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Russian missiles rain down on Ukraine towns
KVIV/MOSCOW, Dec 26 (Reuters) – Russian forces bombarded scores of towns in Ukraine on Christmas Day as Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was open to negotiations, a stance Washington has dismissed as posturing because of continued Russian attacks.
Russia on Sunday launched more than 10 rocket attacks on the Kupiansk district in the Kharkiv region, shelled more than 25 towns along the Kupiansk-Lyman frontline, and in Zaporizhzhia hit nearly 20 towns, said Ukraine’s top military command.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that it had killed about 60 Ukrainian servicemen the previous day along the Kupiansk-Lyman line of contact and destroyed numerous pieces of Ukrainian military equipment.
Reuters was not able to independently verify the reports.
Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine – which Moscow calls a “special military operation” – has triggered the biggest European conflict since World War Two and confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Despite Putin’s latest offer to negotiate, there is no end in sight to the 10-month conflict.
“We are ready to negotiate with everyone involved about acceptable solutions, but that is up to them – we are not the ones refusing to negotiate, they are,” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Putin needed to return to reality and acknowledge it was Russia that did not want talks.
“Russia single-handedly attacked Ukraine and is killing citizens,” the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted. “Russia doesn’t want negotiations, but tries to avoid responsibility.”
Russian attacks on power stations have left millions without electricity, and Zelenskiy said Moscow would aim to make the last few days of 2022 dark and difficult.
“Russia has lost everything it could this year. … I know darkness will not prevent us from leading the occupiers to new defeats. But we have to be ready for any scenario,” he said in an evening video address on Christmas Day.
Ukraine has traditionally not celebrated Christmas on Dec. 25, but Jan. 7, the same as Russia. However, this year some Orthodox Ukrainians decided to celebrate the holiday on Dec. 25 and Ukrainian officials, starting with Zelenskiy and Ukraine’s prime minister, issued Christmas wishes on Sunday.
The Kremlin says it will fight until all its territorial aims are achieved, while Kyiv says it will not rest until every Russian soldier is ejected from the country.
Asked if the geopolitical conflict with the West was approaching a dangerous level, Putin on Sunday said: “I don’t think it’s so dangerous.”
Kyiv and the West say Putin has no justification for what they cast as an imperial-style war of occupation.
BELARUS MISSILES
Russian-supplied Iskander tactical missile systems, which are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and S-400 air defence systems have been deployed to Belarus and are prepared to perform their intended tasks, a senior Belarusian defence ministry official said on Sunday.
“Our servicemen, crews have fully completed their training in the joint combat training centres of the armed forces of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus,” Leonid Kasinsky, head of the Main Directorate of Ideology at the ministry, said in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app.
“These types of weapons (Iskander and S-400 systems) are on combat duty today and they are fully prepared to perform tasks for their intended purpose,” Kasinsky added.
It is not clear how many of the Iskander systems have been deployed to Belarus after Putin said in June that Moscow would supply Minsk with them and the air defence systems.
The news follows Putin’s visit to Minsk on Dec. 19 amid fears in Kyiv he would pressure Belarus to join a fresh ground offensive and open a new front in his faltering invasion.
Russian forces used Belarus as a launch pad for their abortive attack on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in February, and there has been a growing flurry of Russian and Belarusian military activity in recent months.
The Iskander-M, a mobile guided missile system code named “SS-26 Stone” by NATO, replaced the Soviet-era “Scud”. The guided missiles have a range of up to 500 km (300 miles) and can carry conventional or nuclear warheads.
That range reaches deep into neighbours of Belarus: Ukraine and NATO member Poland, which has very strained relations with Minsk.
The S-400 system is a Russian mobile, surface-to-air missile (SAM) interception system capable of engaging aircraft, UAVs, cruise missiles, and has a terminal ballistic missile defence capability.
Blasts were heard at Russia’s Engels air base, hundreds of kilometres (miles) from the Ukraine frontlines, Ukrainian and Russian media reported on Monday.
Russia’s governor of Saratov region, home to the Engels air-base, said law enforcement agencies were checking information about “an incident at a military facility”.
“There were no emergencies in residential areas of the (Engels) city,” Roman Busargin, the governor of the region, said on the Telegram messaging app. “Civil infrastructure facilities were not damaged.”
The air base, near the city of Saratov, about 730 km (450 miles) southeast of Moscow, was hit on Dec. 5 in what Russia said were Ukrainian drone attacks on two Russian air bases that day. The strikes dealt Moscow a major reputational blow and raised questions about why its defences failed, analysts said.
Ukraine has never publicly claimed responsibility for attacks inside Russia, but has said, however, that such incidents are “karma” for Russia’s invasion.
Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Michael Perry; Editing by Himani Sarkar
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Packed ICUs, crowded crematoriums: COVID roils Chinese towns
BAZHOU, China (AP) — Yao Ruyan paced frantically outside the fever clinic of a county hospital in China’s industrial Hebei province, 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of Beijing. Her mother-in-law had COVID-19 and needed urgent medical care, but all hospitals nearby were full.
“They say there’s no beds here,” she barked into her phone.
As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID-19 wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds, and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors for a lack of beds.
Yao’s elderly mother-in-law had fallen ill a week ago with the coronavirus. They went first to a local hospital, where lung scans showed signs of pneumonia. But the hospital couldn’t handle COVID-19 cases, Yao was told. She was told to go to larger hospitals in adjacent counties.
As Yao and her husband drove from hospital to hospital, they found all the wards were full. Zhuozhou Hospital, an hour’s drive from Yao’s hometown, was the latest disappointment.
Yao charged toward the check-in counter, past wheelchairs frantically moving elderly patients . Yet again, she was told the hospital was full, and that she would have to wait.
“I’m furious,” Yao said, tearing up, as she clutched the lung scans from the local hospital. “I don’t have much hope. We’ve been out for a long time and I’m terrified because she’s having difficulty breathing.”
Over two days, AP journalists visited five hospitals and two crematoriums in towns and small cities in Baoding and Langfang prefectures, in central Hebei province. The area was the epicenter of one of China’s first outbreaks after the state loosened COVID-19 controls in November and December. For weeks, the region went quiet, as people fell ill and stayed home.
Many have now recovered. Today, markets are bustling, diners pack restaurants and cars are honking in snarling traffic, even as the virus is spreading in other parts of China. In recent days, headlines in state media said the area is “ starting to resume normal life.”
But life in central Hebei’s emergency wards and crematoriums is anything but normal. Even as the young go back to work and lines at fever clinics shrink, many of Hebei’s elderly are falling into critical condition. As they overrun ICUs and funeral homes, it could be a harbinger of what’s to come for the rest of China.
The Chinese government has reported only seven COVID-19 deaths since restrictions were loosened dramatically on Dec. 7, bringing the country’s total toll to 5,241. On Tuesday, a Chinese health official said that China only counts deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official COVID-19 death toll, a narrow definition that excludes many deaths that would be attributed to COVID-19 in other places.
Experts have forecast between a million and 2 million deaths in China next year, and the World Health Organization warned that Beijing’s way of counting would “underestimate the true death toll.”
At Baoding No. 2 Hospital, in Zhuozhou, Wednesday, patients thronged the hallway of the emergency ward. Patients were breathing with the help of respirators. One woman wailed after doctors told her that a loved one had died.
The ICU was so crowded, ambulances were turned away. A medical worker shouted at relatives wheeling in a patient from an arriving ambulance.
“There’s no oxygen or electricity in this corridor!” the worker exclaimed. “If you can’t even give him oxygen, how can you save him?”
“If you don’t want any delays, turn around and get out quickly!” she said.
The relatives left, hoisting the patient back into the ambulance. It took off, lights flashing.
In two days of driving in the region, AP journalists passed around thirty ambulances. On one highway toward Beijing, two ambulances followed each other, lights flashing, as a third passed by heading in the opposite direction. Dispatchers are overwhelmed, with Beijing city officials reporting a sixfold surge in emergency calls earlier this month.
Some ambulances are heading to funeral homes. At the Zhuozhou crematorium, furnaces are burning overtime as workers struggle to cope with a spike in deaths in the past week, according to one employee. A funeral shop worker estimated it is burning 20 to 30 bodies a day, up from three to four before COVID-19 measures were loosened.
“There’s been so many people dying,” said Zhao Yongsheng, a worker at a funeral goods shop near a local hospital. “They work day and night, but they can’t burn them all.”
At a crematorium in Gaobeidian, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Zhuozhou, the body of one 82-year-old woman was brought from Beijing, a two-hour drive, because funeral homes in China’s capital were packed, according to the woman’s grandson, Liang.
“They said we’d have to wait for 10 days,” Liang said, giving only his surname because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Liang’s grandmother had been unvaccinated, Liang added, when she came down with coronavirus symptoms, and had spent her final days hooked to a respirator in a Beijing ICU.
Over two hours at the Gaobeidian crematorium on Thursday, AP journalists observed three ambulances and two vans unload bodies. A hundred or so people huddled in groups, some in traditional white Chinese mourning attire. They burned funeral paper and set off fireworks.
“There’s been a lot!” a worker said when asked about the number of COVID-19 deaths, before funeral director Ma Xiaowei stepped in and brought the journalists to meet a local government official.
As the official listened in, Ma confirmed there were more cremations, but said he didn’t know if COVID-19 was involved. He blamed the extra deaths on the arrival of winter.
“Every year during this season, there’s more,” Ma said. “The pandemic hasn’t really shown up” in the death toll, he said, as the official listened and nodded.
Even as anecdotal evidence and modeling suggests large numbers of people are getting infected and dying, some Hebei officials deny the virus has had much impact.
“There’s no so-called explosion in cases, it’s all under control,” said Wang Ping, the administrative manager of Gaobeidian Hospital, speaking by the hospital’s main gate. “There’s been a slight decline in patients.”
Wang said only a sixth of the hospital’s 600 beds were occupied, but refused to allow AP journalists to enter. Two ambulances came to the hospital during the half hour AP journalists were present, and a patient’s relative told the AP they were turned away from Gaobeidian’s emergency ward because it was full.
Thirty kilometers (19 miles) south in the town of Baigou, emergency ward doctor Sun Yana was candid, even as local officials listened in.
“There are more people with fevers, the number of patients has indeed increased,” Sun said. She hesitated, then added, “I can’t say whether I’ve become even busier or not. Our emergency department has always been busy.”
The Baigou New Area Aerospace Hospital was quiet and orderly, with empty beds and short lines as nurses sprayed disinfectant. COVID-19 patients are separated from others, staff said, to prevent cross-infection. But they added that serious cases are being directed to hospitals in bigger cities, because of limited medical equipment.
The lack of ICU capacity in Baigou, which has about 60,000 residents, reflects a nationwide problem. Experts say medical resources in China’s villages and towns, home to about 500 million of China’s 1.4 billion people, lag far behind those of big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Some counties lack a single ICU bed.
As a result, patients in critical condition are forced to go to bigger cities for treatment. In Bazhou, a city 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Baigou, a hundred or more people packed the emergency ward of Langfang No. 4 People’s Hospital on Thursday night.
Guards worked to corral the crowds as people jostled for positions. With no space in the ward, patients spilled into corridors and hallways. Sick people sprawled on blankets on the floor as staff frantically wheeled gurneys and ventilators. In a hallway, half a dozen patients wheezed on metal benches as oxygen tanks pumped air into their noses.
Outside a CT scan room, a woman sitting on a bench wheezed as snot dribbled out of her nostrils into crumpled tissues. A man sprawled out on a stretcher outside the emergency ward as medical workers stuck electrodes to his chest. By a check-in counter, a woman sitting on a stool gasped for air as a young man held her hand.
“Everyone in my family has got COVID,” one man asked at the counter, as four others clamored for attention behind him. “What medicine can we get?”
In a corridor, a man paced as he shouted into his cellphone.
“The number of people has exploded!” he said. “There’s no way you can get care here, there’s far too many people.”
It wasn’t clear how many patients had COVID-19. Some had only mild symptoms, illustrating another issue, experts say: People in China rely more heavily on hospitals than in other countries, meaning it’s easier for emergency medical resources to be overloaded.
Over two hours, AP journalists witnessed half a dozen or more ambulances pull up to the hospital’s ICU and load critical patients to sprint to other hospitals, even as cars pulled up with dozens of new patients.
A beige van pulled up to the ICU and honked frantically at a waiting ambulance. “Move!” the driver shouted.
“Let’s go, let’s go!” a panicked voice cried. Five people hoisted a man bundled in blankets out of the back of the van and rushed him into the hospital. Security guards shouted in the packed ward: “Make way, make way!”
The guard asked a patient to move, but backed off when a relative snarled at him. The bundled man was laid on the floor instead, amid doctors running back and forth. “Grandpa!” a woman cried, crouching over the patient.
Medical workers rushed over a ventilator. “Can you open his mouth?” someone shouted.
As white plastic tubes were fitted onto his face, the man began to breathe more easily.
Others were not so lucky. Relatives surrounding another bed began tearing up as an elderly woman’s vitals flatlined. A man tugged a cloth over the woman’s face, and they stood, silently, before her body was wheeled away. Within minutes, another patient had taken her place.
Ukrainian strikes on Russian towns puts pressure on Putin
On Friday, Ukraine reportedly struck the base of the Russian 3rd Motorized Rifle Division near Valuyki, just nine miles north of the Russia—Ukraine border. Russian officials did not acknowledge that a military target was hit but said one civilian died, and the local electrical grid experienced a temporary disruption.
Russia blamed the attacks on Ukraine, but Kyiv did not claim responsibility for striking targets in Russian territory.
Kyiv has assured U.S. officials that donated weapons would not be used to strike targets inside Russia proper. But Ukrainian forces are now so close to the border that they can hit targets using their own less-advanced weaponry.
That Russian citizens are starting to seriously feel the impact of the war directly is another new source of pressure on Putin, who returned home this weekend from a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Uzbekistan where he faced a remarkable public rebuke by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and questions about the war from Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In a stunning public rebuke, Modi told Putin that “today’s era is not an era of war, and I have spoken to you on the phone about this.” That followed an acknowledgment by Putin that he had heard “concerns and questions” about the war from the Chinese president.
Ukraine has made stunning advances in the Kharkiv region, in the northeast of the country, in the past two weeks. During its advances, it has also uncovered hundreds of mass graves and stories of Russian forces terrorizing residents in the liberated city of Izyum.
Ukrainian officials have cited the gains and the evidence of torture and killings to reiterate pleas for modern battle tanks and other heavily armored vehicles which NATO allies have been slow to send.
Valuyki and Krasny Khutor are among dozens of small settlements in Russia that the Russian military uses as a staging ground, putting them in the middle of Moscow’s faltering invasion and Kyiv’s mounting counteroffensive.
The local governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, has ordered the evacuation of hundreds of people and shut down schools in border towns over the past months. But now the authorities in Belgorod are under increasing pressure from unnerved residents who are experiencing what many Ukrainians have lived with for months: nighttime explosions, destroyed homes and sometimes casualties.
“I’m asking once again, where is our army, the one that must be protecting us?” Belgorod resident Tatyana Bogacheva wrote on Gladkov’s VKontakte social media page. “We are on the border; they are shooting at us, so we need an army and protection. Who will wake up the President?”
Russian forces have been depleted after battlefield blunders and are scrambling to find personnel and working equipment to hold their ground in northeastern Ukraine. A recent hasty retreat from Izyum and Balakliya as well as concerns among local Russians who fear the war is coming home appear to have prompted Moscow to reinforce the border with young conscripts.
Russian soldiers who had been conscripted to serve in the 1st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment of the Taman Division as part of this year’s spring draft are reportedly being transferred from the Moscow region to “protect the state border.”
The BBC Russian Service, citing the families of troops, reported that many conscripts in the Taman Division had died at the beginning of the invasion and those who survived were returned to the Russian territory. But instead of returning to headquarters in Naro-Fominsk near Moscow, they were stationed in Valuyki. The new group of conscripts is supposed to replace those who are due to be demobilized in October, the BBC said.
According to Russian laws, conscripts can’t be sent into battle unless they have at least four months of training. Putin has repeatedly denied that Russia is using conscripts in Ukraine. But the country’s defense ministry acknowledged as early as March that some had been mistakenly sent to fight.
Russia’s problems along the border are drawing criticism from staunch pro-Kremlin quarters inside Ukraine as well. “I am curious whether the Russian leadership is going to somehow react to the constant shelling of Russian territory?” Igor Girkin, a hard-line former commander of separatists in Ukraine, lamented in his Telegram blog. “Or do I understand correctly that the Kremlin no longer considers the Belgorod region to be the territory of Russia?”
The war also appears to be weakening Russia’s capacity to put out fires to the south, in the region the Kremlin has long considered its backyard.
This week, for example, Armenia sought Russia’s help amid a renewed Azerbaijani attack on its border towns, according to the country’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan, who formally appealed to the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a regional security alliance of post-Soviet states, including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
But the response so far has been slow and tepid, perhaps undermining Armenia’s trust in Moscow as an ally and in the CSTO as a reliable security broker.
Azerbaijan is not part of the CSTO but is backed by Turkey, an essential mediator in the Ukrainian war. Azerbaijan accused Armenia of “provocations” in the border area, something Yerevan denies.
More than 200 officers have been killed on both sides this week, in what turned into the deadliest confrontation since the six-week war over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020.
On Friday, in a face-to-face meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev said the border conflict had “stabilized,” and a cease fire had been in place for the last three days.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she plans to make a weekend visit to Armenia.
As massive storm batters Alaska coastal towns, residents are evacuated, widespread flooding reported
A massive, potentially record-breaking storm brought major flooding and damage to coastal towns in Alaska on Saturday morning, and some residents were evacuated. Gov. Mike Dunleavy said he “verbally declared” a disaster for communities impacted by the storm.
The governor said on Twitter there have been no reported injuries. “We will continue to monitor the storm and update Alaskans as much as possible,” he tweeted.
In the town of Golovin, major flooding was reported early Saturday, according to the National Weather Service, and forecasters warned it would only get worse. The town could see an additional 1 to 2 feet of water by the day’s end.
“Water is surrounding the school, homes and structures are flooded, at least a couple homes floating off the foundation, some older fuel tanks are tilted over,” the weather service’s office in Fairbanks tweeted.
Photos from the weather service showed the high water levels there.
Another town, Shaktoolik, reported coastal flooding, with water “entering the community and getting close to some homes,” according to the weather service. Residents there were evacuated to a school and clinic. Shaktoolik was also expected to see the worst of the storm later in the day.
According to the NWS, the water level in Nome rose above 10 feet Saturday, and is expected to continue to rise.
The weather service also shared footage from a webcam in Unalakleet, comparing an average day in the town against the scene there Saturday morning.
As of Saturday morning, large swaths of the state’s western coast were under coastal flooding and high wind warnings. The weather service said the flood warnings would remain in effect until Sunday night while the wind warnings were expected to expire by Saturday night.
Other portions of the state are under gale and storm warnings, according to the weather service.
The weather service shared peak reported wind gusts as of 8 a.m. local time — the highest recorded was 91 mph in Cape Romanzof. Several other towns, including Golovin, saw winds topping 60 mph.
The center of the storm was located just south of the Bering Strait on Saturday morning, the weather service said.
The storm is the remnants of Typhoon Merbok, and forecasters predicted this week it could bring “potentially historical” flooding, with some coastal areas seeing water levels up to 11 feet higher than the normal high tide.
Ukraine’s Zelenskiy sees damage in recaptured towns; Russia strikes city water system
IZIUM, Ukraine, Sept 15 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said towns and villages recaptured from Russian forces had been devastated, while a major city stepped up efforts on Thursday to repair damage to its water system from missile attacks.
Kryvyi Rih, the largest city in central Ukraine with an estimated pre-war population of 650,000, was hit by eight cruise missiles on Wednesday, officials said.
The strikes hit the Karachunov reservoir dam, Zelenskiy said in a video address released early on Thursday. The water system had “no military value” and hundreds of thousands of civilians depend on it daily, he said.
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Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the Krivyi Rih military administration, said in a post on Telegram that 112 homes were flooded but that works to repair the dam on the Inhulets river were under way and that “flooding was receding”.
Russian forces suffered a stunning reversal this month after Ukrainian troops made a rapid armoured thrust in the Kharkiv region in its northeast, forcing a rushed Russian withdrawal.
Zelenskiy on Wednesday made a surprise visit to Izium – until four days ago Russia’s main bastion in the Kharkiv region – where he watched as the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag was raised in front of the charred city council building.
“Our law enforcers are already receiving evidence of murder, torture, and abductions of people by the occupiers,” he said, adding there was “evidence of genocide against Ukrainians”.
“They only destroyed, only seized, only deported. They left devastated villages, and in some of them there is not a single surviving house,” Zelenskiy added in the video address.
Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians, and Reuters could not immediately verify battlefield reports. read more
Zelenskiy’s video address was released after his return to Kyiv from the Kharkiv region and following word from his office that his car had collided with a private vehicle in the capital.
“The president was examined by a doctor, no serious injuries were found,” presidential spokesman Serhii Nykyforov said in a Facebook post early on Thursday. read more
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said on Thursday that Russian forces had launched attacks on several settlements on the Kharkiv frontline in the past 24 hours.
However, Ukraine’s forces continue to consolidate their control of the newly liberated areas in the region, Britain’s defence ministry said in an update on Thursday.
DIPLOMACY
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are set to discuss Ukraine and Taiwan at a meeting in Uzbekistan on Thursday which the Kremlin said would hold “special significance”. read more
Ahead of the meeting, the navies of the two countries were conducting joint tactical manoeuvres and exercises involving artillery and helicopters in the Pacific Ocean. read more
Moscow and Beijing declared a “no limits” partnership earlier this year, backing each other over standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West. read more
Also on the diplomatic front, the U.N. General Assembly is on Friday due to consider a proposal for Zelenskiy to address the annual gathering of leaders next week with a pre-recorded video. Russia is opposed to Zelenskiy speaking. read more
Away from Ukraine, Russian authorities are facing challenges in other former Soviet states, with deadly fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia and border guard clashes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. read more
Western politicians and military officials have said it was too early to tell whether Ukraine’s recent success marked a turning point because Russia had yet to fully respond.
“We should avoid euphoria. There is still a lot of work to be done to liberate our lands, and Russia has a large number of weapons,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the national security and defence council, said in an online post.
Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, in a Twitter post after the attacks on Kryvyi Rih, said “Russia is a terrorist state and must be recognised as such”.
In that vein, U.S. senators from Democratic and Republican parties introduced legislation that would designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. The measure is opposed by President Joe Biden’s administration. read more
FEAR LINGERS IN IZIUM
Back in Izium, smashed windows, pock-marked facades and scorched walls lined a battle-scarred main thoroughfare comprised of deserted meat shops and pharmacies and ruined beauty salons. A forlorn handwritten sign on a front door read: ‘People live here’. read more
With a pink hood wrapped around her face for warmth, Liubov Sinna, 74, said Izium residents were still fearful.
“Because we lived through this whole six months. We sat it out in cellars. We went through everything it is possible to go through. We absolutely cannot say that we feel safe,” she said.
She said the town stood at the “gates of the Donbas”, the eastern region whose entire capture Putin has talked up as a key war objective.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who spoke to Putin over the phone this week, said the Russian president “unfortunately” still did not think his invasion was a mistake.
Putin says he wants to ensure Russian security and protect Russian-speakers in Ukraine. Ukraine and the West accuse Russia of an unprovoked war of aggression.
In a move that suggests Putin had wider war aims when he ordered troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, three people close to the Russian leadership told Reuters that Putin had rejected a provisional deal with Kyiv around the time the war began.
They said the deal would have satisfied Russia’s demand that Ukraine stay out of the U.S.-led Western military alliance NATO. The Kremlin said the Reuters report had “absolutely no relation to reality”. It also said Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO still presented a threat to Russia. read more
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Reporting by Reuters bureaux; writing by Grant McCool and Himani Sarkar; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Stephen Coates and Gerry Doyle
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
In Kharkiv, towns liberated by Ukraine rejoiced in a Russian retreat
“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.
“I can’t believe that we went through something like this in the 21st century,” Matvienko said, tears welling.
The hasty flight of Russians from the village was part of a stunning new reality that took the world by surprise over the weekend: The invaders of February are on the run in some parts of Ukraine they seized early in the conflict.
The Russian Defense Ministry’s own daily briefing Sunday featured a map showing Russian forces retreating behind the Oskil river on the outskirts of the Kharkiv region — a day after the ministry confirmed its troops had left the Balakliya and Izyum area in the Kharkiv region, following a decision to “regroup.”
On Sunday, Ukraine’s commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, said Ukrainian forces had retaken more than 3,000 square kilometers (1,864 miles) of territory, a claim that could not be independently verified, adding that they were advancing to the east, south and north.
“Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometers in some places,” reported the Institute for the Study of War, which closely tracks the conflict. They have captured more territory in the past five days “than Russian forces have captured in all their operations since April,” its campaign assessment posted Sunday said.
The apparent collapse of the Russian forces has caused shock waves in Moscow. The leader of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who sent his own fighters to Ukraine, said if there are not immediate changes in Russia’s conduct of the invasion, “he would have to contact the leadership of the country to explain to them the real situation on the ground.”
Evidence of the Ukrainian gains continued to emerge Sunday, with images of Ukrainian soldiers raising a flag in central Izyum, after it was abandoned by Russian forces, and similar images from other towns and villages such as Kindrashivka, Chkalovske and Velyki Komyshuvakha.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to elaborate on his army’s next moves, except to say in a CNN interview, “We will not be standing still. We will be slowly, gradually moving forward.”
Ukrainians emerged into the string of just-liberated villages southeast of Kharkiv hailing the end of their ordeal, and wondering whether it is truly over. “Only God knows if they will be back,” said Tamara Kozinska, 75, whose husband was killed by a mortar blast soon after the Russians arrived.
It is not over by any means, military experts warned. Russia still holds about a fifth of Ukraine and continued heavy shelling over the weekend across several regions. And nothing guarantees that Ukraine can keep recaptured areas secure. “A counteroffensive liberates territory and after that you have to control it and be ready to defend it,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov cautioned in an interview with the Financial Times.
But as Ukrainian soldiers continued Sunday to sweep deeper into territory that had been held by Russia, more of them were willing to see the campaign as a possible turning point.
In Zaliznychne, a tiny agricultural village 37 miles east of Kharkiv, residents were feeling their way back to normality Sunday, sleeping in bedrooms rather than basements for first the first time in months and trying to make contact with family on the outside.
Kozinska hasn’t seen her daughter since February — even though she lives 12 miles away — but had just received word that she will come to pick her up as soon as officials open access to the village, just as the weather turns cold.
“I have been so scared about winter,” said the woman with lung problems, clutching a just-distributed paper giving her a number to call if she finds a land mine. “We have no power and it’s hard for me to collect firewood.”
The first Russian soldiers who set up in the village, turning the sawmill into their base and launching rocket attacks at Ukrainian troops in the next town, had at first not harassed the residents, she said. When they shot pigs on an abandoned farm, they sometimes let residents butcher some of the meat.
But as the occupation ground on, with the Russians rotating out every month, the troops became more aggressive. One of them asked to borrow Kozinska’s phone.
“I gave it to him so he could call his mother, but he took my SIM card,” she said.
One of the medics treated Halyna Noskova’s back after she was hit by mortar shrapnel in her front yard in June. Her 87-year mother pulled out the metal shard. “It was still hot,” she said. The Russian bandaged her up.
“They helped me, but I’m glad we are liberated,” said Noskova, 66.
The residents, all of whom are Russian speaking in this region adjacent to the Russian border, described treatment generally more humane than that experienced by occupied communities farther to the west. The discovery of more than 450 bodies in Bucha, near Kyiv — many showing signs of torture — set off international outrage over atrocities.
“They were not monsters, they were kids,” said Matvienko, who once asked Russian troops to move the tank they parked in front of her house. “I asked what they wanted from us and they said, ‘We can either be here or we can be in jail.’ ”
Others told the villagers they weren’t there to fight Ukraine, but to “protect us from America.”
The Russians’ biggest rule for residents was to get inside by 6 p.m. and stay there, quiet and in the dark, several said. Violating that order could be fatal, as two men on the street learned early on. The friends were drinking and had a light on, said Maria Grygorova, who lives in the attached house next door. The next morning she found them on the floor.
“Konstiantyn had two bullet holes in his head,” she said.
She and two friends buried them in the side yard. The same two friends dug them up Sunday, with Ukrainian war crimes investigators looking on.
The team from Kharkiv collected two other bodies during their visit, including a security guard whose remains have been rotting on the floor of a gravel elevator at an asphalt plant for months, even as the Russians used it as a sniper tower. One investigator vomited over a guardrail repeatedly as officers collected the remains.
“We’re here looking into war crimes,” said Serhii Bolvinov, chief investigator of the Kharkiv Regional Police, as his crew waited on demining techs to clear one area of explosives before they could recover some of the bodies.
The residents were scared of the Russians, several village residents said. But they almost pitied them in their scramble to escape the recent Ukrainian onslaught.
Half of the soldiers fled in their vehicles in the first hours of the offensive, they said. Those stranded grew desperate. Some residents overheard their radio pleas to unit commanders for someone to come get them.
“They said, ‘You’re on your own,’ ” Matvienko recounted. “They came into our houses to take clothes so the drones wouldn’t see them in uniforms. They took our bicycles. Two of them pointed guns at my ex-husband until he handed them his car keys.”
Buoyant Ukrainian officials said they would no longer negotiate a peace deal that would let Russia keep an occupying presence in any territory, even in Crimea and part of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Russia or Russian-backed separatists for years.
“The point of no return has passed,” Reznikov, the defense minister, said at the Yalta European Strategy summit in Kyiv on Saturday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday seemed to backtrack on his previous assertion that the time wasn’t right for peace negotiations, as Russia was preparing to stage a round of sham referendums meant to annex occupied territories.
“We are not against the talks; we are not refusing the talks,” Lavrov said on the state TV program, “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.” Rather, “Those who refuse should understand that the longer they delay this process, the more difficult it will be to negotiate.”
Robyn Dixon reported from Riga, Latvia. Mary Ilyushina in Riga and Isabelle Khurshudyan in Kyiv contributed to this report.
Ukraine on edge as Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, region’s towns shelled
KYIV, Aug 28 (Reuters) – Russian artillery fired at Ukrainian towns across the river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant overnight, local officals said on Sunday, adding to residents’ anguish as reports of shelling around the plant fuelled fears of a radiation disaster.
Russia’s defence ministry said there was more Ukrainian shelling of the plant over the past 24 hours, just a day after Moscow and Kyiv traded accusations of targeting Europe’s biggest nuclear plant, which has prompted grave international concern. read more
Ukrainian nuclear company Energoatom said it had no new information about attacks on the plant.
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Captured by Russian troops in March, but still run by Ukrainian staff, the complex on the southern front line of the war has been one of the major hotspots in the six-month-old conflict.
Regional governor Oleksandr Starukh said on Telegram on Sunday that Russian forces struck residential buildings in the region’s main city of Zaporizhzhia, about a two-hour drive from the plant, and the town of Orikhiv further east.
On Saturday, Starukh told Ukrainian television residents were being taught how to use iodine in case of a radiation leak.
Ukraine’s military reported shelling of nine more towns in the area on the opposite side of the Dnipro river from the plant in its daily report, while the RIA agency quoted the Russian defence ministry as saying its air force struck a Motor Sich (MSICH.UAX) plant in the region where helicopters were repaired.
Reuters could not verify those reports.
Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said nine shells fired by the Ukrainian artillery in two separate attacks landed in the nuclear plant’s grounds.
“At present, full-time technical personnel are monitoring the technical condition of the nuclear plant and ensuring its operation. The radiation situation in the area of the nuclear power plant remains normal,” he said in a statement.
The United Nations and Kyiv have called for a withdrawal of
military equipment and personnel from the plant to ensure it is not a target. read more
CONTINENT AT RISK
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that Russian forces had turned the plant into military base, putting the whole continent at risk, and had no business being there.
“Russian military must get out of the plant,” he said on Twitter.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog IAEA is waiting for clearance for its officials to visit the plant, which its head said on Thursday should be “very, very close”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned on Friday the situation at Zaporizhzhia remained “very risky” a day after it took hours to reconnect two of its reactors to the grid after shelling cut them off. read more
On Ukraine’s eastern front, Ukrainian forces halted the latest Russian attempt to advance on the town of Sloviansk, Kyiv’s military said in its daily report.
Defenders foiled Russian attempts to break through around the strategic city of Bakhmut to extend control over the Donbas region after Moscow captured Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk weeks ago, the military said. According to regional governors, the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in Donetsk province were shelled by Russian forces overnight, but there were no reports of new casualties.
Reuters could not verify those accounts.
President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Russia’s neighbour on Feb. 24, saying a “special operation” was needed to demilitarise the country and remove perceived security threats to Russia.
Ukraine and the West have dismissed this as a baseless pretext for an imperialist war of conquest that has killed thousands, displaced tens of millions, turned cities to rubble and threatened the global economy with an energy and food supply crisis, sending prices soaring.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said Kuleba would travel to Sweden on Monday followed by a trip to the Czech Republic on Tuesday as part of Kyiv’s efforts to cement international support for Ukraine and push for more sanctions pressure on Russia.
In Prague, he will attend an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers that will discuss new sanctions on Moscow and an EU-wide visa ban for Russians. Zelenskiy called for such a ban earlier this month, but so far it found support mainly from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland, which all share a border with Russia. read more
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Reporting by Max Hunder and Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv and Reuters bureaus; Writing by Tomasz Janowski; Editing by Nick Macfie
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
War for the south: Ukraine sets its sights on regaining cities and towns lost to Russian troops
Outside, the garden shed is stacked with Javelins and other shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons.
The owners of the house, who fled to Poland after the war broke out in late February, are happy in the knowledge that their village is now back in Ukrainian hands.
Senior Lieutenant Andrii Pidlisnyi was one of the soldiers that drove the Russians out two months ago. “At first, it was a defensive operation to stop them,” he says. “After that we found some good places where we can make offensive operations and take back our territories. And now we’re doing that.”
Pidlisnyi commands a unit of 100 men tasked with identifying Russian positions, often by drone. They then call in the artillery.
On his computer, he shows CNN bodycam videos from his missions earlier in the war. He has had some close calls, but says his morale is high after recent successes. US hardware has helped.
One video shows Pidlisnyi sitting in a trench, using his drone to pinpoint Russian tank positions. “Call in the American gift,” he says over the radio.
Russian troops are now on the defensive in this part of the south — unlike in the east, where Ukrainian troops are the ones being forced to cede ground.
But here too, it is a slog. The aim for soldiers like Pidlisnyi is to take small strategic pockets, areas of high ground with views of occupied Ukrainian towns in the distance, from where further gains can be made.
“I’m not sure we will win it [by] the end of this year,” he says, referring to retaking Russian-occupied areas in Ukraine’s south. “Maybe not until the end of next year.”
The Ukrainian troops claim to have won back some territory. They say they pushed the Russians out of two more villages along the Mykolaiv-Kherson border early this week.
But it is a large area of open rolling farmland where any advancing forces would be exposed, and the Russians have had several months to build defensive positions in three layers across the region.
And the Ukrainians have limited assault forces — for much of this conflict they have been playing defense and that has degraded some of their best units.
Weapons provided by Western allies are, by and large, not designed for ground offensives, and the Ukrainians are short of air cover for any advancing forces.
Ukrainian forces have also been sustaining heavy losses in the south, though the military rarely provides details.
There are growing signs that the Russians are reinforcing their military presence in Kherson, determined to hold it as a vital part of the land bridge to Crimea — and as the peninsula’s main source of water.
In the past two weeks large convoys have trundled west from Mariupol through Melitopol to Kherson.
Many civilians have already fled. Ukrainian officials estimate that nearly half the population of Kherson has left the region for Ukrainian-held territory.
They accuse the Russians of preventing more people from leaving cities like Melitopol, in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region, so that they can be exploited as “human shields” in the event of a Ukrainian offensive.
Shifts on the battleground
Ukraine’s southern front begins near Mykolaiv, a port city to the north of Russian-held Kherson city. It is struck by missiles and rockets almost every day.
To the south and east, a meandering front line runs from the Black Sea coast through farmland and up towards Zaporizhzhia region.
This area is a long way from the calcified Donetsk front — fought over since 2014 — but it is now just one part of a battlefield that stretches for more than 1,000 kilometers.
Along the line, artillery pieces face off, in battles one Ukrainian soldier described as “ping-pong with cannons.”
It has been that way for months.
Now, the Ukrainians say they have an advantage: Donated weaponry, particularly the HIMARs rocket system supplied by the US, is taking out crucial storage depots and command posts and ammunition dumps deep in Russian-held territory.
This month, Ukraine says it destroyed at least two ammunition dumps at Nova Khakova in the Kherson region. Ukraine has also hit three bridges across the Dnipro River, and even a transport of Russian S-300 missiles — a revamped surface-to-air projectile which has rained horror on Mykolaiv.
More Russian hardware will replace what is lost.
CNN has obtained exclusive video footage, taken by partisans, showing S-300 missiles at Dzhankoi railway station in occupied Crimea. Satellite imaging and analysis provided by Maxar indicates as many as 50 S-300 missiles on railcars at the station on Thursday 21 July. Just one S-300 could destroy a building somewhere in Ukraine.
Yet despite the enormity of the Russian war machine, Ukraine’s military leaders have said this month’s strikes on Russian stores and resupply routes could turn the tide on the battlefield.
Now, multiple frontline soldiers have backed that up — telling CNN they believe the Russians have noticeably fewer rounds to fire at them.
“We had about two to three weeks where they didn’t have enough ammunition to fight us with artillery, rockets and so on,” Snr Lt Pidlisnyi says.
On another part of the southern front, Ukraine Armed Forces Captain Volodymyr Omelyan tells CNN surgical strikes behind enemy lines are a part of an ongoing modernization Ukraine’s strategy.
“We believe that Russians will surrender much faster, especially in Kherson region when we already hit three main bridges, two automobile bridges and one railway one,” says Omelyan, who was a politician before he joined the army.
Omelyan says gains are being made “day by day” on the battlefield, but that Ukraine chooses not to advertise them: “It’s a good policy of our commanders to talk about what’s happening after it’s already happened.”
Readying for a long fight
In the southern industrial town of Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian forces are put through their paces: Reservists and national guardsmen armed with pellet guns must storm a house. Ukrainian police are on the level above, playing the part of the Russians.
After an hour of mock fighting, the trainees have failed to take the top floor — a sign of how deadly and difficult hand-to-hand urban warfare is.
Their commander, Oleksander Piskun, was gravely injured pushing Russian-backed separatists out of cities in the eastern Donbas region in 2014, and has used a wheelchair since.
“Street combat, the battle to storm a settlement is the hardest combat,” he says. “It is more difficult because we are not capturing settlements, we are liberating settlements. These are our cities, these are our people.”
For now, the fight on the southern front is dominated by artillery, not by street combat. Ukrainians say the future will bring an assault on Kherson, but first, the long-range battle must be waged and won.