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Ukraine – 3/10 Sitrep
Kherson, Berdyansk & Melitpol
Big 4 Firms Leave Russia
Bellingcat Assessment
Looting
Former Head of MI-6 on Ukraine
Western Military Aid & Russian Losses
By: Robert Homans
March 10, 2022
Kherson, Berdyansk & Melitopol – Russia now nominally controls these 3 cities located in Southern Ukraine, Kherson near the mouth of the Dnieper River, Berdyansk along the Sea of Azov, and Melitopol inland from Berdyansk, at least to the extent that they’re able to arrest some individuals. Resistance to Russian occupation is active in all 3 cities.
Yesterday in Kherson, the Russians destroyed the Irrigation Institute of Kherson. This will make it impossible to find the technical expertise necessary to repair the North Crimea Canal, Crimea’s only source of water. The canal has been closed since February 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea. Capturing the North Crimea Canal, and rendering it operational, was an important Russian invasion objective. Someone should’ve told the soldiers who destroyed the Irrigation Institute.
In Melitopol and Berdyansk, Russians are offering Russian passports, Russian pensions, and access to Russian markets for farm operators. The pensions and the payments for the sale of farm products will be payable in the collapsed Russian Ruble. As far as becoming Russian citizens is concerned, the residents of Melitopol and Berdyansk need only to look over their shoulders, specifically the destruction in Russian-occupied Donbas, to see what would happen to their communities under Russian “protection.”
All of the Big 4 Audit Firms Leave Russia – The decision of the “Big 4” audit firms, E&Y, PwC, KPMG & Deloitte to leave Russia ranks just below Russian banks being kicked off SWIFT and the sanctions on the Russian Central Bank in importance. BBDO and RSM International, the 5th and 6th largest firms, are also leaving Russia.
Here’s why this development is important:
· Investors and counterparties of big Russian firms, like Gazprom or SberBank, will no longer be able to rely on audits prepared by the biggest international audit firms.
· According to a friend of mine, who worked for one of the “Big 4” in Russia, Russian firms, including those that will likely reorganize themselves after the departure of the Big 4, will be unable to handle the technicalities of an audit for a complex multinational like Lukoil or Gazprom, that require access to proprietary audit platforms and audit technique that is the intellectual property of the Big 4 firms, plus BBDO and RSM.
· The firms that remain in Russia will likely be unable to provide audit services to entities with a level of complexity below the large Russian multinationals.
· If the services provided by the Big 4 firms in Russia are like those offered by Big 4 firms in Ukraine, the Big 4 firms in Russia offer legal services, consulting, and investment advisory work, in addition to audit. Their loss will eliminate access to international legal services and advice.
· Going forward, loss of the Big 4, plus BBDO and RSM, may make it difficult for lesser-known Russian companies, perhaps including some owned by oligarchs, to gain legitimacy with international investors, through having audit reports prepared by Big 4 firms.
Bellingcat - Bellingcat (https://www.bellingcat.com/about/), an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects, predicted that Russia will stop its invasion in 7 to 10 days because its offensive resources will be exhausted.
Bellingcat has a history of gathering reliable information inside Russia. Relying entirely on open-source information, Bellingcat traced the movements of the BUK missile battery that shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 in July 2014, from its base near Kursk, Russia, to the field in Donbas where the BUK missile was launched, and back to Kursk. Information gathered by Bellingcat is being used as evidence in the trial of 4 Russians who are allegedly responsible for ordering the shooting down of MH-17. Bellingcat also traced the movements of the Russian GRU agents who attempted to murder Alexei Navalny, and they revealed the identities of the GRU agents who poisoned the Skripals in Salsbury, England. In both cases, Bellingcat relied solely on open-source information.
Looting – Ukraine is intercepting phone calls from Russian soldiers back to their families, and phone calls between Russian soldiers. In a recent call, a Russian soldier told his wife that he was bringing two fur coats back to her as a present, along with some high-end kitchen appliances.
In a Tweet, a correspondent for one of the international news services said that Russian soldiers looted her brother’s apartment, in a town near Kyiv. He had left for his own safety, leaving the key with his neighbor. When the Russian soldiers started banging on his brother’s door, and when it became obvious that extensive damage to the door and door frame would result, the neighbor gave the Russian soldiers the key.
Ukraine may be able to identify the looters because they have hacked into the personal information of approximately 120,000 Russian soldiers currently in Ukraine.
The Former Head of MI-6 on Ukraine, and Putin – This is a video of a lecture given by Sir John Sawer, the former Head of Great Britain’s MI-6, on the war in Ukraine and his impressions of Putin. Worth watching. He thinks Putin is a different man today, than he was in the early 2000s, when he met with Putin alongside then Prime Minister Tony Blair. In addition, Sawer said he felt that Putin was very much shaken by the “Color Revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, and he needed to make sure that the same didn’t happen in Russia.
Comparing Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Russian invasion of Ukraine using Wikipedia and Ukraine Ministry of Defense Daily Bulletins. Soviet and Russian military losses.
I checked the Bellingcat site (https://www.bellingcat.com/category/news/) and I'm not seeing anything about that estimate of 7 - 10 days. I was able to run down the report by Vladimir Osechkin of Gulagu.net (https://gulagu-net.ru/news/2022-03-09-1226.html) cited in this piece - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10585325/Russia-facing-total-failure-invasion-Ukraine-Moscow-whistleblower-analyst-claims.html - and I've posted the whole thing on my substack: https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/fsb-whistleblower-report-war-in-ukraine