Putin began his Unjust War one year ago

The Crimes of Crimea and Crimea in Ukraine: The Russian War, Crimea, and the War of the Cold War. The story of Russia as a Great Empire

It goes beyond the territory that Russia has captured since the beginning of the invasion more than 10 months ago, and also the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014; as it was since 1991. “As it will always be.”

It is part of a carefully orchestrated process designed to make sure that there are no legal problems for the annexation of the eastern and southern Ukrainian provinces.

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.

To those who argue Ukraine should stop fighting now, and accept lost territory, I say, come with me and meet the citizens who survived Russian atrocities in Bucha. Come hear the stories that I hear of life in towns and villages in Eastern Ukraine overtaken by Russian forces: the killing and persecution of mayors, public activists, journalists, volunteers, priests, artists and countless others. During this brutal occupation, people have had no rights, they cannot protect their freedom, property, life and dearest. There can’t be peace until the Russians leave.

The Russian president framed the annexation as an attempt to fix what he sees as a great historical mistake that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin made a number of statements over the past few years that indicated his desire to renew the Russian empire. This was a warning to me that this war was going to happen,” he said.

Russia will now go ahead and fly its flag over 100,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory despite international condemnation of its actions.

In the same place where he announced that the peninsula of Crimea was a part of Russia in March, the Russian leader spoke.

The audience for Mr. Putin was filled with several hundred Russian members of Parliament and regional governors.

I know that the Russian people have something in common with oppressors. The idea of Russia as a “great empire” was such a threat that we have to come a long way to heal it.

The Kremlin and the War Between China and the United States: From the 1918–1930 War to World War II: The Case of Makiivka

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.

The United States was the only country that had used nuclear weapons in war. “By the way, they created a precedent,” Mr. Putin added in an aside.

Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, a Ukrainian strike on the occupied city of Makiivka killed dozens of troops, with Russia’s Ministry of Defense claiming its soldiers’ cell phone use exposed their location.

A celebration will take place on Red Square. The Kremlin’s spokesman said the official approval of the decree will happen next week.

During a war in defiance of international law, staged referendums were held in occupied territory. 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 Kremlin could declare victory if it succeeds in cementing Russia’s hold over the two eastern regions, where Mr. Putin considers his primary prize.

The military conscription Mr. Putin ordered on Sept. 21 to bolster his battered forces has set off nationwide turmoil and protest, bringing the war home to many Russians who had felt untouched by it. Many men have been drafted who were supposed to be ineligible based on factors like age or disability.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Putin lost Lyman just as he was publicly declaring that the Donetsk region – in which Lyman sits – was now annexed by Russia.

A day earlier, two powerful Putin supporters railed against the Kremlin and called for using harsher fighting methods because Lyman had fallen just as Moscow was declaring that the illegally annexed region it lies in would be Russian forever.

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

“The current onslaught of criticism and reporting of operational military details by the Kremlin’s propagandists has come to resemble the milblogger discourse over the past week. The Kremlin narrative had focused on general statements of progress and avoided detailed discussions of current military operations. The war was a failure before it was lost in the Oblast of Kharkiv, which caused the partial reserve mobilization.

According to the saying truth is the first casualty in war. Russia has a campaign of false advertising to sell the 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.

We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth and our truth is that this is our country, our children, and we will defend all of this. He concluded that’s it. I just wanted to tell you that. Glory to Ukraine.”

Both Mr. Putin and Mr. Dugin believed that the US had sabotaged theNord Stream gas line, which went down after underwater explosions last month.

He said that the West had accused them of blowing up the gas line. We must understand that the war we have with the West is on a larger scale than we know. We must join the fight with the mortal enemy who will use any means to get his way.

The nonstop messaging campaign may be working, at least for now. “Many Russians feel threatened by the West, and they can’t take it anymore,” said a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who is from Russia.

And in the fall, public demobilization was replaced by mobilization – Putin demanded that citizens share responsibility for the war with him with their bodies. This caused a lot of anxiety, but the majority of the population preferred to adapt.

IZIUM, Ukraine — Russian forces in Ukraine were on the run Monday across a broad swath of the front line, as the Ukrainian military pressed its blitz offensive in the east and made gains in the south, belying President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims to have absorbed into Russia territories that his armies are steadily losing.

On the courage of Ukraine and Iran to defend itself in a global civil society war, including the death of a 22-year-old female protester

The author is a former CNN producer and correspondent named Frida Ghitis. She writes for several publications, including the Washington Post and the World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. There is more than one opinion on CNN.

On Sunday, almost by accident, two groups of demonstrators came together in London. One person waved the Ukrainian flags while another waved the Iranian flags. They cheered each other, and said, “All together we will win.”

There has been a transformation in the way that Ukraine and Ukrainians have responded to this war. Tens of thousands of civilians and fighters are believed to be dead. Millions have been driven from their homes.

These battles show bravery that isn’t seen in the rest of the world and is inspiring support in places like Afghanistan.

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.

In scenes of exhilarated defiance, Iranian women have danced around fires in the night, shedding the hijab – the headcover mandated by the regime – and tossing it into the flames.

Their peaceful uprising is not really about the hijab; it’s about cutting the shackles of oppression, which is why men have joined them in large numbers, even as the regime kills more and more protesters.

Moscow’s influence on Syria, its war crimes and the crisis in the world: Why is Russia so dominant? How putin has been criticized in Syria and in Syria, and why

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

Two days before the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, former US President Donald Trump publicly praised the Russian autocrat as a genius and a smart guy, for his decision to declare two regions of the country independent.

The report contains disturbing new details about the extent of Moscow’s efforts to relocate, re-educate, and sometimes militarily train or forcibly adopt out Ukrainian children – actions that constitute war crimes and could provide evidence that Russia’s actions amount to genocide, it said.

The repressions extend elsewhere: organizations and individuals are added weekly to a growing list of “foreign agents” and “non-desirable” organizations intended to damage their reputation among the Russian public.

Is it any wonder that Putin’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the start of his Ukraine war was to Iran? Iran has trained Russian forces and is now thought to have supplied Russia with advanced drones to kill Ukrainians.

These are two very different regimes, but they have in common the same tactic of oppression and willingness to project power abroad.

Niloofar Hamedi was the first to report what happened to Mahsa Amini when she was imprisoned in Iran. In Russia as well, journalism is a deadly profession. So is criticism of Putin. After trying and failing to kill opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Putin’s people manufactured charges to keep him in a penal colony indefinitely.

For people in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, there is more than just the low probability of a fall of the Iranian regime. It would be transformative for their countries and their lives, heavily influenced by Tehran. Iran has a constitution that says it wants to spread its Islamist revolution.

So is Putin’s grip on power unchallenged? There are whispers about another wave of Mobilization in the country. There are signs of elite competition in Moscow, even as some Russians are seeing through the wall of state propaganda.

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

Putin’s History of War: A Case Study in the Soviet-Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Crisis in the Lyman Center

Putin’s problems have only deepened in recent days with the surging Ukrainian counteroffensive that has seized key pockets of Russian-controlled territory, such as the transportation hub city of Lyman.

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

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

According to a recently published book, the soviets planned to set up a puppet government and leave Afghanistan soon after they invaded the country in 1979.

During the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US was initially reluctant to escalate its support for the Afghan resistance, fearing a wider conflict with the Soviet Union. It took until 1986 for the CIA to give the Afghans anti-aircraft missiles, which ended the Soviets’ total air superiority, and forced them to withdraw from Afghanistan.

War is unpredictable and fluid. As Baunov noted, the recent decision by Germany, the United States and other European allies to deliver main battle tanks to Ukraine may test Putin’s long game.

The range of the satellite-guided HIMAPS is currently 80 kilometers. Ukrainian pleas were ignored as a long-range 300-kilometer HIMAPS was not yet authorized. (The Biden administration has worried that the longer-range system could expand the war beyond Ukraine’s frontiers and lead to an escalation of hostilities.)

The Belarusian Parliamentary Committee congratulates Vladimir Bialiatski on his victory in the struggle for freedom and democracy in the late Soviet era

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

Looking further back into the history books, he must know that the loss of the Russian empire in the 1905 war weakened the Romanov monarchy. The Russian Revolution began because of Czar Nicholas II’s feckless leadership during the First World War. The Romanov family was killed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

The Great Patriotic War was a theme in World War II and is a 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.

It has put an end to Putin’s reputation for providing “stability”, which was a key component of his support in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR.

The activist was arrested in 2020 for taking part in the protests against Lukashenko. He is still being held without trial. The committee said that despite tremendous personal hardship, Bialiatski has not given up in his fight for human rights and democracy.

Belarusian opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya congratulated Bialiatski. “The prize is an important recognition for all Belarusians fighting for freedom & democracy,” she wrote in a tweet. All political prisoners should be freed without delay.

Mr. Bialiatski was arrested shortly after he testified on behalf of Mr. Sannikov during the trial for taking part in peaceful protests. Mr Bialiatski was sentenced to four and a half years in jail after being sentenced on trumped up charges of tax evasion. He was released on amnesty in 2014.

The organization he was involved with was called “The Locals” and it helped lay the groundwork for the movement for independence of Belarus during the late Soviet period.

He worked as the director of a museum dedicated to Maksim Bahdanovic, who is considered a founding father of modern Belarusian literature but was forced out of his post because of Mr. Lukashenko.

Mr.Sannikov said that the naming of Mr. Bialiatski as a recipient of the prize was intended to highlight Mr. Lukashenko’s involvement in the invasion of Ukraine, which had been punished with sanctions but with less severity.

Mr. Sannikov hopes that this will send a strong warning to both Lukashenko and his prison wardens that the world is watching and will definitely punish them.

The 2011 charges related to money he had received from abroad to help fund the Viasna rights group, of which he was president, and were based in part on confidential banking information provided to Belarusian prosecutors by Lithuania and Poland. The case, Mr. Sannikov said, showed how the European authorities had sometimes been complicit in helping Mr. Lukashenko consolidate his increasingly autocratic regime.

He said that Europe and the West do not pay adequate attention to human rights in the country.

Natalia Satsunkevich, who currently lives in exile, told Dozhd that she saw Mr Bialiatski being held in inhumane conditions.

The 2022 Ukrainian invasion of Belarus and the work of human rights activists in Russia and Ukraine: the Nobel Peace Prize and the Center for Civil Liberties

She said awarding him the Peace Prize, along with recipients from Russia and Ukraine, was symbolic and highlighted how closely these countries are connected by war.

She said that she had been surprised by the Peace Prize. She said that she had gotten a phone call from the prize committee, but that she could not hear what they were saying because she was on a noisy street.

She missed a lot of calls, so she called a friend who had been trying to reach her to find out that her husband was selected for the award.

Mr. Lukashenko, repaying the Kremlin for its support, allowed Belarusian territory to be used by Russian forces as staging ground for their invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

“Inevitably there will now be a period of attention,” Mr. Sannikov said, adding that he hoped it would translate into specific support for Mr. Lukashenko’s opponents.

Two human rights groups from Russia and Ukraine have won the Nobel Peace Prize together in 2022, as well as a jailed advocate from Belarus.

The new grantees were honored for their efforts to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. “They have for many years promoted the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

The Head of the Center for Civil Liberties is proud that his group has won the prize, calling it a recognition of work done by many human rights activists in Ukraine.

The center is collaborating with international partners to hold people accountable for their crimes.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, the organization’s head, said on Facebook she was “happy” that the Center had received the prize “together with our friends and partners.”

The Swedish International Human Rights Association (SIAP) – The theme of the 2019 Nobel Prizes for Human Rights Research in Europe and the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death

The international tribunal should be created to prosecute Putin and Lukashenko for war crimes.

Memorial, one of Russia’s most well-known and respected human rights groups, worked to expose the abuses and atrocities of the Stalinist era for more than three decades before it was ordered to close by the country’s Supreme Court late last year.

As the war grinds into a new year, Zelensky faces a fresh dilemma. How to balance growing pressure from outside for a ceasefire and negotiations with Russia, and expectations within Ukraine for a full Russian withdrawal to pre-2014 lines.

Dan Smith, director of the Swedish International Peace Research Institute, told CNN that the committee is promoting the importance of civil liberties and an active civil society as being part of a peaceful society. I think that is a very important message.

He said the prize had a lot of layers and was giving more than one message. It’s about citizenship, and what the best kind is if you want to be a citizen of a peaceful world.

The war in Europe this year was most unusual but also a war that had a global effect on people across the world according to the chair of the committee.

The prize was not intended to say anything to Putin, according to Reiss-Andersen. She said he is an authoritarian government that is suppressing human rights activists.

The three winners will each be given a million Swedish krona. The anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death will be celebrated during the awarding of the Prizes in December.

On the Kremlin of the Russian Information Space: The Duma, Valuyki, Kartapolov and the Defense Minister

In order for officials to stop lying and be more friendly with the Russians, the head of the defense committee in Russia’s State Duma demanded in a recent interview.

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. The stance of the Ukrainian government when it comes to striking Russian targets across the border has generally been neither confirmation nor denial.

Stremousov said that there’s no necessity to cast a shadow over the entire Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation because of incompetent commanders who did not bother and were not accountable. “Indeed, many say that the Minister of Defense [Sergei Shoigu], who allowed this situation to happen, could, as an officer, shoot himself. But, you know, the word officer is an unfamiliar word for many.”

Kadyrov has been less reticent when it comes to blaming Russian commanders after Russia retreated from the Ukrainian city of Lyman.

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

The analysis by I SW pointed out that the Russian information space has deviated from the narrative preferred by the MoD that things are under control.

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. In another post, he said he’d give Russia extraordinary wartime powers if he had his way.

Kadyrov said in a post that he would declare martial law throughout the country and use any weapon, after Putin said that Russia was at war with NATO.

The tragedy of Friday night when Putin invaded Kyrgyzstan declared independence and the invasion of the Dnipro River: a report by Michael Bociurkiw

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

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

On the mountain-flanked steppes of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, the result in just one remote village has been devastating: homes reduced to rubble, a burned-out school and a gut-wrenching stench emanating from the rotting carcasses of 24,000 dead chickens.

The area fell victim to the worst violence to hit it since the collapse of the Soviet Union last month, and neither members of a Russia-led military alliance dedicated to preserving peace or the government of Central Asia did anything to stop it.

Editor’s Note: Michael Bociurkiw (@WorldAffairsPro) is a global affairs analyst. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former spokesperson for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He is a regular contributor to CNN Opinion. The commentary is his own. View more opinion at CNN.

Implications of the Crimean Bridge Attacks on Kiev’s Strategic Infrastructure: An Air Raider Attack on the Ukrainian Prime Minister in Kharkiv

A series of bombings, including along a key bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, have raised questions about Russia’s ability to defend its own strategic infrastructure.

The significance of the strikes on central Kyiv, and close to the government quarter, cannot be overstated. Western governments should see this as a red line being crossed, and use it as a basis for justifying their actions during the war.

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. Typically at this time of the day, nearby restaurants are heaving with customers and chatter of 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. There were at least 17 deaths and many injuries.

In a defiant video filmed outside of his office on Monday, the president said that the missile strikes across the nation were aimed at the country’s energy infrastructure. At least 11 important infrastructure facilities in eight regions and the capital have been damaged; some provinces are without power, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said.

The residents of the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv stocked up on canned food, gas, and drinking water due to the bombardments that they’ve seen. Yet they also entertained themselves at the Typsy Cherry, a local bar. The owner told The Times that the mood was cheerful. “People drank, had fun and wondered when the electricity will resume.” The power came back hours later.

Businesses in Ukraine have been asked to shift work online as much as possible and millions of people in cities are being told to spend most of the day in bomb shelters.

With many asylum seekers coming back to their home countries, the attacks could cause another blow to business confidence.

The symbolism of the only bridge connecting mainland Russia and the Crimea is something that Putin can’t overstate. The timing of the assault on the president, which took place a day after his 70th birthday, can be viewed as an added blow to an aging autocrat whose ability to endure shame and humiliation can be taken as a weakness.

The penchant of dictators for hardwiring newly claimed territory with expensive, record-breaking infrastructure projects seems to be. Putin opened the Europe’s longest bridge by driving a truck across it. The world’s longest sea crossing bridge was built after Beijing reclaimed Macau, one of the first things it did after taking control of Hong Kong. The road bridge opened after two years of delays.

Ukraine’s response to the September 11 explosion: Putin’s plan to arm the Russian army and protect the nuclear power – a warning from the Pentagon

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.

Sitting still was never an option for Putin. He responded in the only way he knows how, by unleashing more death and destruction, with the force that probably comes natural to a former KGB operative.

Putin is facing increased criticism at home, placing him on thin ice, as an act of selfish desperation.

A plan was outlined by the Chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, Major General Konrad Budanov, in a conversation with Roman Kravets in late August.

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.

The western world has to show unity and resolve against a man who probes for weakness and tends to exploit divisions. Western governments need to know that rhetoric and sanctions do nothing to affect Putin’s actions. Even if military experts are sent to the battlefield to speed up the integration of high technology weapons, they need to still arm Ukrainians and give them urgent training.

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

U.S. President Biden and the Kiev Air Attacks on Monday: The Case for a New Strategy in the War on the Balkans

Turkey and the Gulf states that receive a lot of Russian tourists need to be pressured to join the West’s efforts to further isolate Russia with trade and travel restrictions.

The attacks snatched away the semblance of normality that city dwellers, who spent months earlier in the war in subways turned into air raid shelters, have managed to restore to their lives and raised fears of new strikes.

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

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 recent attacks on civilians in Ukraine increased the focus on what the US and its allies need to respond after sending billions of dollars of arms and kits to the region in an effective proxy war with Moscow.

During his visit, US President Joe Biden unveiled a $1.8 billion package of assistance for Ukraine that includes a Patriot missile defense system – a longstanding request of Kyiv’s to counter Russian air attacks.

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 they do the best they can in subsequent packages.

Kirby was not able to say whether Putin was shifting his strategy from a losing battlefield war to a campaign to kill civilians and damage the infrastructure in Ukraine, and he speculated that it was already happening.

It was something that they had been planning for a long time. Kirby said that explosion on the bridge might have accelerated some of their planning.

If the supplies of diesel fuel for tanks are not working, how can they be sure that The Button will work if Putin presses it? If you reveal your strategic missiles and retaliatory capability, you’re more at risk for a nuclear power collapsing.

The French president underscored that the rush-hour attacks in Ukraine could be a sign of another pivot in the conflict.

A retired lieutenant. Col Alexander Vindman, who was the former director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, said that the attacks were meant to send a message to Putin about how he would prosecute the war.

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

It’s possible that a campaign against civilians by Putin would cause a break with Ukrainian culture and possibly set off a domino effect of refugees heading to Western Europe.

The lesson of this horrible war is that everything Putin has done to fracture a nation he doesn’t believe has the right to exist has only strengthened and unified it.

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

She said that this is a way for him to scare people in other countries or to show to his own people that he is still a bloody tyrant and look what fireworks we can arrange.

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

It was a sign that the domestic pressures on Russia had reached a point where President Putin wanted a brutal show of force for his people at home.

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

Struggling on the battlefield in southern and eastern Ukraine, Russia felt war on its own territory on Sunday as more than a dozen explosions ripped through a Russian border region, and a series of blasts severely damaged the offices of Russia’s puppet government in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

The Russian Defense Ministry, in a statement cited by the state media outlets RIA Novosti and TASS, described the shootings as a terrorist attack. The soldiers were shot at a firing range by two men from a former soviet nation.

How Ukrainians Left Moscow, and How Russians Can Get Their Regimes Enforced: The Last Days of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The manager of the business, a woman called Olya, said about half of the customers had left. Many of the clients — along with half of the barbers, too — have fled Russia to avoid President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to mobilize hundreds of thousands of men for the flagging military campaign in Ukraine.

Men are scared of getting a draft notice and have decided to stay away from the streets. She said that she saw authorities at each of the four exits as Olya came to work last Friday.

Olya, like many other women who had been interviewed, did not want her last name used, fearing repercussions. It is hard to know what to do. We always planned for each other.

Some regional officials — including the mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin — appeared to be taking pains to offer reassurances. Mr. Sobyanin said on his Telegram channel that no measures are being taken to limit 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.

The martial law imposed inUkraine by Moscow is a warning to Russians, the first time in 70 years that Moscow has declared martial law.

The people are worried about the border being closed and the siloviki will do what they want.

On Tuesday, the newly appointed commander of the Russian invasion, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, acknowledged that his army’s position in Kherson was “already quite difficult” and appeared to suggest that a tactical retreat might be necessary. General Surovikin said he was ready to make “difficult decisions” about military deployments, but did not say more about what those might be.

Russia maintains large quantities of weapons near the troops they will supply and well within range of enemy weaponry. It is standard practice for large depots to be broken up and scattered and that they are located far back from enemy lines, even if Russian territory has been declared off limits to Ukrainian strikes.

Police officers who have returned to towns and villages to re-establish a Ukrainian administration have been overwhelmed by complaints of theft and property damage, but also accounts of detentions, torture and missing relatives.

The police said the scale of abuse of the population would be greater in eastern Ukraine because of the length and scope of the Russian occupation.

Serhii Bolvinov is the police chief of Kharkiv Province, and he said that more than a thousand cases of people being arrested in police stations and holding facilities have been recorded. The real figure is probably two or three times that, he said.

According to witnesses, torture was normal. The signs of abuse were already apparent in some of the 534 bodies recovered across the region, the police chief said. He said there were bodies that were tortured to death. “There are people with tied hands, shot, strangled, people with cut wounds, cut genitals.”

A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, And The History of Wars That Might Still Happen: CNN Viewpoints on Putin’s Cold War with the EU

The author of the book A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen is a CNN contributor, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award. He was a reporter for CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

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.

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.

The EU powers agreed to control energy prices in the early hours of Friday, after embargoes on Russian imports and the Kremlin cut natural gas supplies.

There is an emergency cap on the Dutch Title Transfer Facility, as well as permission for gas companies to form a group to buy gas on the international market.

He conceded that there was only a clear mandate for the European Commission to start work on a gas cap mechanism, even though he characterized the summit as having maintained European unity.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy is skeptical of price caps. Germany is concerned that caps would encourage higher consumption and will require ministers to work out details.

These divisions are all part of Putin’s fondest dream. The Kremlin has a point where the European continent is failing to agree on essentials, which could prove central to achieving success.

Germany and France are already at loggerheads on many of these issues. The French and German leaders have called a conference call to try and reach an agreement.

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

The Italian Prime Minister’s Legacy Revisited: Why Putin and the United States can’t “write a blank check to Ukraine”

And now a new government has taken power in Italy. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first woman prime minister, tried to ignore the post-fascist aura of her party. One of her far right coalition partners has expressed admiration for Putin.

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

Matteo Salvini, the leader of the ruling Italian coalition, said during the campaign that he didn’t want the Russia sanctions to harm those who impose them than those who aren’t.

At the same time, Poland and Hungary, both long-time allies of the ultra-right, became thorns in the EU’s side over its liberal policies of the EU. Poland dislikes the views of Hungary’s populist leader Viktor Orban.

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

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.

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

Indeed, while the US has proffered more than $60 billion in aid since Biden took office, when Congress authorized $40 billion for Ukraine last May, only Republicans voted against the latest aid package.

How long Putin can insulate himself and prevent the blame from turning on himself is the key question in the wake of Makiivka. There is no indication that the Ukrainian military has intentions of easing the pressure on the Russian forces in the south of their country as the war enters a new year.

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 western world is trying to limit how much countries will pay for Russian oil and limit seaborne oil imports. The efforts are already cutting into profits.

The report said that Russian hypersonic missile production was all but ceased due to the lack of necessary semi-conductors. Aircraft are being cannibalized for spare parts, plants producing anti-aircraft systems have shut down, and “Russia has reverted to Soviet-era defense stocks” for replenishment. The Soviet era ended more than 30 years ago.

The property of a top Russian procurement agent and his agencies was seized by the US a day before this report.

The Justice Department also announced charges against individuals and companies seeking to smuggle high-tech equipment into Russia in violation of sanctions.

Donetsk and Novovoznesens’ke: a village of Russian soldiers and the country’s first rape investigation

Still, there remain hardliners like Pavel Gubarev, Russia’s puppet leader in Donetsk, who voiced his real intention toward Ukrainians: “We aren’t coming to kill you, but to convince you. If you don’t want to be convinced, we’ll kill you. We’ll kill as many as we have to: 1 million, 5 million, or exterminate all of you.”

How did people seeUkraine before Feb. 24, 2022? If pressed, some might have conjured mail-order brides and shaven-head gangsters roaming one big post-Soviet Chernobyl. But most probably didn’t think even that; instead, they didn’t imagine Ukraine at all. The country popped up on most people’s radar only in connection to Western political scandals and Russian war making. One Western journalist said recently that he thoughtUkraine was just like Russia, but without all the nonsense.

As the sun sets at the end of a long day, the two-man team arrives in Novovoznesens’ke, a village where they’ve uncovered two more cases of rape, allegedly by Russian soldiers. The next day, they return to Kyiv, to submit their findings.

Until early October, this area of the country was occupied by Russian troops. Burnt-out cars litter the fields. The letter ‘Z’ – a symbol used by Russian forces – marks the walls.

The United Nations says it investigated cases of sexual and gender-based violence against people ranging from four to 92 years old. There were 43 criminal proceedings initiated by the UN as of September.

In the Kherson region, there have been six allegations of sexual assault documented by the team from Kyiv. They say that the real number is much higher.

She says that they walked around the rooms. “One stayed there, and the other one, who raped me, came in here. He walked around the room and in this place he groped me.

She says he pinned her against the wardrobe and ripped her clothes. “I was crying, begging him to stop, but with no success,” she says. I had a singular thought at the time: to stay alive.

She recalled that he warned her not to tell anyone. She said that she didn’t tell her husband right away. My husband overheard and I told my cousin. He said, ‘You should have told me the truth, but you kept silent.’”

She was widowed more than 30 years ago – she says her husband died in a motorcycle accident – and her son joined the military soon after Russia’s invasion on February 24. She decided to leave, she says, about three months after Russian troops occupied her village.

The horrors of occupation confronted by the Kleshchenko, Svidro, and his mother-and-daughter in Tverdomedove

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

Although the prosecutor, Kleshchenko, and police officer Oleksandr Svidro are looking specifically for evidence of sexual crimes, everywhere they go they are confronted with the horrors of occupation.

The village was behind Russian lines, but never directly occupied. The crowd said that they had been abandoned for months, without help from either Russia or Ukraine.

A man in the crowd has claimed that he was held by Russian soldiers and then executed in a mock execution. It’s hard to hear, tales of torture like this are common here, but that’s not the subject of their work today.

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

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

CNN’s journey through Kherson is full of euphoric emotions as Russian soldiers leave the Dnipro River in Kherson

“I don’t know where to put it so that (the ceiling) won’t fall on my head,” she says. “If it would fall and kill me that would be better, so I won’t suffer. I want to see my son again.

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

A CNN team was forced to drive through fields and diversions as they traveled through smaller towns and settlements.

On Friday, Russian soldiers had left the west bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson to leave the regional capital as far as the Ukrainians could see.

The city’s residents have no water, no internet connection and little power. But as a CNN crew entered the city center on Saturday, the mood was euphoric.

The streets of Kherson are now filled with residents waving Ukrainian flags, singing and shouting as they protest against the plans by Russia to transform the region into a republic.

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

As CNN’s crew stopped to regroup, we observed an old man and an old woman hugging a young soldier, with hands on the soldier’s shoulder, exchanging excited “thank yous.”

The Crimes of Crime: Defections in the Crimean War on Crimea and the Unification of Russia with the EU and the United Nations

Hundreds of thousands of Russians have left the country, some out of principle or because of persecution, others to avoid being drafted into the military or western sanctions and still others for the same reason. Thousands have been detained, according to rights groups. Many other were forced to quit or lose their jobs because hundreds of western companies withdrew from Russia.

Everyone wants to understand what the occupiers have gone through, how happy they are, and how thankful they are for the countries who have helped them.

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

Polish and NATO leaders believe that the Russian missile was shot down by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft rocket a short way from the city of Lviv, one of the largest cities in western Europe. (President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, has insisted the missile was not Ukrainian)

Whatever the exact circumstances of the missile, one thing is clear. The Secretary General of NATO said Wednesday that Russia bears ultimate responsibility for the ongoing war against Ukraine.

Russian retaliation – an onslaught of missile attacks – has expanded as Ukrainian forces have continued to push back Russian units and reclaim territory seized in the early days of the war.

A number of Russian soldiers have refused to fight and rebelled against what they were told to do. The Defense Ministry of the UK believes Russian troops may be prepared to shoot retreating soldiers.

The hotline and Telegram channel launched as a Ukrainian military intelligence project designed to assist Russian soldiers wanting to defect has taken off, and booked over 3000 calls in its first two months of activity.

The Brexit Debattle: The Russian Exodus and the Status of a Joint Air System for a Next-Generation Jet

It’s important for your economic prospects, but also important for the political reconstitution of the country if you lose educated middle-class population. She pointed to the exodus of liberal, educated Iranians after the country’s 1979 revolution as proof that large numbers of their demographic can leave the country.

Even though he hoped that it wouldn’t be the case, one leading Russian journalist who fled in March told me last week that like many of his countrymen, he may never be able to return to his homeland.

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

The burden of the conflict on Western countries and Putin’s dream that it would drive further wedge into the western alliance are proving to be unfulfilled. There was word Monday that the long-stalled joint French-German project for a next-generation jet fighter at the heart of the Future Combat Air System was beginning to move forward.

The Russian winner of the peace prize blasted Putin in a speech in the Norwegian capital on Saturday.

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

The president of the European commission and the prime minister of Norwegian are in Paris on Monday for a dinner.

Also in France, on Tuesday, the country is set to co-host a conference with Ukraine in support of Ukrainians through the winter, with a video address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The State of Ukraine: NPR’s coverage of the Dec. 8 release of Brittney Griner and the arrest of Viktor Bout

U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner was freed Dec. 8 after nearly 10 months in Russian detention and following months of negotiations. Her release came in exchange for the U.S. handing over convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. A woman is back in the US with her husband. Bout is said to have joined an ultranationalist party in Russia.

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.

The Russian-occupied city of Melitopol has been hit by a Ukrainian air strike. The city in southeastern Ukranian’s Zaporizhzhia region is one of the targets that Ukrainian forces used long-range cannons to reach.

Russian forces turned the city of Bakhmut into burned ruins, Zelenskyy said. There has been fighting as Russia attempts to move into the city.

President Zelenskyy had a phone call with President Biden on Dec. 11, as well as the leaders of France and Turkey, in an apparent stepping up of diplomacy over the 9 1/2-month-long Russian invasion.

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

Dark Ukrainian fairy tales of displaced mothers: Pregnant women in Warsaw, Ukraine, during the December 18-18 fighting and the birth of her son

December is a month of fairy tales, and there is a hope of a miracle when we peer into darkness.

“We used to joke that our life was like a dark fairy tale inclined towards a happy ending. And now it’s over,” says Ievheniia, a displaced Ukrainian woman in Poland who this December is nursing her two-month-old son – and raw grief for the child’s father.

On November 18, Ievheniia’s husband Denys was killed in action while defending Ukraine against Russian aggression. The 47-year-old died at the site of some of the war’s most intense fighting in the east of the country. Ukrainian forces have been holding the line there for months; soldiers waist-deep in mud amid trenches, bomb craters and charred trees.

Video link takes place in the crucial moments of this dark Ukrainian fairy tale. This is what love looks like in a time of war, shifted to the digital space and disrupted mid-plot.

The team from the Media Initiative for Human Rights traveled across Ukraine in the last year to visit attack sites, assess damage and interview victims. The software used by eyeWitness to Atrocities was designed to document the aftermath of the war in a way that could be used in criminal cases related to the war.

In the streets of Warsaw, her temporary home, the festive season is well underway. The Christmas is coming. Ievheniia said people don’t want to be reminded that someone is suffering. They should be aware that the fight is unfolding right next to them.

After driving westwards across the country under Russian bombardment, Ievheniia finally arrived at an enlistment office. She was told to return the next day to sign a contract, after being interviewed on a Friday.

On the weekend, she decided to take a pregnancy test, just in case. “With war and evacuation, the ground was slipping under one’s feet,” she said with a laugh. I was pregnant on top of that.

The pregnancy test provided that plot twist: the woman who planned to defend her homeland instead joined the flow of refugees looking for safety in Poland.

A short fairy tale about a young Ukrainian woman and her family, Denys and Ievheniia, who left Ukraine to fight for independence

Separated by war, Ievheniia and Denys sought to validate their partnership in the eyes of the state. The everyday ingenuity of the country at war were at work and now Ukrainian servicemen can marry via video call. “Instead of (by) boring civil servants, we got married remotely by a handsome man in a uniform. I had nothing to complain about,” Ievheniia said.

Over the following months, Denys kept the magic alive with flower deliveries and professional pictures ordered from the trenches.

When one morning she did not pick up the phone, Denys raised the alarm all over Warsaw and a rescue squad found Ievheniia unconscious in her rented flat. There could have been death if there had been a delay. A Caesarean section followed. Because the baby was born two months early, the father was able to meet his new son.

Under martial law, Ukrainian men of fighting age, let alone servicemen, are not currently allowed to leave the country. Yet as is appropriate for a fairy tale, Denys got permission, crossed the border, and spent five days with his family.

It was a magical time filled with ordinary things. He left after that. Ievheniia remembered that on his birthday he was sent greetings. He was killed the next day.

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

Calvino’s Fables and the War of the Black-Hole-Laced Ugly-Born-Infeld

Calvino said that fables are often a bad example of a fairy tale ending badly. If it does, it means the time to be consoled has not yet come. It is time to act.

We should not be fooled by the narrative logic of a fairy tale. The wily kid won’t use magic to defeat the monster. Ukrainians need military aid to bring a victory over Russia, not just prolong the fight with lots of sacrifice. Ukrainian victory is dependent on our collective effort.

I was in awe of all the books I was reading and wondered what I would do in a fight against evil. Would I be able to turn away and proceed with my daily life?” Ievheniia told me. All of us have a chance to find out.

Volodymyr Viatrovych, the Russian Revolutionary Leader, and the Birth of the Republic of Ukraine. The Story of Crime and Reconciliation

The Russian empire began to expand. Many Russians believe that their empire is impossible without Ukraine. Volodymyr Viatrovych, member of Ukraine’s parliament and a well-known historian, said that they keep coming back because of that.

He lives near the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, which the Russians pulverized in the first days of the war. Viatrovych’s wife and son were taken to western Ukraine for their safety after the Russians invaded Ukraine.

He then drove to Kyiv for an emergency session of parliament, which declared martial law. By 2 p.m. that day, he received a rifle so he could join the security forces defending the capital.

In 1918, while the Russians were still in control, the country decided to break away and built a beautiful whitewashed building in the center of the city to function as the offices for the House of Teachers.

The missiles began falling from Russian territory on February 24, 2022. The Ukrainians are angry at the missiles that have been thrown at them and they stand up to them.

The blast of independence and the destruction of the building where Ukrainians are still fighting to free their self-from-russia: Ukraine ongoing fight to free itself from-russia

The blast blew out the windows, as well as parts of the glass ceiling in the hall where independence was declared in 1918. The windows are boarded up. There are some shards of glass on the floor.

Steshuk Oleh, the director of the House of Teachers said there were parallels to a century ago. “This building was also damaged in the fighting back then. And now it’s damaged again. But don’t worry. We will rebuild everything.

“It’s not just the hardship that Ukrainians have experienced over the last century, this is the moment where the wrongs of the last hundred years need to be corrected,” he said.

The referendum they held on independence in December of 1991 was supposed to be the end of the matter. Ninety-two percent voted in favor of going their own way. The Soviet Union collapsed later that month.

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

Zelensky: When Russia Wins the War, It’s a Wonderful Place to Die, and What We Can Do About It

He said that if the war is losing, he doesn’t survive. It may signal the end of the era of the empire, not only of Putin’s era. It’s 21st century. It’s time for empires to go.

15 years ago, Kasparov entered politics and challenged Putin’s hold on power. After learning of his safety being at risk, he left Russia and now lives in New York.

Many military analysts warn the war is unlikely to produce a clear resolution on the battlefield. It’s likely to require negotiations and compromises.

Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s former ambassador to the United States, said the region would be more stable if Ukraine wins the war and joins NATO. This is what the government of Ukraine wants, but joining the alliance is unlikely in the near term.

“Being a buffer zone or gray zone is not good from a geopolitical point of view,” he said. Everybody wants to make a move if you’re in a gray zone between two security blocs. This has happened with Ukrainians.

I believe our generation can end this. Ukrainians are more united, more mobilized, more ready to fight than in 1918,” he said.

“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.”

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

Zelensky was in a steep decline in his popularity ratings in the days leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Zelensky was influenced to be a fighter by his environment in the rough and tumble of the neighborhood of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine.

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

This is the leader who when offered evacuate by the US as Russia launched its full-scale invasion quipped: “I need armor, not a ride.”

Revisiting Petrovich Zelensky in the Light of World War II: On the impact of the G7 oil price cap on Russian crude oil prices

Amid the fog of war, it all seems a long, long way since the heady campaign celebration in a repurposed Kyiv nightclub where a fresh-faced Zelensky thanked his supporters for a landslide victory. Standing on stage among the fluttering confetti, he looked in a state of disbelief at having defeated incumbent veteran politician Petro Poroshenko.

His ratings are now back to normal after the war. Just days after the invasion, Zelensky’s ratings approval surged to 90%, and remain high to this day. Zelensky was highly rated by Americans early in the war for his handling of international affairs.

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

As for his skills as comforter in chief, I remember well the solace his nightly televised addresses brought in the midst of air raid sirens and explosions in Lviv.

Zelensky is projecting confidence and competence in a modern way, by wearing T-shirts and hoodies, a uniform of Silicon Valley, rather than suits, to a younger, global audience that recognizes it as such.

Journeying to where her husband can’t, Zelenska has shown herself to be an effective communicator in international fora – projecting empathy, style and smarts. She and King Charles met at the refugee assistance center at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in London. Zelenska was not on the cover of TIME magazine, but there was a reference to her in the supporting text.

Despite the strong tailwinds at Zelensky’s back, there are subtle signs that his international influence could be dwindling. 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.

The economy within the country has stumbled from the impact of war and persistent missile and drone attacks on critical power infrastructure. Millions of Ukrainians don’t have heat, electricity or water during 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).

This adds up to a complicated path for Zelensky’s administration, if the liberation of the peninsula from Russia is part of their definition of victory. For the time being, the guy from Kryvyi Rih is not going to back down.

Zelensky achieved what Putin wanted to achieve but didn’t, that is to mobilize support domestically with a patriotic war in order to distract from his failures at home. Michael Popow said that it was painful for Putin to be shown up by a comedian.

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

The speech spoke about the struggle of the Ukrainian people, how we want to be warm in our homes at Christmas, and how we need to remember all the families in Ukraine that are fighting for their lives.

Zelensky’s historic address strengthened both Democrats and Republicans who understand what is at stake in this fight against Putin and Russian aggression as well as their ally, Iran, as she said.

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

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

Clinton, who previously met Russian President Vladimir Putin as US secretary of state, said the leader was “probably impossible to actually predict,” as the war turns in Ukraine’s favor and his popularity fades at home.

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

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

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

“As the leadership of our country has stated, the tasks set within the framework of the special military operation will be fulfilled, taking into account the situation on the ground and the actual realities,” Zakharova added, referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The US Army has a missile system that is regarded as one of the most capable long-Range Air Defense Systems on the market, and the Ukrainians have repeatedly asked for it.

However, the Kremlin denounced the transaction and said the US supplying Ukraine with Patriot missile systems will prolong the Ukrainian people’s “suffering.”

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

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

Russian President Putin changed his description of the invasion of Ukrainian forces from a special military operation to a “war” in the first public mention of it.

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

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

There was a decree to end the special military operation, according to Yuferev. “Several thousand people have already been condemned for such words about the war.”

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

Putin said Zelensky was refusing to negotiate as he accused Zelensky of refusing to negotiate.

“We never refused, it was the Ukrainian leadership that refused itself to conduct negotiations … sooner or later any party to the conflict will sit down and negotiate and the sooner those opposing us realize it, the better,” he said.

Russia is not ready to give up on the idea of democracy: Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu tells CNN that the Kremlin is making a real investment in the military

Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Wednesday declared the Kremlin would make a substantial investment in many areas of the military. The initiatives include increasing the size of the armed forces as well as speeding weapon programs and putting a new generation of hypersonic missiles in place.

“It was horrible to live under Putin and it was very far from the idea of democracy, but you still had some established institutions which you would almost take for granted that they would exist no matter what, and all of a sudden, everything collapsed,” he said, pointing to the near complete eradication of any remaining independent media, civil society and human rights groups.

She said that she stopped attending demonstrations when it became too dangerous after the war broke out. She doesn’t see a scenario under which the regime in Russia could be overthrown any time soon, she said, pointing out that all of the opposition leaders “are in jail or have been killed.”

CNN is not publishing the woman’s name and is using a pseudonym at her request because of the risks to her personal safety. She is in danger of being arrested and possibly sentenced to lengthy prison time if she speaks to foreign journalists about her involvement in the demonstrations.

The military or leadership’s criticism has been stopped since February by a series of Draconian laws. Nearly 20,000 people have been detained for demonstrating against the war — 45% of them women — according to a leading independent monitoring group.

A court in Moscow used the law to put an eight year prison sentence on a Kremlin critic for speaking out about the deaths of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha. The images of civilians dead were fake according to baseless claims by the Kremlin, which denied involvement in the mass killings.

Russian people can still get access to independent sources of information through technical workarounds. State media propaganda is very popular with older Russians, who watch angry TV talk shows to spread conspiracy theories.

The US Border Patrol recorded 36,271 encounters with Russian citizens between October 2021 and September 2022. The number includes people who were apprehended or expelled by the border force and is significantly higher than the 13,240 and 5,946 recorded in the two previous fiscal years.

A non-profit that helps Russian citizens fleeing persecution claims that its surveys show those leaving are younger and more educated than Russians of the same age.

“If you take the Moscow liberal intelligentsia, and of course, I’m talking only about the people I know and I know of, I would say that maybe 70% left. It’s journalists, it’s people from universities, sometimes schools, artists, people who have clubs and [foundations] in Moscow that got closed down,” Soldatov said.

Maria said she wants to stay in Russia, even though her friends and son have left. Her elderly mother can’t – and doesn’t want to – travel abroad, and Maria is not willing to leave her. “If I knew for sure that the borders would not be closed and I could come at any time if my mother needed my help, it would probably be easier for me to leave. But knowing that something else could happen at any moment scares me,” she told CNN.

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

You’re torn apart constantly, are you to blame? Did you not do all you could? Can you do something else or not? What should you do now? She said so. “There are no prospects. I’m an adult, and I didn’t exactly have all my life figured out, but all in all I understood what would happen next. Now nobody understands anything. People don’t even understand what will happen to them tomorrow.”

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

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

He said he began to feel wrong when speaking about Russians as “us” because he deeply disagreed with Russia’s actions. But saying Russian wasn’t right either. “Because of course, I’m Russian, I also have some partial responsibility for what is going on and I do not want to hide from it.”

Maria is a historian by training and she has spent years taking part in anti-government protests, describing herself as a liberal deeply opposed to Putin. I have always believed our country should not be led by someone from the KGB. It is too deeply rooted with horrors, deaths and all that,” she said.

Berzina said that the expectation of some in the West – that “once people start feeling as though their leaders are doing wrong, that there is an immediate wave of protests on the streets and call for government change that actually has an effect” – does not reflect the reality of life in Russia.

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

“It is probably difficult for people from democratic countries to understand the realities of life in a powerful autocracy,” she said. It feels like one’s insignificance and helplessness is in front of a machine of death and madness.

Moscow will not negotiate with Ukraine on the basis of a 10-point peace formula: the Kharkiv region, the city of Kiev and the Odesa region

At least two people were killed in attacks on Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region. Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said four rockets had hit the city — likely S300s — and that critical infrastructure was the intended target.

Anna Kovalchuk, another Kyiv resident, said she was determined not to let the Russians ruin her upcoming celebrations. I am worried that New Year’s Eve will be without electricity and the holiday will have to be spent in the dark. But I began to prepare myself for such a scenario in advance, stocked up on garlands, power banks, so the blackout would upset us, but not stop us,” she told CNN.

When Anastasiia Hryn, a 34-year-old Kyiv resident, woke up to the sound of air raid sirens followed by an explosion, she and her son descended to the basement shelter beneath their building. They were not surprised but did not let it discourage their spirits.

After the sirens gave the all clear, life in the capital went back to normal, Hryn said: “In the elevator I met my neighbors with their child who were in hurry to get to the cinema for the new Avatar movie on time.” Many people went to work despite the fact that their kids were going to school.

As the war looks set to stretch into another year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday that Moscow will not negotiate with Kyiv on the basis of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s proposed 10-point peace formula, which includes Russia’s withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory, a path to nuclear safety, food security, a special tribunal for alleged Russian war crimes, and a final peace treaty with Moscow.

In western Ukraine, Mayor Andrii Sadovyi said that the city had no power and that the city’s waterworks could also stop working.

At least three people, including a 14-year-old, were injured and two people pulled from a damaged home on Thursday, Klitschko said earlier. In attacks on the capital, homes, an industrial facility and a playground were damaged.

Emergency power cuts have been rolled out in Odesa after the missile attacks. “They are introduced due to the threat of missile attacks to avoid significant damage if the enemy manages to hit energy facilities,” DTEK, a utility company, said in a statement.

The Ukrainian military said that the majority of cruise missiles fired at Ukraine on Thursday were intercepted, with its defense forces shooting down 54 of 69, according to preliminary data. Klitschko said 16 missiles were destroyed by Ukraine’s air defenses over Kyiv.

The end of the Ukrainian war? Social media, news, and social media under “fake news” laws. The case against Russia in the post-Soviet Ukraine

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

Many expected Ukraine’s capital to fall within days of the invasion, but Ukrainians fought and pushed Russian troops back. They’ve continued to fight. Russia now wants to take land in the east of the country. Both sides have gained and lost territory over the course of the year, but now the war appears to be at an inflection point.

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

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

Russia’s anti-LGBT laws have been greatly expanded by the state, which argues the war in Ukraine reflects an attack on traditional values.

For now, repressions remain targeted. Some of the new laws are still unenforced. But few doubt the measures are intended to crush wider dissent — should the moment arise.

Leading independent media outlets and a handful of vibrant, online investigative startups were forced to shut down or relocate abroad when confronted with new “fake news” laws that criminalized contradicting the official government line.

Internet users are subject to restrictions as well. The social media giants were banned in March. Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin’s internet regulator, has blocked more than 100,000 websites since the start of the conflict.

Russia’s First Day of War: The End of the Cold Cold War and its Implications for the Middle East, Europe, and the Cold War

There were many perceived government opponents who left in the early days of the war because of fears of persecution.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians fled to border states like Georgia, because of Putin’s order to mobilize 300,000 additional troops in September.

Some countries that have absorbed the Russian exodus see their economy growing even as Russians remain a sensitive issue in the former Soviet republics.

The ruble regained value after being helped by Russian price controls. McDonald’s and several other brands ultimately relaunched under new names and Russian ownership. The government reported the economy declined 2.5% by the end of the year, which was less than most economists predicted.

Ultimately, President Putin is betting that when it comes to sanctions, Europe will blink first — pulling back on its support to Ukraine as Europeans grow angry over soaring energy costs at home. He announced a five-month ban on oil exports to countries that have a price cap, which will make the pain worse in Europe.

Russia’s military campaign has not had a change in the government’s tone. Russia’s Defense Ministry gives out daily briefings about the successes on the ground. Putin, too, repeatedly assures that everything is “going according to plan.”

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

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

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

It would have been unimaginable in the soviet era for allies to criticize Russia’s actions because of their own sovereignty. China and India have purchased discounted Russian oil but have stopped supporting the Russian military campaign.

The 2011-2012 Russian leader’s big press conference: after 10 months of war, his wife and his wife’s heart were so touched by everything

A state of the nation address, originally scheduled for April, was repeatedly delayed and won’t happen until next year. Putin’s annual “direct line” — a media event in which Putin fields questions from ordinary Russians — was canceled outright.

An annual December “big press conference” – a semi-staged affair that allows the Russian leader to handle fawning questions from mostly pro-Kremlin media – was similarly tabled until 2023.

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

In his speech, Zelensky recalled a year in which he was afraid that Russia would invade, but ended the speech with hope for victory.

Mr. Zelensky recounted in a videotaped speech many noteworthy moments from the war, including the attack on a maternity hospital and the Azovstal steel plant.

He said that the year had struck his and his wife’s hearts. “We’ve cried out all the tears. All of the prayers have been said. There are 311 days. We have something to say about everything.

What does Europe do and what does Russia want to do about it? The role of the West in dealing with Ukraine in the 21st century

All Ukrainians — those working, attending schools or “just learning to walk” — are participating in Ukraine’s defense, Mr. Zelensky said. And although 2022 could be called a year of losses, he said that was not the right way to think of it.

Mr. Zelensky said that the world rallied around Ukraine, starting with the main squares of foreign cities and their halls of government.

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

Despite this palpable Russian decline, Europe is not welcoming in an era of greater security. Even when Russia is not threatening Europe, calls for a greater defense spending are louder than ever.

Russia met a West that was more than willing to send its weaponry to its eastern border, even if it was divided and reticent. Western officials would be surprised by Russia’s changing red lines, as Moscow is realizing how limited its non-nuclear options are. This was not supposed to happen. So, what does Europe do and prepare for, now that it has?

Key is just how unexpectedly unified the West has been. Europe and the US have been speaking the same script on Ukraine despite being split over Iraq, fractured over Syria, and unwilling to spend 2% of GDP on security the United States demanded of NATO members. Washington may have been more warier, and Hungary is an example of an outlier. But the shift is towards unity, not disparity. That was quite a surprise.

The prospect of a Russian defeat is in the broader picture: that it did not win quickly against an inferior adversary. The mouths on state TV talked about the need to take gloves off, as if they would not expose a fist that already had withered. The Russian military’s struggles for a semblance of peer status with NATO will take a long time. The years of effort that had gone into rebuilding Moscow’s reputation as a smart, asymmetrical foe with conventional forces has collapsed in just six months of mismanagement.

America has done this before. The most dangerous nuclear confrontation so far was the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which the Soviet Union shifted its position quickly and accepted the outcome that favored the West. It would not have been wise for America to accept a compromise that would have weakened it’s security and credibility.

The Crime against Russian Servicemen during a High-Toll-Tolerance Military Insurrection: An e-mail Exchange between the U.S. and Russia

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

It was the cell phones that the troops were using in violation of regulations that allowed the Ukrainian force to target them most accurately, according to the Russian account. Ukraine, however, has not indicated how the attack was executed. But the implications are broader and deeper, especially for how Russia is conducting its war now.

After the deadliest known attack on Russian servicemen, President Vladimir Putin called for a temporary ceasefire. The move was rightly dismissed by Ukraine and the US as a cynical attempt to seek breathing space amid a very bad start to the year for Russian forces.

The Russian officials said that four rockets from the Ukrainian side hit the school where the forces were housed. Two more HIMARS rockets were shot down by the Russians.

The failure of Russia to break up large arms depots is a function of the reality that their forces cannot communicate adequately, according to a senior fellow for the Defense program at the Center for New American Security.

It’s a view shared by other experts. “Bad communications security seems to be standard practice in the Russian Army,” James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told me in an e-mail exchange.

Compounding the problem, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said after the recent Makiivka strikes that “the Russian military has a record of unsafe ammunition storage from well before the current war, but this incident highlights how unprofessional practices contribute to Russia’s high casualty rate.”

The troops killed in Makiivka seem to have been recent conscripts, part of a larger picture in which Russian soldiers are shipped to the front lines without proper training and equipment.

A number of inmates from Russian prisons have already been freed and transferred to the Ukrainian side. One can only imagine how appealing the use of cell phones would be to prisoners accustomed to years of isolation with little or no contact with the outside world.

Semyon Pegov, who blogs under the alias WarGonzo and was personally awarded the Order of Courage by President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin two weeks ago, attacked the Ministry of Defense for its “blatant attempt to smear blame” in suggesting it was the troops’ own use of cell phones that led to the precision of the attack.

He was not sure if the location of soldiers in a school building could not have been determined using drones, as was suggested by the Ministry of Defense.

A month earlier, the defense ministry underwent a shakeup when Col. Gen. Mikhail Y. Mizintsev, known to Western officials as the “butcher of Mariupol,” was named deputy defense minister for overseeing logistics, replacing four-star Gen. Dmitri V. Bulgakov, who had held the post since 2008. The location of the arms depot, adjacent to the Makiivka recruits, would likely have been on Mizintsev’s watch.

Even so, Shoigu remains defense minister, even as he tells his troops in a celebratory video: “Our victory like the New Year is inevitable.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/opinions/russia-makiivka-deaths-cell-phones-andelman/index.html

The Ukrainian Children’s Camps: Political Reeducation in Crimea and Crimea, and its Implications to the Kremlin

There seems to be no idea that the West will be letting up on its support for Ukrainians. The US and Europe have pledged to raise their funding by $2 billion in four years, and they appear determined to see Ukraine through this winter.

The US is considering sending Bradley armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine. French President was sending light tanks, but the Ukrainian president wanted heavier tanks to be sent. All of which puts German Chancellor Olaf Scholz under increasing pressure to add its powerful Leopard 2 tanks to the mix.

“The primary purpose of the camps appears to be political reeducation,” he said, noting that at least 32 of the facilities identified in the report “appear to be engaged in systematic re-education efforts that expose children from Ukraine to Russia-centric academic, cultural, patriotic, and in two cases, specifically military education.”

The network includes Russian-occupied Crimea, and the eastern Pacific Coast which is closer to Alaska than it is to Moscow.

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

“Other children have been held for months at these camps, including hundreds of children whose status is unknown; at the time of this report, it is unclear if they have been returned to their families. This report has identified two camps where children’s scheduled return date has been delayed by weeks. At two other camps identified, children’s returns have been indefinitely postponed,” it stated.

It is critical to understand that these are children who do not have constant contact with their parents, and this is putting their lives at risk on a daily basis.

The report claims to have identified several dozen federal, regional, and local figures directly engaged in operating and justifying the program but also that at least 12 of them are not on the U.S. or international sanction lists.

Raymond said that the system was in line with the rules of the Rome Statute and the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, in terms of the prohibition on transferring children from one group to another.

Ned Price said that Russia’s system of forced relocation, reeducation and adoption of Ukraine’s children is a key element of the Kremlin’s systematic efforts to deny and suppress the country’s identity.

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

One Year After the Second World War: Putin-Russia Wrap Opinions Ctpr/Opinions: Kyiv & Moscow

It’s the evening of February 23, 2022. In Kyiv, the boss of a news site relaxes with a bath and candles. A young woman is going to bed so she can celebrate her husband’s birthday on the morning of his birthday. In Moscow, a journalist happens to postpone his travel plans to Kyiv.

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

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/opinions/one-year-anniversary-putin-war-ukraine-russia-wrap-opinions-ctpr/index.html

Zapotrsk, Kiev: The first folk hero in a foreign land. How my husband and I went to school in Odesa

February 23, 2022, is Zaporizhzhia. I went to bed thinking that I would celebrate my husband’s birthday the next day. Our life was getting better. My husband was running his own business. Our daughter had started school and made friends there. Fortunately, we found a special needs nursery for our son with the help of support services. I had time to work. I was happy.

Completely exhausted, frightened and scared, we had to come to terms with our displacement. I will be forever grateful to all those who helped us come to Prague and adjust to a new life in a foreign land.

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

He was the first folk hero for a long time. “He’s a hero for the most ultraconservative – the most, I would say, fascist – part of Russian society, as long as we don’t have any liberal part in Russian society, because most of the leaders of that part of Russian society have left, he’s an obvious rival to President Putin.”

We were woken up by the start of the invasion. I wrote an open letter denouncing the war, which was co-signed by 12 Russian writers, directors and cultural figures. Tens of thousands of Russians added their signatures after it was published.

On the third day we, my husband and I, left Russia. It was kind of a moral obligation for me. I could not stay on the territory of the fascist state.

We moved to Berlin. My husband went to work as a volunteer at the refugee camp next to the main railway station, where thousands of Ukrainians had been arriving every day. I was writing a new book. It starts like this:

My adopted city of Odesa has been hit by dozens of Kalibr missiles fired by Russia. Air raid sirens blare as we bolt for shelter. My landlady brings me a pot of borscht to help create a sense of normalcy.

Time and again since the Russian invasion started, I’m haunted by the darkness in my father’s eyes during the re-telling of chilling dinnertime stories of relatives shipped off to the Soviet gulag, never to return. Stories of millions of Ukrainians who starved to death in Stalin’s manmade famine of 1932-33.

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

My former classmates from Zaporizhzhia whom, based on our teenage habits, I expected to perish from addictions a long time ago, have volunteered to fight. My hairdresser, who I thought was going to remain a sweet summer child, fled with her mom, grandmother and five dogs from the town ofBucha to the forest in Russia.

My capital, which the Kremlin and the West expected to fall in three days, has withstood 12 months of Russia’s terrorist bombings and energy blackouts. The Russians have managed to bring the stars closer to death by seeing so many over Kyiv during the dark winter nights.

It seems that since February 2022 we have experienced several eras. After a long time with stagnant ratings, Putin suddenly received more than 80% approval from the population.

By aborting the past, he canceled the future. It is easier to live this way if your superiors decide what you should be doing, and you assume everything you are told is propaganda.

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

I took a bath, washed my dog, and lit candles on the night of February 23. I live in a one-bedroom apartment in the northern part of the city. I loved taking care of it. I loved the life I had. The small routines and the struggles, all of them. That night was the last time my life mattered.

The phone rang a lot the next day and there was missed calls. A red headline in all caps on the Kyiv Independent website read: “PUTIN DECLARES WAR ON UKRAINE.”

Why does Russia take us seriously? – How did you lose your life? What do we do now to bring them to justice, and what do we need to do?

I remember trying to organize a small army of volunteers to help strengthen the newsroom. And calling my parents to organize buying supplies.

I knew the life was falling apart after, and the first things to fall apart were the small things. I don’t care what drink I drank, how I dressed, or whether or not I took a shower. Life didn’t matter anymore, the battle did.

Just a few weeks into the full-scale invasion it was already hard to remember the struggles, sorrows and joyful moments of the pre-war era. I could no longer relate to my previous upset about my boyfriend. My life didn’t change on February 24, it was stolen from me on that day.

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

I was no longer concerned with my personal ambitions. To raise our flag and show that we are fighting is the only important goal.

I couldn’t enjoy my victories on the track. They were only possible because so many defenders had laid down their lives. But I got messages from soldiers on the frontline. They were happy to follow our achievements, and it was my main motivation to continue my career.

Life values are different. Like never before, I enjoy every opportunity to see or talk to relatives and friends. Like many Ukrainians, I believe in the victory and the fact that it will allow us to return to our country. We need the world to help us.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks this is a critical moment. “The battlefield, as difficult as it is and as bloody as it is … is something that’s going to play a very major factor in both President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and President [Vladimir] Putin’s calculations as to whether or not to go to the negotiating table … and under what conditions.”

“This is something that leads me to the question – for whom do we document all these crimes?” The head of the Center for Civil Liberties told us. “Because I’m not a historian, I’m a human rights lawyer, and we document human pain in order sooner or later to have all these Russians … brought to justice.”

How does Taiwan’s Foreign Minister learn from Ukraine’s War in Ukranian: An Open Question to the CP-Violation?

Taiwan’s Foreign Minister said the country is keeping a careful eye on China and learned from the war in Ukranian.

They have an expansionist motivation. They want to get better at their craft. They want to continue to expand their power. They will continue to march on if they can’t be stopped.

Antony Blinken is the Secretary of State and he told NPR that they avoided conflict between great powers. “This system, for all its imperfections, works. But now, it’s being challenged.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/18/1157820509/ukraine-russia-war-anniversary

The First Battle of Stalingrad: The Birth of a Nation in the War for Russia, and the Failure of the Cold War in the First Year of Russia

They tried to flee in the first days of the war, but the family car was shelled, Natalia believes, by Russian forces. Her husband was killed, along with her 6-year-old nephew, Maxim. Vova was hospitalized for months after the attack, with seven bullets in his body.

The audio for this story was produced by Danny Hajek; edited by Barrie Hardymon and Natalie Winston. Additional editing and production help from Carol Klinger, Denise Couture and Nina Kravinsky. Hanna Palamarenko and Tanya Ustova provided reporting and translation help.

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is fond of a phrase, “the wonderful Russia of the future,” his shorthand for a country without President Vladimir Putin.

Since February of last year, Putin has not been bothered by protests or sanctions. Independent media and human rights groups have been branded as foreign agents or shut down entirely.

“Putin arrived in Volgograd, which was renamed Stalingrad for a few days on the occasion of the anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad,” Rogov wrote on Telegram. “The anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, which is perceived as a turning point in the Patriotic War, is, of course, used as a great allusion and patriotic warm-up before the decisive second offensive against Ukraine that is being prepared.”

Those who draw the European countries into a war with Russia are irresponsibly declaring it to be a good thing, but those who think they can win the war on the battlefield don’t understand.

“A return to rapid warfare with tanks ruins this new strategy that Russia has just set its sights on,” Baunov wrote. “New people may also be needed to hold the front, and this is risky.”

The first mobilization caused major tremors in the Russian society, so this is risky. Hundreds of thousands of Russians voted with their feet. Police faced off against demonstrators in multiple cities when protests erupted in ethnic minority regions. Russian social media was flooded with complaints about the lack of equipment and appalling conditions for new recruits.

The bleak chapter of Soviet History is also a part of Wagner’s methods. Stalin used penal battalions and convicts to take on suicidal and desperate missions in the toughest sectors of the front, using human-wave attacks to overwhelm enemy defenses.

Putin was the only one who had a monopoly on power until a year ago. Any meaningful political opposition had been effectively neutered as the authorities quashed street protests. That caused speculation that the collapse of Putinism might be brought on by a fissure within the elite. The so-called siloviki (the hardcore authoritarians in Putin’s inner circle) still remain publicly loyal, but could be in danger of being overthrown due to setbacks in Ukraine.

Against that backdrop, some Russians have taken refuge in a form of political apathy. CNN recently talked to several Muscovites about how their lives have changed since last year but they had to keep their own names out of the public eye.

Ira doesn’t have a son, so she does not have to worry about him being mobilized. But she did say that her 21-year-old daughter has started going out to kvartirnik – informal, word-of-mouth gatherings in private apartments, somewhat reminiscent of the underground performances held in the Soviet era.

Ira said she felt acute anxiety in February and March of last year, immediately after the invasion. She had just bought an apartment and was worried that work might dry up and she wouldn’t be able to pay her mortgage.

“It got a lot worse in the spring,” she said. We seem to have gotten used to a new reality. I began to go out with my girlfriends. I started to buy a lot more wine.”

She said the restaurants were now full, but that the faces were different. The hipsters – you know what hipsters are? – There are fewer of them.

Russia’s war-anniversary economic activity in the presence of the IMF and other Western sanctions – a perspective from Olya

Olya, who is a 51-year-old events organizing with two teenage children, said that her family decided to take more domestic holidays. Europe is largely closed to direct flights from Russia, and opportunities to travel abroad are more limited.

Olya said life goes on even though there is a war. She said that she couldn’t influence the situation. “My friends say, we do what we can, what’s possible. It doesn’t help to be depressed.

Despite heavy Western sanctions the parts of the Russian economy that are still relevant to the government are stilldurable. The International Monetary Fund is projecting a small return to GDP growth for Russia, despite the Finance Ministry admitting that it ran a higher than expected deficit due to the war.

He said that people who reorganized quickly are seeing growth. In January, there was an unusual number of deals and most of our activity picks up in February.

He said that the cutoff of Western imports hasn’t made a difference in everyday life. It might be difficult to sell parts for the Mercedes Benz G-Class.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/19/europe/russia-ukraine-war-anniversary-intl-cmd/index.html

Barack Obama and the War on Crime: The Ukraine Crisis in the Era of Rejuvenation, and the emergence of new freedoms during the Cold War

He looked for other sources of information, and he was skeptical of state media. He acknowledged that he could get called up in another wave.

I need to explain. Chechnya was one of the two new independent Russian Federation republics when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. (The other one was Tatarstan.) But world leaders were by then quite fed up with the discovery that all those union republics that they had for decades regarded simply as administrative units of Russia — Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and others, still harder to pronounce — appeared to be real things. The West’s shock at this new geography meant that independent Ichkeria had not the slimmest chance of recognition.

Biden will deliver a major speech the day after his visit to Kyiv in order to encourage the world to support Ukraine in its fight against autocracy and to vow to help it defend its independence.

The risky trip on Monday to an active war zone was not just a powerful symbol of American support, it was a shot in the arm to a population that has endured Russia’s devastating attacks on civilian apartment blocks, hospitals, schools and the power stations that provide heat and electricity.

“It’s just something unbelievable that at a time like this the President of the United States is coming to Kyiv,” Andrei Ketov, a 48-year-old Ukrainian service member, told CNN.

Recall that in the early days of the invasion, Ukraine said it found Russian forces had brought along their dress uniforms apparently expecting a victory parade.

The Days of Donald and Alla Barsehian: Why Donald and Vladimir Putin Shouldn’t Have to Travel to Ukraine During the November 2016 Ukraine Referendum

Biden is old and walking with difficulty. He has a great deal of courage and competence even though he was there with Biden.

Biden made it very clear that Putin was going to make it look like it was a result of a Ukrainian provocation, in order to get people to believe it was a war. He became involved in NATO, which had been trashed by Donald Trump.

Who can forget the infamous phone call after which Trump was impeached, when Zelensky implored the US President for help to deter an aggressive Russia? Trump’s response, “I would like you to do us a favor though,” trying to push Ukraine into launching an investigation against Biden, the candidate Trump claimed was weak, even though he feared him as his most effective opponent.

A joyous Zelensky said Biden’s visit “brings us closer to victory,” adding it will “have repercussions on the battlefield in liberating our territories.”

Of course, some GOP members criticized Biden for going to Ukraine. The trip was described by the lawmaker as “incredibly insulting” and showed an “America Last” policy. And Rep. Scott Perry — at the center of a legal dispute with the Justice Department over his cell phone in the special counsel’s January 6 probe — described as “breathtaking” that Biden would help Ukraine defend its borders and not do the same for America.

Several patients were undergoing surgery and a number of women were in a labor ward at the time, Bashtanka Hospital director Alla Barsehian told CNN last week.

Health care workers stayed up to work the following morning after all patients were safely evacuated. In the rain, shoulder to shoulder with their friends and family, they began cleaning up the debris by hand. One and a half days later – with plastic wrap for windows and no doors – the facility reopened.

“We are the lifeblood of this district,” Barsehian said. She told CNN when she returned to the destroyed buildings the day after the attack, patients approached her and asked when the next appointment for their doctor was available — this is when she realized they had no choice but to carry on. We had to do our jobs and quickly restore things because people needed us.

CNN has asked the Russian government for comment but has not yet received a response. Russia has claimed before that it only fires on military targets. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed that Ukrainian soldiers had “equipped combat positions” in the Mariupol maternity and children’s hospital. There was a video of the hospital after the bombing that shows patients and staff, and especially pregnant women who were carried from the hospital.

“The report is the very first comprehensive effort to map and analyze attacks on Ukrainian health care infrastructure and personnel by Russian forces,” said Iryna Marchuk, an associate professor of international and criminal law at the University of Copenhagen, who was not part of the research.

Nearly 200 medical workers, who at the time of war are protected under international human rights laws, were either killed, injured, kidnapped or arrested, the collaboration between the NGOs revealed.

There is an impact after the physical damage to a building which is caused by lack of access to necessary care and essential medicines, De Vos told CNN. I believe that is precisely why the health care is targeted.

“We have clearly seen from the pattern [in the data] a method of warfare which is incompatible with the respect for international humanitarian law and needs to be addressed,” Wille told CNN, referring to incidents of indiscriminate use of explosive weapons against Ukraine listed in the report and alleged cases of kidnapping and torture of individual health workers.

According to the co- founder of the UHC, an implicit Loss of Health in Ukraine is vast. “We see a huge deprivation of health care services and pharmaceuticals in recently de-occupied territories.”

Experts warn that civilians are left with hardly any access to medical care in areas that have seen active combat. Nearly 80% of Mariupol’s health care facilities are destroyed, leaving the city’s remaining population of 100,000, many of them vulnerable or elderly, practically on their own, according to previous research by the Ukrainian Healthcare Center (UHC) think tank, one of the report partners. More than 300,000 Mariupol citizens have fled, been forcibly relocated or died since June of last year according to Mariupol’s City Council.

Health Care in Ukraine: a war crime investigated by a coalition of investigators and a UN tribunal with legal jurisdiction over the Geneva Conventions

A group of Ukrainian and international investigators looked at social media reports and satellite imagery to verify that events took place in locations that were not reachable due to combat or occupation.

The health care infrastructure in Ukraine has been deliberately targeted by Russian forces and constitutes a war crime, according to an email from Marchuk last week.

The Geneva Conventions qualify indiscriminate bombing in populated areas, failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and intentionally directing attacks against distinctively marked medical units, transport, and personnel as war crimes. A crime against humanity is considered by the United Nations.

The international legal community should investigate the evidence gathered by the coalition of investigators.

The former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa found the report to be damning. He said that it will help bring the criminals responsible for the atrocities to justice.

Stephen Rapp told CNN that the evidence from the Tuesday report is likely to be presented at a tribunal this week. One of the judges hearing evidence on aggression in Ukraine was a former US ambassador at large for war crimes. The tribunal will decide if there is enough proof to indict Putin and issue an arrest warrant. Our proceedings will hopefully convince the UN General Assembly to authorize the Secretary General to establish a tribunal with legal jurisdiction over aggression in Ukraine, Rapp told CNN.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/europe/report-hospital-ukraine-attacks-russia-invasion-intl-dg/index.html

The War in Bashtanka, Ukraine: War, Autocracy, Freedom, and Democracy: A Tale of Two Worlds

The hospital in Bashtanka was rebuilt by the end of summer 2022 with the help of donors and volunteers from across the country. And far from scaring the health workers away, the attacks have only made them more determined.

In addition to being a journalist, the author of “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind” is also a writer. She can follow her on the social media site. The views expressed in this commentary are of her own. View more opinion on CNN.

For Americans who came of age after the end of the Cold War, this renewed threat of nuclear annihilation is both new and terrifying; for those who lived through the original Cold War, this is no doubt a hair-raising reboot.

But it’s not just about a renewed nuclear threat. In Poland after an historic wartime visit to Kyiv, US President Joe Biden gave a speech of his own, also highlighting a fundamental divide – not between conservative religiosity and liberal tolerance, as Putin put it, but between autocracy and democracy. “The democracies of the world have grown stronger, not weaker,” Biden said. “But the autocrats of the world have grown weaker, not stronger.”

This is a battle between freedom and oppression, as Biden is correct in saying. It is worth nothing that the emphasis on cultural and gender warfare by Putin is correct.

He is of course lying and fear-mongering when he fulminates about same-sex marriage or the prospect of a gender-neutral God and when he says that the West seeks “the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion and the abuse of children are declared the norm.” There is a relationship between conservative religiosity and autocracy on one hand and liberal tolerance and democracy on the other.

Conservative religiosity is of course not a requirement for autocracy – just look at the previous era of Russian autocracy, which was decidedly irreligious. And the autocrats in Beijing, who are expanding their own nuclear arsenals and toying with lending material support to Russia, are not exactly bringing conservative Christian principles to China.

Traditionalism is embraced by them but they are also embracing a backwards looking national identity. Among analysists of global authoritarians, a familiar refrain has emerged: Make [x country] Again, great again. Evan Osnos wrote that China is trying to make it great again. “Putin set out to ‘Make Russia Great Again,’” Gen. David Petraeus told CNN earlier this month. We all know the American version.

It’s informative, though (and scary) to realize the extent to which a number of right-wing Americans believe Putin has a point about the West being degenerate, and seem comfortable bringing a strongman in to restore the traditional order.

The most salient divide is not between East and West; it’s between those who want pluralistic liberal democracies that allow people to live freely no matter what their religious beliefs, sexual orientations and aspirations – and those who prefer autocratic strongmen who use the law to impose conservative, traditional values whether people like it or not.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/21/opinions/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-war-one-year-filipovic/index.html

The Crime that Crimes: The Misuses of Power in the U.S. During the First Three Years of the Second World War

Former US President Donald Trump notoriously praised Putin and trashed NATO, elevating the dictator’s status among pro-Trump conservatives. Republicans in the US have a more favorable opinion of Putin than of Biden, Vice President Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrats.

Tucker Carlson has used his influential spot on Fox News to spout pro-Putin propaganda. Newly-elected Sen. JD Vance of Ohio has said, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” while former Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro has declared Ukraine “not really a country,” and former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has praised Putin by saying, “I have enormous respect for him.”

Meanwhile, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that “NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them.”

Russia is seen by the West as an example of Christian nationalists against Western secularism and decadence. In the US, many Christian nationalists have gotten in line.

This is not just a divide between Russia and the US. It’s a divide within Russia itself, as the nation’s feminists, LGBTQ rights advocates, and democracy activists continue to push (often at great personal risk) for a freer and fairer country. And it’s a divide within the US, too, between the Americans who want liberal democracy to thrive, and those who want their ideology to rule us all.

Ukraine has made many steps on a democratic path that began during this revolution. The government was able to give more rights to the people who live there. It is difficult to hide the misuses of power due to the anti-corruption legislation adopted by parliament. Judicial reform was possible because of the changes to our Constitution. There are a lot of things that still need to be done, but we were on the right track.

The Center for Civil Liberties and the 2014 Maidan Square Protests: Towards a Vision of a World Where Shared Human Rights Predominates

My organization, the Center for Civil Liberties, has been documenting abductions, illegal detentions, rapes, tortures and extra-judicial killings in the occupied territories since 2014. But since February last year, that river of horrors has turned into a flood.

Over this past year, the emotions I have experienced have evolved. Yes, I still feel anger over the death and destruction inflicted on Ukraine. But I have also felt a rising tide of love.

Because amid so many disappointments — in the ability of the international order to protect us, in the idea that the laws of war protect civilians — I have found we can still rely on people.

This was the spirit I saw before in Maidan Square during the 2014 protests. Those protests kept on, despite the police beatings, and then the killings, because we believed in something better. And it came.

The vision of a future Ukraine where human rights are respected and can rise from all this is a vision that extends further, perhaps. We no longer need a center for civil liberties to fight for them. It could be possible to envision a world where the spirit of shared humanity prevails.