Vladimir Putin declares Ukraine as a Russian power: A bellicose speech on Friday during the Russian annexation of Crimea

On Friday, Putin signed a decree stating that four Ukrainian regions are part of Russia as the Kremlin seeks to solidify its hold over Ukrainian territory through an illegal annexation.

In violation of international law, Moscow attempted to annex four Ukrainian regions last October, including one that had been held by Russian-backed rebels for eight years.

Putin, however, attempted to claim that the referendums reflected the will of “millions” of people, despite reports from the ground suggesting that voting took place essentially – and in some cases, literally – at gunpoint.

“I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me. For everyone to remember. People in Luhansk and Donetsk are becoming citizens. The Russian president said during the ceremony that it would be forever.

The Russian president believes that the annexation was an effort to correct a mistake made after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Putin’s speech echoed his major foreign policy aim: restoring Russia as a major global power charged with protecting the Russian speaking world from the continued threat posed by Western forces.

Russia plans to fly its flag over over 100,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, which is the largest forcible annexation of land in Europe since 1945.

The leader of Russia spoke in St. George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, the same place where he made the announcement that the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea was part of Russia.

A number of Russian cabinet members and the Russian-imposed leaders of the Ukrainian regions sat in the audience for Mr. Putin.

As Russia reels from its military failure in Lyman, the Kremlin has sought to use its propaganda channels to amplify President Vladimir V. Putin’s core argument — emphasized in his bellicose speech on Friday — that in Ukraine, Russia is at war with the collective West, whom he calls “Anglo-Saxons.”

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

Why Putin isn’t losing his touch at reading Russia’s mood: What Ukrainians have done in Ukraine during the February 5-28 War

WASHINGTON — The United States concluded some years ago that small nuclear weapons are far better than a weapon for terror and intimidation.

Russia launched another barrage of strikes targeting Ukraine’s energy grid Dec. 5, knocking out electricity and water for many residents. Five days later, Russian attacks left over a million people without power in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa.

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. Much of the provinces’ civilian populations has fled fighting since the war began in February, and people who did vote sometimes did so at gunpoint.

The hold of Russia over the two eastern regions is considered to be Mr. Putin’s primary goal and could allow the Kremlin to declare a victory at a time when some in Russia have criticized Russian forces for not doing enough.

The possibility that the war could be heading for a bloody new twist was weighing on the minds of the military and political leaders in Washington Monday. The revulsion they felt about Putin was caused by the fact that he was again unleashing callous warfare against civilians.

But Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t buying it. “We will not allow Russia to wait out and build up its forces,” he told the G-20 meeting in Bali earlier this month.

That is the worrying thing. The talk in Russia doesn’t involve ending a war, but about fixing the mistakes that forced the Russians to retreat and double down in Ukraine.

Above all, many of the best and brightest in virtually every field have now fled Russia. Writers, artists, journalists and some of the most creative technologists are included.

CNN is unable to verify the Russian figures, but the 40 kilometers (around 25 miles) traffic tailbacks at the border with Georgia, and the long lines at crossings into Kazakhstan and Finland, speak to the backlash and the strengthening perception that Putin is losing his fabled touch at reading Russia’s mood.

“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 narrative was focused on general statements of progress and avoided detail about current military operations. The Kremlin never acknowledged a major failure in the war until it was too late after the devastating loss in Kharkiv Oblast.

He used the same tactic of annexing another country and now threatens nuclear strikes if it tries to take the annexed territory back.

U.S. officials maintain that the risk remains low, having detected no evidence of a nuclear mobilization. They began to game out scenarios after the conflict began because they were more concerned about the possibility than before, The Times reported. The world should respond if Putin breaks the nuclear taboo. Here are the things people are saying.

Russian Action Against the War on Ukraine: Seismology and Geopolitics in the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions

Both Danish and Swedish seismologists recorded explosive shockwaves from close to the seabed: the first, at around 2 a.m. local time, hitting 2.3 magnitude, then again, at around 7 p.m., registering 2.1.

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

Russia denies responsibility and says it has launched its own investigation. John Brennan, the former CIA chief, said Russia has the know-how to damage these lines with explosion, and that Russia could lay down bombs at the water’s edge.

The most likely culprit for the sabotage would be Russia, and the result would be a message to Europe that Russia can reach beyond Ukraine’s borders. So who knows what he might be planning next.”

Europe raced to replenish gas reserves ahead of winter, while limiting demands from Russian supplies and searching for replacement providers, when it became apparent that Nord Stream 2 was not going to be operational.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive has taken key pockets of Russian-Controled territory, including the transportation hub city of Lyman, which has compounded Putin’s problems.

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

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

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

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.

In the Russian front line, Lyman was an important link for both ground communications and logistics. Russia annexed both the Luhansk region and the Krasnoyarsk region in the Donetsk region on Friday after the local “Referendum” was held at gunpoint.

Kadyrov blamed 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.

Meanwhile, on the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula, the governor of the city of Sevastopol announced an emergency situation at an airfield there. The Russian held resort had several explosion and billows of smoke visible from a distance. Authorities said a plane rolled off the runway at the Belbek airfield and ammunition that was reportedly on board caught fire.

The wide bombardment echoed the early days of Russia’s scattershot initial invasion in February, but also underlined that the conflict in Ukraine, which for months appeared to be descending into a slow and painful grind in the Donbas, has erupted once again as winter nears.

All this adds up to a complex path ahead for the Zelensky administration, especially if liberating Crimea from Russia is part of the definition of victory envisioned by most Ukrainians. For the time being, and true to form, the tough guy from Kryvyi Rih shows no sign of backing down.

The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov, said 24 civilians were killed in an attack this week on a convoy trying to flee the Kupiansk district. He called it “сruelty that can’t be justified.” He said 13 children and a pregnant woman were among the dead.

The Security Service of Ukranian posted photos of the convoy that was attacked. There were burned corpses in the bed of the truck that was blown up. Another vehicle at the front of the convoy also had been ablaze. Bodies lay on the side of the road or still inside vehicles, which appeared pockmarked with bullet holes.

Ihor Murashov, the director-general of the Zaporizhnia nuclear power plant, and the collapse of Lyman-alpha

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

Russia did not publicly comment on the report. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Russia told it that “the director-general of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was temporarily detained to answer questions.”

There is repair work taking place across Ukraine. Most power plants have begun to supply energy to the national grid again after they were temporarily shut down by Moscow, according to Ukrenergo.

The governor of the region said four people were killed by Russian shelling on Friday. The governor of the southern Ukrainian region says the Russian army hit Mykolaiv twice in one night with missiles and drones.

The US has offered more than $60 billion in assistance since Biden took office, while only Republicans voted against the latest aid package.

It comes two days after an eruption damaged a crucial bridge to Crimea and dealt a strategic blow to the Kremlin. Putin was wounded in an explosion that he blamed on Ukraine, and he was under pressure to respond with force because it had been weeks of Russian losses.

Russian forces in Lyman were plagued by desertion, poor planning and late arrival of reserves, according to an article published by the Komsomolskaya Pravda.

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

The Russian War in Ukraine: How the Kremlin has become a Campaign of Fossil Adversaries to Kill the Ukranians

The soldiers said they had been forced to retreat because they were battling with NATO soldiers as well.

These are no longer fun to be around. The deputy commander of a Russian battalion told the show’s war correspondent that they are a part of a systematic and clear offensive by NATO forces. The soldier claimed that his group had been intercepting conversations on their radios from other countries.

Truth, the saying goes, is the first casualty in war. Nowhere is that more true than in Russia, where the Kremlin has engaged in a campaign of false advertising to sell its invasion of Ukraine to the public.

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.

The conflict is grave and far-reaching and it has been happening for some time. The consequences we have already seen underscore the importance of Russia not succeeding.

Both European and Russian leaders have called for the West to be punished for damaging the Nord Stream gas lines after underwater explosions last month.

He said the West accused them of blowing up the gas line. “We must understand the geopolitical confrontation, the war, our war with the West on the scale and extent on which it is unfolding. We must join this fight with a mortal enemy who does not hesitate to use any means, including the use of exploding gas pipelines.

The nonstop campaign may be working 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.

Moscow and Tehran have sought to foment their ideologies beyond their borders. That’s why the struggles of the Ukrainian and Iranian people will have repercussions beyond their countries.

Russian hopes of a swift seizure have been dashed, with most of the army’s resources on the defensive over 600 miles of battle lines strung along the eastern and southern reaches of Ukraine.

Putin may not have the options to disrupt the counter-offensives of the Ukranians if Russia uses its limited supply of precision weapons.

The primary utility, many U.S. officials say, would be as part of a last-ditch effort by Mr. Putin to halt the Ukrainian counteroffensive, by threatening to make parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. Some of the most sensitive discussions in the administration are described by the officials on the condition of anonymity.

The Ukrainian government and people know the danger of the Russian mix of missiles, which if utilized will wreak havoc among the civilian population.

Musk suggested in the poll that re-doing elections in the region of the country illegally annexed by Russia should be overseen by the UN. The land grab was followed by a series of shams that have been widely dismissed as “shams” by the world.

A majority of respondents on Twitter voted “No” in response to Musk’s poll. In a follow-up tweet, Musk appeared to blame these results on a “bot attack.”

Musk himself and one of his companies, SpaceX, became involved early on in the war in Ukraine, after SpaceX sent Starlink internet terminals, which can be operated from anywhere with power and a clear view of the sky, to the war-torn country.

But his latest musings were not well-received by Ukrainian officials, after a months-long war that has left a trail of untold devastation in the region.

As Russian troops began to amass on Ukraine’s borders in the weeks preceding the February assault, around 55% of Ukrainians said they didn’t trust Zelensky to lead them into war. The rating was influenced by him not keeping his campaign promises and failing to have an effective fight against corruption.

Musk continued to tweet out defenses for his initial Twitter thread, seeming to suggest that there was little chance of victory for Ukraine, which recently began swiftly reclaiming territory in its northeast, including the strategically important transport hub of Lyman.

The commentary was written a day after Musk’s company announced lower than expected production and delivery numbers for the third quarter. It also comes as his legal battle with Twitter heats up over his attempt to back out of his proposed $44 billion deal to buy the company.

The World is Waiting for Its End: The David v. Goliath Campaign in Iran and its Challenge to the United States

The world affairs columnist is a former CNN producer and correspondent named Frida Ghitis. She contributes weekly to CNN, has a column for The Washington Post and is a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. There are more opinions on CNN.

On Sunday, 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.”

Nobody knows what happens next. No one knows how all this ends. The world stands at an edge as the people in Iran and Ukraine fight for their freedom. History is waiting to be written.

These David v. Goliath battles show bravery that is almost unimaginable to the rest of us – and is inspiring equally courageous support in places like Afghanistan.

Is Putin really overthrown? The spark of Zhina, the spark of the Iranian revolution, and the fate of the regime that killed Niloofar Hamedi

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

Iranian women are dancing around fires in the night and throwing their headscarf into the flames in defiance of their authoritarian regime, which requires them to wear a hijab.

It’s why women are climbing on cars, waving their hijab in the air, like a flag of freedom, and gathering crowds of supporters in city streets, and in universities, where security forces are opening fire to try and silence them.

After all, it was less than a decade ago that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military entered Syria’s long civil war, helping to save the dictator Bashar al-Assad (as Iran had).

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

The 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.

Putin went to Iran before the start of his war in Ukraine, and it was his first trip outside the Soviet Union since then. Is it possible that Iran has trained Russian forces and supplied Russia with advanced drones to kill Ukrainians?

These are two regimes that, while very different in their ideologies, have much in common in their tactics of repression and their willingness to project power abroad.

Niloofar Hamedi was the first journalist to report on the case of Mahsa Amini. In Russia as well, journalism is a deadly profession. So is saying something bad about Putin. After trying and failing to kill Navalny, Putin’s people made charges to keep him in the colony indefinitely.

There’s more than just interest in the low probability that the Iranian regime can be overthrown. 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.

Arms for the People: The Case of Vladimir Zlatev and the First Crack at International Arms-Export in the Ukranian Regime

Putin has become one of the most disliked people in the world. A Pew survey of 18 countries found positive views of the Russian leader at an incredible 10% or less.

Mr. Zlatev and his new business partner, a local osteopath, took their first crack at international arms dealing. The New York Times obtained contract documents, as well as other records, that show the deal relied upon layers of middleman and transit across seven countries. And it exists in a legal gray area, designed to skirt the arms-export rules of other countries.

They wrote to the ministry that time is of the essence. They outlined a plan to sell American, Bulgarian and Bosnian arms to Ukraine.

A second senior administration official provided a summary of the aid given by the US to Ukraine. We enabled our Allies to transfer air defense systems of their own to Ukraine – including Slovakia’s transfer of a critical S-300 system in April. In August, President Biden announced a new assistance package that included new orders for 8 new NASAMS. We will giveUkraine what it needs to defend itself.

CNN’s Peter Bergen: The Cost of Chaos: The Russians, the American-Suspected War and the War in Afghanistan

Peter Bergen is a CNN national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are of his own. There are more opinions on CNN.

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

His revisionist account demonstrates that the war in Ukraine is based on his belief that Russia has always been part of the Soviet Union.

The Soviets planned to install a puppet government and leave the country as soon as possible after they invaded Afghanistan, according to a new book by a historian.

The US was reluctant to escalate the support they gave to the Afghan resistance due to fears of a bigger conflict with the Soviet Union. The Afghans received the anti-aircraft missiles from the CIA in 1986, which ended the air superiority of the Soviets.

It would be a worry if Western backers failed to demonstrate further progress on the battlefield with billions of dollars worth of military kit. But capitulation to Russia would be a political death sentence.

The Russians have a problem with this threat. “The Russians have seemingly adapted to the presence of HIMARs [American-supplied artillery] on the battlefield by pulling their big ammo depots back outside of the range,” Chris Dougherty, a senior fellow for the Defense Program and co-head of the Gaming Lab at the Center for New American Security in Washington, told me in an interview.

Vladimir Kyiv and the Minister of Defense: What do they know about Russian war crimes against Ukraine? A recent interview with Vladimir Chernyov in the State Duma

The fall of the soviet Union was caused by the pullout of soviet forces from Afghanistan two years earlier.

Looking further back into the history books, he must also know that the Russian loss in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 weakened the Romanov monarchy. 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.

On February 22 – just two days before Russia’s invasion – former US President Donald Trump, who has always fawned over Putin, publicly said that the Russian autocrat was “genius” and “savvy” for declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine independent and moving his troops there in a prelude to full-blown invasion.

The Great Patriotic War, also known in Russia as the World War II, is a key feature of Putinism. 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.

The Russian empire was dissolved in 1917 when the First World War ended and again in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The head of the defense committee in Russia’s State Duma demanded that officials stop lying in a recent interview with Russian propaganda expert, Vladimir Solovyov.

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

Valuyki is in Russia’s Belgorod region, near the border with Ukraine. When it comes to attacking targets across the border, it is generally adopted by Kyiv that they don’t confirm nor deny.

“Inept commanders, who did not bother to and were not accountable, for the processes and gaps that exist today, are not the cause of the Ministry of Defense being cast a shadow over.” “Indeed, many say that the Minister of Defense [Sergei Shoigu], who allowed this situation to happen, could, as an officer, shoot himself. Officer is an unfamiliar word for many.

Kadyrov has been less reticent about blaming Russian commanders since Russia retreated from the strategic Ukrainian city of Lyman.

“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 recently said in another Telegram post that, if he had his way, he would give the government extraordinary wartime powers in Russia.

Kadyrov said he would invoke martial law in the country and use any weapons because they are at war with the NATO bloc.

The Bidens have been debating whether there was a way for the wounded Russian leader to find out. They have offered no details, knowing that secrecy may be the key to seeking any successful exit and avoiding the conditions in which a cornered Mr. Putin reaches for his battlefield nuclear weapons. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, reiterated on Friday that Mr. Biden had no new intelligence about nuclear weapons use and said she “saw no indications” the Russians were “preparing to use them.”

His logic came right out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to which Mr. Biden referred twice in his comments at a Democratic fund-raiser in New York, a good indication of what is on his mind. In that famous case — the closest the world came to a full nuclear exchange, 60 years ago this month — President John F. Kennedy struck a secret bargain with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, to remove American missiles from Turkey.

With that deal, which came to light only later, a disaster that could have killed tens of millions of Americans and untold numbers of Soviet citizens was averted.

Ukrainian Cyber-Spam Attacks on Kyiv During the Monday Morning Broad-Bridge Blastdown: Security Minister Sergey Aksyonov Revisited

A wave of missiles, rockets and drones has struck dozens of locations across Ukraine since Monday, according to officials, targeting civilian infrastructure in several major cities, including Kyiv, located hundreds of miles from the front lines in the east and south.

Over the last three days, the Russians have been using a mix of their missile stocks. The majority were air-launched cruise missiles, some delivered by bombers based near the Caspian Sea. But they also deployed ship-launched Kalibrs from the Black Sea, ground-launched Iskander cruise missiles and dozens of attack drones.

For several hours on Monday morning Kyiv’s subway system was suspended, with underground stations serving as bunkers. Rescue workers worked to free people from the rubble of the strikes that lifted the air raid alert in the city.

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.

In his remarks Saturday night, Mr. Zelensky said that blackouts have persisted throughout various parts of Ukraine including in the capital, Kyiv. Some are what he considers to be emergency internet disruptions caused by attacks. Others are what he called “stabilization” outages, or planned blackouts on a schedule.

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

Recent days have meanwhile shown that sites beyond the current theater of ground fighting are far from immune to attacks. It remains unclear exactly how the Kerch bridge bombing was carried out – and Kyiv has not claimed responsibility – but the fact that a target so deep in Russian-held territory could be successfully hit hinted at a serious Ukrainian threat towards key Russian assets.

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.

“All over Ukraine, the air raid sirens will not abate. The rockets continue to hit. Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded. I ask you: do not leave your shelters. Take care of your family and stay safe. Zelensky said to hang in there and be strong.

Ukraine’s allies understand this need. General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that he would look for air defense options for the Ukrainians after Russia attacked their civilians.

“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 UN Secretary-General called the attacks unacceptable and civilians were paying the highest price.

The Kerch Bridge Explosion, the Lone Star, and Business: CNN’s View of the State of Ukraine after the G7 General Meeting, and CNN Opinion

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

The author is a global affairs analyst, Michael Bociurkiw. He is a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council and once had the job of representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He is a regular contributor to CNN Opinion. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion.

There were fears of an attack from the Russian Federation after the massive explosion that hit the important and symbolic Kerch Straight bridge over the weekend.

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. 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. (Normally at this time of the day, nearby restaurants would be heaving with customers, and chatter of plans for upcoming weddings and parties).

Monday’s attacks also came just a few hours after Zaporizhzhia, a southeastern city close to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, was hit by multiple strikes on apartment buildings, mostly while people slept. Several dozens were injured in the deaths of 17 people.

Repairs to power plants and substations are not a new thing for energy operators in Ukraine. Most of the towns and villages which terrorists wanted to abandon already have electricity and communication.

In scenes reminiscent of the early days of the war when Russian forces neared the capital, some Kyiv media outlets temporarily moved their operations to underground bomb shelters. In one metro station serving as a shelter, large numbers of people took cover on platforms as a small group sang patriotic Ukrainian songs.

Millions of people in cities across Ukraine will be in bomb shelters most of the day, while businesses have been asked to shift work online as much as possible.

With so many asylum seekers going home, the attacks could cause another blow to business confidence.

In the days following the bridge explosion, Putin said, “further acts of terrorism on the territory of Russia will be harsh… have no doubt about that.”

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

The Ukrainian Explosion in November 2004: When Putin was humiliated, he became the next-to-leading commander of Russia’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 sense of jubilation via text messages.

The message was obvious for the world to see. Putin doesn’t want to be humiliated. He will not admit defeat. And he is quite prepared to inflict civilian carnage and indiscriminate terror in response to his string of battlefield reversals.

Facing increasing criticism at home, as well as on state- controlled television, has placed Putin on thin ice.

Faced with growing setbacks, the Kremlin appointed a new overall commander of Russia’s invasion. There isn’t much sign that the Ukrainian counter-offensives can be stopped in time for the end of the year.

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

To show unity and resolve is the most important thing for the west right now against a man who tends to exploit divisions. Western governments need to realize that sanctions have little if any impact on Putin. They need to keep training the Ukrainians and providing arms, even if it means sending military experts closer to the battlefield to speed up integration of high technology weapons.

Furthermore, high tech defense systems are needed to protect Kyiv and crucial energy infrastructure around the country. With winter just around the corner, the need to protect heating systems is urgent.

Joe Biden, the U.S. and Ukraine, a Cold War with the Russians, and the Need for a Protected World

Turkey and the Gulf states, which receive many Russian tourists, need to be pressured into coming on board for the West to furtherisolated Russia with trade and travel restrictions.

President Joe Biden spoke with the president of Ukraine on Monday after Russian missiles hit cities across the country, and promised continued US security assistance.

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 he uses the war to praise himself.

Asked Thursday about Russian warnings that the Patriot system would be “provocative,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Pat said the comments would not affect US aid to Ukraine.

The US has not delivered NASAMS toUkraine as of late September. Brig. was there at the time. Gen. Patrick Ryder said two systems were expected to be delivered in the next two months, with the remaining six to arrive at an undetermined date.

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 CNN that he did the best he could in subsequent packages to meet those needs.

Kirby said on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” that it was obvious that he was feeling the pressure both at home and overseas.

The lesson of the horrible war that Putin didn’t teach us during his first term in power installation attacks on Ukrainian civilians, as reported by the New York Times, Monday

The city dwellers, who had fought the war in the subways and were stuck in air raid shelters for months, had to return to their normal lives because of the attacks.

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

The bombing of power installations, in particular, Monday appeared to be an unsubtle hint of the misery the Russian President could inflict as winter sets in, even as his forces retreat in the face of Ukrainian troops using Western arms.

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.

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

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

Western concerns that Monday could be the beginning of another pivot in the conflict were underscored by the President of France.

He was telling people where he was going to go in the winter. Vindman told CNN that he is going to try and force the Ukrainian population to compromise by going after the infrastructure.

If we had modern equipment, we could raise the number of missiles downed and not kill innocent civilians, as Zhovkva suggests.

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.

The lesson of this horrible war is that nothing Putin has done has strengthened the nation he doesn’t believe has the right to exist.

The mother of three told Anderson Cooper she was angry at a new round of Russian terror, which she said left her in fear for her life.

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

The Russian President said, as soon as we make a move, do something in response – noise, clamor, crackle for the whole universe.

All notions of right and wrong are irrelevant in the age of nuclear weapons, which accept self-defense, justice and punishment for wrongdoers. It really doesn’t matter who was the aggressor, who the aggrieved, who committed crimes against civilians, who was merely acting in self-defense.

It doesn’t matter to you who was right or wrong in the exchange of nuclear missiles in which hundreds of millions could die. No historians will survive to tell the story.

President Biden needs to ponder about alternatives and dispatch his diplomats to Russia so he can give Putin a break. President Zelensky of Ukraine must be pressured to agree on an immediate cease-fire.

WARSAW — President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus announced on Monday that Russian troops would return to his country in large numbers, a replay of the military buildup there that preceded Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine.

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

He gave no details on Monday of the size or precise purpose of the new joint force, stirring speculation that Belarus might send troops into Ukraine to help Russia’s flailing military campaign. Alternatively, he could be preparing his country for the arrival of thousands of freshly drafted Russian soldiers, some of them former convicts and many of them ill trained.

The Belarusian strongman, who has so far resisted pressure from Moscow to send in his own troops, accused Ukraine, which shares a long border with Belarus, of planning attacks from the south, without citing evidence.

Any further Belarusian involvement in the war could also have a psychological impact, Puri suggested. “Everyone’s mind in Ukraine and in the West has been oriented towards fighting one army,” he said. The war is a story about the reunification of the lands of ancient Rus states that would play into Putin’s narrative.

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 very, very damaging to the image of the country.

The deputy foreign minister who fled after being jailed under Mr. Lukashenko said he was caught between Russian pressure to help the demoralized forces in Ukraine and a desire to stay in power.

Moscow’s Air Defense Forces in the Light of the Kyiv Mass Mass Shooting and the November 11th Presidential Aerial Assault

On Monday state television broadcasted the suffering, as well as flaunted it. There was a lot of smoke, carnage and empty store shelves in central Kyiv and it was predicted months of freezing temperatures there.

Zelensky references one video from Monday where a soldier uses a shoulder-held missile to shoot down a Russian projectile.

As Ukraine races to shore up its missile defenses in the wake of the assault, the math for Moscow is simple: A percentage of projectiles are bound to get through.

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

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

This week, some of the inventory was dispatched. Russia has recently been using less precise and older version of the Kh-22 missiles, which still have large inventories, according to Western officials. Weighing 5.5 tons, they are designed to take out aircraft carriers. A KH-22 was responsible for the dozens of casualties at a shopping mall in Kremenchuk in June.

The Russians have been adapting the S-300 to be used as an offensive weapon. These have wrought devastation in Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv, among other places, and their speed makes them difficult to intercept. But they are hardly accurate.

He told CNN that it was the first time since the start of the war that Russia has targeted energy infrastructure.

Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday that more systems needed to be put in place to stop missile attacks. “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. There is a need for more if some of them are not shot down.

Estimating the proportion of Iranian-made Shahed drones being eliminated is more difficult, because so many are being used. Zelensky said that he received a message every 10 minutes about the use of Iranian Shaheds. But he also said the bulk of them were being shot down.

Warheads, missiles, and layered air defense: The Ukrainian Warfare and the transition to western-rigid air defense

At the meeting on Wednesday, a list of Ukrainian wish-lists was shown, which included missiles for their existing systems as well as a transition to Western-origin layered air defense system.

The system is capable of protecting airspace against missiles, as well as some aircraft, and it is often considered the most capable long range weapon. Because of it’s long range and high altitude, it could shoot down Russian missiles and planes far away from their intended targets.

Western systems are beginning to trickle in. A new era of air defense has begun after the arrival of the first IRIS-T from Germany and two units of the US National Advanced Surface-to- Air Missile System (NASAM), according to the Ukrainian Defense Minister.

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

But these are hardly off-the-shelf-items. The IRIS-T had to be manufactured for Ukraine. Western governments don’t have a lot of such systems. And Ukraine is a very large country under missile attack from three directions.

Vladimir Putin vs. the far-right: The perils of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy and their failure to please Russia

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

He said Poland had given Ukraine “systems” to help destroy the drones. Last month there were reports that the Polish government had bought advanced Israeli equipment (Israel has a policy of not selling “advanced defensive technology” to Kyiv) and was then transferring it to Ukraine.

Openly supporting Putin has turned out to be the a more complicated strategy than the far right expected. They supported a man with tyrannical leanings who was later seen to be the core ideology of many of Putin’s former and current supporters.

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.

Giorgia Meloni, leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy and now slated to become prime minister, no longer warms her words toward Putin and promised to continue sending weapons to help Ukrainians. Matteo Salvini, who once praised Putin as the best diplomat in the world, now insists he supports Ukrainians.

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. (Le Pen’s presidential campaign was partly financed by a mysterious multimillion dollar loan from Russia in 2014. French banks refused to lend to Le Pen, she said.

Some in the Alternative for Germany party have openly supported Russia but the leadership has tried to reduce it to their liking because of the hardship it causes for Germans.

A couple of weeks ago, CPAC called on Democrats to end the gift-giving to Egypt and focus on the US, in a message that framed the conflict along Putin’s preferred lines. The group apologized and said that the post did not 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!”

Even the leaders of former Soviet Republics, including autocratic ones Putin protected in the past, are letting him down. Only one, the Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, has stood with the Kremlin.

Most Americans want to support Ukraine despite Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons, and a few prominent far-right figures still defend him.

Tucker Carlson is a useful voice for the Putin propaganda, because clips from his nightly show are used in Russian state-controlled television. Newsmax, another right-wing network, lambasted him because of the spectacle. Eric Bolling referred to Carlson as an “alleged American” for defending “our archenemy Russia and the sociopath Putin…”

The Russian War is Coming: What has the Ukranian people been saying lately about the invasion and what has to be done about it, and what will they say next?

The war has teetered towards an unpredictable new phase before. Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, said that this is the third, fourth or fifth war that they have been observing.

The fast approaching winter will probably slow the pace of the war, but it is not expected to stop it. The weather causes the Ukrainians to be on the battlefield. The Ukrainians could get a bowl of soup from their fellow citizens if they knocked on the door. And of course, they’re welcomed as liberators, whereas the Russian occupiers, the Ukrainians are trying to kill them,” he said.

“What seemed a distant prospect for anything that could be convincingly described as a Ukraine victory is now very much more plausible,” Giles said. The response is likely to get worse from Russia.

The senior military official said last week that the forces have regained some 120 settlements since late September, as they move forward in the eastern part of the country. On Wednesday,Ukraine said that it had liberated more settlements in Kherson.

The counter-offensives have shifted the focus of the war and disproved the idea that Ukraine couldn’t seize ground.

“Otherwise, Russia will just wait it out,” said Dougherty. They have a small front to defend, because they were pushed back in the Fall offensive.

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

Ukrainians are eager to improve on their gains before temperatures plummet on the battlefield and the impact of rising energy prices is felt in Europe.

The economy in Ukranian continues to suffer because of war, missile and drones attacks on critical power infrastructure. Millions of Ukrainians are without water, heat, and electricity 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 says that it has been able to keep the power supply up in the wake of Russian missile attacks on Monday and Tuesday. The Prime Minister has warned of a lot of work to be done to fix damaged equipment and asked Ukrainians to use less energy during peak hours.

Matters for the Russians haven’t improved since then. The British Defense Ministry said that Russian defensive and offensive capability remains hampered by shortages of munitions and skilled personnel, which they reported on Monday.

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.”

Le Monde used on-the-ground video and satellite images to show that Russian armoury has been seriously damaged by Ukrainian attacks.

In terms of pure manpower, the impact of such an intervention would be limited due to the fact that Belarus has around 42,000 active duty troops. But it would threaten another assault on Ukraine’s northern flank below the Belarusian border.

“The reopening of a northern front would be another new challenge for Ukraine,” Giles said. The new route would allow Russia to get into the region which has been wrested back from Ukrainians, he said.

The narrative of the conflict over the past two months was flipped in order to show that the aid from the west could help win the war.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that Ukraine needed “more” systems to better halt missile attacks, ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels.

Sergey Surovikin: a commander of the Russian forces in Syria and his role in Russia’s operations in Syria when Vladimir Putin was in charge in Ukraine

Colonel General Sergey Surovikin, then-commander of the Russian forces in Syria, speaks at a briefing in the Russian Defense Ministry in Moscow, on June 9, 2017.

The role he played in Russia’s operations in Syria, during which Russian combat aircraft caused destruction in rebel-held areas, is noteworthy.

He said Surovikin was “very close to Putin’s regime” and “never had any political ambitions, so always executed a plan exactly as ​the government wanted.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Russian Armed Forces service personnel who took part in operations in Syria, including Sergey Surovikin, at the Kremlin on December 28, 2017.

He believes that his close ties to the government and Putin is one of the reasons he was put in charge in Ukraine. These are areas that Putin is trying to control “at any cost,” said Irisov.

“Everything changed” on February 24, 2022, when Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began and TASS received orders from the FSB security service and defense ministry “that everyone will be prosecuted if they don’t execute the propaganda scheme,” Irisov said.

He had family in Kyiv, hiding in bomb shelters, and told CNN he knew “nothing could justify this war.” He knew from his military contacts that there were a lot of casualties in the first days of the war.

While serving at Latakia air base in Syria in 2019 and 2020, the 31-year-old says he worked on aviation safety and air traffic control, coordinating flights with Damascus’ civilian airlines. He spoke to high-ranking officers under him when he was out on missions and he saw Surovikin several times.

“He made a lot of people very angry – they hated him,” Irisov said, describing how the “direct” and “straight” general was disliked at headquarters because of the way he tried to implement his infantry experience into the air force.

Irisov says he understands Surovikin had strong connections with Kremlin-approved private military company the Wagner group​, which has operated in Syria.

In 2004, according to Russian media accounts and at least two think tanks, he berated a subordinate so severely that the subordinate took his own life.

According to a book by the think tank, during the attempted coup against the Soviet President in August 1991, soldiers under the command of their leader were involved in the killing of three protesters and spent six months in prison.

He is named in a 2020 report from Human Rights Watch as someone who may be responsible for the dozens of air and ground attacks on civilian objects and infrastructure in violation of the laws of war. ​The attacks killed at least 1,600 ​civilians and forced the displacement of an estimated 1.4 million people, according to HRW​​, which cites UN figures.

“Heroes of Russia”: the role of General Surovikin in the war on the Ukraine and the emergence of Russian intelligence

Speaking after an awards ceremony for “Heroes of Russia” at the Kremlin, he addressed a group of soldiers receiving the awards, clutching a glass of champagne.

In February this year the European Union imposed sanctions on the head of the Aerolytical Forces for his role in supporting and implementing policies that undermine and threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukranian.

Clark reasons that “from what we’ve seen, it’s highly ​probable that Putin is involved in decision-making down to a very tactical level and in some cases bypassing the senior Russian military officers to interact directly on the battlefield.”

He was appointed and received praise from various Russian militaryBloggers as well as Yevgeny who is the financier of the Wagner Group, Clark said.

He believes what’s happening now is a reflection of what happened in April, when another commander, Alexander Dvornikov, was appointed overall commander of the operations in Ukraine.

“Similarly, he before then was a commander of one of the groupings of Russian forces and had sort of a master reputation in Syria much like Surovikin for brutality, earning this sort of name of the ‘butcher of Aleppo,’” Clark said.

On Tuesday, the new commander of the Russian invasion acknowledged that the position his army is in is very difficult and suggested that a tactical retreat may 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.

Mobilized forces will be used if they are needed. They could be used in support roles to make up for the rest of Russia’s exhausted professional army. They could also fill out depleted units along the line of contact, cordon some areas and man checkpoints in the rear. They are not likely to be a capable fighting force. There are some signs of discipline problems within the troops in Russian garrisons.

Neither Putin nor Zelensky are interested in negotiating the outcome of the Georgian-Russian war. The Cipher Brief spoke to the National Security Correspondence Greg Myre

“Even if President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy thinks that we should negotiate to stop the punishment. I don’t think he can do that anymore because of the conviction of the Ukrainian people.”

Petraeus spoke to a crowd at an annual meeting of the national security community, which is run by The Cipher Brief.

A top Ukrainian official, Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to President Zelenskyy, told the conference the conflict needs to end with a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield.

But Paul Kolbe, a former CIA officer who runs the Intelligence Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School, says the Russian leader is not looking for a way out of the conflict. In fact, he says, just the opposite. “Putin’s muscle memory when he runs into an obstacle is to escalate,” said Kolbe. There are still many tricks he can pull out to undermine the spirits of the people of the West.

This annexation is a huge deal. Putin is effectively betting his presidency on staying in Ukraine, says Dmitri Alperovitch, who runs the think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator.

“That is essentially a metaphorical burning of bridges,” said Alperovitch. “What this means is that this war is likely to continue for many, many months, potentially many years, as long as he’s in power and as long as he has the resources to continue fighting.”

At the Georgia conference in a ballroom filled with experienced national security types, nobody suggested the war was close to an end. “I don’t think we will see any talks in the near term because most wars end with a negotiated solution, regardless of the outcome,” said Paul Kolbe, a former CIA official.

He noted that the war started with a Russian invasion and is now as intense as it ever has been. Greg Myre is an NPR National Security Correspondent. Get in touch with him at@gregmyre 1.

The War in Ukraine: Why U.S. Help is Needed in the ‘Hot Air’? Commentary of Markov Makarova and Yevheniia Kravchuk

Some regional officials — including the mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin — appeared to be taking pains to offer reassurances. There are no plans at this time to impose measures that would limit the normal rhythm of the city’s life.

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.

But many Russians are sure to see a warning message in the martial law imposed in Ukraine, the first time that Moscow has declared martial law since World War II, analysts say.

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

KYIV, Ukraine — Sitting on a park bench by a tram stop in Kontraktova Square, Marta Makarova, a 21-year-old budding social media influencer, takes a break from talking with two friends about Instagram to talk instead about the war. Their safety depends on U.S. support.

He says the top issues trending on his social media channels are the upcoming U.S. elections and billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial comments about negotiating an end to the war.

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

He toldPunchbowl News that people would not be writing a check for Ukraine during a recession.

Dozens of House Republicans voted against a Ukraine aid bill in May. Last month, all but 10 of the House’s Republicans voted against a funding package that had billions of dollars earmarked for Ukraine.

A line of Ukrainian politicians, activists — even soldiers — have been traveling to Washington in advance of the midterms to keep up relations and lobby for more aid.

Yevheniia Kravchuk is a member of parliament with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party. She’s traveled twice to Washington since the beginning of the war to meet with administration and congressional leaders, making sure to meet with both Democratic and Republican leaders.

Kniazhytskyi is worried about the influence of a vocal group of Republicans who are aligned with former President Donald Trump, as well as conservative TV people who have spoken out against the billions of dollars going to Ukraine.

32% of Republican and Republican-leaning independents believe that the United States is giving too much support for Ukrainians in the war, according to a recent poll. That’s an increase from only 9% in March.

Over roughly the same time, the percentage of Americans who said they were extremely or very concerned about Ukraine’s defeat fell from 55% in May to 38% in September.

The politics of aid to Ukraine are a topic that is difficult to discuss in the Ukrainian capital, where officials say avoiding partisan politics is a key pillar of the country’s foreign policy. That was the lesson learned during the Trump years, says Petro Burkovskiy, a senior fellow at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation who spent years in the Ukrainian government.

Zelenskyy came close to filing an investigation into the family of then-candidate Joe Biden, but he was sucked into Trump’s first impeachment.

Another factor contributing to fears about the U.S. midterms is that many Ukrainians don’t understand U.S. politics, says Volodmyr Dubovyk, the director of international studies at Odesa Mechnikov University.

“If there is a member of the House who speaks about why we are spending money and Ukraine is corrupt, people in Ukraine hear this: ‘Oh my gosh, that’s a new thing.’

The balance of power in Washington means that a few Republicans can’t change the direction of U.S. support for the war, he believes. He emphasizes the bigger problems of Ukraine than U.S. politics.

The American Dream of Vladmir Putin and the U.S. Assistance to Ukraine: Remarks on Tim Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Karl Obeidallah

Dean Obeidallah was an attorney and is now host of a daily program on the radio. Follow him @DeanObeidallah. His own opinions are included in this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.

The GOP Senate candidate in Ohio later flip-flopped, saying that he wanted “the Ukrainians to be successful.” According to The Washington Post, the remark that Vance made is making Ukrainian Americans who are lifelong Republicans to support Tim Ryan.

McCarthy would be happy to have Putin hear his words. The United States is the world leader in helping Ukraine, providing more than $18 billion since January 2021, far more than any other nation. Ukrainians have received desperately needed humanitarian aid along with a wide range of weapons.

It’s just stunning that Kevin McCarthy will be the leader of the pro-Putin wing of my party. It’s dangerous,” Cheney said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

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

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

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

On last week, Ingraham commented on the fact that our military is not enough to assist other countries such asUkraine, and that the United States is the most undemocratic country in the world. Jim Banks, a GOP Representative from Indiana, said on the show that “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. But there’s one person who fully gets it: Vladmir Putin. Few people will have greater cause for celebration if the GOP wins back control of the House.

David A. Andelman is a contributor to CNN and the author of A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars that Might Still Happen. He was a reporter for CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. At CNN you can view more opinions.

First, he’s seeking to distract his nation from the blindingly obvious, namely that he is losing badly on the battlefield and utterly failing to achieve even the vastly scaled back objectives of his invasion.

Putin, Macron, Scholz: Towards a common understanding of energy price caps in the light of the European Commission and the Kremlin

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

European Union powers agreed on a plan to control energy prices that have increased in the wake of the embargos on Russian imports and the Kremlin cutting natural gas supplies.

There is an emergency cap on the benchmark European gas trading hub as well as permission for EU gas companies to create a Cartel to Buy Gas on the International Market.

French President said that there was only a clear mandate for the European Commission to start working on a gas cap mechanism, so he left the summit with joy but also acknowledged that there was only a clear mandate.

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

Putin has a dream that includes these divisions. The success of the Russian Government could be achieved by Manifold forces in Europe, since they do not agree on essentials.

Some of these issues are already 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

Italy’s New Prime Minister: What Putin and the West are saying about the Italian War on the Balkans, Hungary, and the United Kingdom

A new government in Italy has taken power. The post-fascist aura of her party has been scrubbed by the first woman to become Italy’s prime minister. One of her far-right coalition partners meanwhile, has expressed deep appreciation for Putin.

Berlusconi, in a secretly recorded audio tape, said he’d returned Putin’s gesture with bottles of Lambrusco wine, adding that “I knew him as a peaceful and sensible person,” in the LaPresse audio clip.

The other leading member of the ruling Italian coalition, Matteo Salvini, named Saturday as deputy prime minister, said during the campaign, “I would not want the sanctions [on Russia] to harm those who impose them more than those who are hit by them.”

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

Meanwhile on Monday, the influential 30-member Congressional progressive caucus called on Biden to open talks with Russia on ending the conflict while its troops are still occupying vast stretches of the country and its missiles and drones are striking deep into the interior.

The caucus chair, Mia Jacob, was under fire for her comments about the Ukrainians and sent reporters a clarification. Secretary of State Antony Lewington called Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian counterpart, in order to give renewed America’s support.

This support in terms of arms, materiel and now training for Ukrainian forces have been the underpinnings of their remarkable battlefield successes against a weakening, undersupplied and ill-prepared Russian military.

The pressure is being put on Russia by the West. Last Thursday, the State Department released a detailed report on the impact of sanctions and export controls strangling the Russian military-industrial complex.

The lack of necessary semi-conductors has meant that Russian production of hyper sonic missiles has stopped. Plants that produce anti-aircraft systems have stopped making them, and Russia has reverted to Soviet-era defense stocks for replenishment. The era of the Soviets ended more than 30 years ago.

Kim Jong-un has used black market networks abroad to source supplies for his war machine, just as Putin has tried to do. The United States has already uncovered and recently sanctioned vast networks of such shadow companies and individuals centered in hubs from Taiwan to Armenia, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, and Luxembourg to source high-tech goods for Russia’s collapsing military-industrial complex.

The Justice Department has announced charges against companies and individuals for trying to sneak high-tech equipment into Russia in violation of sanctions.

What Did People Think Before Chernobyl Ever Expected? How Did Ukrainians Think About Russia, or What Happened Far From the battlefields?

How did people imagine Ukraine before Feb. 24, 2022? Some may have conjured mail-order brides and shaven-head mobsters roaming one big post-Soviet Chernobyl. Most probably didn’t even think about Ukraine, instead they imagined a different scenario. The country was only on people’s radar because of 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 strengthening relationship between Moscow and Tehran has drawn the attention of Iran’s rivals and foes in the Middle East, of NATO members and of nations that are still – at least in theory – interested in restoring the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which aimed to delay Iran’s ability to build an atomic bomb.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued that no less than the direction of human history is at stake, because a victory by Russia would reopen the door to wars of aggression, to invasions of one country by another, something that since the Second World War most nations had come to reject as categorically unacceptable.

The US led massive support for the Ukrainians. New applications for membership from countries that had been committed to neutrality was brought by the war in Ukraine. It also helped reaffirm the interest of many in eastern European states – former Soviet satellites – of orienting their future toward Europe and the West.

Much of what happens far from the battlefields still has repercussions today. When oil-producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, decided last month to slash production, the US accused the Saudis of helping Russia fund the war by boosting its oil revenues. (An accusation the Saudis deny).

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

Russia suspended an agreement with Turkey to reopen the Ukraine’s maritime corridors after naval ships were attacked at the port of Sevastopol. After Putin made his announcement there was a surge in wheat prices. Those prices partly determine how much people pay for bread in Africa and across the planet.

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

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

U.S. and European Warring Parties: The Case for a Diplomacy between Ukraine and the Kremlin and the White House

Russia launched fresh attacks on Kherson overnight after a wave of fatal shelling this week in the region. Ukrainian forces retook control of the city last month in one of the most significant breakthroughs of the war to date.

And Ukraine will be watching America’s midterm election results this week, especially after some Republicans warned that the party could limit funding for Ukraine if it wins control of the House of Representatives, as forecast.

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

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

And, he added, the Russians are “willing to trade mobilized soldiers and artillery shells.” NATO and the Western allies will no longer be willing to trade with the Russians over time according to the Russians. And eventually it’ll push them to negotiate. That, I totally believe, is Putin’s bet,” said Dougherty.

The Pentagon gave Ukraine $400 million in additional security aid, including refurbished T 72 tanks, Phoenix Ghost drones and other vehicles.

Past recaps can be found here. For context and more in-depth stories, you can find more of NPR’s coverage here. You can also listen and subscribe to NPR’s State of Ukrainian for the day’s updates.

The top general in the United States has pushed for a diplomatic solution to the warring parties in the war in Ukraine in recent weeks.

The result is a growing debate inside the administration over whether Ukraine’s recent gains on the battlefield should spark a renewed effort to seek some sort of negotiated end to the fighting, according to officials.

Administration officials were not surprised by the comments, given Milley’s advocacy for the position internally, but also worried that the administration was divided in the eyes of the Kremlin.

While some Biden officials are more open to exploring what diplomacy may look like, sources tell CNN most of the top diplomatic and national security officials are wary of giving Russian President Vladimir Putin any sort of leverage at the negotiating table and believe Ukrainians must determine when to hold talks, not the US.

In internal deliberations, officials said Milley has sought to make it clear that he is not urging a Ukrainian capitulation, but rather that he believes now is an optimal time to drive toward an end to the war before it drags into spring or beyond, leading to more death and destruction without changing the front lines.

But that view is not widely held across the administration. One official explained that the State Department is on the opposite side of the pole from Milley. The military brass is more likely to push for diplomacy than US diplomats.

Milley’s position comes as the US military has dug deep into US weapons stockpiles to support the Ukrainians and is currently scouring the globe for materials to support Ukraine heading into winter – such as heaters and generators – which has raised concerns about how long this war can be sustained, officials said.

An official with the US said that the US wants to buy 100,000 rounds of weaponry from South Korean manufacturers in order to help the Ukrainian government in its battle against the Russians. 100,000 rounds of 155mm howitzer ammunition, which the US will purchase, will be sent to Ukraine through the US.

The U.S. Embassy Observed on Friday: “It’s a welcome return” for Ukraine after Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson

State Department spokesperson Ned Price would not say Thursday whether the State Department agrees with Milley’s position. Instead, Price deflected to a position that US officials have often made in recent months: the US sides with Zelensky who has said that a diplomatic solution is needed.

Sullivan, who is from the United States, said in his visit that the United States will be with Ukraine for as long as it takes. There will be no wavering as we go forward, and there’s no flinching in our support.

On Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that it was a historic day for Ukraine, after Russia announced it was pulling out of the Kherson region.

Even though there was a threat, the president said he was happy to see how people kept their Ukrainian flags in the city.

Zelensky thanked everyone from privates and generals to the intelligence and the National Guard, as well as the military units who were involved in the operation.

He said stabilization measures would follow due to the threat of mines. The occupiers left a lot of mines and explosives. He said that they would be clearing them.

Police, rescuers, power engineers are following our defenders. Medicine, communications, and social services are all coming back. … Life is returning,” he said.

The Perfect Moment to Make Putin and the United States Part of Their War: The Battle of the Snihurivka-Mykolaiv Freeland

It’s too dangerous for displaced residents to come back to Kherson now, they were warned on Friday.

In neighboring Mykolaiv region: The head of the regional military administration of Mykolaiv visited the small city of Snihurivka Friday to discuss “the restoration of life in the liberated territories of the region.”

Kim warned local residents to be cautious despite the fact that the relevant services had begun moving mines in the liberated territories.

With democracy suddenly looking like it’s on firmer ground and key autocracies facing serious problems, it was an ideal moment for Biden to speak frankly to Xi about areas of disagreement between the two superpowers while trying to build safeguards to prevent the rivalry from careening into conflict as the relationship has deteriorated to its most tense state in decades.

A well-functioning democratic process in the US is likely disappointing to Xi and other autocrats hoping that deep divisions not only continue to weaken the country from within but also prove that democracy is chaotic and ineffective, inferior to their autocratic systems, as they like to claim. The American president had a stronger hand thanks to the mid-terms.

That’s not the only reason, however, why this was the perfect moment — from the standpoint of the United States and for democracy — for this meeting to occur: There’s much more to this geopolitical moment than who controls the US House of Representatives and Senate.

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.

Putin’s adventure turned to disaster as the Ukrainians defended their country with unexpected tenacity and as Biden rallied allies in a muscular push to support Ukraine.

China did little to support Russia, and Putin admitted that he had questions about what was happening in Ukraine during their meeting in September. More recently, after the Russian President thinly threatened to 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.

The Challenges of War and the ‘I want to live’ campaign in the 21st century: The case of Xi, the prime minister

To be sure, Biden is not the only leader with a strong hand. Xi has just secured an unprecedented third term as China’s leader, and he can now effectively rule for as long as he wants. He has no need to worry about elections, the critical press or the opposition party. He is the ultimate ruler of a country for a long time.

And yet, there are a lot of difficult problems faced by Xi. The economy has slowed down so much that China is reluctant to reveal economic data. China’s Covid-19 vaccine, once a tool of global diplomacy, is a disappointment. China is imposing a lot of strictures on people as the rest of the world slowly returns to its pre-pandemic state.

It is necessary to show that the two systems can coexist and that democracy will not be destroyed by attempts to suppress it, and that war will not be a deterrent to the spread of democracy.

The first missile to have land in Poland may have been a Ukrainian rocket intercepting a Russian missile that was just a short distance away from one of the largest cities in Ukraine. President Zelensky insisted the missile was not Ukrainian.

Whatever the exact circumstances of the missile, one thing is clear. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia bears ultimate responsibility for its war against Ukranian.

That said, a growing number of Russian soldiers have rebelled at what they have been asked to do and refused to fight. The Defense Ministry of Britain believes that Russian troops may be ready to shoot retreating or deserting soldiers.

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 with 3,500 calls in its first two months of operation.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is beginning to move forward – a recent Russian journalist tells us he can’t return to his homeland

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

Rumbling in the background is the West’s attempt to diversify away from Russian oil and natural gas in an effort to deprive the country of material resources to pursue this war. The European Commission knows that it was an unsustainable dependency and wants reliable and forward-looking connections, President Ursula von der Leyen told the G20 on Tuesday.

Moreover, Putin’s dream that this conflict, along with the enormous burden it has proven to be on Western countries, would only drive further wedges into the Western alliance are proving unfulfilled. On Monday, 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.

Indeed a truce or negotiations may be the only path to victory possible at this moment for the Russian leader; his manpower exhausted and weapons supplies dwindling.

“The only thing a premature truce does is it allows both parties to re-arm,” Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the CNA think tank and a leading expert on the Russian military, told me in an interview.

Already, Russia is beginning to rearm, experts say. The most determinative aspect of this war was the availability of weapons. “If you burn through 9 million rounds, you cannot make them in a month. What can be done to mobilize and the rate at which it is being produced. He mentioned it.

Kofman cited available information showing that the manufacture of munitions – which have been the staples of the exchanges so far along Ukrainian front lines – has gone from two, and in some factories to three, shifts a day in Russia. This suggests that they don’t have the component parts and won’t double and triple shifts.

“Please imagine how Ukrainians understand negotiations,” former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday. “You are sitting in your own house, the killer comes to your house and kills your wife, rapes your daughter, takes the second floor, then opens the door to the second floor and says, ‘OK come here. Let’s have a negotiation.’ What would be your reaction?”

The Russians’ bet: letting Russia get tired of the 2022-23 War, or maybe letting them return to Crimea

Mick Ryan told me that it would relieve the pressure on their forces by giving the Russians time to regroup and rearm. They had been at it hard for nine months. Their forces are tired.

The images showed that “in total, at least 52 Russian ammunition depots have been hit by the Ukrainian military since the end of March 2022.” It’s a good chunk of the 100 to 200 Russian depots that analysts believe are on the Ukrainian front, according to the report.

But at some point, they’ll also get tired of this war, he added. And the Russian mindset may become “we may not have everything we wanted. But we’ll have a big chunk of the Donbas and will annex that into Russia and we’ll hold onto Crimea. I think that’s kind of their bet right now.

The West would be able to rebuild rapidly depleting arsenals that have been drained by materiel sent to Ukraine, even if there was a truce.

But were the war to resume months or years from now, there’s a real question as to whether the US and its allies would be prepared to return to a conflict that many are beginning to wish was already over.

Putin’s response to the recent attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure: “Whose isn’t supplying water to Donetsk?”

He went on to list a series of events he blames on the Ukrainians: “Who hit the Crimean bridge? There are power lines at the nuclear power plant.

There was an announcement by Russia that their airfield in the Kursk region had been attacked by drones. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry didn’t make a comment on the recent explosions. Officially, the targets are well beyond the reach of the country’s declared drones.

He said that people do not mention that water has been cut off from the city. “No one has said a word about it anywhere. At all! Complete silence.

Russian authorities in the city said this week that they had heard of frequent shelling.

While clutching a glass of champagne, President Vladimir Putin made rare public comments on the Russian military’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

Last week Putin appeared on the Kerch Bridge, where he was shown repairs and drove a car across the structure that he himself officially opened in 2018.

He continued to say, “Who is not supplying water to Donetsk?” while in his Kremlin appearance Thursday. It’s an act of genocide to not supply water to a million people.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemns drone attacks on the Odesa port city of Ukraine and calls for a better energy system

He finished the speech with a toast to the soldiers he had just met, and then drank from his champagne glass.

Strong winds, rain and sub-zero temperatures are making it difficult for the team to restore power to homes.

The attacks on the energy grid are considered to be genocide by a top Ukrainian official. The prosecutor-general of the Ukranian province made the comments to the BBC last month.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russian drone strikes on the southern port city of Odesa left more than 1.5 million people in that region without power Saturday night, the latest attacks in an ongoing series of assaults on Ukrainian energy infrastructure by the Kremlin.

In his nightly address on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine had shot down 10 of the 15 drones that Russian forces used. It wasn’t easy to verify his tally.

The assaults on the plants and equipment that Ukrainians rely on for heat and light have drawn condemnation from world leaders and put Ukraine into a grim cycle where crews rush 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. “Almost every day, in different regions, there is shelling, there are missile attacks, drone attacks. Energy facilities are hit almost every day.”

A weekly recap and look-ahead at Russias war-dec-12 – the latest on Ukraineraia and Ukrainian Orthodox Church –

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

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.

A video address by the Ukrainian president will be provided at the conference in France on Tuesday.

The US basketball player was freed in December after spending nearly 10 months in Russian custody. Her release came in exchange for the U.S. handing over convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. Griner is back in the U.S. and reunited with her wife. There are reports that 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 city of Melitopol was hit by the Ukrainians in a critical infrastructure facility, according to the local head of the Kherson military administration

The Russian military base in the city of Melitopol was reportedly hit by the Ukrainians. Officials said Ukrainian forces used long-range artillery to reach targets in the city in southeastern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

Zelenskyy said that Russian forces turned the city of Bakhmut into burned ruins. Fighting has been fierce there as Russia attempts to advance in the city in the eastern Donbas region.

A Russia-installed official in the occupied region of the east of the country claims that the Ukrainian forces have launched the biggest attack on the area since the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Forty rockets from BM-21 ‘Grad’ MLRS were fired at civilians in our city,” he said Thursday, adding that a key intersection in Donetsk city center had come under fire.

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 member of the rapid response team was one of the victims. During the shelling, they were on the street, they were fatally wounded by fragments of enemy shells,” he added.

The Kherson military administration claimed that the city was completely disconnected from power supplies due to the strikes.

“The enemy hit a critical infrastructure facility. In a Telegram video on Thursday, he said the location of the medical aid and humanitarian aid distribution point has been damaged by shell fragments.

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

The Energy Security Project, run by USAID, delivered four excavators and over 130 generators, Klitschko said on Telegram. All equipment was free of charge.

Zelensky’s “Propagation of Forces” in the Donetsk Region – a “Conventional” Response to Russian President Vladimir Putin

The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to get Russia to pull out its troops from Ukraine this Christmas, however, the Kremlin rejected his proposal.

The realities that have developed over all this time need to be taken into account by the Ukrainian side, according to the Kremlin.

Four areas of the Russian Federation that have been claimed to have been annexed are, in fact, new subjects.

It takes a lot of people to be trained, which is why CNN’s Barbara Starr and Oren Liebermann reported that the US is close to sending the system to Ukraine.

Zakharova said that many outside experts questioned the rationality of the step which could lead to an escalate of the conflict and the risk of dragging the US army into combat.

The Patriot system is expensive and complicated and requires intensive training for the multiple people it takes to operate it, but could help the country guard against Russian attacks that have left millions without power.

He said it is ironic that officials from a country that brutally attacked its neighbor in an illegal and unprovoked invasion would use words like provocative to describe defensive systems that are meant to save lives and protect civilians.

In a way, the deployment of the Yars intercontinental missile into a silo in the Kaluga region was a subtle message to the commander of the Kozensky missile formation, which was shown in the video.

Appearing this week on Russian state TV, Commander Alexander Khodakovsky of the Russian militia in the Donetsk region suggested Russia could not defeat the NATO alliance in a conventional war.

Is Russia ready to take back control of Ukraine? The old enemy is coming: NATO’s answer to Russian aggression in the Middle East, a source tells The Economist

Smaller air defense systems require fewer personnel to operate, while the bigger Patriot missile batteries require many more. The training for Patriot missile batteries normally takes multiple months, a process the United States will now carry out under the pressure of near-daily aerial attacks from Russia.

Zelensky was quoted in Thursday’s edition of The Economist as rejecting the idea that Ukraine should not try to get back land seized by Russia since February 2022 and also not any areas that have been under Russian control in recent years.

NATO has two main objectives, one of which is to provide aid toUkraine, and the other which is to make sure that NATO does not become involved in the war, says NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Old ammo. CNN reported earlier this week on a US military official who said that Russian forces have had to use 40-year-old cannonballs as their supplies are quickly running out.

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

There in the trenches. There is a growing concern about Russia once again assembling troops after CNN’s Will Ripley reported on trenches and fortifications being built along the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Ripley talks to a sewing machine repairman turned tank driver.

Velodomyryr Zelensky in a City: His Last Night at the Llysée Palace: A Memories with a Revolutionary Man

I witnessed how Zelensky arrived in a small car at the lysée Palace, while Putin made his way in a limo. (The host, French President Emmanuel Macron, hugged Putin but chose only to shake hands with Zelensky).

Zelensky is a brand beyond the man. It’s almost impossible these days to dissociate the Ukrainian leader from his olive green t-shirts; worn when meeting everyone from Vogue journalists to military commanders and world leaders.

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.”

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.”

Zelensky stood up to Donald Trump in the quid pro quo scandal, and it’s hard to remember that he had developed his political skills earlier in his career.

It seems a long, long time since Zelensky thanked his supporters in a crammed nightclub where he had just won the presidential election. Standing on stage among the fluttering confetti, he looked in a state of disbelief at having defeated incumbent veteran politician Petro Poroshenko.

His ratings seem to have improved because of the war. Just days after the invasion, Zelensky’s ratings approval surged to 90%, and remain high to this day. Americans rated Zelensky highly for his handling of international affairs, more so than US President Joe Biden.

His bubble includes many people from his previous professional life as a TV comedian in the theatrical group Kvartal 95. In April of this year, a press conference was held on the platform of a metro station in Ukranian capital city of Kyiv, with perfect lighting, and edited camera angles to emphasize a wartime setting.

I remember how comforting his nightly televised addresses were in the midst of the air raid sirens and explosion in a city, as well as his skills as comforter in chief.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/19/opinions/volodomyr-zelensky-profile-ukraine-russia-bociurkiw/index.html

Zelensky, Putin and the Emerging Global Power: Getting Closer to the One and a Half-Size Scale

Zelensky is projecting confident and competence in a modern way by wearing t-shirts and hoodies, the uniform of Silicon Valley, rather than suits, according to a fashion historian.

“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 that she can be a good global ambassador with her smarts and style. She met with King Charles at a refugee assistance center at the Holy Family Cathedral in London. (Curiously, TIME magazine did not include Zelenska on the cover montage and gave only a passing reference in the supporting text).

Despite the strong tailwinds at Zelensky’s back, there are subtle signs that his international influence could be dwindling. For example, last week, in what analysts called a pivotal moment in geopolitics, the G7 imposed a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian crude – despite pleas from Zelensky that it should have been set at $30 in order to inflict more pain on the Kremlin.

Zelensky said in his recent video address that when the world is united, it’s the aggressor that decides how events develop.