The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-24)

4 2GN The Sunday Times April 24, 2022

NEWS

Visas issued through the Homes

for Ukraine scheme by local

authority per 100,000 people,

as of April 19

0

183

Source: Home Office

If Putin puts his

ego above the

advice of his

generals, then

failure beckons

4

WAR IN UKRAINE

Svetlana

Scomavska with

her six-year-old

twins Davyd and

Vasylisa and her

parents Ludmilla

and Vlodymyr

The opinion of a British Ministry of

Defence analyst who has been living and

breathing Russian defence dilemmas

since February is that working through

these challenges and coming up with a

proper plan for a serious offensive in the

Donbas will take at least another two to

three weeks. And even if Putin has for

now ordered a blockade of the last

defenders of Mariupol rather than a

bloody assault, that is still tying up as

many as 11 of Dvornikov’s BTGs.

Then there are also the factors outside

anyone’s control. The weather forecast

for the next week or longer is for clouds,

rain and high winds, all of which hinders

Russian airpower and slows ground

movement. Even Dvornikov cannot do

anything about that.

Russian attacks are focusing on the

cities of Kharkiv and Izyum to the

north, and Kherson in the south.

None of these is being prosecuted

with unusual vigour, though, and

the Russians do not seem to be

making much headway. It may

well be that their efforts are

primarily intended to prevent

the Ukrainians from being able

to relax and consolidate.

After all, the Russians do

seem to be trying to keep their

enemy on edge. On Friday

Major General Rustam

Minnekaev, Dvornikov’s deputy,

implied that their next objective

would be to strike west from

Crimea and take the remaining

Ukrainian coastline — including

the strategic port city of Odesa —

all the way to the border.

Careful reading of his statement

makes it clear that he hedged that

with conditionalities. Besides, the

Russians have already made one

drive towards Odesa, with a distinct

lack of success, and it is better

defended now than before. But as

an attempt to distract Ukraine

and perhaps get it to divert

much-needed troops to foil

an imaginary new offensive,

it is typical of the

mindgames the Russians will play.

THE GENERAL VERSUS THE TSAR

The present offensive is therefore going

to be something of a test case. None of

what is happening at present looks likely

to give Putin any new victory for May 9.

Izyum may fall, but whether a town

which — before so many of its citizens

fled — was the size of King’s Lynn will

really satisfy his desire for a triumph is

questionable.

The chatter in Moscow is therefore

divided between those who believe that

Putin will simply rely on the compliant

media to create a victory out of whatever

has been achieved and those who think

he will demand Dvornikov deliver him

something more impressive. If so, he will

presumably have to start making visible

preparations for a large offensive within

perhaps the next week or so.

Trying to rush such an offensive can

be disastrous. Sending units not

properly restored to operational

effectiveness into battle, trickling in

BTGs as and when they are ready rather

than building up a serious task force,

and denying soldiers a chance to recover

at best undermine combat effectiveness,

and at worst are a recipe for desertion

and mutiny.

Dvornikov ought to know this.

According to a soldier who served under

him in Syria, he was shocked when he

realised just how brittle Bashar al-

Assad’s Syrian army had become, and he

made a point of finding out each unit’s

status — what losses it had taken, when it

was last rotated out of the front line —

before he drew up his battle plans.

What happens in the coming days will

therefore tell us much about Putin’s

capacity to learn from his mistakes — or

even to recognise them. If he has put the

fighting back in the hands of the generals

this will be bad news for the Ukrainians.

While their successes have largely been

won by their own efforts, it has helped

them immeasurably that Russian

strategy so far has been directed by an

amateur who understands warfare as

little as he understands Ukraine.

But if Putin continues to put his ego

and his immediate political interests

above the professional experience of his

generals then further failure beckons,

potentially lengthening the war and

expanding the window for the

Ukrainians to field the western weapons

and training that could tilt it decisively in

their favour.

Dvornikov cannot directly disagree

with his commander-in-chief but in

theory he could appeal to Gerasimov,

who, in turn, ought to get Shoigu to try

to talk sense into Putin.

But with one general from the Federal

Security Service and another from the

Rosgvardia national guard already in the

infamous Lefortovo prison, and with

Putin’s rhetoric increasingly discounting

any room for loyal opposition, would

any of these men be willing and able to

confront the tsar?

Dr Mark Galeotti is an honorary professor

at University College London School of

Slavonic and East European Studies and

author of The Weaponisation of Everything

CHINGIS KONDAROV/REUTERS

in after Dvornikov depended on his

lessons”. What’s more, “he knew when,

in the name of accomplishing the

mission, to push back against the

politicians and the generals of the Arbat

military district”. This last is a dismissive

reference to the bureaucrat-officers

who, when they get a cushy berth in the

general staff — whose offices are in

Moscow’s Arbat neighbourhood — make

sure they never end up transferred back

into the field.

GIVING PUTIN HIS VICTORY

The Second World War — the Great

Patriotic War in Russian parlance — has

become virtually the secular religion of

Putin’s Russia, and Victory Day, May 9, is

its holiest day. Putin has reinstituted the

communist-era tradition of a massive

military parade through Red Square,

and created new ones, like the Immortal

Regiment procession, when Russians

across the country and around the

world march through the streets

bearing pictures of those who fell in

the war. The day is a state-sponsored

nationalist celebration of triumph,

national glory and martial might.

It is clear that Putin wants a

victory for Victory Day. Of course, with

its control over a media space now

entirely cleared of independent outlets,

the state could conjure one out of thin

air, or elevate the final defeat of the

defenders of Mariupol into some game-

changing achievement.

It seems that might not be enough for

Putin, though. According to a well-

connected Russian political analyst who

has fled the country but maintains their

lines of communication back to Moscow,

“the tsar is expecting — demanding —

good news from the battlefield” and is

willing to put pressure on Sergei Shoigu,

the defence minister, and Valery

Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, in

the expectation that they will, in turn,

force Dvornikov to pull some rabbit out

of his general’s cap.

THE TASKS AT HAND

Dvornikov’s assignment is a formidable

one. His 78 battalion tactical groups

(BTGs) are exhausted and badly mauled,

and need time to be replenished with

men and equipment, and simply to

recover.

Damaged vehicles need to be

repaired. The lessons of the past two

months need to be absorbed, and

counters to the Ukrainians’ flexible

tactics developed. Crucial issues relating

to the co-ordination between land and

air forces and tanks and infantry need to

be addressed.

though, this so-called special military

operation looked more like the hastily

cobbled-together initiative of a president

with no real military experience. Putin

did some reserve officer training while at

university but then got an exemption

from keeping this going as soon as he

joined the KGB.

ENTER DVORNIKOV

A fortnight ago, though, the war finally

got a single overall commander instead

of three competing ones: General

Alexander Dvornikov. He was the first

commander of Russia’s intervention into

the Syrian civil war in 2015, something

that tells us much about the man.

Western coverage has tended to focus

on the way that the city of Aleppo was

levelled during his time there. He was

labelled the Butcher of Syria.

But as we saw in 1999-2000 in Grozny,

capital of rebellious Chechnya, and now

in Mariupol and many other Ukrainian

cities, the sad truth is that such an

approach is not the product of one

commander’s sociopathy but Russian

tactics. Urban warfare is hard and puts a

particular premium on the skills and

morale of the individual soldier. Thus

the Russians often resort to devastating

long-range firepower instead.

In this respect Dvornikov was simply

applying ruthlessly and bloodily

pragmatic standard practice. But he was

sent to Syria precisely because he was

regarded as one of the more able and

above all flexible commanders of his

generation, someone who could be sent

into a war unlike any other Russia had

fought, where the old rule book was of

limited relevance at best, and adapt.

As a Russian military observer told

me, “the other commanders who cycled

Russian forces have been regrouping in

the east of Ukraine, and with Vladimir

Putin already (if prematurely)

announcing the “liberation” of the

beleaguered port city of Mariupol, a new

Donbas offensive is under way. It is

probably not the full-scale onslaught

Kyiv is expecting, but how quickly and

how far the Russians do press this attack

will tell us much about their capabilities

and, above all, who is in charge.

Last month I wondered on these

pages whether Putin was going to learn

the lessons of his initial, amateurish

political interference in the military

process. Built around the assumption

that the Ukrainians would quickly fold

and allow Russia to impose a pliant new

regime, this underestimation proved

disastrous.

The Ukrainians resisted with equal

parts imagination and determination;

Russian stockpiles of food, fuel and

ammunition quickly ran dry, and the

Rosgvardia security troops deployed in

the expectation that the operation

would be more crowd control than open

warfare took terrible casualties in the

first fortnight.

The question was whether Putin

would prove more like Stalin, who

realised his mistake when his

interference left the Red Army

vulnerable to German invasion in June

1941, and let his generals run the war

thereafter, or like Hitler, who never did

learn that lesson and micromanaged to

the very end.

Russian military practice is, after all,

that the president sets overall goals and

the military command generates the

plans to achieve them. Until recently,

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Chechen fighters loyal to the

Kremlin have helped to win

ground in the shattered

Ukrainian port of Mariupol

Why Chichester? The area’s relative

wealth and proliferation of spare rooms

help. Tourists flock to the Goodwood Fes-

tival of Speed, Chichester harbour and

the city’s medieval monuments. The

other areas that have taken the most refu-

gees are all affluent: south Oxfordshire,

south Cambridgeshire, Winchester and

Richmond upon Thames. Those that

have taken the fewest are not.

The community in West Sussex is “gen-

erous and open”, according to Gillian

Keegan, the local Conservative MP. Her

team has supported more than 130 peo-

ple with their Home Office applications.

Since Russia’s invasion, the city has

turned blue and yellow. Beneath a sculp-

ture titled The Refugee in the 900-year-

old cathedral, residents and new arrivals

light candles at a prayer station adorned

with blue and yellow ribbons. Howard

Waddell, the head verger, said: “A

woman was in here whose brother is

missing in Ukraine and she doesn’t know

what’s happened to him. But we lit a can-

dle with her and told her to stay positive.

That’s all you can do at this stage.”

Sympathy has translated into a flurry

of online activity. Zoe Collyer’s phone

pings with updates about welcoming ref-

ugees. “There is a huge group of us from

around here who all want to help, but I’ve

also made friends all over the country,”

said Collyer, 45. One new friend intro-

duced her to Marina Avramenko, 38, an

architect from Kyiv. “We video-called her,

and I knew straight away: you’re coming

to us! We want you here. She was lovely.”

The journey out of Ukraine was

traumatic. Avramenko slept in subway

tunnels, passing burnt-out buildings and

bodies as she escaped. She had to wait 31

days for her visa. “It took us six hours to

do the visa form,” Collyer said.

For new arrivals, language is one of the

biggest barriers. “Whether it’s benefits,

helping children with homework or get-

ting jobs, they’re completely blocked

unless they know English,” said Gemma

Driver of Sanctuary in Chichester, a char-

ity helping to match refugees with spon-

sors. They are arranging about 20 lan-

guage tutors to support the new arrivals,

many of which are women with children.

It is up to sponsors to arrange schooling,

no easy feat in an area with few places.

Holt has already spoken to her local pri-

mary school about taking the six-year-old

Scomavska twins, Davyd and Vasylisa.

Some refugees are able to carry on the

jobs they had. Yulia Yanchar, 35, arrived

from Kyiv with her daughter, Eve, six, a

few weeks ago; she is still working

remotely as a PR consultant. Her first pri-

ority, though, is helping her daughter,

six, to adjust. “Yesterday evening there

were some helicopters flying over our

new village. My girl heard the sound and

said, ‘Mummy, do we have to go and hide

in the basement again?’ ” Yanchar said.

Many of Chichester’s newest residents

want to return home one day.

“Marina is determined to go back and

rebuild Ukraine,” said Collyer. “She had

been designing Orthodox churches, and

a lot of them have been bombed.”

Yanchar, too, wants to live in her

“beautiful” country again — though West

Sussex has already made its mark. “I

asked Kate, my sponsor, how I’d know

who she was at the airport,” she said. “I

didn’t have to worry: they were standing

there holding a Ukrainian flag. I burst

into tears ... I’ll never forget the kindness

your people have shown.”

Welcome to Chichester,

Ukraine’s UK refugee capital

Janet Holt is midway through two

application forms for her local primary

school. Not for her own children, though

— her six have long flown the nest.

Three bedrooms in her house in East

Dean, a village north of Chichester, West

Sussex, have a whole new set of occu-

pants: a family of Ukrainian refugees.

“I love it — my house is full again,” said

Holt, 59, whose children are in their twen-

ties and thirties. “There’s always some-

one cooking in the kitchen. We have deli-

cious Ukrainian soup every lunchtime.”

The family she has welcomed, the

Scomavskas, are among about 11 million

people who have fled Ukraine during the

war. So far 71,800 UK visas have been

issued to Ukrainian citizens, although

Home Office figures show that only

21,600 have actually arrived.

At least 222 visas have been granted in

Chichester alone, a district of 121,

people, via the Homes for Ukraine

scheme, which allows people to sponsor

families to live with them. At a rate of 183

per 100,000 people, Chichester has

taken in the highest number of Ukrainian

refugees per capita in the country.

Svetlana Scomavska, 38, her two

young children and her parents, both in

their seventies, left the industrial town of

Kamianske, near Dnipro, for the English

countryside this month.

It took Scomavska and her family

nearly a month to travel from Kamianske

to East Dean. She and her family speak lit-

tle English. “Our best discovery was the

Google Translate app,” Holt said.

The Holts are the first family in East

Dean to take in Ukrainians but more are

on the way. “I really want to meet more of

my people,” said Scomavska. “We hear

that another family is arriving next week.”

Tom Calver Data Projects Editor

The coastal city has become a bastion for those fleeing the war — and it wants to take even more

Refugees

return to

mined

homes

blackened and derelict and

the sense of death is

everywhere. As Horiak and

his team clear mines, police

continue to find bodies — so

many that the mortuary is full

and body bags are being

loaded into refrigerated

trucks, some with feet

hanging out of the ends. On

Friday women waited in the

cold rain outside one of the

trucks, as mortuary workers

in hazmat suits sort through

the bags.

Tanya, 37, lost her husband

and a five-year-old son, whom

she had taken 12 years to

conceive. “They had gone to

the garage and were standing

round the stove to cook food

and get warm and a rocket

came,” she said.

A white tent has been

erected outside the mortuary

for relatives to identify

missing family members. On a

table inside is a stapled list of

bodies found as well as a list of

those missing and packets of

tissues. Olena Krushanovska,

a volunteer psychologist,

waits on standby, tearful at

what she has heard. Outside a

policeman showed grisly

photos on his phone to a

explode as the user opens the

door, and new smart mines

known as “two steps” that

react to human weight and

can be safely removed only by

robots. Some mines were laid

by Ukraine in defence — a

standard tactic — but were

mapped and have been

removed.

“It’s colossal,” says James

Cowan, head of the Halo

Trust, the world’s largest

demining charity, who visited

Ukraine last week. “This will

take years but we don’t have

years as people want to return

home, reopen their factories

and plant their fields.”

Aleksandr Bahri, head of

demining for Ukraine’s state

emergency services, which

have only 535 specialists,

estimates that 300,000 sq km

need demining — almost half

the country. Halo believes the

area affected may be 100,

sq km. “We are still working

on mines left in the Second

World War,” Bahri says.

The Ukrainian military

estimates the total cost of

removal at up to $250 billion.

It has a further 600 deminers

but they are busy fighting or

clearing recaptured bases.

Horiak’s team started by

clearing schools, the water

supply, playgrounds and

public buildings but are now

responding to applications

from residents trying to

return home. They work on

ballistic missiles, shells,

mines, rockets, IEDs and hand

grenades. In a multistorey car

park they found a booby-

trapped anti-tank rocket.

The team used to be

underwater specialists,

clearing rivers, and Horiak

had been planning a new

career. “Now I am needed,”

he says. “Every Ukrainian has

managed to find their role in

defending Ukraine and this is

mine. This is personal. I

started living in Irpin in 2014,

it’s where I got married,

where my son was born, and

rented my first house which is

now destroyed. I don’t have

words for what happened.”

The main streets have been

cleared, the wi-fi restored and

municipal workers are busy

repairing power-lines but

many apartment blocks are

→Continued from page 1

I don’t

have

words

for this

woman looking for her

husband. The centre is run by

Mykolaina Skoryk, who is the

mayor of Bucha’s digital

adviser but like so many

Ukrainians finds herself doing

things she never imagined.

“We’ve never had so many

bodies,” she says. “We

collected 412 in the last few

weeks. Normally we get seven

a month.”

As she speaks, one widow,

Tatiana Adolphovica, 51,

becomes so desperate that

she insists on climbing into

the truck of bodies and

looking in the foul-smelling

bags. She has been searching

for three weeks for the body

of her husband Mykola, an

electrician, who was

abducted by Russians from

their village because he had

been videoing what was going

on. “He was taken to another

village and kept with four

others in a cellar where they

were tortured, then their

heads bashed in as the

Russians left. The local priest

saw their bodies but now I

can’t find him anywhere. I

won’t rest until I do. He was

my big love.”

an additional $800 million in

military assistance.

He paid tribute to Britain,

which he said had agreed to

the rebuilding of the Kyiv

region as part of a plan for the

reconstruction of Ukraine.

But in an apparent dig at

some of his other visitors, he

added: “We are not a country

for tragic selfies ... leaders

should not come to us with

empty hands.”

The president called on

other countries in Asia and

Africa to lend their support.

Today marks two months

of the war and he ended by

paying tribute: “We are so

united. The most important

thing is that this feeling of

unity remains through the

end of the war.”

for the support we have

received from the US and

over the last week everything

has improved,” he said in

apparent reference to

President Biden announcing

Blinken, the US secretary of

state, and Lloyd Austin, the

US defence secretary, would

be in Kyiv today, the highest-

level US visit since the war

began. “We are very grateful

Zelensky had sat in front of

journalists rather than given

individual interviews in

bunkers. He spoke angrily of

cruise missile strikes

yesterday on the Black Sea

port of Odesa that killed eight

people, including a three-

month-old girl.

“The war started when this

baby was one month old,” he

said. “Can you imagine what

is happening? They are

bastards. I don’t have any

other words — just bastards.

“The world has not seen

such barbarity in 80 years.

What they are doing to us,

such violence, raping babies

and small kids, no other

country has seen and I hope

never will.”

He also said that Antony

President Zelensky warned

last night that Vladimir

Putin’s invasion of his

country “is only a

beginning”, adding: “When

they finish with us they will

start with you.” But he

insisted he was still willing to

meet the Russian leader to try

to end the war.

At a press conference on

the platform of a Kyiv metro

station he said: “I don’t say I

want to meet him but any

Zelensky warns the

world: You’re next

healthy and sane person

chooses diplomacy over

military means because even

if it’s hard, it may stop the loss

of hundreds of thousands,

even millions [of lives].”

However, he said he would

agree to meet only if the

Russians did not kill the

residents of the besieged

southern city of Mariupol,

where 100,000 people are

still trapped, including many

women and children.

This was the first time in

the two-month-long war that

Christina Lamb in Kyiv

The Ukrainian president said the war was “only a beginning”