Ukraine war analysis – The Milli Chronicle

Russian forces intensify shelling of Ukraine’s strategic eastern city Bakhmut

Millichronicle — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 15:51:01 +0000

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said his forces were still holding the strategic eastern town of Bakhmut despite repeated Russian attacks while the situation in the larger Donbas region remained tenuous. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

3:05pm: Russian forces intensify shelling of strategic eastern city of Bakhmut

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that Ukrainian troops were facing a “most difficult” situation near the eastern town of Bakhmut, which has been under attack from the Russian army for weeks.

Ukraine is clawing back territory in both the east and south, occupied by Russia for months, but is facing a challenge in some areas.

“A very severe situation persists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” Zelensky said, referring to two of the regions Russia claims to have annexed in staged referendums in September.

“The most difficult is near Bakhmut, like in previous days. We are still holding our positions,” he said.

Russian troops have for weeks been pummelling Bakhmut, a wine-making and salt-mining city that once had a population of 70,000.

3:05pm: Ukraine says shooting in Russian military base caused by row over religion

The gunmen who killed 11 and wounded 15 at a Russian military training camp near the Ukrainian border were from Tajikistan and had opened fire after an argument over religion, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on YouTube.

No civilians died in the attack but many soldiers were killed or wounded, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said.

2:45pm: Russia says Belgorod region bordering Ukraine hit by fresh strikes

The Russian Belgorod region bordering Ukraine was hit by strikes on Sunday, leaving at least four people injured in the latest attacks in the area, Russian officials said.

“As a result of shelling in Belgorod, three people from the same family were injured,” regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov posted on Telegram on Sunday after visiting the family. Two of them were hospitalised.

Gladkov posted photos of damage, smashed windows and craters after strikes in the city and in the region of Belgorod. Around 16 explosions were recorded in the city of Belgorod, Russia’s investigative committee, which investigates serious crimes, said Sunday.

2:14pm: Belarus says it is hosting just under 9,000 Russian troops

The defence ministry in Minsk on Sunday said just under 9,000 Russian troops would be stationed in Belarus as part of a “regional grouping” of forces to protect its borders.

“The first troop trains with Russian servicemen who are part of the (regional grouping) began to arrive in Belarus,” Valeriy Revenko, head of the defence ministry’s international military cooperation department, wrote on Twitter. “The relocation will take several days.”

“The total number will be a little less than 9,000 people.”

More information would be provided at a briefing for military attachés, he added.

1:22pm: Russia says its forces repelled Ukrainian advances in Donetsk, Kherson, Mykolaiv regions

Russia’s defence ministry on Sunday said its forces had repelled efforts by Ukrainian troops to advance in the Donetsk, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, inflicting what it described as significant losses against the enemy.

The battlefield reports could not immediately be verified.

Russia also said it was continuing air strikes on military and energy targets in Ukraine, using long-range precision-guided weapons.

11:26am: Rockets strike mayor’s office in separatist Donetsk

The mayor’s office in a key eastern Ukrainian city controlled by pro-Kremlin separatists was struck by rockets Sunday morning, Russian state agencies reported. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

According to RIA Novosti, the municipal building in Donetsk was seriously damaged by the attack, which local separatist authorities blamed on Ukraine.

Photos circulating on social media showed plumes of smoke swirling around the building, rows of blown-out windows and a partially collapsed ceiling. RIA Novosti and local media also reported that three cars parked nearby had burnt out as a result of the strike.

Kyiv didn’t immediately claim responsibility or comment on the attack.

6:59am: No civilians killed in attack at Russian military base, says local governor

No civilians were killed in the attack at a military base in Russia’s Belgorod region, but many soldiers were killed or wounded, the governor of Belgorod region Vyacheslav Gladkov said early on Sunday.

“A terrible event happened on our territory, on the territory of one of the military units,” Gladkov said in a video post on the Telegram messaging app.

“Many soldiers were killed and wounded … There are no residents of the Belgorod region among the wounded and killed.”

Gladkov did not say how many soldiers were killed. The state RIA news agency cited the defence ministry as saying that 11 people were killed and 15 others were wounded.

9:36pm: At least 11 dead, 15 wounded in shooting at Russian military training ground

At least 11 people were killed and 15 more wounded at a training ground in south-western Russia on Saturday when two attackers opened fire on a group of volunteers who wished to fight in Ukraine, the RIA news agency said.

The Russian news agency, citing the defence ministry, said the two assailants had been shot dead after the attack in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine. It said they were nationals from a former Soviet republic but did not give any details.

“During a firearms training session with individuals who voluntarily expressed a desire to participate in the special military operation (against Ukraine), the terrorists opened fire with small arms on the personnel of the unit,” RIA cited a defence ministry statement as saying. “As a result of the shooting, 11 people were fatally wounded. Another 15 people with wounds of varying severity were taken to a medical facility,” it said.

Authorities in Belgorod have repeatedly accused Ukraine of attacking targets in the city, but Kyiv has not claimed any responsibility.

Based on inputs from FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and REUTERS.

Spectre of ‘tactical’ nuclear attack risks normalising weapons of mass destruction

Millichronicle — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 20:26:30 +0000

But tactical weapons are still seen as a last resort on the battlefield – for a military facing a threat conventional weapons cannot neutralise

US President Joe Biden warned last week that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is now the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis as Russia and North Korea engage in sabre-rattling on the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons. Such weapons are less destructive than “strategic” weapons designed to wipe out entire cities. But analysts worry that this talk of tactical weapons risks normalising weapons of mass destruction.

Nuclear-armed authoritarian states are increasingly invoking the spectre of using “tactical” nuclear weapons. North Korea said on Monday that it had simulated a “tactical” nuclear attack on South Korea. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly hinted at using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine as Moscow suffers heavy losses on the battlefield.

“Until this summer, people talked about nuclear weapons without really specifying what type they were – but then people started using this word ‘tactical’ increasingly often,” said Jean-Marie Collin, spokesman for the French branch of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Battlefield Weapons

Tactical nuclear weapons differ from the more commonly known “strategic” weapons principally due to the “technicalities” of physics, noted Alexandre Vautravers, a defence analyst and editor of specialist publication the Swiss Military Review.

Whereas a nuclear ballistic missile hits hard on all front –including the force of the blast, thermal impact, radiation and electromagnetic disturbances – a tactical nuclear weapon seeks to “maximise the shock wave while minimising other undesirable effects”, Vautravers said, noting that such a weapon might be preferable if the country deploying it later “needs to get its troops across the affected area”.

Tactical nuclear weapons are also easier to transport on the battlefield than strategic missiles, which are stored in silos or specially designed submarines or planes.

Another key difference between tactical and strategic nuclear devices is the military objective of using the weapon, said Fabian Rene Hoffman, a research fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project at the University of Oslo.

In theory, the purpose of strategic weapons is to “directly target other countries to prevent them attacking, while tactical warheads are supposed to be used to aid specific battlefield objectives”, said Jana Baldus, a nuclear arms control specialist at the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt.

Tactical nuclear weapons are seen as more precise and more limited in their effects: “The explosion takes place on the ground or at a very low altitude; the objective is to destroy infrastructure or a precise target – and the effects can be limited to a radius of a few hundred metres to a few kilometres,” Vautravers explained.

But tactical weapons are still seen as a last resort on the battlefield – for a military facing a threat conventional weapons cannot neutralise, or a target too big for conventional missiles to hit. As such, they could be used to destroy a large military base or a column of tanks advancing towards the front.

Trivialising Nukes?

Nuclear weapons have not been used on the battlefield outside of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and there has since been something of an international taboo against their use.

“There’s a significant chance that people today would think of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as tactical nuclear weapons,” Baldus said.

But the “line between the tactical and strategic is really artificial”, she said. “The US and Russia have had plenty of debates about what’s ‘tactical’ and what’s ‘strategic’ – but they’ve never been able to agree.”

This ambiguity is reflected in NATO’s own definitions of nuclear forces, which vary widely by country. For France, NATO’s definition of a “strategic” nuclear weapon is linked to intention, to the “doctrine of deterrence rather than to technical characteristics”. For Russia, a strategic nuclear weapon is defined by reach – notably, weapons “designed to engage objects in geographically remote strategic regions (over 5500 km)”.

Some analysts warn that thinking of some nuclear weapons as less catastrophic than others minimises the risks to make the prospect of a “limited” nuclear deployment more tolerable.

According to Hoffman, the increasing public use of the word “tactical” has a “highly political motive, which is to legitimise the use of nuclear weapons in a conflict”.

The term produces an “unconscious bias by making people think there is a type of nuclear weapon that is more acceptable than others because its use would be limited to military objectives”, Baldus said.

This is a particularly dangerous argument because it tends to lull people into forgetting that all nuclear weapons – whether tactical or strategic – are “weapons of mass destruction”, said Collin.

And the relative power of nuclear weapons should not be underestimated, he said.

“It’s worth noting that the biggest conventional weapon in the US arsenal, known as MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb), has a destructive power equivalent to 11 tonnes of TNT whereas the least powerful of the supposedly ‘tactical’ Russian nuclear weapons has the destructive power of 300 tonnes of TNT,” Collin said.

Moreover, Russia’s fixation on tactical nuclear weapons risks setting off a new arms race. France currently has only strategic nuclear weapons. The US, meanwhile, has decommissioned its tactical arsenal in favour of conventional weapons.

But if Moscow continues invoking the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Europe, that could well push other nuclear powers to bolster their own “tactical” stockpiles. And the more weapons of mass destruction are in circulation, the greater the risk that they will eventually be used.

This article was translated from the original in French.