We will rebuff every manifestation of Russian terror – address by the President of Ukraine

6 January 2024 – 18:33

Wishing you good health, dear Ukrainians!

It’s been a long day today with many meetings. We are planning for the upcoming week – crucial international events. We are preparing new lines of cooperation with partners, particularly regarding drones, strengthening our capabilities in drone usage, and countering Russian drones, enhancing Electronic Warfare (EW) capabilities. I held discussions on security guarantees – one of our key priorities. Bilateral work with partners is ongoing, and today, we outlined the results we aim to achieve shortly. I also had meetings with the defense government unit – the Minister of Strategic Industries, the Minister of Defense, and the ministries’ teams. The key focus is to ensure our soldiers equipped with weaponry and military technology. We are committed to continuous supply and production with a clear trend towards increasing our production of ammunition and equipment in Ukraine and in collaboration with our partners.

We are working tirelessly so that this year, our defense and security forces can rely mostly on our Ukrainian production in their actions. We want the enemy to feel the real power of Ukrainian weapons. The sense of this is already shaping. Many successful things are done with Ukrainian weapons, and the occupiers have fewer and fewer peaceful nights. The strength of our Ukrainian forces must be much greater. It will happen. We will rebuff every manifestation of Russian terror, every attempt by Russia to increase its pressure on our state, our people, our positions.

During these hours in Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, and in the Pokrovsk district, a rescue operation is underway after a Russian missile strike, specifically S-300 missiles. Necessary rescue forces and equipment from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service are engaged in the relief operation, clearing debris. As yet, it is known about over ten people, unfortunately including children, who have tragically lost their lives. My condolences go out to everyone who has lost their loved ones! The Russian strike targeted ordinary residential buildings and private houses. All the wounded are receiving the necessary aid. Russia must feel – always feel – that no such strike will go without consequences for the terrorist state. We must ensure this with our strength, our own defense, and political capabilities.

And one more thing.

I want, as always, to commend our soldiers on the front lines – each and every one, on combat posts, carrying out combat missions, and currently in battle. All those who help, volunteer, train, and work to save every wounded person. Immense gratitude to all! Today, I especially want to recognize Ukrainian border guards who, together with all the defense and security forces, are fighting on the battle lines to protect our state and independence. They have shown exceptional effectiveness in these weeks – both before the New Year and now. Special thanks to the border guards from Kharkiv and Kramatorsk units. Thank you, warriors, for your strength! Staff Sergeant Valeriy Buhor and Captain Ivan Taran involved in battles near Bahmut. Maryinka direction. The Zhytomyr border unit, including Senior Sergeant Oleksiy Shlapakov. Thank you for your courage and accuracy! To the Steel Border brigade’s warriors near Kupiansk, engaging in intense battles with crucial results. Soldier Mykhailo Savchenko, Junior Sergeant Bohdan Kachkovsky, and Senior Sergeant Yevhen Hladkov. Well done!

Glory to all who are fighting! Glory to all who contribute their strength to the strength of our state!

Glory to Ukraine!

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1743550567723503788

Russian assets currently frozen abroad total around $300 billion. They must be put to use in support of Ukraine.

This is a historic opportunity to make the terrorist state pay for its terror. The Russian elite and leadership do not care about human lives, but they do care about money above all else.

For them, losing assets will be the most painful loss. They will sense the true strength of the international community and see that the world is stronger than terror.

The decision to use frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine will be an entirely just and legitimate response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It will send the right message to all would-be aggressors around the world: attacking another state does not pay off; it makes the aggressor pay.

I encourage partners to move quickly on relevant legal frameworks. This year, we must achieve tangible progress toward using frozen Russian assets for the benefit of Ukraine. We firmly rely on G7 leadership on this matter.

 

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen.

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1743585207389716525

In 2023, 🇺🇦 Air Force destroyed 3800 russian air targets:
– 887 cruise missiles;
– 15 Kh-47M2 Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles;
– 41 other ballistic missiles;
– 2691 Shahed UAVs;
– 35 Lancet drones;
– 131 Orlan and other drones.

Our brave warriors made an amazing job in 2023.
We are grateful to our international partners who help Ukraine in strengthening our air defense capabilities.

More great achievements to come in 2024. Believe in Ukraine’s air defense!

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1743664988584034522

Unfortunately, the US is not going to be able to step up in 2024 the way it did in 2023.

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1743658410380349839

⚡️NYT: US faces missile supply shortage for Ukraine’s Patriot air defense systems.

White House and Pentagon officials have warned that the U.S. would soon be unable to keep Ukraine’s Patriot air defense system batteries supplied with interceptor missiles, the New York Times reported on Jan. 6. Patriot systems have been crucial for repelling Russian air attacks across the country.

 

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1743627808427872759

⚡️US official warns of ‘dire’ situation with Ukraine aid.

Shalanda Young, the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, warned on Jan. 5 about the rapidly diminishing time that Congress has to replenish U.S. aid for Ukraine, the Associated Press reported. “I’m very concerned that it’s not just the United States’ resources that are necessary for Kyiv to stop Putin,” she said. “What message does that send to the rest of the world? And what will their decisions be if they see the United States not step up to the plate?”

 

This is what it says:

https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1743774015108296722

Professor Snyder is correct.

As is French journalist Elsa Vidal:

https://twitter.com/EHunterChristie/status/1743452134970974606

According to French journalist Elsa Vidal, of course our govts deliberately starved Ukraine of the most decisive types of weapons — this needs to be universal knowledge now — but she goes further into the interpretation, which is interesting. She believes it’s our fear of Russia collapsing following a proper defeat. She also fingers @RANDCorporation for being responsible for promoting the cynical policy goal of aiming for neither defeat nor victory in Ukraine.
Additionally, and that’s also a diagnosis I made on this platform, she notes that aiming for a stalemate to begin with was necessarily going to make sustaining the political will to support Ukraine more difficult.
And, in my view, it’s on that latter point that we really see the problem we have today, with the U.S. losing heart and resolve at the level of the entire country. Because the policy was not some kind of “golden middle” worked out by geniuses, but a costly and bloody and cowardly middle-of-the-road trajectory at a time in history that requires decisiveness.

Vidal concludes, like entire governments in the eastern half of Europe, like many parliamentarians across all of our nations, like hundreds of experts on the region and on military affairs, that we must aim for victory.

I would very much like to know how often RAND’s in house quisling Samuel Charap’s name appears on the White House visitor’s logs beginning in Fall 2021.

The House Republicans have a new strategy to kill their hostages – actually funding the US government so it doesn’t close down on 19 January and 2 February respectively, aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel – they want their extremist, xenophobic anti-immigrant/anti-immigration bill, HR 2, to be passed through the Senate and signed into law by President Biden with no revisions, changes, and/or amendments. That’s what the past week’s stunt by the House GOP caucus was about.

The Ukrainians are not going to stop defending themselves and working to liberate all of their territory occupied by Russia regardless of what the US does. However, it would be much easier with the US’s help. That help is unlikely to come anytime soon.

In the meantime, Russia is ramping up its production. The Financial Times has the details.

Loaves are not the only things coming hot off the production line at the Tambov Bread Factory in central Russia — and western sanctions authorities are taking notice.

Tambov’s bakers were put on a US blacklist in December for assembling small drones on the premises that Russian troops use in President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Their efforts have made the bakery a poster child for the Kremlin’s drive to engage civilian industry in producing for the front lines as the war increasingly dominates Russia’s economy.

In a state television report from the wholesale bakery, a factory boss showed off half a dozen Bekas drones next to an array of freshly baked loaves. “They even smell like fresh bread!” said Russian journalist Alexander Rogatkin holding up one of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sniffing it.

The Tambov factory first began assembling the drones in February 2023 using a 3D printer that makes carbon frames, as well as antenna and camera holders, according to interviews with the bakery’s managers on Russian state media.

Most of the components for the Bekas are purchased online, allowing the bakers to keep costs between Rbs25,000 ($270) and Rbs50,000 per drone. Tambov now makes about 250 drones a month, as well as accompanying camouflage backpacks, according to the bakery.

Putin has framed the surge in defence spending as a breakthrough for Russia’s industry that has helped the country weather western sanctions during the war.

“The factories of Moscow, St Petersburg, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East — dozens of regions of our country — are working at full capacity in multiple shifts,” Putin said at a November event celebrating Rostec, Russia’s main defence conglomerate. “In today’s conditions this gives an absolutely unique impulse to develop high-tech spheres of production, not only in defence, but in related civilian industries as well,” he added.

War-related industrial output has risen 35 per cent compared with the period leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, while civilian production has remained flat, according to research published by the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies. In some industries, such as electrical equipment and automotive manufacturing, the boost in war-related output has compensated for falling production of consumer goods.

More than 500 light industrial companies have switched to making equipment for the military, Russia’s trade ministry said in February 2023, adding that it expected them to produce four times more for the army that year than they did in 2022.

In Naberezhnye Chelny, a town in west-central Russia on the Kama river, an ice hockey stick workshop has switched to making bulletproof vests. A glamping tent company in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city in the Urals, is now producing sleeping bags and tents for the battlefield. In Voronezh, Russia’s southern farming heartland, an agricultural equipment factory is churning out everything from demining equipment and binoculars to anti-drone defences.

First-person view (FPV) drones have become increasingly important to both sides in the war, leading to more than 100 volunteer efforts focused on UAVs popping up across Russia.

Some of the newly minted drone-makers have said they were asked to pitch in by Russian authorities — the Tambov bakery’s owners have close ties to local government, while the baker in charge of the effort is a lieutenant-colonel in Russia’s reserve army.

“The Russian government has signalled its intent to subsidise drone production in the coming years. Chinese-manufactured 3D printers apparently retail in Russia for the rouble equivalent of a few hundred dollars,” said Allen Maggard, a Russian defence industry analyst at US think-tank C4ADS. “The combination of the low acquisition cost of 3D printers and the assurance of state subsidies might make transitioning to drone production an irresistible prospect for companies.”

Others, however, are amateur drone enthusiasts apparently motivated by a sense of patriotic duty, who share designs and specifications in groups on social media app Telegram and crowdfund to raise money for the FPV drones.

“What you are witnessing is a window into the whole-of-society, large-scale volunteer effort across Russia,” said Samuel Bendett, an expert on autonomous weaponry at the Center for Naval Analyses.

The Bekas drones’ small size means their combat potential is limited as they can only carry a 3.5kg load up to 5km. This makes them more suitable for anti-personnel operations than the larger Lancet drones, which are used to target Ukrainian armour and fortifications, or the Iran-made Shaheds deployed for strikes on Kyiv.

But the ease of producing the Bekas at scale — the factory claims to have spawned eight copycats — boosts Russia’s arsenal of kamikaze loitering drones significantly, Bendett added. “All of this obviously adds up.”

Even simple, low-cost weapons such as the Bekas drones are as reliant on foreign-made components as much of Russia’s high-tech military production, said Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington. “The only Russian thing there is the Bekas sticker,” he added.

The drones’ simple design and specification means tracking their supply chain is difficult: Russian customs records for the Tambov bakery and an affiliated company that produces the drones come up empty. Chinese 3D printers are particularly difficult to track because their components are usually shipped separately, Maggard said.

More at the link!

There is a bit of good news out Poland:

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1743692264428257745

The Polish government has signed an agreement with the protesting farmers, which should end the blockade of the “Medyka-Shehyni” checkpoint with Ukraine.

The agreement includes: the launch of corn subsidies in the amount of PLN 1 million, increasing the credit for liquidity loans by the amount of PLN 2.5 billion and maintaining the amount of agricultural tax at the level of 2023.

https://polsatnews.pl/wiadomosc/2024-01-06/przelom-w-sprawie-protestow-na-granicy-rolnicy-zawieszaja-dzialania/

Hryshyme, Russian occupied Crimea:

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1743653867496034441

An update on the Ukrainian strikes on Saky and Yevpatoriya, Russian occupied Crimea:

https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1743661004376916163

The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine informs that on January 4, 2024, a complex special operation was carried out on the territory of Russian-occupied Crimea.

The targets of the attack were the Russian radar positions at the airfield in Saki and an ammunition depot near the settlement of Hryshyne. Coordinates of the 2nd target:

45°38’10″N 33°50’23″E

The attached picture shows precise impacts on the warehouse and buildings around it. Information on Russian losses is currently under investigation.

Source: https://t.me/DIUkraine/3287

#Ukraine #Crimea

 

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1743556054821040330

 

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1743607274931695776

Point of view on the Crimea 4/5 January attacks by a source that quite often publishes insider information regarding Russian military. I advise to take it not at face value, but as a data point for drawing up an overall picture of the events:

“Regarding the attack in Crimea (04-05.01.2024).

On January 4, 2024, a large-scale attack was carried out on the territory of Crimea.

At lunchtime, due to the activity of tactical aviation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, an “Aircraft Danger” signal was announced on the territory of Crimea.

At 17:00, information began to arrive that ten cruise missiles were approaching the airspace of the peninsula.

At 17:12, a strike was carried out on an object on the territory of the settlement. Uiutne, near Yevpatoriya. The target was the radar unit of the 31st Air Defense Division of the Russian Aerospace Forces. As a result of the strike, the radar and communications center were destroyed. There are serious problems with the ability to conduct radar reconnaissance in the region. Three conscripts were reported injured.

The strike was carried out by a single Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missile.

At 17:18, a strike was carried out on an object on the territory of the city of Sevastopol. The target was the protected command post of the 31st Air Defense Division of the Russian Aerospace Forces (military unit 03121, Sevastopol). As a result of the strike, 12 servicemen of the Russian Aerospace Forces were killed and another 9 were injured. In total, more than 80 division soldiers were trapped under the rubble. Among the lists of the dead, one serviceman with the rank of “general” appears, however, his last name is not indicated (this refers to rumors about the death of Gerasimov, although I believe that these are just rumors). Also, the death of the commander of the 3rd radio technical regiment of the Russian Aerospace Forces was confirmed. As a result of the strike, the division’s communications center was destroyed.

The strike was carried out by two Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles.

It is noted that during the attack, the Ukrainian Armed Forces first used false decoy missiles. The type is currently being established, there is reason to believe that it was “ADM-160A”. Which were already followed by the “Storm Shadow”.

Then at about 23:30, a UAV attack was carried out on the territory of the Pervomaisky and Saky districts. About 35 attack drones are reported to be used. At the moment, I do not have information about the damage caused by the UAV. However, it is worth noting the successful work of the air defense. For the most part, the UAVs were suppressed by electronic warfare. There are no serious “hits” observed.

On the night of 01/05/06/2024, the Saki airfield was attacked. The command post of the 43rd Separate Naval Assault Aviation Regiment (military unit 59882) was reported to have been hit. As a result of the strike, four soldiers of the regiment – 200. There is no information about the wounded.

The strike was carried out by four Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles. Two of them were intercepted by air defense forces. Two reached their goal.”
https://t.me/dosye_shpiona/470

The Olekshi Forest, Kherson Oblast & the Zaporizhzhia front:

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1743591749602169283

Kryvorivnia:

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1743674038843482430

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1743674041322344624

Belgorod Russia:

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1743704263530831921

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

There are no new Patron tweets or videos, so here’s some adjacent material from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1743618416638915054

Open thread!