As we begin Day Six of the Ukraine War, we look at the human cost thus far, some dissenting voices, DW daily timeline and look at Maxar sat image technology.
Photo: A satellite image taken by the US company Maxar, which it says shows part of a 40-mile-long Russian military convoy assembled north-west of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Photograph: Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Tech/AFP/Getty Images (cropped)
01 March 2022 | James Porteous | Clipper Media News
Ukraine death toll: What we know so far
As this war continues, we cannot forget that, at the root, as always, it is innocent civilians who will continue to pay the ultimate price.
Ukraine’s health ministry said on Sunday that 352 civilians, including 14 children have been killed since the start of Russia’s invasion on February 14. It also said 1,684 people, including 116 children, have been wounded.
On Monday, the UN said at least 102 civilians, including seven children, had been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion but warned that toll was likely far higher.
It is not clear how many Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have died so far.
See below for more information.
01 March 2022
Russia-Ukraine war by the numbers: 01 March 2022
The map below shows which parts of the country are under Russian control as of March 1, 04:00 GMT.
28 February 2022 | Al Jazeera
Who controls what in Ukraine?
High-level talks between Kyiv and Moscow ended on Monday with no agreement except to keep talking. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged for a no-fly zone that the White House has ruled out.
Battles continue across the country as Russian forces close in on the capital, Kyiv, home to some 3 million people. Blasts have also been heard across the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, located near Ukraine’s border with Russia and home to about 1.5 million people.
Where are Ukrainians fleeing to?
More than 520,000 people have fled Ukraine into Poland and other neighbouring countries in the wake of Russia’s invasion, the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR) says. The latest and still growing count had 281,000 people entering Poland, more than 84,500 in Hungary, about 36,400 in Moldova, over 32,500 in Romania and about 30,000 in Slovakia, UNHCR spokeswoman Shabia Mantoo said. The rest were scattered in unidentified other countries, she added.
People are waiting up to 40 hours at the border crossing to Poland, as cars line up for 14km (9 miles). Cars have been backed up for several kilometres at some border crossings as authorities in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova mobilised to receive Ukrainians and provide shelter, food and legal help.
Most of the arrivals have been women and children. All men aged between 18 and 60 have been prevented from leaving Ukraine to stay and fight.
Anti-war protests around the world
Thousands of people have taken to public squares and Russian embassies across the globe to protest against the invasion.
OVD-Info, which has documented crackdowns on Russia’s opposition for years, says more than 5,000 demonstrators have been arrested across Russia since President Vladimir Putin launched the war on Ukraine.
The map and list below show the locations where sizeable protests have occurred. More protests are planned in the coming days across cities worldwide.
Which countries are sending military aid to Ukraine?
At least 13 countries, including neutral non-aligned Sweden have started to send military aid to Ukraine.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday that the alliance was also providing Ukraine with “humanitarian and financial aid”.
If Russia decided to shut out international flights from its airspace, the move would have a significant impact on the country’s finances. ‘Russia makes a lot of foreign exchange for charging for overflight rights, the use of airspace and navigation, and it is a substantial amount…’
Russian airlines to be banned from most European airspace
Dmytro Zhyvytskyy posted photographs of the charred shell of a four-story building and rescuers searching rubble. In a later Facebook post, he said many Russian soldiers and some local residents also were killed during the fighting on Sunday. The report could not immediately be confirmed. The Guardian
Russian army has lost more than 5,700 troops since beginning of Ukraine invasion
UKRINFORM | 01 March 2022
The losses of Russian troops since the invasion of Ukraine amounted to 5,710 people, 200 prisoners, 29 aircraft and 29 helicopters, seven air defense systems, 24 MLRS and hundreds of units of military equipment.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported this on Facebook, Ukrinform reports.
“The total estimated losses of the enemy from 24.02 to 01.03 as of 06:00 amounted to 5,710 personnel and 200 prisoners,” the statement said.
The Ukrainian army also destroyed and damaged 29 planes, 29 helicopters, 198 tanks, 846 armored fighting vehicles, 77 artillery systems, and 305 vehicles.
In addition, Russia also lost seven air defense systems, 24 MLRS, 60 fuel tanks, three operational-tactical UAVs and two boats.
At the same time, the General Staff explained that the data are being clarified, as the calculation is complicated by the high intensity of hostilities.
As Ukrinform reported earlier, on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops are shelling and destroying key infrastructure, with missiles hitting residential homes.
Martial law was imposed in Ukraine and general mobilization was announced.
Biden addresses an anxious world as Putin makes nuclear threats
Analysis by Stephen Collinson and Maeve Reston, CNN
Updated 1:46 AM ET, Tue March 1, 2022
(CNN)As Russian President Vladimir Putin rattles the West with nuclear threats, President Joe Biden faces an even tougher-than-expected task in Tuesday’s State of the Union address.
He must recognize the fatigue, suffering and pessimism in a nation exhausted by the Covid-19 pandemic, rocked by rising inflation and high gas prices and now suddenly thrown by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into the worst geopolitical crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Then he must somehow conjure optimism about better times to come ahead of this year’s midterms as he faces ebbing confidence among Americans that he has the plans, skills and endurance to end the crises.
At the same time, the President needs to send a message of US resolve amid fears the Ukraine crisis could spin out of control and trigger a direct clash with Russia, which has the world’s most nuclear warheads. But any further escalation with Putin, who on Sunday ordered his nuclear deterrent to higher alert, carries significant risks.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine shattered 30 years of relative peace in Europe after the end of the Cold War. The battle for Ukraine is the first real fight in the new war for dominance between autocracy and democracy, which the President has long predicted.
Biden faces a rhetorical balancing act. He needs to avoid the impression that his role as the leader of the free world is distracting him from economic pain, rising crime, and the cascade of domestic crises that he inherited and promised to fix but has not yet done so.
Commercial spy satellites put Russia’s Ukraine invasion in the public eye
27 February 2022 | Sandra Erwin | Space News
Scott Herman, CEO of Cognitive Space: ‘You don’t get a better opportunity than this to show how remote sensing can support media storytelling’
WASHINGTON – Images collected by commercial satellites have chronicled the buildup of Russian forces on Ukraine’s borders and the ongoing invasion, providing intelligence previously only available from government sources — and seldom released to the public.
The crisis has showcased the capabilities of companies like Maxar Technologies and BlackSky, whose high-resolution satellite images have been ubiquitous for the past several weeks as the conflict intensified.
Last week, Daniel Jablonsky, Maxar’s president and CEO, told Wall Street analysts that the company is “working to increase global transparency.”
An organization within the company, called Maxar News Bureau, has created a partnership program with “respected and trusted media organizations, and our team is in regular contact with hundreds of journalists, both here in the U.S. and abroad,” said Jablonsky.
The company also provides pro bono access to satellite imagery to environmental and humanitarian groups through a “SecureWatch” platform.
Increased awareness of the value of space data is a welcome development for the commercial geospatial business — a $9 billion industry projected to grow to $37 billion by 2026 — where many new venture-funded firms are rushing to deploy constellations and data analytics services.
“The conflict in Ukraine and its global implications create an opportunity for the new Earth observation space companies to demonstrate their capabilities,” said Scott Herman, CEO of Cognitive Space and a geospatial data expert who works with commercial satellite operators.
“You don’t get a better opportunity than this to show how remote sensing can support media storytelling and help with the general public’s understanding of a crisis like Ukraine,” he said. “The coverage by the major media, much of it is derived from geospatial data from a variety of commercial and open sources.”
But while companies like Maxar are financially able to provide imagery to the news media and nonprofits at no cost, it’s more difficult for emerging companies that need paying customers, Herman noted.
One of the challenges for new Earth-observation companies is that they need to drive sufficient revenue, he said, and public service and media exposure may not be enough to satisfy investors. “Everybody wants to contribute and see their work out there, but you’re diverting resources, and you’re not getting any revenue out of it. So there’s always been kind of a tug-of-war within these companies around crisis support for the media.”
Other forms of space intelligence
Optical imaging satellites use visible, near-infrared and short-wave infrared sensors to produce photographic images, but the downside is that they can’t see through clouds. And Ukraine in winter has notoriously overcast skies.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor satellites can penetrate cloud cover and shoot pictures at night, but “a bunch of radar blobs don’t necessarily make a newsworthy picture,” Herman noted. “It may require some enhancement or interpretation for the general public.”
Another challenge for satellite companies is knowing exactly where to point their sensors to get a newsworthy picture, he said. Many of the newer satellite operators have limited capabilities to gather sufficient intelligence of what’s happening on the ground in order to task their satellites effectively. They may depend on their customers to point them in the right direction to get a newsworthy shot.
Other space data companies like Spire use nano-satellites with ADS-B receivers that track aviation traffic. Aircraft carry ADS-B transponders, short for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). Herman said this is another form of open-source intelligence that “people are paying a lot of attention to” for clues about Ukraine developments.
“There’s a lot of interesting information out there right now about all the flight diversions,” he said. “A lot of people tracking that ADS-B data are doing it both in terms of what’s happening with commercial flights, but they’re also tracking a lot of the military activities as well.”
Whether it’s overhead imagery, geo-located tweets and videos, ship tracking and air tracking data, Herman said, “the media can now do a lot of source confirmation in ways that they couldn’t do before. And a lot of that has been enabled by the rise in geospatial analytics that’s happened over the last several years.”
Government support of commercial imagery
Maxar’s primary customer for its satellite imagery is the U.S. government. But as a commercial provider, Maxar can also publicly release images of the Ukraine conflict.
The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office pays Maxar about $300 million a year to access the company’s four high-resolution imagery satellites and image archives. This gives the government “preemption rights” for tasking satellites, said Chris Quilty of the market research firm Quilty Analytics.
“The U.S. government can step to the front of the line and get control of the camera to take a picture,” he said. “The premium that the government is paying for access to imagery allows them to dictate what targets the camera shoots at over certain areas of the world.”
But for the most part, all the pictures Maxar shoots for the government are publicly released, Quilty said.
“The government has priority, but once the imagery goes into the image library, then Maxar can go ahead and offer it to other customers,” he said. The U.S. government likes that arrangement because it allows valuable intelligence to be shared, given that the NRO cannot release any images from its satellites, which are classified.
“What they love about commercial providers is that the images are freely shareable,” he said. This is important during a conflict because U.S. allies worldwide who wouldn’t have access to the NRO’s data can get unclassified images.
“With the commercial imagery from Maxar, it helps us to collaborate better,” Quilty said. Another benefit is that the media can use commercial imagery to corroborate government claims.
“If commercial imagery didn’t exist, you would have had the U.S. administration waving their hands about the Russians massing troops around Ukraine” and not being able to prove it, Quilty said.
“People on the ground with their cell phone cameras might have gotten some pictures of tanks,” he said, but only satellites could get overhead images of troops massing.
“We couldn’t send a spy plane, or the Russians could shoot it down,” Quilty added, “so yes, it’s hugely beneficial to have a commercial provider that has unclassified imagery that can be shared.”
