Page 34 - RusRPTJan23

Ukraine. The 39-year-old Moscow city councilor was found guilty for saying that occupying Russian forces in Ukraine were responsible for the massacre of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha this spring. Judge Oksana Goryunova of the Meshchansky district court said Yashin had committed a crime by disseminating "knowingly false information about Russia's Armed Forces." One of the few vocal Kremlin critics who chose to stay in Russia following the war’s outbreak, Yashin made his comments during a YouTube stream in April, though he wasn’t arrested until July.
New US sanctions target
said.
China’s leader Xi is deepening economic ties with Putin’s Russia despite public distance. China's President Xi Jinping has instructed his government to deepen economic ties with Russia despite his months-long public distance from the Kremlin amid its humiliating battlefield defeats in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 14, citing policy advisers to Beijing.
Lukashenko doesn’t see Belarus’ further integration with Russia. During a meeting in Minsk on December 19, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko apparently rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to force Belarus to make concessions on Russian-Belarusian integration, according to analysts from the ISW. Putin and Lukashenko have refrained from publicly discussing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with both leaders saying Belarus still faces a Western threat. At the same time, the ISW believes that Belarus’ participation in Putin's war against Ukraine is unlikely. Russian press secretary Dmytro Peskov also stated that Putin did not go to Belarus to persuade Lukashenka to join the war. Peskov also categorically denied Putin's intention to invade Ukraine a few days before the start of the offensive, but this denial is most likely an attempt to hide Putin's desperate desire to involve Lukashenka in the war and his apparent failure to secure this assistance yet again, the ISW emphasised
Russian billionaire Vladimir Potanin, the
President of Norilsk Nickel n December 15 and more than 40 other
individuals linked to the Russian government. The US Treasury also
sanctioned 18 organisations in Russia’s financial services sector, including
Rosbank. These sanctions “are part of the US government's efforts to further
limit [Russia's] ability to fund its unconscionable war of choice against
Ukraine,” the Department
34 RUSSIA Country Report January 2023 www.intellinews.com