Twenty thousand of Russia’s most capable troops face being surrounded and defeated if Moscow’s generals do not order their withdrawal, western officials said on Friday.
The mobilisation of 300,000 reservists by President Vladimir Putin to prevent further Ukrainian gains had led Russia to call in troops of “very low quality”, officials told a media briefing.
The Kremlin’s threat of nuclear retaliation if Ukraine crosses “red lines” by entering territory now claimed by Russia after “sham referendums” are understood to be hollow, the officials said.
The counter-offensive in the strategically important port of Kherson, the only city to be seized by the Russians in their seven-month campaign, has been under way since August.
Using western-supplied long range artillery, Ukraine has been able to cut-off the Russian occupiers, that include airborne troops, on the western bank of the 1,000-metre wide Dnipro river.
However, this month's defeat in the Kharkiv region, with Ukraine seizing back territory the size of Cyprus, Moscow would be extremely unwilling to order a withdrawal.
“We assess that Russian commanders will now consider the roughly 20,000 force on the West Bank to be extremely vulnerable and withdrawal from that ground would make operational sense,” one official said. “But the area clearly has political significance and it's the only regional capital that Putin has seized since the start of the invasion.”
The Ukrainian advance has been incremental around Kherson, mainly focusing on destroying Russian supplies including large artillery stockpiles and bridges.
Asked by The National if a Ukrainian breakthrough could lead to a sudden collapse with a swift push on Crimea 90 kilometres away, the official said Russia had “defence in depth” beyond the Dnipro’s eastern bank, making a break-out difficult.
“But one of the challenges in assessing this is the morale factor because these things are a genuinely hard to assess and you can't rule it out,” the official said.
With the loss of territory in the north-eastern Kharkiv region and the pressure on Kherson in the south, Mr Putin has called up a raft of reserves to make up for the losses of 80,000 troops either killed, severely wounded or deserted.
But the call up is causing disquiet in Russia and the troops are said to be poorly trained and equipped, with some in their 60s.
“Russian military planners will face a dilemma of either very low-quality reinforcements soon or a better-trained force later,” the source said. “Russia has effectively exhausted the pool of willing volunteers for combat duty and Ukraine.”
“Russian forces have been largely fixed, trying to hold a line effectively across an area the size of Great Britain with very few reserves of any quality."
Despite the partial mobilisation Mr Putin, still has no plans to admit that Ukraine is a war rather than what he has called a “special military operation”.
But the contradiction, with more men being forced on to the front line, was creating a “dissonance in Russian society” and this was “likely to certainly increase”.
The mobilisation was unlikely to include sons from “well-off families” and there was increasingly “shallow support for the war across Russian society”.
The current referendum in Donbas, which is highly likely to be fraudulent, is partly to produce red lines with a nuclear threat. However, officials believe that the Kremlin’s red lines “are not probably in exactly the places where they say they are”.
“These statements are made with intent and the intent is to deter, it doesn't necessarily reflect the true calculus of the Kremlin,” the official said.
However, Ukraine’s gains in Kharkiv, and potentially Kherson, were “politically significant and have caused extreme concern in the Kremlin and elsewhere in Moscow”.
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Commission caps
For life insurance products with a savings component, Peter Hodgins of Clyde & Co said different caps apply to the saving and protection elements:
• For the saving component, a cap of 4.5 per cent of the annualised premium per year (which may not exceed 90 per cent of the annualised premium over the policy term).
• On the protection component, there is a cap of 10 per cent of the annualised premium per year (which may not exceed 160 per cent of the annualised premium over the policy term).
• Indemnity commission, the amount of commission that can be advanced to a product salesperson, can be 50 per cent of the annualised premium for the first year or 50 per cent of the total commissions on the policy calculated.
• The remaining commission after deduction of the indemnity commission is paid equally over the premium payment term.
• For pure protection products, which only offer a life insurance component, the maximum commission will be 10 per cent of the annualised premium multiplied by the length of the policy in years.
Disclosure
Customers must now be provided with a full illustration of the product they are buying to ensure they understand the potential returns on savings products as well as the effects of any charges. There is also a “free-look” period of 30 days, where insurers must provide a full refund if the buyer wishes to cancel the policy.
“The illustration should provide for at least two scenarios to illustrate the performance of the product,” said Mr Hodgins. “All illustrations are required to be signed by the customer.”
Another illustration must outline surrender charges to ensure they understand the costs of exiting a fixed-term product early.
Illustrations must also be kept updatedand insurers must provide information on the top five investment funds available annually, including at least five years' performance data.
“This may be segregated based on the risk appetite of the customer (in which case, the top five funds for each segment must be provided),” said Mr Hodgins.
Product providers must also disclose the ratio of protection benefit to savings benefits. If a protection benefit ratio is less than 10 per cent "the product must carry a warning stating that it has limited or no protection benefit" Mr Hodgins added.
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Reports at the time said Lord Carnarvon suffered from “pain as the inflammation affected the nasal passages and eyes”.
Decades later, scientists contended he had died of aspergillosis after inhaling spores of the fungus aspergillus in the tomb, which can lie dormant for months. The fact several others who entered were also found dead withiin a short time led to the myth of the curse.
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Launch year: 2020
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APPLE IPAD MINI (A17 PRO)
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Chip: Apple A17 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
Storage: 128/256/512GB
Main camera: 12MP wide, f/1.8, digital zoom up to 5x, Smart HDR 4
Front camera: 12MP ultra-wide, f/2.4, Smart HDR 4, full-HD @ 25/30/60fps
Biometrics: Touch ID, Face ID
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