All posts tagged: Russia

Russia-Ukraine war live: Russia and Ukraine both report thwarting drone strikes; Zelenskiy calls for more air defences | Ukraine

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Key events Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature Russia and Ukraine report downing of drones in overnight attacks Russia’s defence ministry says it had thwarted a major Ukrainian drone attack with at least 20 drones shot down over Russian regions, including Moscow. Officials said the drones were shot down over regions including Moscow, Tula, Kaluga and Bryansk. One person was injured in Tula when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, the region’s governor Alexei Dyumin said. Ukraine’s air force says it destroyed eight of nine attack drones launched overnight by Russia. There were no immediate reports of damage or about where the remaining drone had struck. The attack, which the air force said was launched from the south-east, came a day after what Ukrainian officials said had been Russia’s largest drone attack of the war. Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will target critical infrastructure in a winter aerial campaign, as it did last year. Ukraine needs more air defences to protect grain exports, Zelenskiy says …

Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 641 | Russia

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Russia has sent waves of kamikaze drones into Ukraine in what Kyiv claims is the most intensive drone attack since the start of the war. Five people were wounded by falling debris, including an 11-year-old child, the mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko, said. Several buildings, including a kindergarten, were damaged and about 17,000 people in the Kyiv region were left without electricity. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 74 of the 75 drones launched in the attack. The former Russian prime minister turned Kremlin critic Mikhail Kasyanov has been added to a list of “foreign agents”, Russia’s justice ministry has announced. Kasyanov who served as prime minister for the first four years of Putin’s administration, now appears in the justice ministry’s register of foreign agents, a term reminiscent of the Soviet-era “enemy of the people”. He was sacked in February 2004 and he went into opposition to the Kremlin. In 2022, Kasyanov left the country and has criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Switzerland’s president, Alain Berset was in Kyiv and paid homage to the victims of …

How I Lost the Russia That Never Was

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The lack of respect for the dead surprised even a soldier with the Wagner Group, Russia’s mercenary legion of former convicts that fought some of the bloodiest battles in the invasion of Ukraine. He looked at an ugly heap of wooden crosses and flower wreaths that had been pushed aside and cursed the authorities. “What are you doing? They died for Russia, and you are razing their graves to the ground. You are rolling over them,” he said in a video shot at the time, pointing at the wreckage. Workers were pouring concrete over a Wagner cemetery near the southern Russian city of Samara on August 24, part of Moscow’s punishment for the private army’s one-day mutiny in June. Not many in Russia noticed the soldier’s distress. Layers of injustice and mass killings go so far and so deep into Russia’s history that most of us have lost track. In Ukraine, the Russian army often leaves its dead soldiers behind. Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted that at least 20,000 of his soldiers had died in …

naval success raises hopes of advantage against Russia this winter

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War in wintertime is especially challenging militarily. Troops have to deal with the risk of frostbite while vehicles can’t always move over muddy or frozen terrain. It’s no wonder then that wars tend to move much more slowly during the colder months. Cold weather can also open up opportunities that either side in a conflict can try to exploit. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, temperatures around -40ºC gave the much smaller Finnish force an advantage, forcing significant losses on the Soviets that significantly undermined their military reputation. Being agile, changing tactics, and having the right equipment for the weather are even more vital when the temperature drops. This winter, Russia is expected to open up attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as it attempted to do in 2022, writes Lancester University’s professor of international security Basil Germond. Russia may find it more difficult this time around to undermine Ukraine’s energy supply, partly because of Ukraine’s successful attacks on its Black Sea fleet. This has pushed the Russian fleet away from its base …

Not a World War But a World at War

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Just in the past 24 months, an astonishing number of armed conflicts have started, renewed, or escalated. Some had been fully frozen, meaning that the sides had not sustained direct combat in years; others were long simmering, meaning that low-level fighting would intermittently erupt. All have now become active. The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which has been tracking wars globally since 1945, identified 2022 and 2023 as the most conflictual years in the world since …

Russian artist who protested against Ukraine war jailed for seven years | Russia

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A Russian court has sentenced a St Petersburg artist to seven years in prison in a closely watched trial that has highlighted the severe punishments meted out to ordinary Russians for even small acts of civil protest against the invasion of Ukraine. Aleksandra “Sasha” Skochilenko, an artist, musician and activist, was found guilty on Thursday of “knowingly spreading false information about the Russian army” in March 2022. The artist admitted replacing five price tags in a local supermarket with pieces of paper urging shoppers to stop the war and resist propaganda on television. “Putin has been lying to us from television screens for 20 years: the result of these lies is our readiness to justify the war and the senseless deaths,” read one of the altered price tags, which prosecutors declared dangerous to Russian society and the state. “The Russian army bombed an art school in Mariupol. Around 400 people were hiding inside,” read another. Skochilenko is one of hundreds of Russians to face criminal charges for their opposition to the war. Many have been …

Has Putin got the upper hand in Ukraine? – podcast | World news

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This summer, hopes were high that Ukraine could use western weapons to claim back big cities, liberate hundreds of miles of territory and maybe even cut off Russian forces inside the country. That has not happened. Instead the war’s progress has slowed to an agonising pace. Drones mean both sides have impressive intelligence of what their enemies are doing and breakthroughs are hard to come by. And the world’s attention being on the Middle East is a dangerous situation for Ukraine – will it lose the financial support of its western backers, such as the US? The possible re-election of Donald Trump, who is thought to be even less keen on financing Ukrainian efforts, is looming. But, Luke Harding tells Michael Safi, morale is still surprisingly high in Ukraine. And counting them out now would be a mistake. Photograph: Kateryna Klochko/EPA Support The Guardian The Guardian is editorially independent. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work. Support The Guardian Source …

Putin Wants the West to Give Up on Ukraine

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They planned to take Kyiv in three days, the rest of Ukraine in six weeks. More than 21 months later, Russian forces have withdrawn from half the territory they occupied in February of last year. At least 88,000 Russian soldiers are likely dead—a conservative estimate—and at least twice as many have been wounded. Billions of dollars worth of equipment, Russian tanks, planes, artillery, helicopters, armored vehicles, and warships have been destroyed. If you had predicted this outcome before the war—and nobody did—it would have seemed fanciful. No one would have believed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a professional comedian, could lead a country at war, that the democratic world would be united enough to help him, or that Russian President Vladimir Putin would endure such a humiliation. Ukraine, the United States, and the European Union have achieved something remarkable: Working together, they have not only preserved the Ukrainian state, but stood up to a bully whose nihilism harms the entire world. Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe, provides thugs to support African dictatorships, …

Russia-Ukraine war live: Russia intensifying assault on Avdiivka, says Ukraine military | Ukraine

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Ukrainian military repelled Russian assaults near town of Avdiivka, says general staff Ukraine’s general staff reported its military repelled Russian assaults in widely separated sectors of the front. Russian forces have been bearing down since mid-October on the shattered town of Avdiivka, known for its coking plant and its position as a gateway to the city of Donetsk, 20km (12 miles) to the east. Ukraine’s general staff, in its latest evening report, said its forces had repelled 11 attacks near Avdiivka, 15 in the nearby Maryinka sector and 22 further north-east in Bakhmut, a town seized by Russian in May. Six attacks were repelled further north near Kupiansk, where Russian forces have been active. Russia’s investigative committee, in an account of Thursday’s fighting, said Ukrainian forces shelled the town of Skadovsk in a Russian-occupied area of southern Kherson region. Ukrainian news reports and online observers said the target was a base of the Russian FSB security service in Skadovsk. Dead and wounded were reported. Anton Gerashchenko, from Ukraine’s internal affairs ministry, said of the strike …

Overthrow the tyranny of morning people

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. I’m a night person, and I say: The rest of the world needs to sleep later. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Creatures of the Night This is the time of year when opponents of changing the clocks go on about why it’s unhealthy to fall out of sync with the sun, about why a practice first instituted more than a century ago is outdated, about how much human productivity is lost while we all run around changing the hands and digits on timepieces. Those are all great arguments, and I agree with them, but that’s not really why I hate letting go of daylight saving time. I hate it because, as a general rule, I cannot stand Morning People. I do not like to cede even one minute to those chipper and virtuous larks, the …