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Reshaping central Asian order
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Cracks through censorship
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Additional US Military Assistance for Ukraine and its Neighbours
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Allies push for US weaponry after seeing an impact in Ukraine
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Kremlin's Narratives in Western Societies
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Military support of Ukraine provokes the parties, thinks Erdogan
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Sanctions are means of EUs self-destruction says secretary of the Hungarian PM office
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- Russian Propaganda in Ukraine
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Russian propaganda says that the counteroffensive of the AFU failed
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Russia claims that NATO is throwing Leopard 2А4 on the Kherson front
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Reshaping central Asian order |
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This week Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will attend a summit in Central Asia, ahead of which the Chinese leader will tour countries that have much to lose from the war in Ukraine. Indeed, the destinations are not coincidental; Russia's southern neighbours are home to substantial Russian minorities and they are concerned about Putin's actions in Ukraine and his motives that recall Soviet-era mentality. In addition, the lackluster performance of the Russian military is spreading doubts about the Kremlin's capabilities as a guarantor of security and could create a vacuum that Beijing would fill.
China is in the uncomfortable position of supporting the Kremlin but doesn’t want to engage materially or militarily in the war in Ukraine and therefore cannot afford Putin to lose the war and embarrass both leaders.
The Russian economy's dependence on China is also growing, allowing commodity giants indeed to profit but selling LNG to Beijing at a price almost halved because of the difficulty in finding buyers. Moreover, Russian exports to China have increased by 50 per cent since the invasion and imports by 8.5 per cent, resulting in Xi Jinping profiting the most from Russia's weakening role in Central Asia.
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Cracks through censorship |
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The Samizdat Online project is creating a powerful anti-censorship tool that allows access to blocked websites without requiring technical expertise to use. This tool is designed to give the Russian people a way out of the Kremlin's narrative, seeking to diminish the power of Putin's propaganda in the country.
In practice, the blocked publications give the organization permission to spread their stories and articles to new domains through what they call SOS-Links, randomly generated using a system implemented by the founders. Indeed, censored publications were already generating new domains about every week to continue publishing, but without Samizdat Online it was an expensive and unsustainable process.
Samizdat is a term that refers to the dissemination of banned self-published media in the former Soviet Union, and the project now operates primarily in Belarus and Russia, ranked 153rd and 155th out of 180, respectively, by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.
Since the invasion, there has been an 848 per cent increase in blocked websites since 2021, reaching 600 thousand censored sites, including Russia's largest independent news organization, Meduza, which will now join the project.
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Additional US Military Assistance for Ukraine and its Neighbours |
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US President Joe Biden authorized the twentieth drawdown of arms and equipment for Ukraine. In total, drawdown accounts for $2.8 billion of which $675 million is allocated to Ukraine for providing arms and equipment. It includes additional arms, munitions, and equipment from the US Department of Defense inventories.
In particular aid package encompasses additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), four 105mm Howitzers, 36,000 105mm artillery rounds, additional High-speed Anti-radiation missiles (HARM), 100 armoured High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV), 1,5 million rounds of small arms ammunition, more than 5,000 anti-armour systems, 1,000 155 rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine (RAAM) systems, additional grenade launchers and small arms, 50 armoured medical treatment vehicles.
It is worth mentioning that the rest of the aid will be distributed among 18 neighbours of Ukraine belonging to the Baltic and Mediterranean regions. As experts claim, this move means that besides Ukraine, there are huge challenges in NATO countries in terms of defending themselves from Russia and this will be a bigger issue in the next three to five years.
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Allies push for US weaponry after seeing an impact in Ukraine |
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After having seen how effective the US weapons were in the Ukraine war by other countries, the demand for this weaponry increased. A special interest was expressed in the high-tech, multiple-rocket system, in particular HIMARS, used by the Ukrainian army against the Russian ammunition depots and supplies.
As the department’s undersecretary for acquisition, Bill LaPlante stated, the Pentagon has started working to increase production lines to meet international demand. Furthermore, the Pentagon has already begun investing in the defence industrial base to enable companies to expand and accelerate their production.
According to LaPlante, there are cases when the production capacity meets the demand, but in other cases, certain measures should be adopted. In any case, the US is ready to contact other companies abroad to buy, for instance, additional ammunition. It is worth noting that later this month LaPlante is going to meet officials from other NATO and Allie countries who are in charge of acquisition and weapons to discuss the supply chain issues and increase of production.
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Military support of Ukraine provokes the parties, thinks Erdogan |
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RBC reports President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the West countries do not supply Ukraine with weapons, but with scrap metal. "The countries declare military support. However, as a matter of fact, how much stale weapons and scrap metal are in the West, so much is sent to Ukraine," the Turkish leader believes.
According to the President of Turkey, the position of the West in this conflict is wrong, because his actions are based on "provoking the parties." Based on his view that is why the effectiveness of peace initiatives will be minimal in that case. However, Erdogan is satisfied with a "balanced policy" and advocates a ceasefire, but based on his consideration current situation indicates that the war will not end soon.
He also criticized the short-sighted policy of European countries concerning Russia and claimed such policy led to the gas crisis. "Russia stopped gas supplies, and prices in Europe soared. Why didn't you think about this before? After all, Russia has an important resource in its hands. Instead, they are now analyzing gas storage reserves," he said.
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Sanctions are means of EUs self-destruction says secretary of the Hungarian PM office |
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Ria Novosti informs the parliamentary secretary of state of the office of the Prime Minister of Hungary, Csaba Demeter, who said Anti-Russian sanctions had become a "means of self-destruction" for Europe. He believes the sanctions policy must be changed. "The sanctions of the EU do not help their original goals and harm Europe.
There is not a person in Europe who in one way or another would not feel the inflationary effect of the erroneous sanctions policy, starting with the payment of communal services and ending with transport and agriculture. In Brussels, in connection with the sanctions, they promised that they would be a miracle weapon, in fact, they have become useless means of economic self-harm, so it is necessary to change this," Demeter said. He issued that the "biggest and longest" rise in prices started not after the beginning of the large-scale invasion but after the adoption of sanctions in the field of the energy sector.
Earlier, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that 11,000 sanctions had been imposed against Russia, but they were not successful, and the inflation and energy deficit caused by them could bring Europe to its knees, reports Ria Novosti.
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Russian propaganda says that the counteroffensive of the AFU failed |
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Russian propaganda launched a disinformation campaign regarding the counteroffensive of Ukrainian troops in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions. After the official announcement of the start of the counterattack in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions, to successfully complete the identified objectives, the Ukrainian Armed Forces announced a regime of informational silence. On the contrary, the Russian propaganda began a discrediting campaign, the main theses of which were: "the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian troops is just another information and psychological operation of the Kyiv regime"; "in the course of conducting counteroffensive actions, Kyiv is suffering huge losses"; "the counteroffensive actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine failed – the troops were destroyed" etc.
However, after the liberation of Balakliya (Kharkiv region), the phrase "Ukrainian offensive" became the most popular in Russian propaganda, according to the Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security of Ukraine. At the same time, the rhetoric has changed dramatically. It was no longer possible to hide the truth. Panic, fear, aggression, and frustration prevailed in Russian social media.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military demonstrated an effective counteroffensive, the success of which is confirmed by the Pentagon and many world leaders.
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Russia claims that NATO is throwing Leopard 2А4 on the Kherson front |
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Foreign military aid to Ukraine continues to be one of the main targets of Russian propaganda. In this context, pro-Kremlin telegram channels began to spread information about the transfer of a “company of Italian Leopard 2А4 tanks” near the city of Kherson. In the first message, Russian propaganda got confused by the modifications of non-existent “Italian Leopards” and “re-armed” Ukraine with Leopard 2А6 tanks. But this did not turn the fake into the truth.
There are no such tanks in service with the Italian army either. StopFake compared the propagandists’ speculations about “Italian Leopards” with official information on the website of the Italian armed forces. It was found out that there are neither Leopard 2A4 nor Leopard 2A6 tanks in service with Italy. Accordingly, Italy does not have the opportunity to transfer tanks to Ukraine that it does not have.
The assertion that “NATO is throwing Leopard 2А4 on the Kherson front” turned out to be another fiction of propagandists. According to the Kiel Institute, as of July 2022, Ukraine has not received Leopard tanks from partners or under its contracts. The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine confirmed this information.
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This newsletter is supported by the European Cultural Foundation
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Elita Khmelidze
Eleonora Sobrero
Dmytro Filonenko
in collaboration with experts from Information Defense Hub
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