Russian forces have carried out artillery strikes on Ukrainian positions using the renowned D-30 howitzers in the Krasny Liman direction.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has published footage of Russian D-30 howitzer units wiping out Ukrainian servicemen in the special operation zone.
With a maximum range of 15.3 kilometers and rate of fire of up to six rounds per minute, the D-30 howitzer is a formidable weapon designed to wreak havoc on strongholds, armored vehicles, and manpower. Thus, the D-30 howitzer is widely used by many national armed forces all over the world due to its reliability, as well as considerable tactical and technical characteristics.
Ukraine Loses Up to 285 Military in Donetsk Direction - MoD
Ukraine has lost up to 285 military in the Donetsk direction over the past 24 hours, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday.
Over the given period, the Russian armed forces have repelled three attacks by Ukrainian military in the Donetsk direction, another three in the Krasny Liman direction, and one in the South Donetsk direction.
"The enemy’s losses per day amounted to up to 285 Ukrainian military personnel killed and wounded, as well as seven vehicles. During the counter-battery fight, a Grad MLRS combat vehicle, as well as a French-made Caezar self-propelled howitzer, were hit," the ministry said in a statement.
Ukraine has also lost over 120 military both killed and injured, as well as 10 pieces of military equipment in the South Donetsk direction, the statement read.
Hidden Ukrainian hardware bursts into flames after strike - VIDEO
The Russian Defense Ministry has published footage of what it said was the destruction of Ukrainian armored vehicles on the Donbass front line. The target was covered by trees but was reportedly identified by drones and taken out by artillery fire.
The engagement took place near the village of Urozhaynoye in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), according to the ministry. The settlement has been the scene of intense fighting between Ukraine and Russia since the summer.
The video shot from the air appears to show the same location – a crater-dotted field bisected by lines of trees – at different points in time. In one part of the footage, a cloud of smoke erupts from among the trees, as if produced by an explosion. The latter part of the clip shows a thinning plume of smoke rising from the same location, before a new blast sends more smoke into the air and ignites a secondary fire.
The ministry did not provide details on when the footage was taken. On Sunday, it reported conducting aerial and artillery strikes against several Ukrainian units in the DPR, including near Urozhaynoye. The location was mentioned in other ministry briefings throughout the week.
The small village drew national attention in Russia last week, after President Vladimir Putin met with three soldiers and a sergeant whose unit fended off a Ukrainian assault near Urozhaynoye in late August.
Despite being outnumbered by more than two to one, the group turned the tide on the attackers, with two defenders sustaining injuries, the ministry reported.
The president awarded decorations to the service members, including one who received the Gold Star of the Hero of Russia, the country’s highest honor.
'Vulnerable' Abrams Tanks in Ukraine May Be Swiftly 'Detected & Destroyed' by Russia's UAVs
Russia’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been relentlessly homing in on the Kiev regime’s weaponry donated by NATO, wreaking havoc on Ukrainian forces as they struggle with their faltering counteroffensive. When delivery of US-made Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was announced, Moscow responded by saying that, "[Abrams] too will burn."
Abrams tanks supplied to Ukraine by its Western donors will be increasingly vulnerable because of the wide use of Russia's advanced drones during combat operations, military expert Gustav Gressel told German media.
“The technologies of warfare are changing rapidly. The proliferation of drones has made [Abrams] tanks more vulnerable. They can be detected and destroyed more swiftly," Gressel, a senior policy expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) which specializes in armed conflict and military affairs, was quoted as saying by a media outlet.
Furthermore, the time factor was singled out by the expert. Gressel underscored that last autumn, when Ukraine was begging for Western tanks, Russian forces did not have as many unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at their disposal. Accordingly, the significance of the arrival of Western battle tanks has been diminished, the military expert acknowledged.
Throughout Ukraine’s botched counteroffensive, Russia’s Lancet loitering munition/kamikaze attack drones have wreaked havoc on Ukrainian forces, relentlessly destroying the Kiev regime’s manpower and weaponry donated by NATO. The Russian army uses Lancet drones in the special operation zone to target various Ukrainian military assets such as howitzers, air defenses, multiple launch rocket systems, as well as command and observation posts, and gatherings of troops.
As for the much-heralded arrival of the M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, the United States reportedly began delivering these to Ukraine in late September. These tanks are part of a 31-tank package approved by the Biden administration. Close to 500 Ukrainian soldiers have undergone a 10-week course on how to operate and maintain the M1A1 at the US Army’s Grafenwöhr training facility in West Germany.
However, Abrams armor will not be able to jumpstart Ukraine’s stalled offensive, experts told Sputnik. The Ukrainian soldiers, after their crack training routine, will have only the most basic skill levels associated with the M1A1 Abrams, lacking any tactical or operational skill. Their gunnery skill will also be rudimentary, pundits added, describing the M1A1 as no more than a "death trap" when facing off against Russian military equipped with modern tank-killing weapons.
Now, the arrival of M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine comes as Russian forces have been successfully taking on Ukraine’s NATO-equipped army, with dozens of Leopard 1s and Leopard 2s knocked out, and at least two of Britain’s "unbeatable" tanks destroyed earlier this month.
As for Moscow, it succinctly commented that, "these [Abrams] tanks will burn too", in reference to the shipment of Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Western weapons deliveries will be unlikely to change the balance of power on the battlefield, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized, adding that the US continues to increase its involvement in the conflict, and the Russian Army is honing its countermeasures skills.
The world outside Europe does not share its position on the Ukraine conflict and does not understand European double standards applied to conflicts in other parts of the planet, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said.
"I can say that the world outside Europe is already really looking forward to the end of this war, because they do not understand many things. They do not understand, for example, how it can be that when a war is not in Europe, the European Union, looking down with fantastic moral superiority, calls on the parties to peace, advocates negotiations and an immediate end to violence. However, when there is a war in Europe, the European Union incites the conflict and supplies weapons, and anyone who talks about peace is immediately stigmatized," Szijjarto said in an interview on Monday.
He also said that other countries do not understand why Europe "has made this conflict global" and why people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have to pay for it due to growing inflation, energy prices and unstable food supplies.
Szijjarto added that Hungary’s position on the issue is treated with "great respect" outside the EU, which he was witnessing more than once during the UN General Assembly.
Hungary has consistently opposed sanctions on Russian energy resources and sending weapons to Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in February 2022.
The Hungarian parliament issued a decree banning the supply of weapons to Ukraine from the country's territory. Szijjarto explained that Budapest seeks to secure the western Ukrainian region of Zakarpatye, where ethnic Hungarians live, since the supply of weapons through its territory would become a military target for Russia. The country's leadership has repeatedly emphasized that Hungary stands for the earliest possible start of peace negotiations.
Mass Anti-Government Rally Takes Place in Berlin
German Unity Day is a national holiday in Germany, celebrated every 3 October. It commemorates the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sputnik comes live as thousands of people take to Berlin's streets on German Unity Day to protest against the coalition government's policies.
Berlin-based groups are holding rallies on the streets of the German capital, calling for transparent political dialogue and peace talks in Ukraine.
Lise Meitner, the Austrian-born physicist, was a longtime collaborator of Otto Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize in 1946. She did not share in the award with him. Credit... Bettmann, via Getty Images
Lise Meitner developed the theory of nuclear fission, the process that enabled the atomic bomb. But her identity — Jewish and a woman — barred her from sharing credit for the discovery, newly translated letters show.
There is a memorable scene in “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster film about the building of the atomic bomb, in which Luis Alvarez, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, is reading a newspaper while getting a haircut. Suddenly, Alvarez leaps from his seat and sprints down the road to find his colleague, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“Oppie! Oppie!” he shouts. “They’ve done it. Hahn and Strassmann in Germany. They split the uranium nucleus. They split the atom.”
The reference is to two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who in 1939 unknowingly reported a demonstration of nuclear fission, the splintering of an atom into lighter elements. The discovery was key to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret American effort led by Oppenheimer to develop the first nuclear weapons.
Except the scene is not entirely accurate, to the chagrin of some scientists. A major player is missing from the portrayal: Lise Meitner, a physicist who worked closely with Hahn and developed the theory of nuclear fission.
Meitner was a giant in her own right, a contemporary of Nobel laureates like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Max Planck. After the second atomic device was dropped on Nagasaki, the American press dubbed her the “mother of the atomic bomb,” an association she vehemently rejected.
Only Hahn won the Nobel Prize for nuclear fission. In his acceptance speech, he referred to Meitner with a German term that means assistant or employee, according to Marissa Moss, the author of a recent book about Meitner. “Or a co-worker at best,” she said.
In 2022, Ms. Moss sifted through Meitner’s archive at the University of Cambridge. Since then, she has translated hundreds of letters between Meitner and Hahn, written in German, which she says offer a more nuanced perspective of their relationship’s demise. That insight also challenges a common perception that Meitner accepted the outcome of the Nobel Prize without resentment.
The snub was about more than just gender, according to Ms. Moss. “It’s easy to say she didn’t get it because she was a woman,” Ms. Moss said. “One doesn’t think a woman is going to make noise about things.” Ms. Moss also believes Meitner’s heritage was at play: “This is a case where it was because she was a Jew.”
Dr. Meitner and Otto Hahn in a Berlin laboratory in the early 20th century.
In 1947, Meitner wrote to her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, a Jewish physicist who also contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission: “I know that his attitude contributed to the Nobel committee deciding against us,” she said of Hahn, in a letter translated by Ms. Moss. “But that is purely private stuff that we don’t want to make public.”
Nobel Week is a moment when the scientific community celebrates its greatest achievements but also, increasingly, examines oversights and injustices. Lise Meitner is one of many women in science who failed to receive due credit for their work, including, perhaps most notably, Rosalind Franklin, the chemist who contributed to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953.
“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of women who achieve something great in science that just didn’t get recognized in their lifetime,” said Katie Hafner, the host of the podcast “Lost Women of Science.” Ms. Hafner recently completed a two-part episode about Meitner, the second half of which opens with the fateful Oppenheimer scene. Unlike other figures on her podcast, Ms. Hafner said, “Lise Meitner is not lost.”
But, she added, “she is misunderstood.”
A Radioactive Trailblazer
From the beginning, Meitner was breaking glass ceilings. Born in 1878 in Vienna, she began studying physics privately, as women in Austria were not allowed to attend college until 1897. In 1901, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Vienna; five years later she earned a doctorate in physics, only the second woman from her university to do so.
Meitner spent the rest of her career working among the greats. She moved to the University of Berlin and began auditing classes taught by Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics — and who generally did not allow women to attend his lectures.
In Berlin, Meitner also met Otto Hahn, a chemist who was around her age and had a more progressive attitude about working with women. Hahn was also eager to collaborate with Meitner, as physicists tended to have a better grasp on radioactivity, the energy emitted by unstable atomic nuclei, than chemists. But, as a woman, Meitner was not allowed upstairs in Hahn’s lab. So she worked — without pay — in the basement. (When she needed to use the restroom, Ms. Moss said, Meitner had to dash across the street.)
In 1912, Meitner and Hahn moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. Together, they discovered a new element named protactinium. When the men at the Institute were drafted during World War I, Meitner was given her own physics lab and the title of professor, a position that granted her recognition and the independence to pursue her own research.
But outside the realm of science, the walls were closing in. Antisemitism was on the rise, and in 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Many Jewish scientists left the country, but Meitner stayed, thinly protected by her Austrian citizenship and keen to hang on to the rare opportunity for a woman to conduct scientific research.
“I love physics with all my heart,” she wrote in a letter to a friend. “I can hardly imagine it not being part of my life.”
In 1938, Germany invaded Austria, leaving Meitner subject to the full extent of the Nazi regime. She opted to flee. The Nobel physics laureate Niels Bohr arranged for her to escape by train.
Meitner eventually made her way to Sweden, devastated at having had to leave behind her life’s work and concerned about the safety of her family.
She continued collaborating with Hahn by mail. He ran experiments, and she interpreted findings he did not understand. One result stumped them both: When uranium atoms were bombarded with neutrons, the neutron should have been absorbed and an electron released, creating a heavier element. Instead, Hahn found barium, a much lighter element. They were baffled.
The finding was outside of Hahn’s expertise as a chemist. “Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation,” he wrote in a letter to Meitner translated by Ruth Lewin Sime, a chemist at Sacramento City College who published a biography of Meitner in 1996. “If there is anything you could propose that you could publish, then it would still in a way be work by the three of us!”
Hahn and his colleague Fritz Strassmann submitted the results for publication in December of 1938. Their tone was uncertain. “There could perhaps be a series of unusual coincidences which has given us false indications,” they wrote in German.
Meitner was not included as an author, nor was there any mention of her contribution to the work.
A Theory Is Born
A lecture in 1937 attended by, from left in front row, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Otto Stern and Lise Meitner. Credit... CBW/Alamy
In Sweden, Meitner mulled over the results with Frisch, her physicist-nephew. One snowy day, Frisch recalled in a memoir, they took a walk, eventually stopping to sit on a tree trunk and scribble calculations on scraps of paper.
Uranium was extremely unstable, they realized, and likely to fracture on impact with, say, a neutron. Those fragments would be violently blasted apart. If one of those pieces were barium, Meitner mused, the other would have to be another light element called krypton. She computed the energy driving the blast using Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc².
Hahn and Strassmann had split the atom.
“We have read and considered your paper very carefully,” Meitner wrote to Hahn in January 1939. “Perhaps it is energetically possible for such a heavy nucleus to break up.” In a later letter, she expressed disappointment at being absent: “Even though I stand here with very empty hands, I am nevertheless happy for these wonderful findings.”
Meitner and Frisch published their theoretical interpretation of Hahn and Strassmann’s results in the February 1939 edition of the journal Nature. Frisch and Meitner devised experiments to test their hypothesis. In the following weeks, they published two more papers with the results, which became the first physical confirmation of what Frisch coined “nuclear fission.”
Behind the scenes, Meitner and Hahn’s correspondence spiraled into misunderstanding. Hahn thought that she was angry that he had published without her. “What else could I have done?” he wrote to Meitner. “Believe me, it would have been preferable for me if we could still work together and discuss things as we did before!”
Hahn was also receiving pushback for working with a Jewish scientist. “I don’t give these things much weight, of course, but didn’t want to confess to the gentlemen that you were the only one who found out everything immediately,” he wrote Meitner in 1939.
Later that year, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun. And the race was on to build an atomic bomb.
Word spread about nuclear fission. Though a single split atom did not generate enough energy for potential use in a weapon, some speculated that a chain reaction could do the trick. Bombarding uranium with neutrons not only produced lighter elements; it also created more neutrons. If those neutrons collided with more uranium, the reaction might sustain itself.
The American government assembled the Manhattan Project to develop such a weapon. Many of Meitner’s peers, including Frisch and Bohr, became involved. Einstein did not, although he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to secure uranium and fund chain reaction experiments.
Meitner, though she had been invited, refused to join. (“I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” she famously said.) In 1945, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the end of the war, some newspaper stories claimed that Meitner had smuggled the recipe for the weapon out of Nazi Germany in her purse. She dismissed them. “You know so much more in America about the atomic bomb than I,” she told The New York Times in 1946.
In 1945, Hahn was nominated for the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, one year late, for the discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner and Frisch were also nominated for the physics prize that year. But only Hahn won.
A ‘Firm Tradition’
Meitner arriving in New York for a U.S. visit in January 1946. “You know so much more in America about the atomic bomb than I,” she told The New York Times that year. Credit... Associated Press
Details of Nobel Prize deliberations remain secret for 50 years after an award is given. After the documents surrounding Hahn’s win were released, science historians published an analysis of the deliberations in Physics Today in 1997. “None of this embittered Meitner,” they wrote. “She complained very little, and forgave a great deal.”
Ms. Hafner takes issue with that stance. “Who is going to say, ‘Hey, I’m bitter’?” she said. “What are the optics of that?”
Ms. Moss thinks bitter is the wrong word. “She was very, very hurt,” she said of Meitner, at both the lack of credit and the passive loyalty she felt Hahn had to Germany.
“It was quite clear to me that Hahn was completely unaware of his unfriendly behavior,” Meitner wrote to a friend in 1946. “Naturally, the time together with him was somewhat painful, but I was prepared for it and held myself firm, bringing up no personal debates.”
Meitner was nominated again — five times — for the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics. According to the authors of the Physics Today article, the Nobel committee argued that it was “firm tradition” to award the prize for experimental, rather than theoretical, discoveries.
But Demetrios Matsakis, a retired physicist of the U.S. Naval Observatory, said it is impossible to separate the “interplay between experimentalists and theorists. They need each other.” (Dr. Matsakis learned of Meitner in 2018, and was inspired to petition to rename another radioactive process, to recognize Meitner’s role in that discovery.)
Hahn deserved the award, but Meitner did, too, Dr. Matsakis said: “She should have gotten the Nobel Prize. There’s really no question about that.”
As an inverse comparison, scientists note the case of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese American physicist who ran experiments showing that some particle interactions do not obey mirror symmetry. In 1957, two of Wu’s male colleagues won the Nobel Prize in Physics for building the theory confirmed by her results.
The award recipient — the experimentalist or the theorist — “seems like it was reversed in these two cases,” said Harry Saal, a physicist who studied under Wu at Columbia University. “And in both cases the woman got screwed.”
Memorializing Meitner
Meitner with Otto Hahn in 1959, to inaugurate the Hahn-Meitner-Institut Berlin, now the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. Credit... Heinrich Sanden Sr./Associated Press
In his later years, Hahn seemed to try to make amends. He and Meitner remained friends, and he offered her a head position at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, which she declined. In 1948, he nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Meitner went on to be nominated 46 times for the Nobel in both physics and chemistry, but she never won. (To date, only four women have won in physics, most recently in 2020, and only eight have won in chemistry.)
In 1968, Meitner, then 89, died in England. An obituary that ran in The Times referred to her as an “atomic pioneer” and the “scientific partner of Otto Hahn, the Nobel Prize-winning nuclear chemist and the discoverer of nuclear fission.”
In 2020, the official Nobel Prize account on X, formerly known as Twitter, acknowledged that both Hahn and Meitner discovered nuclear fission. The post was accompanied by artwork showing Meitner standing behind Hahn, to the outrage of many people.
Any effort to award a Nobel to Meitner posthumously would be in vain. “Once a Nobel is given, there is no going back,” Dr. Sime said. The best that can be done is to acknowledge Meitner in the present, she added — and her omission from the new Oppenheimer film “was not excusable.”
Ms. Moss is still translating Meitner’s letters; so far, she has worked through more than 700 pages. “Now I’m just doing it because I fell in love with her,” she said. “She’s an incredible person.” She plans to write another book about Meitner with all the material that did not make it into the first one.
Earlier this year, Ms. Hafner and a friend visited Meitner’s grave, located in a tiny English churchyard “in the middle of nowhere,” she said. It took them half an hour to find the faded tombstone, which was overgrown with weeds.
Ms. Hafner was surprised at how unremarkable the grave was for such “a giant in science,” she said. Still, she was comforted to find a stone perched atop the marker, a Jewish practice to honor the dead. Ms. Hafner added visitation stones for herself, Ms. Moss, Bohr, Einstein, Frisch and even Hahn.
This is how people are remembered, Ms. Hafner said. “Until we chip away at this and continue to remind people of the important work she did, it just won’t get recognized,” she added. So “we do everything we can to set the record straight.”
Donald Trump attacked New York's attorney general and the judge overseeing his civil fraud trial as it began on Monday and a state lawyer accused the former president of generating more than $1 billion by lying about his real estate empire.
The trials of Donald J. Trump began Monday in a New York courtroom, where the former president made an appearance to fight the first of several government actions against him — a civil case that imperils his company and threatens his image as a master of the business world.
The case, brought by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, takes aim at Mr. Trump’s boasts about his net worth, accusing the former president of crossing from hyperbole into fraud. In some years, the attorney general’s office contends, Mr. Trump, his adult sons and their family business inflated his riches by more than $2 billion so that they could secure favorable terms from banks and bragging rights about his overall wealth.
“Year after year, loan after loan, defendants misrepresented Mr. Trump’s net worth,” Kevin Wallace, a lead lawyer for Ms. James, said during opening statements on Monday morning. He noted that while it might be one thing to exaggerate for a television audience or Forbes Magazine’s list of the richest people, “you cannot do it while conducting business in the state of New York.”
The trial in a Manhattan courtroom concerns accusations by state Attorney General Letitia James that Trump inflated his assets and his own net worth from 2011 to 2021 to obtain favorable bank loans and lower insurance premiums.
James is seeking at least $250 million in fines, a permanent ban against Trump and his sons Donald Jr and Eric from running businesses in New York and a five-year commercial real estate ban against Trump and the Trump Organization.
The state called Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars USA and longtime accountant for Trump's businesses who worked on Trump's annual statements of financial condition, as its first witness.
The trial could end with Mr. Trump stripped of signature properties, including his namesake tower in Midtown. Credit... Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Trump told reporters outside the courtroom before the day's proceedings began that the case was a "scam," a "sham" and a political vendetta by James, calling the Democrat "a corrupt person, a terrible person. Driving people out of New York."
Trump kept up his verbal attacks on the judge. Trump accused Justice Arthur Engoron of being a partisan Democrat who is using the case to interfere with the 2024 presidential election, where Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
"This is a judge that should be disbarred," Trump said to reporters during Monday's lunch break. "This is a judge that should be out of office."
James has accused Trump of overvaluing assets including his Trump Tower penthouse apartment in Manhattan, his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and various office towers and golf clubs, and inflated his own fortune by as much as $2.2 billion.
In his opening statement, Kevin Wallace, a lawyer in James' office, called Trump "materially inaccurate" in describing his finances to banks and insurers.
"This isn't business as usual, and this isn't how sophisticated parties deal with each other," Wallace said. "These are not victimless crimes."
Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Trump, countered in his opening statement that the financials for Trump and the Trump organization were entirely legal.
"It is one of the most highly successful brands in the world, and he has made a fortune literally being right about real estate investments," Kise said. "There was no intent to defraud, there was no illegality, there was no default, there was no breach, there was no reliance from the banks, there were no unjust profits, and there were no victims."
'WITCH HUNT'
Trump wore a dark blue suit, a brighter blue tie and an American flag pin on his lapel in court. As he entered, he called the case "a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time."
He also defended his company as a "great" and "tremendous" business owning "some of the greatest real estate assets in the world. And now I have to go in before a rogue judge."
“For years, Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth to enrich himself and cheat the system,” Letitia James said in a statement Monday. Credit... Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
James said her office was ready to prove its case.
"The law is both powerful and fragile," she said before entering the courtroom. "No matter how much money you think you may have, no one is above the law."
Former U.S. President Donald Trump attends the trial of himself, his adult sons, the Trump Organization and others in a civil fraud case brought by state Attorney General Letitia James, at a... Acquire Licensing Rights Read more
Engoron will hear evidence without a jury.
The case largely concerns penalties that Trump, his adult sons and 10 of his companies must face after Engoron last week found them liable for fraud.
Before opening arguments, Engoron described himself as a generalist on the law. "One thing I know a lot about is the definition of fraud," he said.
In his Sept. 26 decision, Engoron described in scathing terms how the defendants made up valuations.
He said this included valuing the Trump Tower apartment as if it were three times its actual size, and estimating that Mar-a-Lago was worth up to $739 million though deed restrictions capped it at $28 million.
The judge canceled business certificates for companies controlling pillars of Trump's empire, and said he would appoint receivers to oversee their dissolution.
Trump responded at the time by calling Engoron "deranged."
MANY LEGAL WOES
Wallace played an excerpt from a deposition where Michael Cohen, who had been Trump's personal lawyer and fixer but has since turned against his former boss, said the goal was "to attain the number that Mr. Trump wanted."
Kise countered that just because people disagree about valuations does not mean one valuation must be fraudulent.
He also said Trump's banks and insurers knew his valuations were estimates.
"They are not designed to be absolutes," he said.
Alina Habba, a lawyer speaking on behalf of some defendants, in a separate opening statement called Trump's assets "Mona Lisa properties," and said Mar-a-Lago alone would fetch more than $1 billion if Trump sold it.
The trial is scheduled to run through early December.
More than 150 people including Cohen could testify, though much of the trial may be a battle of experts opining on financial documents.
Trump also faces several other legal headaches, which have been a financial drain, and made him the first sitting or former U.S. president to be criminally charged.
He has been criminally charged in Washington over his efforts to undo his loss in the 2020 presidential election, in Georgia over moves to reverse election results there, in Florida over his handling of classified documents upon leaving office, and in New York over hush money payments to a porn star.
Trump has denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty.
