Ukraine will not get a new territory of Russia. Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters on January 24th at the Grand Kremlin Palace

All territory that has been seized by Russia will not be recognised by the Ukranian government. “Russia will not get a new territory of Ukraine,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his overnight address. The country will be annexed by Russia as a result of what it has done to the occupied territory.

Those towns and Donetsk are in the industrialized Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Kyiv since 2014. Russia illegally annexed four regions last month.

Reports of voting taking place at an armed station are unconfirmed, but Putin attempted to claim the referendums reflected the will of millions of people.

“I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me. For everyone to remember. The people in Luhansk are becoming citizens. The Russian president said “forever” during the ceremony.

The president of Russia said the annexation was an attempt to fix a mistake that happened after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Putin’s logical option, Kortunov says, is to declare victory and get out on his own terms. But for this he needs a significant achievement on the ground. Russia cannot simply get to where it is on February 24th, and that’s fine. Our mission has been accomplished. So we go home… …There should be something that can be presented to the public as a victory.”

Russia will now, despite the widespread international condemnation, forge ahead with its plans to fly its flag over some 100,000 square kilometers (38,600 square miles) of Ukrainian territory – the largest forcible annexation of land in Europe since 1945.

The Russian leader spoke in the chandeliered St. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace — the same place where he declared in March 2014 that the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was part of Russia.

Hundreds of Russian members of Parliament and regional governors sat in the audience for Mr. Putin’s speech, as well as many of his cabinet ministers and the four Russian-imposed leaders of the occupied Ukrainian regions.

He maintains that attempts to rewrite and remake world history by certain countries is becoming increasingly aggressive, eventually and obviously seeking to divide his country and weaken it.

He reeled off a litany of Western military actions stretching over centuries — from the British Opium War in China in the 19th century to Allied firebombings of Germany and the Vietnam and Korean Wars.

Russian military action in the Kharkiv region of Central Asia: a probe of the Kremlin’s military operations in the 21st century

Russian President Putin suggested that he could abandon his country’s no first use nuclear weapons doctrine if it were threatened with a nuclear war. Putin’s comments came after drone strikes hit military infrastructure deep inside Russia. Russia’s military blamed Ukraine for the strikes.

Russia’s defense ministry said it destroyed Ukrainian military targets in the area but didn’t comment on whether it targeted fleeing civilians. Russian troops have retreated from much of the Kharkiv region but they have continued to shell the area.

On Friday, there is a celebration on Red Square. Next week, the decrees will be formally endorsed by the government, according to the Kremlin spokesman.

The moves followed staged referendums held in occupied territory in defiance of international law. Much of the provinces’ civilian populations has fled fighting since the war began in February, and people who did vote sometimes did so at gunpoint.

The two eastern regions, which Mr. Putin considers his main prize, could become the basis for a Kremlin victory at a time when it has come under fire for not doing more to stop gains by Ukrainian forces.

A recent draft of hundreds of thousands of people into military service has caused a protest in Russia and poses a huge hurdle to regain control over the war.

Despite Russia’s military setbacks, President Putin is doubling down to get people to support his government, even if that means they have no choice but to.

The Russian International Affairs Council is run by Andrey Kortunov. “President Putin wants to end this whole thing as fast as possible,” he told CNN.

Independent Russian media quoting Russia’s revamped KGB, the FSB, put the total exodus even higher. They say that 261,000 military age men have left the country since compulsory military service started, an estimated 160,000 to 19,000 of them have fought in the war.

The backlash at the border with Georgia and the long lines at crossing into Luxembourg speak to the growing perception that Putin is losing his touch at reading Russia.

“The current onslaught of criticism and reporting of operational military details by the Kremlin’s propagandists has come to resemble the milblogger discourse over the past week. The Kremlin narrative talked about progress, but avoided detailed discussions of military operations. The Kremlin had never openly recognized a major failure in the war prior to its devastating loss in Kharkiv Oblast, which prompted the partial reserve mobilization.”

He used the same playbook annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and now, like then, threatens potential nuclear strikes should Ukraine, backed by its Western allies, try to take the annexed territories back.

Western leaders are locked in a battle with Putin. Jake Sullivan, a US national security adviser, told NBC last Sunday that Washington would respond to a Russian deployment of nuclear weapons with “catastrophic consequences”.

Moscow Does Not Operate in Ukraine: The First Shocks, and How Vladimir Has Been Afflecked for a Long Time

The first shock was recorded at 2 a.m. local time and followed by a second shock at 7 p.m.

After roiling patches of sea were discovered, Danes and Germans sent warships to secure the area, as well as increased security around its oil and gas facilities.

Russia denies responsibility and says it has launched its own investigation. According to former CIA chief John Brennan, Russia has the ability to damage these pipes by scuttling them in less than 200 feet of water and making them explode.

Brennan’s analysis is that Russia is the most likely culprit for the sabotage, and that Putin is likely trying to send a message: “It’s a signal to Europe that Russia can reach beyond Ukraine’s borders. So who knows what he might be planning next.”

Nord Stream 2 was never operational, and Nord Stream 1 had been throttled back by Putin as Europe raced to replenish gas reserves ahead of winter, while dialling back demands for Russian supplies and searching for replacement providers.

Another factor accelerating Putin’s thinking may be the approach of winter. Both Napoleon and Hitler failed to take Moscow because the supply lines were too long in the winter. Volker says that what historically saved Russia is now pressing down on Putin: “This time, it’s Russia that has to supply lines, trying to sustain its forces in Ukraine. This winter will be very hard for that. Putin’s timeline has moved up because of these factors.

Having failed in the face of Western military unity backing Ukraine, Putin appears set to test Western resolve diplomatically, by trying to divide Western allies over terms for peace.

Volker expects Putin to pitch France and Germany first “to say, we need to end this war, we’re going to protect our territories at all costs, using any means necessary, and you need to put pressure on the Ukrainians to settle.”

Putin knows he is in a corner, but doesn’t seem to realize how small a space he has, and that of course is what’s most worrying – would he really make good on his nuclear threats?

Russian troops have withdrawn not only from the Kyiv area and around the country’s largest city, Kharkiv, but from a large part of the Kherson region. Another problem for Putin are attacks this week against air force bases deep inside Russia. He put much of the country, especially border areas, on security alert recently, and fresh signs emerged Wednesday that Russian officials are strengthening border defensive positions.

Lyman had been an important link in the Russian front line for both ground communications and logistics. It is situated in the eastern part of the country, in the vicinity of the border with Luhansk region, which Russia annexed on Friday, after the local “Referendum” was held at gunpoint.

Russian attacks on the Kherson peninsula in the wake of the September 11 eruption of the first Russian army general Reissner-Norway

The leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, blamed the retreat, without evidence, on one general being “covered up for by higher-up leaders in the General Staff.” He demanded more drastic measures.

On the Russian side of the peninsula, an emergency situation was announced by the governor of the city of Sevastopol. The loud bangs of fire and smoke could be seen by the beachgoers from a distance. Authorities said a plane rolled off the runway at the Belbek airfield and ammunition that was reportedly on board caught fire.

Russia is sending conscripts across the entire front line in order to stop recent Ukrainian advances and rebuild ground forces decimated during the war. Military analysts had predicted that the deployment of Russian men to front line areas would cause many casualties, after a chaotic mobilization in September. Russian forces are attacking in the east but on defense in the south.

The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has vowed to fight for the freedom of parts of the country that had been annexed by the Russians.

Over 70 Russian attacks were conducted in the Kherson region on Saturday, with at least 16 people killed, including three emergency workers who were killed in demining operations. 64 people received injuries that ranged in severity, he said.

The Security Service of Ukraine, the secret police force known by the acronym SBU, posted photographs of the attacked convoy. At least one truck appeared to have been destroyed, with bodies in its bed. There was a vehicle in front of the convoy that had caught fire. There were corpses lying on the side of the road or inside vehicles that had bullet holes in them.

Russian Attacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and Implications for Security in Ukraine: The Debacle of Lyman

In other developments, in an apparent attempt to secure Moscow’s hold on the newly annexed territory, Russian forces seized the director-general of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Ihor Murashov, on Friday, according to the Ukrainian state nuclear company Energoatom.

Russia was silent on the report. Russia told the IaE that the director-general of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was held temporarily to answer questions.

“Today the enemy carried out another massive attack on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine,” Halushchenko said in a post on Facebook. There is damage to generation facilities and power grids.

At least 19 people were killed and 105 others were injured in Russian missile attacks across Ukraine on Monday, according to preliminary data, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said Tuesday.

US President Joe Biden is expected to announce an additional $1.8 billion in security assistance to Ukraine during President Volodymyr Zelensky’s expected visit to the White House. The significant boost in aid is expected to be headlined by the Patriot missile defense systems that are included in the package, a US official told CNN.

Two days after Putin held a grandiose ceremony to commemorate the annexation of four Ukrainian territories into Russia, his leadership was dealt a blow by the debacle in the city of Lyman, a strategic railway hub in the east of the country.

In an unusually candid article published Sunday, the prominent Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that in the last few days of their occupation, Russian forces in Lyman had been plagued by desertion, poor planning and the delayed arrival of reserves.

On Russia’s flagship Sunday political show, “News of the Week,” on Channel 1, the fall of Lyman wasn’t even mentioned until after more than an hour of laudatory coverage of Russia’s growth from 85 to 89 regions in an annexation most of the world views as illegal.

The “Russian Army and NATO”: What Do We Really Need to Know About the Cold War in the United States? A View from the Voice of Evgeny Poddubny

But the soldiers interviewed on the Sunday broadcast said they had been forced to retreat because they were fighting not only with Ukrainians, but with NATO soldiers.

These are not toys anymore. They are part of a systematic and clear offensive by the army and NATO forces,” the unnamed deputy commander of one Russian battalion told the show’s war correspondent, Evgeny Poddubny. The soldier insisted that his unit had been intercepting discussions by Romanian and Polish soldiers, not Ukrainians, on their radios.

The broadcast seemed intended to convince Russians who have doubts about the war or feel anger over plans to call up as many as 300,000 civilians that any hardships they bear are to be blamed on a West that is bent on destroying Russia at all costs.

The idea that Russia is fighting a broader campaign was repeated in an interview with Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right thinker whose daughter, also a prominent nationalist commentator, was killed by a car bomb in August.

Ukraine has become the epicenter of a global conflict; a hub whose spokes connect to every country, every life. Russia has brought about a decline in living standards around the world, as a result of its Iranian drones, civilian targets and weaponization of hunger.

Mr. Putin, like Mr. Dugin, believes Western countries were responsible for tearing up theNord Stream gasline, which he said was an act of sabotage.

He said that the West had accused them of blowing up the gas line. The war is unfolding on the scale and extent that it is. We must join the battle with the mortal enemy, who will use any means, including exploding gas pipelines, to destroy us.

At least for the moment, the nonstop messaging campaign is working. Russian’s feel threatened by the west, according to a senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who is from Russia.

Moscow and Tehran have sought to foment their ideologies beyond their borders. The struggle of the Ukrainian and Iranian people will have an effect on other countries.

Russian conscripts are being funneled to the front line of eastern Ukraine, but so far, it has proved ineffectual and high Russian casualties are expected.

Analysts inside and outside the government are doubtful of how useful the arms delivered in an armored vehicle or thrown into the back of a truck would be in helping Mr. Putin to achieve his objectives.

Many U.S. officials say that the primary utility is part of Mr. Putin’s last-ditch effort to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe some of the most sensitive discussions inside the administration.

Russia’s use of the munitions – including its 300mm Smerch cluster rockets that can unleash 72 submunitions over an area the size of a football pitch – has been documented in dozens of Ukrainian regions, including in Kharkiv, as CNN has reported.

An example of the bravery of women in Iran: From the Ukraine to the Crimes against the G-Unification Movement and the Palestine Genocide

Editor’s Note: Editor’s note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

A group of people came together on Sunday in London. The Ukrainian flag was waved by the one that waved the Iranian flags. When they met, they cheered each other, and chanted, “All together we will win.”

The intersection of the war in Ukraine and the conflicts surrounding Iran is just one example of how Ukraine has become the pivot point for so many of the world’s geopolitical tensions.

These battles show bravery that is almost impossible to get elsewhere, and is inspiring equally brave support in places like Afghanistan.

The spark was the death of a 22-year-old in Iran last month. Known as “Zhina,” she died in the custody of morality police who detained her for breaking the relentlessly, violently enforced rules requiring women to dress modestly.

In defiant defiance, Iranian women have stripped of their headscarves, danced around fires and tossed them into the flames.

It is why women are standing on cars, waving their hijabs and gathering with their friends and family in cities, where they are being shot at by the security forces.

Syria: Moscow and Iran in the War on Drugs. Putin and the Revolutionary Fate of the Faint Syrian Regime on October 7, 2015

Russia, which has been a dominant military force in Syria since 2015 and helps maintain the government’s grip on power, still keeps a sizable presence there. But the change could herald shifts in the balance of power in one of the world’s most complicated conflict zones, and may lead Israel — Syria’s enemy — to rethink its stance toward the Ukraine conflict.

A little over seven months later, Russia’s trajectory looks like a trail of war crimes, with hundreds of bombed hospitals, schools, civilian convoys, and mass graves filled with Ukrainians.

The regimes in Tehran and Moscow are now seen as pariahs by many people in the world because of their authoritarian tendencies.

This is not the first time Russia has accused Western nations of turning the conflict into a proxy war by supplying Ukraine with weapons. Iran acknowledged that it gave military drones to Russia.

These are two regimes that have much in common when it comes to their policies of oppression and their willingness to project power abroad.

Multiple Putin critics have suffered mysterious deaths. Many people fell out of windows. And both Iran and Russia have become leading practitioners of transnational repression, killing critics on foreign soil, according to Freedom House and other democracy research and advocacy groups.

There is more than a low probability that the Iranian regime will fall, for people in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It would be transformative for their countries and their lives, heavily influenced by Tehran. After all, Iran’s constitution calls for spreading its Islamist revolution.

For the rest of the world, it’s a time of uncertainty and expectation. Putin was seen as something of a genius by some seven months ago. The myth has died down. The man who helped suppress uprisings, entered wars, and tried to manipulate elections across the planet now looks cornered.

Ukraine is not a Russian region, but a “European Political Community”: The wake of the Kherson assaults in Donetsk

Hours before the strikes occurred, the country’s president announced that Ukraine’s military had regained control of three villages in one of the regions annexed by Russia.

A young girl who fell from a multi-story building was taken to the hospital for treatment, according to the governor.

Rogov also said that Ukrainians “have concentrated significant number of militants in Zaporizhzhia direction” and that the risk of storming the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant “remains high”.

Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, plans to talk with Ukrainian officials about the Russian move. The facility has been damaged in the fighting and staff including its director have been kidnapped by the Russians.

Meanwhile, leaders from more than 40 countries are meeting in Prague on Thursday to launch a “European Political Community” aimed at boosting security and prosperity across the continent, a day after the Kremlin held the door open for further land grabs in Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s spokesman told reporters on Friday that it was a Russian region. It has been fixed and defined. There can be no changes here.”

The war in Ukraine ramped up further south as Russia also launched fresh assaults on Kherson overnight, after a wave of fatal shelling in the region earlier this week. The retook of the city by the Ukrainians last month is one of the most significant accomplishments of the war to date.

The army is degraded in quality and capability. The composition of Russia’s military force in Ukraine — as much of its prewar active duty personnel has been wounded or killed and its best equipment destroyed or captured — has radically altered over the course of the war. The Russian military leadership is unlikely to know with confidence how this undisciplined composite force will react when confronted with cold, exhausting combat conditions or rumors of Ukrainian assaults. Recent experience suggests these troops might abandon their positions and equipment in panic, as demoralized forces did in the Kharkiv region in September.

When Russian troops pulled back from the Donetsk city of Lyman over the weekend, they retreated so rapidly that they left behind the bodies of their comrades. Some people were still by the road near the city on Wednesday.

Lyman sustained heavy damage both during the occupation and as Ukrainian soldiers fought to retake it. Mykola, a 71-year-old man who gave only his first name, was one of about 100 residents who lined up for aid.

Biden’s Nightly Address to the Russians During the February 24 U.S. Airborne Car Bomb Attack: How Will the War End?

He believes that the war can end and that the shops and hospitals will work again. We don’t have anything yet. Everything is destroyed and pillaged, a complete disaster.

In his nightly address, a defiant Zelenskyy switched to speaking Russian to tell the Moscow leadership that it has already lost the war that it launched Feb. 24.

WASHINGTON — United States intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist, an element of a covert campaign that U.S. officials fear could widen the conflict.

While Russia has not retaliated in a specific way for the assassination, the United States is concerned that such attacks — while high in symbolic value — have little direct impact on the battlefield and could provoke Moscow to carry out its own strikes against senior Ukrainian officials. The lack of transparency regarding military and covert plans by the Ukrainian government has annoyed American officials.

But Biden’s musings do appear to offer a window into his thinking as he games out how this crisis ends. He seems to have been wrestling over the very same questions about escalation and avoiding a moment of no return that President John Kennedy faced in 1962 in his game of nuclear poker.

“He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”

US officials have said that they have not found any sign that Russia is moving any of its tactical nuclear weapons to place within its borders.

How did President Kennedy Lose His Face? The Nuclear Off Ramp: The Case of the U.S. Navy, and the Challenge of Armageddon

Biden is trying to figure out what the off ramp is. Where did he find a way out? Where does he find himself in a position that he does not not only lose face but significant power within Russia?” “I’m talking.” Biden said.

The President may have been thinking of Kennedy’s commencement address at American University in Washington in 1963 in which he reflected on the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis and the risks posed by weapons that could end the world.

Kennedy said that while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary a choice of either a humiliation or a war.

In the nuclear age, adoption of that type of course would only be evidence of the bankruptcies of our policy and of a desire for the world to end.

The entire strategic logic between maintaining nuclear weapons for self-defense is that they are too terrible to be used, and any nation that did would be writing their own death warrant.

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden said at the fundraiser.

The commander uses the name of the code name Swat, and he states that they dropped personal care and helmets. “I think it was a special unit, but they were panicking. The road was bad and it was raining very hard.

The scale of Russian losses in these infantry advances is uncertain. The institute described the advances as being ill-prepared and were damaging to the defensive positions of the Ukrainian troops. The increase in the reported numbers suggests a rising toll of Russian casualties, but the Ukrainian military is thought to be inflating their estimates. More than 800 Russian soldiers were wounded or killed in the previous 24 hours according to the Ukrainian military.

Peter Bergen is a professor at Arizona State University and has been a national security analyst for CNN. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” His views are his own. You can have more opinion on CNN.

With even his allies expressing concern, and hundreds of thousands of citizens fleeing partial mobilization, an increasingly isolated Putin has once again taken to making rambling speeches offering his distorted view of history.

(Indeed, his revisionist account defines his rationale for the war in Ukraine, which he asserts has historically always been part of Russia – even though Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.)

The Soviets planned to set up a puppet government and leave Afghanistan as soon as possible after they invaded the country in 1979 according to a new book.

During the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US was initially reluctant to escalate its support for the Afghan resistance, fearing a wider conflict with the Soviet Union. It took until 1986 for the CIA to arm the Afghans with highly effective anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which ended the Soviets’ total air superiority, eventually forcing them to withdraw from Afghanistan three years later.

The United States is following a path of increasing the range and level of weapons it supplies to Ukraine, according to the spokesman for the Kremlin. This isn’t going to contribute to a quicker settlement of the situation.

The soviet-era S300 missile system is key to the country, but it’s difficult to find. The U.S. has regularly delivered air defense assistance, including more than 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and eight ground-based air missile defense systems called NASAMS. The U.S. has supplied a number of military vehicles and equipment including howitzers and Javelin anti-tank missiles. Supplies are also running low.

Putin’s War of 1917 and Russia’s First World War: Why Solovyov didn’t tell Putin? Why Russia shouldn’t have a Shadow

Putin is also surely aware that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was hastened by the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan two years earlier.

Looking at the history books he must have been aware that the Romanov monarchy was weakened by the Russian loss in 1905. Czar Nicholas II’s feckless leadership during the First World War then precipitated the Russian Revolution in 1917. The family of the Romanov were killed by a firing squad.

The day before Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, former US President Donald Trump publicly said that Putin was a genius and a smart guy for moving his troops there.

Against that background, Russia has seen some unusual public criticism of the top brass running Putin’s war. Within limits, of course: Criticizing the war itself or Russia’s commander-in-chief is off limits, but those responsible for carrying out the President’s orders are fair game.

If Russia is allowed to win, Putin’s war would mark the beginning of a new era of global instability, with less freedom, less peace and less prosperity for the world.

In a recent interview with Russian arch-propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, the head of the defense committee in Russia’s State Duma demanded that officials cease lying and level with the Russian public.

Kartapolov complained that the Ministry of Defense was evading the truth about incidents such as Ukrainian cross-border strikes in Russian regions neighboring Ukraine.

Near the border with Ukraine is Valuyki. The stance taken by Kyiv when it comes to striking Russian targets across the border is neither confirm nor deny.

“There is no need to somehow cast a shadow over the entire Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation because of some, I do not say traitors, but incompetent commanders, who did not bother, and were not accountable, for the processes and gaps that exist today,” Stremousov said. Many say the Minister of Defense could shoot himself if he wanted to. But, you know, the word officer is an unfamiliar word for many.”

But after Russia’s retreat from the strategic Ukrainian city of Lyman, Kadyrov has been a lot less shy about naming names when it comes to blaming Russian commanders.

“The Russian information space has significantly deviated from the narratives preferred by the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) that things are generally under control,” ISW noted in its recent analysis.

Kadyrov has argued against the methods of the past in the past, and he was recently promoted by Putin to the rank of colonel general. He stated in a recent Telegram post that if he had his way, the government would have extraordinary wartime powers in Russia.

“Yes, if it were my will, I would declare martial law throughout the country and use any weapon, because today we are at war with the whole NATO bloc,” Kadyrov said in a post that also seemed to echo Putin’s not-so-subtle threats that Russia might contemplate the use of nuclear weapons.

Russian-Ukraine Counterattacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: In response to the Kerch Bridge Explosion

The barrage continued on a day when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to human rights activists in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, an implicit rebuke to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his invasion of Ukraine.

There were rockets across from the nuclear plant that damaged power lines, gas lines and a number of civilian businesses. Russia and Ukraine have been accused of firing at and near the nuclear plant, Europe’s largest. It’s under Russian oversight and run by its pre-occupation Ukrainian staff.

Crews restored power and cellular connection in Enerhodar, the city near Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant that is currently under Russian control, a senior official said Sunday.

In a telegram posted Sunday, Rogov wrote that the water supply would be restored soon.

Orlov said “the Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly tried to deliver humanitarian supplies with food, hygiene products and so on to the city,” adding that Ukraine is “ready to organize prompt delivery and distribution of drinking water in Enerhodar” but that Russian forces have not let humanitarian aid through.

Some background: The reference to the bridge pertains to an explosion that took place on the Kerch bridge — which connects Crimea to Russia — on Oct. 8, when a truck crossing it exploded and caused it to be partially destroyed. The Kremlin pointed to the Ukrainians as the culprit but the Ukrainians have never said they were responsible. In the days following the bridge explosion, Putin said “further acts of terrorism on the territory of Russia will be harsh … have no doubt about that.” While he was showing the repairs, Putin drove a car across the bridge.

Surveillance video posted by Russian media shows a single truck driving from mainland Russia toward Crimea before a flash of light swallows he bridge. Photos posted by independent media outlets show at least three collapsed road spans resting crookedly on piers in the shallow water.

“We have already established the route of the truck,” he said, adding that it had been to Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia and Krasnodar — a region in southern Russia — among other places.

Illusion in the Kremlin: The response of the Russian president to the bombing of a neighborhood bridge by an air-strike

When emergency crews attempted to get to the upper floors of a building that had been hit, residents were watching from behind the police tape. There was a chasm ofat least 40 feet wide where apartments used to be. In an adjacent apartment building, the missile barrage blew windows and doors out of their frames in a radius of hundreds of feet. At least 20 private homes and 50 apartment buildings were damaged, city council Secretary Anatoliy Kurtev said.

After hearing air raid sirens, a couple took shelter in the hallway of their top floor apartment. The possessions flew out of the building after the explosion. Lazunko wept as the couple surveyed the damage to their home of nearly five decades.

In a neighborhood ravaged by a missile, three people dug a grave for a dog that had his leg torn off in the strike.

Abbas Gallimov, an analyst with a former speechwriter for Putin, said that the Russian president did not respond forcefully enough to appease angry war hawks after the bridge explosion. The attack and response has inspired the opposition and demoralized the loyalists.

“Because once again, they see that when the authorities say that everything is going according to plan and we’re winning, that they’re lying, and it demoralizes them,” he said.

“It is time for the end of the war”: Russian reactions to the clashes at the Kerch bridge and Kiev’s nuclear power plant

Hardwiring newly claimed territory with expensive, record-breaking infrastructure projects seems to be a penchant of dictators. In 2018, Putin personally opened the Kerch bridge – Europe’s longest – by driving a truck across it. One of the first things Beijing did after it reclaimed Macau and Hong Kong was to build the world’s longest sea crossing bridge. The road bridge was finally opened after about two years of delays.

Crimea is a popular vacation resort for Russians. People trying to drive to the bridge and onto the Russian mainland on Sunday encountered hours-long traffic jams.

— The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, said that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s biggest, had been reconnected to the grid after losing its last external power source early Saturday following shelling.

Authorities in Sumy, in the northeast of Ukraine, said there were power outages across the region after missile attacks, reporting that “two missiles hit an infrastructure facility” in Konotop. Attacks were reported by officials in Kharkiv.

India and China too called for de-escalation after the strikes. India has said it is “deeply concerned” by the escalation of the conflict and said that “escalation of hostilities is in no one’s interest,” urging an “immediate cessation of hostilities” and return to the “path of dialogue. ” Other European leaders have also condemned the attack.

Several explosions as well as being chaotic and confusing were reported by residents of Kherson by phone on Friday morning after the Russian occupation had ended.

Moscow fired at least 84 cruise missiles toward Ukraine on Monday, the Ukrainian military said, 43 of which were neutralized by missile defense systems. Russian attack drones were used along with twenty-four others.

The underground stations of the subway were serving as shelters after the system was suspended for several hours. Rescue workers were able to extricate people from the rubble caused by the air raid alert being lifted at midday.

Russian terrorist attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure are part of Putin’s ill-fated attempt to hammer the nation into submission in the last few days of the Ukrainian War

Demys Shmygal, Ukraine’s Prime Minister, said Monday that as of 11 a.m. local time, a total of 11 “crucial infrastructure facilities” in eight regions had been damaged.

Putin held an operational meeting of his Security Council on Monday, a day after he called the bridge explosions a terrorist attack and said they were the work of Ukrainian special services.

The Russian-appointed head of annexed Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, said he had “good news” Monday, claiming that Russia’s approaches to what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine “have changed.”

The goal of the special military operation was to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure and if they did not do so, we would have accomplished our task by the end of May.

“Russian terrorists have been saving one of the most massive missile attacks since the beginning of the full-scale invasion for the last days of the year,” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said in a statement on Twitter Thursday. “They dream that Ukrainians will celebrate the New Year in darkness and cold. They can’t defeat the people of Ukrainian origin.

NATO leaders have made it clear that they are behind Ukraine no matter what the length of the war, and several European countries that relied on Russian energy are at risk of suffering a cost-of-living crisis that could endanger public support.

But the proximate reason for this action was in fact Putin’s utterly inhumane carpet bombing of Ukrainian infrastructure. This is all part of Putin’s misguided, and likely futile, effort to hammer the nation into submission – a hail of rockets designed to knock out electricity, water, and other critical civilian infrastructure as winter looms.

Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, denounced the latest escalation of the war, and the civilians are paying the highest price.

Uk’s public transportation crisis in Kyiv: the impact of a local strike on public infrastructure and public transport in Ukraine’s capital Dnipro

The G7 group of nations will hold an emergency meeting via video conference on Tuesday, the office of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz confirmed to CNN, and Zelensky said on Twitter that he would address that meeting.

The strikes occurred while people headed to work and children were dropping off at school. A friend in Kyiv sent a text saying she had just left the bridge when it was struck.

President Zelenskyy said in a video posted to social media that the strikes disproportionately targeted civilian infrastructure in 11 of Ukraine’s 25 regions, including power plants and water heating facilities.

In Kyiv, Ukraine Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko says that at least two museums and the National Philharmonic concert halls sustained heavy damage. A nearby strike damaged the country’s main passenger terminal, delaying trains during this morning’s rush hour, according to Ukraine’s National Railway.

“This happened at rush hour, as lots of public transport was operating in the city,” said Ihor Makovtsev, the head of the department of transport for the Dnipro city council, as he stood by the wreckage. He added that the bus driver and four passengers had been taken to the hospital with serious injuries.

All of our transportation is only for civilian purposes and it’s difficult for me to find any logic to their work.

The explosion of the first Ukrainian air strike was from the beginning of the war, according to the Chechen republic’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko

The windows on the first floor balcony were gone, and a new one was next to the bus stop. Shattered glass covered the ground below. He said that he went to his kitchen to make breakfast just minutes before the blast, but had been watering the plants on his balcony.

“The explosion blew open all of my cabinets, and nearly knocked me to the ground,” he said. I would have been on the balcony, full of glass, five minutes before.

This week’s air strikes may point towards that endeavor; Ukraine’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko told CNN that around 30% of energy infrastructure in Ukraine was hit by Russian missiles on Monday and Tuesday. The first time that Russia has targeted energy infrastructure was from the beginning of the war, according to the minister.

The leader of the Chechen republic wrote a letter warning Zelenskyy that Russia hadn’t really begun yet.

The wake of a bomb attack on Kiev’s most strategic nuclear power plant and an autocrat’s desperate need to rejoin

A global affairs analyst is Michael Bociurkiw. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He contributes to CNN Opinion. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

Fear of revenge by the Kremlin was never far from the surface of the aftermath of a massive explosion on the extremely strategic and symbolic Kerch Straight bridge.

As of midday local time, the area around my office in Odesa remained quiet with reports of missiles and drones being shot down. Normally at this time of the day nearby restaurants are busy and people are talking about upcoming weddings and parties.

The attacks came just a few hours after Zaporizhzhia, a city close to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, was hit by multiple strikes on apartment buildings. At least 17 people were killed and several dozens injured.

Some of the media outlets in the city temporarily moved their operations to underground bomb shelters during a similar time when Russian forces bombarded the capital. In a subway station serving as a shelter, large number of people took cover on the platforms as a small group performed patriotic songs.

Businesses have been instructed to shift work online as much as possible and millions of people inUkrainian cities will be spending most of the day in bomb shelters.

Just as many regions of Ukraine were starting to roar back to life, and with countless asylum seekers returning home, the attacks risk causing another blow to business confidence.

For Putin, the symbolism of the only bridge linking mainland Russia and Crimea cannot be overstated. The fact that the attack happened a day after his 70th birthday is seen as an added blow to an aging autocrat’s ability to endure shame and humiliation.

The funny meme lit up social media channels like a christmas tree and the reaction from Ukrainians was instantaneous. Many shared their sense of jubilation via text messages.

The message was clear for all to see. Putin does not intend to be humiliated. He will not admit defeat. And he is quite prepared to inflict civilian carnage and indiscriminate terror in response to his string of battlefield reversals.

It was also an act of selfish desperation: facing increasing criticism at home, including on state-controlled television, has placed Putin on unusually thin ice.

Russian Counter-offensives During the Decelerator of Kiev’s Crimean Slepton Attacks: Implications for the Security and Security of the Kremlin

The Kremlin was faced with growing setbacks and appointed a new overall commander. The pace of the counter-offensives by the Ukrainians has made it hard to know if Gen. Sergey’s forces will make it back onto the front foot before the end of the year.

After weeks of Ukrainian ground gains, the strikes began after a huge explosion damaged the only crossing between the annexed Crimean peninsula and Russia. That blast, which was used as a reason for Monday’s onslaught, badly wounded the Russian psyche and gave Ukraine a major strategic boost.

What is crucially important now is for Washington and other allies to use urgent telephone diplomacy to urge China and India – which presumably still have some leverage over Putin – to resist the urge to use even more deadly weapons.

If these measures are not in place, Putin will continue his violence, which will amplify the humanitarian crisis throughout Europe. A weak reaction will be interpreted as a sign of the Kremlin’s ability to weaponize energy, migration and food.

In recent months, Russian troops have relentlessly targeted Ukraine’s power grid, repeatedly pounding power plants, heating systems and other energy infrastructure with targeted drone and missile strikes. The attacks have spanned the country on the cusp of winter, leaving Ukrainians vulnerable and in the dark just as the coldest time of the year is beginning.

Turkey and the Gulf states need to be pressured by the West if they want to impose more sanctions on Russia, since they get a lot of Russian tourists.

U.S. Aid for Ukraine in the Light of the Dec. 5 Nov. 11, 2016 Crimes: Secretary of State Mike Biden at the White House

A White House statement said Biden condemned Russia’s missile strikes across Ukraine and conveyed his sympathies to the families of those killed and injured in the attacks. President Biden pledged to continue providing Ukraine with the support needed to defend itself, including advanced air defense systems.”

Biden, the statement said, “also underscored his ongoing engagement with allies and partners to continue imposing costs on Russia, holding Russia accountable for its war crimes and atrocities, and providing Ukraine with security, economic, and humanitarian assistance.”

The U.S. reaction to the Dec. 5 assaults was muted. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said, “We are not working to prevent Ukraine from developing their own capability.” Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, stated only that the United States was neither encouraging nor enabling attacks on Russia.

The US had yet to deliver NASAMS to Ukraine according to a Department of Defense briefing in late September. At the time, he was a bristling. Gen. Patrick Ryder said two systems were expected to be delivered in the next two months, with the remaining six to arrive at an undetermined date.

Yes. There is an enormous $45 billion aid package in the works, and while not all military, it is part of a consistent drumbeat from the Biden administration. The message is simple: Ukraine is receiving as much aid as Washington can provide, short of boots on the ground, and that aid will not stop.

The Russian Attacks on Monday: How Putin and the U.S. are feeling the pressure from home and overseas, and how he’s reacting to it

“It’s clear that he’s feeling the pressure both at home and overseas, and how he reacts to that only he can say,” Kirby told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “Erin Burnett OutFront.”

Critical and civil infrastructure was hit in 12 regions and the capital, where more than 30 fires broke out, the emergency services said, adding the blazes have been put out.

International leaders including US President Joe Biden have condemned the Russian attacks. The US would provide advanced air defense systems for Kyiv, according to Biden.

In the months since the war in the subways became an air raid shelter, city dwellers have been able to return to normal and are now afraid of new strikes.

But the targets on Monday also had little military value and, if anything, served to reflect Putin’s need to find new targets because of his inability to inflict defeats on Ukraine on the battlefield.

These two headline packages alone could impact the course of the war. Russia’s most potent threat now is the constant bombardment of energy infrastructure. It is making winter colder and unbearable for some, plunging cities into darkness of up 12 hours a day and sometimes longer, in the hope of sapping high Ukrainian morale.

The recent Russian airstrike barrages and ongoing assault on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure have turned up pressure on the U.S. and its allies to do more.

Kirby was also unable to say whether Putin was definitively shifting his strategy from a losing battlefield war to a campaign to pummel civilian morale and inflict devastating damage on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, though he suggested it was a trend developing in recent days and had already been in the works.

It is likely that they had been planning it for a long time. Kirby said that the explosion on the bridge didn’t have an accelerated effect on planning.

But French President Emmanuel Macron underscored Western concerns that Monday’s rush-hour attacks in Ukraine could be the prelude to another pivot in the conflict.

Retired Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, former director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, said that by attacking targets designed to hurt Ukrainian morale and energy infrastructure, Putin was sending a message about how he will prosecute the war in the coming months.

Exploding drones are one of the fastest growing classes of weapons in the world, and are likely to become a staple of modern armed conflicts. That is a point that Ukrainian officials have been making in seeking air defense assistance from their allies. The benefits of this experience could be shared by allied countries if Ukraine can learn how to shoot the drones down.

If a long campaign by Putin against civilians was to begin, it would be aimed at breaking the Ukrainian people’s belief in their country and possibly unleashing a new wave of refugees into Western Europe that would cause tensions among NATO allies.

The lesson of this war is that, because of Putin, everything that was done to break up a nation has strengthened it.

Olena Gnes, a mother of three who is documenting the war on YouTube, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she was angry at the return of fear and violence to the lives of Ukrainians from a new round of Russian terror.

“This is just another terror to provoke maybe panic, to scare you guys in other countries or to show to his own people that he is still a bloody tyrant, he is still powerful and look what fireworks we can arrange,” she said.

The Russian president tersely compared the difference in reactions to attacks on Russia and attacks on Ukraine, saying, “as soon as we make a move, do something in response – noise, clamor, crackle for the whole universe.”

All of the accepted modes of war in the age of Nuclear Weapons are irrelevant, and all notions of right and wrong are irrelevant. It matters who committed crimes against civilians, or acted in self-defense, but who was the aggressor is not really important.

It doesn’t really matter who was correct or wrong, in the asymmetrical exchange of nuclear missiles, hundreds of millions could die. No one will be able to tell the story.

President Biden could muse and dispatch his diplomats to Russia to let Putin know he was off the leash. An immediate cease-fire must occur, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine must be pressured to agree.

Russia used Belarusian territory as a base for its February invasion of Ukranian and used it as a launching point for its assault on the Ukrainian capital. Moscow still has hundreds of troops in Belarus, from which it launches missiles and bombing raids, but their number is now expected to increase sharply.

“This won’t be just a thousand troops,” Mr. Lukashenko told senior military and security officials in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, after a meeting over the weekend with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in St. Petersburg.

He gave no details on Monday of the size or precise purpose of the new joint force, stirring speculation that Belarus might send troops into Ukraine to help Russia’s flailing military campaign. He could be preparing his country for a lot of Russian soldiers, some of whom are former convicts, many of which are ill trained.

Some help for Putin may be on the way, however. An announcement by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that Belarus and Russia will “deploy a joint regional group of troops” raised fears of deepened military cooperation between the close allies and that Belarusian troops could formally join Russia in its invasion. It is thought that there could be a link between the threat ofUkrainian threats to its security in recent days and some level of involvement.

Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst now in exile in Warsaw, said Mr. Lukashenko would likely try to resist deploying his own troops in Ukraine because that “would be so dangerous for him on so many levels. It would be catastrophic politically.”

Andrei Sannikov was deputy foreign minister and fled into exile after he was jailed for being in power.

Russia has not mastered its air defenses since the Ukraine crisis: The first time from the beginning of the war had advanced missile capabilities, according to an Air Force spokesman

On Monday, state television not only reported on the suffering, but also flaunted it. It showed smoke and bloodshed in central Kyiv, along with empty store shelves, and a long-range forecast showing months of freezing temperatures there.

During the course of the conflict, the Ukrainians have succeeded in keeping Russia from getting air superiority over its airspace.

In order to bolster its missile defenses in the wake of the assault, Moscow needs to know how many projectiles are bound to get through.

“The barrage of missile strikes is going to be an occasional feature reserved for shows of extreme outrage, because the Russians don’t have the stocks of precision munitions to maintain that kind of high-tempo missile assault into the future,” Puri said.

The Pentagon’s view at the time was that of its weapons stocks, Russia was “running the lowest on cruise missiles, particularly air-launched cruise missiles,” but that Moscow still had more than 50% of its pre-war inventory.

The inventory was dispatched this week. But Russia has recently resorted to using much older and less precise KH-22 missiles (originally made as an anti-ship weapon), of which it still has large inventories, according to Western officials. Weighing 5.5 tons, they are designed to take out aircraft carriers. Dozens of casualties were caused at a shopping mall in June by a KH-22.

The Russians have also been adapting the S-300 – normally an air defense missile – as an offensive weapon, with some effect. These have wrought devastation in Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv, among other places, and their speed makes them difficult to intercept. But they are hardly accurate.

He told CNN’s Richard Quest that this was the “first time from the beginning of the war” that Russia has “dramatically targeted” energy infrastructure.

The Ukrainians have had plenty of practice with their limited air defenses in the past nine months, mainly BUK and S-300 systems. The systems do not last forever and may suffer losses in combat operations, according to the Air Force Command spokesman.

It’s also uneconomical to waste advanced systems on taking out cheap drones. But there may be other answers for the hundreds of attack drones Russia is now deploying. Zelensky says that Russia has ordered 2,400 drones from Iran.

Ukraine’s wish-list – circulated at Wednesday’s meeting – included missiles for their existing systems and a “transition to Western-origin layered air defense system” as well as “early warning capabilities.”

The advanced long-range air defense system is very effective at protecting a limited number of high value targets. It is not a total solution to the problem of air defense in Ukraine or a swift one, with one earliest possible in-service date estimated in February next year.

Western systems are starting to be used in other places. The Ukrainian Minister of Defense announced that a new era of air defense has begun, with the arrival of the first IRIS-T from Germany and the expected arrival of two units of the US National Advanced Surface-to- Air Missile System.

This is just the beginning. And we need more,” Reznikov said Wednesday before tweeting as he met with Ukraine’s donors at the Brussels meeting:” Item #1 on today’s agenda is strengthening (Ukraine’s) air defense. I feel optimistic.

But these are hardly off-the-shelf-items. They had to make the IRIS-T for Ukraine. Western governments do not have a lot of systems. And Ukraine is a very large country under missile attack from three directions.

On the attack on Oct. 8 in Ukraine: An analyst’s insight into the case of an explosion in a U.S. naval pier

Ukraine’s senior military commander, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, tweeted Tuesday his thanks to Poland as “brothers in arms” for training an air defense battalion that had destroyed nine of 11 Shaheeds.

He said Poland had given Ukraine “systems” to help destroy the drones. There was a report last month that the Polish government had bought advanced Israeli equipment, and was transferring it to Ukraine.

The president of Ukraine told the international community that his country needed $57 billion to rebuild and stay afloat. He gave that figure to the boards of governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Mr. Zelensky said that the country needed $17 billion to rebuild schools, hospitals, transport systems, and housing, with $2 billion going towards exports to Europe and restoring energy infrastructure.

The images captured hundreds of cargo trucks backed up and waiting to cross from Crimea into Russia by ferry, some five days after the bombing. A lot of trucks are lined up at a port in the UK and an airport is being used as a staging area.

The long lines for the ferry crossing had been made more difficult by the security checkpoint that was put up after the bridge explosion, according to an analyst with the International Crisis Group.

But Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, says Ukrainian intelligence believes that Russian forces planned the attack as a pretense to escalate the war in Ukraine.

“The Crimea bridge incident gives the Russian military a convenient alibi for all of its defeats in southern Ukraine,” Podolyak told Ukraine’s national broadcaster.

There are many theories about who is to blame for the Oct. 8 attack in Ukraine. But, says Andrew Barr, an impact dynamics researcher at the University of Sheffield, “Despite all of the publicly available photos and videos, it’s quite difficult to be certain about this.”

The pier is damaged in a way that’s consistent with an explosion in the center of a bridge span.

Nick Waters, an analyst with the digital forensics firm Bellingcat, points out that the bridge’s underside shows barely any blast damage, dismissing a popular Ukrainian theory that a special naval operation destroyed the bridge from below.

Soon after the explosion, Ukrainian experts quickly dismissed the notion that a Ukrainian missile had targeted the bridge, citing the 180-mile distance from Ukrainian-held territory as a technical limitation. The United States and other countries that supply weapons to Ukraine have refused to provide missiles that travel that far.

There is a video that shows explosives and an X-ray of the truck. Where on the “x-ray” another axle with wheels and a frame disappeared, the FSB does not specify ???? pic.twitter.com/onKbOndxVO

Ukrainian journalists pointed out that the photos of different trucks were shown in different places after Russian state media posted their evidence about a truck bomb.

The bridge is designed to have a single section of road floating above several piers and detached from other sections. When one span falls into the water, it pulls several other spans with it.

Barr believes that the truck was loaded with specialized compounds that caught fire enough to ignite a fuel train and cause serious damage to the bridge.

Mika Tyry, a retired military demolition specialist, said that the flames and sparks are consistent with a thermite bomb. Russia’s military has been known to use thermite, though Ukraine could have recovered the substance from unexploded Russian munitions.

The attack on a guarded structure with explosives and timed with a train was successful, according to Barr. “That’s highly suggestive of a carefully planned military operation rather than a lone actor or other group.”

Not for the first time, the war is teetering towards an unpredictable new phase. Keir Giles is a senior consultant at Chatham House and says this is the third, fourth, or fifth war they have observed.

Despite the fact that the war has favored Ukraine, American and Ukrainian officials say the fighting will go on for months more. There are a lot of variables that could influence shifting the conflict’s trajectory, including more difficult fighting conditions in December and whether Europe’s unity can be maintained this winter as energy prices soar.

“What seemed a distant prospect for anything that could be convincingly described as a Ukraine victory is now very much more plausible,” Giles said. The response from Russia is not likely to remain the same.

While there was a suggestion that the war could not be won becauseUkraine didn’t have the ability to seize ground, these counter-offensives showed that the idea was wrong.

Ukrainian troops hoist the country’s flag above a building in Vysokopillya, in the southern Kherson region, last month. Ukrainian officials say they have liberated hundreds of settlements since their counter-offensive began.

A senior fellow from the International Institute for Strategic Studies says that the Russians are hoping to avoid a collapse in their frontline before winter sets in.

“If they can get to Christmas with the frontline looking roughly as it is, that’s a huge success for the Russians given how botched this has been since February.”

The impact of rising energy prices on Europe, as well as a blow to Ukraine’s hopes in Donbas, will be felt by the whole of Europe, if the Ukrainians get a major blow in the war.

“There are so many reasons why there is an incentive for Ukraine to get things done quickly,” Giles said. The winter energy crisis in Europe and the destruction of Ukraine’s power infrastructure are two of the hardest tests for the Western backers of the Ukrainian government.

“We know – and Russian commanders on the ground know – that their supplies and munitions are running out,” Jeremy Fleming, a UK’s spy chief, said in a rare speech on Tuesday.

That conclusion was also reached by the ISW, which said in its daily update on the conflict Monday that the strikes “wasted some of Russia’s dwindling precision weapons against civilian targets, as opposed to militarily significant targets.”

Justin Bronk, a military expert with the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), agreed with that assessment, telling CNN that, “Ukrainian interception success rates against Russian cruise missiles have risen significantly since the start of the invasion in February.”

The impact of such an intervention in terms of pure manpower would be limited; Belarus has around 45,000 active duty troops, which would not significantly bolster Russia’s reserves. But it would threaten another assault on Ukraine’s northern flank below the Belarusian border.

The reopening of a northern front would be a new challenge for Ukraine. He said that it would give Russia a new way into the area that has been captured by the Ukrainians.

As Russian troops began to amass on Ukraine’s borders in the weeks preceding the February assault, around 55% of Ukrainians said they didn’t trust Zelensky to lead them into war. It is believed that his rating was influenced by the fact that he didn’t launch a fight against corruption in the judiciary as he promised.

Ahead of a NATO meeting of defense ministers inBelgium, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg saidUkraine needed more systems to stop missile attacks.

Russian troops in Ukraine are mobilized and can’t be used for combat training – France’s defense minister confirms it’s sending air-defense missiles to Ukraine

That’s not to say mobilized forces will be of no use. If used in support roles, like drivers or refuelers, they might ease the burden on the remaining parts of Russia’s exhausted professional army. They could also fill out depleted units along the line of contact, cordon some areas and man checkpoints in the rear. They are not likely to become a capable fighting force. Already there are signs of discipline problems among mobilized soldiers in Russian garrisons.

The strikes in the Belgorod region next to Ukraine and the destruction of the municipal administration building in Donetsk, a city firmly controlled by Russia and its proxies since 2014, sent a powerful signal that the mayhem unleashed by President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion is spreading far beyond the front lines.

The most significant areas on the front line are neighboring towns. Soledar and Bakhmut, where extremely heavy fighting continues,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address Sunday.

Western intelligence officials say that Zelenskyy’s accusation is true and that Russia included convicts with “long sentences for serious crimes” in return for pay and amnesty.

Zelenskyy’s office said Moscow was shelling towns and villages along the front line in the east Sunday, and that “active hostilities” continued in the southern Kherson region.

Meanwhile, Russia opened an investigation into a shooting in that region Saturday in which two men from a former Soviet republic who were training at a military firing range killed 11 and wounded 15 during target practice, before being slain themselves. The Russian Defense Ministry has labeled the incident a terrorist attack.

— France, seeking to puncture perceptions that it has lagged in supporting Ukraine, confirmed it’s pledging air-defense missiles and stepped-up military training to Ukraine. Up to 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers will be embedded with military units in France, rotating through for several weeks of combat training, specialized training in logistics and other needs, and training on equipment supplied by France, the French defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said in an interview published in Le Parisien.

The Institute for the Study of War in Washington, DC, alleged late Saturday that Moscow was likely to conduct ethnic cleansing by deporting Ukrainians.

It referenced statements made this week by Russian authorities that claimed that “several thousand” children from a southern region occupied by Moscow had been placed in rest homes and children’s camps amid the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The comments made by Russia’s deputy prime minister were reported by RIA Novosti on Friday.

Russian authorities have previously admitted to placing children from Russian-held areas of Ukraine, who they said were orphans, for adoption with Russian families, in a potential breach of an international treaty on genocide prevention.

pro-Kremlin fighters are accused of evicting civilians in occupied territories to house officers in their homes, an act it described as violation of international humanitarian law. The evictions were happening in the Luhansk region. It didn’t provide evidence for its claim.

pro-Kremlin commenters on social media said that a Russian commander wanted for his part in downing of a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine is currently at the front. Posts by Maksim Fomin and others said Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, has been given responsibility for an unspecified Russian front-line unit.

Girkin has been on an international wanted list over his alleged involvement in the downing of Kuala Lumpur-bound flight MH17, which killed 298 people. A verdict in the murder trial against him is expected in November.

Recently, Girkin’s social media posts have lashed out at Moscow’s battlefield failures. Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency said Sunday it would offer a $100,000 reward to anyone who captures him.

Anton Gerashcenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Internal Ministry, reported attacks on infrastructure near the city’s main rail station, but lines were operating as normal midmorning Monday.

Zelenskyy’s chief-of-staff, Andriy Yermak, again called on the west to provide Ukraine with more air defense systems. He said that there was no time for slow actions.

The photo of the bomb that was labeled Geran-2 was removed after commenters criticized him for suggesting that a Russian strike was related to Iran.

Ukraine’s crisis response plan in light of Russia’s attacks on critical energy infrastructure: A statement from the EU’s foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg

There is a foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg today. Before the meeting, Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, told reporters that the bloc would look into “concrete evidence” of Iran’s involvement in Ukraine.

The areas in the west and center of Kyiv were the hardest hit. A road in Solomyanskyi was damaged and fragments of a drone landed on a high rise residential building in Shevchenkivskui district.

Kamikaze drones, or suicide drones, are small, portable aerial weapon systems that are hard to detect and can be fired at a distance. They can be easily launched and are designed to hit behind enemy lines and be destroyed in the attack.

The attack on the energy infrastructure in the Kamianske district of Dnipropetrovsk caused “fire and serious destruction,” according to the regional military official.

All services are working to eliminate the consequences of shelling. Each region has a crisis response plan,” Shmyhal added.

Ukrainians were asked to take a conscious approach to economical consumption of electricity in order to stabilizing the energy system. Especially during peak hours.

Ukraine’s state energy supplier Ukrenergo said the power grid in the country remains “under control,” adding that repair crews are working to curb the consequences of the attacks.

Shmyhal’s announcement came as Ukraine is still dealing with Russian attacks on critical energy facilities.

The State of Ukraine: The Status of the War between the Russian and the Russian Instrinsic Armed Forces after the October 11 Protest

The partnership of convenience between the two dictatorships is an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said.

Both countries are deep in crisis, struggling economically and politically. Iran is attempting to quell street protests that pose the most serious challenge in years to the government, while Russia is trying to manage rising dissension over a faltering war effort and an unpopular draft.

Nuclear deterrence exercises will be held by NATO. The NATO alliance warned Russia not to use nuclear weapons on Ukranian, but said they were a routine yearly training activity.

Russian agents detained eight people on Oct. 12 suspected of carrying out a large explosion on a bridge to Crimea, including Russian, Ukrainian and Armenian citizens.

The United Nations General Assembly roundly condemned Russia’s move to illegally annex four regions of Ukraine. Four countries voted with Russia, but 141 voted in favor ofUkraine’s resolution, while 35 abstained.

Russian troops began arriving in Belarus Oct. 15, which Minsk said were the first convoys of almost 9,000 service members expected as part of a “regional grouping” of forces allegedly to protect Belarus from threats at the border from Ukraine and the West.

You can read past recaps here. For context and more in-depth stories, you can find more of NPR’s coverage here. Also, listen and subscribe to NPR’s State of Ukraine podcast for updates throughout the day.

The mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin, seemed to take pains to offer reassurances. “At present, no measures are being introduced to limit the normal rhythm of the city’s life,” Mr. Sobyanin wrote on his Telegram channel.

And despite the new power granted them by Mr. Putin, the regional governors of Kursk, Krasnodar and Voronezh said no entry or exit restrictions would be imposed.

Many Russians will see a warning message when Moscow declares martial law for the first time since World War II.

“People are worried that they will soon close the borders, and the siloviki” — the strong men close to Mr. Putin in the Kremlin — “will do what they want,” Ms. Stanovaya said.

On Tuesday, the newly appointed commander of the Russian invasion, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, acknowledged that his army’s position in Kherson was “already quite difficult” and appeared to suggest that a tactical retreat might be necessary. When asked what decisions he would make about military deployment, a prepared General said he was ready to make difficult decisions.

A Ukrainian MiG pilot who jumped out of Vinnytsia, Ukraine, using a military-style jet to kill five drones

One Ukrainian MiG pilot won folk hero status in Ukraine this month for shooting down five Iranian Shahed-136 drones over the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, only to be forced to eject after crashing into the debris of the last one. The pilot, Karaya — who identified himself by only his nickname, according to military policy — told the local news media afterward, “Within a short period of time, we are adapting to this kind of weapon and are starting to destroy it successfully.”

After colliding with the airborne debris, he said, Karaya steered his MiG away from Vinnytsia and ejected. The jet crashed into houses in an outlying area, but injured nobody on the ground. Karaya later visited the site to apologize.

He said he apologized to the residents, and thanked them for their steel nerves, after he showed up in his tattered uniform. He joked that it was a violation of military protocol. “Lost them while leaving the office,” he wrote.

CNN’s Dean Obeidallah Revisited: Kevin McCarthy and the Ukraine Crisis in the Presidency of the Kremlin

Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him on his verified account. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. You can find more opinions on CNN.

Vance’s initial reaction was callous and inflammatory, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent comments were even more alarming. McCarthy said that if Republicans win the House in November, Ukraine can no longer expect that US assistance would be a “blank check.”

The Kremlin has tried to removeUkrainefrom the map over the past three hundred days. The U.S. Secretary of State said that Russia is trying to weaponize winter by freezing and starving Ukrainian families and forcing them from their homes.

The idea that Kevin McCarthy is going to lead the pro-Putin wing of my party is stunning. Cheney was interviewing on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“He knows better, but the fact that he’s willing to go down the path of suggesting that America will no longer stand for freedom, I think, tells you he’s willing to sacrifice everything for his own political gain.”

Meanwhile, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — who recently declared that if Republicans win the House in next month’s elections that she expects McCarthy “to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway” — blamed Ukraine for the war shortly after Russia’s attack, saying that “Ukraine just kept poking the bear and poking the bear, which is Russia, and Russia invaded.”

Conservative Fox News stars, including Laura Ingraham and especially Tucker Carlson, have been laying the groundwork with members of the Republican base, readying them for the possibility of an end to US assistance for Ukraine.

Carlson — who declared on his show in 2019 when there was a potential conflict between the neighboring countries that he was “root(ing) for Russia” — did his best in the months before Putin’s attack to paint Ukraine in a negative light. For example, Carlson falsely claimed Ukraine was “not a democracy” and called Ukrainian leader Zelensky a “puppet of the Biden administration.”

And just last week, Ingraham derided former Vice President Mike Pence for referring to the United States as the “arsenal of democracy” and suggested our massive military is too depleted to help other countries such as Ukraine. Jim Banks of Indiana, a GOP congressman, spoke on the same episode, and he agreed that America shouldn’t give aid to those around the world that don’t need it.

As Biden suggested, McCarthy and some of his fellow Republicans may or may not get it. One person who fully grasps it is me: the President of Russia, Mr. Putin. If the GOP wins back control of the House, there will be huge celebrations.

Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion.

He is trying to distract his nation from what is obvious, namely that he is losing badly on the battlefield and failing to achieve even the scaled back objectives of his invasion.

Putin Prolonge War Ukraine Winter Andelman: The Status of the EU’s Energy Deal with the Kremlin and Russia

This ability to keep going depends on a host of variables – ranging from the availability of critical and affordable energy supplies for the coming winter, to the popular will across a broad range of nations with often conflicting priorities.

In the early hours of Friday, European Union powers agreed on a path to control energy prices that have been surging on the heels of embargoes on Russia and the Kremlin cutting natural gas supplies.

These include an emergency cap on the benchmark European gas trading hub – the Dutch Title Transfer Facility – and permission for EU gas companies to create a cartel to buy gas on the international market.

While French President Emmanuel Macron waxed euphoric leaving the summit, which he described as having “maintained European unity,” he conceded that there was only a “clear mandate” for the European Commission to start working on a gas cap mechanism.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is skeptical of price caps. Now energy ministers must work out details with a Germany concerned such caps would encourage higher consumption – a further burden on restricted supplies.

These divisions are part of Putin’s dream. The success that could be achieved from the Kremlin’s viewpoint could be achieved by Manifold forces in Europe.

Germany and France are already at loggerheads on many of these issues. Though in an effort to reach some accommodation, Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have scheduled a conference call for Wednesday.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/25/opinions/putin-prolonge-war-ukraine-winter-andelman/index.html

The case for a new Italian prime minister: Congress should end the invasion by sanctions on Russia, and the Republicans will end the crisis in Italy

A new government has been formed in Italy. Italy has a woman prime minister for the first time in its history, and she is trying to downplay her party’s past. One of her far-right coalition partners meanwhile, has expressed deep appreciation for Putin.

Silvio Berlusconi, himself a four-time prime minister of Italy, was recorded at a gathering of his party loyalists, describing with glee the 20 bottles of vodka Putin sent to him together with “a very sweet letter” on his 86th birthday.

The other leading member of the coalition said during the campaign that he didn’t want the sanctions on Russia to hurt those who impose them more than those who are hit.

At the same time, Poland and Hungary, longtime ultra-right-wing soulmates united against liberal policies of the EU that seemed calculated to reduce their influence, have now disagreed over Ukraine. Poland has taken offense to the statements made by Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orban.

This is trickier. Congress’s likely new Speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, has warned the Biden administration cannot expect a “blank cheque” from the new GOP-led House of Representatives.

The influential Congressional progressive caucus called on Biden to open talks with Russia to end the conflict while it continues to occupy vast stretches of the country and its missiles are hitting deep into the interior.

Hours later, caucus chair Mia Jacob, facing a firestorm of criticism, emailed reporters with a statement “clarifying” their remarks in support of Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also called his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba to renew America’s support.

The War in Ukraine: Russia’s Cold War, NATO, the West and the Security of the Middle East – How the Cold War is going to End

In its counteroffensive in the northeast, the Ukrainian military has made significant inroads in cutting supply lines and attacking Russian fuel depots with long-range rockets.

All these actions point to an increasing desperation by Russia to access vitally-needed components for production of high-tech weaponry stalled by western sanctions and embargos that have begun to strangle the Kremlin’s military-industrial complex.

The lack of necessary semi-conductors has caused Russian production of hypersonic missiles to cease, according to the report. Plants producing anti-aircraft systems have been shut down, and aircraft are being cannibalized for spare parts. The end of the soviet era was 30 years ago.

Putin has also tried, though he has been stymied at most turns, to establish black market networks abroad to source what he needs to fuel his war machine – much as Kim Jong-un has done in North Korea. The United States has recently taken action against a network of shadow companies in Taiwan, Switzerland and other countries to source goods for the Russian military-industrial complex.

The Justice Department said that they were charging individuals and companies for trying to smuggle high-tech equipment into Russia.

Iran’s rivals in the Middle East, NATO members and nations that are still interested in restoring the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, have all been drawn attention to the strengthening relationship between Moscow and Tehran.

Yuval Noah Harari, the historian, has argued that victory by Russia would reopen the door to wars of aggression, which had been rejected by most nations since the Second World War.

The United States led the West’s support of Ukraine. The war in Ukraine revived NATO, bringing new applications from countries that had been committed to neutrality. It helps reinforce the interest in eastern European states of orienting their future toward Europe and the West.

There are still repercussions to what happens far away from the battlefields. Saudi Arabia and other oil producers decided last month to slash production, which the US accused the Saudis of doing to help pay for the war. (An accusation the Saudis deny).

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz recently reiterated that “Israel supports and stands with Ukraine, NATO and the West,” but will not move those systems to Ukraine, because, “We have to share our airspace in the North with Russia.”

A UN and Turkey-brokered agreement allowed Ukraine’s maritime corridors to reopen, but this week Moscow temporarily suspended that agreement after Russian Navy ships were struck at the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Putin’s announcement was immediately followed by a surge in wheat prices on global commodity markets. The prices for bread in Africa and across the planet are affected by those prices.

Everyone has already been affected by the war in Ukraine. The conflict has also sent fuel prices higher, contributing to a global explosion of inflation.

Higher prices not only affect family budgets and individual lives. When they come with such powerful momentum, they pack a political punch. Inflation, worsened by the war, has put incumbent political leaders on the defensive in countless countries.

The Attack of October 10 Explosion on a Russian-Ukrainian Bridge: State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (SSSCIP)

It’s not just on the fringes. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader who could become speaker of the House after next week’s US elections, suggested the GOP might choose to reduce aid to Ukraine. Progressive Democrats released and withdrew a letter calling for negotiations. Evelyn Farkas, who was in the Pentagon under the Obama administration, said they were bringing a big smile to Putin.

Russian news media has reported on soldiers telling their relatives about high casualty rates, and harrowing videos filmed byUkrainian drones showing Russian infantry being struck by shells in poorly prepared positions have supported those claims. The exact location of the front line could not be determined due to the fact that the videos have not been verified.

Russian forces had tripled the intensity of their attacks on some areas of the front, according to the commander of the Ukrainian military. He did not say what the time frame was or where the attacks were coming from.

An assessment from the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based analytical group, also said that the increase in infantry in the Donbas region in the east had not resulted in Russia’s gaining new ground.

Russian forces would have had more success if they waited until they had a large enough force that they could overcome Ukrainian defenses, according to the institute.

With Russian and Ukrainian forces apparently preparing for battle in Kherson, and conflicting signals over what may be coming, the remaining residents of the city have been stocking up on food and fuel to survive combat.

Private analysts and US and Ukrainian officials are questioning the extent to which Russia’s government have used up or burned some of their access to Ukrainian critical infrastructure in previous attacks. Once they are found, hackers lose their original access to the computer network.

Cyber operations aimed at industrial plants can take many months to plan, and after the explosion in early October of a bridge linking Crimea to Russia, Putin was “trying to go for a big, showy public response to the attack on the bridge,” the senior US official said.

The Ukrainian officials have had to balance protecting their networks from Russian spies and criminal hackers with avoiding shelling.

Four officials from one of Ukraine’s main cyber and communications agencies — the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (SSSCIP) — were killed October 10 in missile attacks, the agency said in a press release. The four officials did not have cybersecurity responsibilities, but their loss has weighed heavily on cybersecurity officials at the agency during another grim month of war.

Menon notes, however, that every one of his comments could just as easily apply to Russia’s earlier waves of cyberattacks on the country’s internet—such as the NotPetya malware released by Russia’s GRU hackers, which five years earlier destroyed the digital networks of hundreds of government agencies, banks, airports, hospitals, and even its radioactivity monitoring facility in Chernobyl. He says the goal is the same despite them being different in the details. Demoralization and punishing civilians are done.

“I don’t think Russia would measure the success in cyberspace by a single attack,” the Western official said, rather “by their cumulative effect” of trying to wear the Ukrainians down.

In 2017, as Russia’s hybrid war in eastern Ukraine continued, Russia’s military intelligence agency unleashed destructive malware known as NotPetya that wiped computer systems at companies across Ukraine before spreading around the world, according to the Justice Department and private investigators. The incident cost the global economy billions of dollars by disrupting shipping giant Maersk and other multinational firms.

Matt Olney, the director of threat intelligence and interdiction at Talos, said the operation involved injecting malicious code into Ukrainian software to weaponize it.

“All of that was just as astonishingly effective as the end product was,” said Olney, who has had a team in Ukraine responding to cyber incidents for years. “And that takes time and it takes opportunities that sometimes you can’t just conjure.”

Russian cyber attacks against Ukraine during the November 2 Nov. 2 eruption: An analyst’s analysis of the events BLAHODATNE, Ukraine

Zhora, the Ukrainian official who is a deputy chairman at SSSCIP, called for Western governments to tighten sanctions on Russia’s access to software tools that could feed its hacking arsenal.

According to CNN, Tanel Sepp,Estonias ambassador-at-large for cyber affairs, said that it is possible that the Russians could increase their cyberattacks.

The goal is to make Russia feel like a pariah on the international stage, according to Sepp.

In the case of a Republican win in the House of Representatives, it is feared that the party could limit funding for Ukrainians.

Also Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will host Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Erdogan insists Sweden must meet certain conditions before it can join NATO.

The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday is scheduled to discuss an International Atomic Energy Agency report, in which Ukraine is expected to be on the agenda.

The attacks onUkraine’s infrastructure left more than four million people without electricity and was accused of being energy terrorism by the Ukrainian President.

Russia rejoined a U.N.-brokered deal to safely export grain and other agricultural goods from Ukraine, on Nov. 2. Moscow had suspended its part in the deal a few days prior after saying Ukraine had launched a drone attack on its Black Sea ships.

The new deal will likely include the supply of guidance kits, or Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), which Ukraine can use to bolt on to their unguided missiles or bombs. This increases the rate of burn through bullets for Kyiv’s forces. The majority of the money is expected to fund the replacement of bombs and missiles.

BLAHODATNE, Ukraine — Ukraine’s troops entered the key city of Kherson on Friday, its military said, as jubilant residents waved Ukrainian flags after a major Russian retreat.

Videos shared by Ukrainian government officials on social media showed scenes of civilians cheering and awaiting the arrival of a contingent of Ukrainian troops shortly after Russia said that the withdrawal of its forces across the Dnipro River was complete.

Even as its soldiers fled, the Kremlin said that it still considered Kherson — which President Vladimir V. Putin illegally annexed in September — to be a part of Russia.

As he spoke the soldiers moved through the towns and villages, greeted with joy by the residents who had been through a lot.

Arrival of the Ukrainian army at the end of the Russian war: Voitsehovsky, a retired resident of Kherson, Ukraine

Oleh Voitsehovsky, the commander of a Ukrainian drone reconnaissance unit, said he had seen no Russian troops or equipment in his zone along the front less than four miles north of Kherson city.

“The Russians left all the villages,” he said. We didn’t see a single car because we looked at dozens of villages with our drones. We don’t see how they are leaving. They retreat quietly at night.

Serhiy, a retiree living in the city who asked that his last name not be published for security reasons, said in a series of text messages that conditions in the city had unraveled overnight.

“At night, a building burned in the very center, but it was not possible even to call the fire department,” he wrote. “There was no phone signal, no electricity, no heating and no water.”

“The Russian military is settling in local houses they seized, schools and kindergartens. Military equipment is stationed in residential areas,” Federov said in November.

Russian forces were setting up defensive positions on the Dnipro bank, and shelling the Ukrainians who were crossing the river.

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian and Russian forces traded fire on Monday from across the broad expanse of the Dnipro River that now divides them after Russia’s retreat from the southern city of Kherson, reshaping the battlefield with a victory that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, declared marked “the beginning of the end of the war.”

The new front line in southern Ukraine is called the Dnipro, and officials in the region warned against the continued danger from fighting that has already taken place.

Through the afternoon, artillery fire picked up in a southern district of the city near the destroyed Antonivsky Bridge over the Dnipro, stoking fears that the Russian Army would retaliate for the loss of the city with a bombardment from its new positions on the eastern bank.

Smoke billowed from mortar shells that hit near the bridge. Near the riverfront, incoming rounds rang out with thunderous, metallic booms. It wasn’t possible to assess what had been hit.

Zelensky met with the Kherson Regional Military Administration: “We firmly believe that Russia is ultimately responsible for its illegal war against Ukraine”

The leader of the Kherson regional military administration urged the remaining residents in the city to leave as Ukrainian forces worked to clear land mines, chase down Russian soldiers and restore essential services.

The mines are a significant danger. A group of people, including an 11-year-old, were killed when a family’s vehicle ran over a mine outside the city. Another mine injured six railway workers who were trying to restore service after lines were damaged. And there were at least four more children reportedly injured by mines across the region, Ukrainian officials said in statements.

Even though Mr. Zelensky made a surprise visit to Kherson, the death underscored the threats remaining on the ground.

Mr. Zelensky made his first appearance as president in the city’s main square on Monday, walking down the street and speaking to hundreds of people.

According to the Ukrainian military, Russian forces fired across the river on the towns and villages newly captured by Ukrainian forces. The military said that the town of Beryslav was struck by two Russian missiles. It was not immediately known if there were any casualties.

Residents in Kherson City say that people in the city rob local people and exchange things for homemade alcohol, called Samogon. “Then they get drunk and even more aggressive. We are so scared here.” She asked that her surname be withheld for security.

Ivan said in a text message that Russian people were roaming around and identifying empty houses. He asked that his name not be used because of safety concerns, and he is located in Skadovsk, which is south of Kherson city. “We try to connect with the owners and to arrange for someone local to stay in their place. So that it is not abandoned and Russians don’t take it.”

The fragments of a missile in the snow, which was shared by authorities in theUkraine, was from a missile that had gone down. The military administration in the city claimed to have shot down 37 of the 40 missiles that had been fired at the capital.

Whatever the circumstances of the missile, one thing is clear. “Russia bears ultimate responsibility, as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Wednesday.

A number of Russian soldiers refused to fight and rebelled at what they were told to do. Russian troops could be prepared to shoot retreating or deserting soldiers, UK’s Defense Ministry believes.

According to reports, the hotline has taken off, and booked more than 3,500 calls in its first two months of activity, since it was launched as a Ukrainian military intelligence project.

Vladimir Zygar and the Depletion of Russian Natural Gas and Oil During the Cold War: The Case of the Russian-German Strategic Air Force

One leading Russian journalist, Mikhail Zygar, who has settled in Berlin after fleeing in March, told me last week that while he hoped this is not the case, he is prepared to accept the reality – like many of his countrymen, he may never be able to return to his homeland, to which he remains deeply attached.

Rumbling in the background is the West’s attempt to diversify away from Russian oil and natural gas in an effort to deprive the country of material resources to pursue this war. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, spoke to the Group of 20 on Tuesday and said that they had learned that dependency was unsustainable and they wanted reliable connections.

Moreover, Putin’s dream that this conflict, along with the enormous burden it has proven to be on Western countries, would only drive further wedges into the Western alliance are proving unfulfilled. On Monday, there was word that the long-stalled French-German project for a next- generation jet fighter was beginning to move forward.

The energy company Ukrenergo said that three nuclear power plants in the country were disconnected from the national electricity grid due to the Russian strikes.

The company stated that after a brief emergency shutdown, the nukes have been switched back on, but are still not connected to the national grid.

In the southern region of Mykolaiv, the military administrator, Vitaliy Kim, also said the nuclear plant in his area has been cut from the grid, leading to a risky shutdown of the reactors there.

Ukrainian officials say that power cuts cause a cascading effect of turning off the heat and water. And with temperatures often below freezing, the water in pipes could freeze, adding further complications.

The Ukrainian request for the cluster-munition reloaded: a controversial proposal that will not be taken seriously by the United States or by the Kiev government

The President ofMoldova wrote on Facebook: “We can’t trust a regime that leaves us in the dark and cold, that purposely kills people to keep other people poor and humble.”

Ukraine is scrambling to prepare for the winter. In a Tuesday night video address, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there are now 4,000 centers to take care of civilians if there are extended power cuts.

He stated that they will provide internet access, phone charging, and heat. Many will be in schools and government buildings.

The Ukrainian request for the cluster munitions, which was described to CNN by multiple US and Ukrainian officials, is one of the most controversial requests the Ukrainians have made to the US since the war began in February.

Senior Biden administration officials have been fielding this request for months and have not rejected it outright, CNN has learned, a detail that has not been previously reported.

If you come in contact with cluster bombs, you are at risk of long-term injury because they can fail to explode on impact. They also create “nasty, bloody fragmentation” to anyone hit by them because of the dozens of submunitions that detonate at once across a large area, Mark Hiznay, a weapons expert and the associate arms director for Human Rights Watch, previously told CNN.

If the inventory runs alarmingly low, the Biden administration won’t take the option off the table. The proposal has not yet been considered in a serious way because of the statutory restrictions on the ability of the US to transfer cluster munitions.

Those restrictions apply to munitions with a greater than one percent unexploded ordnance rate, which raises the prospect that they will pose a risk to civilians. President Joe Biden could override that restriction, but the administration has indicated to the Ukrainians that that is unlikely in the near term.

“The ability of Ukraine to make gains in current and upcoming phases of conflict is in no way dependent on or linked to their procuring said munitions,” a congressional aide told CNN.

The Defense Ministry told CNN it does not comment on reports regarding requests for particular weapons systems or ammunition, choosing to wait until any agreement with a supplier is reached before many any public announcement.

“They [DPICMs] are more effective when you have a concentration of Russian forces,” the Ukrainian official told CNN, noting that Ukraine has been asking for the weapons “for many months.”

The Russian president acknowledged that his ” special military operation” in Ukraine is taking longer than expected, but said it has succeeded in seizing new territory and that his country’s nuclear weapons are making the conflict less violent.

The land gains were described by President Putin in a meeting with his Human Rights Council, as a significant result for Russia. In one of his frequent historic references to a Russian leader he admires, he added that “Peter the Great fought to get access” to that body of water.

Putin’s meeting with the Kremlin and the armed forces of the Russian Federation: “We don’t need to be afraid of what the enemy can tell us”

“If it doesn’t use it first under any circumstances, it means that it won’t be the second to use it, either, because the possibility of using it in case of a nuclear strike on our territory will be sharply limited,” he said.

Putin rejected Western criticism that his previous nuclear weapons comments amounted to saber-rattling, claiming they were “not a factor provoking an escalation of conflicts, but a factor of deterrence.”

“We haven’t gone mad. Putin said that they’re aware of what nuclear weapons are. He added, without elaborating: “We have them, and they are more advanced and state-of-the-art than what any other nuclear power has.”

In his televised remarks, the Russian leader didn’t address Russia’s battlefield setbacks or its attempts to cement control over the seized regions but acknowledged problems with supplies, treatment of wounded soldiers and limited desertions.

The “dragon’s teeth,” concrete anti-tank barriers in open fields, were posted by the governor of theKursk region. The governor said on Tuesday that a fire broke out at an airport after a drone strike. In Belgorod workers were working on adding anti-tank barriers. Russia’s air defenses shot down some incoming rockets, the governor reported Wednesday, as Belgorod has seen numerous fires and explosions.

Moscow responded with strikes by artillery, multiple rocket launchers, missiles, tanks and mortars at residential buildings and civilian infrastructure, worsening damage to the power grid. Ukrenergo, a private Ukrainian power utility, said it had to make repairs in the east because temperatures there had dropped to as low as minus 17 degrees Celsius.

At his meeting, Putin discussed the mobilization of 300,000 reservists that he ordered in September to bolster forces in Ukraine. Around 150,000 have been deployed to combat zones so far and most are still undergoing training, he said. Addressing speculation that the Kremlin could be preparing another mobilization, Putin said: “There is no need for the Defense Ministry and the country to do that.”

He concluded the speech by adding that “it won’t interfere with our combat missions,” before raising a toast to the listening soldiers and sipping from his champagne glass.

Water isn’t flowing to Donetsk, Ukraine: Putin on the Kremlin after his alleged bombing of a Ukrainian city

He blamed a number of events on the Ukranians: Who hit the bridge? Who blew up the power lines?

The reference to Kursk appears to reference Russia’s announcement that an airfield in the Kursk region, which neighbors Ukraine, was targeted in a drone attack. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has never commented on the recent explosions in Russia. The targets are not reachable by the country’s declared drones.

He ended his apparently off-the-cuff comments by claiming that people seem to refrain from mentioning that water has been cut off from Donetsk. No one has said anything about it. At all! Complete silence.”

Local Russian authorities in Donetsk — which Putin claimed to annex in defiance of international law — have reported frequent shelling of the city this week.

At a Kremlin reception, President Putin had a glass of champagne while addressing Russian military attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

In his Kremlin appearance Thursday, he continued to say: “Who is not supplying water to Donetsk? Not supplying water to a city of million is an act of genocide.”

Russian behavior towards Odesa and the vulnerability of power systems to missile attacks: Implications for Russia, and the problems that Ukrainians face

“The pace of restoration [to household consumers] is slowed down by difficult weather conditions,” it said, with the damage “made worse by the freezing and rupture of wires in distribution networks.”

Two people were killed and 10 others were wounded when four missiles hit the city of Melitopol, which is now controlled by Moscow.

A report said that there were dead and wounded in a barracks that was set on fire after an explosion.

The air defense system worked in Simferopol, according to Sergey Aksenov. All services are working.

There are reports that 1.5 million people have been without power in the Odesa region of Ukraine, as a result of strikes by Iranian-made drones.

Authorities in Odesa, in southern Ukraine, said that emergency power outages had been rolled out amid the missile attacks. “They are introduced due to the threat of missile attacks to avoid significant damage if the enemy manages to hit energy facilities,” DTEK, a utility company, said in a statement.

“This is the true attitude of Russia towards Odesa, towards Odesa residents – deliberate bullying, deliberate attempt to bring disaster to the city,” Zelensky added.

The repeated assaults on the plants and equipment that Ukrainians rely on for heat and light have drawn condemnation from world leaders, and thrust Ukraine into a grim cycle in which crews hurry to restore power only to have it knocked out again.

He said that the power system is in crisis and that people should use less power to reduce strain on the grid.

Even though there are no heavy missile strikes, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems. Missile attacks, drone attacks, and shelling are common in different parts of the country. Energy facilities are hit almost every day.”

Vladimir Zelenskyy and the Russian Embassy in Paris: a video message to the PM of the United States after Brittney Griner’s release

Ukrainian authorities have been stepping up raids on churches accused of links with Moscow, and many are watching to see if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy follows through on his threat of a ban on the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is in Paris with the prime minister of Norway for a working dinner.

On Tuesday, France is going to co- host a conference with Ukraine in support of Ukrainians through the winter with a video address by President Zelenskyy.

Following Brittney Griner’s release from Russian prison, fans, friends and family are celebrating the basketball player’s return to the U.S. Some Republicans are objecting to the prisoner swap and the still being held US citizens by Russia.

The new measures were in effect on Dec. 5. The embargo on most Russian oil imports was included, along with a Russian oil price cap.

Zelenskyy said that the city of Bakhmut had been turned into burned ruins. Russia is attempting to take over the city in the eastern Donbas region.

Ukrainian forces have unleashed the biggest attack on the occupied Donetsk region since 2014, according to a Russia-installed official, in the wake of heavy fighting in the east of the country.

The Russian-appointed mayor said that the Ukrainians had brought the city to a halt at 7 a.m.

A key in the city’s intersection center had come under fire, and he said a group of 40 rockets from BM-21 were fired at civilians.

The city was hit 86 times with “artillery, MLRS, tanks, mortars and UAVs,” in the past 24 hours, according to the regional head of the Kherson military administration.

A volunteer member of the rapid response team was one of the victims. They were killed when they were hit by fragments of enemy shells on the street.

The response of the Kremlin to Zelensky’s three-step proposal for the evacuation of Kyiv from the Ukrainian army

The city was completely disconnected from power supplies as a result of the strikes, according to the regional head of the Kherson military administration.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said the city “received machinery and generators from the U.S. Government to operate boiler houses and heat supply stations.”

The Energy Security Project, run by USAID, delivered four excavators and over 130 generators, Klitschko said on Telegram. There was no charge for the equipment.

This week, the Kremlin appeared to resist Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s peace solution that called for Russia to pull troops out of the country by Christmas.

“The Ukrainian side needs to take into account the realities that have developed over all this time,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday in response to Zelensky’s three-step proposal.

He said that the Russian Federation has new subjects, including four areas that it has claimed to have annexed.

A warning from Russia’s US embassy is said to have been triggered by news that the US is about to send the system to Ukraine.

Zakharova said that experts questioned the rationality of such a step, which could lead to an escalation of the conflict and increase the risk of dragging the US army into combat.

U.S. Deployments of the Patriot System to Protect Ukraine in an Unprovoked War: The Case of the Donetsk Region

The system has been purchased by other US allies, including Israel, Germany, and Japan, and was sent to Poland in an effort to help them defend themselves against Russia as it invaded Ukraine on its border. The US military made clear in March when the Patriot system was sent to Poland that it was purely for defensive purposes of NATO territory and “will in no way support any offensive operations.”

“I find it ironic and very telling that officials from a country that brutally attacked its neighbor in an illegal and unprovoked invasion … that they would choose to use words like provocative to describe defensive systems that are meant to save lives and protect civilians,” Ryder told reporters.

In what may be a no less subtle message than calling the Patriot deployments provocative, Russia’s defense ministry shared video of the installation of a “Yars” intercontinental ballistic missile into a silo launcher in the Kaluga region for what Alexei Sokolov, commander of the Kozelsky missile formation, called “combat duty as planned.”

Commander Alexander is from the Russian militia in the Donetsk region, and he said this week that Russia would not defeat the NATO alliance in a conventional war.

Smaller air defense systems require a few people to operate them, whereas the Patriot batteries require a lot of people to operate them. The training of the missiles is normally not done for many months, so the United States will now have to do it under fire from Russia.

Zelensky said in an interview with The Economist published Thursday he didn’t agree with the US Secretary of State’s suggestion that no more than land seized by Russia and not regions under Russian control should be seen as reclaimed by Ukraine.

“We don’t have NATO troops on the ground. NATO planes do not fly over Ukraine. But we are supporting Ukraine in their right to defend themselves,” he said.

There were old guns. A US military official has said that Russian forces have had to use 40-year-old projectiles due to their dwindling supply of new weaponry.

“You load the ammunition and you cross your fingers and hope it’s gonna fire or when it lands that it’s gonna explode,” said the official, speaking to reporters.

In the trenches: How many missile strikes are needed in the Russian fortifications? The case of Engels-2 in the Volga River

In the trenches. CNN’s Will Ripley filed a video report from trenches and fortifications being built along the Ukrainian border with Belarus, where there is growing worry about Russia assembling troops again. Ripley spoke to the sewing machine repairman.

Oleh Syniehubov is the head of the regional military administration and he said that at least 10 missiles hit various targets in the north of the region. The power was out for a while in Kharkiv city. “There is a colossal infrastructural damage,” Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said, instructing residents to use so-called “invincibility points” – makeshift centers offering relief from power outages – to collect food and hot drinks, and recharge cellphones.

Oleksandr Starukh, chief of the regional military administration, said the southeastern region had been hit by more than a dozen missile strikes.

The incident took place in the western port city of Engels, some 500 miles (more than 800 kilometers) southeast of Moscow, located on the Volga River. It is the second such attempted attack on the city, which houses the Engels-2 military airfield, a strategic bomber airbase, this month.

An MiG-31K, a supersonic aircraft capable of carrying a Kinzal hypersonic missile, was also seen in the sky over Belarus during the air attacks on Friday in Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s Armed Forces. It was not known whether a Kinzal was used in the attacks.

“We know that their defense industrial base is being taxed,” Kirby said of Russia. “We know they’re having trouble keeping up with that pace. We know that he is having trouble with replenishment of precision guided missiles.

Zelensky: A Scrappy Kid who Learned to Survive the Fluxes, Bullies, and Peculiarities

I witnessed Zelensky pull up to the lysée Palace in a small car, while Putin drove away in a limo. (The host, French President Emmanuel Macron, hugged Putin but chose only to shake hands with Zelensky).

Fast forward to 2022 and Zelensky is the instantly recognizable wartime president in trademark olive green; as adept at rallying his citizens and stirring the imaginations of folks worldwide, as naming and shaming allies dragging their feet in arming his military.

Zelensky’s upbringing in the rough and tumble neighborhoods of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine shaped him into a scrappy kid who learned how to respond to bullies.

“After the full-scale invasion, once he got into a position of being bullied by someone like Vladimir Putin he knew exactly what he needed to do because it was just his gut feeling,” Yevhen Hlibovytsky, former political journalist and founder of the Kyiv-based think tank and consultancy, pro.mova, told me.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, the leader of the US quipped, “I need bullets, not a ride.”

It is perhaps easy to forget that Zelensky honed his political muscles earlier in his career standing up to another bully in 2019 – then-US President Donald Trump, who tried to bamboozle the novice politician in the quid pro quo scandal.

Zelensky thanked his supporters for a huge victory at a campaign party in a converted Ukrainian nightclub, but the fog of war seems long ago. Standing on stage among the fluttering confetti, he looked in a state of disbelief at having defeated incumbent veteran politician Petro Poroshenko.

His ratings seem to have been turned around by the war. Just days after the invasion, Zelensky’s ratings approval surged to 90%, and remain high to this day. Even Americans early in the war rated Zelensky highly for his handling of international affairs – ahead of US President Joe Biden.

His bubble includes many people from his previous professional life as a TV comedian in the theatrical group Kvartal 95. Even in the midst of the war, a press conference held on the platform of a Kyiv metro station in April featured perfect lighting and curated camera angles to emphasize a wartime setting.

I remember well the comforting air raid sirens and explosions he brought to the area as comforter in chief.

She’s Getting Better at it than Putin – Prominent Fashion Leaders Learn to Communicate Effectively with the World, Not Just Make It Happen

“By wearing T-shirts and hoodies, the youthful, egalitarian uniform of Silicon Valley, rather than suits, Zelensky is projecting confidence and competence in a modern way, to a younger, global audience that recognizes it as such,” Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, a fashion historian and author of “Red, White, and Blue on the Runway: The 1968 White House Fashion Show and the Politics of American Style,” told NPR.

She thinks he is more comfortable on camera than Putin is, even as a digital native. I think Zelensky is better able to balance authority with accessibility, as he wants to come across as less like a jerk and more like a person.

Zelenska has shown she can communicate effectively in international fora by showing her style and smarts. She met with King Charles at a refugee assistance center in London, during her recent trip to the UK. (Curiously, TIME magazine did not include Zelenska on the cover montage and gave only a passing reference in the supporting text).

Zelensky has strong tailwinds at his back, but there are signals that his international influence could be waning. The G7 imposed a $60 a barrel price cap for Russian crude despite pleas from Zelensky that it should have been set at $30 in order to make the Kremlin suffer more.

Zelensky said in his recent video address that when the world is truly united, it is then the world that determines how events develop.

The Air Force said Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 drones were launched from the eastern coast of the Sea of Azov.

Zelensky’s Christmas Address in Kyiv, Ukraine, and the EU-Suzuki impact on energy and oil prices

Zelensky thanked everyone who works on repair works around the clock. It is difficult but I am positive we will pull through and Russia will fail.

In the run up to Christmas, Ukrainians far from the eastern and southern frontlines of the ground war seek for some semblance of normality.

An artificial Christmas tree in the middle of Kyiv will be powered by a generator at certain times and will illuminate with energy-saving garlands, according to the city’s mayor.

Roughly 1,000 blue and yellow balls and white doves will decorate the tree in Sophia Square, with a trident placed at the tree’s summit. The flags of countries that are in support of Ukraine can be seen at the bottom.

Zelensky said in his address that the children of Ukrainian descent are asking St. Nicholas for air defense and weapons for victory.

An official announcement is expected on a European Union cap on natural gas prices, the latest measure to tackle an energy crisis largely spurred by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak makes his first appearance as prime minister before the Commons Liaison Committee, where the Ukraine war and other global issues are discussed. That follows Sunak’s meeting on Monday in Latvia with members of a U.K.-led European military force.

According to the Russian news reports, Putin and Kasich will hold a virtual meeting later this month.

The First Christmas of the Third World War. The United Nations and the Soviet Union as a Test of Nuclear Security (NOW) Practice: Ukraine’s Nuclear Power Plants

Ukraine has traditionally celebrated Christmas on January 7 in line with Orthodox Christian customs, which acknowledge the birth of Jesus according to the Julian calendar.

The Nuclear Safety and Security experts from the IaE have been sent to each of the country’s nuclear power plants.

An American was freed from Russian-controlled territory as part of a 65-person prisoner exchange. He spent months in a prison in eastern Ukraine, and weeks in a basement, where he was tortured.

EU lawmakers gave the go-ahead for about $19 billion to be spent onUkraine. The aid package followed pledges earlier in the week from dozens of countries and global institutions to support more than $1 billion in winter relief funds for Ukraine, helping the country with power, heat, food and medical supplies.

In fact, repetition of the narrative that any one of a wide range of events that Russia would dislike will ensure “guaranteed escalation to the Third World War” has been highly effective in shaping US and Western behavior.

And yet, Russia’s UN Security Council veto and the fear it has instilled through nuclear propaganda have given it a free pass to behave as it wishes, without fear of interference from a global community looking on in either ambivalence or helpless paralysis.

Nuclear threats are Russia’s most effective tool of deterrence. Loose talk from Russia about using nuclear weapons has died down a little recently, but a decade or more of driving home the message of inevitable nuclear response if Russia is cornered or humiliated has already had its effect.

If that’s not the message the US and the West want other aggressor states around the world to receive, then supply of Patriot should be followed by far more direct and assertive means of dissuading Moscow.

There are two key headline deliverables: first, the Patriot missile systems. They are described as the US’s “gold standard” of air defense. NATO guards them and requires the personnel who operate them to be properly trained.

The second are for Ukrainian jets. Russia and Ukraine are mostly equipped with dumb weapons which are fired towards a target. Ukraine has been provided with more and more Western standard precision artillery and missiles, like Howitzers and HIMARS respectively.

The remnants of the Trumpist “America First” elements of that party have echoed doubts about how much aid the US should really be sending to the edges of eastern Europe.

The bill for the slow defeat of Russia in the conflict is light for Washington, given its trillion dollar annual defense budget.

The Patriot Radar System: A System for Protecting Strategic Targets in the Middle East and the Ukraine, as Revised by Maj. Gen. Marks

“It increases accuracy, it increases the kill rate, so it really does exactly what you want it to do which is protection on the ground on very specific targets,” retired Maj. Gen. James “Spider” Marks previously told CNN of the system’s capabilities.

A description from the center for strategic international studies says that the radar system of the Patriot is unique in that it combines intercept, tracking, and engagement functions in one unit. The system’s engagements with incoming aerial threats are “nearly autonomous” aside from needing a “final launch decision” from the humans operating it.

“These systems don’t pick up and move around the battlefield,” Hertling said. “You put them in place somewhere that defends your most strategic target, like a city, like Kyiv. If anyone thinks that the system will be spread across the border between Russia and Ukraine, they have no idea how the system works.

Not to mention the significant logistical needs; just one battery is operated by roughly 90 soldiers, and includes computers, an engagement control system, a phased array radar, power generating equipment, and “up to eight launchers,” according to the Army.

Depending on which missiles are used and what is being targeted, a Patriot battery has a strike range of roughly 20 to 100 miles — much too small to cover the entirety of Ukraine, which is about 800 miles from east to west and more than 500 miles from north to south.

InUkraine, Hertling believes that offensive operations are more important than the Patriot system. CNN reported last month that the US may double the number of troops provided training by instructing as many as 2,500 troops a month at a US base in Germany. In January, the Pentagon said that combined arms training of battalion-sized elements would begin.

“The Patriots are a defensive, anti-ballistic and anti-aircraft weapon system, with the emphasis on defensive,” Hertling said. You do not win wars with defensive capabilities. You win wars with offensive capabilities.”

Measuring the Patriot system: What is it telling Ukraine? Menon’s remarks after Zelenskyy’s visit to Ukraine

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy returned from Washington, D.C. — having secured billions of dollars in U.S. aid and multiple standing ovations in Congress — the Kremlin was quick to criticize the trip.

“If you mess with the system, you put all systems out of whack,” says Rajan Menon, a director of the Defence Priorities think tank who recently returned from a trip to Ukrainian capital. It is not only inconvenient but a huge cost. It’s an effort to create pain for the civilian population, to show that the government can’t protect them adequately.”

“That will do a good job of defending maybe a single city, like Kyiv, against some threats. Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel, said that it’s not putting a bubble over Ukraine.

Even on a compressed schedule, the training requirements mean that the Patriot system is unlikely to be operational until late winter or early spring, perhaps in February or March.

Cancian said hasty training could hamper the system’s effectiveness, in a worst case scenario, Ukrainians could not prevent Russians from destroying it. That in turn could damage the political will to send future assistance to Ukraine, he said.

It would not be a problem if the Ukrainians had a year or two to learn the system. They do not have a year or two. Cancian said that they want to do this in a couple weeks.

U.S. Response to the Zelensky’s War in Ukraine: “I am afraid I’m afraid I can’t do that”

The new aid package includes hundreds of millions of dollars in additional assistance, including the Patriot battery, and tens of thousands of GRAD rockets.

Kelly Greico, a defense analyst at the Stimson Center, called the announcement “a sign that there is a real deep concern” among U.S. officials about Ukraine’s air defense capability.

Ukrainian air defenses had focused on protecting frontline troops in the east and south before October.

“That’s a terrible choice to face, between the natural urge to protect your civilians from these brutal attacks and trying to ensure that you have the long-term military wherewithal to continue to resist the Russian war effort,” Greico said.

Her comments came after Zelensky delivered a historic speech from the US Capitol, expressing gratitude for American aid in fighting Russian aggression since the war began – and asking for more.

The speech “connected the struggle of Ukrainian people to our own revolution, to our own feelings that we want to be warm in our homes to celebrate Christmas and to get us to think about all the families in Ukraine that will be huddled in the cold and to know that they are on the front lines of freedom right now,” Clinton said on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” Wednesday.

As the war in Ukraine progresses, Clinton thinks it will be hard to predict who will win due to his unpopularity at home.

Clinton thinks that Putin would use Russian conscripts to kill people in the fight in Ukraine.

After the visit of President Zelensky to Washington, Moscow said that the war in Ukraine was set for a long confrontation with Russia.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that no matter how much military support the West provides to the Ukrainian government, “they will achieve nothing.”

The tasks set within the framework of the special military operation will be fulfilled according to the wishes of the leadership of our country.

Peskov added that “there were no real calls for peace.” But during his address to the US Congress on Wednesday, Zelensky did stress that “we need peace,” reiterating the 10-point plan devised by Ukraine.

He said there had been no calls for peace or signs of willingness to “listen to Russia’s concerns” during Zelenskyy’s visit, which he said proves that the U.S. is fighting a proxy war with Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” Reuters reports.

The Kremlin has also been selling that line to the Russian public, who is largely buying it, says Sergey Radchenko, a Russian history professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Dismissing accusations of a proxy war, Sloat says Zelenskyy and Ukraine have made clear that they want a “just peace,” and all the U.S. has been doing is help the country defend itself against Russian aggression.

Moscow had warned last week that it would see the reported delivery of Patriot missiles to Ukraine as “another provocative move by the U.S.” Does Sloat worry this could provoke a Russian escalation?

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday used the word “war” to refer to the conflict in Ukraine, the first known time he has publicly deviated from his carefully crafted description of Moscow’s invasion as a “special military operation” 10 months after it began.

“Our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war,” Putin told reporters in Moscow, after attending a State Council meeting on youth policy. “We have been and will continue to strive for this.”

Nikita Yuferev, a municipal lawmaker from St. Petersburg who fled Russia due to his antiwar stance, on Thursday said he had asked Russian authorities to prosecute Putin for “spreading fake information about the army.”

“There was no decree to end the special military operation, no war was declared,” Yuferev wrote on Twitter. “Several thousand people have already been condemned for such words about the war.”

A US official said that the initial assessment was that the remark was not intentional and possibly a slip of the tongue. However, officials will be watching closely to see what figures inside the Kremlin say about it in the coming days.

Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Wednesday declared the Kremlin would make a substantial investment in many areas of the military. The initiatives include increasing the size of the armed forces, accelerating weapons programs and deploying a new generation of hypersonic missiles to prepare Russia for what Putin called “inevitable clashes” with its adversaries.

Zelensky’s Messiah: How the Ukrainians can rejoice in the midst of a dark winter, when evil forces threaten to wipe them out

President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Ukrainians to have “patience and faith” in a defiant Christmas address after a deadly wave of Russian strikes pounded the southern city of Kherson.

He urged the nation to stand up in the face of a tough winter, as well as the threat of Russian attacks, and the absence of loved ones.

There may be empty chairs near it. And our houses and streets can’t be so bright. And Christmas bells can ring not so loudly and inspiringly. It could be through air raid sirens, gunshots or explosions.

In this battle, we have another powerful and effective weapon, even though Ukraine has been resisting evil forces for three hundred days and eight years. The hammer and sword of our spirit and consciousness. Thewisdom of God. Courage and bravery. We can do good and overcome evil with certain virtues.

Addressing the Ukrainian people directly, he said the country would sing Christmas carols louder than the sound of a power generator and hear the voices and greetings of relatives “in our hearts” even if communication services and the internet are down.

“And even in total darkness – we will find each other – to hug each other tightly. And if there is no heat, we will give a big hug to warm each other.”

Zelensky finished with, “We will celebrate our holidays!” As always. We will smile and be happy. As always. The difference is not large. We won’t wait for a miracle. After all, we create it ourselves.”

The branch of the Orthodox church in Ukraine will allow its churches to celebrate Christmas on December 25. Many youngerUkrainians are choosing to observe a holiday on December 25 in order to move away from Russia and towards the Western world.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/25/europe/ukraine-zelensky-christmas-message-intl/index.html

Rectified comments on the shooting of a Ukrainian drone by a military airfield: “This is not war, it is not military,” he tweeted

He wrote on Telegram Saturday that they are not military facilities. This is not a war according to the rules. It is terror, it is killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure.”

Three Russian servicemen were killed Monday after a Ukrainian drone was shot down by air defenses as it approached a military airfield in Saratov Oblast, deep inside Russian territory, according to Russian state news agencies, citing the defense ministry.

Roman Busargin said on Monday that law enforcement agencies are investigating the incident at the airfield. There were reports of an explosion in the city and the comments were posted on his official Telegram channel.

He added that there were “no emergencies in the residential areas of the city,” and that no civilian infrastructure had been damaged. He also extended his condolences to the families of the servicemen, saying the government would provide them with assistance.

“This reminds of the events of December 5, so there may be some deja vu, some repetition of this situation, after which [the Russians] launched a massive missile strike,” the spokesperson said. We need to be prepared for this, so we need to don’t forget to go to the shelter.

Earlier this month, CCTV footage appeared to show an explosion lighting up the sky in Engels. At the time, Gov. Busargin also reassured residents that no civilian infrastructure was damaged and that “information about incidents at military facilities is being checked by law enforcement agencies.”

Russian Foreign Minister Yuri Kuleba on the Prospects of a Peace Summit over the 25th Anniversary of Russia’s War

Since some cruise missiles are launched from bombers that fly from the airfields hit in the attacks, the strikes could potentially destroy the missiles on the ground at the Russian airfields before they can be deployed.

He added that “you cannot consider, this person will attack you because you are fighting back.” There is no reason not to try and do this.

The most sophisticated missile in Russia’s arsenal, the Kinzhal, a hypersonic weapon that can reach targets in minutes and is all but impossible to shoot down, is in even shorter supply, Mr. Budanov said.

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s foreign minister on Monday said that his government is aiming to have a peace summit by the end of February, preferably at the United Nations with Secretary-General António Guterres as a possible mediator, around the anniversary of Russia’s war.

Asked about whether they would invite Russia to the summit, he said that Moscow would first need to face prosecution for war crimes at an international court.

Kuleba also said he was “absolutely satisfied” with the results of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. last week, and he revealed that the U.S. government had made a special plan to get the Patriot missile battery ready to be operational in the country in less than six months. Usually, the training takes up to a year.

Kuleba said during the interview at the Foreign Ministry that Ukraine will do whatever it can to win the war in 2023, adding that diplomacy always plays an important role.

U.S. President Vladimir Zelenskyy: It’s time for the United Nations to come together and speak out for Ukraine, and for a united country

The United Nations could be a good place to hold the summit because they don’t care about making a favor to a certain country. “This is really about bringing everyone on board.”

Zelenskyy presented a 10-point peace formula at the Group of 20 summit in November that included the return of Ukrainian territory, withdrawal of Russian troops and the release of prisoners.

Kuleba said that he has proven himself to be an efficient negotiator and an efficient mediation with the help of a man of principle and integrity. So we would welcome his active participation.”

“They regularly say that they are ready for negotiations, which is not true, because everything they do on the battlefield proves the opposite,” he said.

Zelenskyy traveled to the U.S. for the first time since the war began. Kuleba praised Washington’s efforts and underlined the significance of the visit.

Kuleba said that this shows that the United States is important to both Ukraine and the United States.

He said there was a program developed by the U.S. government for the missile battery to complete their training quicker than usual.

Kuleba only mentioned that it would be less than six months. And he added that the training will be done “outside” Ukraine.

During Russia’s ground and air war in Ukraine, Kuleba has been second only to Zelenskyy in carrying Ukraine’s message and needs to an international audience, whether through Twitter posts or meetings with friendly foreign officials.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/26/1145539638/ukraine-russia-peace-summit-foreign-minister

Crime in Ukraine: the aftermath of the 2011 Christmas and New Year televised by the Ukrainian airwaves and air ambulances, according to the Foreign Ministry

The ForeignMinistry said that Russian never went through legal process to become a member of the UN Security Council.

“If the Russians thought that no one at home would be affected by the war, then they were deeply mistaken,” Colonel Ihnat said. The bombing campaign against Ukraine was complicated by the explosions at Russian airfields, forcing Moscow to relocate some of its aircraft, but nobody is saying that strikes have seriously hampered the Russian bombardment.

The lead for disaster response in the Ukrainian presidential office said that several residential buildings were destroyed in the capital.

An explosion shook the windows of nearby homes. Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko urged residents to charge their electronic devices and fill water containers in case of shortages.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian media that Moscow will continue to pursue its objectives with perseverance and patience.

Russia was preparing to launch an all-out assault on the power grid that would plunge the country into darkness as Ukrainians celebrated Christmas and New Year in a few days.

After the sirens gave the all clear, life in the capital went back to normal, Hryn said: “In the elevator I met my neighbors with their child who were in hurry to get to the cinema for the new Avatar movie on time.” Parents took their children to school and people went to work, while others continued with holiday plans in defiance.

Halyna Hladka stocked up on water in the capital as soon as the sirens sounded to make sure her family would have something to eat. They heard the loud blasts after nearly two hours. She told CNN that it appeared that they were close to her area but that it was actually air defense. “Not a single attack will cancel the fact that we will celebrate the new year with the family.”

A 14-year-old and two other people were pulled from a damaged home on Thursday, and at least 3 other people were injured. Homes, an industrial facility and a playground in the capital were damaged in attacks on Kyiv, according to the city military administration.