War Day 52, April 12

Far From Defeated, 

Putin Intends to 

Escalate War in 

Ukraine

Austria’s chancellor visited President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday — the first Western leader to see him in person since the Ukraine invasion — and said he came away feeling not only pessimistic about peace prospects but fearing that Putin intended to drastically intensify the brutality of the war.

…

How much more brutal the war could become was signaled in an interview with Eduard Basurin, a separatist commander, aired on Russian state television. Mr. Basurin said that with Ukrainian forces ensconced in underground fortifications at a steel plant in Mariupol, storming the redoubt did not make sense. Instead, he said, Russian forces needed to first block the exits and then “turn to the chemical troops who will find a way to smoke the moles out of their holes.”
…
Describing Putin as dismissive of atrocities in Ukraine, the visiting chancellor, Karl Nehammer said… “The battle being threatened cannot be underestimated in its violence”…
…
Nehammer said that Putin had brushed aside the accusations of war crimes as having been staged by Ukraine.

…

“We can have no illusions: President Putin has totally adopted the logic of war, and is acting accordingly,” Mr. Nehammer said. “This is why I believe it is so important to permanently confront him with the facts of the war.”

…

Putin…still appeared in control of the crisis. He has severely repressed any dissent and benefited from widespread domestic support, continuing revenues from oil and gas sales to Europe, the implicit backing of China and the refusal of much of the world to join sanctions against Russia.

… 

…Austria, Hungary and Germany opposed any effort, for now, to restrict Russian gas imports.

...
Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said in a Russian television interview that aired on Monday that what the Kremlin calls its “special operation” in Ukraine is aimed at rolling back American influence — which the Russian government characterizes as the root of the world’s ills.

“Our special military operation is designed to put an end to the reckless expansion, and the reckless course toward complete dominance, of the United States,” Lavrov said.
…
If and when the southern port city of Mariupol finally falls, Russian troops can move north to meet up with Russian troops attempting to move south from Izyum and try to encircle the bulk of Ukraine’s army, which is concentrated further east, said…an expert…

I read yesterday that accounts to effect that Mariupol was doomed. Ukrainian defenders seem unable to dislodge the anthropoid invader.
…
Putin originally named one goal of the war [falsely] as the “denazification” of Ukraine…An article on Monday in a Russian state newspaper, Parlamentskaya Gazeta, written by an adviser to the chairman of Russia’s lower house of Parliament, expanded on that concept to define the enemy as “Ukrainian-American neo-Nazism.”