Explained: Ruins of Mariupol port could become Russia’s first big prize in Ukraine

Explained: Ruins of Mariupol port could become Russia’s first big prize in Ukraine

The Sea of Azov port of Mariupol, reduced to a wasteland by seven weeks of siege and bombardment that Ukraine says killed tens of thousands of civilians, could become the first big city captured by Russia since its invasion.
Russia said on Wednesday more than 1,000 Ukrainian marines, among the last defenders holed up in the Azovstal industrial district, had surrendered, though Ukraine did not confirm that.
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Here is why the city’s capture would be important.
STRATEGIC LOCATION
Mariupol, home to more than 400,000 people before the war, is the biggest Ukrainian city on the Sea of Azov and the main port serving the industries and agriculture of eastern Ukraine. It is also the site of some of Ukraine’s biggest metals plants.
On the eve of the war, it was the biggest city still held by Ukrainian authorities in the two eastern provinces known as the Donbas, which Moscow has demanded Ukraine cede to pro-Russian separatists.

Its capture would give Russia full control of the Sea of Azov coast, and a secure overland bridge linking mainland Russia and pro-Russian separatist territory in the east with the Crimea peninsula that Moscow seized and annexed in 2014.
It would unite Russian forces on two of the main axes of the invasion, and free them up to join an expected new offensive against the main Ukrainian force in the east.
Prominent among the Ukrainian forces that have defended Mariupol is the Azov Regiment, a militia with far right origins incorporated into Ukraine’s national guard. Russia has portrayed destroying that group as one of its main war aims.
HUMANITARIAN IMPACT
The siege of Mariupol has been the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the conflict, described by Kyiv as a war crime. Ukrainian officials say at least 20,000 civilians were killed there by Russian forces employing tactics of mass destruction used in earlier campaigns in Syria and Chechnya.
International organisations such as the Red Cross and the United Nations say they believe thousands died but the extent of suffering cannot be assessed yet because the city has been cut off.
Ukrainian officials have said around a third of the population escaped before the siege, a similar number got out during it, while around 160,000 were trapped inside. They sheltered for weeks in cellars with no power or heat, or access to outside shipments of food, water or medicine.

Daily attempts to send convoys to bring in aid and evacuate civilians failed throughout the siege, with Ukraine blaming Russia for looting shipments and refusing to let buses pass through the blockade. Moscow said Ukraine was to blame for failing to observe ceasefires.
Bodies have been buried in mass graves or makeshift graves in gardens. Ukraine says Russia has brought in mobile crematorium trucks to burn bodies and destroy evidence of killings.
Among the major incidents that drew international outcry was the bombing of a maternity hospital on March 9, when wounded pregnant women were photographed being carried out of rubble. A week later, the city’s main drama theatre was destroyed. Ukraine says hundreds of people were sheltering in its basement, and it has not been able to determine how many were killed. The word “children” had been spelled out on the street in front of the building, visible from space.
Russia denies targeting civilians in Mariupol and has said, without presenting evidence, that incidents including the theatre bombing and maternity hospital attack were staged. Kyiv and its Western allies dismiss this as a smear to deflect blame.
Ukraine says Russia forcibly deported thousands of Mariupol residents to Russia, including some unaccompanied children it views as having been kidnapped. Moscow denies this and says it has taken in refugees.
WHAT NEXT?
Western countries believe Russia’s initial war aim was to quickly topple the government in Kyiv, but Moscow has had to abandon that goal after armoured columns bearing down on the capital were repelled. Russia withdrew from northern Ukraine at the start of April and has said its focus is now on the areas claimed by the separatists in the east.
 

In recent days, a new Russian column has been moving into eastern Ukraine near the town of Izyum to the north of the Donbas. The fall of Mariupol could free up Russian troops in the south of the Donbas to mount an assault on Ukrainian forces from two directions.
Claiming its first big prize in eastern Ukraine could also give Russia a stronger position to negotiate at any peace talks.

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Explained: Who are Vladimir Putin’s daughters facing US sanctions over Ukraine war?

Explained: Who are Vladimir Putin’s daughters facing US sanctions over Ukraine war?

The United States and its allies have imposed sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s two daughters as the West looks to penalise Moscow for the killing of Ukrainian civilians.
Justifying the decision, a US official said: “We believe that many of Putin’s assets are hidden with family members, and that’s why we’re targeting them.”
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The European Union is also expected to follow suit as it discusses imposition of fresh sanctions against Russia among its 27 members. The EU sanctions, expected to take effect by Friday, would entail a freeze of any assets held in the bloc and a ban on traveling to member countries.
The moves come after reports of alleged atrocities that Ukrainian officials say were committed by Russian troops. Moscow has, however, denied any responsibility.

As the spotlight now shines upon a family shrouded in secrecy for years, we take a look at who Putin’s daughters are.
The family
Putin has two children, Maria and Katerina, from his marriage to Lyudmila Putina, a former Aeroflot steward whom he divorced in 2013, becoming the first Russian leader to divorce since Peter the Great in 1698. According to the Kremlin’s website, Putin and his wife had Maria before leaving for Germany in 1985, where he was based as a KGB officer. Katerina was born in 1986 in the German city of Dresden.
They were named after their maternal and paternal grandmothers — Maria Ivanovna Putina and Katerina Tikhonovna Shkrebneva, according to the Kremlin biography. “According to their mother, Lyudmila, Putin loves his daughters very much,” the biography said. Putin “always spoiled them, and I had to educate them,” she is cited as saying.

Putin, who has very rarely spoken publicly about his children, responded to questions at his annual press conference in 2015, saying his daughters had not fled the country, as had been speculated.
“They live in Russia. They have never been educated anywhere except Russia. I am proud of them; they continue to study and are working,” he had said. “My daughters speak three European languages fluently. I never discuss my family with anyone. They have never been ‘star’ children, they have never got pleasure from the spotlight being directed on them. They just live their own lives.”
Putin had also added that his daughters were “taking the first steps in their careers”, and were “not involved in business or politics”. However, both daughters have since launched business ventures.

The two have been kept so far from the public view that even the Kremlin has only ever identified them by their first names.
Katerina, who uses the surname of her maternal grandmother, studied at St Petersburg State University and Moscow State University and has a master’s degree in physics and mathematics. The more famous of the two daughters, Katerina, in 2013, came fifth in the world dancing championships in Switzerland. It was footage from her dance competitions that helped people identify her as Putin’s daughter.
Married to Kirill Shamalov, the younger son of Nikolai Shamalov, a close confidant of Putin and co-owner of Rossiya Bank, the two, according to an investigation by the Reuters in 2015, have corporate holdings worth more than $2 billion, as well as a luxury £4m beachfront villa in the French resort of Biarritz. Krill is already facing sanctions by the United Kingdom.
According to the Reuters report, Katerina, now, is the deputy director of the Institute for Mathematical Research of Complex Systems at Moscow State University. A Guardian report states that she also heads the $1.7 billion “artificial intelligence issues and intellectual systems” institute at the university.
Putin’s elder daughter Maria Vorontsova, 36, is a paediatric endocrinologist, studying the effects of hormones on the body. She co-wrote a book on stunted growth in children, and is listed as a researcher at the Endocrinology Research Centre in Moscow. She’s also a businesswoman with پراکسی Russia identifying her as co-owner of a company planning to build a massive medical centre.

In 2013, Maria married Russian-born Dutch businessman Jorrit Faassen, and the couple lived in the penthouse of an exclusive Amsterdam apartment building. In 2014, some Dutch neighbours called for her to be expelled from the country after the downing of MH17 by pro-Russian forces over Ukraine.
Recently a group from Amsterdam had appealed to Maria to plead with her father to end the invasion of Ukraine. A sign placed on land owned by the couple read: “Less than 2,000km from your peaceful piece of free land, your father is decimating an entire free country and its people. It seems your old man is hard to reach and clearly impossible to stop by even his hangmen. But as we all know, fathers and daughters are a different story.”
Why the secrecy?
Putin’s two daughters have kept such a low profile that even the Russians do not know what they look like.
During a press conference in 2019, Putin declined to directly answer a question about his daughters’ growing business clout and their ties to the government. He referred to Maria and Katerina as “women”, never acknowledging them as his children. “I am proud of them. They continue to study and they work,” Putin had said. “They are not involved in any business activity and they are not involved in politics. They are not trying to push their way anywhere,” he added.

Opening up about his family a bit, Putin, in an interview with the Russian state news agency TASS, had acknowledged that he enjoys communicating with his grandchildren but doesn’t like to be open about his family for security reasons. “I have grandchildren, I am happy. They are very good, sweet, like that,” Putin told TASS. “I get great pleasure from communicating with them.”
What brought the spotlight upon them?
Maria and Katerina, who have been off the radar for most of their lives, had the spotlight on themselves after their names featured on America’s new list of sanctions.
“We have reason to believe that Putin, and many of his cronies, and the oligarchs, hide their wealth, hide their assets, with family members that place their assets and their wealth in the U.S. financial system, and also many other parts of the world,” a senior US administration official told reporters, according to news agency Reuters.
 

“We believe that many of Putin’s assets are hidden with family members, and that’s why we’re targeting them,” the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The sanctions’ list also includes the daughter and wife of Russian foreign affairs minister Sergei Lavrov. The US also banned Americans from investing in Russia, and targeted Russian financial institutions and Kremlin officials, in response to what President Joe Biden condemned as Russian “atrocities” in Ukraine.

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Explained: Why Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal

Explained: Why Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal

On March 1, Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told the Conference of Disarmament in Geneva (which he attended virtually due to restrictions on air space) that “the threat that the (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy regime (in Ukraine) poses to neighbouring countries and international security in general have increased significantly after the Kyiv authorities started dangerous games involving plans to obtain their own nuclear weapons”.
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From the beginning, Russia has sought to justify its invasion of Ukraine on grounds of the alleged nuclear threat from its smaller neighbour to the west. Lavrov said to the conference that the “irresponsible” statements had to be taken seriously because “Ukraine possesses Soviet nuclear technology and means of delivering these weapons”.
And as a “responsible member” of the international community, he said, Russia “is committed to its non-proliferation pledge, and is taking every necessary measure to prevent the emergence of nuclear weapons and related technology in Ukraine”.
In Ukraine, the nuclear question is playing out very differently. Under an international agreement, and supervised by Russia and the United States, Ukraine had de-nuclearised completely between 1996 and 2001. Now, with invading Russian forces inside its borders, many Ukrainians are wondering whether it had been a mistake to de-nuclearise, and whether having nuclear weapons could have worked to deter Russia’s aggression against their country.

This is based on the arguable underlying assumption that countries that possess nuclear weapons rarely go to war against each other, deterred by the prospect of mutually assured destruction. Ukraine’s decision to give up nuclear weapons followed three years of national deliberations and with the US and Russia, and hefty security assurances by the three original Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) powers — the US, Russia, and UK — and by France and China, too. This was buttressed by promises of non-expansion by NATO to assuage Russian concerns.
For more than two decades, Ukraine was seen as a model of non-proliferation, and an example of an ideal NPT signatory, at a time when India and Pakistan went nuclear, and the A Q Khan proliferation network put Pakistan at the centre of the scandal.

At the end of the Cold War, Ukraine’s choices
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Ukraine set out on the path to independence from the crumbling Soviet Union. Its 1990 Declaration of Sovereignty, passed a year before the USSR broke up, contained an explicit political declaration that it wanted to be a non-nuclear, nuclear weapons-free state.
The Ukrainian republic, one of the 15 in the erstwhile USSR, was at the time just emerging from the Chernobyl disaster (1986). The command and control of the nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil was in Moscow. Ukrainian leaders of the time feared this could place restrictions on their freedom.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union, however, the mood changed in Ukraine. It now believed that giving up the nukes was no longer necessary for its freedom. At the time, Ukraine had 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), of which 130 were liquid fuel SS-19s, and 46 were solid fuel SS-24s. In addition, it had 44 cruise missile-armed strategic bombers. Its warhead inventory was nearly 2,000 — in addition, it had 2,600 tactical nuclear weapons.

But the question then turned to who owned these weapons — Russia, as the main successor state of the Soviet Union, or Ukraine or Belarus or Kazakhstan, where this former Soviet arsenal was stationed. Their deterrence value was also in question, given the long range of the ICBMs, and the knowhow and the finances that would be needed to maintain and replace the arsenal at end of their life.
Retaining the weapons would additionally mean that Ukraine would be a nuclear state outside the NPT. (Other than the P5 countries, other signatories have to be non-nuclear states, or must give up nuclear weapons). Ukraine, which desired to be part of Europe, did not want to embark on its new journey with sanctions and isolation on the continent.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrive for a working session at the Elysee Palace. (AP/File)
The assurance of 1994 in Budapest
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurance, signed on December 5, 1994, sealed Ukraine’s membership in the NPT and its status as a non-nuclear country in return for security assurances. The signatories were the presidents of Ukraine (Leonid Kuchma), the US (Bill Clinton), Russia (Boris Yeltsin), and the British Prime Minister (John Major). Later, China and France, who became NPT members in 1992, also became signatories.
The Budapest Memorandum came after the Lisbon Protocol of 1992, which made Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan parties to the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), a 1991 treaty signed by the US and the Soviet Union to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on each side.
The Budapest document committed the powers to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and the “obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”. It also committed them to not using their weapons against Ukraine “except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations”.
The powers also said they would “seek immediate UNSC action to provide assistance to Ukraine” if it was threatened or attacked with nuclear weapons, and would consult in the event such a situation arose. However, it has been pointed out that this was an assurance, but not a security guarantee.

Ukraine won a political victory by the implicit recognition that it was the owner of the nuclear weapons on its soil. In 1996, within two years of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine handed over all the nuclear weapons on its soil to Russia. Ukraine also managed to strike tough bargains — Russia compensated its neighbour with a payout of 1 billion dollars, and the US paid a massive sum to buy Ukraine’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
Although Ukraine continued to have concerns that Russia was not fully reconciled to the new international boundary, the agreement held for over two decades, even as Russia expressed concerns over NATO’s expansion. Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president at the end of 1999, first expressed this concern at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, accusing NATO of pushing the envelope to incorporate former states and satellites of the Soviet Union and lighting into the US, accusing it of considering itself above international law and triggering a new arms race through its unilateral actions.
Russian Army military vehicles drive along a street, after Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized a military operation in eastern Ukraine, in the town of Armyansk, Crimea. (Reuters)
From annexation of Crimea to invasion of Ukraine
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a clear violation of the Budapest Agreement, and the first big test of its security assurance to Ukraine. Despite being a signatory to the agreement, Moscow did not participate in the consultations, and vetoed a resolution against the annexation at the United Nations Security Council. The US imposed some sanctions on Russia, but Europe continued to do business with him.
In the US Congress, a discussion in the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations in 2016 reflected the escalatory nature of US and Russian responses to each other at the time. Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary in the State Department for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, described in detail the steps the US had taken in response to Russia:
“To help Ukraine better monitor and secure its borders, deploy its forces more safely and effectively, and defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, the United States has committed over $600 million in security assistance. We have trained over 1,700 Ukrainian conventional forces and National Guard personnel and 120 Special Operations Forces (SOF). We have provided counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, over 3000 secure radios, 130 Humvees, over 100 armoured civilian SUVs, and thousands of medical kits to help Ukrainian troops successfully resist advances and save lives.

“To counter the threat posed by Russian aggression and deter any military moves against NATO territory, over the past 2 years the United States and our NATO allies have maintained a persistent rotational military presence on land, sea, and air all along NATO’s eastern edge: the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria. As we look towards the NATO Summit in Warsaw this coming July, allies will institutionalize a more sustained approach to deterrence, including by enhancing forward presence in the East to reduce response times to any aggression. To support this commitment,the President has requested $3.4 billion to fund the European Reassurance Initiative. With your support, these funds will be used to deploy an additional rotational armored brigade combat team to Central and Eastern Europe, and for pre-positioning of combat equipment as well as additional trainers and exercises in Europe.”
To President Putin, each element of this response was geared towards an encirclement of Russia, and represented a threat to its security. President Zelenskyy’s statements on arming his country with nuclear weapons was “crossing a red line”, Senator Andrei A Klimov, head of the ruling United Russia party’s foreign affairs committee, told The Indian Express last week.
Now Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on “special alert”, the move justified as a response to “aggressive statements” by the West. On Tuesday, as Russia’s nuclear submarines participated in drills, even Russia would be hoping that Putin would not go as far to use any nuclear weapons.
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