Ukraina: Låg bakom stor attack mot rysk flygbas

Zarnitsa är ett slags realistiskt krigsspel från Sovjettiden men som har återuppstått i dagens Ryssland som ett led i den pågående militariseringen av det ryska samhället. Tävlingarna arrangeras av organisationen ”De första”, en ungdomsrörelse som skapades 2022 på initiativ av Vladimir Putin. I videoklipp som organisationen lagt ut på sociala medier syns barn och ungdomar som lär sig skjuta med gevär, marschera i takt, köra stridsvagn och springa i skyttegravar. I år deltog 800 000 ryska skolbarn mellan 11 och 17 år i spelen som enligt arrangörerna bland annat syftar till att deltagarna ska utveckla "färdigheter som möter moderna utmaningar". Utbildas i stridsdrönare Som exempel på färdigheter nämns grundläggande militär utbildning, arbete med cyberhot och drönare. I finalen, där 600 barn och ungdomar deltog, möttes två lag och målet var att upptäcka och ”krossa” motståndaren. Bland instruktörerna fanns hundratals ryska krigsveteraner som stridit i Ukraina. – Det handlar överhuvudtaget inte om lek utan är i grunden ett stridsmöte mellan två styrkor, säger Dmitrin Tsibirev på ”Ne norma”, en aktivistgrupp som vill motverka krigspropaganda bland barn, till Radio Free Europe. Det ryska samhället blir allt mer militariserat och det är sedan länge en realitet även i skolan. Ett exempel på det är att ryska elever i årskurs 10 och 11 från och med höstterminen får lära sig att använda stridsdrönare. Granatkunskap på schemat Omkring 17 000 drönare uppges ha köpts in för ändamålet och lektionsundervisningen är en del av ämnet "Grunderna i säkerhet och skydd av fosterlandet". Förutom drönare ingår gevärshantering och granatkunskap i undervisningen. Tsibirev menar att de militära aktiviteterna i skolan under det här läsåret har ökat. Han beskriver hur elever väver kamouflagetyger på rasterna och att frågor som handlar om kriget har letat sig in i det nationella provet, som krävs för att söka vidare till högre utbildning. I Pskov-regionen ska eleverna i år dessutom få anteckningsböcker som prytts med foton på stupade soldater. – Miljön som barnen växer upp i är i dag helt militariserad. Det finns ingen idrott, ingen vetenskap, ingen kultur. Bara krig, säger han.

När ukrainska drönare en kväll i september förra året var på väg över Svarta havet för att attackera ryska mål på den annekterade Krymhalvön uppstod ett oväntat problem. Det satellitsystem, Starlink, som Ukraina använt sedan Rysslands fullskaliga invasion fungerade inte längre. Flera personer försökte få Starlinks ägare Elon Musk att slå på systemet. Men enligt Walter Isacsson, som skrivit en biografi om Musk, hade ryska ambassadörer varnat Musk för att en attack mot Krym skulle kunna leda till ett kärnvapenkrig. Av döma av senare attacker var de ryska varningarna bara tomma hot. Men Musk är långt ifrån ensam om att låta sig påverkas av den ryska skrämseltaktiken, skriver Anne Appelbaum i The Atlantic. The billionaire isn’t the only one who’s been frightened into holding back help for Ukraine. By Anne Applebaum September 11, 2023 One evening in September 2022, a group of Ukrainian sea drones sped out into the Black Sea, heading for Russian-occupied Crimea. Their designers—engineers who had been doing other things until the current war began—had carefully targeted the fast, remote-controlled, explosive-packed vessels to hit ships anchored in Sebastopol, the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. But the drones ran into a problem: Starlink, the satellite-communications system that Ukraine had been using since Russia invaded early last year, unexpectedly wasn’t working. This was a surprise to the engineers. Several people, in Ukraine and elsewhere, frantically called and texted Elon Musk, the owner of Starlink, to persuade him to enable the system. Musk, in turn, called Walter Isaacson, his biographer, and told him there was a “non-trivial possibility” that the sea-drone attack could lead to a nuclear war. According to Isaacson, Musk had recently spoken with Russia’s ambassador in Washington, who had warned him explicitly that any attack on Crimea would lead to nuclear conflict. Musk implied to several other people (though he later denied it) that he had been speaking with President Vladimir Putin around that time as well. These are details that you may have already heard. Many of them were first reported in May, by Oliver Carroll at The Economist. Since then, The New Yorker has also described how Ukrainian soldiers abruptly lost their access to Starlink on the battlefield during a different set of land operations. Isaacson’s version of the maritime story implies that all of the drones in the operation washed ashore that evening. But recently in Ukraine, I met some of the engineers who helped design the unmanned sea vehicles, including an engineer who was involved in the first attempt to hit Russian ships in Sebastopol. They told me that not all of the drones involved were lost. Some returned back to base, undamaged. Here is the part you might not have heard, or not registered: The same team launched a similar attack again a few weeks later. On October 29, a fleet of guided sea drones packed with explosives did reach Sebastopol harbor, using a different communications system. They did hit their targets. They put one Russian frigate, the Admiral Makarov, out of commission. The team believes that they damaged at least one submarine and at least two other boats as well. And then? Nuclear war did not follow. Despite Musk’s fears, in other words—fears put into his head by the Russian ambassador, or perhaps by Putin himself—World War III did not erupt as a result of this successful attack on a Crimean port. Instead, the Russian naval commanders were spooked by the attack, so much so that they stuck close to Sebastopol harbor over the following weeks. For their own security, I am choosing not to publish the names of the engineers. I was introduced to them by a tech executive I met on a previous trip to Ukraine, when I was writing about drone operations more broadly. This team has shown off its unmanned boats before, so I am not revealing secrets when I write that they are small, black, and hard to see on the water, and have a very long range—now more than 650 miles, the engineers told me. The drones are constantly reinvented and redesigned. Some of those I saw were described as the “fifth generation.” I was given remote control of one on a distant body of water; directing it felt remarkably like playing a video game. Like the more famous air drones, sea drones are a central important part of Ukraine’s idiosyncratic way of waging war. Unable to compete plane for plane or ship for ship against the much larger Russian military, Ukraine is using tiny, high-tech, custom-designed, and relatively cheap devices that can take large, expensive artillery, tanks, and ships out of the game. Many of these devices are built by groups that are not quite part of the military, but not exactly private either. This networked, grassroots, asymmetric response is part of how the Ukrainians hope to win the war. “This is Ukraine. We are hybrid,” one of the engineers told me. He also told me that although his drones didn’t destroy the whole Black Sea fleet, they have had an impact on the war. Russian military ships became more cautious. Instead of physically blocking Ukrainian grain transports, as some observers expected them to do, they have stayed in port. “We made them scared,” he told me. They were happy to confirm that if a Russian warship does try to block a cargo ship carrying Ukrainian grain, they will hit it. Musk was wrong, in other words. Instead of inspiring World War III, the sea-drone attack helped reduce violence, protected commerce, boosted Ukrainian farmers, and maybe even ensured that some people outside Ukraine didn’t go hungry. If not for Musk’s hubris, those effects might have been felt earlier. Maybe the first attack could have eliminated more of the ships whose missiles have been killing civilians in Ukrainian cities. Maybe fewer people would have died as a result. And maybe the war, which will be over when Ukraine takes back its own territory, and ends the torment of its own citizens on that territory, would be closer to its end. This is a cautionary tale about the arrogance of a billionaire who has come to play a mercurial role in U.S. foreign policy. But it’s also a story about fear, seeded and promoted by the Russians, deliberately designed to shape broader Western perceptions of this war. Musk is not alone: Many people in Washington, and in Berlin, Brussels, and other European capitals, including people who support Ukrainian sovereignty and who want Ukraine to win the war, have also been cowed by conversations with Russian ambassadors, by threats issued by Russian leaders, and by the pictures of nuclear explosions shown on Russian state television. Long before he spoke with any real Russians, Musk likely encountered that same propaganda in the Russian-influenced far-right echo chambers that he frequents. In 2016, Donald Trump probably got the idea to accuse Hillary Clinton of wanting to start World War III in that same social-media milieu. The Russians do this for a reason: Fear of escalation is designed to create self-deterrence—and it works. In 2014, Western leaders, fearing escalation, advised Ukraine not to fight back when Russia invaded Crimea. This advice led to misery for the people arrested, imprisoned, and chased away from the peninsula. It also persuaded the Russians to continue their invasion of eastern Ukraine. They stopped only when the Ukrainians fought back. From 2014 to 2022, the United States and European nations, fearing they might provoke Russia attack, limited or banned weapons sales to Ukraine. This, too, proved to be a terrible, consequential mistake: Had the Russians actually been afraid of the Ukrainian army, they might never have launched the full-scale invasion at all. Even when the full-scale invasion began last year, amorphous fear of Russian reaction again persuaded Americans and Europeans to hold back on long-range weapons to Ukraine, partly because we feared what could happen if they were used to hit Russian targets. But then the Ukrainians used their own weapons to hit Russian targets, first in the border region, then in Moscow, Pskov, and other cities. Nuclear war did not break out then either. I could repeat the same story for just about every significant class of weapons. Fear of escalation meant that some nations, notably Germany and the United States, did not give Ukraine the tanks that it needed to go on the offensive and take back its territory. Fear of escalation also meant that Ukrainians did not receive F-16s in time to help with this summer’s counteroffensive. Fear of escalation meant that we have refused to give the Ukrainians a long-range ballistic-missile system known as ATACMS. Now the tanks are on the ground, the F-16 pilot training has begun, and the Biden administration reportedly may be planning to give Ukraine ATACMS. Each of the delays wasted time. And time has cost lives—maybe tens of thousands of lives. I was in Ukraine exactly a year ago, on the weekend that Ukrainian troops took back the northern cities of Izyum and Kupiansk. A few weeks later, the Ukrainians took back the city of Kherson. At the time, they had momentum. A year later, the euphoria is gone, and no wonder: That momentum was lost. After taking Kherson, Ukrainian forces did not have the weaponry to move farther forward. They did not try to advance again until June of this year. By that time, Russians had created hundreds of kilometers of minefields, some of the most extensive minefields any army has ever tried to cross, as well as a system of tank traps and trenches that has slowed Ukraine’s counteroffensive and, again, led to the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. Think about what the world might look like if Putin’s nuclear threats had not influenced our imaginations so profoundly. If Musk had not been spooked by Russian propaganda, then some of Russia’s fleet might have been disabled a month earlier. If Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin had not been spooked by Russian propaganda, then the Ukrainians might have expelled the Russians earlier, and the war might be over. Death, horror, and terror have been the result every time outsiders hesitated to aid Ukraine. There is always a “non-trivial possibility,” to borrow Musk’s term, that the Russians will use nuclear weapons; there was also a nonzero possibility that Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear-bomb test would blow up the planet. But if we want to deter the Russians from using their nuclear weapons, we have other ways to do it. Our own nuclear weapons, and our own superior conventional forces, are powerful deterrents: Most analysts think they explain why Russia has not deliberately hit any targets on NATO territory. Heavy hints from China and India that nuclear escalation would be a terrible mistake, as well as statements about the unacceptability of nuclear war from the G20, the United Nations, and others help, too. Ukrainian attacks—especially unexpected, asymmetric attacks, like those from sea drones—are also a form of deterrence. So is our continued commitment to Ukraine. Every time we announce another weapons shipment, or the European Union makes another financial pledge, or President Joe Biden makes another statement of support, then the Russians know that the price of occupation, and of any escalation, is growing higher. Resistance doesn’t provoke Putin; weakness does. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

”Ingen kommer levande härifrån”, sjöng Jim Morrisson innan han dog vid 27 års ålder. Och kanske är det just påminnelsen om det som får oss att sörja öppet när kändisar vi aldrig träffat dör, resonerar The Economist. Men det finns fler förklaringar till fenomenet. När uppskattade artister dör blir det också ett tillfälle and samlas runt minnena av deras verk tillsammans med andra beundrare. ”Artistens avskedsgåva blir att ge oss en sorgesam högtid, som ett avbrott i vardagens slit och släp.” What we talk about when we talk about dead artists By The Economist 3 September, 2023 After Alexander Pushkin was shot in a duel in 1837, crowds of mourners formed in St Petersburg. Russia’s nervy authorities moved his funeral service and mustered 60,000 troops. When the wagon bearing the poet’s body reached Pskov province, where he was to be interred, devotees tried to unharness the horses and pull it themselves. The death of Rudolph Valentino, a silent-movie idol, in 1926 set off similarly fervid lamentation. Mounted police restrained the fans who mobbed the funeral parlour in New York where he lay on view (several reportedly killed themselves). In 1975 some of the millions of Egyptians who paid their respects to Um Kalthoum, a megastar singer, took hold of her coffin and shouldered it for hours through the streets of Cairo. Today’s celebrity obsequies tend to be less fanatical, and largely digital rather than in-person. But they are passionate all the same. In the past few months, grief has coursed around the internet for Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, Tina Turner and, most recently, Jimmy Buffett. If you stop to think about it, many such outpourings for writers, actors and musicians are odd, even irrational. Unlike other kinds of grief, this one does not stem from personal intimacy. If you ever interacted with a cherished author, it was probably during a book tour when, caffeinated to the eyeballs, she signed your copy of her novel and misspelled your name. Maybe you delude yourself that you once locked eyes with a frontman hero during a gig and that he smiled only for you. But you didn’t really know them, and they certainly didn’t know you. Nor would you always have liked them if you had. Their books or songs may be touching and wise, but (in the parlance of criticism) it is a biographical fallacy to assume that the work reflects an artist’s life or beliefs. Your favourites may indeed have been lovely people; or perhaps, beneath their curated images, they were spiky money-grubbers, consumed by rivalry or solipsists who drove their families nuts. Rarely do you know for sure. Though the artists are gone, meanwhile, the art you prize is not. Death does not delete it—on the contrary, curiosity and nostalgia often drive up sales. (David Bowie’s only number-one album in America was “Blackstar”, released days before he died in 2016.) The dead, it is true, write no more books and record no songs. Philip Roth will never set a novel in the era of Donald Trump; you will never hear another operatic Meat Loaf ballad. The cold reality, however, is that many artists’ best work was done long before their demise. The sorrow makes more sense when a star dies young or violently. Had she not perished at 27, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who knows what music Amy Winehouse would have added to her small, exquisite oeuvre? Sinéad O’Connor, another casualty of 2023, lived a troubled life that ended too soon. Buddy Holly (killed in a plane crash), Amedeo Modigliani (dead of tubercular meningitis at 35), Wilfred Owen (slain in action a week before the armistice in 1918): such premature and cruel exits are tragic. Objectively, though, the death of a long-lived and fulfilled artist is far from the saddest item in an average day’s headlines. And whereas most mortals sink into oblivion, laureates live on in their output, which Horace, a Roman poet, called a “monument more lasting than bronze”. The standard reasons for mourning don’t apply. Why, then, are these losses felt so widely and keenly? One interpretation is that the departed celebrities are merely the messengers. The real news is death itself, which comes for everyone, immortal or impervious as some may seem. If the reaper calls for Prince, with all his talent and verve, he will certainly knock for you. As Jim Morrison sang before he, too, died at 27: “No one here gets out alive.” Part of your past—the years in which the mute musician was the soundtrack, the silenced writer your ally—can seem to fade away with them. Just as plausibly, the grief can be seen as a transmuted form of gratitude for the solidarity and joy they supplied. On your behalf, they undertook to make sense of the world and distil beauty from the muck of life. Yet as much as anything else, the passing of an artist is an occasion for communion. In an atomised age, in which the default tone is abrasive, a beloved figure’s death is a chance to share benign feelings and memories with fellow admirers. Like water-cooler moments in a cemetery, these sombre holidays from spite and strife are the artists’ parting gifts. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Ryska trupper har börjat täcka vissa av sina flygplan i bildäck. Enligt experter kan det vara ett försök att skydda farkosterna mot det ökande antalet ukrainska drönarattacker. Satellitbilder från den militära flygbasen Engels-2, djupt inne i Ryssland, visar hur två strategiska bombplan av modell Tu-95 utrustats med flertalet bildäck. CNN har inte lyckats bekräfta varför däcken placerats på flygplanen. Enligt experter kan det handla om att göra dem mer svårupptäckta – eller som ett skydd mot drönarattacker. – Även om det verkar ganska fånigt, så tycks de göra vad de kan för att skydda sina flygplan som annars är öppna måltavlor, säger Steffan Watkins, forskningskonsult inom flygplan och fartyg, till CNN. – Huruvida det fungerar beror på vilken typ av stridsspets missilen/drönaren utrustats med, säger han. Natokälla bekräftar En källa inom Nato bekräftar att de känner till den ryska däcktaktiken. Även inom försvarsalliansen tror man att däcken ska agera skydd mot drönare. – Vi tror att det är ett försök att skapa skydd mot drönarattacker, säger källan men tillägger: – Vi vet inte om det har någon effekt. Förra veckan attackerade sex ryska regioner, inklusive Moskva, i det största drönarangreppet mot ryskt territorium sedan de inledde sitt anfallskrig i Ukraina. I staden Pskov, nära den estniska gränsen, kom då rapporter om att ett flertal transportflygplan ska ha skadats av drönarattacker mot stadens flygplats.

Drönarna som Ukraina använde i attacken mot en flygbas i ryska Pskov i veckan skickades från ryskt territorium, uppger Kyrylo Budanov, chef för den ukrainska underrättelsetjänsten, enligt flera medier. Enligt Budanov träffades fyra transportplan, varav två förstördes och två skadades. Ryssland har tidigare uppgett att fyra plan skadats. Kreml vill inte kommentera uppgifterna om varifrån attacken startade, men har sagt att det ska utredas. Pskov ligger över 60 mil från den ukrainska gränsen och attacken beskrivs som en av de största på rysk mark sedan den storskaliga invasionen inleddes, skriver Wall Street Journal.

Det kan aldrig bli en ”hållbar fred” med Ryssland om inte Ukraina återfår kontrollen över Krym, Donbas och andra ockuperade områden, säger ukrainske presidenten Volodymyr Zelenskyj på fredagsmorgonen under ett besök i Italien. Det rapporterar Reuters. Tidigare under natten ska Zelenskyj ha kommenterat de senaste dagarnas ukrainska drönarattacker mot Ryssland. Enligt ryska uppgifter ska två drönarattacker under torsdagen och fredagen mot Moskva ha avvärjts. Men en stor attack på onsdagen orsakade stora skador på en flygbas i staden Pskov, i vilken flera transportplan förstördes. – Det är resultatet av våra nya vapen, på 700 kilometers avstånd, sa presidenten i en nattlig uppdatering enligt The Independent, son kallar uttalandet för sällsynt. – Och det kommer mer, fortsatte han.

Under natten mot onsdag blev sex regioner i Ryssland utsatta för drönarattacker, något som beskrivs som den största attacken på rysk mark sedan invasionen av Ukraina började. Flera explosioner ska ha hörts vid flygplatsen i Pskov i västra Ryssland, ungefär fem mil från Estlands gräns. Ryska medier rapporterade att fyra militära transportflyg skadades i attacken. Flera drönarattacker i Ryssland Under de senaste veckorna har mycket pekat på att Ukraina har ökat sin användning av explosiva drönare för att attackera mål i Ryssland, skriver BBC. Det här verkar även den ryska programledaren Vladimir Solovyov ha noterat när han i rysk stats-tv gav sken av att ifrågasätta Rysslands förmåga att försvara landet. – Vad är det som händer? Är vi inte medvetna om var de (drönarna) tillverkas, levereras eller lagras?, frågar sig Vladimir Solovyov i tv-rutan, innan han fortsätter: – Om vi inte kan hantera drönarna, hur ska vi då hantera F-16? ”Kan inte hålla tillbaka sin ilska” BBC-journalisten Francis Scarr som bevakar rysk stats-tv delade klippet på X, tidigare Twitter, med engelsk undertext. ”Det ryska försvarsministeriet ignorerade Pskov-attackerna i sin uppdatering i morse men Vladimir Solovyov kan inte hålla tillbaka sin ilska”, skriver Francis Scarr på X. Uttalandet från Vladimir Solovyov kommer efter att Nederländerna och Danmark tidigare under månaden meddelade att de skickar stridsflygplan av modellen F-16 till Ukraina. Några dagar senare hakade även Norge på i samband med att statsministern Jonas Gahr Støre besökte Kiev. Programledaren Vladimir Solovyov har beskrivits som en del av det ryska propagandamaskineriet, och har tidigare bland annat förordat användandet av kärnvapen mot Ukraina.

Rysslands enorma, svårskyddade areal och specialbyggda drönare med jetmotorer kan ha legat bakom att Ukraina nådde ända till flygbasen Pskov nära gränsen mot Estland. – Man slog ut fyra transportplan, säger militärexperten Jörgen Elfving.

Ett antal explosioner uppges ha hörts vid flygplatsen i staden Pskov i västra Ryssland, som ligger omkring fem mil från gränsen till Estland. Det rapporterar BBC Russia med hänvisning till "flera ryska källor". Michail Vedernikov, guvernör i Pskov, uppger på meddelandetjänsten Telegram att flygplatsen i Pskov ska ha attackerats av drönare. Han hävdar också att attacken avvärjts av rysk militär. Uppgifterna har inte bekräftats av oberoende källor. Enligt den ryska statliga nyhetsbyrån Tass, som citerar räddningstjänsten, ska fyra militära transportflygplan av typen Il-76 ha skadats vid den påstådda attacken. Luftrummet över Vnukovos internationella flygplats utanför Moskva ska också ha stängts tillfälligt, uppger Tass. Anklagar Ukraina Ryssland anklagar Ukraina för drönarattacker i sex ryska regioner, inklusive Pskov, under natten mot onsdagen. De övriga drönarattackerna påstås ha skett i regionerna Bryansk, Oryol region, Ryazan, Kaluga och Moskva. Samtidigt hävdar det ryska försvarsdepartementet under natten till onsdagen att landets militär har attackerat och tillintetgjort fyra ukrainska militärbåtar i Svarta havet med upp till 50 soldater ombord. Uppgifterna har inte kommenterats av Ukraina och har inte heller bekräftats av oberoende källor. Dessutom inträffade flera explosioner runt om i Kiev under onsdagsmorgonen, uppger stadens borgmästare Vitalij Klitsjko. Minst två personer ska ha dött.