The US decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is the right one
The research reported here was funded in part by the Minerva Research Initiative (OUSD(RE)) and the Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory via grant #W911-NF-17-1-0569 to George Mason University. Any errors and opinions are not those of the Department of Defense and are attributable solely to the authors.
The Biden administration’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021 is a wise strategic choice that took significant political courage. The administration correctly assessed that perpetuating U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan has become a strategic liability and a futile investment that lost the capacity to alter the basic political and military dynamics in Afghanistan. That does not mean that desirable political and security developments will follow in Afghanistan after the U.S. military withdrawal. Unfortunately, the possibility of an intensified and potentially highly fragmented and bloody civil war is real, and at minimum, the Taliban’s ascendance to formal power will bring painful changes to the country’s political dispensation.
Vanda Felbab-Brown
Senior Fellow. Foreign Policy, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
The basic wisdom of the administration’s decision is the realization that perpetuating U.S. military engagement would not reverse these dynamics and that U.S. military, financial, diplomatic, and leadership resources would be better spent on other issues. Even so, the administration made some serious tactical mistakes in its announcement.
Strategic priorities and liabilities
The U.S. primary objective in Afghanistan since 2001 has been to degrade the threat of terrorism against the United States and its allies. That basic goal was accomplished a decade ago: Al-Qaida’s capabilities are a fraction of what they used to be. The Islamic State in Khorasan (ISK) continues to operate in Afghanistan, but the Taliban has been fighting ISK assiduously. However, perpetually bad governance in Afghanistan has undermined stability and allowed the Taliban to entrench itself. While the Taliban too is implicated in many illicit economies, it is often seen as less predatory and capricious, even if brutal and restrictive, than powerbrokers associated with the Afghan government.
The Biden administration correctly assessed that the threat of terrorism from Afghanistan today is in fact smaller than from various parts of Africa and the Middle East. In Somalia, for example, al-Shabab’s territorial and governing power are steadily increasing and the group retains a strong allegiance to al-Qaida. The Islamic State (ISIS) in Somalia, while much weaker than al-Shabab, retains persistent capacity. Various al-Qaida and ISIS affiliates robustly operate in Mali and other parts of the Sahel and North Africa. Thus, even though the Taliban is unwilling to sever its connections with al-Qaida, that threat is not radically different from the terrorist threats against the United States and our allies emanating from other locales. Though hopefully the U.S.-Taliban Doha agreement from February 2020 will incentivize the Taliban to prevent al-Qaida from taking actions against the United States and its allies from Afghanistan, and ongoing U.S. policy should be geared toward this objectives through diplomacy, conditional aid and sanctions, and, even, possibly occasional strikes from off-shore.
The Biden administration’s political courage lies in its refusal to be cowed by the possibility that a terrorism threat will grow in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. That specter has been a key justification for militarily staying on and on. That possibility needs to be weighed against other already materialized strategic threats and realities. Indeed, another wise aspect of the Biden administration’s decision was to stop treating U.S. Afghanistan policy in isolation from other issues and strategic priorities; to date, the tyranny of sunk costs has inflated Afghanistan’s importance.
Now, threats from China, an aggressive Russia, North Korea, and Iran — as well as zoonotic pandemics — are more important strategic priorities. Investing in U.S. Special Operation Forces, top leadership attention, and financial resources to counter those threats can deliver far greater strategic benefits than perpetuating the Afghanistan military effort.
The hard ground realities in Afghanistan
The United States hasn’t achieved its goal of defeating the Taliban. For several years, the Taliban has been steadily ascendant on the battlefield. It is on a path to become the strongest political force in Afghanistan, and a powerful actor in a future Afghan government.
Militants, Criminals, and Warlords
Continuing the U.S. deployment won’t alter this reality. There is no credible path whereby a sustained U.S. troop presence helps bring a desirable peace deal — “desirable” defined as a Colombia-like deal, with minimal political representation for the Taliban in national and subnational government, an amnesty, and fighter demobilization and reintegration assistance. In Colombia, the war was stalled at a much lower level of conflict when negotiations with the leftist guerrillas began, and the basic trends for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were headed downward. The opposite is the case in Afghanistan, where Afghan security forces by and large remain weak, often reach accommodation with the Taliban, and suffer from many deficiencies.
The U.S. military presence has slowed the Taliban’s military and political gains, but not reversed them (even when American troop levels were 100,000 strong). It has no prospect of accomplishing them with 5,000 or 10,000 troops staying for another five or 10 years, let alone less. Since 2015, the U.S. approach to Afghanistan has been staying and praying — praying that the Taliban will make enough strategic mistakes to do itself in on the battlefield. It has not.
Nor has the United States managed to redress another key malady of Afghanistan: the perpetually parochial, fractious, and corrupt political elite, which engages in disruptive politicking instead of governing, even as Afghanistan has burned in an intensifying insurgency. Neither U.S. and international donor threats to reduce aid nor the ever-clearer and nearer prospect of the U.S. military withdrawal have swayed politicians toward unity against the Taliban and fundamentally improved governance.
over, sustaining a U.S. military deployment in Afghanistan until a peace deal is reached would neglect the fact that any serious negotiations amidst the ground realities require the Afghan government to cede a considerable amount of power to the Taliban. The Afghan government has naturally not wanted to do so, and thus had had no interest in seriously negotiating with the Taliban. As long as there was a prospect for the United States staying militarily and propping up the Afghan government, Kabul has had little incentive to negotiate. Conversely, a firm U.S. withdrawal date — which Trump and now Biden have declared —incentivizes the Taliban not to negotiate until after U.S. troops are gone and the Taliban gains more power.
Supporters of a sustained presence point out that the U.S. withdrawal is abrupt; rather, Washington has repeatedly and ever more strongly signaled it over a decade. In 2014, for instance, the Obama administration was on the verge of going merely to an embassy-level military presence. But the Afghan government and political elites have ignored the steady warnings, hoping instead to entangle the United States with an open-ended military commitment until the Taliban was much weakened, however many years or decades that would take.
NATO and Pakistan
Even though the writing has been on the wall, the U.S. decision creates discomfort for some European allies — a poignant and ironic disparity in policy preferences. For years, the United States had been urging NATO allies under the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to devote greater military forces to Afghanistan and to leave their bases to engage in offensive counterinsurgency actions, even though Washington originally sold the Afghanistan mission to them as one of defensive patrolling, state-building, and economic development. Watching allies’ restrictive battlefield rules of engagement made U.S. soldiers joke bitterly that ISAF stood for “I Saw America Fight,” while U.S. troops slugged out in hard firefights in remote forward operating bases.
Yet while NATO partners are dependent on the United States for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and logistics — and thus are most unlikely to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan beyond the U.S. withdrawal — they now fear the withdrawal. The likely deterioration of security and political dispensation in Afghanistan creates serious domestic political problems for them, as does the prospect of Afghan refugees. But extending the withdrawal deadline from May 1 to September gives the NATO partners a chance to manage an orderly lift out from Afghanistan.
With Pakistan, U.S. policy can move toward more normalization. At a minimum, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan will liberate the United States from dependence on ground and air lines of control to Afghanistan through Pakistan. This dependence has been holding other elements of U.S. Pakistan policy hostage, including concerns about tactical nuclear weapons, civil-military relations, and democracy.
The bleak outlook in Afghanistan
The political prospects in Afghanistan are not pretty. At best, the existing civil war, killing tens of thousands of Afghans annually, will eventually ease. But the Taliban is heading to power and the new political dispensation will mean a significant weakening of political and human rights, civil liberties, and pluralistic processes.
The Taliban continues to object to elections, at least elections that could remove it from power. Instead, it embraces an Iran-like model of a supreme religious council where the Taliban is the strongest actor, ruling over other political and administrative structures where elections can take place.
Understandably, the Taliban also wants to integrate its fighters into the Afghan military and intelligence services — whether or not the Afghan security forces have significantly collapsed beforehand. Already, the Taliban encircles at least 12 provincial capitals, and without the U.S. air power holding back its offensives, the Taliban can pounce on and hold many of them. Worse yet, the existing civil war can easily intensify into a far bloodier, fragmented, and protracted one (à la Syria or Libya) before the Taliban arrives in power, for who knows how long.
All of these likely losses to democratic processes, rights, and humanitarian concerns are immensely tragic. But the United States could no longer reverse them.
All of these likely losses to democratic processes, rights, and humanitarian concerns are immensely tragic. But the United States could no longer reverse them.
A major tactical error and way forward
Although correct in its basic strategic decision, the Biden administration nonetheless made a major tactical error: In announcing the new withdrawal timeline just a few days before a planned Istanbul conference on Afghanistan, it undercut peace diplomacy. The conference — which sought an interim peace agreement between the Ashraf Ghani government and the Taliban, against the two sides’ preferences — had been a major diplomatic stretch. The United States and the international community put a lot of diplomatic capital into a rushed and undercooked effort, further weakening the embattled Afghan government and augmenting the fractious tendencies among the Afghan elite.
Managed differently, the conference could have generated a new negotiating process, complementing the moribund Doha peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Unsurprisingly, the Taliban said this week that it would not engage in any peace conference until after all international troops are out of Afghanistan. This U.S. tactical error is costly for future American and international diplomatic efforts in Afghanistan.
The United States needs to remain engaged in those efforts and continually urge power-sharing in Afghanistan. It should continue providing financial, intelligence, and perhaps other remote support for the Afghan security forces. It should seek to shape the Taliban through prospects of international economic aid (or its denial), sanctions, travel visas, and other tools so as to minimize the losses to pluralistic political and economic processes and rights in Afghanistan. Those losses are coming, but we should try to reduce their extent. The United States should also mitigate humanitarian consequences, including by providing visas to Afghans who collaborate in the U.S. effort.
Despite the inglorious departure, having the wisdom to liquidate unwise commitments and redirect resources toward more important priorities is a basic hallmark of a great power, and to the credit of the Biden administration.
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Ukraine’s troops long planned their move on Russian forces. Then came the flood
KHERSON, Ukraine — The soldiers had staked out the islands for months, working in shifts, often crossing the river at night to build a bridgehead for Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive.
Then our command office said the enemy had blown up the Kakhovka dam, said Andriy, a tactician in a territorial defense unit in this southern Ukrainian region.
Millions of tons of water rushed down Ukraine’s largest river, the Dnipro, flooding towns and settlements in its wake. The catastrophic flooding also upended months of careful maneuvers by Ukrainian forces in the region.
Over several weeks, NPR spoke with Andriy and several other soldiers working in reconnaissance and special forces here. They declined to give their last names for security reasons but said they were helping to lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive. But instead of facing off against Russian soldiers, they found themselves fighting floodwaters.
A pre-dawn call
Andriy got the call about the dam explosion at 2:58 a.m. on June 6, not long after he had helped embed fellow soldiers from his territorial defense unit onto the islands of the Dnipro River.
A 40-something with a VIKING-style warrior haircut, Andriy recalled bolting out of bed to help evacuate civilians and soldiers. In a series of voice messages to NPR sent earlier this month, he alternated between calmly describing the unfolding disaster and raging against Russia’s war of ecocide and genocide to destroy the Ukrainian people.
The Russians showed that they can blow up a hydroelectric plant, he said in an exhausted voice. Who says tomorrow they won’t blow up a nuclear power plant?
Russia denies it blew up the dam and instead claims the Ukrainians did it. Ukraine’s security services say they intercepted communications pointing to a group of Russian saboteurs who intended to damage the dam but instead accidentally blew it up. Andriy said he doesn’t believe it was an accident.
They knew that, as a consequence, it would flood the islands and the occupied bank, where our troops are already, without thinking about their own personnel there, and of course, without thinking about civilians, he said.
Months of counteroffensive groundwork
Andriy and his unit had spent months doing reconnaissance work on the islands of the Dnipro, which divides the two armies. Russian forces currently occupy land in the Kherson region that begins east of the river and stretches south toward the peninsula of Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014.
Before last November, Russian forces also occupied the regional capital, the city of Kherson. After Ukrainian forces liberated it, Russian soldiers responded by shelling the city and surrounding villages nearly every day. Russian snipers also shot at anyone near the riverbank. Kherson’s regional military administration says Russian attacks have killed more than 260 people in the area since last November.
Serhiy, a former park ranger who is in Andriy’s unit, said in an interview last month that residents were killed everywhere — waiting for a train, going to the doctor, grocery shopping with their kids.
We won’t be safe here until we push out the Russians, he said.
The river islands, Serhiy said, were the best place to observe Russian troops.
This is the closest we can get to the enemy to see their movements with our own eyes, he said.
The stakeouts on the river islands came with enormous risk. Serhiy said he and the other soldiers faced constant shelling and attack drones constantly flying over their heads. Russian soldiers in tanks stood ready to strike with artillery or mortars at the slightest movement.
Andriy said he knew that an offensive across a heavily guarded river would be challenging. Military experts also saw difficulties in moving troops into soft terrain with floodplains and irrigation canals.
But he said his unit had made progress — destroying Russian equipment and enemy sabotage groups, fortifying positions along both sides of the Dnipro. He cited Ukrainian media reports and government statements saying Russian forces had begun evacuating residents from the occupied side and forcing them to apply for Russian passports.
He saw this as a sign that the Russians knew they were losing.
The river guerrillas
Andriy and his territorial defense unit were not alone on the river islands and banks. A group from Ukraine’s special forces had also spent months sabotaging Russian camps and attacking Russian-installed politicians on the occupied side.
We would also give the coordinates of Russian weapons stockpiles to our artillery units, says Alex, one of those special forces fighters. And then we would do a little piff-poff, he added, simulating the sound of shooting. On the Russians. You know what I mean.
Alex is a sniper with graying hair and a Rapid-fire sense of humor. He and his wife Svitlana dreamed of returning to their 17-acre farm in the occupied town of Oleshky across the river.
Now the Russians are on my land, he said when we met in Kherson last month. They are living in my home. They are drinking my water.
He and Svitlana lived with another special forces fighter and his wife in Kherson. Shelling had pockmarked the iron gate around their house. Inside, the garden was blooming. After two explosions boomed, Svitlana started to joke about needing to wear her custom-made body armor to water the flowers.
We better go in the house, Alex said, with a nervous smile. You never know what could land on you out here.
As Alex and the other fighter, Michel, made a schnitzel lunch for their wives, they explained that they met last summer, before the city of Kherson was liberated, after spending months ambushing Russians on the river islands and in the marshlands in the occupied area.
After months of guerrilla-style warfare, Alex was convinced that a large-scale counteroffensive here was imminent.
Don’t expect some scene out of World War II, like millions of soldiers swimming across the Dnipro River, Alex said. Everything will happen like it’s supposed to.
The flood — and its aftermath
Alex said he didn’t expect the Russians to blow up the dam. But when they did, he knew that the floodwaters would drown his occupied town, Oleshky, and the farm where he and his wife used to host their famous barbecues before the war.
He immediately texted friends in Oleshky, sending them the coordinates of high-rise buildings on higher ground, where they could shelter with Ukrainian partisans.
In the first few days, he said, it was nearly impossible to cross the Dnipro River. He knew of at least two territorial defense soldiers who died trying.
They were very experienced, he said, but in a split second their boat capsized.
Andriy, the territorial defense soldier, said that Russian forces also shot at anyone trying to evacuate.
We could not use helicopters to help them, he said, We also could not use emergency rescue workers, because they could be killed by Russian terrorists. We had to rely on each other.
He said some soldiers died trying to evacuate civilians by boat but declined to give more details.
Within a couple of days, Oleshky was flooded, including Alex’s home. His mother-in-law as well and the couple’s beloved dogs survived by sheltering on top of a roof. A group of volunteers rescued them amid constant shelling from Russian forces.
Alex said he can’t say much more than that, repeating the Ukrainian military’s slogan for the counteroffensive: Plans like silence. He says the Russians are still hunting anyone trying to rescue stranded Ukrainians.
They are firing at them, he said. And there are victims.
He said the fighters in his unit made it out alive and saw the bodies of many dead Russian soldiers floating by. Those who survived were clinging to trees.
Our unit even took a prisoner, he said, referring to a Russian captive. He was taken down from a tree.
Most of Oleshky remains flooded. Alex remains hopeful that Ukraine can reclaim it and the rest of Kherson once the floodwaters recede.
Andriy, the territorial defense soldier, also said that this disaster is not going to slow down Ukraine’s quest to push Russian forces out of their land.
But he says he lies awake thinking about post-flooding problems, like dislodged landmines and the loss of so much farmland.
The situation looks really difficult, he said. And we will be dealing with this long after liberation.
Ukraine’s troops long planned their move on Russian forces. Then came the flood
KHERSON, Ukraine — The soldiers had staked out the islands for months, working in shifts, often crossing the river at night to build a bridgehead for Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive.
Then our command office said the enemy had blown up the Kakhovka dam, said Andriy, a tactician in a territorial defense unit in this southern Ukrainian region.
Millions of tons of water rushed down Ukraine’s largest river, the Dnipro, flooding towns and settlements in its wake. The catastrophic flooding also upended months of careful maneuvers by Ukrainian forces in the region.
Over several weeks, NPR spoke with Andriy and several other soldiers working in reconnaissance and special forces here. They declined to give their last names for security reasons but said they were helping to lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive. But instead of facing off against Russian soldiers, they found themselves fighting floodwaters.
A pre-dawn call
Andriy got the call about the dam explosion at 2:58 a.m. on June 6, not long after he had helped embed fellow soldiers from his territorial defense unit onto the islands of the Dnipro River.
A 40-something with a VIKING-style warrior haircut, Andriy recalled bolting out of bed to help evacuate civilians and soldiers. In a series of voice messages to NPR sent earlier this month, he alternated between calmly describing the unfolding disaster and raging against Russia’s war of ecocide and genocide to destroy the Ukrainian people.
The Russians showed that they can blow up a hydroelectric plant, he said in an exhausted voice. Who says tomorrow they won’t blow up a nuclear power plant?
Russia denies it blew up the dam and instead claims the Ukrainians did it. Ukraine’s security services say they intercepted communications pointing to a group of Russian saboteurs who intended to damage the dam but instead accidentally blew it up. Andriy said he doesn’t believe it was an accident.
They knew that, as a consequence, it would flood the islands and the occupied bank, where our troops are already, without thinking about their own personnel there, and of course, without thinking about civilians, he said.
Months of counteroffensive groundwork
Andriy and his unit had spent months doing reconnaissance work on the islands of the Dnipro, which divides the two armies. Russian forces currently occupy land in the Kherson region that begins east of the river and stretches south toward the peninsula of Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014.
Before last November, Russian forces also occupied the regional capital, the city of Kherson. After Ukrainian forces liberated it, Russian soldiers responded by shelling the city and surrounding villages nearly every day. Russian snipers also shot at anyone near the riverbank. Kherson’s regional military administration says Russian attacks have killed more than 260 people in the area since last November.
Serhiy, a former park ranger who is in Andriy’s unit, said in an interview last month that residents were killed everywhere — waiting for a train, going to the doctor, grocery shopping with their kids.
We won’t be safe here until we push out the Russians, he said.
The river islands, Serhiy said, were the best place to observe Russian troops.
This is the closest we can get to the enemy to see their movements with our own eyes, he said.
The stakeouts on the river islands came with enormous risk. Serhiy said he and the other soldiers faced constant shelling and attack drones constantly flying over their heads. Russian soldiers in tanks stood ready to strike with artillery or mortars at the slightest movement.
Andriy said he knew that an offensive across a heavily guarded river would be challenging. Military experts also saw difficulties in moving troops into soft terrain with floodplains and irrigation canals.
But he said his unit had made progress — destroying Russian equipment and enemy sabotage groups, fortifying positions along both sides of the Dnipro. He cited Ukrainian media reports and government statements saying Russian forces had begun evacuating residents from the occupied side and forcing them to apply for Russian passports.
He saw this as a sign that the Russians knew they were losing.
The river guerrillas
Andriy and his territorial defense unit were not alone on the river islands and banks. A group from Ukraine’s special forces had also spent months sabotaging Russian camps and attacking Russian-installed politicians on the occupied side.
We would also give the coordinates of Russian weapons stockpiles to our artillery units, says Alex, one of those special forces fighters. And then we would do a little piff-poff, he added, simulating the sound of shooting. On the Russians. You know what I mean.
Alex is a sniper with graying hair and a Rapid-fire sense of humor. He and his wife Svitlana dreamed of returning to their 17-acre farm in the occupied town of Oleshky across the river.
Now the Russians are on my land, he said when we met in Kherson last month. They are living in my home. They are drinking my water.
He and Svitlana lived with another special forces fighter and his wife in Kherson. Shelling had pockmarked the iron gate around their house. Inside, the garden was blooming. After two explosions boomed, Svitlana started to joke about needing to wear her custom-made body armor to water the flowers.
We better go in the house, Alex said, with a nervous smile. You never know what could land on you out here.
As Alex and the other fighter, Michel, made a schnitzel lunch for their wives, they explained that they met last summer, before the city of Kherson was liberated, after spending months ambushing Russians on the river islands and in the marshlands in the occupied area.
After months of guerrilla-style warfare, Alex was convinced that a large-scale counteroffensive here was imminent.
Don’t expect some scene out of World War II, like millions of soldiers swimming across the Dnipro River, Alex said. Everything will happen like it’s supposed to.
The flood — and its aftermath
Alex said he didn’t expect the Russians to blow up the dam. But when they did, he knew that the floodwaters would drown his occupied town, Oleshky, and the farm where he and his wife used to host their famous barbecues before the war.
He immediately texted friends in Oleshky, sending them the coordinates of high-rise buildings on higher ground, where they could shelter with Ukrainian partisans.
In the first few days, he said, it was nearly impossible to cross the Dnipro River. He knew of at least two territorial defense soldiers who died trying.
They were very experienced, he said, but in a split second their boat capsized.
Andriy, the territorial defense soldier, said that Russian forces also shot at anyone trying to evacuate.
We could not use helicopters to help them, he said, We also could not use emergency rescue workers, because they could be killed by Russian terrorists. We had to rely on each other.
He said some soldiers died trying to evacuate civilians by boat but declined to give more details.
Within a couple of days, Oleshky was flooded, including Alex’s home. His mother-in-law as well and the couple’s beloved dogs survived by sheltering on top of a roof. A group of volunteers rescued them amid constant shelling from Russian forces.
Alex said he can’t say much more than that, repeating the Ukrainian military’s slogan for the counteroffensive: Plans like silence. He says the Russians are still hunting anyone trying to rescue stranded Ukrainians.
They are firing at them, he said. And there are victims.
He said the fighters in his unit made it out alive and saw the bodies of many dead Russian soldiers floating by. Those who survived were clinging to trees.
Our unit even took a prisoner, he said, referring to a Russian captive. He was taken down from a tree.
Most of Oleshky remains flooded. Alex remains hopeful that Ukraine can reclaim it and the rest of Kherson once the floodwaters recede.
Andriy, the territorial defense soldier, also said that this disaster is not going to slow down Ukraine’s quest to push Russian forces out of their land.
But he says he lies awake thinking about post-flooding problems, like dislodged landmines and the loss of so much farmland.
The situation looks really difficult, he said. And we will be dealing with this long after liberation.
Ukraine war updates: Wagner chief accuses Russian army of attack
This blog is now closed. Thanks for joining us. These were the updates on the Russia-Ukraine war on Friday, June 23:
This blog is now closed. Thanks for joining us. These were the updates on the Russia-Ukraine war on Friday, June 23:
- Russian shelling kills two people in Kherson, according to the Ukrainian governor in the partly occupied region.
- President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promises personnel changes following an inquest into Ukraine’s bomb shelters, launched after a recent deadly incident.
- In response to another European sanctions package, Russia says it will expand the list of people banned from visiting to include members of the European Parliament.
- “The counteroffensive is not a new season of a Netflix show,” says Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, after Russia depicted Kyiv’s attacks as slow and faltering.
Russia’s FSB opens criminal case against Wagner chief: TASS
Russia’s FSB security service has opened a criminal case against mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin for calling for armed mutiny, Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency has said, citing the National Antiterrorism Committee.
President Vladimir Putin has been briefed on the developments and “necessary measures are being taken”, Interfax news agency said, citing Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Wagner chief: This is a ‘march for justice’
The founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has said that his call to action against the Russian military was not a military coup but rather a “march for justice”.
“This is not a military coup,” Prigozhin said in a series of audio recordings posted on Telegram. “It is a march for justice. Our actions do not in any way interfere with troops.”
Prigozhin also accused Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu of ordering 2,000 bodies of Wagner fighters be hidden in a morgue in southern Russia.
Wagner chief: ‘There are 25,000 of us’, urges Russians to join
The chief of mercenary group Wagner said he had 25,000 troops under his command and urged others to join to resist Moscow’s military brass.
“There are 25,000 of us and we are going to look into why there’s total lawlessness in the country,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in an audio message, urging Russians to join his forces.
Wagner chief pledges to ‘stop’ Russian military leadership
The chief of mercenary group Wagner has pledged to “stop” Moscow’s top military leadership and called on Russians not to resist his forces.
“The council of commanders of PMC Wagner has made a decision – the evil that the military leadership of the country brings must be stopped,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in an audio message released by his spokespeople, urging Russians to remain calm.
Moscow strikes kill ‘huge’ number of Wagner forces: chief
The chief of Russian mercenary group Wagner has accused Moscow’s military leadership of ordering attacks on their camps and killing a “huge” number of forces.
“We were ready to make concessions to the defence ministry, surrender our weapons,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in a furious audio message released by his spokespeople.
“Today, seeing that we have not been broken, they conducted missile strikes at our rear camps.”
The defence ministry quickly issued a statement saying Prigozhin’s accusations “do not correspond to reality and are an informational provocation”.
White House monitoring Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant situation
The White House has that it has not detected elevated levels of radioactivity at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, but that it is monitoring the situation closely.
Ukraine warns against ‘panic’ after alleged nuclear threat
Kyiv has urged Ukrainians not to panic or stockpile iodine tablets after Zelenskyy alleged that Russia planned to organise a radiation leak at an occupied nuclear plant.
Zelenskyy said this week that Russian forces controlling Zaporizhzhia – Europe’s biggest nuclear plant – were planning a “terror attack” by orchestrating a radiation leak.
The Kremlin said it was a “lie” but the president’s warning put many Ukrainians on alert and sent demand for iodine at many pharmacies skyrocketing.
“Read and share but don’t panic! Don’t play the enemy’s game. President Zelenskyy said nothing new,” the Ukrainian health ministry said late on Thursday.
“Russia is a terrorist country from which, like a monkey with a grenade, you can expect anything.”
EU fund that bankrolls Ukraine arms to get 3.5-billion-euro boost
European Union foreign ministers will approve a boost of 3.5 billion euros (3.81bn) to a military aid fund used to bankroll weapons and ammunition for Ukraine, officials have said.
The ministers are expected to raise the financial ceiling on the European Peace Facility (EPF) – a fund that has already allocated some 5.6bn euros in military aid for Ukraine – at a meeting in Luxembourg on Monday.
However, Hungary continues to block the allocation of another 500-million-euro tranche of the fund for Ukraine, according to officials.
Budapest has said it will not lift its block until Kyiv removes Hungarian bank OTP from a list of companies it deems “international sponsors” of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Hungary has branded the bank’s inclusion “scandalous”.
“On Monday, a decision will be taken to top up the European Peace Facility by 3.5 billion euros,” said a senior EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“But there will be no decision on a new tranche of the European Peace Facility for Ukraine because there is not yet agreement among member states on that.”