Eurasia note #45 - Russia Steps Up Donbas Thrust

ICBM 'Sarmat' passes latest test launch; Mariupol deadline; journalists missing

Pentagon says Ukraine has received fighter planes/parts from unnamed allies.
Says Russia has made few territorial gains in Mariupol, Izyum-Slovyansk axis.
Ukraine military say Russia increases bombardment of second city Kharkiv.
Russia says it hit 1,000 military “assets” in the past 24 hours.

U.S. sources admit they can’t track weapons given to Ukraine; may have been sold.
Russia's ex-president Medvedev: Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to mercenaries.
Hungary will not support an embargo on Russian sanctions on oil and gas supplies.
Russia tests new intercontinental missile, Sarmat - Putin says “strengthens potential.”
(1,500 words or about 7 minutes’ read.)

Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile - Russian Defense Ministry press service

Tbilisi, Apr 20, 2022 (2000 GMT)

Russian forces issued a second deadline for Ukraine forces to vacate the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol as the painstaking clearance of the city continues.

There is still little evidence to support the claim by president Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday that Russian troops had launched a second phase of the war to seize Donetsk and Luhansk.

President Zelenskiy said during his nightly address to the nation  minutes before midnight on Apr 18, they had “begun the battle for Donbas.” Instead the build up continues.

U.S. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters in Washington the Russia has 76 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) inside Ukraine, mostly in the east and southeast — that’s about 76,000 troops with air cover.

Russia increased air and missile strikes in the past 24 hours on Ukrainian command posts, artilliary firing positions — and says it destroyed six fuel depots. It follows Monday’s destruction of Western military supplies at a logistics centre near Lviv in the west of the country.

In the eastern oblast of Donetsk, ground forces exert pressure on the Izyum-Slovyansk axis towards the towns of Slavjanska and Barvenkov, according to the Pentagon.

Ukraine’s defence ministry said it had succeeded in repelling some assaults on villages in the countryside, while to the north Russians were trying to partially blockade Kharkiv.

In the south-east, Russian forces fired on Ukrainian positions in Zaporizhzhia and the Southern Bug river. That’s according to the minstry’s report of 1800 local time Apr 20.

Courtesy @War_Mapper

On Wednesday, Russia test-launched its intercontinental ballistic missile, the Sarmat, in the Plesetsk State Testing Cosmodrome, Arkhangelsk. President Vladimir Putin said it should “give thought to those who are trying to threaten Russia.”

Previously he has claimed the missile would render Western defenses “useless.”

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told Indian television on Apr 19 that the war has nothing to do with Ukraine’s independence.

“I don’t think it’s about any independence. Since 2013, and maybe even earlier, hundreds and hundreds of US, UK, and other Western security and military experts have been openly sitting in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and the Ukrainian security apparatus. They basically were running the place.”

“We managed to stop this bloodshed in February 2015 – the so-called Minsk Agreements were signed, providing Eastern Ukraine with some special status, language, the right to have some local police, special economic relations with the adjacent Russian regions. It was basically the same as [the agreement] the European Union negotiated for the north of Kosovo where Serbs live. In both cases, the European Union failed totally to deliver on what was guaranteed by the signatures of its members.” [1]

Russia claims to have killed about 1,000 our of 7, 000 foreign mercenaries it estimates to be in Ukraine. Former president Dmitry Medvedev called them “professional killers with a damaged psyche" and said the Geneva Convention offered no protection to foreign mercenaries. British legislators were told on Tuesday that 8,000 Russian mercenaries of the Wagner group had been deployed, of whom 3,000 had died.

Meanwhile, sources told CNN no-one’s sure where the anti-aircraft and battlefield munitions supplied to Ukraine end up. Western military have noted how quickly Ukraine is consuming the weaponry supplied. Sources told CNN there’s no way to track the shipments of anti-tank and other weapons. [2]

Since the days of President Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine has a record of politicians and senior military selling weaponry to third countries.

Journalists missing