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.
The relentless battle for Bakhmut
Oleh Bendyk showed off a video taken in Ukraine’s eastern forests. It shows a group of soldiers from Bendyk’s 103rd brigade sheltering in a sandy trench. Around them a battle rages. There are explosions, booms, and the rattle of small arms fire. A grad missile crashes down among the pine trees, in a large orange fireball.
“Some bastards are firing at us from over there. But we can’t see who they are because of the forest,” a soldier says. He adds: “A Grad now! Do you see how we get hit? It’s been like this since 7am. And now it’s 11am. That’s how it fucking is, folks!”
Bendyk and his fellow Ukrainian soldiers have been holding off a surging Russian offensive west of Kreminna, a city that Moscow captured last year. Further along the same front, Ukrainian soldiers are doggedly defending the town of Bakhmut, once home to 70,000 people. Fighting has gone on there for months. Luke Harding reported this story from Kramatorsk.
Later in the week, as the battle got even more fierce, Peter Beaumont reported from Kramatorsk, too. The volunteers collecting the civilian dead risk becoming casualties themselves. “Where? Where?” demands Daniel Wilk, a Canadian driver, in shaky video footage shot recently inside the city and seen by the Guardian.
Wilk proceeds quickly, the anxiety of the situation visible in his movements as he is directed to a fence, cutting an uncertain path across the snow as another voice cries “no, no” repeatedly.
The bodies, when Wilk gets to them, have been cut in half by the force of the explosion that took their lives, and still lie where they fell three days before. Quickly they are bundled up in a sheet to be removed.
People who have managed to reach Bakhmut in the past week use the same word to describe what they have experienced: hell.
China spends billions on pro-Russia disinformation
The west has been slow to respond to China spending billions globally to spread poisonous disinformation, including messaging that is completely aligned with Russia on Ukraine, a US special envoy has claimed.
James Rubin, a coordinator for the Global Engagement Center, a US state department body set up to “expose and counter” foreign propaganda and disinformation, made the remarks during a European tour this week.
“The well has been poisoned by Chinese and Russian disinformation – it’s pernicious,” said Rubin, a broadcaster and former official in the Clinton administration and broadcaster.
Six weeks into the job, he said his aim was not just a passive rebuttal of Russian-Chinese disinformation on Ukraine but to go on the active offensive by urging countries not to harbour those who have been exposed for spreading disinformation.
He claimed Russia and China were spending billions of dollars in an effort to manipulate information but said Beijing was operating globally and spending more than Moscow. Patrick Wintour had this story.
As US officials spent the weekend reiterating their concerns that Beijing is considering sending lethal weapons to Russia, amid China’s attempts to position itself as a peacemaker and deny that it would provide arms to Moscow, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and close ally of Vladimir Putin, visited Beijing for a meeting with Xi Jinping. The high-profile trip symbolised the widening gulf between the US and China over the war in Ukraine, Amy Hawkins wrote.
Vladimir Putin says west seeking to ‘dismember’ Russia
Vladimir Putin has accused the west of seeking to “dismember” Russia and to turn the vast country into a series of weak mini-states, Luke Harding reported.
In an interview with the state TV channel Rossiya on Sunday, Russia’s president claimed the US and its Nato allies wanted to “inflict a strategic defeat on us”. The aim, he said, was to “make our people suffer”, adding: “How can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?”
Russia’s president said this alleged plot had been under way since the collapse of the USSR. “They tried to reshape the world exclusively on their terms. We had no choice but to react,” he said, adding that the west was complicit in Ukraine’s “crimes”.
If Washington got its way, Russia would be divided into Moscow, the Urals, and other disparate regions, he said, claiming there was “written proof” for his assertion.
Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate calls for special tribunal to try Putin
A Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate has called for the swift creation of a special tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his associates for the crime of aggression, arguing that it could have “a cooling effect” on daily atrocities committed by the Kremlin’s invading forces, Jennifer Rankin reported from Brussels.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, said a speedy start to war crimes trials against the Russian president and soldiers could save people’s lives by deterring Russian forces from committing further crimes.
Belarusian partisans blow up Russian plane near Minsk
Belarusian anti-war partisans claim to have severely damaged a Russian military aircraft in what an opposition leader has called the “most successful diversion” since the beginning of the war. Andrew Roth and Peter Beaumont reported this story.
BYPOL, the Belarusian partisan organisation, said it had used drones to strike the Machulishchy airfield 12km from Minsk, severely damaging a Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs).
“One of the nine Awacs of the Russian aerospace forces worth $330m [was destroyed],” the group said. “These were drones. The participants of the operation are Belarusians. [They have attained] ‘Victory’ and are now safely outside the country. Everyone has escaped.” The plane “definitely won’t fly anywhere”, it added.
Russia planned Kherson’s torture centres, lawyers said
Evidence collected from Kherson in southern Ukraine shows Russian torture centres were not “random” but instead planned and directly financed by the Russian state, according to a team of Ukrainian and international lawyers headed by a UK barrister.
The city was under Russian control for eight months, from 2 March 2022 until Ukrainian forces entered on 11 November. The lawyers, called the Mobile Justice Team, said on Thursday they had investigated 20 torture chambers in Kherson and concluded they were part of a “calculated plan to terrorise, subjugate and eliminate Ukrainian resistance and destroy Ukrainian identity”, Isobel Koshiw reported.
The evidence collected by Ukrainian prosecutors and analysed by the Mobile Justice Team includes plans used by Vladimir Putin’s occupying forces to establish, manage and finance the 20 torture centres in Kherson.
“The mass torture chambers, financed by the Russian state, are not random but rather part of a carefully thought-out and financed blueprint with a clear objective to eliminate Ukrainian national and cultural identity,” said the British barrister Wayne Jordash, who is leading the team.
More than 1,000 survivors have submitted evidence and more than 400 people have vanished from Kherson, the lawyers say.
Mariupol residents’ shock at Putin’s parade lineup
At the climax of the pageantry in Moscow to mark the first anniversary of the start of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine, the Kremlin wheeled out children from Mariupol in occupied south-east Ukraine to “thank” their invaders.
The star of this orgy of Russian patriotism was Anna Naumenko, a 15-year-old with black hair, who was pushed on to the stage of Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium to thank a soldier nicknamed “Yuri Gagarin” for rescuing her: “Thank you Uncle Yura for saving me, my sister and hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol.” Anna’s sister, Karolina, covered her ears against the noise of the crowd as she stood nearby.
As the Ukrainian children crowded round to hug the soldier, their former neighbours from Mariupol felt shock and disgust, Andrew Roth reported. These were children they had huddled with in basements less than a year earlier, sheltering from Russian bombs and suffering from hunger and cold as Moscow launched a bloody onslaught that destroyed the city. “The abomination is that these are not actors,” wrote one. “They are really children from Mariupol.”
Pointing out another child, he added: “That teenager in a black hat and grey jacket hugging the occupier is Kostya, my neighbour. We lived in the same building, and spent the first month of the war in the same shelter.”
