From the editor
NATO allies have agreed at their summit in The Hague to increase members’ defence spending target to 3.5 percent of GDP plus another 1.5 percent of GDP to be spent on security by 2035, but that is of little use to Ukraine if the bloc still refuses to act to stop the daily Russian bombing of civilians. On Tuesday Russia launched a massive attack on Dnipro, killing 21 people in the city and surrounding region and injuring more than 300 others. One of the missiles struck a passenger train coming from Odesa. On Monday night a Russian strike on Sumy killed an eight-year-old boy and two adults in their homes and injured six other people. Also on Monday a Russian missile hit a school in Odesa Oblast, killing two staff members.
Russia attacked civilians across Ukraine, including in Kyiv, before the NATO summit
On Sunday night another Russian attack on Kyiv killed 10 people, including an 11-year-old girl, and injured more than 30 others, while on Saturday a Russian missile hit a residential building in Kramatorsk, killing four people, including a 17-year-old boy, and injuring four others. Ukraine’s parliamentary ombudsman for human rights Dmytro Lubinets wrote on X: “Russia does not understand the weak actions of the world. As practice shows, only strong steps work to stop the killing and bring peace.”
Vladimir Putin reiterated his aims in Ukraine at last Friday’s St. Petersburg Economic Forum, saying, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. In that sense all of Ukraine is ours,” and adding, “Where a Russian soldier sets foot, that is ours.” On Monday at a ceremony in the Kremlin for graduates of military academies Putin said: “Participants in the special military operation and all our troops are the direct descendants of the heroes of the Great Patriotic [War], and of all the generations of defenders of thousand-year-old Russia. Always remember that you are continuing the great work of your great-grandfathers, grandfathers and fathers. Their example, their loyalty to the Fatherland, to truth and justice… you will write new glorious pages in the history of our armed forces, law-enforcement bodies and security services.” He adopted a rather different tone this week when speaking about the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in a meeting with the Iranian foreign minister, describing them as “unprovoked absolute aggression with no basis, grounds or justification whatsoever”.
Donald Trump meanwhile fell for the good cop bad cop routine enacted by Putin and Dmitri Medvedev after the latter posted on X that after the US strikes on Iran “a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads”. Trump responded: “Did I hear Former President Medvedev, from Russia, casually throwing around the ‘N’ word (Nuclear!) and saying that he and other Countries would supply Nuclear Warheads to Iran?... The ‘N’ word should not be treated so casually. I guess that’s why Putin’s ‘The Boss’.”
Presumably in a good mood after being called “Daddy” by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the summit, Trump expressed his support for Article 5 which commits members of the alliance to protect each other in the event of an attack on one, and spoke positively to a Ukrainian reporter who said she lived in Warsaw and her husband was serving in the Ukrainian armed forces. She asked him if he would supply more missile defence systems to Ukraine. “They do want to have the anti-missile missiles as they call them, the Patriots, and we’re going to see if we can make some available,” he said. Ukrainians will be waiting to see if Trump will decide that the “two weeks” he keeps giving Putin to show signs of wanting peace are finally up.
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Russia sentences 184 Ukrainian POWs to prison
A military court has given 184 Ukrainian POWs who were captured in Kursk Oblast sentences of between 13 and 17 years in prison for terrorism. TASS has reported that in total more than 500 Ukrainian soldiers were captured in Kursk Oblast, of whom 267 have already been sentenced for terrorism for entering Russia to fight.
More people sentenced for anti-regime actions
A military court in Yekaterinburg has sentenced 36-year-old ethnic Ukrainian officer in the Russian army Yevgeny Alakayev to 18 years in a maximum-security prison for treason. Alakayev, who is from Moscow and is a Catholic, had spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine. According to prosecutors, in September 2023 he photographed a secret document about the death of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh and sent it to his mother and a Ukrainian Catholic priest he knew who lived in Italy. He was arrested the following month and held in custody until his trial, at which accusations were added that the priest was collaborating with Ukrainian security services and Alakayev allegedly sent him information about the war. Alakayev said there was no indication that the document he photographed was secret, and that he was being prosecuted because of his political opinions.
A court in Perm Krai has sentenced photographer Grigory Skvortsov to 16 years in a maximum-security prison for treason for giving copies of a book about secret Soviet bunkers of the 1930s-1960s to an American journalist. The book was freely available on sale in Russia. Skvortsov was arrested in Moscow in December 2023 and held in custody until his trial. He specialised in photographing industrial and architectural sites and also started a band called Jagath that performed in derelict buildings. In 2022 he spoke out against the war in Ukraine and left Russia, but he returned to Perm the following year. Skvortsov said he didn’t give the journalist the book itself but photographs of declassified documents that are available online. He said after his arrest he was beaten and forced to confess.
A military court has sentenced 51-year-old Volodymyr Bondar from Zaporizhzhia to 13 years in a maximum-security prison for allegedly planning to assassinate Sergei Aksenov, the head of occupied Crimea. Bondar and two other defendants, Oksana Shevchenko and Volodymyr Ananev, were arrested in February last year and accused of bringing explosives to the peninsula for the assassination attempt. Shevchenko was sentenced to 10 years in prison in May.
A court in Moscow has sentenced programmer Ilya Vasiliev, 51, to eight years in prison for “spreading fakes about the army” for a post about the shelling of Kherson during a Christmas truce. Vasiliev, who is a Buddhist, wrote: “Putin rejected the Christmas truce, and now his missiles are shelling peaceful Ukrainian towns and villages. Just yesterday in Kherson, where my father’s family lives, 16 people were killed. Millions of Ukrainians are sitting without electricity or water. The picture is called Christmas 2022.” He was arrested in June last year and held in jail until his trial. A year previously he had been fined 40,000 roubles ($400) for “discrediting the army” for a Facebook post.
A court in Moscow has sentenced tattoo artist Svetlana Agibalova and her boyfriend Vladislav Remnev to 3 ½ years in prison each for “vandalism” and “interfering with the work of a journalist” for drawing pig heads on the door of the flat of Izvestiya military correspondent Valentin Trushnin. The couple were arrested in October 2023 and held in jail while they awaited trial. In court Agibalova said she had watched TV while in custody and now had a different view of events, and supported Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.
A court in St. Petersburg has sentenced historian Dmitri Vitushkin to a year in prison for “rehabilitating Nazism” for comments he made on social media platform VKontakte calling a Finnish sniper in the Winter War a hero and saying that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Vitushkin was arrested in October 2023 and held in custody until April last year, when he was released on bail. He pled guilty. Vitushkin’s lawyer said that he had not fully studied the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had mistakenly come to the conclusion that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies.
Chelyabinsk war returnee sentenced for murder of ex-wife
A military court in Yekaterinburg has sentenced a Chelyabinsk man who fought in Ukraine to 12 years in prison for strangling his ex-wife to death in front of their three-year-old son. Nikita Sidorov, 33, killed 41-year-old Natalia Dorma in February last year after getting drunk with friends to celebrate Defender of the Fatherland Day. Dorma called the police to report that Sidorov was trying to kill her, but he managed to break into her flat. She had reported similar threats in previous years. A neighbour said that on the night of the murder the police arrived after 35-40 minutes and stood knocking on the door while Dorma was screaming for help. By the time they broke down the door she was dead.
RFE/RL journalist in Crimea released from prison
Freelance contributor to RFE/RL affiliate Krym.Realii Vladyslav Yesypenko has been released from prison and has reunited with his wife and daughter in Prague. Yesypenko was arrested in occupied Crimea in March 2021. The FSB accused him of gathering information on behalf of the Ukrainian security services and claimed that something that looked like an improvised explosive device had been found in his car. Yesypenko said he confessed after two days of torture, but later recanted. He said the FSB stopped him on the road, planted a grenade in his car and took him to a basement where they beat him and gave him electric shocks. In February 2022 he was sentenced to six years in prison, which was reduced to five years on appeal.
Yesypenko was released at the same time that 14 political prisoners of various nationalities were released from prison in Belarus after a visit to the country by Gen. Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine. Ihar Karnei, also a freelancer for RFE/RL, was one of those released, as was Belarusian opposition leader Siarhei Tsikhanouski, the husband of 2020 presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
UK’s NHS confirms Russian ransomware attack killed a patient
A ransomware attack by the Russian group Qilin last June resulted in the death of a patient in London due to a long wait for a blood test, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has said. The attack on Synnovis, which provides blood test services, saw 1,100 cancer treatments delayed, 2,000 outpatient appointments cancelled and more than 1,000 operations postponed. Affected healthcare providers were unable to do work involving transfusions or blood matching and were forced to use the universal O-type blood for everyone. This contributed to a national shortage of O-type blood supplies. Sensitive data stolen from an NHS provider was also published online.