Every week we wrap up essential coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, opinion and more.
Mr Fifty Percent: the former Ukraine mayor doing Putin’s work
The Russians were Volodymyr Saldo’s salvation. The wealthy Ukrainian in his 50s had done a stint in the national parliament and won three terms as the mayor of the southern city of Kherson, but at the start of 2022 police had opened a case against him for ordering a contract killing.
“I wanted to jail him,” Oleksandr Prokudin, Kherson’s police chief at the time and now the city’s governor, told Tom Burgis as he sat in the basement he uses for meetings since the Russians blew the roof off his office.
Detectives had found the intermediary they suspected of sending gangland assassins to shoot one of Saldo’s enemies. And the intermediary had told them it was Saldo who had paid for the hit, Prokudin says. “Then the war happened.”
Today, Saldo is beyond the reach of Ukrainian law. He is once again a powerful politician – Vladimir Putin’s chosen ruler of the occupied territory that lies across the river from Kherson. From there, shells, bombs and mortars rain down ceaselessly on the city he used to run.
A Guardian investigation into Saldo’s regime reveals that, under the banner of Russian nationalism, the invaders and their collaborators appear to be using terror tactics to construct on Ukrainian soil an extension of the gangster state Putin has built at home, where cronies grow rich and dissent is punished.
The Ukrainian city split by suspicion
Often, when Kostiantyn Grygorenko walks the streets of Izium, he spots people he suspects collaborated with the Russians during the five-month occupation of his home town last year.
He used to feel an overwhelming rush of emotions when he saw them. Now, he tries to conserve his energy and nerves and ignore them. But still, it gets to him.
“These people are walking around the town, living among us, and they think they’re not guilty of anything. But I think they’re criminals and should go to jail,” Grygorenko, editor-in-chief of the local weekly newspaper Izium Horizons, told Shaun Walker.
More than a year after the Russians retreated from Izium, much of the city is still in ruins. More than 5,000 houses and 120 apartment blocks have been damaged or destroyed. Schools, bridges and other critical infrastructure remain out of action.
As well as the material destruction, the 160 days of Russian occupation left an insidious psychological legacy that may take just as long to heal. It’s hinted at by the phone number daubed on walls throughout the town in white paint. The number is for a hotline run by the Ukrainian SBU security service, an invitation to provide information on who did what during the dark days of occupation.
Zelenskiy and Putin each vow to press on to victory
The leaders of Ukraine and Russia struck a defiant tone at end-of-year press conferences and vowed to reach their military goals as the war heads toward its third year, Pjotr Sauer reported.
Speaking in Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelenskiy sought to boost the domestic mood, saying he was confident US and European support would continue despite signs that support for the war, particularly in the US, is flagging.“I’m confident the US won’t betray us,” he said.
Meanwhile in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin told defence officials that in Ukraine he would “not give up what is ours”, while claiming the Russian military had momentum.
“Our troops are holding the initiative,” Putin said, during an end-of-year meeting with his defence leadership. “We are effectively doing what we think is needed, doing what we want.”
‘A capitulation to Orbán’s dirty blackmail tactics’
The decision by European leaders to open formal EU membership negotiations “marks a historic new chapter for the EU,” Katalin Cseh, a Hungarian MEP for the Renew Europe Group, wrote in an op-ed. “Yet it is tainted by the questionable means through which the agreement was achieved.”
“In a highly dubious deal that emerged in the run-up to the summit, the European Commission had unblocked €10.2bn, a third of an overall sum for Hungary frozen as punishment for [prime minister Viktor] Orbán’s dismantling of the rule of law,” she wrote. “This was a capitulation to Orbán’s dirty blackmail tactics, and it undermines the EU’s credibility in enforcing the rule-of-law standards required by membership.”
In a separate op-ed, Paul Taylor, a senior fellow of the Friends of Europe thinktank, argued that “the European Union is never quite as bad or quite as good as it looks.”
Just after the decision on membership talks, Orbán vetoed a €50bn four-year assistance package for Kyiv, Taylor wrote: “All of a sudden, it looked as if Europe had failed Ukraine in its hour of need.”
But he continued, “There is a good chance that EU ministers will either approve the aid package unanimously next month, after Orbán has had his moment of glory to show his domestic audience that he has the power to stop Europe if necessary, or find another way to get the money to Kyiv.”
The plight of Ukrainian PoWs
In a small apartment in a high-rise block on Kyiv’s left bank, 50-year-old Natalia struggled to remain composed as she contemplated spending a second New Year’s Eve without her son Artem.
“It’s the time when you’re meant to be with your family and this is going to be the second year without him, unless there is a miracle. I’m looking towards the holiday period with fear,” she told Shaun Walker.
Artem, 31, was a member of Ukraine’s Azov regiment and was taken prisoner at the end of the siege of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol last May. It was only in March this year that Russia officially confirmed to the Red Cross that Artem was being held prisoner there; Natalia has heard nothing since and had no news from him directly.
Artem is one of at least 4,500 Ukrainian servicemen and women believed to be in captivity in Russia as prisoners of war. Their families are often deprived of even elementary information about their location and wellbeing.
Prisoners who have returned in exchanges tell stories of mistreatment, humiliation and torture in Russian captivity.
A ‘pivotal’ moment in world history
The existing rules-based international system “needs fundamental change”, Estonian foreign minister Margus Tsahkna warned in an op-ed.
“Russia’s ongoing and barbaric war of aggression against Ukraine did not just break the system. It exploited some of its many flaws to degrade its apparently unenforceable norms and values,” Tsahkna wrote. “If that continues, we will all eventually lose interest in saving the system.
He advocates for reforming the UN security council to “protect the world from abusive veto-users” as well as reform of the Rome statute that founded the international criminal court to give it jurisdiction over crimes of aggression.
“We are at a pivotal moment in world history,” he wrote. “The only certainty is that the existing international system cannot survive unchanged much longer. However challenging the world becomes, remember that it was during the very darkest days of the second world war that the rules-based world was developed in its current iteration.”
