A U.S. teacher who was in Ukraine caring for his sick partner was killed during a Russian attack on Chernihiv, a city north of Kyiv, according to his sister and a local official.

James Whitney Hill, 67 years old, was one of four people killed in a shelling incident on one of the city’s main streets, the local official said Thursday.

Mr. Hill was found with his passport, which said he was born in Minnesota, the official said.

…Mr. Hill, who went by Jimmy with friends and family, identified himself as a freelance lecturer on his Facebook page, which was filled with condolences on Thursday.

Ms. Hill said her brother spent the past 25 years teaching throughout Europe, with most of that time in Ukraine. His bio on Facebook said he lectured at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. The father of two loved baseball and fly fishing, Ms. Hill said.

Mr. Hill had been home for Christmas, his sister said, but went back to Ukraine to help his partner, Iryna Teslenko, get into a special hospital to begin advance treatment for her multiple sclerosis. The couple remained in Chernihiv as Russian forces invaded the country. As attacks on the city intensified, his Facebook feeds became more urgent.

“We want to take a family with children out with us. It's not safe here. But it's not safe,” he wrote on March 13. Ms. Teslenko, who is from Ukraine, was too weak to travel, he said in another post.

More at https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-2022-03-17/card/u-s-teacher-caring-for-sick-partner-in-ukraine-is-killed-during-shelling-in-chernihiv-ov2baZistnyivc0FOl9p?mod=e2twp

WASHINGTON — In 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Now, 20 days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers, according to American intelligence estimates.

The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

It is a staggering number amassed in just three weeks of fighting, American officials say, with implications for the combat effectiveness of Russian units, including soldiers in tank formations. Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.

With more than 150,000 Russian troops now involved in the war in Ukraine, Russian casualties, when including the estimated 14,000 to 21,000 injured, are near that level. And the Russian military has also lost at least three generals in the fight, according to Ukrainian, NATO and Russian officials.

Pentagon officials say that a high, and rising, number of war dead can destroy the will to continue fighting. The result, they say, has shown up in intelligence reports that senior officials in the Biden administration read every day: One recent report focused on low morale among Russian troops and described soldiers just parking their vehicles and walking off into the woods.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/russia-troop-deaths.html

China has rejected accusations that it was aware of President Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine and claims it would have tried to prevent the onslaught had it been warned beforehand.

Qin Gang, the Chinese ambassador to Washington, issued a fresh rebuttal against allegations that Putin told President Xi in advance that he would invade, only to delay the attack until after Beijing’s Winter Olympics had concluded.

The pair met on February 4, the opening day of the Games, and simultaneously promised to deepen ties in a partnership with “no limits”. The Games concluded on February 20, with Putin ordering the offensive four days later.

Western intelligence had previously claimed that senior Chinese officials asked their Russian counterparts not to invade until after the Winter Olympics ended. President Xi, it is claimed, had sought assurance that nothing would distract from the Games.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d91a0042-a527-11ec-8cae-f1e364cbbd1a?

Russian soldiers have taken hundreds of civilians hostage at a hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol, the regional governor has reported.

“Russian occupiers have taken doctors and patients hostage,” Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of Donetsk Oblast, wrote on his Telegram channel. He said one of the hostages told local officials that the Russians had herded about 400 civilians into the hospital and were preventing anyone from leaving.

“We can’t get out of the hospital,” the unnamed hostage was reported to have said. “They’re shooting a lot. We’re sitting in the cellar.”

…One report indicated that Russian soldiers were using windows as sniper positions. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), whose workers have been in Mariupol throughout the siege, said conditions in the city were “dire”.

…“What’s happening in Mariupol is very much in character with the way the Russian military dealt with Aleppo and Grozny,” Mark Galeotti, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said. “This is how you do urban warfare on the cheap, if you aren’t confident in the training or morale of your soldiers. And the last few weeks have shown the Russian army isn’t exactly thriving in Ukraine.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/076b15d6-a4a0-11ec-b05a-8d7b276f1397?shareToken=995222ae664a163d5d83d743e1a21fcd

…I’m not suggesting that Putin will fall because young Russians find it harder to post bathroom selfies. Not quite. Extrapolate it out, though, to a Russian future without iPhones, without Coke, without fashion labels, without western music, without Hollywood films, without international travel, and without the freedom to even complain about it, and you do wonder. Indeed, you also wonder if this isn’t, in a sense, precisely what Ukrainians are fighting for, and why they are fighting so hard. For 32 years, they have tasted the world. Now comes the old oppressor from the East, determined to wrest them out of it. Just like young Russians, but unlike many older ones, they know precisely what it is that they have to lose.

If there’s a historical parallel for this, I suppose you’d find it in those haunting black and white images of young Afghan women in miniskirts, or of hippy Iranians in flares before 1979. The more obvious parallel, of blue jeans and rock’n’roll ripping holes into the Iron Curtain, doesn’t quite work. Even when young East Berliners watched, say, Bruce Springsteen in 1988, they were seeing what they wanted, not what they’d already known but abruptly lost. What you do have though, clearly, is a familiar dynamic of young people who can see a future, and old men hellbent on dragging them back to the past.

We’ve grown accustomed, in the past decade, to projecting softness and fecklessness onto millennials, as if their very futurism — their social performances and their blithe connectivity; their internationalism and easy travel — comes, inevitably, with a lack of conviction, backbone and mettle. I’m not sure how many more young, Instagram-ready Ukrainian MPs we have to see, chopping off their nailjobs to better hold an AK-47, before we realise that this has always been nonsense.

Either way, there’s a new curtain coming down, whatever it is made of, and I don’t see much chance of Vladimir Putin convincing even the most politically apathetic of young Russians that they’re on anything other than the wrong side of it. Shirt off or shirt on.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/328b1cb4-a3d5-11ec-9909-6547dd4945b7?shareToken=61f1278b01782899a1aa19274a3bfac5