How the international media covered the Russo-Ukrainian war, July 17

The OCCRP international project on the coverage of organized crime and corruption published material on the flourishing of criminality in the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas. These regions were restless even before the arrival of Russia, the journalists note, recalling that in 2012 the Donetsk oblast held the lead in Ukraine in terms of the number of murders and crimes. However, during the occupation, it was organized crime that became a support for the puppet regime, OCCRP writes. Recalling, for example, the Donetsk "counterfeit vodka baron" nicknamed "The Devil", who is now the founder of the "Russian Orthodox Army" military unit that participated in the attack on Mariupol. Or a tobacco smuggler nicknamed "Prokop", who installed his henchmen in the local "parliament" and became a supplier of cannon fodder for local military units. The economies of the "DPR" and "LPR" are deeply subsidized, the publication notes, and Russian money is only enough to cover the most necessary expenses and salaries of officials. For higher incomes, isolated "republics" need criminality, and without it, the local "official government" actually cannot take a single step.

The Hill describes the situation with the supply of high-precision artillery weapons such as HIMARS to Ukraine from the perspective of Washington. The publication admits: the Americans were impressed by how quickly the Ukrainians mastered the new installations and how effectively they use them on the battlefield. This partly broke the position of the Joe Biden administration that the installations should be given gradually, literally several a month, so that the Ukrainian army had time to learn to work with them and maintain them. The successes of the Ukrainians in recent weeks have led to the fact that Kyiv will receive more HIMARS. However, even a dozen or two installations are extremely insufficient for Ukraine to have enough firepower to retake the territories occupied by Russia. Time is now playing into the hands of the Russians, the publication notes. Moscow still has human reserves and stocks of old weapons, and it will be about a year until sanctions effectively make it impossible to conduct intensive hostilities due to problems in the economy. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also recently stated that the war in Ukraine could last for years. Therefore, if Ukraine is not given the weapons it needs now, it will be increasingly difficult for the world to support Kyiv economically and militarily, the publication concludes.

The BBC published a story called "The Donbas body collector who has lost count”. It is about Oleksiy Yukov, who drives around the front areas in a van with a red cross on the hood and collects the bodies and body parts of all Ukrainian soldiers, occupiers, and civilians. This is work without days off or rest, says Yukov: you must constantly search for places of burial or death, arrive at the place, and take the cargo to a safe area. This is a very gloomy work ― however, it allows us to establish that Russian losses are at least three times greater than Ukrainian ones. Oleksiy, who has not seen his one-year-old child for several months, is sure that Ukraine will win this war. Even though Russia releases about 20,000 shells every day, and Ukraine can only respond with 6,000. Even with the technical ability of the Russians to continue this war for months, if not years. Ukrainian fighters who are fighting fiercely even in units that have lost half of their personnel add to his confidence in the Ukrainian victory. And medical volunteers, some of whom have only recently turned 21.