The United States tried to stop Ukraine from killing a top Russian general. US officials learned that General Valery Gerasimov was planning a trip to the front lines, but withheld the information from the Ukrainians, fearing that an attempt on his life could lead to war between the United States and Russia. The Ukrainians heard about the trip anyway. After an internal debate, Washington took the extraordinary step of asking Ukraine to call off an attack, only to be told that the Ukrainians had already launched it. Dozens of Russian soldiers are said to have been killed. General Gerasimov was not one of them.
Why we published an obscenity. Because the tone of a Times article should be thoughtful and understated, we generally avoid publishing vulgarities. In exceptional cases, however, we publish offensive language, such as when an important public figure uses such language in a public setting, or when the use of the words themselves is the story.
A senior Russian official told CIA director William J. Burns last month that Russia would not give up no matter how many of its soldiers were killed or wounded. A NATO member warns allies that Putin could accept the death or wounding of as many as 300,000 Russian troops — about three times his estimated losses to date. Before the war, when Mr. Burns warned Russia not to invade Ukraine, another senior Russian official said the Russian military was strong enough to even stand up to the Americans.
A few days after the invasion, Mr Putin told the Israeli leader that the Ukrainians had “turned out tougher than I was told”. But, he warned the leader, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, “we are a great country and we have patience.” Earlier, in October 2021, during his first meeting with Mr. Bennett, did Mr. Putin ranted at President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine: “What kind of Jew is he? He is a facilitator of Nazism.”
Invading Russian soldiers used their mobile phones to call home, allowing the Ukrainian army to find and kill them. Telephone intercepts obtained by The Times showed the bitterness Russian soldiers felt towards their own commanders. “They prepare you like cannon fodder,” said one soldier. Another described a commander warning him that he could be prosecuted for leaving his position, only for the commander to flee when the shelling began. “His wheels didn’t even get stuck in the mud,” the soldier said.
On the day of the invasion, Mr. Putin set a trap for Russian business tycoons by putting them on television “to bully everyone there,” as one of them described it. Indeed, the businessmen present were all hit by Western sanctions in the months that followed. Yet another Kremlin billionaire that day, Andrey Melnichenko, was defiant and persistent that sanctions would not make him turn against Putin. “In school textbooks they call this political terrorism,” he said.