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Newly appointed Head of the Ukraine's State Security Service Vasyl Maliuk looks on during a session of Ukrainian parliament, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine February 7, 2023. Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights

Nov 24 (Reuters) - A Ukrainian sea drone attack on Russia's Crimean bridge in July had "overturned" naval operations and forced Moscow to resort to ferries to move weaponry, the head of Ukraine's main intelligence agency said in a video broadcast on Friday.

Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said the second of two major attacks in August had seriously disrupted operations on the 19-km (12-mile) bridge, Europe's longest, and dented the notion of Russian invincibility.

"We have practically overturned the philosophy of naval operations," Maliuk said in the first of a series of televised documentaries entitled "SBU, the Special Operations of Victory."

"We have destroyed the myth of Russian invincibility. The country is a fake. The bridge is doomed. Plenty of surprises lie ahead and not just the Crimean bridge."

Maliuk outlined how the attack, endorsed by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, involved five "Sea Baby" seaborne drones -- remotely controlled from Kyiv, 1000 km (600 miles) to the north.

Video clips showed a fiery explosion on the bridge and technicians cheering the outcome in a control room.

The documentary said reports submitted by agents showed that six of eight supporting structures were destroyed and two damaged and Russian forces switched to ferries to supply their troops with weapons.

Russia said the July attack killed two people on the bridge linking the Crimean peninsula with the Russian mainland by road and rail. Traffic has since been operating on the bridge, though Russian officials say repair work is still proceeding.

The bridge was completed amid great fanfare in 2018, four years after Moscow annexed the peninsula, proclaiming it Russian territory forever.

The attack on the bridge is one of a number of Ukrainian offensive actions in the Black Sea, including a missile assault on the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol in September.

Zelenskiy said this month that Ukraine has seized the initiative from Russia in the Black Sea and, thanks to the use of naval drones, forced Russia's naval fleet and warships to pull back.

Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Josie Kao

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Ukrainian sabotage of Crimea bridge 'overturns' naval operations -intelligence head - Reuters

A Ukrainian politician said Russia proposed ending the war if Ukraine abandoned its NATO ambitions.

Russia made the proposal during peace talks soon after the full-scale invasion began.

"There is no, and there was no, trust in the Russians that they would do it," the politician said.

Russia offered to stop its invasion of Ukraine on the condition that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government abandon its ambition to join NATO, the Kyiv Post reported.

David Arakhamia, the leader of the Servant of the People party and the head of the Ukrainian delegation in the talks, said that Russia had proposed a resolution to the conflict in spring 2022.

The peace talks took place during the early stages of the full-scale war on the border of Ukraine and Belarus and in Turkey.

The Russian delegation reportedly proposed ending the war if Ukraine dropped its NATO aspirations and took a neutral position.

Arakhamia said that a shift toward neutrality would require a constitutional change, considering Ukraine's current constitutional commitment to NATO membership.

Arakhamia told Natalia Moseychuk, a Ukrainian journalist, that Russia saw Ukraine's neutrality as a key condition for a potential peace agreement. "They really hoped almost to the last that they would put the squeeze on us to sign such an agreement so that we would take neutrality. It was the biggest thing for them," he said.

Arakhamia said there was a lack of trust in Russia's sincerity. "There is no, and there was no, trust in the Russians that they would do it. That could only be done if there were security guarantees," he explained.

Signing an agreement without such assurances, Arakhamia argued, would leave Ukraine vulnerable to a potential second incursion because it would have given Russia an opportunity to regroup and prepare for another round of military aggression.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's unexpected visit to Kyiv on April 9, 2022, had an impact on the potential cease-fire. Johnson advised against signing any agreement with Russia and encouraged Ukraine to continue the fight. Arakhamia recalled Johnson's stance, saying Ukraine "shouldn't sign anything with them at all and let's just fight."

While both sides expressed readiness for a meeting between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, discussions abruptly halted when Russian troops retreated from Kyiv. The withdrawal exposed the extent of apparent war crimes committed, including the Bucha massacre.

Three days after Johnson's departure from Kyiv, Putin publicly declared that talks with Ukraine had "turned into a dead end."

NATO expansion has been underway since the beginning of the war, with the formerly neutral Finland joining in April.

Business Insider reported in January that Putin's decision to invade Ukraine was a miscalculation because the war backfired by uniting NATO in support of Ukraine.

While the bloc has been a crucial ally to Ukraine, there is a reluctance to initiate Ukrainian membership while the country is at war. The US opposes extending NATO membership to Ukraine in the immediate future to avoid escalating the West's tensions with Russia.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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Russia offered to end its invasion of Ukraine if it dumped plans to join NATO, but Kyiv feared a double cross, says negotiator - Yahoo News

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Andriy Kostin has been serving as Ukraines Prosecutor General since July 2022. At that time, Ukrainian government and law enforcement officials were being flooded with an unprecedented amount of images, videos, and other data from Ukrainian civilians documenting alleged war crimes and human-rights violations committed by Russian troops.

Kostins office is operating a database to collect all of this information, and has set up websites and chatbots to help Ukrainians categorize and submit digital evidence. Now, after 20 months of war, TIME spoke to Kostin in Kyiv about how his office is developing new ways to analyze evidence to build and prosecute war-crimes cases with the help of technology companies and international partners.

Q: When it comes to prosecuting war crimes in this conflict, theres an overwhelming amount of video and photo evidence being submitted in real time, as well as corroborating data from digital sources, satellite images, cell phone providers. In what ways does this fit into the traditional framework used to prosecute war crimes, and how are you doing things differently?

A: We're doing something which has not been done before. I think the most important challenge for us is to ensure comprehensive accountability. First we are looking at the old elements [and lessons] of the old types of war crimes. In all previous wars and conflicts, everyone was concentrated on crimes against the physical security of peoplepeople who were killed, wounded, assaulted, and humiliated. They were also setting standards which we now use as precedent in our cases. For example when it comes to conflict-related sexual violencethe international community has invested a lot of resources into the proper investigation of these types of crimes and prepared a lot of solutions focusing on a victim or survivor-centered approach.

Read More: How Ukraine Is Crowdsourcing Digital Evidence of War Crimes

These are now included in our own strategic documents and all of our investigators and prosecutors use them. Now, in this conflict, were also expanding and looking at a wider range of war crimes.

Q: What kind of war crimes are you focusing on that have never been prosecuted before?

For instance, crimes against the environment [including damage to nuclear facilities, and environmental destruction and pollution that will negatively impact Ukrainians health for generations.] The discussion on the international level is much more active now than it even was one year ago, since we started to allocate resources to investigate environmental crimes. But it's important, because these crimes are and will be committed globally. And those who will commit them in other parts of the world will see that there are now the tools and standards to investigate and prosecute them, because were creating strategic documents.

We are also now investigating or prosecuting cyber attacks as war crimes, which are very difficult to investigate. Its never been done before. But were doing it with the help of our partners, namely Palantir and Microsoft, who are ready to help us because they also understand that in looking deeply into such situations and investigating them as war crimes, we can highlight them to such an extent that many others will look very carefully [before committing them]. This is a terrorist behavior. So it's very important that we cover these new avenues.

Q: How are you using technology and new digital tools to collect and analyze evidence?

In order to build these cases, we often have to use evidence that is not enough at the first glance. If a witness says something happened to them, we need to identify the perpetrator, which is the most challenging task in the daily work of our prosecutors, and for that we will use all elements of new technologies which often is the only useful tool we have.

For instance, there were civilians who were attacked by Russian forces while trying to evacuate, and survivors went to investigators. They could identify the specific place where it happened. When the territory was liberated, we were able to find the documents of the [Russian] units, which had birthdays and some other data. Then we used [open-source intelligence] instruments to analyze their social networks with the help of NGOs and civil-society organizations. I have a specific platform in my office, the International Council of Experts, where more than 45 NGOs are helping us on war crimes accountability. So we were able to identify most of them. And when we showed these to the survivors, who had interacted with the Russian [troops], they would confirm it: I saw this face.

Read More: The Crime Scene Left Behind at a Summer Camp in Bucha.

Some of these cases are already in court in Kyiv [where the International Criminal Court has opened an office]. Weve used Palantir as a unique instrument to [analyze] all the data, and Microsoft for voice recognition in cases where perpetrators were calling for genocide and an aggressive war. All of this helps so much because these are unique tools to analyze voices and faces to build the cases. And we are also [getting close] to using more artificial intelligence to go over the hundreds of terabytes of photo, video, voice, etc.

Q: How are you collecting the evidence you need from the more than six million Ukrainian refugees abroad, and millions more displaced civilians inside the country? How are international partners helping with this?

Creating these technological tools is not just about [identifying perpetrators] but also about not losing any evidence that can be used to build the case. Legal interaction between different jurisdictions is always a challenge. There may be evidence in a regional office, or coming from a temporarily displaced person in Ukraine, and other pieces of evidence that may appear somewhere in Poland or in Germany where someone came to the police. If we put together all three about the same event, they will complement each other and complete this puzzle.

There are also other new tools, like the Core International Crimes Evidence Database (CICED). Its a new database, absolutely secured, where you can include information for joint investigations. We have thousands and thousands of Ukrainians [submitting reports] in different countries. It took more than one year to make it happen, and it was very important that the European Union [Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation] really invested in it. Now, if one person in Germany or Poland or the Czech Republic comes to a police officer and tells them something that happened in Bucha, they will keep it carefully in the file. This database will be fully operational in November.

Q: Given the vast amount of digital evidence, and the fact that its being submitted in real time as the war is ongoing, can the international justice system keep up?

The judicial process in some occasions needs to be more rapid, because justice can be denied when it is delayed. We are also in constant dialogue with Ukrainian courts [to prioritize war-crime cases]. For many of our victims and survivors, it's important to even have these [prosecuted] in absentia, so they know that we did everything possible to restore their dignity.

We will use every legal avenue, and we will use every technology to come up with a way.

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How Ukraine is Pioneering New Ways to Prosecute War Crimes - TIME

Recent comments by Ukraines commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, claiming that the war with Russia has reached a stalemate, have sparked fresh calls for a negotiated settlement. While this desire to end the bloodshed in Ukraine is perfectly understandable, anyone advocating a peace deal with Vladimir Putin must first reckon with the genocidal reality of Russias invasion. Putin himself has repeatedly made clear that he denies Ukraines right to exist and is determined to extinguish Ukrainian statehood. Unless he is defeated, any compromise agreement would merely set the stage for the next phase in Russias campaign to wipe Ukraine off the map.

Putins obsession with Ukraine and his rejection of the countrys historical legitimacy were on full display recently during a November 3 address to Russias Public Chamber. There was no Ukraine in the Russian Empire, he declared. The Russian dictator went on to repeat many of his most notorious historical distortions, including the claim that Ukraine had been artificially created by Vladimir Lenin and the early Soviet authorities at the expense of southern Russian lands.

Such arguments are not new. Indeed, Putin has been weaponizing history to delegitimize independent Ukraine for nearly two decades, with this trend escalating dramatically during the build-up to the current full-scale invasion. In July 2021, Putin published a 6,000-word essay attacking Ukraine as an artificial state and arguing that Ukrainians are in fact Russians (one people). This chilling treatise was widely circulated throughout the Russian military and has since come to be viewed as the ideological basis for the invasion of Ukraine.

Months after the outbreak of hostilities, Putin compared his invasion of Ukraine to the eighteenth century imperial conquests of Russian Czar Peter the Great while claiming that he was returning Russian lands. During subsequent ceremonials marking the annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces, he declared these regions would be part of Russia forever. On the first anniversary of the invasion, Putin told crowds in Moscow that Russia was fighting for its historical lands in Ukraine.

Putins historical illiteracy and duplicity were once again on display in spring 2023 when he publicly inspected a seventeenth century French map depicting the lands of Eastern Europe including todays Ukraine. The Russian dictator pointed to the map as supposed proof that no Ukraine ever existed in the history of mankind, despite the fact that Ukraine was clearly indicated by name on the map.

If he had been paying more attention, Putin would have noticed that the map did not contain any references to the Russian Empire, which was at the time known as Muscovy. Nor did it feature his own hometown, Saint Petersburg, which was not founded until the beginning of the eighteenth century. In contrast, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv is thought to date back over 1500 years, making it far older than Russias leading cities.

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Putin is not the first Russian ruler to deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation. On the contrary, Ukraine denial has been a central pillar of Russian imperial policy for centuries. The Russian Empire consistently refused to acknowledge Ukraine precisely because the repression of Ukrainian national identity was regarded as essential for the survival of the Czarist regime. Instead, Ukrainians were labelled as Little Russians by the Czarist authorities, who banned the Ukrainian language while declaring, a separate Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.

Putins insistence on Ukraines alleged lack of legitimacy reflects Russias deep insecurity about its own past. Generations of Russians have traced their national story back to Ukraine and the Kyivan Rus state of medieval Europe. However, many historians regard todays Russia as the successor to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which first rose to regional prominence as a vassal state of the Mongol Empire long after the decline and fall of the Kyivan Rus.

Despite these tenuous ties to the Kyivan Rus era, Russian rulers since the seventeenth century have laid claim to Kyivs historical legacy in order to justify the colonization of Ukraine and strengthen their European credentials. Putin has continued this tradition, unveiling a huge monument to tenth century Kyivan Rus ruler Prince Volodymyr the Great in central Moscow in 2016, despite the fact that the Russian capital city was not founded until more than a century after Volodymyrs death.

Following the 1991 collapse of the USSR, growing international awareness of Ukrainian history has raised awkward questions about many deeply engrained aspects of Russias national narrative dating back to the Czarist and Soviet eras. This helps to explain why Putin and other members of the Russian establishment regard the consolidation of Ukrainian statehood as an existential threat to their own authoritarian empire. Independent Ukraines embrace of European democratic values has only served to heighten this sense of danger within the Russian elite.

Putin has sought to frame the invasion of Ukraine as a crusade for historical justice and the return of ancestral Russian lands. In reality, it is an old-fashioned colonial war that echoes the worst excesses of European imperialism. His mythologized version of Russian history is utterly incompatible with the notion of a separate Ukrainian nation; he is therefore obliged to deny its existence entirely.

This denial is now fueling a genocide in the heart of Europe. Russian troops have already killed thousands of Ukrainians and have deported millions more. Throughout the regions of Ukraine currently under Kremlin control, the Russian occupation authorities are openly engaged in the methodical eradication of Ukrainian identity and the forced russification of the remaining population.

In such circumstances, international calls for a compromise peace are deeply disingenuous. It should be crystal clear to all objective observers that unless Ukraine can achieve a decisive victory, any pause in hostilities would merely provide the Kremlin with breathing space to rearm and regroup before renewing hostilities. Putin has weaponized history to justify the destruction of a neighboring state that threatens his dreams of a new Russian Empire. Until this imperial ideology is decisively defeated, the war will continue.

Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He is the winner of the 2022 Peterson Literary Prize for the book Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War: Autocracy-Orthodoxy-Nationality.

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. October 24, 2023. (Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS)

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Peace is impossible while Vladimir Putin denies Ukraine's right to exist - Atlantic Council