Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the war in Ukraine is part of Russia’s broader struggle against Western dominance. “We stand at a historical frontier: Ahead of us is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of World War II,” he said. The Ukraine offensive, he said Thursday in a speech to the Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of Russian specialists. He added that the war was simply part of the “tectonic shifts in the entire world order” and that “the historical period of the West’s undivided dominance over world affairs is coming to an end”.
Putin said he ordered his defense minister to call senior NATO commanders this week about the possible detonation of a “dirty bomb” in Ukraine. In a speech near Moscow on Thursday, Putin claimed that Russia was “aware of an incident in which a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ is being prepared” and that Russia knew “where it is generally being prepared”. He gave no evidence of the alleged conspiracy, which included the possibility of the device being loaded onto a Tochka-U or other tactical missile, detonated, and then “blamed on Russia.”
Fighting on the ground appears to have slowed in recent days, with Ukrainian officials saying difficult terrain and inclement weather halted their main advance in southern Kherson province. On Thursday, a close Putin ally, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, said 23 of his soldiers were killed and 58 others wounded in a Ukrainian artillery attack in the Kherson region this week. After the attack, Chechen forces carried out a revenge attack, killing about 70 Ukrainians, he claimed.
Ukrainians living in and around Kyiv have been told that the region’s electricity supply has “severely deteriorated”. after a fresh wave of Russian strikes aimed at sapping public morale as the country’s cold winter approaches. In the coming days, a new schedule of planned power outages will be introduced in Kyiv and the surrounding area, which is intended to prevent uncontrolled power outages and will be stricter and longer. Residents of apartment buildings in Kyiv have started leaving small packets of snacks in elevators that can be used in case people get stuck during a power outage.
Authorities deployed by Russia in the occupied Zaporizhia region of Ukraine ordered telephone checks on residents on Thursdayannouncing the implementation of military censorship under Putin’s Martial Law Decree. “As of today, law enforcement officers in the Zaporizhia region began selective preventive checks on citizens’ mobile phones,” Moscow-appointed official Vladimir Rogov said.
Moscow said provisions of the Black Sea Grains Agreement to facilitate Russian agricultural and fertilizer exports are not being met and that it has yet to make a decision on whether to extend the agreement. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters that the West had not taken enough steps to ease sanctions on Russia’s logistics, payments and insurance industries to ease Russia’s exports.
The United States has seen nothing to suggest that Russia’s ongoing annual “Grom” exercises of its nuclear forces could be a cover for a real deployment, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Thursday. “We haven’t seen anything that would lead us to believe at this point it was some kind of camouflage activity,” Austin told reporters.
An oil depot in the Russian-held city of Shakhtarsk in eastern Ukraine caught fire overnight on Wednesday. The city’s Russian-installed mayor, Alexander Shatov, claimed the fire was caused by Ukrainian shelling of the train station.
The US is sending Ukraine a new arms and aid package worth $275 millionto step up efforts to push Russian forces out of key areas in the south as winter hits, US officials said Thursday. Officials said the package, which is expected to be announced on Friday, will not include any major new weapons.
The Ukrainian authorities have announced that they will initiate criminal proceedings against the Russian commissioner for children’s rights. She accused them of facilitating the kidnapping and forced adoption of thousands of vulnerable Ukrainian children. Maria Lvova-Belova said this week that she herself adopted a boy who was detained by the Russian army in the bombed city of Mariupol. Last month she was sanctioned by the West over allegations that she oversaw the eviction of more than 2,000 children from Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. According to Ukraine, she has orchestrated a new policy to facilitate her forced placement with “foster families” in Russia.
Russian journalist and alleged goddaughter of Putin fled to Lithuania This was announced by secret services in Vilnius after the police in Moscow had searched one of their houses. Ksenia Sobchak is the daughter of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, whom Putin has previously referred to as his mentor.