TIG Post

Tag: John Kirby

  • US claims 20,000 Russians have died in Ukraine since December

    US claims 20,000 Russians have died in Ukraine since December

    According to the White House, 100,000 Russians have perished in the Ukraine conflict since December, including 20,000 of its fighters.

    The most recent statistics coincide with an uptick in bloodshed in the nation as Kyiv gears up for a counteroffensive to drive the invaders out of territory they earlier this spring.

    The eastern half of the annexation of Donbas, where the Kremlin’s men are still battling to encircle Bakhmut after months of Ukrainian resistance, has seen the most violent fighting.

    White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the US estimate is based on newly declassified American intelligence.

    He did not detail how the intelligence community derived the figures.

    They would suggest, however, that Russian losses have accelerated dramatically in recent months.

    In November last year, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said well over 100,000 Russians had been killed or wounded since they invaded Ukraine the previous February.

    If accurate, the new numbers from the US would suggest the country has reached the same grim milestone in five months as it previously did in eight.

    In this handout photo made from video released by the Governor of Sevastopol Mikhail Razvozhaev telegram channel on Saturday, April 29, 2023, smoke and flame rise from a burning fuel tank in Sevastopol, Crimea. A massive fire erupted at an oil reservoir there after it was hit by a drone, a Russian-appointed official there reported on Saturday. (Sevastopol Governor Mikhail Razvozhaev telegram channel via AP)
    A massive fire erupted at an oil reservoir in Sevastopol, Crimea last week after it was hit by a drone, a Russian-appointed official there reported (Picture: AP)

    Mr Kirby said almost half of the fighters lost by Russia since December were Wagner forces, many of whom are convicts released from prison specifically to enter combat.

    He described the forces under Wagner command as being ‘thrown into combat and without sufficient combat or combat training, combat leadership, or any sense of organisational command and control’.

    In particular, he highlighted the shocking toll for the ‘little town of Bakhmut’, which he compared to some of the bloodiest periods of fighting in the Second World War.

    Mr Kirby said: ‘It’s three times the number of killed in action that the United States faced on the Guadalcanal campaign in World War Two and that was over the course of five months.’

    He declined to give a figure for Ukrainians killed and wounded, though General Milley said in November that Kyiv had also suffered around 100,000 casualties.

    The Kremlin claimed to have dented Ukraine’s imminent counteroffensive in missile strikes this morning, destroying ammunition supplied by the West and hitting key communication links.

    Russian defence ministry spokesman Lt-Gen Igor Konashenkov said this morning: ‘As a result of an attack on a train at a railway station near the settlement of Kramatorsk in Donetsk People’s Republic up to 200 tons of Ukrainian ammunition supplies were eliminated.’

    One person died in the Kherson region and 34 people – including five children – were injured in Dnipropetrovsk, it was reported.

    Two women were also in intensive care, the Dnipropetrovsk RMA said, following the second incident of pre-dawn violence in three days.

  • ‘Chinese spy balloon’: US suspects three unidentified objects it shot down were ‘benign’

    ‘Chinese spy balloon’: US suspects three unidentified objects it shot down were ‘benign’

    The White House has reported that there is no proof that the three flying objects that the US military shot out of the sky over the weekend were connected to alleged Chinese espionage.


    According to spokesman John Kirby, the objects “may be tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign.”

    The three downed aircraft’s wreckage has not yet been found or recovered by US or Canadian authorities.

    Beijing previously charged the US with having “a trigger-happy overreaction.”

    China has denied that one of its balloons, which was destroyed by a US fighter jet earlier this month off South Carolina, was being used for espionage, saying it was merely a weather-monitoring airship that had blown off course.

    At Tuesday’s daily news conference, Mr Kirby said it will be difficult to determine the purpose or origin of the three other objects that were destroyed over Alaska, Canada, and Michigan until the debris is found and analysed.

    “We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] spying programme,” the White House National Security Council told reporters, “or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts.”

    A “leading explanation” being considered by US intelligence, he added, was that “these could be balloons that were simply tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign”.

    But he noted that no company, organisation, or government had yet laid claim to the objects.

    In the most recent strike – over Lake Huron – the first Sidewinder missile fired by a US F-16 warplane missed its target, the top US general has confirmed.

    “First shot missed.” “Second shot hit,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley during a visit to Brussels on Tuesday.

    “We go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear up to the max effective range of the missile. And in this case, the missiles land, or the missile landed, harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron.”

    A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, meanwhile, criticised the American response.

    “Many in the US have been asking, ‘what good can such costly action possibly bring to the US and its taxpayers?’” said Wang Wenbin on Tuesday.

    https://emp.bbc.com/emp/SMPj/2.47.2/iframe.htmlMedia caption,

    Watch: ‘What’s going on?’ The mind-boggling balloon mystery in 61 seconds

    Sensors from the alleged Chinese spy balloon shot down over the US on 4 February were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean on Monday, and are being analysed by the FBI.

    Search crews found “significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified” off the coast of South Carolina, said US Northern Command.

    The Chinese balloon was being tracked by US intelligence since its lift-off from a base on Hainan Island on the south coast of China earlier this month, US media report.

    Shortly after take-off the balloon drifted towards the US islands of Guam and Hawaii before moving north towards Alaska, American officials told CBS News, the BBC’s partner.

    The unnamed officials say that its path indicates that it could have been blown off course by weather, but that it was back under the Chinese control again by the time it reached the continental US.

    The entire US Senate received a classified briefing on Tuesday about the matter from military leaders.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the chamber would launch an inquiry into why the aircraft were not detected earlier.

    “It’s a good question,” Mr Schumer told reporters. “We need to answer it.”

    Meanwhile, Romania scrambled fighter jets on Tuesday to investigate an aerial object entering European airspace.

    But the country’s defence ministry said the pilots were unable to locate it and abandoned the mission after half an hour.

    Navy divers helped recover the balloon from the Atlantic Ocean
    Image caption,Navy divers helped recover the balloon from the Atlantic Ocean

  •  White House, intelligence suggests North Korea is providing Russia with artillery shells

    White House national security spokesman John Kirby says, the United States has information that suggests North Korea is clandestinely supplying Russia with a “significant” amount of artillery shells for use in Ukraine.

    North Korea was trying to conceal the shipments by routing them through nations in the Middle East and North Africa, Kirby said in a virtual briefing.

    “Our indications are that the DPRK is covertly supplying, and we are going to monitor to see whether the shipments are received,” Kirby said, referring to the country by the acronym of its official name, adding that the US would consult with the United Nations on accountability issues over the shipments.

    “It is not an insignificant number of shells, but we don’t believe they are in such a quantity that they would change the momentum of the war,” he said.

    North Korea said in September that it had never supplied weapons or ammunition to Russia and has no plans to do so.

     

  • White House: Biden’s Saudi trip wasn’t a waste as he lambastes OPEC+’s ‘shortsighted’ decision to cut oil output

    President Joe Biden is “disappointed” that  the Saudi-led OPEC+ oil cartel agreed to cut output by 2 million barrels per day, the White House said Wednesday, as the threat of rising gas prices, looms weeks ahead of critical midterm elections.

    The decision by the grouping of major oil producers rebuffed heavy lobbying from US administration officials and prompted Biden to say he was concerned about the move. It reversed a small increase in output OPEC+ announced shortly after Biden visited Saudi Arabia for a conference in July.

    Still, the White House insisted that the visit was not a “waste of time,” even as it sharply criticized the decision to cut production.

    “The President is disappointed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” said two of Biden’s top aides, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, in a statement.

    “At a time when maintaining a global supply of energy is of paramount importance, this decision will have the most negative impact on lower- and middle-income countries that are already reeling from elevated energy prices,” the two advisers wrote.

    The administration will “consult with Congress on additional tools and authorities to reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices,” the statement read, without specifying which actions are under consideration to dampen the oil cartel’s sway.

    Slashing oil production just ahead of November’s midterm elections poses a potential political problem for the President, who has touted this summer’s decreasing gas prices as he works to promote his agenda. The average gas price has been rising nationally again in recent days, according to AAA.

    Departing the White House on Wednesday, Biden said he was concerned about the possibility of a significant cut to production.

    “I need to see what the detail is. I am concerned, it is unnecessary,” he said in response to a question about the OPEC+ decision as he departed the White House for Florida, where he was set to tour storm damage.

    The international cartel of oil producers held a critical meeting Wednesday, where energy ministers decided to slash production by 2 million barrels per day, the biggest cut since the start of the pandemic.

    For the past several days, Biden’s senior-most energy, economic and foreign policy officials had been lobbying their foreign counterparts in Middle Eastern allied countries including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to vote against cutting oil production.

    When he visited Saudi Arabia in July, Biden sought to make clear it wasn’t solely to ask the oil-rich kingdom to increase its oil output. After decrying the regime’s human rights record as a candidate, Biden fist-bumped the powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who US intelligence has said masterminded the murder of Saudi journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi.

    Speaking on Fox News shortly after the decision was announced, National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby said the oil cartel was “adjusting back their numbers down a little bit” after making a small increase after Biden’s visit.

    “OPEC+ has been saying and telling the word they’re actually producing 3.5 million more barrels than they actually are. So in some ways this announced decrease really gets them back into more alignment with actual production,” Kirby said, noting there hadn’t yet been dramatic shifts in the price of oil.

    “We have to see how it plays out over the long term,” he said.

    Kirby said Biden’s visit to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a regional conference “was not about oil.”

    “It was about larger national strategic and national interest goals throughout the region to try to foster a more integrated cooperative region,” he said.

  • Russia-Ukraine war: Your threats are being taken ‘seriously’ – US to Putin on nuclear threats

    A top White House source told the BBC that Vladimir Putin’s veiled threats to use nuclear weapons to defend territory in Ukraine are being taken “seriously” by the US.

    John Kirby said the US was not changing its “strategic deterrent posture”, but that Mr Putin spoke irresponsibly.

    On Wednesday Russia’s leader warned his country would use all the means at its disposal to protect its territory.

    It came as four Ukrainian regions part-occupied by Russian forces are about to stage snap votes on joining Russia.

    Ukraine and its allies call these votes a sham exercise, designed to give spurious legitimacy to an illegal annexation.

    “It is a dangerous precedent for Mr Putin to be using this kind of rhetoric in the context of a war clearly that he’s losing inside Ukraine,” National Security Council spokesman Mr Kirby told the BBC.

    “We have to take these threats seriously and we do… We’ve been monitoring, as best we can, his nuclear capabilities, I can tell you that we don’t see any indication that we need to change our strategic deterrent posture at this point.”

    He dismissed plans for Russia to annex further parts of Ukraine as “nothing more than a ploy by Vladimir Putin to try to gain… through politics and electoral issues, that which he cannot gain militarily”.

    “But it’s not going to work,” he said. “No one’s going to recognise it. And what needs to happen is Mr Putin needs to leave Ukraine. He needs to stop this war.”

    Russia’s conduct in Ukraine was strongly condemned at a special meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Thursday.

    “This week, President Putin said Russia wouldn’t hesitate to use ‘all weapon systems available’ in response to a threat to its territorial integrity – a threat all the more menacing given Russia’s intention to annex large swaths of Ukraine in the days ahead…” said US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

    “This from a country that in January of this year joined the other permanent members of the Security Council in signing a statement affirming that ‘nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.”

    Former Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev said in a statement on social media on Thursday that the means by which Russia would defend itself included “strategic nuclear weapons”.

    But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused some Security Council members of trying to impose a false narrative on Moscow’s operations in Ukraine and restating allegations that ethnic Russians had been persecuted by Ukrainian government forces.

    “There’s an attempt today to impose on us a completely different narrative to show Russian aggression as the origin of all the tragedy,” Mr Lavrov said.

    “This ignores the fact that for over eight years the Ukrainian army and fighters from the nationalist formations killed and continue to kill inhabitants of [the east Ukrainian region of] Donbas with impunity simply because they refused to recognise the results of the coup d’etat in Kyiv. They decided to uphold their rights, which were guaranteed by the Ukrainian Constitution, including the right to freely use Russian, their mother tongue.”

    Russia attempts to justify its invasion by saying it is fighting neo-Nazis, a claim widely dismissed by the international community, as well as resisting Nato expansion.

    In his speech on Wednesday, President Putin also announced a call-up for reservists in a move analysts say is a sign that Russia’s forces in Ukraine are struggling to hold on to the strip of the territory they occupy in the east and south.