Weekly megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - January 12

News about the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been starting to slip down the front page of newspapers and websites recently, exactly as would benefit Putin‘s long game. And what happens when international attention drops? The corporations start quietly going back in.

Intel Quietly Resumes Russia Support, Unblocks Software Downloads
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-resumes-russia-support

The Polish Economic Institute has released a report about Ukrainian businesses set up in Poland since the start of the war.

Around 3 600 new business entities ("partnerships with Ukrainian capital") were set up by Ukrainian nationals from January to September of 2022. 10 200 are listed as "Ukrainian sole proprietors" – that is, as either self-employed or single owners. Top three areas for the new businesses are construction, IT and communications, and services.

Most of the businesses started as a way to supply the families in Ukraine during the war.

66% of the businesses intend to stay in Poland after the war's over.

Indeed, most [Ukrainian entrepreneurs] consider Poland as a step towards entering the EU market and expanding markets for their products

— Tetiana Chuzha, Polish Investment and Trade Agency (PIAH)

You can find the full report attached down the page.

The bad news is: nobody's there to stop Ukrainian beavers from making dams because of the war, which makes miles and miles around Kyiv marshy and hard to traverse.

The good news is: this makes it that much less likely that Russia would consider invading through Belarus.

The swampy conditions have given Ukrainians an advantage, and time to prepare: a local military unit called the Volyn territorial defense [located in the Belarus-bordering region of Volyn, to the west of Kyiv] has been conducting daily training exercises in the area, according to Reuters.

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Analyst Konrad Muzyka, who runs the defense consultancy Rochan Consulting, told Reuters that Volyn would be a "horrible place to conduct an offensive operation."

"There are many watercourses there, very few roads," he said. "This makes it easy for Ukrainian forces to channel the movement of Russian forces into specific areas where they would be shelled by artillery."

Unexploded grenade removed from Ukrainian soldier's chest

Photos on the Facebook page of Ukraine's armed forces medical service show an X-ray of the explosive close to the serviceman's heart, and another of the surgeon holding the device.

The social media post said the surgery was carried out without the use of electrocoagulation - where an electric current is used to help control bleeding during surgery - because the "ammunition could [have detonated] at any time".

BBC News – Alex Binley – 12th January 2023

Ukraine’s unity continues to blow me away. Even their graffiti artists are supporting the effort.

https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/spray-painting-the-resistance/

Sunak confirms UK will send tanks to Ukraine ‘to push Russian troops back’ (Guardian)

Britain plans to send tanks to Ukraine, Rishi Sunak has confirmed, in a move that will heap further pressure on Germany to approve a wider delivery of the vehicles this week.

In a call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the prime minister confirmed for the first time that it was Britain’s intention to provide a small number of Challenger 2 tanks to help push back Russia’s invasion. It would make Britain the first western power to supply the Ukrainians with main battle tanks, which would be used to help train Ukrainian troops.

The move comes as Germany faces international pressure to allow the delivery of German-made Leopard 2 tanks as part of a plan by western forces to increase military aid to Ukraine. It would represent a major upgrade for Ukrainian forces.

Finland and Poland have said that they could send Leopard tanks to Ukraine. However, the move requires Berlin’s approval and diplomacy on the topic is set to take place over the coming days. The German government has said it has not yet received a formal request to re-export the tanks.

The push is taking place so that Ukrainian soldiers have sufficient training before a possible offensive in the spring. The US defence secretary Lloyd Austin will meet his German counterpart Christine Lambrecht in Berlin at the end of the week.

Ukraine's interior ministry leadership killed in helicopter crash (BBC)

The three main figures in Ukraine's interior ministry have been killed in a helicopter crash beside a nursery in an eastern suburb of the capital Kyiv.

Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky, 42, died alongside his first deputy minister and state secretary.

Fourteen people died when the helicopter came down in Brovary around 08:30 local time (06:30 GMT), including one child, authorities said.

There is no indication the crash was anything other than an accident.

But the SBU state security service said it was following several possible causes for the crash, which included sabotage as well as a technical malfunction or breach of flight rules.

The State Emergency Service had previously stated that up to 18 people were killed but later revised the death toll from the crash, saying 14 had died.

Mr Monastyrsky, who was one of President Volodymyr Zelensky's longest serving political advisers, is the highest profile Ukrainian casualty since the war began.

The deputy head of Ukraine's presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said the minister had been travelling to a war "hot spot" when his helicopter went down.

The head of police in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, Volodymyr Tymoshko, said the ministerial team were on their way to meet him there and he had spoken to them only yesterday.

The minister's death cuts to the heart of the government in Kyiv as the interior ministry has the vital task of maintaining security and running the police during the war.

President Zelensky has spoken of a terrible tragedy that claimed the lives of "true patriots".

The head of Ukraine's national police force, Ihor Klymenko, has been appointed acting interior minister following Mr Monastyrsky's death.

German battle tanks for Ukraine ‘won’t be ready until 2024’

Battle tanks from German industrial reserves wanted by Ukraine will not be ready to be delivered until 2024, the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall has warned, dampening Kyiv’s hopes that the UK’s promise to deliver Challenger 2 tanks would encourage other European nations to swiftly follow suit.

“Even if the decision to send our Leopard tanks to Kyiv came tomorrow, the delivery would take until the start of next year,” Rheinmetall’s chief executive, Armin Papperger, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

“The vehicles must be completely dismantled and rebuilt,” he added.

The Guardian – Philip Oltermann – 15th January 2023

Splitting the atomic scientists: how the Ukraine war ruined physics (The Guardian)

According to sources at Cern, after the invasion of Ukraine some members objected to co-authorship with Russian institutes and even with individuals working for them (making up about 7% of the collaborators). Fedor Ratnikov, a Russian physicist, explains that no publication policy has satisfied the required two-thirds majority of the participating institutes in each collaboration. “We have Ukrainian collaborators for whom this question is naturally extremely painful. [But] most of my Ukrainian colleagues do not extend responsibility for the invasion to their colleagues from Russian institutes. I would say that some of my EU colleagues are much more radical.”

Andreas Höecker, spokesperson for the Atlas experiment, emphasises that the issue is “solely related to the form of the institutional acknowledgment, given the statements of high-level representatives of Russian academic institutions… and the links of high-level funding bodies with the Russian government”.

Since March, the four LHC experiments have kept preparing new articles, sending them to journals for peer review and freezing their publication. The unpublished pipeline now includes more than 70 pieces.

Public versions are uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, but both they and the submissions to journals lack a list of authors and funding agencies. Where in the past this list would take up several pages, now there is a general attribution, eg “the Atlas collaboration”.

[…]

Although unique, the case of the LHC experiments is part of a wider trend. The German Research Foundation has warned scientists against publishing with co-authors from Russian institutes. The Web of Science database tracking citations has stopped evaluating articles from Russia. There have been reports of individual peer-review referees rejecting articles. And as Russian institutes are getting excluded from international projects, some fields see a direct impact – such as climate change research, which is being set back by the suspension of collaboration in the Arctic.

In a letter published in Science last spring, five prominent western scientists urged colleagues not to “abandon Russian scientists”. One of them, Nina Fedoroff, emeritus professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, says that “some of [the situation] seems pretty symbolic”. In her opinion, science diplomacy “can sort out the bad actors from the good actors, but we do much less of it through official channels than we could be doing.”