Russia appears to be advancing in its invasion of Ukraine with satellite imagery indicating that a huge convoy — some 40 miles or 65 kilometers long — of Russian military vehicles is heading towards Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.
The following satellite image was taken by U.S firm Maxar Technologies on Monday. It appears to show a convoy of Russian armored tanks and trucks that stretches from Pybirsk, further north of Kyiv, to the Antonov airport (also known as the Hostemel airport — the site of fighting last week between Russian and Ukrainian forces) on the northeast outskirts of the Ukrainian capital.
In some parts of the convoy, the vehicles appear to be traveling three or four abreast on the road. The distance along the road is approximately 40 miles.
It should be noted that the situation in Ukraine is fast-moving and may now may be different to what is seen in these images, which show the convoy on Sunday and Monday.
The following two images were taken by Maxar Technologies on Sunday. At this point, the convoy does not appear to cover as large an area and cloud cover precludes a complete view of the area.
Official sources have not confirmed the existence of the convoy, but there are fears it suggests that Russia is preparing to launch a full-scale assault on Kyiv, a city it has not yet occupied although there have been skirmishes on the outskirts.
Other images from Maxar suggest additional military activity in southern Belarus, which borders Ukraine and is an ally of Russia, with ground forces and ground-attack helicopter units seen in the images. Again, official sources have not confirmed whether these units — or Belarus more broadly — is preparing to join Russian forces in an assault on Ukraine.
Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko repeated on Monday that his country has no plans to join the incursion, according to state news agency Belta.
Will Ukraine surrender?
Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last Thursday and its forces have attacked various cities and areas in the north, east and south of the country. However, analysts have suggested that Russia had made slower progress in its advance into the country, and had met more resistance, than it had expected.
If Russia is about to launch a much harder assault on the capital Kyiv, however, how Ukraine’s armed forces and civilian resistance will cope is much more uncertain.
“We have every indication that they still want to take Kyiv, that they are advancing on the ground and trying to get closer,” a senior Defense official told CNBC on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to share new details from the Pentagon’s assessment.
Separately, analysts at Teneo Intelligence concluded on Monday that “the Kremlin appears to be committed to eliminate Ukraine’s political leadership, while the movement of Russian military forces suggests preparations for new, likely heavier, military action against the capital Kyiv and other key cities in the coming days.”
The U.K.’s Defense Ministry casts a more sober glance over Russia’s progress, however, tweeting on Monday in their intelligence update that
Peace talks were held between Russian and Ukrainian delegates on Monday, in neighboring Belarus, and although no breakthrough was reached, there are hopes that talks will continue in the coming days.
For its part, Ukraine has vowed that it will not surrender to Russia and has demanded an immediate cease-fire and that Russian forces leave its territory.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had already struck a pessimistic tone over the outcome of talks, and Kuleba told CNBC he did not know whether the talks would be successful.
“I’m a diplomat, I have to believe in the success of talks, but at the same time my main goal as a diplomat now is to impose more sanctions on Russia, to bring more weapons to Ukraine and to isolate Russia as much as we can in the international arena so I’m focused on this part of diplomacy,” Kuleba said
“We stand not only for ourselves but for the world order as we all know it.”
The foreign minister said that “every 24 hours are crucial, because Russia deploys more and more military might on Ukraine, hundreds of tanks moving into the country, they dominate the skies with their bombers, rockets, missiles are being thrown on our peaceful cities, civilians being killed, but we continue fighting.”
He said the war had turned into a “real people’s war against Russian aggression.”
Russia has already conducted attacks both on the ground and by air, with major cities reporting shelling and damage to buildings. Both sides have said that some of their soldiers have been killed, and Ukraine has reported that several hundred of its citizens have died during Russian attacks, including a number of children.
The invasion has led to a huge number of Ukrainians attempting to flee the country for safety in Eastern Europe, although many have also stayed to defend their homes and nation.
– CNBC’s Amanda Macias contributed reporting to this story.
In a dramatic, eleventh-hour move,Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) on Thursday granted clemency to Julius Jones mere hours before Jones was scheduled to be executed for the 1999 murder and carjacking of businessman Paul Howell. Jones, 41, had spent nearly 20 years on death row professing his innocence. Following a crush of national attention as athletes, activists, celebrities, and even fellow Republican lawmakers appealed loudly on Jones’s behalf, Stitt reduced Jones’s sentence to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
“After prayerful consideration and reviewing materials presented by all sides of this case, I have determined to commute Julius Jones’ sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” the governor said in a statement released by his office.
In short: Stitt spared Jones’s life, but wants him incarcerated for the duration of it. That represents a different sort of death sentence. It also signals an incomplete victory for both sides of this case: Jones’s advocates are happy he’s alive, but lament his inability to now argue for release; Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor condemned the decision, saying in a statement that he is “greatly disappointed that after 22 years, four appeals, including the review of 13 appellate judges, the work of the investigators, prosecutors, jurors, and the trial judge have been set aside.”
The commutation was also only a partial acceptance of the recommendation earlier this month from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board that Jones be granted clemency and have the chance to be eligible for immediate parole.Members of the board cited doubts about the evidence in the case, which has been controversial from the start.
Jones has always maintained his innocence, arguing that he was not even present at the scene of the killing and that his defense made a number of mistakes. The late Oklahoma County prosecutor “Cowboy” Bob Macy, who first brought the case against Jones, had a sordid record that’s been the subject of much scrutiny from academics, the press, and a 2018 ABC documentary about the Jones case, The Last Defense.
Alarm over Jones’s planned execution had been mounting in part because officials on the state’s parole board have publicly questioned the state’s lethal injection process. One official said Wednesday about another case, “I don’t think that any humane society ought to be executing people that way until we figure out how to do it right.”
Stitt’s statement did not mention the controversies surrounding Oklahoma’s lethal injections or the fate of a slate of incarcerated individuals who remain scheduled to be executed.
Members of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board listen as the family of Paul Howell testifies at a commutation hearing for Julius Jones in Oklahoma City on September 13.Sue Ogrocki/AP
Oklahoma, one of 27 states with the death penalty, has been among those with the highest number of executions since the US Supreme Court reaffirmed the legality of capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. After Oklahoma’s lethal injection drug protocols caused two grisly deaths and a last-minute pharmaceutical error was found before the execution of a man whose guilt was in doubt, a six-year moratorium on executions in the state was instated in 2015.
State prosecutors had pledged to continue the moratorium at least until a federal trial next year examined the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s execution practices. But the state recentlybegan plowing ahead with the planned executions of several peoplein coming months, including Jones. The last man who died by lethal injection in Oklahoma, John Marion Grant, convulsed and vomited for several minutes following the administration of a sedative on October 28 — only heightening concerns about lethal injection practices.
No matter where the governor or anyone else stands on the question of capital punishment as a practice, questions about the drugs the state is continuing to use should have us asking: Does Oklahoma have any business executing people right now?
From the start, Julius Jones has said he didn’t do it
On July 28, 1999, businessman Paul Howell was shot to death outside his parents’ home in the predominantly white city ofEdmond, Oklahoma, in front of his two young children. Howell’s GMC Suburbanthen went missing.
Julius Jones, a 19-year-old engineering student at the University of Oklahoma at the time of the killing, has maintained he is innocent since his arrest three days after the shooting. “As God is my witness, I was not involved in any way in the crimes that led to Howell being shot and killed,” Jones wrote in his clemency report. “I have spent the past 20 years on death row for a crime I did not commit, did not witness and was not at.”
Outspoken celebrity advocates for Jones over the years have included Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield, who has advocated for Jones for years. He choked back tears this week when speaking about the case. Mayfield, who won a Heisman Trophy at the University of Oklahoma, told the presshe’s “been trying to get the facts stated and the truth to be told for a while.”
Calls for mercy for Jones this week came from millions of online petitioners. Joining Mayfield in his advocacy for Jones were NBA players Trae Young, Blake Griffin, Russell Westbrook, and Buddy Hield, all of whom have Oklahoma ties. Along with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, they wrote letters to Stitt pleading for commutation. Other celebrities such as reality star and legal-system reform advocate Kim Kardashian used their platforms to bring attention to Jones’s plight.
So did five Republicans in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Those lawmakers — Kevin McDugle, Garry Mize, Logan Phillips, Preston Stinson, and John Talley — released a joint statement last week asking Stitt to accept the parole board’s recommendation.
The Black Wall Street Times reported that former Trump White House communications official Mercedes Schlapp, along with her husband Matt, had been advocating for the same. “We are pleading, praying for the governor of Oklahoma to make the right decision,” Schlapp said last week.
Julius Jones in a photo provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections in February 2018.Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP
There are many reasons Jones should be spared, his advocateshave argued. Jones and his family have said that Jones was home that night, playing Monopoly with them and eating “spaghetti and cornbread.” That alibi wasn’t presented in court by his defense, which the family claims was incompetent. Prosecutors have said this is a “blatant falsehood,” and that Jones’s trial attorney never called the family to the witness stand because Jones repeatedly told his attorneys that he was not at home on the night of the murder.
The Innocence Project has called for Jones to be completely exonerated, arguing that there is “little doubt that racism was at play in Mr. Jones’s case.” Represent Justice, the nonprofit organization operating the site Justice For Julius, saysthe Jones family has claimed there was racial bias within the courtroom and racist intimidation from law enforcement — including an arresting officer and a juror who both allegedly directed the n-word at Jones.
The most significant allegation from the Jones camp is that they believe someone else committed the murder — someone who may have already admitted to it.
Trial transcripts show that witnesses identified Jones as the shooter and placed him within Howell’s stolen SUV. Howell’s daughter, Rachel — a young child sitting in the car when her father was shot — has also continued to insist that Jones was the killer. Jones, however, has said that Christopher Jordan, his former associate and co-defendant, committed the killing and later set him up by planting the murder weapon and a red bandana seen at the crime scene in the attic space above Jones’s bedroom. That’s where investigators found them both, and the bandana had Jones’s DNA on it.
It may also be incumbent upon the state to reexamine the evidence in Jones’s case solely because of the record of “Cowboy” Bob Macy, who first charged Jones with the crime in 1999. He secured at least 54 death sentences — more than any other individual prosecutor in the United States. However, courts have reversed nearly half of those sentences, and at least three of the people Macy sent to death row were later exonerated.
Macy claimed he was protecting the innocent. In 2001, he told the New York Times of the death penalty, “I feel like it makes my city, county and state a safer place for innocent people to live. And that’s why I embrace it, not because I get any enjoyment out of it.” According to a 2016 study by Harvard’s Fair Punishment Project, Macy once told a jury that sentencing a defendant to death was a “patriotic duty.”
Rachel Howell, daughter of Paul Howell, sits next to a photo of her father during a commutation hearing for Julius Jones, who was convicted of Howell’s murder, on September 13. Jones was sentenced to the death penalty; the board voted that the sentence be commuted to life in prison.Sue Ogrocki/AP
That same Harvard study concluded that Macy engaged in“extreme prosecutorial misconduct,” including findings of inappropriate behavior in 18 of his cases. At least three of his capital convictions have been overturned. Many of his convictions relied on the testimony of police forensic scientist Joyce Gilchrist, who the FBI and Oklahoma Attorney General’s office later discovered had falsified evidence.
Even with the governor’s granting of clemency to Jones on Thursday, an urgent question remaining concerns the exceptional brutality of Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocols.
Oklahoma’s history of horrific executions
Before Clayton Lockett was executed by the state in 2014 for a murder conviction, his stepmother, LaDonna Hollins, wanted to know how it was going to happen. She said to reporters at the time, “I want to know, what mixture of drugs are you going to use now? Is this instant? Is this going to cause horrible pain?”
The sedative midazolam was administered to Lockett first, followed by a paralytic called vecuronium bromide. Then came potassium chloride, which was supposed to stop Lockett’s heart. His death, however, was not instantaneous. It took 40 agonizing minutes for Lockett to die.
Lockett woke up and tried to rise from his chair, even after he was declared unconscious with all three drugs in his system. Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton said at the time that Lockett’s vein failed, allowing the drugs to leak out into his system. The lethal injections hadn’t brought about the relatively silent death expected from such procedures. Lockett’s botched execution resulted in him dying of a heart attack.
Charles Warner, sentenced to death after he was convicted of killing an infant, stayed still in his seat after he received his injections in 2015, but his last words were “My body is on fire.” That same year, the state came within moments of killing Richard Glossip before prison officials discovered they had received the wrong injections from their supplier. The state knew this before the execution, yet the governor’s general counsel still said that stopping Glossip’s execution “would look bad for the state of Oklahoma.”
Then all executions halted in the state for six years, until John Marion Grant was put to death in October. The 60-year-old, sentenced in 1999 for the murder of prison cafeteria worker Gay Carter, began convulsing and vomiting following the midazolam injection, per the Associated Press, something observers said was unusual. One doctor characterized the dose Grant was given as “insane.” The state insisted that it carried out the execution “in accordance with Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ protocols and without complication.”
Madeline Davis-Jones, the mother of Julius Jones, speaks to supporters outside the offices of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board on February 25. Sue Ogrocki/AP
Julius Jones’s supporters rally for the commutation of his death sentence in Oklahoma City on February 25.Sue Ogrocki/AP
The latter part of that sentence —“without complication” — is surely in doubt. Oklahoma’s track record is giving authorities in the state, including some on the state parole board, pause as they consider the state’s unchanged drug protocol. Its constitutionality is still in question.
In a statement, Gov. Stitt’s office said that a 2016 election referendum had the effect of “constitutionalizing” the state’s death penalty. The governor’s office, citing the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center, argued that the referendum prevents state courts from declaring the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment or a violation of any provision of the state constitution.
Oklahoma moved forward last month with executing Grant, the first to die by lethal injection in the state since 2015, after the US Supreme Court voted 5-3 to lift temporary stays on his execution and that of another man: Julius Jones.
What comes next?
Even with Stitt’s announcement Thursday that he had granted Jones clemency, there is another thing to reevaluate: Oklahoma’s methods for killing its incarcerated defendants on death row. Including Thursday’s proclamation, Stitt has not given any recent public statements indicating he’ll do so.
The sparing of Jones’s life brings relief to his supporters, but not satisfaction. For every other personwho remainson Oklahoma’s death row, the same specter still looms: the violent, potentially unconstitutional manner in which the state intends to bring about their deaths.
Joe Biden has said he believes Vladimir Putin is a “rational actor” who badly misjudged his prospects of occupying Ukraine, but does not believe he would resort to using a tactical nuclear weapon.
The US president told CNN in remarks released ahead of a rare TV interview on Tuesday that he believed his Russian counterpart had underestimated the ferocity of Ukrainian defiance in the face of invasion.
“I think … he thought he was going to be welcomed with open arms, that this was the home of Mother Russia in Kyiv, and that where he was going to be welcomed, and I think he just totally miscalculated,” Biden said.
“I think he is a rational actor who has miscalculated significantly.”
When asked by interviewer Jake Tapper how realistic he believed it would be for Putin to use a tactical nuclear weapon, Biden responded: “Well, I don’t think he will.”
The president spoke as his administration looks for what he has described as an “off-ramp” for Putin to de-escalate his invasion of Ukraine before he resorts to weapons of mass destruction.
Biden warned last week that the world risks “Armageddon” in unusually direct remarks about the dangers posed by Putin’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons to assist Russia’s faltering attempt to take over swathes of Ukraine.
Putin’s state of mind has been the subject of much debate after the Russian president suffered a series of recent military set-backs in the invasion, which he launched in February.
On Tuesday, Biden suggested that he believed Putin to be rational overall but questioned the language used when announcing the invasion of Ukraine back in February.
“If you listen to the speech he made after, when, that decision was being made, he talked about the whole idea of – he needed to be the leader of Russia that united all of Russian speakers. I mean, it’s just, I just think it’s irrational,” Biden said.
Biden’s remarks were released after Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, asked G7 leaders for more air defence systems and a monitoring mission on the Belarusian border, as Russia continued to attack key infrastructure in Ukraine with a new wave of missile strikes.
In response to Zelenskiy’s speech, G7 leaders issued a statement saying they would “stand firmly with Ukraine for as long as it takes”.
In a separate video address on Tuesday night, Zelenskiy said: “The enemy launched a second wave of terrorist attacks against our country. As of this morning, there were 28 missiles, of which 20 were shot down. More than 15 drones, almost all of them are Iranian combat drones. Most were shot down.”
The White House national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said on Tuesday the US was working to expedite the shipment of Nasams air defences capable of engaging Russian cruise missiles. Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine reported on Tuesday that Ukraine had received a delivery of the German Iris-T air defence system.
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