians into fighting their own forces.
The drive to compel Ukrainians to fight against other Ukrainians is part of a broader effort to mobilize hundreds of thousands of new fighters as its forces suffer huge casualties amid Ukraine’s push to retake territory.
Mr. Putin has grappled with growing anger at home over his call-up of about 300,000 reservists to fight in the war. Protests have erupted in far-flung cities, recruitment centers have been the target of arson, and thousands of military-age men have packed planes and vehicles to flee across Russia’s borders.
The separate decree allows for significantly more restrictive measures to be introduced in regions across Russia, including in Moscow, to more tightly control critical infrastructure facilities, public transit and communications. According to Mr. Putin, the regional leaders will be given additional powers “to ensure security.”
Russia’s upper house of Parliament, the Federation Council, approved martial law unanimously.
As with many Russian laws, there are provisions that allow for broad interpretation. For example, the law would allow for the suspension of activities of political parties, public organizations and religious groups, or any activity deemed to undermine Russian Federation’s defense and security.
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KYIV, Ukraine — Russian occupation officials were moving civilians out of Kherson on Wednesday, another sign that Moscow’s hold on the strategic southern Ukrainian city was slipping, as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sought to reassert control over that and other occupied regions by declaring martial law.
The move by Mr. Putin was an effort to tighten the Kremlin’s authority over Kherson and three other Ukrainian regions he recently claimed to annex, even as his army loses ground in those areas to Ukrainian forces and as Western allies dismiss the annexations as illegal.
As Russian proxy officials in Kherson said they would move as many as 60,000 civilians to the eastern side of the Dnipro River and shift its civilian administration there, they appeared to be girding for a battle for control of the region. Amid a weekslong Ukrainian counteroffensive, the pro-Kremlin leader in Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, said the relocations would protect civilians and help Russian forces fortify defenses to “repel any attack.”
Ukrainian officials dismissed the plans as “a propaganda show.” Andriy Yermak, the head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, accused the Russian proxies of scaring civilians with claims that Ukraine would shell the city. He called it “a rather primitive tactic, given that the armed forces do not fire at Ukrainian cities — this is done exclusively by Russian terrorists.”
Ukrainian forces have been advancing gradually for weeks along both sides of the river in Kherson, a region that Moscow seized early in the war and has declared part of Russia. Since late August, Ukrainian troops have damaged bridges near the city of Kherson, making it harder for Moscow to resupply the thousands of troops it has stationed there.
Western analysts have suggested that the Russian positions in and around the city are untenable without the bridges, and U.S. officials have said that Russian commanders have urged a retreat from Kherson, only to be overruled by Mr. Putin. But Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the Kherson region has moved more slowly than its recent advances in the east, and it was far from clear whether its forces could soon mount a push to retake the city of Kherson.
On Tuesday, the general Mr. Putin appointed earlier this month to command the war in Ukraine, Sergei Surovikin, said he was ready to make “difficult decisions” about the military deployments in the Kherson region, without specifying what those decisions would entail.
Ukrainian officials have greeted the hints of a Russian pullback of at least civil administrators with caution, saying the announcements could be intended for internal Russian audiences, signaling commitment to protecting civilians or preparation for a Russian military action in the area. Videos released on Russian media showed lines of civilians apparently boarding ferries at a river port to evacuate to the eastern bank of the Dnipro.
The Kherson region spans both banks of the river, with the city of Kherson, the regional capital, lying on the western side. The western bank is an expanse of pancake-flat farmland crisscrossed by rivers and irrigation canals, and one of the most pivotal battlefields of the war.
Ukrainian troops had through the summer whittled away at Russian supply lines by firing American-provided precision guided rockets at the four bridges over the Dnipro River in areas Russia controls. All are now mostly destroyed.
In late August, Ukraine opened an offensive with ground troops, advancing in bloody, slow-moving combat through several dozen villages while driving the Russian forces backward, toward the Dnipro. The Russian announcements of evacuating civilians and the civil administration could signal a faltering of military defenses, presaging a Russian pullback from the western bank of the Dnipro River in what would be a major setback for Moscow — but could also be a ruse.
Mr. Saldo, a Ukrainian politician who had switched sides at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, told the Russian state news agency RIA on Wednesday that all ministries would evacuate to the eastern bank. The occupation government earlier on Wednesday said it would evacuate from 50,000 to 60,000 civilians across the river and onward to the occupied peninsula of Crimea or into Russia. Residents risked artillery fire from the Ukrainian Army or flooding from the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on the Dnipro River, Mr. Saldo said.
Correction:
Oct. 19, 2022
An earlier version of this article misidentified the location that Russian proxy officials in Kherson, Ukraine, said they would move as many as 60,000 civilians to. It is the eastern side of the Dnipro River, not the western side.
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Russian forces launched missile strikes against a string of targets in Ukraine over the past 24 hours, killing three civilians, damaging energy infrastructure and forcing residents to find cover in their homes or in shelters, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.
Those and other recent strikes across Ukraine have caused hardship and death but have not halted Ukraine’s attempts to regain territory, underscoring how Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure in cities including Kyiv and other towns has not translated into fundamental changes on the battlefield.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an overnight speech that more than 10 regions in the north, east and south of the country had been attacked since Tuesday.
Missiles rained down on the southern town of Orikhiv in Zaporizhzhia Province for almost seven hours, killing three people and wounding eight others, Oleksandr Starukh, the head of Ukraine’s military administration in the region, wrote on Telegram. He said the attack had destroyed homes, an educational facility and the town council building, forcing 200 people to evacuate from the town and cutting off power and water.
Even before this latest attack, most residents had already fled the town, which is squeezed between the Ukrainian and Russian front lines in an increasingly volatile battlefield in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian control of the town has stood in the way of Russian attempts to close in on the much larger provincial capital.
Russia has pounded civilian targets in Ukraine since its full-scale invasion began in February, on occasion killing dozens of civilians in a single attack. But Moscow has escalated its attacks since Oct. 8, in response to an attack on a bridge that connects the Crimean Peninsula with Russia. The attacks have not stopped Ukraine from stepping up its own pressure in a counteroffensive to retake the strategically important southern region of Kherson.
Control of that area, however precarious, matters to Russia. It allows Russian forces to operate on the western side of the Dnipro River, which divides the country into two. That, in turn, allows Russia to threaten the rest of the Ukrainian-controlled Black Sea coast, including the city of Odesa.
Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been in Russia’s crosshairs, and Mr. Zelensky said this week that 30 percent of the country’s power stations had been struck. On Wednesday, missiles hit a power plant in the southern city of Kryvyi Rih, cutting off electricity, according to Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the regional military administration.
Missiles also struck a coal-fired power plant in Burshtyn, in western Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk Province, the head of the regional military administration, Svitlana Onyshchuk, wrote on Telegram. Attacks on western Ukraine, which is far from the war’s front lines, are relatively rare.
“A fire broke out,” Ms. Onyshchuk wrote. “All services are working. Rescuers are on site.”
Shelling damaged three ambulances in Kharkiv Province in the northeast of the country on Wednesday, according to a statement posted on Facebook by the regional council, which said that nobody was injured. Ukrainian forces last month recaptured dozens of towns in the region, dealing a heavy blow to Russia and challenging President Vladimir V. Putin’s war effort.
Buttressed by air defense systems from its western allies, the Ukrainian military has improved its ability to shoot down missiles since the Russian invasion began in February. Ukraine’s Air Force Command said in a statement that it had shot down four out of six cruise missiles and 10 self-destructing drones aimed at Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and in Vinnytsia region, southwest of Kyiv, over the past 24 hours.
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Ukrainian military commanders in the Kherson region on Wednesday described small combat gains in recent days, but no dramatic breakthroughs that would prompt a move by Russian occupation officials to evacuate civilians. Week by week, however, Ukrainian advances have been closing the window for Russia for an orderly pullback from the western bank of the Dnipro River.
Ukrainian howitzers are now nearly within range of the bridges and river ports over the Dnipro, which Russian troops would have to cross to retreat eastward toward Russia, military commanders said. Those guns could make a pullback bloody and chaotic for tens of thousands of Russian soldiers now on the western bank.
Once in range, the howitzers could deliver round-the-clock barrages onto these escape routes, in contrast to the intermittent fire from long-range rockets now. Advancing howitzers to within range of the Dnipro bridges has been a war aim for the Ukrainian army since spring.
A Ukrainian military intelligence officer serving in the Kherson region who asked to speak on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said he anticipated the Russians would withdraw rather than fight on.
“They will leave Kherson themselves,” he said. “We created such conditions.”
It was not immediately clear how many residents would heed a call by local pro-Kremlin officials to evacuate or whether the evacuations would be voluntary. Many civilians have already fled the region.
Ukraine has accused Russia of forcibly relocating thousands of adults and children from occupied areas to Russian territory since the war began under the guise of evacuating civilians from danger.
Rights groups have said Russia is forcibly assimilating deported Ukrainian children. The Russian announcements could be catering to a domestic audience inside Russia, she said.
“They want to prepare a demonstrative picture for their propaganda media that locals in the Kherson region are afraid” of the Ukrainian military, Ms. Humeniuk said.
The evacuation of a portion of the civilians could telegraph plans for widespread bombardments in the Kherson region by the Russian army, the Ukrainian military governor of the Mykolaiv region, which borders the Kherson region, wrote in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
The Russian army has been distributing leaflets in Kherson city encouraging residents to flee, according to photographs posted on social media.
One shows parents with a small boy, all smiles, with a Russian flag in the background. The text says, “Save your family, move to the eastern bank.”
Residents have also received messages on their phones that urge them to flee the city. Serhiy, a retiree living in the city of Kherson said in a telephone interview on condition his last name not be revealed for security reasons.
“A slow panic is setting in,” he said, as the prospect for a battle for control of the city looms. “People are quietly happy the Ukrainian army is close but don’t know how it will end for us.”
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.
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WASHINGTON — Iran has sent trainers to occupied Ukraine to help Russians overcome problems with the fleet of drones that they purchased from Tehran, according to current and former U.S. officials briefed on the classified intelligence, a further signal of the growing closeness between Iran and Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Iranian trainers are operating from a Russian military base in Crimea where many of the drones have been based since being delivered from Iran. The trainers are from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a branch of the Iranian military designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.
In recent days, the Iranian drones have become an important weapon for Russia, which has used them as part of the broad strikes across Ukraine against electrical infrastructure and other civilian targets. The deployment of the Iranian trainers appears to coincide with the stepped-up use of the drones in Ukraine and indicates a deeper involvement by Iran in the war.
“Sending drones and trainers to Ukraine has enmeshed Iran deeply into the war on the Russian side and involved Tehran directly in operations that have killed and injured civilians,” said Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official and retired C.I.A. officer.
“Even if they’re just trainers and tactical advisers in Ukraine, I think that’s substantial,” Mr. Mulroy said. The United Nations’ human rights body has said that deliberate strikes on such civilian targets could constitute war crimes.
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BRUSSELS — The European Union agreed on a fresh round of sanctions on Iran on Wednesday, this time over providing drones that Russia has used to strike battlefields and civilian targets in Ukraine, according to three E.U. diplomats.
The sanctions will target the company that manufactured the Shahed-136 drones, diplomats said, as well as three individuals. They have been agreed on by national ambassadors. To enter into force, they must be greenlighted by all E.U. member countries through a written procedure, which is expected to conclude Thursday morning.
Iran has denied supplying Russia with drones for use in Ukraine. Josep Borrell Fontelles, the E.U.’s top diplomat, said on Monday that the European Union was looking for “concrete evidence” of Iran’s role in the drone strikes in Ukraine.
The latest sanctions add to other punitive measures the bloc has imposed on Iran for reasons unrelated to the Ukraine war. Earlier this week, the European Union added two entities and several individuals, including two key figures in Iran’s morality police and the country’s information minister, to its sanctions list over the recent violent crackdown on peaceful anti-government protesters.
Earlier on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, called Russia’s targeted strikes on Ukraine’s civilians and infrastructure “war crimes.”
“The international order is clear. These are war crimes,” Ms. von der Leyen told European lawmakers gathered in the French city of Strasbourg. “Targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure with the clear aim to cut off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming — these are acts of pure terror.”
MOSCOW — Friday afternoons at the Chop-Chop Barbershop in central Moscow used to be busy, but at the beginning of a recent weekend, only one of the four chairs was occupied.
“We would usually be full right now, but about half of our customers have gone,” said the manager, a woman named Olya. Many of the clients — along with half of the barbers — have fled Russia to avoid President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to mobilize hundreds of thousands of men for the flagging military campaign in Ukraine.
Her boyfriend, who was a barber at the salon, has also fled, and the separation is taking a toll. “Every day is hard,” Olya said.
She is hardly alone. While there are still plenty of men in a city of 12 million people, across the capital their presence has thinned out noticeably — in restaurants, in the hipster community and at social gatherings like dinners and parties. This is especially true among the city’s intelligentsia, who often have disposable income and passports.
Some men who were repulsed by the invasion of Ukraine left when the war broke out; others who oppose the Kremlin in general fled because they feared imprisonment or oppression. But the majority of the men who have left in recent weeks were either called up to serve in the military, wanted to avoid the draft, or worried that Russia might close the borders if Mr. Putin declared martial law.
— Valerie Hopkins and Nanna Heitmann
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BERLIN — The German government has removed the official responsible for keeping the country safe from cyberattacks over reports that he kept in touch with a lobbying group that had links to Russian intelligence. The move comes as Russia’s war against Ukraine has increased fears over cybersecurity.
The Interior Ministry confirmed on Tuesday the dismissal of Arne Schönbohm, who had led the Federal Office for Information Security since 2016. The accusations of possible ties to Russian intelligence, which were reported this month by a German satirical news show, “have permanently damaged the necessary public trust in the neutrality and impartiality” of Mr. Schönbohm, a spokeswoman for the ministry said.
The dismissal comes after ZDF Magazin Royal reported that Mr. Schönbohm had kept contact with a lobbying group he co-founded a decade ago that included at least one Russian cybersecurity company founded by a Russian intelligence agent as a member even after Russia invaded Ukraine. The group cut ties with the Russian company three days after the show aired.
The show did not link Mr. Schönbohm directly with Russian intelligence, though the current president of the lobbying group acknowledged such contacts.
Mr. Schönbohm did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel quoted him as saying that he had asked this week for disciplinary proceedings to clear up the issue. The Interior Ministry said that the accusations “would be thoroughly and vigorously investigated” and that he was “presumed innocent.”
Mr. Schönbohm’s removal comes amid fears of the vulnerability of German infrastructure, following attacks on gas pipelines connecting Russia and Germany and targeted sabotage of a communication system used by the national railway.
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Brittney Griner, the American basketball star who has been detained in Russia since February, sent a message of thanks to her supporters on Tuesday — her 32nd birthday.
According to a statement from two of her lawyers in Russia, Maria Blagovolina and Alexander Boykov, Ms. Griner said: “Thank you everyone for fighting so hard to get me home. All the support and love are definitely helping me.”
The lawyers said they had met with Ms. Griner for several hours on Tuesday and relayed messages from well-wishers. “Today is of course a difficult day for Brittney,” they said, adding that she was “very stressed” in anticipation of a hearing over the appeal of her conviction on drug charges, which is scheduled for Oct. 25.
Ms. Griner told her lawyers last week that she was not optimistic about the chances of her being freed before serving her full nine-year sentence and that she was struggling emotionally. Ms. Griner is allowed outside once a day, according to Mr. Boykov, during which she walks for an hour in a small courtyard at the penal colony outside Moscow where she is being held. She spends the rest of her time in a small cell with two cellmates, sitting and sleeping on a specially elongated bed to accommodate her 6-foot-9 frame.
While she awaits the appeals court hearing, Mr. Boykov said, Ms. Griner struggles in large part because it is “very difficult” to speak to her relatives. He added that it had been very difficult to organize phone calls with Ms. Griner’s wife, Cherelle, and that she had been unable to speak to her parents or siblings since her detention, as far as he was aware.
Last Wednesday, President Biden said that there had been no movement with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, over Ms. Griner’s case. A White House official said last week that the administration was trying “every available channel” with Moscow, including the one through which U.S. officials arranged a prisoner swap in April to secure the release of Trevor Reed, a former Marine who had been serving a nine-year prison sentence in Russia.
Ms. Griner was stopped in February at an airport near Moscow on her way to play for UMMC Yekaterinburg, a Russian professional women’s basketball team. Customs officials said that she had been carrying two vape cartridges with hashish oil in her luggage. In August, she was sentenced to nine years in prison after a trial that was all but assured to end in a conviction.
The United States has said that her detention and trial were politically motivated and that the Kremlin wants to exchange her for high-profile Russian citizens held in the United States. After her conviction, Russian officials said that political negotiations with the United States were already underway.
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WASHINGTON — Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, said that if his party wins a majority in next month’s midterm elections, its members would be unwilling to “write a blank check” to Ukraine, suggesting that it could be more difficult for President Biden to get congressional approval for large infusions of aid to bolster the country’s war against Russia.
“I think people are going to be sitting in a recession, and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he said in a recent interview with Punchbowl News. “Ukraine is important, but at the same time, it can’t be the only thing they do, and it can’t be a blank check.”
Mr. McCarthy’s comments reflected the rising tide of isolationism in the Republican Party, especially in the House, where an increasing number of libertarian-minded conservatives who have adopted former President Donald J. Trump’s “America First” position have vocally opposed authorizing billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as it fights off an unprovoked attack from Russia.
That impulse led 57 House Republicans to vote in May against a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine. In the Senate, 11 Republican senators opposed the aid package after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, marshaled support for the legislation in his conference.
In total, Congress has approved more than $60 billion to Ukraine this year alone by overwhelming margins, the largest amount of military aid the United States has committed to any country in a single year in nearly half a century, since the Vietnam War.
Mr. McCarthy, who is in line to be speaker if his party wins control of the House, voted for the aid package in May, as did his top two deputies. His remarks on Tuesday casting doubt on his party’s appetite to send more aid underscored the precarious balance he is attempting as he tries to straddle the rift among Republicans between the traditional, hawkish conservatives and the harder-right, more anti-interventionist members whose support he needs to be elected speaker.
The House Republicans who are poised to run the committees with oversight of the war should they win the majority are largely hawks who have backed the aid to Ukraine, indicating that some in the party may be reluctant to turn their backs on Kyiv. And many Democrats have supported the money for Ukraine, suggesting that even if most Republicans were opposed, the House could still muster bipartisan support to approve such aid.
Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday in response to Mr. McCarthy’s remarks that there was still “broad bipartisan support” for aiding Ukraine.
“We want to ensure that our NATO partners are stepping up to the plate and bearing the burden of the cost,” Mr. McCaul said, adding of Mr. McCarthy, “I think he’s just saying we’re not going to write a blank check without oversight and accountability, which my committee will be providing.”
from
https://digitalalaskanews.com/putin-declares-martial-law-in-occupied-ukraine-as-evacuation-of-civilians-starts/
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