NOV 17, 2022
China and India, after months of refusing to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine, did not stand in the way of the release of a statement by the world’s leading economies that harshly criticized Moscow.
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China and India, after months of refusing to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine, did not stand in the way of the release this week of a statement by the world’s leading economies that strongly criticizes Moscow.
Could this, at last, signal a bold new policy change by Beijing and New Delhi to align themselves with what the United States and its allies believe is the best way to end a war that has brought death and misery to Ukraine and disrupted millions of lives as food and energy prices soar and economies crack?
The fall of the Berlin Wall more than 30 years ago symbolized hope for cooperation with Moscow. Russia’s war in Ukraine has now ushered in an era of confrontation.
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The long border between Finland and Russia runs through thick forests and is marked only by wooden posts with low fences meant to stop stray cattle. Soon, a stronger, higher fence will be erected on parts of the frontier.
Earlier this month,
Polish soldiers began laying coils of razor wire on the border with Kaliningrad, a part of Russian territory separated from the country and wedged between Poland and Lithuania. Cameras and an electronic monitoring system also will be installed on the area that once was guarded only by occasional patrols of border guards.
Russian airstrikes have targeted Ukraine’s energy facilities as the first snow of the season fell in Kyiv.
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The Kremlin’s forces have suffered a series of setbacks on the ground, the latest being the loss of the
southern city of Kherson. In the face of those defeats, Russia has increasingly resorted to aerial onslaughts aimed at energy infrastructure and other civilian targets in parts of Ukraine it doesn’t hold.
Russia on Tuesday unleashed a nationwide barrage of more than 100 missiles and
drones that knocked out power to 10 million people in Ukraine —
strikes described by Ukraine’s energy minister as the biggest assault yet on the country’s battered power grid in nearly nine months of war.
NOV 18, 2022
President Vladimir Putin wasn’t present when his top military officials announced on television that Russia was withdrawing from the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine.
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As Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s chief commander in Ukraine,
stiffly recited the reasons for the retreat in front of the cameras on Nov. 9, Putin was touring a neurological hospital in Moscow, watching a doctor perform brain surgery.
Later that day, Putin spoke at another event but made no mention of the pullout from Kherson -– arguably Russia’s most humiliating withdrawal in Ukraine. In the days that followed, he hasn’t publicly commented on the topic.
Putin’s silence comes as Russia faces mounting setbacks in nearly nine months of fighting. The Russian leader appears to have delegated the delivery of bad news to others — a tactic he used during the coronavirus pandemic.
As violence escalates in Ukraine, human rights abuses have become widespread. The situation is particularly concerning in the southern region of Kherson, where villages were liberated from Russian occupation a week ago.
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For 10 days, Alesha Babenko was locked in a basement and regularly beaten by Russian soldiers. Bound, blindfolded and threatened with electric shocks, the 27-year-old pleaded for them to stop.
“I thought I was going to die,” he told The Associated Press.
In September, Babenko and his 14-year-old nephew, Vitaliy Mysharskiy, were arrested by Russian soldiers who occupied his village of Kyselivka in Ukraine’s southern
region of Kherson. They had been taking photos of destroyed tanks and sending them to the Ukrainian army.
A Swedish prosecutor says investigators have found traces of explosives at the Baltic Sea site where two gas natural pipelines were damaged in what he called an act of “gross sabotage.”
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Investigators found traces of explosives at the Baltic Sea site where two natural gas pipelines were damaged in an act of “gross sabotage,” the prosecutor leading Sweden’s preliminary investigation said Friday.
Mats Ljungqvist of the Swedish Prosecution Authority said the investigators carefully documented the area where the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines
ruptured in September, causing significant methane leaks. The parallel undersea pipelines run from Russia to Germany.
“Analysis carried out shows traces of explosives on several of the foreign objects that were found” at the site, Ljungqvist said in a statement.
Ukraine’s electricity grid chief is warning of hours-long power outages as Russia zeroed in on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with renewed artillery and missile attacks.
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“You always need to prepare for the worst. We understand that the enemy wants to destroy our power system in general, to cause long outages,” Ukrenergo’s chief executive Volodymyr Kudrytskyi told Ukrainian state television. “We need to prepare for possible long outages, but at the moment we are introducing schedules that are planned and will do everything to ensure that the outages are not very long.”
The capital of Kyiv is already facing a “huge deficit in electricity,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko told The Associated Press. Some 1.5 million to 2 million people — about half of the city’s population — are periodically plunged into darkness as authorities switch electricity from one district to another.
“It’s a critical situation,” he said.