Devastation on Ukraine’s eastern front, where the notorious Wagner group is making gains

 

The weather in Bakhmut deceives the senses, sunny and warm – almost peaceful.

But a deafening boom of outgoing artillery from the critical eastern Ukrainian town shook that notion out of the system, as Ukrainian soldiers on Wednesday launched offensives to try to reclaim positions from Russian forces.

Three men could be seen making a run for it out of town, one with a microwave strapped to his back.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been going on for eight months. It’s only when you descend into the city of Bakhmut that you really get a sense of the devastation and destitution that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion has wrought. 

A vantage point gives a view over the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.

 

Our guide is a Ukrainian military medic, who goes by the nom-de-guerre “Katrusya.” In tinted sunglasses and fatigues, she slings our convoy into the center of the city at breakneck speed.

Flashing through the windows is a near ghost town.

“For the past two months, Russians have been trying to break into the city defenses and have not been successful,” she tells us between cigarettes.

She took us to see a building that had just been shelled. Our car hadn’t even come to a complete halt as another artillery shell hit close by. We scrambled for cover as more artillery rained down nearby for around 20 minutes. 

Katrusya is a combat medic in Bakhmut. She lost her husband in the fighting a month ago.

 

The attacks are normal, says Katrusya, as she leans on a wall – a picture of composure – as we take shelter from the incoming shells.

“The artillery attacks fly every day so it’s never quiet here. Other parts of the city take hits many times a day,” she says.

A handful of residents are still on the streets of Bakhmut. Buildings have no windows; the streets are pockmarked with craters and industrial garbage bins have merged into small pools of trash.

Those who remain seem to live in a parallel universe. They’re out on their bikes, running errands, and elderly women drag their shopping trolleys behind them, though which shops are open seems a mystery.

Sergey is one of those Bakhmut inhabitants still walking the streets. Asked if he is worried about the shelling he replies, “Afraid of what, mate? Everything is going to be okay.”

He then stares out into the distance, almost as if he doesn’t really believe his own words.

 

Katrusya says that the intense fighting has cost the lives of numerous soldiers and civilians here. “I cannot give you the number, but it is a lot… there are a lot of injured from both sides and also lots of dead.”

She lost her husband fighting the Russians in Bakhmut just a month ago. Only antidepressants mask the pain, she says.

The struggle for Bakhmut has grown ever more ferocious in recent days. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the fighting in the city “the most difficult.”

The significance of the city cannot be overstressed.

Bakhmut lies at a fork that points toward two other strategic towns in the Donetsk region: Konstantinivka to the southwest, and Kramatorsk and Sloviansk to the northwest. All three are key to Putin’s total control of the region.

The scenes in Bakhmut, though, are different to those across the rest of the country, where Ukraine has largely been able to repel Russia’s advance and even gain territory in recent weeks as Russian forces retreated at the end of September.

Here, Russian forces have made small, steady gains, largely thanks to the Wagner group, which is considered by analysts to be a Kremlin-approved private military company.

Reports on social media and in Russian state media say Wagner mercenaries are on the outskirts of Bakhmut, in a small village called Ivangrad.

On social network Telegram, Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin has acknowledged that resistance from the city is stiff.

“The situation near Bakhmut is stably difficult, the Ukrainian troops are putting up decent resistance and the legend of the fleeing Ukrainians is just a legend. Ukrainians are guys with the same iron balls as we are,” he wrote.

Katrusya says she’s come up against Wagner fighters and, despite their international notoriety, they seem more like a hodgepodge of soldiers for hire, she says.

“They are a rabble. There are a few, very well-trained professional fighters, but the majority of them have found themselves accidentally fighting in this war looking for money or for the ability to get out of jail,” she said.

In September, video surfaced appearing to show Prigozhin recruiting prisoners from Russian jails for Wagner, offering a promise of clemency in exchange for six months’ combat service in Ukraine.

Despite her heartbreak, Katrusya’s spirit isn’t dimmed. The one goal is victory.

“The price for Ukraine will be enormous,” she acknowledges. “We will lose the best of the best, the most motivated and trained but we will definitely win; we have no other choice, it is our land. We will win absolutely.” 

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Human rights advocates from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus share Nobel Peace Prize

From left: Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, jailed activist Ales Bialiatski and Alexander Cherkasov, Memorial's chairman.

 

Human rights groups from Russia and Ukraine – Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties – have won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022, along with the jailed Belarusian advocate Ales Bialiatski.

The new laureates were honored for “an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power” in their respective countries. “They have for many years promoted the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

Their win comes seven months after Russia waged a full-scale war on Ukraine, with the assistance of Belarus. That ongoing conflict loomed heavily over this year’s award, and it had been speculated that the committee would seek to pay tribute to activists in the affected nations.

The Ukrainian group, Center for Civil Liberties, has “engaged in efforts to identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population” since the invasion was launched in February, the committee said.

“In collaboration with international partners, the center is playing a pioneering role with a view to holding the guilty parties accountable for their crimes.”

The head of the Center for Civil Liberties said the group was “proud” to win the prize, calling it “a recognition of work of many human rights activists in Ukraine and not only in Ukraine.”

Oleksandra Matviichuk, the organization’s head, said on Facebook she was “happy” that the Center had received the prize “together with our friends and partners.”

She also called for the creation of an international tribunal to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for war crimes.

Matviichuk also said Russia should be “thrown out” of the UN Security Council for what she called “systemic breaches of the UN Charter.”

Memorial was founded in 1987 and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, became one of Russia’s most prominent human rights watchdogs. It has worked to expose the abuses and atrocities of the Stalinist era.

The group was shut down by Russian courts in the past year, in a major blow to the country’s hollowed-out civil rights landscape.

Bialiatski, meanwhile, has documented human rights abuses in Belarus since the 1980s. He founded the organization Viasna, or Spring, in 1996 after a referendum that consolidated the authoritarian powers of president and close Russian ally, Lukashenko.

The activist was arrested in 2020 amid widespread protests against Lukashenko’s regime. “He is still detained without trial. Despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus,” the committee said.

Belarusian opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya congratulated Bialiatski. “The prize is an important recognition for all Belarusians fighting for freedom & democracy,” she wrote in a tweet. “All political prisoners must be released without delay.” 

Ales Bialiatski speaking at the European Parliament headquarters in Strasbourg in 2014.

 

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen applauded the “outstanding courage of the women and men standing against autocracy.”

And French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that the Nobel committee had honored “the unwavering defenders of human rights in Europe.”

“Artisans of peace, they know they can count on the support of France,” Macron added.

It had been widely anticipated that the Nobel decision-makers would focus attention on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, given its aftershocks in security and stability across the globe.

But those involved in leading military campaigns, such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, were seen as longshots given that government-led peace negotiations appear to offer slim hopes of a resolution to the conflict in the near future.

“The committee is giving a message about the importance of political freedoms, civil liberties and an active civil society as being part of what makes for a peaceful society,” Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told CNN. “I think that’s a very important message.”

“This prize has a lot of layers on it; it’s covering a lot of ground and giving more than one message,” he added. “(It is) a prize about citizenship, and what is the best kind of citizenship if we wish to be citizens of peaceful countries in a peaceful world.”

“This year we were in a situation with a war in Europe, which was most unusual, but also facing a war that has a global effect on people all over the world,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the committee, told reporters.

Reiss-Andersen said the prize was not intended to send a message to Putin or any other individual. But she added that he represents “an authoritarian government that is suppressing human rights activists.”

The three winners will share the prize money of 10,000,000 Swedish krona ($900,000). The Nobel Prizes will be officially awarded to the laureates at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

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US and South Korea test-fire missiles in continued response after North Korea launch

A surface-to-surface missile is fired into the sea off the east coast in this handout picture provided by the Defense Ministry, South Korea, October 5, 2022.

 

The United States and South Korea launched four missiles off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula on Wednesday morning local time, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The test was the allies’ second exercise in under 24 hours, following a provocative test-launch Tuesday morning by neighboring North Korea, which fired a ballistic missile without warning over Japan in a significant escalation of its weapons testing program.

The US and South Korea initially responded to the provocation with a precision bombing exercise on Tuesday, which involved a South Korean F-15K fighter jet firing two air-to-surface munitions at a virtual target in a firing range west of the Korean Peninsula, per the South Korean Joint Chiefs.

The allies typically respond to missile tests by North Korea with military exercises.

Wednesday’s launch included four ATACMS missiles, the statement by the South Korean Joint Chiefs said. Also known as Army Tactical Missile Systems, such weapons are surface-to-surface missiles that can fly around 200 miles (320 kilometers).

According to John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, the launch was designed to demonstrate that the US and its allies have “the military capabilities at the ready to respond to provocations by the North.”

“This is not the first time we’ve done this in response to provocations by the North to make sure that we can demonstrate our own capabilities,” Kirby told CNN’s Pamela Brown on the “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

“We want to see the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, (North Korean leader Kim Jong Un) hasn’t shown an inclination to move in that direction, quite frankly he’s moving in the opposite direction by continuing to conduct these missile tests which are violations of security council resolutions,” he added.

On Tuesday, the US and Japan also conducted a joint response to the North Korean launch, with US Marine Corps and Japan Air Self-Defense Force fighter jets flying over the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea.

Following a 25-minute phone call with US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said North Korea’s latest launch posed “a grave challenge to peace and the stability of Japan, the region and the international community” and that Biden shared this view completely.

Analysts say there’s little the US and its allies can do to stop Kim’s relentless weapons buildup.

“The North Koreans are in no mood to talk. They’re in the mood of testing and blowing things off,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Failed US-North Korea summits during the Trump administration have led Kim to believe he can gain nothing from talks, Lewis said.

Since 2019 negotiations with former US President Donald Trump were cut short with no agreement, the North Korean leader has laid out a program to develop missiles with nuclear capability – and he’s following that timetable, Lewis added.

“North Korea is going to keep conducting missile tests until the current round of modernization is done. I don’t think a nuclear (test) explosion is far behind,” Lewis said.

Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, said North Korea is making progress.

Every time the Kim regime launches a weapon, “They learn, they get better, they get more capable,” he said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

Ankit Panda, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said North Korea appeared set on a course to develop nuclear weapons.

“Denuclearization is now I think in the dustbin of history as a failed policy,” he said.

“There is simply no practical plan at this point, especially in the short term, to bring North Korea to the negotiating table and to pursue denuclearization.”

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