Russia could be blackmailing relatives of Ukrainian prisoners of war and those killed in combat

Correspondent and journalist María Senovilla, a contributor to Atalayar, analysed on Onda Madrid's programme ‘De cara al mundo’ the summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron and the willingness of 26 countries to support Ukraine's security in the face of the Russian invasion.

She also discussed the new reorganisation of the Ukrainian army.

Meanwhile, Russia attacked the Cabinet building, the seat of the Ukrainian government, for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, in a new wave of massive bombings that Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky described as ‘ruthless’.

The symbolic attack came amid a new wave of massive bombing by the Kremlin, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko. 

Emmanuel Macron held his summit in Paris and 26 countries are willing to participate in security guarantees for Ukraine if a ceasefire is signed and peace follows. This is nothing new, is it?

It is not new, except that it seems it will take quite some time for that ceasefire to be signed and then for a truce to be reached, because at the moment the Russian army is not doing anything to show that they are preparing for a ceasefire. On the contrary, they are increasing the pressure on the battlefronts, especially in Donbas.

We said that it is not new for Macron to offer troops because about a year and a half ago he made similar statements saying that France, Germany and other countries would be willing to deploy troops on Ukrainian soil. What happened? The German government did not follow up, did not legitimise those words, and it all came to nothing. And, of course, at least officially, no European Union country ever deployed those troops on Ukrainian soil.

Perhaps now it sounds a little more credible because of the condition they have set that a ceasefire must first be reached and a truce signed, but in any case, the Ukrainians will not believe it until they see it.

For the moment, something has also been agreed upon to put pressure on Russia and get it to the negotiating table: more sanctions from the United States and Europe if Putin does not sit down to negotiate.

And for those sanctions to finally be agreed upon, new massive bombings against cities and civilian targets were necessary.

In Konstantinovka, the Russian army killed nine people and wounded around twenty in one of the worst attacks ever seen in this city north of Kramatorsk. Russian troops are already at the gates of the city, just 3-4 kilometres away. The city has been practically evacuated, but, as we have said every time we talk about besieged cities, there is always a small core population, usually very elderly people who do not want to leave their homes, who do not feel strong enough to start from scratch somewhere else.

And there are also people who think, who hope, who believe that even if the Russians arrive, they are very old and will not do anything to them. This is a grave mistake because the tactic the Russian army is now employing on Ukrainian soil is to soften up the target, to bomb the cities, destroy them and then march over the rubble. Gone are the early months of the invasion when it conquered cities, occupied them and kept the population alive inside.

Now, since the fall of Avdivka more than two years ago, we have been reporting that the real situation on the battlefronts and in the cities near the battlefronts is that they are first destroyed and then overrun, which is what they are doing with Konstantinovka. Even so, the bombing was particularly bloody. It came two days after another bombing that also claimed lives in Zaporizhia and just a week after that brutal massive air strike in Kyiv that left 25 dead, including four children, and nearly 70 wounded. 

In addition to the bombings, the Ukrainian government has other problems because another MP has been assassinated, I believe the fourth. What is going on, Maria?

The case of this latest murdered MP, Andriy Parubiy, has revealed a whole plot of Russian interference within Ukraine, which is allegedly trading in something as terrible as the bodies of those killed in combat and Ukrainian prisoners of war. The Ukrainian authorities have arrested the alleged perpetrator of Andriy Parubiy's murder. It should be noted that Andriy Parubiy was a significant figure in Ukrainian politics because he was the one who pushed through legislation in 2019 that made Ukrainian the official language of the state, above Russian.

It did not ban the Russian language, mind you, which remains the mother tongue of half of Ukraine, but it did say that Ukrainian should be the central language for official matters throughout the country. It was very difficult for him to get these laws passed, there were many amendments, but finally, in 2019, they were approved, giving a boost and very important support to Ukrainian identity as such. So you can imagine that he had been in the Kremlin's sights for a long time.

What happened? How was he killed? Well, a person, a Ukrainian, dressed in a Glovo delivery man's uniform, which is a company with an app that operates in Ukraine, shot him in the street in Lviv; eight shots, obviously Parubiy died. The alleged perpetrator was arrested by the authorities and during questioning confessed that a year ago his son had been killed in combat and his body had not yet been recovered. The body was in the Kremlin's possession. It seems that the Russian secret services contacted him and told him that if he wanted to recover his son's body, he had to do some work for them, in this case assassinate a politician.

Why Parubiy? Because the alleged perpetrator lived near him in Lviv, knew where his house was, saw him frequently, knew the places he frequented, and chose him. He had been planning this murder for a year. It was supposed to take place on 23 August, which was Flag Day, a day on which Ukrainian cultural and political identity is celebrated.

It could not be, and was finally carried out a week later. But the alleged perpetrator has had no qualms about confessing all the details. To give you an idea, in his latest statements, he has confessed to the murder and claims that he threw the weapon and the telephone into a pond and that he is now waiting for the trial to start soon, to be sentenced, because the Russian secret services have promised him that they will exchange him in the next prisoner of war exchange, that they will include Parubiy's murderer in those exchanges, that he will be able to go to Russian soil and that he will recover his son's body.

Bear in mind that it is currently known that there are more than 10,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war and tens of thousands of bodies of missing persons in combat who have fallen on Russian soil and that obviously not all of them have been recovered, but the Russian army has collected thousands of these bodies, which are also normally included in prisoner exchanges, although they are given less attention because, obviously, there are no photos of these exchanges of bodies. But what this murder has uncovered is a plot, a brutal Russian interference that is extorting and blackmailing all the possible relatives of these prisoners of war, those who have fallen in combat, telling them that they have to provide information or do some kind of work, even commit murder, if they want to recover the bodies of their relatives, their loved ones, or even stop the torture of those who are alive and are prisoners of war in prisons, or have them included in the next exchange. 

Imagine the potential of this type of interference that Russia is currently carrying out. A few months ago, a well-known, very nationalist activist was also shot dead on a street in Lviv. There were conflicting opinions even within Ukraine as to whether she was very radical or not very radical, but the fact is that she was a very vocal activist and died in the same circumstances as Parubiy. It is reasonable to think that this was also a planned assassination and that the perpetrator was also coerced with something as horrible, we insist, as being told that if you want to recover your son's body or even your son who is a prisoner of war, you have to do a little job for the Kremlin. This is terrible.

It's appalling. I already said that neither ethics, human rights nor the law would be respected, and here you have it in all its gory detail, unfortunately. Another issue, María: problems between the Ukrainian security services and the anti-corruption authorities. What's going on?

Well, there was already a major protest, which we reported on here a few weeks ago, when an attempt was made to place the two bodies that are supposed to be external regulators of corruption under the authority of the Attorney General's Office. In the end, the law was stopped. Well, it wasn't stopped, it was signed, but then Zelensky revoked it in the face of protests that brewed in Maidan, and it seems that now, once again, it is unclear what role they will play, what they will do, and we will probably see more protests in Maidan in the coming days. 

One of the good things about Ukrainian civil society, as we saw in 2014, but we are seeing it even in the midst of war, is that despite martial law, despite living in the midst of war, the people are not conforming, they do not want to conform, to political practices and, above all, to everything that has to do with corruption, especially younger people who understand that this corruption is a legacy of the Soviet Union and want to get rid of it. Even more so now, after three and a half years of invasion and war, in which they have seen family members, friends and acquaintances die, and they now refuse to allow institutions to continue to be corroded by this corruption. And I can tell you, we will see more demonstrations in the coming days in an attempt to clean up the system and make the government understand that civil society will no longer tolerate certain practices, certain traditions, so to speak, that have been going on.

One last question, María. What do we know about the new reorganisation of the Ukrainian army?

Well, it is a reorganisation, the second one to be carried out. The first reorganisation of the army took place in early 2023 when new operational brigades were created, and now, around April this year, a second reorganisation began, which is now underway throughout August and is already quite well established. What they are doing at the moment is reorganising the Ukrainian army into army corps. The Ukrainian Army was organised into brigades, and what they are doing is regrouping those brigades, putting four or five brigades into a single army corps, and they have created at least twenty of these army corps. A few weeks ago, I interviewed the commander-in-chief of Brigade 20, which is now part of the Azov Army Corps, and this commander, nicknamed Yanqui, when I asked him why this reorganisation was taking place, why they were now part of the Azov corps, explained very clearly that after three and a half years of invasion and conflict and the creation of numerous brigades, and with more and more casualties being caused by the accumulation of drones on the front line, practically none of the brigades were complete anymore.

So it is true that recruitment is continuing and many people are in the process of training to join these brigades, but the reality is that most of the brigades are not as complete as when they were first formed. So, what happens when the army is restructured into army corps? Well, you group several of these brigades together and, between them, they compensate for each other: what one lacks, the other provides. And, at the operational level, this gives them a versatility and a tactical level that is far above what they had been experiencing up to that point.

In August, as we said, we saw that this restructuring is working, that it is already well established, when Russia advanced almost 18 kilometres along the Pokrovsk front east of Mirnogrado. It did so with small sabotage groups of between three and five people who, walking without using vehicles, because large vehicles are quickly detected and neutralised, organised an advance, an offensive based on these small sabotage groups who managed to penetrate 18 kilometres between the Ukrainian lines on foot. Of course, imagine, it was a scandal, no one knew how this could have happened, but the Army did one thing very well, which was that instead of wasting time blaming each other, they quickly launched a counter-offensive to push them back. 

And it was precisely the first Azov corps, whose commander I interviewed, that was put in charge. The entire corps, under the organisation of the Azov brigade, was put in charge of repelling this offensive, and it was an absolute success. In less than a week, not only did they stop the advance, but they even pushed them back to a point before where they were, and it has been proven that, operationally, the army corps works very well. More brigades are being grouped together, the reorganisation is not yet complete, but let's say that in recent weeks their functioning has been put to the test, and I believe that between now and the end of the year we will see the army completely restructured under this new system. 

Incidentally, Commander Yanqui told me when I interviewed him that the Russian Army is also based on army corps and that it was a disadvantage that they were not.