The Washington Post

2022-05-12 18:10:35 U.N. Human Rights Council considers war crimes probe in Kyiv region

The United Nations Human Rights Council is poised to decide Thursday whether to greenlight an investigation into alleged abuses by Russian troops around the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, which could constitute war crimes.

At a special session of the council Thursday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said her team had collected evidence of hundreds of killings of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers and continues to verify allegations that “may amount to war crimes.”

“The scale of unlawful killings, including indicia of summary executions in areas to the north of Kyiv, is shocking,” Bachelet said in a video message to the council. “These killings of civilians often appeared to be intentional, carried out by snipers and soldiers.”

More than 1,000 civilian bodies have been recovered in the Kyiv region alone, she said.

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2022-05-12 12:09:40 Finland’s leaders give green light for NATO membership

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Thursday that Finland should join NATO — signaling tectonic shifts in Europe’s post-Cold War security landscape, a day after Helsinki signed a mutual security agreement with London. A green light from Finland’s leaders is the first step toward a formal application, with a proposal also requiring approval from the country’s Parliament.

“Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay,” Niinisto and Marin said in a highly anticipated statement. The leaders also said Finland joining the security alliance would be mutually beneficial.

A membership application from Finland, which has long maintained military nonalignment, would be an ironic consequence of an invasion that Russian President Vladimir Putin said he started for fear of NATO expanding to include Ukraine.

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2022-05-12 09:19:23 Here’s the latest on key battlegrounds in Ukraine.

Kharkiv region: Ukraine said Wednesday that its armed forces had recaptured the village of Pytomnyk while pushing Russian troops back in the Kharkiv region, which has seen intense fighting and aerial bombardment.

Kherson: This Russian-occupied region plans to ask President Putin to make it a part of Russia, state news agencies said Wednesday.

Mariupol: Ukraine has offered to turn over Russian prisoners in exchange for the evacuation of seriously injured fighters holed up at a steel plant here. There was no immediate response from Russia regarding the proposal and Ukraine said Wednesday that negotiations were ongoing.

Snake Island: The Ukrainian military successfully struck Russian air defenses and resupply vessels in the Black Sea with Turkish-made Bayraktar drones and continues to combat Russian forces near Snake Island, Britain’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday in an intelligence update.

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2022-05-12 00:52:49 Sanctions said to force Russia to use appliance parts in military gear

U.S.-led sanctions are forcing Russia to use computer chips from dishwashers and refrigerators in some military equipment, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday.

“We have reports from Ukrainians that when they find Russian military equipment on the ground, it’s filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators,” Raimondo told a Senate hearing, noting that she recently met with Ukraine’s prime minister.

U.S. technology exports to Russia have fallen by nearly 70 percent since sanctions began in late February, according to Raimondo, whose department oversees the export controls that form a big part of the sanctions package. Three dozen other countries have adopted similar export bans, which also apply to Belarus.

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2022-05-11 22:38:02 Ukraine regains territory, and crime scene investigators move in

TSYRKUNY, Ukraine — To get to the crime scene, the police investigators drove about 30 minutes northeast of downtown Kharkiv — past neighborhoods in ruins, destroyed Russian military vehicles, a field littered with blast craters, and plumes of dark smoke rising a few miles in the distance, where fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries was ongoing.

The Ukrainians had expelled Russian forces from the town of Tsyrkuny, less than 20 miles from the Russian border, just three days earlier — part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has reclaimed a significant swath of territory in the Kharkiv region this month.

Now the police investigators were eager to visit the village, where they had a report of two civilian bodies lying on the side of a dirt road. The women had been killed by a Russian land mine weeks earlier, the police said.

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2022-05-11 20:22:42 Russia-Ukraine gas dispute could threaten some European supply amid war

Ukraine’s national gas company, Naftogaz, said it would halt the transit of some Russian gas that runs through its borders into Europe due to challenges relating to Russia’s invasion. The move could affect a third of Russia’s gas transiting through Ukraine.

“Ukraine no longer bears responsibility for the transmission of Russian gas through Ukrainian territories under Russian military occupation,” Naftogaz said Tuesday in a statement. The company said it notified Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas supplier.

Naftogaz said Russian forces occupying parts of eastern Ukraine had made it impossible to operate in those areas or communicate with facilities that oversee gas flow from Russia into Europe via Ukraine. It said the Gas Transmission System Operator of Ukraine (GTSOU) could no longer “perform uninterrupted and effective operational and technological control” over its facilities in Russian-occupied territory.

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2022-05-11 18:59:07 Mariupol fighters — faces bruised, limbs missing — plead for rescue

With swollen faces and missing limbs, Ukrainian fighters who for weeks have been defending Mariupol’s steel plant issued a desperate plea for help, seeking escape as pro-Russian forces in the city appeared to threaten an acceleration of strikes.

The Azov Regiment, the nationalist group that is part of Ukraine’s national guard that has been defending the Azovstal plant, the last bastion of Ukraine’s defense in the shattered port city, on Tuesday shared photos of the injured fighters on its Telegram channel.

Some are pictured with lost arms, others their legs, while many sit with bandaged wounds, waiting for help that might not arrive as Russian troops continue their assault.

“The whole civilized world must see the conditions in which the wounded, crippled defenders of Mariupol are and act!” the regiment wrote in its post.

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2022-05-11 17:28:33 Congress set to approve an additional $40 billion in aid to Ukraine

Congress is poised to approve nearly $40 billion in additional military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, outstripping President Biden’s $33 billion request and extending a fresh lifeline to Kyiv as Moscow plows ahead with plans to annex vast swaths of the country’s south and east.

The House approved the proposal late Tuesday on a 368-to-57 vote, with the Senate likely to follow suit as early as this week. Passage of the measure would bring the total amount of Ukrainian aid provided by Congress since the Feb. 24 invasion to more than $53 billion.

The bill includes almost $15 billion earmarked for military equipment, training, intelligence support and Ukrainian defense force salaries. A further $14 billion would be allocated for nonmilitary support, including humanitarian aid, and another $5 billion would address global food security issues.

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2022-05-11 15:18:04 Russian soldier in Ukrainian custody will stand trial for alleged war crime, Ukraine’s prosecutor general announces

The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said it would try a 21-year-old Russian soldier who is in Ukrainian custody, the first Russian service member to stand trial in the country on a war crimes charge since the war began.

The prosecutor’s announcement accused Vadim Shishimarin of firing several shots with a Kalashnikov rifle that killed an unarmed 62-year-old resident by the side of the road in a village in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine on Feb. 28. It said investigators have collected “enough evidence of his involvement in violation of the laws and customs of war combined with premeditated murder."

“Shishimarin is actually physically in Ukraine,” Iryna Venediktova, the prosecutor general, told Ukraine’s public broadcaster. “We are starting a trial not in absentia, but rather directly with the person who killed a civilian, and this is a war crime.”

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2022-05-11 12:19:30 Putin prepared for ‘prolonged’ conflict, U.S. intelligence chief says

Russian President Vladimir Putin is prepared for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine, betting that Russia is more willing and able to endure the longer-term effects of the war than Moscow’s adversaries, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told senators on Tuesday.

But the war may grow more volatile in the next few months, she said. Both Ukraine and Russia appear confident in achieving battlefield progress, making a diplomatic path unviable. That, combined with the mismatch between Putin’s ambitions and the Russian military’s capabilities, means the war could become more “unpredictable and escalatory,” she said.

“The [intelligence community], as you know, provided warnings of President Putin’s plans” to attack Ukraine before the Kremlin’s Feb. 24 invasion, Haines told senators in her opening statement. “But this is a case where I think all of us wish we had been wrong.”

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