Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the Ukraine war, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
After the counteroffensive, the reckoning
Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the north-east dominated the news – its success has surprised some and sparked talk of a turning point in the conflict. However, as the week progressed and Kyiv’s forces consolidated their territory, the conversation shifted inexorably to the scale of the death and destruction, often wrought on civilians, that Russian forces left behind.
In the city of Izium, in the Kharkiv region, chief police investigator Serhiy Bolvinov said on Thursday that more than 400 bodies had been found in a mass burial site. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy compared it to the massacre in Bucha, where the bodies of civilians were found lying in the streets in scenes that shocked the world early on in Russia’s invasion.
Zelenskiy had cited Bucha the previous day when he made a surprise visit to Izium, holding a minute’s silence for Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war. Lorenzo Tondo and Isobel Koshiw were there as the Ukrainian flag was raised. The president praised the armed forces and said his country was “moving in only one direction: forward towards victory”.
In the city of Kharkiv itself, the situation has in some ways become more precarious since the success of the counteroffensive. Isobel Koshiw and Lorenzo Tondo found a weary population who now face Russian missile attacks on infrastructure, blackouts and no water supply.
There, too, Ukrainian forces have found the bodies of civilians who appeared to have been tortured. “Our investigative work in liberated cities has just begun,” said Oleksandr Filchakov, the region’s chief war crime prosecutor.
With the withdrawal of Russian troops came a change in Moscow’s battle tactics, targeting infrastructure affecting civilians. Luke Harding reported on Russia’s launching of repeated cruise missile attacks on a dam near Zelenskiy’s home city of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, flooding the city. Zelenskiy, in a late-night address on Wednesday, described Russia’s tactics as the work of “weaklings and scoundrels” who had fled the battlefield and were doing harm from “far away”.
Lorenzo Tondo visited Balakliia, another Kharkiv town liberated in the counteroffensive push. One woman there, Liudmyla Voloshyna, had a telling interaction that gave a glimpse into what the Russian plan for the area might have been, had they stayed in control. She said the Russians had told her she would need to soon re-register her property and would be given a Russian passport. “They said the Kharkiv People’s Republic is going to be here.”
Russia’s local allies flee
“Everyone had told us we’re here now, we’re here, you have nothing to be afraid of,” Irina told Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth, recalling promises from officials sent by Moscow. A resident of Kupiansk, a large town in northern Ukraine that had been captured just days into the invasion, she had taken a job in the accounting department of the new local administration installed by Russia, she said. “Five days ago they were telling us they would never leave. And three days later we were under shelling.” Irina is among the many who fled to Belgorod, a Russian region that borders Kharkiv.
For months, Russia told people in occupied regions it was there to stay. The rouble was introduced, retired people were told they would get Russian pensions, and pro-Russian residents were hired as government workers.
Now Russia’s retreat has dealt a devastating blow to the image of the Russian armed forces and the Kremlin among some of their most willing supporters in Ukraine, and Kyiv has vowed to catch locals who collaborated with the Russian army or cooperated with Russian-installed governments.
Can Ukraine win?
A little more than a week ago, Ukraine’s western allies seemed to be presented with no good option, with the battlefield appearing deadlocked and Vladimir Putin ready to turn the screws on popular support for the war by cutting off oil and gas supplies to Europe. And while the latter might well still come to pass, Ukraine’s breakthrough in the Kharkiv region has “radically altered” that gloomy landscape, according to our diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour.
He looks at whether it’s possible that Ukraine, having given their western backers more evidence that they can take on the Russians on the battlefield, can now win the war. Justin Bronk, at the British thinktank Rusi (Royal United Services Institute), says a path to victory for Ukraine is “now visible and credible”.
The problem is that Ukraine and the west will need to build a bigger international coalition to bring more pressure on Russia away from the battlefields. The thin backing for the war in Africa and Asia is a “wake-up call” about the lack of depth of support for western values in this new multipolar world”, Wintour writes.
One particularly influential relationship in that multipolar world appears to be showing tensions. Thursday’s in-person meeting between Vladimir Putin and China’s president, Xi Jinping, saw the Russian president admit that he understands China’s “questions and concerns” about the war in Ukraine. “We highly value the balanced position of our Chinese friends when it comes to the Ukraine crisis,” Putin said at a summit in Uzbekistan, striking a conciliatory tone on a topic where he is often volatile and uncompromising. “We understand your questions and concerns about this. During today’s meeting, we will of course explain our position.”
Refugees fear for the future as winter looms
Away from the frontline, Shaun Walker spoke to refugees from Kharkiv who fled to Hungary but now face fresh uncertainty as the economic repercussions of the war spread across borders. Alisa, a 16-year-old art student, and her family had been living with an elderly couple until their kind hosts realised they simply couldn’t afford it amid the energy crisis. “They very politely told us we had to leave,” says Alisa.
The tale is an increasingly common one, as governments across Europe begin rolling back emergency support programmes for Ukrainians in the face of a potentially costly winter and uncertainty about the duration of the conflict.
Aid workers say it is often the older and more vulnerable refugees, especially those who cannot speak English or other foreign languages, who do not know where to turn and can fall between the cracks.
Anastasia Chukovskaya, a Russian volunteer living in Budapest, said: “There is a real issue with food and provisions, and there are people who genuinely don’t have enough to eat, and don’t know how to access help.”
