WAR IN UKRAINE: January 16, 2023
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 327
The death toll in that ferocious Russian missile strike on a large residential complex in Dnipro nears 36 as of this morning - with 35 still missing. At least 75 are wounded and hospitalised, including children. Dnipro mayor Borys Filatov said there was "minimal" chance of finding anyone else alive.
The ship-destroyer missile used in the Dnipro attack appears to be similar to the one used to target a Kyiv shopping center early in the war last year. An unusual trajectory helped it to evade air defence systems and air raid alarms, Reuters reported.
Russian missiles hit a building in Kherson Sunday from where the Red Cross operated
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called the missile strikes "inhuman", adding that "Russia intentionally keeps on committing war crimes against civilians" - BBC
Ukrainian forces repelled fresh Russian attacks in the east, the Ukrainian military said on January 16, as the United States announced the start of an expanded combat training program for Ukrainian forces in Germany. Russian forces targeted Ukrainian positions and civilian settlements in Luhansk and Donetsk, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in its daily report on January 16, as uncertainty continued over which side controls Soledar -- which has been shelled into mostly ruins by Russian forces. The Russian military has said it is in control of Soledar, a claim denied by Kyiv, which said that heavy fighting is continuing in and around the strategic salt-mining town in Donetsk. A Russian victory in Soledar would allow Moscow's forces to inch closer to the bigger city of Bakhmut to the south, where pitched battles have been raging for months.
The British Defense Ministry said that, as of January 15, Ukrainian forces "almost certainly maintained positions" in Soledar, where intense fighting continued over the weekend.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wants to visit the UN to address a high-level meeting of the 193-member General Assembly on the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s February 24 invasion of his country if the security situation permits - RFE/RL
The Russian strikes on Kyiv on January 14 used new S-400 missiles, reports Defense Express. The publication received a photo of the wreckage marked 48N6DM. This is reportedly a new missile for the Russian S-400 air defense system. It has a range of about 230 km - meaning from Belarus, it can target not only Kyiv, but also Zhytomyr, Rivne, Lutsk and Lviv.
Belarus, on Ukraine's northern border, is beginning joint air force drills with Russia on Monday. The Belarusian defence ministry insists they will be defensive, but there are concerns that Moscow is pressuring Minsk to join the war in Ukraine. Belarus was one of Russia's launchpads for the invasion last February - BBC
Last fall, as Ukraine won back large swaths of territory in a series of counterattacks, it pounded Russian forces with American-made artillery and rockets. Guiding some of that artillery was a homemade targeting system that Ukraine developed on the battlefield. A piece of Ukrainian-made software has turned readily available tablet computers and smartphones into sophisticated targeting tools that are now used widely across the Ukrainian military. Read more in this CNN piece here
Required reading…
As Russians Steal Ukraine’s Art, They Attack Its Identity, Too
Russian forces have looted tens of thousands of pieces, including avant-garde oil paintings and Scythian gold. Experts say it is the biggest art heist since the Nazis in World War II, intended to strip Ukraine of its cultural heritage.
Kherson. Mariupol. Melitopol. Kakhovsky. Museums of art, history and antiquities.
As Russia has ravaged Ukraine with deadly missile strikes and brutal atrocities on civilians, it has also looted the nation’s cultural institutions of some of the most important and intensely protected contributions of Ukraine and its forebears going back thousands of years.
In Kherson, in Ukraine’s south, Ukrainian prosecutors and museum administrators say the Russians stole more than 15,000 pieces of fine art and one-of-a-kind artifacts. They dragged bronze statues from parks, lifted books from a riverside scientific library, boxed up the crumbling, 200-year-old bones of Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover, and even stole a raccoon from the zoo, leaving behind a trail of vacant cages, empty pedestals and smashed glass.
Read the full New York Times report here