Russian servicemen begin to arrive in Belarus; US thinktank says Putin engaging in ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Ukraine
Russia continues to conduct “massive, forced deportations” of Ukrainians that “likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign”, according to a US-based think tank.
In its latest assessment of the conflict, the Institute for the Study of War notes that Russian officials have “openly admitted to placing children from occupied areas of Ukraine up for adoption with Russian families”.
It adds: “Russian authorities may additionally be engaged in a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing by depopulating Ukrainian territory through deportations and repopulating Ukrainian cities with imported Russian citizens.”
President Zelenskiy said a “very severe” situation persists in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with the “most difficult” fighting near the town of Bakhmut.
Officials in Donetsk, which remains under Russian separatist control, have blamed Ukraine for a rocket attack that did significant damage to the city’s mayor’s office.
More than 30 settlements across Ukraine have been hit by Russian strikes in the last day, according to the Ukrainian military.
The Ukrainian military has also said the estimated number of Russians killed since the start of the war has reached 65,000.
Two schools in the southern Zaporizhzhia region have reportedly been destroyed in Russian strikes.
Ukraine has succeeded in maintaining its energy stability after Russian attacks last week that targeted key parts of its infrastructure, Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal has said.
Russia is “probably incapable of producing advanced munitions at the rate they are being expended”, according to the latest update from the UK Ministry of Defence.
US and allied security officials believe Iran has agreed to provide Russia with surface-to-surface missiles and attack drones intended for use in Ukraine.
The Belarusian defence ministry has said just under 9,000 Russian troops will be stationed in Belarus as part of a “regional grouping” of forces to protect its borders.
Russian soldiers have reportedly shot dead Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson.
US-based thinktank The Institute for the Study of War has said Russia continues to conduct “massive, forced deportations” of Ukrainians that “likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign”.
The UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs has reportedly arrived in Moscow for talks over grain exports.
Poverty in Ukraine has increased tenfold since the start of the war, a top World Bank official has said.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said it was incumbent upon Nato allies and other responsible countries, including China and India, to “send a very clear and decisive message to Russia that they should not contemplate the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict”.
He was a surprise absentee from the leadership race in July, but the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, is now being touted as a replacement for UK prime minister Liz Truss.
Wallace was promoted to defence secretary in 2019 and has been praised for his handling of the Ukraine crisis.
He was one of the first to make Kyiv’s case with western allies, and pushed the government to support Ukraine.
Retaining control of its electricity assets has given Queensland in Australia an edge over other regions in coordinating and funding the race to decarbonise the economy, Mick de Brenni, the state’s energy minister, said.
Queensland last month unveiled a $62bn plan to rid its power grid of coal by 2036, replacing the generation with 25 gigawatts of large-scale wind and solar farms, new transmission lines and two giant pumped hydro plants for storage.
With its dominant ownership position of electricity generation and distribution assets, the government has been able to offset the impact of higher energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the ground, Ukrainian soldiers told AFP there was now close combat with members of pro-Russian forces.
Enemy troops “start when night falls. They send their reconnaissance units around 6pm,” said one soldier who uses the nom de guerre “Poliak”.
In a bitter tone of voice, the 50-year-old from the 93rd brigade said inexperienced, “single use” soldiers are sent into the line of fire to “divert” attention from more experienced units carrying out sabotage.
“Between then and 5 am, we get about seven or eight (diversion) attacks like that,” he explained.
Poliak recently suffered a minor shrapnel injury and returned exhausted from the most intense of the fighting.
After four sleepless nights, the former truck driver said he experiences “hallucinations” from the stress and fatigue.
One evening, his unit opened fire, thinking they could see a Russian commando through night-vision goggles.
Early in the morning, they realised they had been shooting at a pile of logs.
The Russian missiles come to Zaporizhzhia when the “people’s dreams are at their deepest”, says Oleksandr Starukh.
The governor of this south-eastern region of Ukraine since 2020, Starukh, 49, took the call from his bed at 5.08am on the morning of 24 February when one the first missiles of the Russian invasion had hit a local air defence system. Nearly eight months later he is still taking the dawn calls.
The Russians generally strike, he says, at 2am, 4am and 6am.
The latest raid out of the dark had been just a few hours earlier, when 10 S-300 cruise missiles and four Iranian-made Shahed-136 kamikaze drones crashed into the suburbs of the region’s eponymous capital at 5.30am on Saturday morning.
An update from the ministry of defence of Ukraine.
Half a year has passed since the russian occupiers were driven out of the Kyiv region. Ukrainians are cleaning up the mess. Step by step. House by house. This will continue to be the case - until complete victory over russian darkness and tyranny. pic.twitter.com/Onokv0Ux79
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday it was incumbent upon Nato allies and other responsible countries, including China and India, to “send a very clear and decisive message to Russia that they should not contemplate the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict”.
If you’re just joining us, here’s a quick roundup of all the day’s news from the war in Ukraine.
President Zelenskiy has said a “very severe” situation persists in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with the “most difficult” fighting near the town of Bakhmut.
Officials in Donetsk, which remains under Russian separatist control, have blamed Ukraine for a rocket attack that did significant damage to the city’s mayor’s office.
More than 30 settlements across Ukraine have been hit by Russian strikes in the last day, according to the Ukrainian military.
The Ukrainian military has also said the estimated number of Russians killed since the start of the war has reached 65,000.
Two schools in the southern Zaporizhzhia region have reportedly been destroyed in Russian strikes.
Ukraine has succeeded in maintaining its energy stability after Russian attacks last week that targeted key parts of its infrastructure, Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal has said.
Russia is “probably incapable of producing advanced munitions at the rate they are being expended”, according to the latest update from the UK Ministry of Defence.
US and allied security officials believe Iran has agreed to provide Russia with surface-to-surface missiles and attack drones intended for use in Ukraine.
The Belarusian defence ministry has said just under 9,000 Russian troops will be stationed in Belarus as part of a “regional grouping” of forces to protect its borders.
Russian soldiers have reportedly shot dead Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson.
US-based thinktank The Institute for the Study of War has said Russia continues to conduct “massive, forced deportations” of Ukrainians that “likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign”.
The UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs has reportedly arrived in Moscow for talks over grain exports.
Poverty in Ukraine has increased tenfold since the start of the war, a top World Bank official has said.
Ukraine has succeeded in maintaining its energy stability after Russian attacks last week that targeted key parts of its infrastructure, Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal has said.
In a post on Facebook, Shmyhal said that, in the first three days of the week, Russia launched up to 130 missile and drone strikes against civilian and energy facilities, particularly in the capital, Kyiv.
He said maintenance workers had been able to restore electricity to some 4,000 settlements, and that people across Ukraine had voluntarily reduced their consumption by an average of 10%, making it easier to avoid outages.
“The aggressor sought to intimidate Ukrainians and paralyse the state’s energy industry. He did not achieve his goal,” Shmyhal said.
Four ships carrying 140,000 tonnes of agricultural products left Ukrainian ports on Sunday, the country’s ministry of infrastructure has said.
The ministry said the ships left the ports of Odesa and Pivdennyi on Ukraine’s south-western coast and were destined for Africa, Asia, and Europe.
It added that, since a deal agreed in July, 1.1m tonnes of grain had been sent to Africa, including five ships’ worth chartered by the UN World Food Programme.
Many African countries depend heavily on Russian and Ukraine for their grain imports.
In September, Russia’s President Putin threatened to reintroduce limits on exports, claiming the majority of the grain leaving Ukraine was going to the European Union, not developing countries.
UN data shows that, since the deal was signed, dozens of shipments have gone to developing countries in Africa and elsewhere.
Speaking during a visit to Senegal earlier this month, the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said his country would “do our best until the last breath to continue exporting Ukrainian grain to Africa and the world for food security”.
As per our previous post, the UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs is currently in Moscow negotiating an extension to the July deal.
Martin Griffiths, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, has arrived in Moscow for talks over grain exports, Russian state media agency Tass reports, citing a diplomatic source.
The agency said Griffiths – along with Rebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development – is attending talks with the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Vershinin.
Since a deal brokered in July between the UN, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, more than six million tonnes of grain and other agricultural exports have been allowed to leave Ukraine.
The original deal applied for 120 days after signing and is set to expire next month.
Speaking earlier this week, Griffiths said he was “reasonably confident” the deal could be extended, possibly to apply for a longer period.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Israel prepared for a new wave of immigration from the former Soviet state. About 13,000 Ukrainians with Jewish heritage have made aliyah, or emigrated, since then.
Unexpectedly, double that have come from Russia, meaning around one in eight Russian Jews have left the country. Since Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation announcement in September, their numbers are growing.
“I got an Israeli passport many years ago because I always knew something like this was possible. I always knew the dark days of the Soviet Union could return,” said Anna Klatis, a journalism professor at Moscow State University who left for Jerusalem with her 16-year-old daughter in February.
“I could not let [my daughter] grow up in a place where freedoms are vanishing.”
Read the full story here:
The Belarusian defence ministry has said just under 9,000 Russian troops will be stationed in Belarus as part of a “regional grouping” of forces to protect its borders, Reuters reports.
Last week, the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, said his troops would be deployed with Russian forces near the Ukrainian border as part of a “joint grouping”, citing what he said were threats from Ukraine and the west.
“The first troop trains with Russian servicemen who are part of the [regional grouping] began to arrive in Belarus,” Valeriy Revenko, the head of the defence ministry’s international military cooperation department, tweeted on Sunday.
“The relocation will take several days.
“The total number will be a little less than 9,000 people.”
People in the Kyiv region have averted blackouts by reducing their power usage, the regional governor has said.
Posting on Telegram, Oleksiy Kuleba said that, by exercising “responsibility and solidarity, residents had helped reduce energy consumption by 7%”.
“This made it possible to spend the evening without forced power outages,” he said.
“In the evening, turn off at least one electrical appliance and unnecessary lighting. Let’s hold another front! Let’s use energy wisely!”
Ukrainian authorities have been concerned about the country’s power supply since Russian strikes at the start of this week damaged key parts of its energy infrastructure.
US and allied security officials believe Iran has agreed to provide Russia with surface-to-surface missiles and attack drones intended for use in Ukraine, the Washington Post reports.
The paper says intelligence from a US-allied country suggests Iranian officials visited Moscow last month to finalise the terms of a shipment of additional weapons.
It comes after UK intelligence suggested Russia was unlikely to be able to produce missiles as fast as it is currently using them.
On Monday, Russia is believed to have used up more than 80 missiles in a series of strikes across Ukraine, including onthe capital, Kyiv.
On Saturday, Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said the country “has not and will not provide any weapon to be used in the war in Ukraine”.