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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks from Kyiv on Thursday night. He said he had stripped two generals of their military rank and that all traitors will ultimately be punished. Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP hide caption

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks from Kyiv on Thursday night. He said he had stripped two generals of their military rank and that all traitors will ultimately be punished.

Ukraine's president has stripped two generals of their military rank, calling them "traitors" and "antiheroes."

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly public address on Thursday the two intelligence officers Naumov Andriy Olehovych, the former chief of the main department of internal security of the Security Service of Ukraine, and Kryvoruchko Serhiy Oleksandrovych, the former head of the Office of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Kherson region are no longer generals.

The Security Service of Ukraine is the government's main intelligence and security agency focused on counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism. Kherson is one of the few big Ukrainian cities that has fallen to Russian forces, who occupied it in the early days of the war.

Zelenskyy did not elaborate on the reasons behind the decision, but suggested that the generals had not been loyal to Ukraine.

"According to Article 48 of the Disciplinary Statute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, those servicemen among senior officers who have not decided where their homeland is, who violate the military oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people as regards the protection of our state, its freedom and independence, will inevitably be deprived of senior military ranks," he said, according to an English translation. "Random generals don't belong here!"

He added that he does not have time to deal with all such traitors, "but gradually they will all be punished."

Zelenskyy also mentioned that a government program to compensate citizens who have lost their homes has received more than 25,491 applications in just a few days, even though the estimated number of residents in these houses and apartments is closer to 63,000.

"But we know that more needs to be restored," he said. "Much more."

This story originally appeared in the Morning Edition live blog.

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Zelenskyy calls 2 Ukrainian generals traitorous and strips them of their rank - NPR

The scenes of German and Soviet soldiers overtaking Ukraine in Sergei Loznitsas Babi Yar: Context inevitably bring to mind the current Russian invasion of the country. For more than two decades, Loznitsa, a Ukrainian filmmaker who was raised in the Soviet Union, has chronicled the past and the present in Ukraine and Russia by revisiting historic events and depicting daily life in the grips of war and empire.

Babi Yar: Context, a documentary that opens on Friday at Film Forum, recreates Ukraine during World War II through vivid archival footage of Kyiv, where Nazis murdered thousands of Jews at a single site, the ravine of the films title. In the fictional satire Donbass, which opens on April 8, Loznitsa re-enacts bizarre and disturbing episodes from Russian incursions into eastern Ukraine in the 2010s.

Loznitsa, 57, recently made news when he quit the European Film Academy over a statement by the group on the Russian invasion that he deemed toothless; then he returned to the headlines after he was ejected from the Ukrainian Film Academy for opposing boycotts of Russian filmmakers. Even Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelensky, weighed in during a March 27 interview with Russian journalists, saying of Loznitsa, Hes an artist who supports Ukraine.

Loznitsa regards the conflict as a European war, not just a Ukrainian war. Speaking in Russian, with his producing partner Maria Choustova-Baker serving as an interpreter, he spoke about his films and current events during a video chat from Berlin, where he lives. These are excerpts from our conversation.

Where were you when the Russian invasion started?

Vilnius. I am finishing a new film there. I was awoken by an SMS from my friend, Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky. It said, Forgive me. What a nightmare.

Is it true that you helped your parents get out of Ukraine?

In contrast to many others, I actually believed in what the U.S. intelligence was reporting and what President Biden was telling the world [that Russia had planned to invade]. I even guessed the dates correctly. My friend, the Ukrainian co-producer Serge Lavrenyuk, helped me remove my parents [from Kyiv, three days before the invasion started]. This war comes as an enormous shock for millions of people. My father was born in 1939, and he remembers very well his childhood and these horrors. My mother was born in 1940 and also remembers all the movement during the war. Now they are [in their 80s] and it is the same circumstances!

How would you compare the situation now with the history in Babi Yar: Context?

The fundamental difference is that back then, it was a fight between two totalitarian regimes. Now there is one totalitarian regime fighting with a country aspiring to be independent. Back then, the big countries like the U.S. and the U.K. also participated in the war. But today, the majority of the countries who have the potential to stop this war have chosen this immoral position of an onlooker, of noninterference. And the politicians of these countries have put their citizens in this situation of immorality, because the only choice the citizens have is to observe online, in real time, how city after city of Ukraine is destroyed.

You could say that Putin is winning at the moment internationally, because the policies of world leaders are based on fear. Theyre not even capable of taking a rather neutral step of introducing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Some worry that such involvement would lead to escalation and nuclear conflict.

I dont think its a valid excuse. First of all, do these politicians have any guarantee that in case God forbid Russia does manage to swallow Ukraine, they wont use nuclear weapons? Putin had no valid reason for invading Ukraine. So why do you think he would need a valid reason to use nuclear weapons? This can only be stopped by force. Sooner or later, NATO will have to get involved, and the longer they wait, the bloodier the resolution of the conflict would be.

Babi Yar: Context doesnt shy from addressing the role of people within Ukraine in the massacre of Jews. Have you experienced any criticism about this?

There were people who criticized me in Ukraine for making this film the way I made it. The contemporary situation is completely different. And its absolutely obvious that all that Putin is talking about, that there are Nazis in Ukraine, was all nonsense. At the same time this question of collaboration in history is very, very painful in Ukraine. Yes, I was heavily criticized.

Do you have relatives that were affected by the Babi Yar killings?

[Nods]

In Donbass you take a different approach: dramatizing events based on actual cellphone videos. Why this form?

First, because I was mesmerized by those amateur videos that I found on the internet. Second, I wanted to create this grotesque form because I needed something to keep the film together and I didnt want to use just one protagonist or a group of protagonists. I wanted you to observe the idiocy in all its shapes and forms. This wonderful film by Luis Buuel, The Phantom of Liberty, also employs this method.

One of the scenes shows Russians moving artillery around from place to place after firing on a civilian bus.

Yes, the most important thing for them was not to be identified. So this is why they had to move from one place to the other. And the killing that occurs afterward [in the film] is because they wanted to get rid of the witnesses.

That sounds like a mafia movie.

Yes, in fact, these criminal gangs that took power in 1917 and that hold power today, theres no difference between them and any other mafia. Before this, the mafia covered itself up with Soviet ideology. Nowadays there is no ideology anymore. Its just mafia.

Donbass also portrays people who are hired to pretend to be witnesses to a staged explosion.

Yes, it happens all the time. This is the technique thats routinely employed by Russian television, and monitoring groups managed to identify actors who play the parts of witnesses in different locations. So they have almost a cast of actors that they employ for fabrication of fake news. There was a notorious TV report around 2014: a story of how Ukrainians crucify a Russian boy. This report was analyzed by professionals who proved that every single element was fake, all staged.

When you were growing up in the Soviet Union, was there a point where you became disillusioned?

The fact is that the entire Soviet Union lived in this kind of double reality or multiple realities, and everybody was aware of it, but very few people actually questioned it. But I was a very bad pupil. [Laughs] I was a very good pupil in terms of school results, but I always questioned this double reality and asked myself, Where am I and what is going on?

Today this criminal group [in power in Russia] has regrouped. They fixed the countrys economy a little bit. They upgraded their military force. And now theyre ready to conquer the world again. [Laughs]

These days your movies can look like prophecies because of their familiar images of war.

The problems that I talk about in my films have been around for a long time. This is why I wanted to make Mr. Landsbergis [a new film about Lithuanias successful bid for independence from the Soviet Union in 1989-91]. Because there is this unique and fantastic and colossal experience of fighting against the Soviet Union and winning.

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Russia and Ukraine Have Long Been This Filmmakers Subject - The New York Times

President-elect Vladimir Putin ahead of being sworn-in as President of Russia at St Andrew's Hall of the Moscow Kremlin.

Mikhail Metzel | TASS via Getty Images

Russia's Kremlin has rebuffed claims made by the U.S. that President Vladimir Putin felt he was "misled" by his military commanders over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

"To our regret and even concern neither the Department of State nor the Pentagon have authentic information about what is happening in the Kremlin," Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters at a briefing Thursday.

"They just do not understand what is happening in the Kremlin, they do not understand Russian President Vladimir Putin, they do not understand the mechanism of decision-making and they do not understand the style of our work," Peskov added, according to state news agency Tass.

"This is not just regrettable. It causes our concern, because such utter misunderstanding results in wrong decisions, in careless decisions that have very bad consequences."

The comments came after a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment released Wednesdaysuggested Putin had not been given the whole truth about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Statements by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House communications director Kate Bedingfield on Wednesday included comments that Putin "felt misled by the Russian military" and that this had resulted in "persistent tension between Putin and his military leadership."

Putin is thought to have expected Russian forces to be able to occupy Ukraine with some ease, with the aim of unseating the Ukrainian government and installing a pro-Russian regime as Moscow looks to expand its sphere of influence over former Soviet states.

However, Russian forces have faced staunch resistance from both Ukrainian forces and thousands of volunteer civilian fighters across the country.

To date, Russia has only captured one city, Kherson, while a much-feared assault on the capital of Kyiv has yet to begin, the second-largest city Kharkiv continues to resist and the western city of Lviv remains relatively unscathed.

Defense analysts have said that Russian troops were ill-prepared for the invasion, but this may not have been communicated to Putin by military commanders eager to please and reluctant to look incompetent.

Analysts told CNBC on Thursday that Putin's inner circle are either too loyal, or too scared, to question the strongman leader. As a result, despite the unpopular war, no one is likely to challenge his leadership or instigate a coup against Putin.

Read more of CNBC's politics coverage:

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Russia hits back at U.S. intelligence claims that Putin was 'misled' over Ukraine war - CNBC

On March 25, the Russian Ministry of Defence announced that the first phase of the invasion of Ukraine was over. A mere month earlier, President Vladimir Putin had vowed to completely destroy Ukraines military capabilities and to replace the Ukrainian government, which he claimed without any evidence was a neo-Nazi junta planning to commit genocide in Donbas.

To that end, on February 24 the Russian army and airborne forces attempted a lightning assault on Kyiv, and simultaneously launched offensives against Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kherson, Melitopol, Mariupol and on the line of contact in the Donbas region. The subsequent month of unexpectedly vicious high-intensity combat has seen Russian forces fail to take all the cities, with the exception of the smaller southern cities of Kherson and Melitopol, which fell in the first days. In return, the Russian army has taken extremely heavy losses; between 7,000 and 15,000 personnel killed and more than 2,000 vehicles visually confirmed as destroyed or captured.

The new announcement by the Russian government is a direct response to these failures. It is an admission that, at least for now, Russia cannot return Ukraine to its control by force. Instead of regime change (denazification according to Russia), the new claim is that Russias goal is a more limited focus on taking territory and destroying Ukrainian forces in the Donbas.

This is a serious crisis for President Putins regime. To justify the special military operation against Ukraine, he has used extreme rhetoric and baseless claims of neo-Nazism and genocide in Ukraine for months. Since the invasion began, ordinary Russians have been presented with a barrage of Z-themed pro-war propaganda, patriotic speeches and rallies designed to stir patriotic fervour.

During the first few days, when Russian leaders still assumed they would quickly defeat Ukraine, Russian state media carried pronouncements that President Putins invasion had reshaped the world order and put an end to both the Ukraine question and a unipolar United States-led, NATO dominated world. Perhaps even more importantly, Russias military power and history both conventional and nuclear are a cornerstone of national identity and national pride, and Russians have long looked down culturally and politically on Ukraine and Ukrainians. All of this makes the current situation extremely difficult for the Russian government to explain to its people.

In the information climate carefully created by the Russian government for its people, how could the mighty Russian military have failed to destroy the much weaker Ukrainian army? How can a supposedly high-tech special military operation that would be conducted in a short time by elite forces have led to tens of thousands of dead, wounded and captured Russian troops and more than 2,000 destroyed Russian vehicles? How is it that the Ukrainian people supposedly being oppressed by an unpopular neo-Nazi junta imposed by shadowy hostile Western forces are now fighting with fierce anger and almost total national unity against their Russian liberators? Most of all, how can the Russian government supposedly a nuclear superpower, and the self-proclaimed heir of the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 make a ceasefire deal that leaves the supposedly genocidal, neo-Nazi Ukrainian government in power? By creating a narrative justification for the invasion that was completely divorced from reality, the Russian government has created a situation where almost any possible outcome to the war now will be extremely hard to justify to its own people.

Russia needs a ceasefire soon, however, because the current rate of equipment and personnel losses is not sustainable, and in any case, they are making little meaningful progress except in the east. In fact, in the past week, Ukraine has retaken significant territory around Mykolaiv and Kherson in the southwest, around Irpin and Makariv to the west of Kyiv and Trostyanets to the east of Kyiv. With each passing day, the Ukrainian hand in the ongoing ceasefire negotiations becomes stronger rather than weaker.

In this context, the Russian announcement of a new phase of the war that will focus on the Donbas has two purposes. Firstly, it represents a pragmatic military strategy. The Donbas is the part of Ukraine where Russian forces stand the best chance of achieving major military successes they are attempting to concentrate sufficient forces to break the Ukrainian defence line along the Donets River and have gained important ground around Izyum in the past week. It makes sense to prioritise overstretched forces where they have the best chance of achieving tangible results, which will improve their bargaining position in ceasefire talks. Secondly, this is the start of an effort to moderate the expectations created by the completely unrealistic view of the war that the Russian government has fed its people.

Despite this, some in the Russian government seem to find it hard to accept these reduced ambitions and the reality that they imply. On March 27, the propagandist known as Putins mouthpiece, Dmitry Kiselyov, stated on Russian television that Russia will never cede Ukraine to anyone it has to be part of Russia, even against Ukraines own will. Furthermore, Russia continues to conduct missile strikes throughout Ukraine including in Lviv in the west, and is finding it difficult to disengage its forces around Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy and Kherson due to strong Ukrainian counterattacks. Therefore, while a new phase of the invasion has been announced, it remains to be seen if Russia can successfully focus on the Donbas as stated.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.

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Russia has effectively admitted defeat In Ukraine - Al Jazeera English

KYIV, Ukraine Ukrainians on Monday reported that they had pushed back invading Russian forces in fierce fighting around Kyiv and in northeastern Ukraine, while the Russians moved to encircle and cut off Ukrainian forces in the east, making a diplomatic resolution to the war seem as far away as ever.

Ukrainian counterattacks around Kyiv reportedly retook more ground, with the mayor of Irpin, a fiercely contested suburb on the northwestern edge of the capital, saying that most Russian troops had retreated, though fighting continued in some districts. If Ukrainian soldiers can maintain control of Irpin, it would be strategically important to keeping their hold on Kyiv.

Our Irpin is liberated from Moscows evil, Mayor Oleksandr Markushin of Irpin posted on Telegram on Monday. But the deputy police chief, Oleksandr Bogai, offered a more skeptical account in a telephone interview, noting that fighting continued even as most Russian troops appeared to have pulled back, and that the Russians continued to shell the town.

Diplomacy between the warring countries continued, with Russian and Ukrainian delegations arriving in Istanbul for another round of talks set to begin on Tuesday.

While Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has said that he is open to discussing the future neutrality of Ukraine, if he can get security guarantees for his country and only after a national referendum, he has refused to concede territory to Russia or to the self-declared republics in the southeastern region known as the Donbas, as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has demanded.

In Washington, President Biden on Monday stood by comments he made Saturday about Mr. Putin, for Gods sake, this man cannot remain in power. Speaking to reporters, Mr. Biden said the remark, apparently ad-libbed in a speech he delivered in Warsaw, was an expression of his personal outrage, not a statement of a U.S. policy that the Russian leader should be toppled.

On the battlefield, in addition to gains around Kyiv, the Ukrainians also reported important progress in the Sumy region, northwest of Kharkiv, near the border with Russia. Dmytro Zhyvytsky, head of regional military administration, said that the Ukrainians had recaptured the towns of Trostyanets and Boromlya. A Pentagon official confirmed the recapture of Trostyanets.

The Russian army is trying to cut off the major Ukrainian forces to the east of the River Dnipro, where the bulk of the army has been fighting Russian troops and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas, which Moscow has recognized as the independent Donetsk and Luhansk republics. The Russian aim is to keep the Ukrainian troops from coming to the aid of Kyiv, and Russian military officials said over the weekend that their war effort was now concentrated in the east of the country.

Despite those comments, Russian forces continued to battle for control of key towns east and northwest of Kyiv.

Russian forces have seized a southern corridor between Crimea, which they captured from Ukraine in 2014, and the Donbas, interrupted only by the besieged port city of Mariupol, which they have devastated with artillery, rockets and airstrikes, and appear determined to capture.

Russian forces appear to be concentrating their effort to attempt the encirclement of Ukrainian forces directly facing the separatist regions in the east of the country, advancing from the direction of Kharkiv in the north and Mariupol in the south, the British Ministry of Defense said in a statement.

A spokesman for Mariupols mayor, Vadym Boichenko, said on Monday that almost 5,000 people, including about 210 children, have been killed there. Those figures could not be confirmed. The mayors office also said that 90 percent of the buildings had been damaged and 40 percent destroyed, and that some 170,000 people still remain in the city again, figures that cannot be confirmed.

The situation in the city remains difficult, Mr. Boichenko, who is no longer in the city, said on national television on Monday. People are beyond the line of humanitarian catastrophe. We need to completely evacuate Mariupol.

In weeks of talks between Ukrainian and Russian representatives, there have been no clear diplomatic steps toward bringing the war to an end. Mr. Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Monday that while the decision to keep talking in person was important, We cannot yet talk about progress and we will not.

In an interview on Sunday with independent Russian media an interview censored in Russia itself Mr. Zelensky restated his willingness to accede to at least some Russian demands.

Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state we are ready to go for it, he said.

But it is not clear what neutrality would mean. Mr. Putin insists that Ukraine must never join NATO, a demand Mr. Zelensky appears to have accepted, but also that it demilitarize, a term that has not been defined. And it remains unclear if Mr. Putin would accept Ukraine joining the European Union, too.

After all, Mr. Putin has responded with force in the past to Ukraines drawing closer to Europe. He pressured the last Kremlin-aligned Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to renege on a promised trade deal with the European Union. After that sparked protests that forced out Mr. Yanukovych in 2014, Mr. Putin invaded Crimea and spurred the separatist war in Donbas.

On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky again called for direct negotiations with Mr. Putin, but the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, repeated on Monday that such talks would have to wait for more progress in the peace talks and presumably more progress in Russias war.

Reports emerged Monday that Ukrainian peace negotiators and a Russian billionaire attempting to act as a mediator might have been poisoned early this month, though the circumstances were very murky and those affected all recovered.

The first reports, by The Wall Street Journal and the investigative group Bellingcat, indicated that at least two Ukrainian peace negotiators and the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who has attempted to act as a go-between, developed unusual symptoms at the same time in early March after meeting in Kyiv red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands.

The description of the symptoms was confirmed to The Times by someone close to Mr. Abramovich.

Asked about the reports, members of the Ukrainian negotiating team did not address them directly. There is a lot of speculation, various conspiracy theories, said one, Mykhailo Podolyak. Another, Rustem Umerov, referred to unverified information.

Reuters reported that an unnamed U.S. official with knowledge of the matter said that the sickness may have been caused by an environmental factor.

Within Russia, censorship of the Zelensky interview was just another indication of the repression of information the government has essentially made it a criminal offense to criticize the war or even call it a war. On Monday, Novaya Gazeta, the Russian newspaper that helped define fearless journalism in the post-Soviet era and whose editor, Dmitri A. Muratov, shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, suspended publication in print and online at least until the end of war, leaving Russia without a major media outlet critical of the Kremlin.

President Biden has not withheld his own contempt for Mr. Putin and this war. Mr. Peskov on Monday said that Mr. Bidens comments in Warsaw about Mr. Putin not remaining in power are concerning, of course. He added that we will continue following the U.S. presidents statements very carefully, we are scrupulously documenting them and we will keep doing this.

Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, who is seeking re-election next month, warned on Sunday against escalation of words or actions, in an implicit critique of Mr. Biden. Mr. Macron, who has had several conversations with Mr. Putin, said he hoped to achieve first a cease-fire and then the total withdrawal of troops by diplomatic means. He added, If we want to do that, we cant escalate either in words or actions.

Mr. Zelensky has consistently demanded more action from NATO and Western countries to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, to supply combat aircraft, to accelerate the flow of advanced weaponry, including armed drones, ground-to-air missiles and anti-tank weaponry, not to mention many thousands of rounds of ammunition. Washington and its allies have ruled out a no-fly zone; they have not refused to provide aircraft, but so far they have not delivered any.

In an interview with the Economist in Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky said he was committed to victory and asked for more aid.

We believe in victory, he said. Its impossible to believe in anything else. But to achieve it, he said, Ukraine needs tanks, armored personnel vehicles and military aircraft, and it needs them now.

The West can just promise to help in coming weeks, he said. It doesnt allow us to unblock Russia-occupied cities, to bring food to residents there, to take the military initiative into our own hands. And Russia keeps pushing ahead, he said. The Russians have thousands of military vehicles, and they are coming and coming and coming.

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kyiv and Steven Erlanger from Brussels. Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall and Maria Varenikova from Kyiv, Valerie Hopkins from Lviv, Ukraine, Anton Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul, Michael D. Shear from Washington, and Tariq Panja, Kaly Soto and Cora Engelbrecht from London.

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Heres What Happened on Day 33 of the War in Ukraine - The New York Times