I love it. The Mirror says: The Suvorovets anti-sabotage boat, when it is actually a Sverdlovsk class cruiser.Boac wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2023 9:53 amSome more 'news' of the event. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-new ... l-30626226
Full article and photos at link:I remember the exact moment when I heard how Christchurch scientist and humanitarian aid worker Andrew Bagshaw had really died.
In early March, I was about one month into researching my book about Bagshaw’s extraordinary work in Ukraine. The official story was that Bagshaw, 47, and a British colleague named Chris Parry, 28, had been accidentally killed in the eastern Ukrainian city of Soledar while trying to rescue an elderly woman.
It was to have been one of hundreds of evacuations by Bagshaw since his arrival in Ukraine in April 2022. From July on, he worked as part of a loose group of largely international volunteers based in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. Some, like Parry, were British. Others were from the US, Canada, Australia, Poland, the Netherlands and Germany. They got stragglers out of cities and villages in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine before the advancing Russians moved in.
The volunteers funded their work with donations, paid for their own vehicles and resources and often reached out to the wider world by posting dramatic clips of their rescues on social media apps like YouTube and Instagram – although that wasn’t really Bagshaw’s style. He was unusual in the group as someone who didn’t seek attention and resisted the limelight.
This volunteer culture seemed unique to me. They were not foreign fighters but freelance aid workers who went into places the big aid organisations stayed away from. In some cases they took risks even soldiers were not comfortable taking.
So the story was that Bagshaw and Parry drove to Soledar on the cold morning of January 6 to rescue an elderly woman – they would use the Russian term, a “babushka” – and drive her to safety.
But after leaving for Soledar, Bagshaw and Parry were not seen again. They were considered missing until their deaths were finally confirmed a fortnight later.
In the official version, their car, a black Land Rover belonging to Parry, was hit directly by a Russian artillery shell. They would have been killed immediately. That story gave an impression that their deaths were as close as possible to accidental. Perhaps they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or caught in the crossfire? Or their car was mistaken for an enemy vehicle?
But the truth was much worse than that.
I came across a story in a small British daily newspaper, the Oxford Mail. I had set a daily Google Alert for Bagshaw’s name, which usually meant I saw notices about the same story published again and again, in Polish or Italian or Vietnamese. But this was different.
The story, headlined “Inquest opened in death of Briton killed in Ukraine war”, was a report from the Oxford Coroner’s Court.
It said Parry and Bagshaw “were trying to rescue a woman in the war zone when their car was hit by shelling”. Again, the official story.
But then, only a couple of lines later: “Oxford Coroner’s Court heard that a post-mortem had found the cause of Mr Parry’s death to be gunshot wounds to the head and torso. His body was identified at the John Radcliffe Hospital on February 20 by a forensic odontologist, using dental records.”
I felt sick as I read those words. Obviously a gunshot wound to the head was not caused by artillery from a long distance away. It pointed to a deliberate killing, an execution – one that had all the hallmarks of the Wagner Group, the notorious Russian mercenaries who took control of Soledar. Wagner Group defectors said they had a brutal policy of killing everyone they encountered.
Parry’s body was returned to the UK for a second post-mortem, but Bagshaw was cremated in Kyiv. Yet, as Bagshaw’s father, Phil, told me during one of our subsequent interviews, the death certificate produced in Kyiv described his cause of death as a gunshot wound. He also learned that a criminal investigation has been launched into his son’s death by Ukrainian authorities.
...
Russia’s war crimes
If we call Bagshaw and Parry’s deaths war crimes what, if anything, can the British and New Zealand governments do about it? Their deaths are on the appallingly long list of war crimes committed by the Russians since they invaded Ukraine in February 2022. People may remember hearing about Bucha, near Kyiv, where hundreds of civilians and prisoners of war were tortured and killed, or the bombing of civilians hiding in a theatre in Mariupol, or the shelling of the train station in Kramatorsk as refugees tried to flee to the west.
As if in an act of defiance, Bagshaw and his Polish friend Grzegorz Rybak posed outside the same train station months later. After Bagshaw died, Rybak told me from his home in Scotland, “Sad didn’t cover it. It was devastating.”
What does the likely involvement of the Wagner Group mean for future attempts to prosecute a war crime? It has been said that the mercenaries gave Russia plausible deniability. In other words, they could do Russia’s dirty work while at arm’s length from the state.
Parry’s body was returned to the UK for a second post-mortem, but Bagshaw was cremated in Kyiv. Yet, as Bagshaw’s father, Phil, told me during one of our subsequent interviews, the death certificate produced in Kyiv described his cause of death as a gunshot wound. He also learned that a criminal investigation has been launched into his son’s death by Ukrainian authorities.
The true story of Parry’s death is also becoming more widely known. When the BBC announced in June that it had commissioned a documentary about Parry, the announcement explicitly stated he was shot dead by the Wagner Group, and British media has reported that an inquest into Parry’s death will start in September. That might answer further questions about what happened to both men in Soledar on January 6 and during the days after.
But others have said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s admission in June that Russia paid the Wagner Group more than 86 billion rubles (NZ$1.4b) in one year alone could make it easier to bring a case against Russia.
Bagshaw is one of three New Zealanders who have been killed in Ukraine. The other two, Dominic Abelen and Kane Te Tai, died in combat. Te Tai wrote a very moving letter that was widely shared after his death, and appeared to express peace about the possibility he may not see home again.
“I enjoyed myself here,” he wrote. “I’ve learnt to live and love here. I have fallen in love with the people, the country. I came out here not fully knowing what I was getting myself into, but now I am here and five months on, my resolve has only grown stronger.”
He found a new sense of meaning and an identification with the Ukrainian people. That identification was also common among the volunteers, including Bagshaw, who found a new sense of purpose.
They related to Ukraine’s defiant spirit, its underdog status, its determination. They recognised that which was tragic about Ukraine, as expressed by US historian Timothy Snyder, who said “the first thing to know about Ukraine is that the 21st century has given Ukraine a chance. And now Ukraine is facing a war whose aggressor seeks to take that chance away.”
Who knows what the outcome will be. Is it possible for Ukraine to win, and take back all of the Donbas and Crimea? And to then join Nato? This is the ending most of the world hopes for. But what kind of instability would then follow in Russia?
In the meantime, Bagshaw must be remembered for more than just the tragic way he died. The possible war crime is not dwelt on in The Quiet Hero, but instead his motivations are emphasised, along with his personality and the qualities his friends and family talked about – his intelligence, his sensitivity, his scientific genius and his affinity for the suffering of people and animals.
He clearly had a moral sensibility. Talking openly about morality makes many of us uncomfortable but what I found among the volunteers was a drive that was quasi-religious and sometimes openly religious. It seemed fitting that Bagshaw was honoured at a solemn and beautiful Ukrainian Orthodox service in Kyiv.
British journalist John Sweeney attended the service and set the tone for the entire book when he said afterwards, “You can say what’s the point of dying in somebody else’s war? And I would say something different to that. I would say, to die helping other people, it’s the noblest death of all.”
When I contacted him, Sweeney generously offered to write a foreword for the book, in order to say what he wished he had said at the service. Like me, Sweeney never got to meet Bagshaw but he was impressed by his story.
One early reader of the book was reminded of philosopher Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment about the drowning child. If you are walking past a drowning child, do you have an obligation to rescue them? Of course you do. Then surely you have the same obligation for someone further away, in another country.
Bagshaw might have encountered that idea as a philosophy student. It is a story about what it means to be part of the human race.
And finally there is poetry. Early in my research, I came across a poem by Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky, titled We Lived Happily during the War. It was cited as inspirational by US volunteer Brad Hendrickson, and it seemed to get to the core of the urgency felt by Bagshaw and others, and their sorrow as people in more comfortable places just watched as Ukrainians were killed and a country was destroyed.
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough.
A drone appears to have destroyed a supersonic Russian bomber on an airfield hundreds of kilometres from Ukraine, British military intelligence has said, the latest in a string of successful assaults on prestige infrastructure and military hardware.
These attacks, far beyond the frontlines, are powerful propaganda for Ukraine, though Kyiv rarely claims them directly. Hits on key assets, which are meant to be heavily guarded by the latest technology, is highly damaging to morale in Russia, even if they do not change the balance of forces on the battlefield.
The latest attack was “highly likely” to have destroyed a Tu-22M3 Backfire bomber jet at the Soltsy-2 airbase, 400 miles (650km) from the border with Ukraine, on 19 August, British military intelligence said in a regular update on the war.
Social media images showed an aircraft that resembled the Tu-22M3 in flames on a runway. The planes have been used regularly in campaigns that killed civilians in Ukraine, including dropping unguided missiles on Mariupol during an intense bombing campaign at the start of Russia’s invasion.
In January this year, a Tu-22M3 was probably used to launch a heavy anti-ship missile at a block of flats in Dnipro. “This is at least the third successful attack on long-range aviation airfields, again raising questions about Russia’s ability to protect strategic locations deep inside the country,” the statement said.
Adding to Russian humiliation, the attack may have been launched inside the country. Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday that an aircraft in Novgorod region, where the Soltsy-2 airbase is located, was hit by a drone, causing a fire that damaged one plane.
The “copter-style” drone mentioned by Moscow was unlikely to have the range to fly there from outside the country, British military intelligence said. “This adds weight to the assessment that some UAV [drone] attacks against Russian military targets are being launched from inside Russian territory.”
Previous high-profile targets included the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, which was sunk last year, and the Kerch bridge linking Crimea to Russia, a personal project of Vladimir Putin that has been damaged twice.
Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia have increased in recent months, with Moscow a regular target. On Monday, one disrupted flights in and out of the capital on Monday, and injured two people when it was shot down by Russian air defences.
There was no official comment from the government on the destruction of the jet, with authorities wary of commenting on sophisticated sabotage operations or antagonising western allies who are more openly comfortable with supporting defensive military operations.
Senior officials often make barely veiled suggestions of links to the attacks, however. Andriy Yusov, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, mocked Russian attempts to downplay the destruction of the jet and other drone attacks.
“It was probably just some big pigeons that dropped something on those Tu-22M3 aircraft,” he said on national TV. “In Moscow, there are no explosions, their airports and flights are probably operating according to schedule, there are no changes. In general, everything is going according to plan.”
The New Voice of Ukraine reported that Ukrainian drones had damaged five planes in recent days.
Citing Ukrainian intelligence, known as the GUR, it reported that the Tu-22M3 was “destroyed” on Saturday and that two other aircraft were damaged. Two days later, on Monday, two bomber planes in Kaluga were damaged, “as a result of an attack by drones controlled by GUR saboteurs”.
At least two people were injured on Monday when parts of a Ukrainian drone destroyed by Russian air defences fell on a house in the Moscow region, the regional governor said. Arrivals and departures from Moscow’s four main airports – Vnukovo, Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo and Zhukovsky – were restricted, disrupting 45 passenger planes and two cargo planes, the Russian aviation authority said.
The governor of Kaluga region, south of Moscow, said a drone attack had also been repelled there.
Oh dear, he was situated near some of that fiery carnage wasn't he? I hope that he and his property have not been affected.
Oh dear, so sad. Do object to aviation being used in this manner, to eliminate Poo-tins discards.k3k3 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 23, 2023 5:38 pmPrigozhin may have died in an air crash:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66599733
