WAR IN UKRAINE: March 13, 2023

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 383

  • The Ukrainian military asserted on March 12 that the Russian side lost more than 1,000 troops in 24 hours as Moscow's push for the eastern city of Bakhmut continued.

  • Russia's Foreign Ministry said on March 12 that the country's representatives had not yet taken part in negotiations on extending the Black Sea grain deal - RFE/RL

  • Russia is trying to buy “anything, anywhere”—including from countries like Myanmar to get weapons for its invasion of Ukraine - the head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence Kyrylo Budanov told VOA. He said, “There are certain efforts to buy through third countries. Large-scale withdrawal of weapons. Now they are trying with Myanmar.” My analysis: not surprising given the closeness of the corrupt Myanmar generals to Beijing and Moscow

  • A group of Russian wives and mothers have called on President Vladimir Putin to stop sending their husbands and sons “to the slaughter” by forcing them to join assault groups without adequate training or supplies. In a video shared by the independent Russian Telegram channel SOTA, the women said their loved ones had been “forced to join assault groups” at the beginning of March despite having just four days training since their mobilization in September - CNN

  • Anti-government protests took place in Chisinau, Moldova on Sunday - organized by the pro-Russian political party Shor. Marina Tauber of Shor has been highly visible today. Numbers appeared large but many elderly people, apparently bused in. Chants of “Down with Maia Sandu!” and “Down with dictatorship” were heard. The chief of the National Police alleges mass riots were planned. Some media reported that a member of the Russian mercenary organization, Wagner Group, was stopped at the airport & deported.

  • Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed that there is infighting in the Kremlin inner circle, that the Kremlin has ceded centralized control over the Russian information space, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently cannot readily fix it. During a panel discussion Zakharova stated that the Kremlin cannot replicate the Stalinist approach of establishing a modern equivalent to the Soviet Information Bureau to centrally control Russia’s internal information space due to fighting among unspecified Kremlin “elites. Zakharova’s statement is noteworthy and supports several longstanding assessments about deteriorating Kremlin regime and information space control dynamics. The statement supports several assessments: that there is Kremlin infighting between key members of Putin’s inner circle; that Putin has largely ceded the Russian information space over time to a variety of quasi-independent actors; and that Putin is apparently unable to take decisive action to regain control over the Russian information space. It is unclear why Zakharova — a seasoned senior spokesperson — would have openly acknowledged these problems in a public setting. Zakharova may have directly discussed these problems for the first time to temper Russian nationalist milbloggers’ expectations regarding the current capabilities of the Kremlin to cohere around a unified narrative — or possibly even a unified policy - ISW


Required reading…

‘Little fissures’: The U.S.-Ukraine war unity is slowly cracking apart

A tough week for U.S.-Ukraine news reveals an imperfect harmony.

Publicly, there has been little separation between Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an alliance on full display last month when the American president made his covert, dramatic visit to Kyiv. But based on conversations with 10 officials, lawmakers and experts, new points of tension are emerging: The sabotage of a natural gas pipeline on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; the brutal, draining defense of a strategically unimportant Ukrainian city; and a plan to fight for a region where Russian forces have been entrenched for nearly a decade.

Senior administration officials maintain that unity between Washington and Kyiv is tight. But the fractures that have appeared are making it harder to credibly claim there’s little daylight between the U.S. and Ukraine as sunbeams streak through the cracks.

Read the full Politico article here