Kherson residents refuse to leave
Eight months after Russia captured Kherson, the first major Ukrainian city to fall, Moscow’s grip on the city appears to be slipping as many of those who have refused Russia’s calls to evacuate anxiously wait for their city to be liberated, Pjotr Sauer writes.
The occupied city’s Russian administration earlier this month ordered an “evacuation” of its residents to Russian-controlled areas across the Dnieper River but many have decided to stay put.
“The city feels somewhat abandoned. Everyone who sympathised with Russia has fled, and the rest are stocking up on food,” said Anastasya, an elderly woman who evacuated her son at the beginning of the war but decided to stay in Kherson to take care of her three cats and two dogs.
“I am not planning to go anywhere. I am staying right here to wait for Ukraine to finally liberate us,” said Vladimir, a Kherson native.
Putin U-turns on UN grain deal
The Kremlin has said it will rejoin the UN-administered grain export corridor from Ukraine, after pulling out last weekend following a drone attack on Russian warships in the port of Sevastopol.
Moscow’s humiliating climbdown came two days after a large convoy of ships moved a record amount of grain in defiance of Russia’s warnings that it would be unsafe without its participation, Peter Beaumont reports.
Zelenskiy hailed Russia’s U-turn to rejoin the deal as a “significant diplomatic outcome” that demonstrated “the failure of the Russian aggression”.
Andrew Roth says the deal offers a lesson in calling Vladimir Putin’s bluff.
“In the end, Vladimir Putin backed down. Faced with blocking ships carrying grain from Ukraine or tacitly admitting that his threats to do so had been a bluff, the Kremlin leader opted not to rekindle a global food crisis,” he writes.
Russian strikes seek to put Ukraine in the cold
Waves of Russian missiles slammed into hydroelectric plants and other critical energy and water infrastructure across Ukraine throughout the week, with explosions reported near the capital, Kyiv, and in at least 10 other regions.
Hydro plants, substations and heat generation facilities were all hit, Ukraine said, while the ministry of defence in Moscow said it had targeted “energy systems” in a devastating Monday morning raid carried out using long-range cruise missiles.
By Thursday, electricity supplies to the Zaporizhzhia plant – Europe’s largest nuclear plant – were cut after Russian shelling damaged the remaining high voltage lines, leaving it with just diesel generators and 15 days’ worth of fuel to run, Ukraine nuclear firm Energoatom said.
Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector and energy facilities “do not stop for a single day” Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, noted in his Thursday evening address.
Sustained attacks on Ukrainian power facilities is the “strategy of nihilism”, Guardian defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh wrote in an analysis piece. “Bombing, however terrifying, is a military tactic that has a poor record of changing hearts and minds. It was used heavily in the Vietnam war, for instance, but failed to stem the overall resolve of the North Vietnamese, and if the Russians are any students of history, they will know its limitations.
“But Russia probably does not care. Its strategy is also aimed at the west: a shameless attempt to prompt a fresh flow of several million migrants across the border.”
The head of Ukraine’s national grid said that unless the country can prevent the collapse of its power supply, it faces a humanitarian crisis.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said the attacks were in retaliation for strikes on Russian vessels in Odesa. Russia’s Black Sea flagship vessel, the Admiral Makarov, was damaged and possibly disabled during an audacious Ukrainian drone attack over the weekend on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, according to an examination of video footage.
Luke Harding and Isobel Koshiw reported that open-source investigators said the frigate was one of three Russian ships to have been hit on Saturday. A swarm of drones – some flying in the air, others skimming rapidly along the water – struck Russia’s navy at 4.20am. Video from one of the sea drones shows the unmanned vehicle weaving between enemy boats.
Dan Sabbagh asked whether the boat drone attacks herald a new type of warfare.
Life amid the bombs in Mykolaiv
Dan Sabbagh visited the port city in southern Ukraine that has been relentlessly targeted by Russia since March. There have been only 25 days without shelling, officials say, and 148 civilians have been killed, including, earlier this month, an 11-year-old boy.
“At 1.40am on 23 October, two S-300 missiles landed on Davydiuk’s estate a couple of minutes apart. One hit her block, and the other blew up a shop, blasting rubble all over a children’s playground. Olena Izotova, 46, said she was woken up by the first bomb, while the shock wave from the second ‘blew her into the other room’. Miraculously, nobody was killed, because the strike happened at night – and so many people have already moved away.
“Fear is part of everyday life. ‘We hear shellings every day and night,’ said Davydiuk. ‘Sometimes you run to work and think: Thank God I’m alive. Sometimes at night you lean into the wall for safety and you feel like you are merging into the wall’.”
Rise and rise of Putin’s Wagner group
The leaders of the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary group answerable to Putin, now have as much political influence in the Kremlin as the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, a prominent Russian dissident and former political prisoner has told a British parliamentary group.
Patrick Wintour reported that founder Yevgeny Prigozhin had as much access to Putin as the formal government officials, according to dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He said Prigozhin was behind the recent appointment of General Sergey Surovikin to head the military operation in Ukraine and was working in close conjunction with Surovikin.
Wagner Group’s popularity in Russia had surged in recent months since it was able to argue that its existence acted as an alternative to wider mobilisation, Khodorkovsky said.
Meanwhile, Putin appeared to have allowed for future waves of mobilisation after declining to end a decree that has called up tens of thousands of Russians to fight in Ukraine.
A joke that went ‘out of control’
Daniel Boffey writes that by Christmas, 50 hardly used FV103 Spartan armoured personnel carriers (APCs), until recently the property of the British army, and currently in warehouses in secret locations across the UK, will arrive on the frontline in Ukraine’s war with Russia in time for the toughest winter conditions.
The transfer, the largest of such APCs to Ukraine, is not due to British munificence nor to procurement by the Ukrainian ministry of defence.
It is instead just the latest example of the extraordinary scale and indeed speed of the crowdfunding campaigns that have been powering the Ukrainian military since the early days of the war.
