Vladimir Putin Celebrates 10 Years of Making Russia Great Again by Forcible Annexing Ukrainian Territoires: An Address to the Security Council on the Crimea Crisis

It has been 10 months since the Russian President announced that he was sending tens of thousands of troops to demilitarizeUkraine, the small, independent neighbor of the Russian and Soviet empires.

Russian troops were not able to conquer the capital of Ukranian, Kyiv. Kherson, the sole major city seized by Russia, was abandoned amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive in November. Russian forces have been bombarding the city.

Putin attempted to claim that the referendums reflected the will of millions of people, despite reports from the ground that voting took place in some cases at gun point.

I want the authorities in Kyiv to hear what I have to say. Everyone needs to remember. People living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are becoming our citizens. During the annexation ceremony, the Russian president said that it would remain forever.

The Russian president thought that the annexation was to fix a mistake made after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, as Petraeus notes, though Russian President Vladimir Putin set out to Make Russia Great Again with his invasion of Ukraine, he has, instead, achieved exactly that with the NATO alliance.

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.

Many of Mr. Putin’s cabinet and leaders of the Russian-imposed Ukrainian regions were in the audience for his speech.

Stremousov may be aware of the fact that troublesome leaders of Russian-backed separatist entities have a habit of dying violently, but some of this criticism is not new. Just weeks after Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of his key domestic enforcers, Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, urged the Russian military to expand its campaign, implying that Moscow’s approach had not been brutal enough.

He showed a list of military actions by the Western nations over the centuries, from the British Opium War in China in the 19th century to the Vietnam and Korean Wars.

The United States was the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in a war. Mr. Putin said that they created a precedent.

Russian War in Ukraine and Russia’s Unpredictive War with the Kremlin: Insights from a Large-Scale Analysis

On Monday, Russia unleashed a fresh wave of drone and missile attacks targeting energy infrastructure across Ukraine. Zelensky said that the strikes caused extensive power outages in several regions.

There is a celebration on Red Square on Friday. Official ratification of the decrees will happen next week, said Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman.

The moves follow staged referendums held in occupied territory during a war in defiance of international law. Most of the civilian population in the country have fled fighting since February, and people who voted sometimes did so at their own risk.

If Russia is cement over the eastern regions, it will be a victory for Mr. Putin who has been accused by Russia of not doing enough to prevent recent gains by Ukrainian forces.

Putin’s recent heavy-handed conscription drive for 300,000 troops won’t reverse his battlefield losses any time soon, and is backfiring at home, running him up a dangerous political tab.

He called on Ukraine to “cease fire” immediately and “sit down at the negotiating table,” but added: “We will not negotiate the choice of the people. It has been made. Russia will not betray it.”

Andrey Kortunov, who runs the Kremlin-backed Russian International Affairs Council in Moscow, sees it, too. “President Putin wants to end this whole thing as fast as possible,” he told CNN.

In late September, Putin announced a “partial” military mobilization which saw more than 300,000 people across Russia mobilized as its war in Ukraine failed to make progress. There is not publicly known the number of soldiers killed and injured in the fighting.

The perception that Putin is losing his way at reading Russia’s mood was strengthened after the Georgian invasion, and traffic tailbacks on the border with Georgia and long lines at cross-border airports spoke to the backlash.

“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 focused on statements of progress rather than detailed discussions of current 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 made it clear that if the Western allies try to take the annexed territories back he will use a nuclear strike.

There is a battle going on between Western leaders and Putin. Last Sunday US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Washington would respond decisively if Russia deployed nuclear weapons against Ukraine and has made clear to Moscow the “catastrophic consequences” it would face.

The 2019 Russian-Putin Explosion: What he Needs to Tell the Germans and the U.S. to End the War?

The first explosion hit at 2 a.m., and the second at 7 p.m., both hitting 2.3 magnitude.

The Danes, Germans and Norway sent warships to secure the area after it was discovered that some patches of sea were roiling.

The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage could, according to Hill, be a last roll of the dice by Putin, so that “there’s no kind of turning back on the gas issues. And it’s not going to be possible for Europe to continue to build up its gas reserves for the winter. Right now Putin is throwing everything at this.

Russian naval vessels were seen by European security officials in the area in the days prior, Western intelligence sources have said. NATO’s North Atlantic Council has described the damage as a “deliberate, reckless and irresponsible act of sabotage.”

As Europe rushed to replenish gas reserves ahead of winter, Putin slowed down Nord Stream 1 to make sure there were no future supplies from Russia.

That said, we should not underestimate Putin. He still believes that Russia can “out-suffer” the Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans in the same way that Russians out-suffered Napoleon’s army and Hitler’s Nazis. And the US and our NATO and western allies and partners need to do all that we can, as quickly as we can, to enable Ukraine and prove Putin wrong.

It was 2019. The commander in chief traveled to Paris for a summit to negotiate a peace deal with Putin. Despite the doubts of many, Zelensky managed to walk away giving few concessions.

The Russian leader is expected to pitch Germany and France first to say, we need to end the war, protect our territories and 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?

Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded the Ukrainian territory, but did not leave the country until the end of the Cold War — The case of Asher and David Cherkaskyi

For Ukrainian Orthodox Jews Asher and David Cherkaskyi, a father and son both fighting on the front lines in the eastern Donbas region, beating Russia has become especially important to them because of their faith.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told the world that he had ordered his troops to enter the Ukrainian territory. “And all of a sudden, everything we still believed in got completely compromised,” Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who lives in self-imposed exile in London, told CNN.

The father and son were withNPR in July and September, when Jews all over the world were celebrating the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, and preparing for the Day of Atonement.

“If you said you were Jewish, you’d be downgraded in school. And if you were fighting in the army, you wouldn’t get a medal no matter how brave you were. He says you would be sent to the most dangerous places. “I remember the anecdotes and propaganda to humiliate and intimidate us. They were seen as inferior by Jews and other nationalities. In the Soviet Union only Russians were good enough to rule.”

Vladimir Cherkaskyi and the fate of his country Lyman. A memoir of a courageous Ukrainian man who worked for unification with Russia

David Cherkaskyi, 20, has only known an independent Ukraine, which declared independence in 1991. He told NPR that Ukraine was a free country. You can do what you please here. It’s not a problem if you are Muslim, Jewish or go to church.

The Cherkaskyis met NPR in Dnipro just hours before David was to deploy to the front. One of the world’s top sofruts, a center of religious calligraphy, has a large Jewish population.

He says he became a Ukrainian Jew during the annexation of the peninsula by Russia. He remembers the referendum in favor of unification with Russia.

Asher Cherkaskyi says the so-called voting process the Kremlin just staged in an attempt to justify seizing four Ukrainian regions was even tougher and more cynical than Crimea’s referendum.

He says that the new soldiers that Putin conscripted are unprepared, forced and intimidated, but they won’t deter Ukrainian soldiers from continuing their service.

But this past Rosh Hashana, Asher says they were able to celebrate as usual, with blessings, apples and honey. He says they said a prayer for the light to overcome darkness that was coming from the Russian Federation.

After weeks of fighting, Russia decided to retreat from the riverbank that has served as a dividing line between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines.

Two powerful Putin supporters railed against the Kremlin and called for using harsher fighting methods because they felt that the illegally annexed region would be taken over by Moscow forever.

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.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just as Putin was declaring that the Donetsk region in which he was talking was annexed by Russia, he lost Lyman.

Russian War with the West: A Campaign to End the Cold War in Ukraine, as Revealed by the Broadcast News Channel Evgeny Poddubny

According to the soldiers interviewed on Sunday, they were forced to retreat since they were fighting with NATO soldiers as well as Ukrainians.

“These are no longer toys here. 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 said his unit had been listening in on the conversations of other soldiers, not Ukrainians.

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.

“Russia’s weak, (but) Russia will be stronger. This is a period where the United States needs to pour in the support. … This is the window, President Zelensky knows it – if he is going to defeat, with US support, the Russian aggression in Ukraine,” Clark said.

Mr. Dugin, like Mr. Putin, has accused Western countries of damaging theNord Stream gas pipes, which were damaged after underwater explosions last month.

The West accuses us of blowing up the gas lines themselves. “We must understand the geopolitical confrontation, the war, our war with the West on the scale and extent on which it is unfolding. In other words, we must join this battle with a mortal enemy who does not hesitate to use any means, including exploding gas pipelines.”

The nonstop messaging campaign may be working, at least for now. Many Russians feel threatened by the West, said Aleksandr Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who is from Russia.

The Russian population on the left and right is becoming more critical of Putin at home as he faces severe penalties for speaking out against his military operation in Ukraine.

But when Aleksandr was captured outside the eastern city of Lyman last week, he was thinly dressed, without the customary armband denoting his allegiance — usually red or white for Russia and blue or yellow for Ukraine. The Ukrainian soldiers gave him a parka that was lying on the trench to keep him warm.

“He came out of the forest and went to our positions,” said Serhiy, one of the Ukrainian soldiers who had found Aleksandr, recounting the capture to a pair of reporters from The New York Times visiting their position near the front line.

Very little information can be given on the battlefield, not even where the enemy will hit next, what the next step is in an overgrown field, or whether a deadly mine will go off. The exchange between Ukrainian soldiers and Aleksandr that unfolded over the next roughly 15 minutes provided a snapshot of the confusion and ambiguity that defines life on the front line — what has long been known as the fog of war.

The War Between Ukraine and Iran: A Global View of Human Rights and the Role of Morality in the Fighting against Fascism

Editor’s Note: Editor’s note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a columnist for The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views in this commentary are hers alone. CNN has more opinions on it.

On Sunday, almost by accident, two groups of demonstrators came together in London. One was waving Ukrainian flags; the other Iranian flags. When they met, they cheered each other, and chanted, “All together we will win.”

Because they hold the moral high ground, the struggles of the Ukrainian and the Iranian people have inspired support around the globe among backers of democracy and human rights. In this era of social media, their anthems against fascism have gone viral, as has the brutality of their foes.

These battles show the bravery of David and the support that’s available to him in places like Afghanistan.

The death of a young woman in Iran last month is said to be the catalyst. 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 scenes of exhilarated defiance, Iranian women have danced around fires in the night, shedding the hijab – the headcover mandated by the regime – and tossing it into the flames.

Their peaceful uprising is about cutting the shackles of oppression and is why men join them in large numbers even as the regime kills protesters.

Putin, Xi, and the Israeli-Pukushushushenko Conflict: Two World’s Leading Autocrats, Two Worlds Away

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.

Russia’s invasion of its neighbor in February put the eastern border region into a state of turmoil, and it was not the first time Russia had rained down cyberattacks onUkraine’s critical infrastructure. Many military and cyberattack watchers were warning about the dangers of Russia’s hacking when it was first discovered, but it was soon found that it was a plan to hit the US as well as other countries.

The repressive regimes in Moscow and Tehran are now isolated, pariahs among much of the world, openly supported for the most part by a smattering of autocrats.

Is it any wonder that Putin’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the start of his Ukraine war was to Iran? It’s no wonder that Iran trained Russian forces and that Russia is now using drones to kill Ukrainians.

Both of these regimes have the same willingness to project power abroad as they do in their own countries, despite their very different ideologies.

Iran’s prisons are filled with regime critics and courageous journalists – including Niloofar Hamedi, first to report what happened to Mahsa Amini. Journalists are a dying profession in Russia. So is criticizing Putin. Putin created charges to keep Navalny in a colony indefinitely after he failed to kill him.

For people in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, there’s more than passing interest in the admittedly low probability that the Iranian regime could fall. 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.

The two world’s leading autocrats, Putin and Xi, looked unstoppable. Meanwhile, Western democracies appeared unsettled, roiled by sometimes violent protests against Covid-19 restrictions. Putin was getting ready for a victory. Xi was hosting the Olympics, basking in attention, and preparing to solidify his control of China.

The area was occupied by Russian troops until early October. Cars destroyed in a fire litter the fields. Russian forces use a symbol called the Z to mark the walls.

The commander uses the code name “swam” and said that they dropped everything. I believe it was a special unit that they were scared of. It was raining very hard, the road was bad and they drop everything and move.”

The Putin Legacy of the Cold War Isn’t: The Future of Warfare in the United States from the Perspective of a Cold War Modernization

Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. View 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.)

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, they planned to install a puppet government and get out of the country as soon as it was feasible, as explained in a recent, authoritative book about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, “Afghan Crucible” by historian Elisabeth Leake.

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. In 1986 the CIA gave the Afghans with highly effective anti-aircraft missiles which ended the Soviets’ air superiority, as well as forcing them to leave Afghanistan three years later.

The leader of the United States forces in Iraq. With a few exceptions, I think Ukraine is not the future of warfare. In large measure, it is what we would have seen had the Cold War turned hot in the mid-1980s – with largely Cold War weapons systems (albeit with some modernization).

“These air defense systems are making a difference because many of the incoming missiles [this week] were actually shot down by the Ukrainian air defense systems provided by NATO Allies,” he said.

What Do Ukrainians Tell Us About Ukraine Cross-Border Strikes Towards the First World War and How Does Putin Wanna Be?

The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan two years earlier led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The loss in the Japanese war in 1905 weakened the Romanov monarchy, and he must have been aware of it. Czar Nicholas II’s feckless leadership during the First World War then precipitated the Russian Revolution in 1917. Subsequently, much of the Romanov family was killed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

At the same, at the CPAC conference, former President Donald Trump, long a Putin admirer, was already under fire. As Putin was making moves towards a war, Trump called him a genius and praised him for being astute.

The Great Patriotic War is a part of Putinism that is related to World War II. And those in Russia’s party of war often speak admiringly of the brutal tactics employed by the Red Army to fight Hitler’s Wehrmacht, including the use of punishment battalions – sending soldiers accused of desertion, cowardice or wavering against German positions as cannon fodder – and the use of summary execution to halt unauthorized retreats.

Putin’s gamble may lead to a third dissolution of the Russian empire, which happened first in 1917 as the First World War wound down, and again in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

A former colonel-general in the Russian military, who is a member of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, said that they need to stop lying. “We brought this up many times before … It appears that it is not getting through to individual senior figures.

The Ministry of Defense is evading the truth about Ukrainian cross-border strikes in Russian regions neighboring Ukranian, says Kartapolov.

Valuyki is in Russia’s Belgorod region, near the border with Ukraine. Kyiv has generally adopted a neither-confirm-nor-deny stance when it comes to striking Russian targets across the border.

“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 that the Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, could shoot himself as an officer if he so chose. The word officer is not well known to 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.

Writing on Telegram, Kadyrov personally blamed Colonel-General Aleksandr Lapin, the commander of Russia’s Central Military District, for the debacle, accusing him of moving his headquarters away from his subordinates and failing to adequately provide for his troops.

“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 – who recently announced that he had been promoted by Putin to the rank of colonel general – has been one of the most prominent voices arguing for the draconian methods of the past. He stated in a Telegram post that he would give the government extraordinary wartime powers if he had his way.

“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.

Moscow air raid attacks on Kyiv during the February 24 killing of a terrorist attack on Ukraine’s Dnipro River were an explicit warning to Russia and its president

On a day when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to human rights activists in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, it was an implicit rebuke to Russia and its president.

Overnight nearly 40 Russian rockets hit Nikopol, on the Dnipro River, damaging at least 10 homes, several apartment blocks and other infrastructure, according to the head of the regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko. He said that a man died and another was wounded by shelling on Friday evening.

The result of a volcano in southwestern Kyrgyzstan has wreaked havoc: homes have been reduced to rubble, a burned out school and a sickening smell from the rotting carcasses of 24,000 dead chickens.

Last month was the bloodiest in the region since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and resulted in the deaths of all but one person.

Multiple explosions shook the city of Kyiv and many other Ukrainian cities on Monday as Russia launched a wave of violent air assaults that evoked the days of its invasion.

Russian retaliation has increased as Ukrainian soldiers continue to push Russian units back and regain territory seized during the early days of the war.

The subway system was suspended on Monday, with underground stations serving as a shelter. But the air raid alert in the city was lifted at midday, as rescue workers sought to pull people from the rubble caused by the strikes.

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.

Forty percent of Kyiv residents were without power, mayor Vitali Klitschko said, adding that this was due to security measures taken by power engineers during the air raid alarm and that they were now working to resume services. The city is providing heat and water in normal mode, according to a message on the Telegram app from boxer Vitali Klishcko.

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

Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for the blast on the enormous 19-kilometer (about 12-mile) bridge, which was built after Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, an annexation regarded by the West as illegal. The crossing was opened by Putin himself in 2018, and Ukrainian reaction to the explosion has been gleeful and triumphant.

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.”

“I have been saying from the first day of the special military operation that if such actions to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure had been taken every day, we would have finished everything in May and the Kyiv regime would have been defeated,” he added.

The air raid sirens will not abate all over the country. They continued to strike. There are dead and wounded. I ask you: do not leave your shelters. Take care of your family and stay safe. Zelensky urged them to hang in there and be strong.

NATO leaders have vowed to stand behind Ukraine regardless of how long the war takes, but several European countries – particularly those that relied heavily on Russian energy – are staring down a crippling cost-of-living crisis which, without signs of Ukrainian progress on the battlefield, could endanger public support.

“Again, Putin is massively terrorizing innocent civilians in Kyiv and other cities,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said. The Netherlands condemns these heinous acts. Putin does not seem to understand that the will of the Ukrainian people is unbreakable.”

The war is escalating and the civilians are paying the highest price, according to the UN Secretary-General.

Unveiling the impact of Ukrainian air strikes on Zaporizhzhia: CNN’s Michael Bociurkiw reported from Kiev on Sunday

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.

There is a global affairs analyst named 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 is a regular contributor to CNN Opinion. His opinions are not reflected in this commentary. CNN has an opinion on this.

After a massive explosion that hit the hugely strategic and symbolic Kerch Straight bridge on Sunday, there was jubilation in Ukraine but there were fears of retaliation from the Kremlin.

Unverified video on social media showed hits near the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and close to Maidan Square, just a short stroll from the Presidential Office Building. The Ukrainian officials said five people were killed by strikes on the capital.

As of midday local time, the area around my office in Odesa remained eerily quiet in between air raid sirens, with reports that three missiles and five kamikaze drones were shot down. At this time of the day, nearby restaurants would be crowded with customers and there would be talk of upcoming weddings and parties.

Zaporizhzhia, a southern city near the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, was hit by multiple strikes on apartment buildings during the night. At least 17 people were killed and several dozens injured.

Repair work to fix infrastructure facilities across Ukraine is ongoing. After being temporarily knocked out by a Russian missile attack, most of the power plants inUkraine are now supplying energy to the national grid.

The first Russian president, Vladimir Putin, made the road to Europe: a road bridge across Europe and a giant road bridge in the world

At the beginning of the war, the city tried to resist and people were taken away, tortured and disappeared, residents said.

Indeed, millions of people in cities across Ukraine will be spending most of the day in bomb shelters, at the urging of officials, while businesses have been asked to shift work online as much as possible.

The attacks may cause a blow to business confidence because many asylum seekers are coming back to their homes.

There was a day of high drama in a war that is still playing out. But as an historian, Viatrovych also sees the actions of President Vladimir Putin as part of a pattern of behavior by Russian leaders.

dictators are known for their penchant for hardwiring newly claimed territory with large, expensive infrastructure projects. In 2018, Putin personally opened the Kerch bridge – Europe’s longest – by driving a truck across it. After Beijing gained control of Macau and Hong Kong it was necessary to link the former Portuguese and British territories with the longest bridge in the world. Two years of delays has led to the opening of the road bridge.

What Do We Have to Say About Putin? The Response of Ukrainians to the Nov. 11 Explosion to Staggering Moscow’s Invasion

The reaction among Ukrainians to the explosion was instantaneous: humorous memes lit up social media channels like a Christmas tree. Many shared their joy with text messages.

Sitting still was never going to be an option for Putin. He unleashed more death and destruction, with the force that comes naturally to a former KGB agent, in the only way he knows how.

Putin has been placed on thin ice by increasing criticism at home and the fact that he is a Russian.

Petraeus: Putin has made General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, to ensure that the Russian military and defense ministry are using all their power to increase the size of the Ukrainian army. Russia is looking for more weaponry and weapons systems from other countries, such as Iran and North Korea, in order to make up for shortfalls in its military industries that are constrained by export controls.

What is important now is for Washington to use urgent telephone diplomacy to urge China and India to avoid the use of more deadly weapons, as they still have leverage over Putin.

Third, the West should inform Russians that it is possible to end the war in Ukraine if they leave. An orderly withdrawal is not likely to lead to a regime change. Neither outcome is an official goal of Western policy, and talk of them is unhelpful and even counterproductive. Some people in the west don’t want to be reassured. But if Russia’s elites conclude that it is as dangerous for Russia to leave Ukraine as to stay, they have no incentive to press for an end to the war. It doesn’t mean compromise if you are reassured.

The Attacks on Monday of Ukraine’s Underground Market: What Washington and its Allies Will Do to Effort to Face the Cold War?

High tech defense systems are needed to protect the energy infrastructure around the country. With winter just around the corner, the need to protect heating systems is urgent.

Turkey and the Gulf states which welcome a lot of Russian tourists need to be pressured in order for the West to impose further sanctions on Russia.

The war in the subways turned into air raid shelters for city dwellers, and now they fear for their lives because of the attacks.

The targets on Monday were of little military value, as well as reflectingPutin’s need to find new targets because of his inability to cause losses on the battlefield.

These two headline packages alone could impact the course of the war. The threat from Russia now is the constant bombardment of energy infrastructure. It’s making the winter too cold and unbearable for some cities, which is why they go into darkness for 12 hours a day.

The attacks on civilians, which killed at least 14 people, also drove new attention to what next steps the US and its allies must take to respond, after already sending billions of dollars of arms and kits to Ukraine in an effective proxy war with Moscow.

The crucial meeting between Biden and Zelensky, who has not met in person since the invasion, comes at a crucial time in the war. Biden has been careful to send US arms and weapons systems to save Ukrainians but not to lead to a direct clash between NATO and Russia. He did not approve of a no-fly zone being enforced over the country. The deep dive the US has made into the conflict, would be seen by the long range-aerial defense system called the Patriots.

John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, suggested Washington was looking favorably on Ukraine’s requests and was in touch with the government in Kyiv almost every day. He told Kate that they did the best they could in subsequent packages.

Kirby was unable to say if Putin was shifting his strategy from a losing war to a campaign of civilian harassment and destruction, though he said it was a trend already in the works.

It was likely something that they had been planning for a long time. Now that’s not to say that the explosion on the Crimea bridge might have accelerated some of their planning,” Kirby said.

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.

“He was telegraphing about where he is going to go as we get into the winter. Vindman said on CNN that he was going to try to get the Ukrainian population to give up territory by going after the infrastructure.

“So imagine if we had modern equipment, we probably could raise the number of those drones and missiles downed and not kill innocent civilians or wound and injure Ukrainians,” Zhovkva said.

Any prolonged campaign by Putin against civilians would be aimed at breaking Ukrainian morale and possibly unleashing a new flood of refugees into Western Europe that might open divisions among NATO allies that are supporting Ukraine.

Above all, Putin still does not appear to have learned that revenge is not an appropriate way to act on or off the battlefield and in the final analysis is most likely to isolate and weaken Russia, perhaps irreversibly.

U.S. troops and the Russia-Russia “terror” — a warning to Russia, Belarus and the country’s close allies

Olena Gnes, a mother of three who is documenting the war on YouTube, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper live from her basement in Ukraine on Monday 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.

Lukashenko said on Monday that Russian troops would return to his country in large numbers, the same thing they did in February when they invaded Ukraine.

Mr. Lukashenko told senior military and security officials that this won’t be a few thousand troops.

In rambling remarks reported by the state news agency Belta, Mr. Lukashenko said that work had already started on the formation of what he called a “joint regional group of troops” to counter “possible aggression against our country” by NATO and Ukraine.

Some help for Putin may be on the way, however. Concerns were raised about military cooperation between the close allies after Alexander Lukashenko said that a joint group of troops would be sent to Russia. Belarus has been complaining of alleged Ukrainian threats to its security in recent days, which observers say could be a prelude to some level of involvement.

A new force set up by Russia and Belarus will reinforce the view in Ukraine that the country is definitely a co-aggressor.

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.”

Mr. Sannikov worked as a deputy foreign minister while Mr. Lukashenko was in power and fled into exile.

The suffering of Kyiv’s children: Walking in Shevchenko Park, a favorite playground of Askold and the writer’s son

On Monday, state television reported on the suffering and also showed it. It showed a scene of carnage incentral Kyiv, along with empty store shelves and a long-range forecast that predicted months of freezing temperatures there.

Editor’s Note: Sasha Dovzhyk is a special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London and Associate Lecturer in Ukrainian at School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, University College London. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of London. She divides her time between the UK and Ukraine. Her work on Ukraine is supported by the IWM project Documenting Ukraine. The views that she expresses in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Two months ago, on October 10, there was a reminder of that history. A missile hit the street in front of the Ukrainian House of Teachers.

We wanted to continue giving our child a good sleep, karate workouts and a daily walking and running routine in between the sirens and air raid sirens, even if it meant living in a bomb shelter.

Our playground is in Shevchenko Park in the center of the city, and is very well known to every Kyivan. I went for my first walk with my son in the park that is close to my parents home. We have visited almost daily since the beginning, continuing to this day.

The park has become Askold’s main playground, and it was deserted in late February and March when Russian tanks stood a mere 25 kilometers away.

Askold would bring a wooden sword to the playground to be used as a weapon, despite the National Guard being in charge of the park. The lack of playmates made it hard for him to pick any slide, see-saw or merry-go-round that he wanted.

On some days the only human in the park was the imposing yet welcoming monument of Taras Shevchenko, not then protected by a concrete enclosure, that would come later.

The Shevchenko statue is located just a short distance from Askold’s playground, and is easily seen from the entrance to the university.

The writer’s son, Askold, holds his wooden sword alongside grandparents Roman Weretelnyk and Halyna Stefanova in Shevchenko Park earlier this year. The statue of poet Taras Shevchenko can be seen in the background.

Did Shevchenko somehow know that Russians would turn playgrounds into battlegrounds in Ukraine – playgrounds right here, in a carefully-groomed park named after him? That portions of Kyiv’s National University, along with the monument to historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, regarded by many as the first president of Ukraine, would also be hit by shrapnel? I like to think he probably did.

Would I inform him that Russia is using old maps? Because it wants to destroy monuments of Ukrainian history and culture? It can? Or, simply, because it can?

Why does Russia invade Ukraine? Askold was born in Kiev, 1916 to 2022 – the Italian Revolution of Dignity began in Italy as a young boy

The first question my son had asked on the morning of February 24 was this one. The full-scale war was a huge shock but unfortunately not a big surprise for us.

The Revolution of Dignity, also known as Euromaidan, began when Askold was 7 months old. A few months later, Russia annexed Crimea and started a war in the east of Ukraine. We always knew that one day war would come to our home in Kyiv – and in 2022 it did.

Why does Russia do that? Askold looked at pictures and videos of the crater where his favorite swing used to be.

This whole year has been full of tears and worries. There are people who were killed by Russians that I read about, such as a teammate, the coach of a school, or a friend’s parents.

He must know why he goes to a bomb shelter instead of a classroom, and why Russia intends to destroyUkraine with its playground, parks and Shevchenko’s poetry. And why the weapons in the hands of the National Guard in the park are not wooden – but utterly real.

The Russian strongman was a role model for the extreme right as their democracies became more sclerotic. After all, Putin claimed to be motivated by a passion for safeguarding ultra-conservative values, even as he trained much of his venom against the United States.

The daily images of bombed out schools, hospitals, playgrounds and apartment buildings, and the determined, so-far-largely-successful pushback by Ukraine, has prompted many – though not all – former fans to reconsider their admiration.

The leader of the Brothers of Italy, slated to become prime minister, has changed her mind about supporting Russia and has vowed to continue sending weapons to Ukraine. Likewise, Matteo Salvini, who once called Putin “the best statesman on Earth” and used to sport a shirt with Putin’s face on it, now insists he supports Ukraine.

The source of their reconsideration may be found in a separate Pew poll that revealed favorable opinions of Putin and Russia among far-right members have collapsed since Russia invaded Ukraine. Among Salvini’s Lega backers, confidence in Putin to do the right thing regarding world affairs collapsed, from 62% last year to 10% now.

Pro-Russia positions are so poisonous that the RN’s acting president, Jordan Bardella, threatened to sue anyone who suggests there are financial ties between the party and Russia. A multimillion dollar loan from Russia in the summer of 2014 financed the presidential campaign of Le Pen. Le Pen said French banks refused to give her a loan.)

In Germany, the Alternative for Germany party has tried to balance out support for Russia with its opposition to Berlin’s policies, because it creates hardships for Germans.

CPAC, the conservative political action group, called on Democrats to end gift-giving to Ukraine in a cringeworthy message that was sent a couple of weeks ago. The group deleted the post apologetically, claiming that it didn’t go through proper vetting.

At the far-right America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) in February, days after Russian started bombing Ukraine, AFPAC founder and notorious White nationalist Nick Fuentes bellowed, “Can we get a round of applause for Russia!”

Trump held his ground, repeating his praise of the Russian dictator and claiming, “Putin is playing Biden like a drum, and it’s not pretty to watch.” (Trump hasn’t been praising Putin as much lately. More often using the war to praise himself.)

Even the leaders of former Soviet Republics, including autocratic ones Putin protected in the past, are letting him down. Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of the nation of Belarus, was the only one to have sat with the Kremlin.

A few prominent far-right figures still defend Putin even after he threatened to use nuclear weapons.

Speaking about Russians as “us” had begun to feel wrong because he deeply disagreed with Russia’s actions, he said. But saying “Russians” didn’t seem right either. I am Russian and have a part in what is going on, but I don’t want to hide it.

Kherson, Ukraine: What have we learned from the victories of the first 24 hours of the Russian offensive on Kherson?” A senior consultant at the Institute for Strategic Studies (ISW)

Russia launched fresh assaults on Kherson overnight after a wave of fatal shelling in the region earlier this week. In one of the most significant victories of the war, Ukrainian forces took control of the city last month.

Not for the first time, the war is teetering towards an unpredictable new phase. “This is now the third, fourth, possibly fifth different war that we’ve been observing,” said Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme.

It means that, as winter approaches, the stakes of the war have been raised once more. “There’s no doubt Russia would like to keep it up,” Giles said. The Russian government has been sent a message by the Ukrainian successes of recent weeks. Giles said that they are able to do things that surprise them, so let’s get used to it.

Oleksii Hromov, a senior Ukrainian military official, said last week that Kyiv’s forces have recaptured some 120 settlements since late September as they advance in the Kharkiv, Donetsk and Kherson regions. More than 5 settlements were liberated on Wednesday by Ukraine, which has been steadily pushing in Kherson.

Russia said it would help evacuate the residents of occupied Kherson to other parts of the country, as the Ukrainian offensive continued. The head of the Moscow-backed administration in Kherson appealed to the Kremlin for help moving residents out of harm’s way in the latest hint that Russian forces were struggling in the face of Ukrainian advances.

Ukrainians know that they are stronger than they thought. Have those who have underestimated them learned their lessons? Military aid has helpedUkraine survive and not crush the enemy.

The Russians are playing for the whistle to avoid collapsing their frontline before the winter season starts, according to the senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Russians must be very happy that they can get to Christmas with the frontline looking the same as it is.

Ukrainian troops are focused primarily on pushing Russian forces eastwards, having crossed the Oskil River in late September, with Moscow likely preparing to defend the cities of Starobilsk and Svatove in the Luhansk region, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Landing a major blow in Donbas would send another powerful signal, and Ukraine will be eager to improve on its gains before temperatures plummet on the battlefield, and the full impact of rising energy prices is felt around Europe.

The effects of war and missile attacks on critical power infrastructure in Ukranian continue to have a negative impact on the economy. millions of Ukrainians have to endure long periods without heat, electricity and water during the winter. (However, indicative of the resiliency that Ukrainians have displayed since the start of the war, many say they are prepared to endure such hardship for another two to five years if it means defeating Russia).

Ukrenergo, the nation’s national electricity company, says it has been able to maintain power supplies to the capital city of the country after Russian missile attacks disrupted the electricity supply. But Ukrainian Prime Minister has warned that “there is a lot of work to do” to fix damaged equipment, and asked Ukrainians to reduce their energy usage during peak hours.

Western assessments suggest that Moscow may not be able to keep up its aerial bombardments because it isn’t certain if it will form a recurring pattern.

The chief of the UK’s spy agency said in a rare speech that Russian commanders on the ground know that their supplies are running out.

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.”

The Ukrainian army is going to have to move their systems forward so they can destroy any Russian weaponry that is on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River.

“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.

Petraeus: If all of Russia cooperated with Putin, it would be possible. Putin seems to fear how the country might respond to total mobilizes, which has resulted in partial mobilizes to date. In fact, reportedly, more Russian men left the country than reported to the mobilization stations in response to the latest partial call-up of reserves.

“The reopening of a northern front would be another new challenge for Ukraine,” Giles said. He said that the new route into the Kharkiv oblast would help Russia if Putin wanted to reestablish control over that area.

He has posted several videos online, and they’ve inspired a fierce defiance among the Ukrainian people. In one video, we are here. We are in Kyiv. Zelensky can be seen surrounded by his top advisers. We are all here. Our army is here. Citizens and society are here,” he says. We are defending our state, and it will stay that way.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday that more systems should be put in place forUkraine to stop missile attacks.

Ukraine “badly needed” modern systems such as the IRIS-T that arrived this week from Germany and the NASAMS expected from the United States , Bronk said.

What will the mobilized forces of Russia look like when they arrive at the metro station? The case of Olya, a former Soviet soldier in Moscow

Mobilized forces are not going to be useless. 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 aren’t likely to become a capable fighting force. Already there are signs of discipline problems among mobilized soldiers in Russian garrisons.

The Russian Defense Ministry, in a statement cited by the state media outlets RIA Novosti and TASS, described the shootings as a terrorist attack. It said the two gunmen were from a former Soviet nation and had fired on the soldiers during target practice at a firing range.

The Chop-Chop barbershop in central Moscow used to be busy but at the beginning of a recent weekend only one of four chairs was occupied.

A lot of men were staying off the streets in fear of getting a draft notice. As Olya came to work last Friday, she said, she witnessed the authorities at each of the four exits of the metro station, checking documents.

“Every day is hard,” acknowledged Olya, who like other women interviewed did not want her last name used, fearing retribution. It’s hard for me to decide what to do. We always planned for each other.

Moscow has given up fighting in the fight against Russian invasion. The Russian invasion of Kherson has frustrated Russia, but Russia has redeployed troops

The mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin, appeared to attempt 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 in the martial law that was imposed inUkraine, the first time since World War II that Moscow has declared martial law.

The siloviki, the men behind Mr. Putin, will do what they want, Ms. Stanovaya said.

On Tuesday, the newly appointed commander of the Russian invasion acknowledged that the situation in Kherson was already difficult and speculated that a tactical retreat might be necessary. General Surovikin said he was ready to make “difficult decisions” about military deployments, but did not say more about what those might be.

In a signal that the faltering invasion of Ukraine has eroded Moscow’s influence elsewhere, Russia has recently redeployed critical military hardware and troops from Syria, according to three senior officials based in the Middle East.

The U.S. is going to be a blank check if the Republicans win the House, but will not spend it if they do

Dean Obeidallah is the host of “The Dean Obeidallah Show” on SiriusXM radio and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him on the internet. His opinions are his own in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.

The initial reaction from Vance was callous and inflammatory, but the recent comments from Kevin McCarthy were much more alarming. McCarthy said that the US would not be a blank check if the Republicans won the House.

McCarthy said after the speech that he did not support a blank check. We want to make sure that there is accountability when we spend money.

The US official told Phil Mattingly that Biden would be announcing an additional $18 billion in assistance to Ukraine, including the purchase of Patriot missile systems. CNN’s Pentagon team reported that the United States plans to send bombs to Ukraine that can help it target Russian defensive lines. Zelensky’s visit also comes as Congress is poised to sign off on another $45 billion in aid for Ukraine and NATO allies, deepening the commitment that has helped Kyiv’s forces inflict an unexpectedly bloody price on Putin’s forces.

“The notion that now Kevin McCarthy is going to make himself the leader of the pro-Putin wing of my party is just a stunning thing. Cheney was talking on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“He knows better, but the fact that he is willing to sacrifice things for his political gain proves to me that he is willing to sacrifice everything for his own political gain.”

Cold War, the Ingraham Tease, and the Clinton-Bounds: The U.S. Military and the End of the Cold War

The GOP Rep. who believes McCarthy would give her a lot of power if Republicans win the House in next month’s elections blamedUkraine for the war immediately after Russia launched its attack.

Tucker Carlson is one of the Fox News stars who’s been preparing the Republican base for the possibility of an end to US assistance for Ukraine.

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. During that same episode, Ingraham welcomed GOP Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who echoed McCarthy’s comments about aid for Ukraine, saying, “We can’t put America first by giving blank checks to those around the world to solve their problems.”

As Biden suggested, McCarthy and some of his fellow Republicans may or may not get it. One person who completely understands it is Vladmir Putin. Few people will have more reason to celebrate if the GOP gets back control of the House.

Putin Prolonges War in the Euro-Continent: An Analysis of the First Days of the Brussels White House Summit on Energy and Foreign Trade Relations

Petraeus has spent decades studying warfare and practicing its application. He became the director of the CIA after commanding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton with a dissertation on the Vietnam War and the lessons the American military took from it. Petraeus is also the co-author, with British historian Andrew Roberts, of the forthcoming book, “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.”

He is seeking to distract from the fact that he is losing badly on the battlefield and failing to achieve even the scaled back objectives of his invasion.

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

In the early hours of Friday in Brussels, European Union powers agreed a roadmap to control energy prices that have been surging on the heels of embargoes on Russian imports and the Kremlin cutting natural gas supplies at a whim.

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 is skeptical of any price caps. Germany is concerned that caps on consumption will cause higher consumption which will make it harder for the country to restrict supplies.

Putin hopes that the divisions will one day become part of his dream. Europe may prove crucial to achieving success from the Kremlin’s viewpoint because of the fact that the continent fails to agree on essentials.

Many of these issues are at odds between Germany and France. 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 Italy First Woman Prime Minister and the Putin-Russia War on Crime: An Attempt to End the Cold War with Trump, Putin and the United States

Italy has a new government. Giorgia Meloni was sworn in Saturday as Italy’s first woman prime minister and has attempted to brush aside the post-fascist aura of her party. 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.

Matteo Silvani, a member of the ruling Italian coalition, said during the campaign that he didn’t want the sanctions against Russia to harm those who impose them more than those who are hit by them.

The EU policies that seemed calculated to reduce the influence of Poland and Hungary have caused a disagreement between the two countries over Ukraine. Poland was offended by the pro-Putin sentiment of Hungary’s populist leader.

Similar forces seem to be at work in Washington where House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, poised to become Speaker of the House if Republicans take control after next month’s elections, told an interviewer, “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They will not do it.

The influential 30-member Congressional progressive caucus called on Biden to open talks with Russia on ending the conflict in order to end the missiles and drones that are hitting deep into the interior.

Mia Jacob sent a statement to clarify her remarks on support for UKRAINE hours later. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Dmytro Kuleba of the Ukranian government to thank him for America’s support.

Supporting Ukrainian forces with arms, materiel and training has been the foundation of their battlefield successes against a weakened Russian military.

All of this action points to an increased desperation by Russia to get components for production of high tech weaponry that have been blocked by western sanctions.

Russian production of hypersonic missiles has all but ceased “due to the lack of necessary semi-conductors,” said the report. Plants making anti-aircraft systems have shut down, aircraft are being cannibalized, and Russia has reverted to Soviet-era defense stocks for replenishment. The soviet era ended 30 years ago.

A day before this report, the US announced seizure of all property of a top Russian procurement agent Yury Orekhov and his agencies “responsible for procuring US-origin technologies for Russian end-users…including advanced semiconductors and microprocessors.”

The Justice Department has announced charges against individuals and companies that have been trying to get high-tech equipment into Russia.

How Ukrainians saw Russia before Feb. 24, 2022? When Russians first realized Russia was a weapon for sexual assault, a journalist in the Kherson region

How did people see Ukrainians before Feb. 24, 2022? If pressed, some might have conjured mail-order brides and shaven-head gangsters roaming one big post-Soviet Chernobyl. But most probably didn’t think even that; instead, they didn’t imagine Ukraine at all. The country popped up on most people’s radar only in connection to Western political scandals and Russian war making. Few Westerners visited it, and those who did might have concluded — as one Western journalist confessed to me recently — that “Ukraine was just like Russia but without all the crap.”

The scars of war are visible here. In the conquest of the country of Ukraine, Russia used sex as a weapon, according to an investigation by the UN. They have told of allegations of Viagra being carried by Russian soldiers.

In two weeks of work in the Kherson region, the team from Kyiv has documented six allegations of sexual assault. The real number is almost certainly much higher, they say.

“They walked around those rooms,” she says. “One stayed there, and the other one, who raped me, came in here. He walked through the room and then on to the floor where he started touching me.

He pinned her against the wardrobe, she says, and tore at her clothes. She says that she was crying and trying to stop him. I only thought of staying alive.

He warned her not to tell anyone, she recalls. “I didn’t tell my husband right away,” she says, in tears. “But I told my cousin, and my husband overheard. He said, ‘You should have told me the truth, but you kept silent.’”

She spent three days at home, in a daze, too ashamed to step outside. Then, in an extraordinary act of bravery, she says she confronted the Russian soldier’s commander.

“His commander found the head of his unit. He came to see me and told me, ‘I punished him severely, I broke his jaw, but the most severe punishment is ahead.’ Like shooting. The commander asked me, ‘Do you mind this?’ I said, ‘I don’t mind, I wish all of them will be shot.’”

After a long day of searching, the team arrives at a village in Novovoznesens’ke where they have uncovered two more cases of rape, allegedly by Russian soldiers. The next day, they return to Kyiv, to submit their findings.

It’s hard to know what’s going on inside because most communications are cut off by Russian forces. But those who recently left and others with loved ones still there paint a harrowing picture of a community living in fear of the Russian occupiers, while hoping the constant shelling that keeps them on edge also means Ukrainian forces are arriving.

A man in the crowd tells the investigators that he was held by Russian soldiers and subjected to mock execution. It is hard to hear tales of torture like this, but they are not the subject of their work today.

A short drive down roads pockmarked by shelling, in Tverdomedove, a mother and daughter tell Kleshchenko that they have not heard of any sexual crimes in their one-road hamlet.

Months later, after the Ukrainian military liberated her village in a lightning counteroffensive, she returned. Shelling had reduced her roof to its rafters.

Viktor’s case for the murder of his father, an ex-cop in Zaporizhia, Argentina, is still unsolved

She doesn’t know where to put it to stop the ceiling from falling on her head. I won’t suffer if it falls and kills me. I want to see my son again.

Of course, many of these allegations will be impossible to prove; many do not even have a suspect. For now, the team files its reports, and its investigators continue their work, hoping to be able to file charges in the future.

“I still can’t believe that I left there,” says Viktor, while pulling a red suitcase from the black car he rode to Zaporizhia, about 25 miles from occupied territory. “The madness.”

His home is just outside Kherson. He and his wife Nadiya raised their three daughters there. The Russians broke into their house within hours of them leaving, Viktor says a neighbor told him.

At a Zaporizhzhia shelter, a volunteer who asks that he be called by his middle name, Artyom, helps care for Kherson evacuees as if they were his own family. Artyom doesn’t want us to use his full name to protect his relatives in Kherson.

Artyom’s frustrations with Russia: Counting the fingers of a frustrated father who isn’t afraid of his wife

His wife generally stays home as much as she can. At the local street market, she sells potatoes and vegetables from her garden.

Artyom says that it’s not good. He counts his fingers as he lists off his various fears: He worries that the Russians will stop his wife. He worries that she’ll get sick. She’s four months’ pregnant. He worries about the baby.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/07/1134465380/kherson-ukraine-russia-battle-looms

Working in the street markets: Artyom and Janislav Schevchenko in the city of Kyiv, Russia, during the war

Holovnya, who is living in Kyiv, calls some of them collaborators. And he says some are people who just can’t leave. Many are older. Some have very little resources. Their lives right now are “intense,” he says.

Since the beginning of the war, most of the public interaction in the city has gone to the local street markets. Local farmers and bakers have been selling their goods at the street markets in Kherson, because most of the stores in the area are either closed or have empty shelves.

“You can buy anything from medicine to meat,” says Natalyia, who fled Kherson this summer. “But it’s terrible to observe. On one car they sell medicine on the hood, while on the other they cut meat.

Schevchenko, who is volunteering at an Odesa nonprofit called Side-by-Side to evacuate residents from Kherson and other occupied territories, remains in contact with those in the city. She says her grandmother, who refused to leave, gives her regular updates.

Whenever Artyom and his wife talk, they should be able to get a decent connection. They try to keep their conversations light, but worry about Russians listening in.

The Siege of Katerinas in the Crimea de Novosibirsk: The Last Day of Putin’s War in Ukraine

Everyone we have spoken to is aware that there are tougher days to come: that the Russians across the river could shell them here. It is also unclear whether all Russian troops have left Kherson and the wider region. There is still uncertainty behind this euphoria.

Once the scene of large protests against Russian plans to transform the region into a breakaway pro-Russian republic, the streets of Kherson are now filled with jubilant residents wrapped in Ukrainian flags, or with painted faces, singing and shouting.

A group of locals climbed onto the top of the cinema in the square to put up Ukrainian flags. The soldiers are asked to sign autographs on flags after being greeted with cheers.

A teenager said that he was beaten up by Russian soldiers after they mistook him for a spy. Residents said that they are exhausted and overwhelmed by what this new freedom means.

“Everyone here is out celebrating in the square here. People are wearing the Ukrainian flag, they’re hugging the soldiers, they’ve come out to see what it’s like to have freedom,” Robertson said.

The liberation was the best day of Katerinas life after eight months under Russian occupation. “Our town is free, my street is free,” she told CNN.

The retreat represents a major blow for Putin’s war effort in Ukraine. Kherson was the only Ukrainian regional capital that Russian forces had captured since February’s invasion. Their withdrawal east across the Dnipro cedes large swathes of land that Russia has occupied since the early days of the war, and that Putin had formally declared as Russian territory just five weeks ago.

Everyone who is against the war saw their lives ruin, she said. Someone will tell you that no one is interested in you, and we can just ignore it. It’s Ukrainians who suffered the most. They are in much worse conditions now. But that doesn’t mean we’re okay.”

The next step for the Ukrainian military is going to be an urban operation according to CNN military analyst Cedric Leighton. You will see a methodical operation to clear buildings of any booby traps or mines.

On Friday evening, the President of Ukraine posted a video on his website showing a crowd of people in the city waving flags and chanting ZSU.

Earlier that day, the Ukrainian military’s southern operational command said Russian forces had been “urgently loading into boats that seem suitable for crossing and trying to escape” across the river.

For much of the journey through smaller towns and settlements, our team of CNN journalists was forced to drive through diversions and fields: bridges over canals were blown up, and roads were full of craters and littered with anti-tank mines.

Kherson, a city filled with joy as Russian forces invaded a Ukrainian village on the southern banks of the Dnipro River

After Russians withdrew from the west banks of the Dnipro River in the strategically important southern region of Kherson, the only things left were trenches and checkpoint.

The city’s residents have no water, no internet connection and little power. The city center was filled with joy on Saturday, as a CNN crew entered.

The military presence is still limited, but huge cheers erupt from crowds on the street every time a truck full of soldiers drives past, with Ukrainian soldiers being offered soup, bread, flowers, hugs and kisses by elated passersby.

The old man and woman hugged the young soldier with their hands on his shoulder as the CNN crew stopped to regroup.

Everyone wants you to understand what the occupiers have gone through and how grateful they are for the countries that have helped them.

Vladimir Bespalov and Maria Bespalaya feared their dream of starting a family through adoption was over when Russian forces invaded their country in February.

“I remember that morning of February 24, very clearly,” said Vladimir Bespalov, a 27-year-old railroad worker, of the first day of the war. We thought we were late. We realized we were already in a state of war, and we thought we could no longer adopt.”

Instead, the situation pushed the couple to try to do it sooner, he said. “We were waiting to earn more money, have a better car, buy a house, and build something to give our children first. When the war began, we thought about how to accomplish these things together as a family.

Bringing up the fight in Mariupol: How a railroad worker was killed in 1943 and how to foster a safe home with a child

That message reached a volunteer who was helping people flee Mariupol, a southern city that became a symbol of the campaign by Russian President Vladimir Putin to take Ukrainian land.

The roads are covered in mud and rubble. The few cars must navigate around craters where bombs were dropped. In some of the apartments, the upper floors have been reduced to rubble, with only a window on the street remaining. Telephone and electrical wires are dead on the ground.

His mother was struck down by Russian artillery after she left home to find food for her family, Bespalov and Bespalaya were later to learn from police.

“The men were drinking alcohol and the children of those neighbors bullied him. He was starving and freezing, Bespalaya told CNN. She is careful not to bring up Ilya’s traumatizing experience in front of him unprompted, but he has told the woman he now calls “mama” everything about his three terrifying weeks in the basement, she says.

Bespantha and Bespalov are now the legal caretakers of Ilya. They have been a little family for more than six months, and they plan to formally adopt him as soon as possible. Martial law in Ukraine has resulted in the suspension of adoption processes.

Like parents, the young couple try to protect their child from the horrors of war and give him a sense of security.

When fighting, it’s important to take your mind off the fighting and focus on enjoying time with your child. We aim to create normal childhood memories. Work takes time, but we spend every free moment together,” said Bespalov, who as a crucial railroad worker has not been called up for military service.

But there is nothing normal about war. The couple set up two spare rooms after posting their appeal on social media, one of which was a nursery that included a crib and bunk bed, as well as lots of toys.

“I just totally stopped being afraid of adoption. She told CNN she was confident that she could care for anyone and deal with their character while having a child.

“I know the light will turn back on.” A boy’s cry in Kherson, Ukraine, as Russian troops invade the Dnipro river

But that plan, too, was shattered by war. They were forced to flee their home in Slovyansk, in the frontline of the Donetsk region, to find a new place to live.

They finally received a call in April asking if the couple could care for the little boy, who had no parents.

They traveled to Dnipro the following day to meet the boy who would become a part of their family.

That love that makes you a family is what we have now. We didn’t have a baby and our love is real, but we cuddled with each other on a playground bench.

But little Ilya is learning to cope. As he played with the couple in a living room lit by candles during one of the power outages, he looked up and said: “I am not afraid of the dark anymore. I know the light will turn back on.”

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 Dnipro has become the new front line in southern Ukraine, and officials there warned of continued danger from fighting in regions that have already endured months of Russian occupation.

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.

Mortar shells struck near the bridge, sending up puffs of smoke. Near the riverfront, incoming rounds rang out with thunderous, metallic booms. It was not possible to tell what had been hit.

A surprise visit to Kherson during the first Russian invasion of the city of Crimea: Ms. Yanushevich meets with Mr. Zelensky

The mines are a significant danger. Four people, including an 11-year-old, were killed when a family driving in the village of Novoraysk, outside the city, ran over a mine, Mr. Yanushevich said. 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 as Mr. Zelensky made a surprise visit to Kherson, there were still threats on the ground.

Mr. Zelensky made his appearance in the city’s main square Monday evening, as hundreds of jubilant residents celebrated.

The Russians tried to storm the capital at the start of the war. The Russians laid waste to a number ofoutlying towns, includingBorodianka, 35 miles northwest of the capital.

One Kherson city resident who uses a secure messaging app in OleshKY saidOccupants rob local people and exchange things for homemade alcohol, known as Samogon. “Then they get drunk and even more aggressive. We are very scared here. She asked that her name not be published.

The birth of the United States: A meeting between China and the US in the aftermath of the November 2016 midterm elections, as reported by Biden and Xi

That is what happened according to the statements from the White House and the Chinese government. Taiwan’s independence was one of the sources of disagreement discussed by the two sides. Climate change and global health were topics of potential cooperation that they broached.

Biden pointed out that the results of the midterm elections “sent a very strong message around the world” that the US will remain engaged. There was a bigger message. The health of America’s democracy is the signal to the world from the midterms. The US elections not only went smoothly and peacefully, but they also dealt a harsh blow to many of the most antidemocratic elements in the country.

This meeting was perfect for a number of reasons: It was the best moment for the United States and democracy; it was the most important reason for the US House of Representatives and the Senate to be together; and it was the most critical reason for the Senate to be together.

As Biden and Xi were meeting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an emotional, triumphant return to the devastated, now liberated city of Kherson, the one provincial capital that Russian invaders had conquered.

As Putin embarked on his adventure, the Ukrainians defended their country with surprising determination and as Biden rallied allies in a muscular push to support them.

After the meeting between Putin and Xi again in September, Putin admitted that he had questions about the situation in Ukraine. After the Russian President said he’d use nuclear weapons, Xi rebuked him.

Tellingly, Putin chose not to attend the G20 summit in Bali, avoiding confrontations with world leaders as he increasingly becomes a pariah on the global stage.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/15/opinions/biden-xi-meeting-democracy-ghitis/index.html

Russia’s Cold War with Ukraine: The case for a missile intercepted in Poland by the Ukrainian Aircraft Interferometer and the project I want to live in Ukraine

Biden is not the only leader with a strong hand. There is a new term in place for China’s leader, and he can now rule for as long as he wants. He does not have to worry about elections, the press or an opposition party. He is essentially the absolute ruler of a mighty country for many years to come.

And yet Xi faces a mountain of daunting problems. China is reluctant to reveal economic data because of the slowing economy. The vaccine was a disappointment because it was used for global diplomacy. China is imposing a series of harshures as the rest of the world slowly gets back to normal after the Pandemic.

It is important to show that the democracy works and that there are no unprovoked wars of aggression that will destroy it, because autocratic countries like China and Russia may try to undermine it.

The first missile to have landed in Poland – a NATO member – on Tuesday may well have been a Ukrainian anti-aircraft rocket intercepting an incoming Russian missile a short distance from one of Ukraine’s largest cities, Lviv, as suspected by Polish and NATO leaders. Zelensky has insisted that the missile was not Ukrainian.

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

That said, a growing number of Russian soldiers have rebelled at what they have been asked to do and refused to fight. The UK’s Defense Ministry believes Russian troops could be prepared to shoot retreating and deserting soldiers.

Indeed a hotline and Telegram channel, launched as a Ukrainian military intelligence project called “I want to live,” designed to assist Russian soldiers eager to defect, has taken off, reportedly booking some 3,500 calls in its first two months of activity.

Vladimir Putin’s memoir of the first 15 years of the War between Russia and Ukraine: How much of his anger has come out of it?

The leading Russian journalist, who fled in March and has now settled in Berlin, told me last week that he was prepared to accept the reality, since he might never be able to return to his homeland.

Some good has come out of this debacle. Europe knows it must get off its dependence on Russian gas immediately, and hydrocarbons in general in the longer term, as economic dependence on the fossil fuels of dictators cannot bring longer-term stability.

The burden that this conflict has had on Western countries is proving to be unfulfilled, as Putin believes his dream that this conflict would drive further wedges into the Western alliance. On Monday, word began circulating in aerospace circles that the long-stalled joint French-German project for a next-generation jet fighter at the heart of the Future Combat Air System – Europe’s largest weapons program – was beginning to move forward.

Russian President Vladimir Putin held a glass of champagne at a reception Thursday, after making comments about the Russian military’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

After finishing his speech he raised a toast to the soldiers and drank from his champagne glass.

The book is a confession. I am guilty for not reading the signs much earlier. I was also responsible for the war between Russia and Ukraine. As are my contemporaries and our forebears. Regrettably, Russian culture is also to blame for making all these horrors possible.”

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 not commented on recent explosions that are deep within Russia. The country’s declared drones aren’t able to reach the targets.

Putin: Why do we need water? What does it take to be genocide for the whole universe, not an act of geocide?

He ended his comments by saying there is no mention of the water situation. No one has said anything about it. At all! There is complete silence. He said it was.

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

Last week, Putin was shown the repairs on the Kerch Bridge and went across it in his car.

He continued, in his Kremlin appearance Thursday, to say “who is not supplying water to Donetsk?” Not supplying water to a city of million is an act of genocide.”

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.”

In a statement in November, Ukrenergo acknowledged that the race to restore power to homes is being hampered by “strong winds, rain and sub-zero temperatures.”

A top Ukrainian official said the attacks on the country’s energy grid amount to genocide. The prosecutor-general of the Ukrainians made some comments to the television station.

Borodianka, a small town in the war-ukraine-town-occupied by Russians, is undergoing massive power cuts

During the week, he shares the school with nearly 1,000 students. The school provides heat, food and water to the community when the power goes out.

Power cuts have lasted up to 24 hours, he says. In this agricultural region, farming equipment and warehouses were destroyed. He estimates business activity is one-third of what it was.

About 200 Ukrainians were killed when the Russians occupied Borodianka shortly after the invasion began on Feb. 24 until the end of March, Yerko says. The town’s prior population of more than 12,000 dwindled to less than 1,000 after the war. Even though there’s no resources, it’s back up to about 9,000.

Most of the people are from the houses on the main street. The ones that were destroyed and burned down were in charge of the temporary housing.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/10/1141536117/russia-war-ukraine-town-borodianka-banksy-power-cuts

Boredian Ka-banksy power cuts: A street graffiti-painting of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko

During an interview, the lights go out and she is standing in a dark hallway. She says she’ll wait a while to see if the power comes back. She’ll use the generator if it starts to get cold. It’s like this every day, she adds.

In the center of town is a bust of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko. He championed Ukraine’s independence from Russia in the 19th century. He wrote, “It’s bad to be in chains and die a slave.”

A British artist well-known for his street spray-paintings, Banksy surreptitiously painted on several badly scarred walls last month, later confirming it was his work on Instagram.

One picture shows a young boy playing with a man. Both are practicing martial arts. The man is assumed to be Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/10/1141536117/russia-war-ukraine-town-borodianka-banksy-power-cuts

The Oslo Nobel Prize for 2022: The Russian and Ukrainian “war crimes” and the violation of foreign agents law, a human rights advocate said

“People are happy we’re getting this attention. But the paintings are on buildings that were destroyed,” Yerko says. “We’re planning to remove the paintings and put them somewhere else.”

Russian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yan Rachinsky blasted President Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” war on Ukraine in his acceptance speech in the Norwegian capital Oslo on Saturday.

Even Russia’s most revered human rights group, 2022’s Nobel Prize co-recipient Memorial, was forced to stop its activities over alleged violations of the foreign agents law.

Matviichuk said the prize would be used to ensure justice for people who have been affected by the war.

Human rights groups from Russia and Ukraine – Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties – were officially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 on Saturday, along with the jailed Belarusian advocate Ales Bialiatski.

The new winners were recognized for their work to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power.

The award of the Norwegian prize for peace was given by the Norwegian committee and it said they had supported the rights to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens.

Nonetheless, he said, the strikes, using Iranian drones, had left many in the dark. Mr. Zelensky called the situation in the Odesa region “very difficult,” noting that only the most critical infrastructure there remained operational. He warned that restoration of power to civilians would take days, not hours.

In his nightly address on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine had shot down 10 of the 15 drones that Russian forces used. It was not immediately possible to verify his tally.

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.

“The power system is now, to put it mildly, very far from a normal state — there is an acute shortage in the system,” he said, urging people to reduce their power use to put less strain on the battered power grid.

It must be understood. Even if there are no heavy missile strikes, this does not mean that there are no problems,” he continued. There are missile attacks, drones, and shelling almost every day. Almost every day, energy facilities are hit.

Latest on Ukrainianraine a weekly recap and look-ahead at Russias war-dec-12: The story of the freed U.S. basketball star

The threat by the Ukrainian president to outlaw the Russian Orthodox church in the country is drawing attention to the fact that Ukrainian authorities have stepped up raids on churches with suspected links to Moscow.

French President Emmanuel Macron hosts European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store for a working dinner Monday in Paris.

The French government is going to host a conference in support of Ukrainians in the winter with a video address from President Zelenskyy.

After a year in Russian captivity, the U.S. basketball star was freed in December. She was released in exchange for the US handing over a convicted Russian arms dealer. Her husband is in the U.S. According to a report, Bout has joined an ultranationalist party.

New measures targeting Russian oil revenue took effect Dec. 5. They include a price cap and a European Union embargo on most Russian oil imports and a Russian oil price cap.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1141827823/latest-on-ukraine-a-weekly-recap-and-look-ahead-at-russias-war-dec-12

The State of Ukraine in 2022: From Ukraine to the World to the Death of Queen Elizabeth II – The Case of Melitopol

A church is alleged to be used by the Russian military in the city of Melitopol. Ukrainian forces used long-range shelling to reach their targets in the Zaporizhzhia region, officials said.

Russian forces turned the city of Bakhmut into burned ruins, Zelenskyy said. Russia is trying to get to the city in the eastern Donbas region.

The leaders of France and Turkey received a phone call from President Zelenskyy on December 11, in what appears to be a stepped up of diplomacy over the Russian invasion.

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 world witnessed an unwieldy and unparalleled set of news events in 2022. In the year, there were historic and surprising moments that made some people believe and others feel despair. Yet some days offered joy and pride. There are a lot of remarkable stories of the year, from the war in Ukraine to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. As the world slowly emerged from a long and drawn out Pandemic, the year started calmly. Russia invaded the country in February and began a war that left many, including children, dead. A photo of a pregnant woman being carried on a stretcher after a bomb exploded at a maternity hospital in Mariupol was captured by a photographer for the Associated Press. The unnamed woman and her baby died days later. This image symbolizes one of the Russian atrocities in the war in Ukraine. The attack on March 9 was one of the most brutal days of the conflict, it happened just 13 days after the war started. In June a school shooting took place in Uvalde, Texas. A chaotic scene outside the school was photographed by Pete Luna of the Uvalde Leader-News. And on September 8, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, sending shockwaves around the world. The 96-year-old monarch had worked with 15 British prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. She died a week after inviting him to form a new government. The Queen’s funeral drew crowds by the tens of thousands as they paid their last respects to a monarch who reigned for an unprecedented 70 years. This was the first year that there had been more than one first. The United States saw the confirmation of the country’s first Black woman Supreme Court justice. Jackson is the first black woman to win an individual medal in speedskating. And history was made with the first all-female refereeing crew at a men’s World Cup. Another notable moment this year was the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision that guaranteed the federal constitutional right to an abortion in the United States. The court’s decision this year triggered protests by abortion-rights activists and celebrations in the streets by anti-abortion groups, further ideologically separating an already divided country. Americans went to the polls in November to vote in the election. As all these moments unraveled, the Earth continued to warm up, melting and separating glacial ice ridges while much of the Northern Hemisphere dealt with a historic drought that scorched soil, dried up rivers and triggered mass crop failure. Superb images of space were captured by the James WB Telescope above the Earth. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in the middle of the Oscars because he was upset with what the comedian said about his wife. Millions of people around the globe watched the moment on television. While Roger Maris held the American League home runrecord, many sports fans supported New York Yankee pitcher Aaron Judge for breaking it in a single season. Interwoven with these big news events were snapshots of daily life reminding the world of the beautiful, quiet — and sometimes hilarious — moments in and out of people’s lives. The hard work of journalists is behind the top photos this year. Many of them continue to document wars and conflicts, away from the safety of their homes. It is thanks to their perseverance and dedication that these images come to light, offering a window to the world and helping us understand it through photography. CNN Digital is reporting on the year in pictures.

Tarasov explains the shelling incident in Kostiantynivka, Bakhmut, West Macedonian

Tarasov was in the basement trying to protect himself when the shelling started. But last week he decided to buy vegetables so he could make borscht.

His face pales as he relays the graphic images still fresh in his mind. I would have blown apart if it wasn’t for the leather jacket I was wearing. I mean, my guts would have been all over the place… I lost a lot of blood. I remember seeing it — a huge puddle.”

The blast that tore through Tarasov’s body killed his friend and as the shelling continued, he realized he might not make it either. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he says. “I prayed to survive.”

Tarasov begged the doctors to save his limb. I asked if I could have my arm sewed back on. It was torn off, but still hanging in the sleeve. And my stomach was burning. I thought it was the intestines coming out. There was blood everywhere.”

“Sometimes the power goes out,” chief surgeon Dr. Yuri Mishasty tells CNN, still dressed in his scrubs. “Water comes by the hour, not regularly. The weekend had no water because of the catastrophic shelling incident.

“She’s a resident of Bakhmut. She sustained an injury to her abdomen and several internal organs after being hit by a volley of fire. We see people with these wounds every day. Every day.

As the Russian army intensifies its campaign to take Bakhmut, the shelling comes ever nearer to Kostiantynivka, 25 kilometres (about 15 miles) to the west. Since the beginning of the month, the town has been hit almost every day, the hospital director says.

“It’s been quite loud lately,” Khassan El-Kafarna, a surgeon from Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF), stationed at the hospital, says. His colleague, nurse Lucia Marron, agrees. “I think there’s more movement around in general – more troops, more people,” she says. We are familiar with the sound. You get to a point where you understand what is dangerous and what is not.”

The local authorities have implored civilians to leave the region for months. It was hard for Tarasov to go to a safer area as he was from his home in the old industrial heartland.

“If I had a lot of money, I would rather live abroad,” Tarasov says. “But I have no money and everything I had saved up was invested there. I didn’t have any money or a place to go.

Dark Ukrainian fairy tales: Denys, a mother who grieves for a two-month-old baby and her father’s father

December is the month of fairy tales, when we can peer into the darkness only to be reassured of the miracle that will come.

We used to joke that our life was a dark fairy tale, and we were hoping for a happy ending. Ievheniia is a Ukrainian woman who is currently in Poland nursing a two-month-old baby and is still grieving for the child’s father.

Denys was killed on November 18 while defending Ukraine. The 47-year-old died at the site of some of the war’s heaviest fighting, near the city of Bakhmut in the east of the country. Ukrainian forces have been holding the line there for months; soldiers waist-deep in mud amid trenches, bomb craters and charred trees.

In this dark Ukrainian fairy tale, pivotal moments – from marriage ceremony to funeral – take place via video link. This is what love looks like in a time of war, shifted to the digital space and disrupted mid-plot.

A sports medicine physician and reserve officer, Ievheniia has too been ready to join Ukraine’s army these eight years, if called upon. “I am not the kind of person who flees,” she explained.

In the streets of Warsaw, her temporary home, the festive season is well underway. “Christmas is coming. People don’t want to be reminded that someone somewhere is suffering,” Ievheniia said. “And yet, they must be aware that this fight is unfolding right next to them.”

After driving westwards across the country under Russian bombardment, Ievheniia finally arrived at an enlistment office. She was interviewed on Friday and ordered to sign a contract with the military the next day.

On the weekend, she decided to take a test to see if she was pregnant. The ground was beginning to slip under one’s feet during war. “On top of that, it turned out that I was pregnant.”

The pregnant woman who planned to defend her homeland instead joined refugees looking for safety in Poland after the pregnancy test provided an unexpected plot twist.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/opinions/ukraine-christmas-fairy-tales-death-dovzhyk/index.html

Denys and Ieveniia, a married couple in Ukraine, separated by a war: a joyous story of family and friends

Ievheniia and Denys wanted to prove their relationship in the eyes of the state, after being separated by war. The everyday ingenuity of the country at war was at work; now, Ukrainian servicemen are allowed to marry via a video call. “Instead of (by) boring civil servants, we got married remotely by a handsome man in a uniform. I had nothing to complain about,” Ievheniia said.

Denys kept the magic alive on the internet, with flower deliveries and professional photoshoots ordered from the trenches.

Ievheniia’s rented flat was found to be empty and she was unconscious when Denys raised the alarm. It could have caused death if there was a delay. There was a Caesarean section. The father was able to meet his son because he was born two months early.

Ukrainian men of fighting age are not allowed to leave the country under martial law. Denys was given permission, crossed the border and spent five days with his family.

“It was a magical time filled with ordinary things: shopping, registering with a pediatrician, laughing, talking. Then he left. It was his birthday on November 17 and we sent him greetings,” Ievheniia remembered. “The next day he was killed.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/opinions/ukraine-christmas-fairy-tales-death-dovzhyk/index.html

The Italian fairy tale told by Italo Calvino, the head of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, said he felt the ‘evil’

Italo Calvino, a celebrated Italian journalist and editor of folktales, said that consolatory fables are a rare type of fairy tale. If it does, it means the time to be consoled has not yet come. Instead, it is time to act.

And we must not be deluded by the narrative logic of a fairy tale. The wily kid won’t be defeated by magic. Ten months ago, Ukrainians needed military aid in order for them to bring a victory over Russia. Ukrainian victory depends on our collective effort.

I wondered how I would act in a fight against evil when I was a teenager. I would like to be able to keep going with my daily life. Ievheniia told me. “Today, all of us have a chance to find out.”

A Russia-installed official said theUkrainians have unleashed the most aggressive assault on the occupied DONETSk region since the conflict began in the east of the country.

A key in the intersection center of the city has come under fire, he said, after 40 rockets from BM-21 was fired at civilians in the city.

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.

The strikes in Kherson left the city “completely disconnected” from power supplies, according to the regional head of the Kherson military administration, Yanushevych.

“The enemy hit a critical infrastructure facility. Shell fragments damaged residential buildings and the place where the medical aid and humanitarian aid distribution point is located,” Yanushevych later said in a Telegram video on Thursday.

The U.S. Government gave the city machinery and generators to operate boiler houses and heat supply stations, according to the mayor.

Four excavators and over 130 generators were delivered by the Energy Security Project, which was run by the United States Agency for International Development. The equipment was not included in the cost.

Olga and Vladimir Zelensky: The Last Days of Elena and Aleksander in Avdiivka, Ukraine

The war in eastern Europe is approaching the 10-month mark and the Kremlin appeared to ignore Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s peace proposal to get Russia to start withdrawing troops.

“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.

The Russian Federation has new subjects, like the areas that it claimed to have annexed, such as Kherson and Luhansk.

It was a pleasant place to be, and we were always welcomed with the smells of delicious food Elena had prepared to welcome us. The reason Elena and Aleksander stayed in Avdiivka was because of the subsistence farming they did every day in their vegetable garden, which was one of the reasons they stayed. They cleaned up debris and pieces of shrapnel and buried shell holes, all while continuing to cultivate the land.

Currently, Avdiivka doesn’t exist anymore. Soon after the beginning of the invasion, the town turned into an active battlefield, day after day methodically razed to the ground by Russian artillery. Nearly the city’s entire population, about 25,000 people, has been forced to flee for their lives.

With the beginning of the Russian invasion this year, both husbands enlisted in the armed forces and the family is currently living in a central Ukrainian village. This is how Olga describes the family’s last days in Avdiivka, before their evacuation:

Every summer we were introduced to the large extended family of the Griniks. They took us fishing, picnicking and mushroom-picking at their favorite spots. The forests and lakes around Avdiivka had been covered in land mines, but the family had already learned safe routes.

“In mid-March, several shells landed in our garden but didn’t explode. We needed to get some bread and I headed to the grocery store the next day. The Russian fighter jet was shot down as I was on my way, and it flew very low. I panicked and ran, but the Ukrainian soldier asked me if I had seen a parachutist. A parachutist? I couldn’t see a meter in front of me. ‘ Well,’ the soldier said, ‘if you see him, hit him with a spade.’ As soon as I got home, I packed up the kids and we took an evacuation bus.”

On the losses of their elderly neighbors: Elena, Rodion, and Lord in Opytne, Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine

Elena and Rodion were heartbroken to leave Opytne and its elderly inhabitants, whom they’d been taking care of all this time, behind, but returning was not viable, either. Eventually, they relocated to the city of Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, where they continue to struggle to find work and housing, as displaced people from Donbas are often discriminated against by society and the authorities. About 30 of their elderly neighbors still remain in Opytne, which is now an active front line and has recently been captured by the Russian forces. Elena and Rodion say they haven’t been able to get in touch with some of them.

Rodion and Elena remained in Opytne until this summer — even as the fighting in the area intensified — until Elena was hit by shrapnel in the couple’s backyard. The shrapnel landed a fraction of an inch from her spinal cord, and only by a miracle, the couple managed to get out of danger and to a hospital in time to save her life.

Lord was a sweetheart and Aleksander told us the dog had even saved his life once. One night, as Aleksander was asleep, shelling came dangerously close to their home. At some point during the night, Lord woke up and dragged him out of the bed and followed the dog. The next moment, a shell struck and collapsed the wall.

After the full-scale invasion began in February, whatever fragile stability the family had managed to maintain was shattered. Elena left with her daughter and grandson. When the bombing began again, Aleksander decided to stay behind to look after Lord and the house and help with water distribution for the residents.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2022/12/16/1136962015/ukraine-war-photos-ukrainians-donbas

Ongoing fight to free itself from-russia: Ukrainian independence ongoing-fight-to-free-it-self-from-russia

“I lived only 500 meters [0.3 miles] from work but it took me forever to get there every morning,” he recalls. After hearing a whistle in the air, you begin walking and then run for cover. You stand there and wait for the explosion to sound, this means it landed somewhere else. So you continue walking — but only until the next whistle.”

Following the fall of the Russian monarchy a year earlier, Ukrainians sought to take advantage of the chaos in Russia. After Russia lost its monarchy, the Communists sent troops to defeat the Ukrainian independence movement.

The Russians demolished the suburb of Bucha in the first days of the war. Viatrovych sent his family to western Ukraine for their safety after the Russians invaded Ukraine.

The emergency session of parliament was called to declare martial law. By 2 p.m. that day, he received a rifle so he could join the security forces defending the capital.

The blast blew out the windows, as well as parts of the glass ceiling in the hall where independence was declared in 1918. The windows are boarded up. Shards of glass still cover the floor.

“There are, of course, parallels to a century ago,” said Steshuk Oleh, the director of the House of Teachers. This building was damaged in the fighting. And now it’s damaged again. Don’t worry. We will rebuild everything.”

“If you look at all the hardships that Ukraine experienced in the 20th century, and they’re vast, this is the moment where all the wrongs of the last hundred plus years need to be redressed,” he said.

Ukrainians thought this matter was finally resolved in December 1991, when they held a referendum on independence. Ninety-two percent voted in favor of going their own way. The soviet union went down that month.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/16/1142176312/ukraine-ongoing-fight-to-free-itself-from-russia

The Time for Ruling an End of the Era to War: Vladimir Putin’s “Disagreement” with Ukraine’s Security Forces

Because “if he’s losing a war, especially a war of his own making, he doesn’t survive,” he said. It is possible that the result signals the end of the era of the empire. It’s 21st century. It is time for empire to go.

When he entered politics in Russia 15 years ago, Kasparov challenged Putin’s hold on power. He left Russia and now lives in New York, because he knew his safety was at risk.

Many military analysts warn the war is unlikely to produce a clear resolution on the battlefield. They think it’s likely to involve a lot of negotiation and compromises.

That’s not a popular opinion in Ukraine. Many citizens and President Zelenskyy want the Russians to leave the country. Zelenskyy recently told Time magazine, “We are dealing with a powerful state that is pathologically unwilling to let Ukraine go.”

Also when Ukraine reaches the limits of its ability to withstand missile and drone strikes, getting a Marshall-like plan (developed by the US and G7) to help rebuild the country, and gaining an ironclad security guarantee (either NATO membership or, if that is not possible, a US-led coalition guarantee).

“Being a buffer zone or gray zone is not good from a geopolitical point of view,” he said. “If you are a gray zone between two security blocs, two military blocs, everybody wants to make a step. This has happened with Ukraine.”

“I believe our generation has an opportunity to put an end to this. He said that Ukrainians are more ready to fight than they were in 1918.

Moscow has begun a new campaign to encourage Russians to enlist in the armed forces and fight in Ukraine, despite the Kremlin having denied needing more recruits.

The Ukrainian President and the Crisis in the Middle East: Surprises From a Young, Obscured Man in an Old Soldier’s Survival Video

A young man in one of the videos chooses to fight instead of partying with his mates and then surprises everyone by buying himself a new car after making money from his military service.

A video that was posted on December 15 shows the former girlfriend of a soldier begging her ex to get back together. A further example shows a middle-aged man leaving the factory job that doesn’t pay him enough to sign a military contract and go to the front.

Another of the videos shows a group of 30-something, well-off Russian men loading a car as they are asked by elderly women where are they going. One of the men replies: “To Georgia. For a long time. When one woman spills a bag of groceries, the men just get into the car and leave, instead of helping, while younger Russian men rush to pick up the groceries. One of the old women stated that the boys and the men had left.

Many of the videos depict the war as an escape for men who are drinking booze and living in poverty on a daily basis. Meanwhile, reports and complaints of shortages of provisions and equipment in the Russian military continue to emerge.

Russian President Putin said during a meeting with the mothers of the mobilized that it was better to be killed fighting for the motherland than to drink yourself to death.

The public was reassured by Putin at the news conference after the summit that there were no plans for additional deployment.

Putin said he was working with the Russian defense ministry to correct the situation after being questioned about continued shortages of military equipment.

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

Zelensky is the brand, beyond the man. These days it is virtually impossible for anyone to deny that the Ukrainian leader is wearing olive green t-shirts while meeting many people from Vogue journalists to military commanders.

In a new book looking at the Ukrainian president’s speeches, the Economist’s Eastern European editor, Arkady Ostrovsky, describes Zelensky as “an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances.”

“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.

This, after all, is the leader who when offered evacuation by the US as Russia launched its full-scale invasion, quipped: “I need ammunition, 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.

It all seems a long way since Zelensky thanked his supporters for a huge victory during his campaign celebrations in a converted nightclub in a war zone. He looked in a state of disbelief as he stood on stage among the confetti.

Zelensky went into decline after a few years because of his limited success. By October 2021 his approval ratings were in freefall.

Vladimir Zelensky and the International Crisis: A Memories of a Comforter in Chief during the Leptophilic War and a Promise to Washington

His bubble includes many people from his previous professional life as a TV comedian in the theatrical group Kvartal 95. In the middle of the war, a press conference on the platform of a metro station in May had good lighting and camera angles to emphasize a wartime setting.

As a comforter in chief, I remember that his nightly televised addresses brought some solace to the people of Lviv, as air raid sirens and other noise filled the sky.

Zelensky is projecting his competence in a modern, younger way, to a younger, global audience that recognizes it as such, because he is wearing T-shirts and hoodies.

“He is probably more comfortable than Putin on camera, too, both as an actor and as a digital native,” she added. “I believe both of them want to come across as relatable, not aloof or untouchable, although Zelensky is definitely doing a better job balancing authority with accessibility.”

Zelenska has shown she can be effective in international fora, showing her smarts and ability to communicate with others. Most recently, she met with King Charles during a visit to a refugee assistance center at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in London. Zelenska was not on the cover of TIME magazine, but a reference was given to her in the supporting text.

Despite the strong tailwinds at Zelensky’s back, there are subtle signs that his international influence could be dwindling. The G7 imposed a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian crude despite pleas from Zelensky that they should have set it at $30 in order to cause more pain on the Kremlin.

As Zelensky said in a recent nightly video address: “No matter what the aggressor intends to do, when the world is truly united, it is then the world, not the aggressor, determines how events develop.”

After the historic visit of Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington, the Ukrainian president gave a speech to Congress appealing for more US support.

Zelensky is sure to get that kind of hero’s welcome and will hope that extra US support will mean that Washington has truly “drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard,” as Churchill said of the Roosevelt administration in his address to Congress on December 26, 1941.

Zelensky was invited by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was about to give up the gavel. She traveled to Kyiv earlier this year for a meeting with Zelensky.

Zelensky was going to Washington on a specific mission, that was the claim made by Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona. “What he is trying to do is draw a direct correlation between our support and the survival and support and future victory of Ukraine,” Gallego, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said.

“Patriots are a defensive weapons system that will help Ukraine defend itself as Russia sends missile after missile and drone after drone to try and destroy Ukrainian infrastructure and kill Ukrainian civilians,” she said. “If Russia doesn’t want their missiles shot down, Russia should stop sending them into Ukraine.”

Zelensky was quoted as saying that there was a moment when it was clear that the fate of the war between Russia and Ukraine could not be decided without US support.

Zelensky and Biden know that this is the time to re-engage the US public as Russia’s war drags on with no end in sight.

With Republicans poised to take over the House of Representatives in the new year, his visit will play an important role in the debate overUkraine aid on Capitol Hill. A small group of pro-Donald Trump members have warned that tens of millions of dollars sent to the Ukrainians should go towards fortifying the US southern border because of the expected influx of migrants within days.

Zelensky’s 1944 March speech: From Hitler to the U.S., 1945 to the present, from WW II to the Cold War, and beyond

In March, for instance, Zelensky evoked Mount Rushmore and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream Speech” during a virtual address to Congress. He also referred to two days of infamy in modern history when Americans directly experienced the fear of aerial bombardment.

The wartime British leader sailed to the United States aboard HMS Duke of York, dodging U-boats in the wintery Atlantic and took a plane from the coast of Virginia to Washington, where he was met on December 22, 1941, by President Franklin Roosevelt before their joint press conference the next day.

Over days of brainstorming and meetings – fueled by Churchill’s regime of sherry with breakfast, Scotch and sodas for lunch, champagne in the evening and a tipple of 90-year-old brandy before bed – the two leaders plotted the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and laid the foundation of the Western alliance that Biden has reinvigorated in his support for Ukraine.

Churchill, who had pined for US involvement in World War II for months and knew it was the key to defeating Adolf Hitler, said during his visit, “I spend this anniversary and festival far from my country, far from my family, and yet I cannot truthfully say that I feel far from home.”

The Ukrainian leader is likely to appreciate the historical parallels. He paraphrased one of Churchill’s most famous wartime speeches in an emotional address to British members of parliament in March.

The first deliverables are the missile systems. They have been called the US’s “gold standard” of air defense. NATO protects them, requires the personnel who operate them to be properly trained, and they use almost 100 battalions for each weapon.

More precision weapons are vital: they ensure Ukraine hits its targets, and not any civilians remaining nearby. Russia is bombing areas it wants to capture, but it doesn’t seem to burn through hundreds of thousands of shells.

Petraeus: There will be several new features this year, most significantly the additional capabilities on the Ukrainian side: Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles; longer-range and larger precision munitions for the US-provided HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket systems) that will enable precise strikes out to 150 kilometers (twice the range of the current precision munition); additional air defense systems of various types; augmented air defenses and additional wheeled armored vehicles, as well as enormous quantities of additional ammunition of all types.

Regardless of the true nature of the aid, Biden wants Putin to hear huge sums of money to make Russia think twice about supporting the rebels and making it hard for the Europeans to help.

The remnants of the Trumpist “America First” elements of the party have questioned how much aid the US should give to the edges of eastern Europe.

Realistically, the bill for the slow defeat of Russia in this dark and lengthy conflict is relatively light for Washington, given its near trillion-dollar annual defense budget.

Clinton said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress was extraordinary and that the country’s fight against Russian aggression has proven that they are a really good investment for the United States.

The speech connected the struggle of Ukrainian people to our own revolution and to our own feelings of warmth that we want to give to our families at Christmas and to know that they are stuck in the cold.

She hopes that they will send more than one. She noted there’s “been some reluctance in the past” by the US and NATO to provide advanced equipment, but added “We’ve seen with our own eyes how effective Ukrainian military is.”

Clinton, who met Russian President Vladimir Putin as Secretary of State, said the leader was difficult to predict because of the war and his popularity at home.

“I think around now, what [Putin] is considering is how to throw more bodies, and that’s what they will be – bodies of Russian conscripts – into the fight in Ukraine,” Clinton said.

Fresh from a trip to the bloody front lines in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky strode onto the ornate US House floor on Wednesday evening in his signature green military wear to shore up his supply line.

On the dais where heads of state usually sport suits, Zelensky embraced the look of a warrior as he used confident English to claim “joint victory” in what he said was the defeat of Russia in the “battle for minds of the world.”

Although he did not mention the elephant in the room, the speech was a clear plea to Republican lawmakers, who will control the House in January, to stay with Ukraine.

Congress was planning to vote this week on a year-long spending bill that provides $45 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine and NATO allies.

Perhaps the last possible day Zelensky could address a joint meeting of Congress would be Wednesday, when Republicans are set to take over the House in a few weeks. The US has provided more than $21 billion in defense assistance in less than a year. Zelensky met with President Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday and they announced a new weapons deal.

The Battle of the Bulge: The State of the Nation Address to Ukraine and the Problem with the Kremlin-Ukrain Relations

He returned to US military history Wednesday, referring to the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, when US troops were surrounded in the snow after gaining a foothold in Europe on D-Day.

“He’s already established in the American people’s mind we’re in this together, but then pointing out that they’ll do the fighting for us – ‘just give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ That’s what Churchill said,” Kearns Goodwin told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday evening.

A state of the nation address, originally scheduled for April, was repeatedly delayed and won’t happen until next year. The annual “direct line” in which Putin answers questions from ordinary Russians has been canceled.

He handed over the Ukrainian flag signed by troops from the besieged area of Bakhmut to Pelosi, urging her to support the country. She handed him an American flag that had been flown over the US Capitol, which he carried out of the chamber.

Biden said that it was important forPutin and everyone else to see that Zelensky and he were from the same country, so that they could not succeed.

There are new funds pledged to Ukraine by the White House as well as a larger spending bill that lawmakers need to pass by Friday.

Kevin McCarthy, leader of the House Republicans, met with Zelensky and three other congressional leaders in order to get the votes he needs to become House speaker.

The only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, Indiana GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz, has expressed skepticism about some of the aid to Ukraine.

Kyiv and its Western allies are “set for a long confrontation with Russia” following President Volodymyr Zelensky’s momentous visit to Washington, Moscow said as the war in Ukraine approaches 10 months.

Russia’s foreign ministry condemned what it called the “monstrous crimes” of the “regime in Kyiv,” after US President Joe Biden promised more military support to Ukraine during Zelensky’s summit at the White House on Wednesday.

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

“Russia is preparing for maximum escalation. It is doing drills and training. When it comes to an offensive from different directions, as of now, I can say that we are not excluding any scenario in the next two to three weeks.”

Peskov added that “there were no real calls for peace.” Zelensky said in his address to the US Congress that we need peace and the 10-point plan devised by Ukraine.

Peskov told journalists, however, that Wednesday’s meeting showed the US is waging a proxy war of “indirect fighting” against Russia down “to the last Ukrainian.”

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.

Zelenskyy and Ukraine want “just peace,” and all the US has been doing is helping the country defend itself against Russia, says Sloat.

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.

Putin told reporters in Moscow that his goal is not to spin the military conflict, but to end it. “We have been and will continue to strive for this.”

Nikita Yuferev said on Thursday that he 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 told CNN that Putin’s remark was likely a slip of the tongue, and that it wasn’t intentional. In the coming days, officials will watch closely to see what figures inside the Kremlin say about it.

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.

A Defiant Christmas Address for the Ukrainian People: “We will Celebrate Our Holidays!” Revealed President Volodymyr Zelensky

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.

The nation needs to stand its ground in the face of a grim winter of energy cuts, as well as the threat of Russian attacks.

There may be no chairs around it. Our houses and streets are not as bright as they could be. And Christmas bells can ring not so loudly and inspiringly. Through explosions and gunshots or even air raid sirens.

In this battle, we have another powerful and effectual weapon, but we had been resisting evil forces for more than 300 days. The spirit and consciousness have a sword and hammer. The wisdom of God. Courage and bravery. Virtues that incline us to do good and overcome evil.”

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.

We will hug each other tightly even in total darkness. If there is no heat, we will give a big hug to each other.

Zelensky concluded: “We will celebrate our holidays! As always. We will smile and be happy. As always. The difference is one. We will not wait for a miracle. After all, we create it ourselves.”

Orthodox Christian customs state the birth of Jesus according to the Gregorian calendar and that Christmas was celebrated in Ukraine on January 7.

The Crime against Human Rights Defenders in Ukraine, a new law in Russia punishes dissent and informs the media against the crimes against humanity

A total of 16 people were killed in Russian attacks across the Kherson region on Saturday, including three state emergency workers. Another 64 people received injuries of varying severity, he said.

“These are not military facilities,” he wrote on Telegram Saturday. According to the rules, it is not a war. It is killing for the sake of fun.

He said that having established institutions which you would nearly take for granted that they would exist no matter what, collapsed under the weight of Putin’s power.

February 24 is the point of no return for a woman who still lives in Moscow. She told CNN that life was turned into a nightmare from which it was impossible to wake up and read the news. “The aggressor is our country. She said that this terrible massacre is being waged on her behalf.

Maria wants CNN to not publish her name or employer’s information because of personal security concerns. Maria is at risk of being arrested and sentenced to prison because she works for an organization that is considered a foreign agent by Russia.

The repression of dissent has been brutal. According to independent human rights monitor OVD-Info, there have been more than 19,400 detentions for protesting against the war in Russia and dozens are prosecuted every week under a new law that made it illegal to disseminate “fake” information about the invasion.

A court in Moscow used the law earlier this month when it sentenced Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin to more than eight years in prison for speaking up about the alleged killing of civilians by Russian troops in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, outside Kyiv. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the mass killings, while reiterating baseless claims that the images of civilians bodies were fake.

Any remnants of a free press have been wiped out since the war started. Western publications and social media sites have been blocked online in Russia, forcing the Russians to use virtual private networks to access the internet without fear. Data from Sensortower, an apps market research company, show the top eight VPN apps in Russia were downloaded almost 80 million times in Russia this year, despite the government’s efforts to crack down on their use.

There were 36,272 encounters between the US Border Patrol and Russians between October 2016 and September 2022, according to the agency. The number includes people who were forcibly removed from the United States by the Border force and is higher than the previous two fiscal years.

OK Russians, a non-profit helping Russian citizens fleeing persecution, said its surveys suggest those who are leaving are on average younger and more educated than the general Russian public.

If you include the Moscow liberal intelligentsia, I would say that about 70% of them are gone. People from universities, schools, artists and the like are the ones who get closed down, Soldatov said.

“If you are losing the educated middle-class portion of the population, then it matters for your economic prospects, but it also matters for the potential political reconstitution of the country,” said Kristine Berzina, a Russia expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She pointed to the mass exodus of Iranians following the 1979 revolution as an example of the consequences of large numbers leaving the country.

Maria said she is still determined to stay in Russia despite her friends and son leaving. Maria is willing to stay with her elderly mother because she doesn’t want to travel abroad. I would be less inclined to leave if I knew the borders wouldn’t be closed and I could come whenever I wanted. She told CNN that she was scared that something else could happen at any moment.

She still believes her work is important, but said she is struggling to see any hope for the future. She said that her life was like a cycle of panic, horror, shame and self-doubt.

Are you to blame? Did you do enough? Can you do something else or not, and how should you act now?” She said, “Yes.” “There are no prospects. I understood what would happen next, but I didn’t have all my life figured out. Now nobody understands anything. People do not understand what will happen to them tomorrow.

He had begun to question who he was. “The things we held dear, like the memory of the Second World War, for instance, became completely compromised,” he said, referring to Putin’s baseless claim that Russian forces are “denazifying” Ukraine.

“It’s part of the Russian national identity that the Russian army helped to win the war (against Hitler’s Germany) and now it feels absolutely wrong because this message was used by Putin. You start questioning the history,” he said, adding that the favorable reaction by some parts of the Russian society to the invasion prompted him to research pre-war rhetoric in Germany.

Maria, a historian by training, has spent years taking part in anti-government protests, describing herself as a liberal deeply opposed to Putin, a former KGB agent. I knew that our country would not be led by someone from the KGB. She said that it was too deeply anchored with horrors and deaths.

Berzina stated that the expectation of Russians in the West that there would be a wave of protests if their leaders are doing wrong does not correspond to reality.

Most opposition and opinion leaders are either in prison or outside the country. People have a huge potential for political action, but there is no leader and no power base,” she said, adding that civilians will not come out against the armed police, the National Guard, and other security forces.

“It is probably difficult for people from democratic countries to understand the realities of life in a powerful autocracy,” she said. It feels as if one is powerless in front of the big machine of death and madness.

“It’s like the central nervous system of the human body: If you mess with it, you put all sorts of systems out of whack,” says Rajan Menon, a director of the Defense Priorities think tank who recently returned from a trip to the Ukrainian capital, speaking about Russia’s power grid attacks. It is an enormous cost and an inconvenient one. It’s an effort to create pain for the civilian population, to show that the government can’t protect them adequately.”

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. “They’re different in the technicalities, but the goal is the same,” he says. Demoralizing and punishing civilians.

Moscow intends to “intimidate, leave us in the dark for the new year, cause as much damage to civilian infrastructure as possible,” Shmyhal said on Telegram.

Crime and Freedom during the First World War: Russian Life in the Afterglow of the Kyiv Violations During the Second World War

Hryn said that after the sirens sounded, life in the capital went back to normal, and that his neighbors had to hurry to get to the cinema to see the new movie. Parents took their children to school and people went to work, while others continued with holiday plans in defiance.

She told CNN that she tried to sleep on New Year’s Eve. I woke up to the sound of explosions, and they continued through the night. She said that the sirens were on until 4:30 a.m.

At least three people, including a 14-year-old, were injured and two people pulled from a damaged home on Thursday, Klitschko said earlier. The city military administration says that homes, an industrial facility and a playground in the capital were damaged during attacks on Kyiv.

At the time, Putin insisted his forces were embarking on a “special military operation” — a term suggesting a limited campaign that would be over in a matter of weeks.

Yet the war has also fundamentally upended Russian life — rupturing a post-Soviet period in which the country pursued, if not always democratic reforms, then at least financial integration and dialogue with the West.

The state has also vastly expanded Russia’s already restrictive anti-LGBT laws, arguing the war in Ukraine reflects a wider attack on “traditional values.”

The targets are still targeted for now. Some of the new laws are still unenforced. The measures may be meant to crush dissent if the moment arises.

Leading independent media outlets were forced to shut down or relocate abroad when faced with new “fake news” laws that criminalized different things than the official government line.

Restrictions extend to internet users as well. American social media giants were banned in March. Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin’s internet regulator, has blocked more than 100,000 websites since the start of the conflict.

War Against Ukraine Has Left Russia Isolated And Stuck With More Turbulent Ahelion: U.S. Embassy, Foreign Investments, and Military Campaign

Thousands of perceived government opponents — many of them political activists, civil society workers and journalists — left in the war’s early days amid concerns of persecution.

Meanwhile, some countries that have absorbed the Russian exodus predict their economies will grow, even as the swelling presence of Russians remains a sensitive issue to former Soviet republics in particular.

The banking and trading markets of Russia were shaky in the early days of the invasion. Hundreds of global corporate brands, such as McDonald’s and ExxonMobil, reduced, suspended or closed their Russian operations entirely.

President Putin wants Europe to pull back on its support for Ukraine as Europeans get angry about soaring energy costs at home. He banned oil exports to countries with a cap on prices, which is likely to make the pain in Europe worse.

The government’s tone remains unchanged when it comes to Russia’s military campaign. Russia’s Defense Ministry provides daily briefings on the successes on the ground. Putin, too, repeatedly assures that everything is “going according to plan.”

The sheer length of the war, with no immediate Russian victory in sight, suggests that Russia vastly underestimated Ukrainians’ willingness to resist.

The true number of Russian losses – officially at just under 6,000 men – remains a highly taboo subject at home. Western estimates place those figures much higher.

Indeed, Russia’s invasion has — thus far — backfired in its primary aims: NATO looks set to expand towards Russia’s borders, with the addition of long-neutral states Finland and Sweden.

Longtime allies in Central Asia have criticized Russia’s actions out of concern for their own sovereignty, an affront that would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. India and China have purchased discounted Russian oil but not all of them have supported Russia’s military campaign.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/31/1145981036/war-against-ukraine-has-left-russia-isolated-and-struggling-with-more-tumult-ahe

The Top Ten Stories of the Year 2023: The Russian Leader’s First Big Press Conference Before the War In Ukraine And What We Don’t Know About It

A December big press conference, a semi-staged event that allows the Russian leader to handle fawning questions from mostly pro-Kremlin media, was tabled until 2023.

The Kremlin has given no reason for the delays. Many suspect it might be that, after 10 months of war and no sign of victory in sight, the Russian leader has finally run out of good news to share.

When news breaks, the world comes to CNN, as it has for more than 40 years on television and more than 25 years on digital platforms. On average, more than 165 million of you came to CNN Digital from around the globe every month in 2022, according to Comscore.

The war in Ukraine proved that our news coverage needs to be global as well, and we were able to prove that by the year’s end. CNN’s teams on the ground are often involved in the line of fire, but many of the stories in our top 10 and top 100 wereUkraine live stories.

I wrote an analysis before the conflict explaining the limits of what the US and its allies would and would not do. Those limits have been contentious from the start and are only growing more so today as Russia accuses the West of going too far.

The impact on womens lives and US politics was one of the top stories of the year.

The Covid-19 tragedy in Ukraine: Deputy Head of the Office of the President of the Ukrainian Telegram, Tymoshenko, and deputy head of the office of the presiding head of state

The last few weeks of the year bring new worries in China even though interest and fear around the Covid-19 epidemic waned. History has taught us that pandemic developments know no borders.

CNN got a lot of people to listen to entertainment news. Our top entertainment story was the tragic death of Stephen “tWitch” Boss, the amiable DJ for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” There were bright moments too: like the Good Samaritans that made a difference in the lives of strangers.

For those playing along at home, every piece on our Top 100 Stories list this year received more than 3 million visits, according to our internal data.

Thank you for being here with us through it all. We promise we will be here for you in 2023, for every breaking news story and for every piece of joy, delight and triumph.

Zelensky made a change to speak Russian in his nightly address on Saturday, as Moscow launched a series of strikes in Ukraine and began to mark New Year’s.

Three people died and three more were wounded in the Donetsk region, Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine On Telegram, Tymoshenko made a statement.

One person was wounded in the Zaporizhzhia region. Two people were killed and a third was wounded in the region. Two people were wounded in the Kherson region, while one died in the Chernihiv region.

The enemy hit 26 of the civilian infrastructure. In particular, the occupants used 10 Shahed-136 UAVs, but all of them were shot down. The General Staff said in its latest operational update that the enemy made 80 attacks from multiple rocket launchers, hitting civilian settlements.

The Fate of a Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the Struggles for a Victory in the War of Ukraine

Russia continues to conduct offensive actions at the Bakhmut directions, as well as trying to improve the tactical situation at the Avdiivka directions.

The life support system of the capital is functioning normally. 30% of consumers are without electricity. He said on Telegram that it was due to emergency shutdowns.

Klitschko also reported that the restrictions were applied to check the open section of the red metro line in the city “for the presence of remnants of missile debris.”

I wish to win and have new feelings from now on. I miss it very much. I also want to travel. And I also think about personal and professional growth, because one should not stand still. I have to develop and work for the benefit of the country,” said Alyona Bogulska, a 29-year-old financier.

The symbol of the year is not a small victory, but a symbol that we survived the year, according to a pharmacy employee.

KYIV, Ukraine — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine delivered a rousing New Year’s Eve address on Saturday night, recalling a year that he said truly “began on Feb. 24” with fear over Russia’s invasion but ended with his country hopeful for victory.

Standing in darkness with a Ukrainian flag rippling gently in the breeze behind him, Mr. Zelensky recounted in a videotaped speech many notable moments from the war — including the attack on a maternity hospital, the intense fighting at the Azovstal steel plant, the destruction of a Russian bridge to Crimea, the retaking of Kherson, the sinking of a Russian flagship — as the video cut to footage that underscored his words.

“This year has struck our hearts,” he said, according to a translated transcript posted on his official website. “We’ve cried out all the tears. The prayers have been said. 311 days is a long time. We have something to say about every minute.”

What Have We Learned about the First Ukrainian War and What Are We Expect to Learn From Its Successes? – Europe is Unified now that Russia has Done It

By March, my initial shock of the war turned into a desire to play sports. Athletes could fight against Russian propaganda in the best way. We just had to tell the truth about the war and Ukrainians – how strong, kind and brave we are. We have acted together to defend our country.

The world has rallied around Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky said, from the main squares of foreign cities and their halls of government to the top of Google’s search results.

And finally, to those who felt nuclear saber-rattling was an oxymoron in 2022 – that you could not casually threaten people with nukes as the destruction they brought was complete, for everyone on the planet.

Europe is left with a set of unknowns as the year draws to a close. To recap: a military once considered the world’s third most formidable has invaded its smaller neighbor, which a year ago excelled mostly in IT and agriculture.

The West was willing to send some of its weaponry to its eastern border with Russia, despite being divided and reticent. Western officials might also be surprised that Russia’s red lines appear to shift constantly, as Moscow realizes how limited its non-nuclear options are. None of this was supposed to happen. So, what does Europe do and prepare for, now that it has?

Key is just how unexpectedly unified the West has been. Despite being split over Iraq, fractured over Syria, and partially unwilling to spend the 2% of GDP on security the United States long demanded of NATO members, Europe and the US have been speaking from the same script on Ukraine. Washington may have been more warier, and there have been autocratics like Hungary. The shift is not towards disparity. That is quite a shock.

So, the situation is essentially a stalemate at present, albeit with Russia making costly attacks in several areas, and with both sides building up forces for offensive operations expected in the late winter (likely the Russians) and spring/summer (the Ukrainians).

If Moscow’s supply chains for diesel fuel for tanks 40 miles away from its border do not function, then how can they be sure that The Button will work if Putin presses it? The greatest danger for a nuclear power is to reveal its missiles and capabilities.

America has done this before. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the position of the Soviet Union changed rapidly, and they accepted an outcome that favored the West. Had red lines been in place, America could have accepted an inferior compromise that would have hurt its security and credibility.

Jay Parini and the onset of war: a conversation with Daniel Johnson on social media and the birth of his twin sons, Born and Me

Jay Parini is a poet and novelist, and teaches at a college. His most recent book is a memoir of his time in the Highlands of Scotland in 1971 and his friendship with the Argentine writer and thinker, Luis Aragones, or “Borges and Me”. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. It is possible to view more opinions at CNN.

Perhaps most notably, of course, we see a war taking place, for the first time, in a context that includes the widespread presence of smart phones, internet connectivity, and social media and other internet sites.

Daniel Johnson, an Iraq War veteran and journalist, wrote that it was a large scale invasion that was being streamed live to the world. Those who are far away from the fighting and missile strikes are able to watch the events unfold on their phones, while the gunfire and shelling continues.

His communication skills and knowledge of social media make him a formidable opponent for Putin, even though his army pales in comparison to Russia’s.

They are getting ready for the arrival of twin boys. Kateryna, who is 34, is eight months pregnant. CNN agreed to use only first names for her and Oleg in order to protect their privacy.

When the sirens aren’t wailing, Kateryna said, there is another noise that is new to her neighborhood: the chattering of generators as homes and businesses try to compensate for being without electricity twelve for as much as 12 hours a day.

Kateryna travels to central Ukraine twice a week to use a co-working space that has popped up across the Ukrainian capital despite the risk and imminent arrival of the twins.

Moving to a free Ukraine: Helping the children of the Ukrainian army by means of Starlink, a new service provided by the Elon Musk company

These spaces have become quite professional, with furniture, heat, lighting and reliable internet, provided through Starlink terminals, bought from the company owned by Elon Musk.

Kateryna feels they both are involved in securingUkraine’s future. She helped raise money for warm clothes for the Ukrainian army in the early months of her pregnancies.

Most Ukrainians use a lot of generators at home, but Kateryna and Oleg only use a small one. It needs to cool down four hours a day and use a liter of diesel every hour to power it. They have to make a decision on which appliance to use.

Sometimes Kateryna has to shop with a flashlight because there is enough food in the stores. They keep about two months’ worth of food supplies stacked in the house, just in case the situation goes from bad to worse.

I have a job here, and Oleg can’t work from home. We have a lot of friends here. Kateryna said that it was a nightmare to move somewhere else.

“The company my husband works for has a fund and they help the Ukrainian fighters who are on the front line with equipment like drones and pick-up trucks. She said that they helped collect money for the equipment.

I want my children to live in a free Ukraine because I want them to be safe. They have the same rights as any other child in the world. She wants them to be happy and free, they should not be afraid of dying from a Russian rocket.

Her one concern – beyond giving birth to healthy children – is that she might find herself lying in the hospital amid another wave of missile attacks. She said she will pray very hard at that point.

Implications of the Makiivka Attack on Russian Forces and Arms: What Has Russia Learned Since the First Russian Militia Attack?

Regardless of whether Russia lost 400 men as Ukraine claims, or 89 as Moscow says, the result of the attack is the same: Russia’s highest single-incident death toll since the war began more than 10 months ago.

If the Russian account is accurate, it was the cell phones that the novice troops were using in violation of regulations that allowed Ukrainian forces to target them most accurately. Ukraine has not said how the attack was executed. The implications are broader for how Russia is conducting its war now.

It is telling that days after the deadliest known attack on Russian servicemen, President Vladimir Putin called for a temporary ceasefire, citing the Orthodox Christmas holiday. The move was rightly dismissed by Ukraine and the US as a cynical attempt to seek breathing space amid a very bad start to the year for Russian forces.

Russian officials said that four Ukrainian-launched HIMARS rockets hit the vocational school where its forces were housed, apparently adjacent to a large arms depot. (Another two HIMARS rockets were shot down by Russian air defenses).

Russia has failed to break up or move large arms depots because their forces cannot communicate adequately, according to Chris Dougherty, who is a senior fellow for the Defense Program at the Center for New American Security in Washington.

It’s a view shared by other experts. According to James Lewis, the director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), bad communications are common in the Russian Army.

Adding to the problem, the Ministry of Defense said after the Makiivka strikes that Russia has a record of unsafe storage of weaponry, which contributes to its high casualty rate.

He’s not the only Russian war blogger casting doubt. A post on the Telegram channel called “Grey Zone” attributed the blame for what happened in Makiivka to the soldiers. “In this case, it is to 99% a lie and an attempt to throw off the blame.”

Indeed, a number of the most recent arrivals to the war are inmates from Russian prisons, freed and transferred immediately to the Ukrainian front. One can only imagine how appealing the use of cell phones would be to prisoners accustomed to years of isolation with little or no contact with the outside world.

Semyon Pegov, who is a personal friend of President Putin, was honored with the Order of Courage at the Kremlin two weeks ago, but he did not like the Ministry of Defence’s attempts to implicate the troops in their own cell phone use.

He wondered how the ministry of defense had been so sure of the location of the soldiers that they could not have determined it using drones or a local source.

The defense ministry made a change a month after that when the butcher of Mariupol was named deputy minister for overseeing logistics. The location of the arms depot, adjacent to the Makiivka recruits, would likely have been on Mizintsev’s watch.

Still, Putin-favorite Sergei Shoigu remains defense minister — as recently as Saturday, before the Makiivka attack, telling his forces in a celebratory video: “Our victory, like the New Year, is inevitable.”

The US was contemplating sending Bradley armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine, just this week. French President Emmanuel Macron also announced he would be sending light tanks, though Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was urging the dispatch of heavier battle tanks. The Chancellor of Germany has become under increasing pressure to add its powerful Leopard 2 tanks.

Every few minutes the ground shakes as blasts echo through the battered streets of Siversk, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Sometimes it is outgoing Ukrainian fire and sometimes it is Russian fire.

An elderly woman in black pants, heavy shoes, and a dirty grey overcoat and headscarf shuffles up the street. Another explosion rings out. She flinches, her eyes open wide, but she doesn’t miss a step. She joins a crowd of several dozen, mostly elderly residents bundled up against the cold.

On the edge of the crowd, standing alone, is 72-year-old Lubov Bilenko. Her face is flat, devoid of emotion, her dark eyes without expression – the thousand-mile stare.

The Banks of Siversk: When the Russians are Gathering in the War Zone, the Ukranian Army is IntlCmd

She says in a low voice that they were scared before. “Now we’re used to it,” she says of the shelling. We no longer pay attention.

In order to collect her monthly pension, Bilenko ventured out of her apartment alone to the main road brought to town by the Ukrainian postal service. The pension for Bilenko is just short of $82 a month. It’s just enough to buy a bit of food from one of the few shops still open.

Anna Fesenko, a blonde woman with a quick smile, heads the mobile unit. Anna smiles as she and her colleagues checks documents against a list of recipients and hand out cash, and occasionally the town residents laugh.

Fesenko worked at a post office in 22 miles south of Siversk before heading the mobile unit. But in mid-fall the fighting around the town became so intense that she and her colleagues there had to evacuate.

She understands her job is not just to hand out pensions: It’s to remind the people in Siversk they haven’t been forgotten. “I think we’re the only one connection between them and the rest of the world,” she says.

Volodymyr, a 63-year-old with no name, was the first person in the line and said that his wife was afraid to come here.

The man has made it to the front. She spent months huddling with others in the basement of her apartment building while she lived in the war zone. It is a very cramped and uncomfortable existence. Yet she is willing to put up with it.

The Siversk military administration is overseen by Oleksi, who is the head. He’s nervous that so many people have gathered in public.

Russian forces are just across a wide valley, occupying hills visible from the pension distribution point. They’re about 10 kilometers (six miles) to the north.

“We are trying to choose the right time and place,” Vorobiov says of the pension handout. That means every time the mobile unit comes, it’s a different place and time to avoid being targeted by the Russians.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/08/europe/ukraine-siversk-postal-service-pensions-intl-cmd/index.html

Mosile attack in Kramatorsk, Ukraine: The perpetrators don’t deserve mercy. We need to protect our country, and we need to do so

No one was injured, she said, but she and her colleagues dispensed with formalities. They quickly handed out the cash they could to those still waiting, she said, and left.

There were missiles in the air that exploded in the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, sending flames and a large amount of smoke into the air.

Paramedics rushed to the scene to treat at least one wounded civilian. Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Honcharenko also confirmed that there had been a strike on the city, and urged residents to stay in bomb shelters.

Rescue workers searched through piles of rubble to try and locate survivors in the aftermath of Wednesday’s attack, which damaged eight apartment buildings. Authorities also evacuated people to a local school for shelter.

A country that was bordering evil. It’s necessary for a country to overcome it so that tragedies don’t happen again. We will definitely find and punish all the perpetrators. They don’t deserve mercy.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/02/europe/russia-ukraine-kramatorsk-missile-attack-intl/index.html

On the experience of fighting on the battlefield in Ukraine, as revealed by two former fighters of the Russian military company, Danilov’s wife and son

The top official in Kyiv said Russia is ready for a’maximum escalation’ of the war in Ukraine.

“These will be defining months in the war,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told Sky News in an interview broadcast Tuesday.

Two former fighters of the Russian military company who used to work there told CNN about their harrowing experiences on the battlefield in eastern Ukrainian, and how anyone who failed was immediately shot by their commanders.

The two fighters were captured by Ukrainian forces. CNN is not disclosing their identities for their own safety. Both are married with children and were recruited while in prison. One was serving a 20-year sentence for manslaughter.

The Ukrainians were in the room for security reasons. CNN told the fighters that they could end the interview at any time they wished. They spoke in detail for more than an hour.

There were 90 of us. Sixty died in that first assault, killed by mortar fire. A handful remained wounded,” said one, recalling his first assault near the village of Bilohorivka. If one group is unsuccessful another will be sent immediately. If the second one is unsuccessful, they send another group.”

The other fighter was involved in a five day assault that began in a forest near the town of Alychansk on the Luhansk-Donetsk border.

You can not help the wounded. The Ukrainians were firing heavily on us, so even if their wounds were minor, you’ve got to keep going, otherwise you’re the one getting hit by the fire.

The prisoner said a self-preservation instinct had kicked in for him, but others froze. “Some stop right there in the forest and drop their weapons. But to drop your weapons is to come under sniper fire and die.”

He said there wasn’t an evacuate of the wounded. “If you’re wounded, you roll away on your own at first, any way you can, somewhere neutral where there’s no fire, and if there’s no one around, you administer first aid to yourself,” he said.

The men said that there were a lot of casualties. “When the casualties arrive, you get orders to load them, and you don’t really think who’s dead and who’s wounded,” one of the fighters said.

They became numb to the casualties and the killing of the Ukrainian soldiers they faced. You would think that you would feel something. [after killing someone], but no, you just keep going.”

The commander told the other fighter that if anyone gets cold feet, he’d have to be eliminated. We would be eliminated if we failed to eliminate him.

PRIGOZhin’s recruitment campaign in the Rostov prisons of Russia during the Second World War II: The story of two men and the fate of their freedom

At the time, Prigozhin’s recruitment campaign in Russia’s prisons was in full swing. It’s estimated by Western intelligence officials and prison advocacy groups that between 40,000 and 50,000 men were recruited.

One of the fighters stated that most came because they had long sentences. There were some people who had only a few days left to serve, and they went anyway.

One prisoner said that the selection process was so rudimentary that older prisoners only had to show they could walk a few yards. Almost all of them were taken.

The prisoner said that for their freedom, they had to fight in Europe to fight the Nazis. At the same time, he promised us a clean history.

The two men said hundreds of prisoners were taken by bus and plane to the training ground in the Rostov region of Russia.

The training was brief and basic – handling guns for the terrible assaults they would soon be ordered to carry out. The men said they were well prepared for missions they had not signed up for.

International Team Investigation of the Ukraine-Second-Ukraine Operation ‘State of the Union’: President Biden and Russian Foreign Minister Oksana Markarova

“He did not mention anything about danger,” one said. He talked about expunging all convictions, which would take 6 months, an advance payment of 240,000 roubles, and also that we had to hold the defense on the second line.

“The command ordered me to dig in at my position, so I dug in at my position, awaiting evacuation. They sent one group of 10, and the sniper eliminated all 10,” he recalled.

“I think it was the wrong choice… I’d never participated in any military operation, especially fighting against the AFU, which refuses to give up its land. The people brought us here with the wrong idea. And so we are at war, but I don’t think it’s a just cause,” said one.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a surprise tour of Europe, meeting leaders from London to Paris and repeating his calls for NATO to send fighter jets to his country.

Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova attended President Biden’s State of the Union speech, for the second year in a row, but the war in Ukraine received far less attention in the address this time.

There’s “strong indication” Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead to supply anti-aircraft weapons to separatists in Ukraine, according to the international team investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014.

He said that the primary purpose of the camps appeared to be political reeducation, and he pointed to at least two cases where children from Ukraine were exposed to Russia.

It identified 43 facilities that are a part of the network, which “stretches from one end of Russia to the other,” including Russian-occupied Crimea, the “eastern Pacific Coast – closer to Alaska than it is to Moscow,” and Siberia, Raymond said.

According to Raymond, a camp in Chechnya and a camp in Crimea “appear to be specifically involved in training children in the use of firearms and military vehicles,” but the researchers have not seen evidence at this point that the children trained in these military camps are being sent into conflict.

In many cases, the ability of parents to provide meaningful consent may be considered doubtful, as the report found that many children taken to camps are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed length of days or weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled.

“It’s also critically important to understand that these are children who – the lack of contact that they have, or the only intermittent contact that they may have with their parents, is causing very real and potential harm on a very daily basis,” said Caitlin Howarth, also of Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.

The report said it “identified several dozen federal, regional, and local figures directly engaged in operating and politically justifying the program,” and “at least 12 of these individuals are not on U.S. and/or international sanction lists.”

Raymond noted that “we are not here today making the genocide conclusion, but we are saying that this system is consistent with the statutory basis in both the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention in terms of the prohibition on transferring children from one group to another.”

Ned Price said in a statement that the Kremlin’s efforts to deny and suppressUkraine’s identity is part of a system of forced relocation, reeducation and adoption of the country’s children.

The US State Department said in a media note that “the unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and constitutes a war crime.”

What are we seeing in the future of Cold War warfare? A candid account of the Russian involvement with NATO and the role of drones in the fight against cold war

Multiple failures of their military culture, doctrine, organizational structures and training have lead to many battles lost by the Russians. While Petraeus says this is in many ways the first open-source war, other aspects are being fought with Cold War tactics and weapons – albeit with upgraded capabilities, drones and precision munitions.

The person said that it was not completely. In an interview with The Atlantic published shortly before the Russian invasion, I explained the considerable difficulties I expected Russia would encounter and noted that an invasion force of some 190,000 was much less than what likely would be required, especially if the Ukrainians proved to be as determined as I thought they would be (and they have been even more so).

Some glimpse of what the future of warfare might look like is what we are seeing. We see the Ukrainian use of drones (of only modest range and capability) as aerial observers identifying Russian headquarters and other targets for the precision munitions the US has provided (which will double in range from 70-80 kilometers to 150 kilometers when the just announced US precision munitions arrive in Ukraine).

There would be more capable systems in the air, ocean, space, and cyberspace, as well as ground, sea, and cyberspace.

I recall an adage back in the Cold War days that stated, “If it can be seen, it can be hit; if it can be hit, it can be killed.” In truth, we didn’t have the surveillance assets, precision munitions and other capabilities needed to truly “operationalize” that adage in those days. In the future, however, just about everything – certainly every platform, base and headquarters – will be seen and thus be susceptible to being hit and destroyed (unless there are substantial defenses and hardening of those assets).

The actions that must be taken to transform our forces and systems are summarized by this. We must do everything possible to make sure that we don’t get into a conflict with other great powers because we want to build a strong and prosperous nation.

Thanks to Putin, the description of NATO as suffering from “brain death” by French President Macron in late 2019 has turned out to be more than a bit premature.

Petraeus said all of the above. There were a lot of things that did not go as planned, from poor campaign design to poor training, and a culture that condones war crimes.

Petraeus: Not at all. Russia still has enormous military capacity and is certainly still a nuclear superpower, as well as a country with enormous energy, mineral and agricultural blessings. In addition, it has a population of nearly twice as many as the next largest European countries, Germany and Turkey.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/opinions/petraeus-how-ukraine-war-ends-bergen-ctpr/index.html

How Do We Expect Russia to Win in the First World War? The Unsuccessful Progress of the Ukraini Army as a Cold War

A dictator who embraces innumerable grievances and extreme revanchist views that undermine his decision-making is still leading it.

Stalin was said to have commented thatQuantity has a quality all its own. Russia has a bigger population than Ukraine, will that affect the outcome of the war over the long term?

Nonetheless, it is estimated that as many as 300,000 new recruits and mobilized reservists are being sent to the frontlines, with up to 100,000-150,000 more on the way. And that is not trivial – because quantity does, indeed, matter.

While Ukrainians are aware of what they are fighting for, many of the Russian soldiers are mostly from ethnic and sectarian minorities in the Russian Federation.

And the Ukrainians also have demonstrated a very impressive ability to learn how to employ new weapons systems and vehicles much more rapidly than anyone anticipated, as they want to master new capabilities as quickly as is possible and get back to the fight.

I know that it is much easier to second-guess from the inside than it is from the outside, and I think that is because of the fact that I was at the White House. But there are some additional capabilities (advanced drones, even longer-range precision munitions, fighter aircraft, and additional air defense and counter-drone capabilities) that I would like to see us provide sooner rather than later.

Ukraine is going to need to change from eastern bloc aircraft to western ones eventually. They have more pilots than aircraft at the moment, and there isn’t any more jets to give them.

So, we might as well begin the process of transition, noting that it will take a number of months, regardless, to train pilots and maintenance personnel. The Administration has done a very impressive job and proven to be the indispensable nation in this circumstance, and it has important ramifications for other situations around the world.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/opinions/petraeus-how-ukraine-war-ends-bergen-ctpr/index.html

How Russian war fought against Taiwan: Is it a relic of the Ottoman Empire? The case of the Moskva

Bergen: The quasi-private Wagner Group is the force that Putin sends into the meat grinder of the toughest battles. Any thoughts on using mercenaries, many of whom are convicts, as a tactic?

What Russia has done with mercenaries is rather innovative but also inhumane, as it involves throwing former convicts into battle ascannon fodder and with little or no concern for their survival.

The tactics and practices that foster development of well-trained, disciplined, capable, and cohesive units that have trust in their leaders and soldiers on both the left and right are not the tactics or practices that foster this.

What are the lessons for the Chinese to learn from Ukraine if they were to attack Taiwan over a body of water instead of a land border? The Moskva, the flagship of the Russia’s Black Sea navy, was sunk.

If the target of the operation has a large population willing to fight for its survival and are supported by major powers, it can be a good idea to conduct such an operation.

Petraeus: Yes, I believe that’s true. This is the first war in which smartphones and social media have been so widely available and also so widely employed. The result is unprecedented transparency and an extraordinary amount of information available – all through so-called “open sources.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/opinions/petraeus-how-ukraine-war-ends-bergen-ctpr/index.html

What will we learn from the 2003 Moscow “PUT IN DECLARES WAR ON UKRAINE”? A 222-year question about the end of the war in Ukraine

That said, there does not seem to be a particularly innovative new plan, given the limitations of the professional capabilities of the Russian forces and their demonstrated inability to generate “combined arms effect” – to integrate the actions of tanks with infantry, artillery/mortars, engineers, explosive ordnance disposal, electronic warfare, fixed and rotary wing close air support, air defenses, effective command and control, drones, etc.

Beyond that, I believe we will see Ukrainian forces that are much more capable than the Russians at achieving the kind of combined arms effects that I described earlier and that thus enable much more effective offensive operations and can unhinge some of the Russian defenses. We may not see this until the spring or summer because the amount of time required for Ukrainian forces to receive and train on the new western tanks is too long.

In 2003 you famously asked a rhetorical question: “tell me how this ends.” How will the war in Ukranian end?

The evening is on February 23, 2022, a date that is 222 years ago. The editor of a news site relaxes with a bath and candles. A woman is going to bed and planning to celebrate her husband’s birthday. A journalist in Moscow has delayed his travel plans to Kyiv.

The next day, my phone kept buzzing with missed calls and messages. There is a headline on the website that said: “PUT IN DECLARES WAR ON UKRAINE.”

In the space of a year, the war has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions more. It has unleashed unfathomable atrocities, decimated cities, driven a global food and energy crisis and tested the resolve of western alliances.

From Moscow to Ukraine: When Russian missiles began to fall in February 2022, Zaporizhzhia became a nation without a trace

February 23, 2022, Zaporizhzhia. I went to bed thinking that I would celebrate my husband’s birthday. Our life was getting better. My husband was running his own business. Our daughter had started school and made friends there. We were fortunate to find a special needs nursery for our son, thanks to our support services. I had enough time to do my job. I felt happy.

We are trying to live in the here and now. But the truth is, we are heartbroken. While physically we are in Prague, our hearts have remained in Ukraine.

Thanks to the opportunities for Ukrainians provided by the Czech Republic, my husband got a job. I found special needs classes for my son. He now attends an adaptation group for Ukrainian children and has a learning support assistant. My daughter goes to a Czech school while studying in her Ukrainian school remotely.

That morning we woke up to learn that the invasion started. The war was denounced in an open letter co-signed by 12 Russian writers, directors and cultural figures. The petition was published and tens of thousands of Russian citizens signed it.

On the third day we, my husband and I, left Russia. I felt that it was some kind of moral obligation. I could no longer stay on the territory of the state that has become a fascist one.

We moved to Berlin. The refugee camp next to the main railway station had been home to thousands of Ukrainians. I began to write a book. This is how it begins:

As I write, Russia has just fired dozens of Kalibr missiles towards several cities in Ukraine, including my adopted city of Odesa. We are forced to run for shelter as air raid sirens blare. A pot of borscht is brought to me by my landlady.

What’s changed since Russian missiles first began falling on February 24, 2022? The Ukrainian people were used to fear, but as they stand up to the drones and rockets they are angry.

A year into the full-scale invasion, my passport is a novel in stamps. My life is split between London, where I teach Ukrainian literature, and Ukraine, where I get my lessons in courage.

The Kremlin and the West predicted that my capital would fall in 3 days, but it did not. The Russians have only managed to bring closer to eternity the number of stars in Kyiv these dark winter nights.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a senior fellow named Andrei Kolesnikov. He is the author of several books on the political and social history of Russia, including “Five Five-Year Liberal Reforms.” The history of Russian modernization and Egor-GAidar’s Legacy.

It seems that we have had several eras. When Putin received 80% approval from the population after a long period of stagnant ratings, it was the first time that euphoria had set in.

He canceled the future by aborting the past. It is easier to live this way if you are supported by your superiors and taken for granted by propaganda.

For me personally and my family, what happened was a catastrophe to which it is impossible to adapt. As an active commentator on the events, I was labeled by the authorities as a “foreign agent,” which increased personal risk and reinforced the impression of living in an Orwellian anti-utopia.

On the evening of February 23 I washed my dog, cleaned the house, took a bath and lit candles. I have a cozy, one-bedroom apartment in a northern district of Kyiv. I loved taking care of it. I loved the life I had. All of it – the small routines and the struggles. That night was the last time my life mattered.

I remember talking to colleagues, trying to assemble and coordinate a small army of volunteers to strengthen the newsroom. And calling my parents to organize buying supplies.

I knew the life I had was falling apart, but it began with the small things. I no longer have to worry about what cup of tea I drank, or whether or not I took a shower. The battle mattered more than the life itself.

And besides the obvious battles, there was another one to fight – trying to claim my life back. The life Russia stole from me and millions of Ukrainians.

My ambitions were no longer important to me. The only thing that was important was raising the flag and showing that we are still fighting despite the circumstances.

I was not able to enjoy my victories on the track. The only way they could be done was because so many defenders had died. But I got messages from soldiers on the frontline. My main motivation to stay alive was that they were happy to follow our success.