Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
Attack on Ukrainian village cafe kills more than 50 people
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has accused Russia of “brutal” and “genocidal aggression” after a missile hit a cafe during a wake service in a village in the Kharkiv region, killing more than 50 people including a six-year-old boy.
The attack took place at 1.15pm in the village of Hroza, in the Kupiansky district of the north-eastern Kharkiv province.
Ukraine’s president described it on Telegram as “a demonstrably brutal Russian crime – a rocket attack on an ordinary grocery store, a completely deliberate act of terrorism. My condolences to all those who have lost loved ones.” Luke Harding and Pjotr Sauer reported this story.
What does speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ousting mean for US aid to Ukraine?
The historic removal of the House speaker Kevin McCarthy has thrown further doubt over the future of US support for Ukraine and resistance against Russia’s invasion, Julian Borger reported.
The latest tranche of $300m (£247m) in aid to Ukraine was approved overwhelmingly by the House in a 331-117 vote, but all the 117 no votes were Republicans – more than half the party’s representatives. It was the far right of the party – which is focused on cutting US funding for Kyiv – that ousted McCarthy and it will be critical to the election of his replacement.
US president Joe Biden admitted Wednesday he was worried that political turmoil in Washington could threaten US aid to Ukraine, and urged Republicans to stop their infighting. He said he would soon be giving a major speech on the need to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Meanwhile the US has supplied Ukraine with more than a million rounds of Iranian ammunition confiscated in the Gulf late last year, Julian reported separately. European leaders rallied around the Ukrainian president, Lisa O’Carroll reported, promising to never waver in their support for the country.
Windows for Ukraine
In the village of Kamianka, tucked into a valley near Izium in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, Victor and Larysa Sysenko were in triumphant mood: Victor had just managed to finish getting a roof on their house, in time for winter.
Kamianka got very unlucky last year. Soon after the launch of the full-scale invasion it was caught between the Russians as they tried to advance towards Donetsk from the north, and the Ukrainian defenders. Over the spring and summer, the village was occupied by the Russians and reduced to ruins.
One of the village’s most pressing needs is for windows, Charlotte Higgins reported. Amid the rest of the destruction in the village, hardly a window remains, a problem that stretches across Ukraine since every missile or rocket attack on a building will probably also blow out the glass of its immediate neighbours. One of the characteristic sounds of the war is the harsh tinkle of broken glass as it is swept up. In cities such as Kharkiv, many city-centre windows are boarded up – or crisscrossed with tape to lessen the danger of flying shards in the event of a blast.
How war has changed Ukrainian literature
Volodymyr Rafeyenko is a distinguished Ukrainian novelist. Ten years ago he wrote and published entirely in Russian. Born in Russian-speaking Donetsk, in the east of the country, he won literary awards for his work, including the prestigious Russian prize, given in Moscow.
In July 2014, Rafeyenko was forced to flee his home city after the Kremlin staged a covert takeover. He recalled standing in Donetsk’s central boulevard – named after the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin – as soldiers rolled in. “I saw a military column arrive. I understood that with my beliefs it was time to leave,” Rafeyenko said.
Rafeyenko moved to Kyiv leaving behind his job as a writer, literary critic, poet and scholar. “I began to study Ukrainian. It was a principled decision,” he said. Three and half years later, he published Mondegreen, his seventh book, and his first written in the Ukrainian language. His second Ukrainian novel, Petrichor, is out soon.
Since Putin’s invasion, Rafyenko has refused to speak Russian. “I think in Ukrainian. We speak it as a family,” he told Luke Harding.
Ukraine tries to protect electricity supply before winter
On 25 February 2022, Oleksandr Danyliuk woke up to see Russian soldiers. “I peered outside my window. It was 6.30am. There were four Russian armoured vehicles opposite my house,” he told Luke Harding. Danyliuk, an engineer with Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, DTEK, said Moscow’s invasion took him by surprise.
Over the next four weeks a battle raged in his home city of Hostomel, a short drive from the capital, Kyiv. The fighting destroyed the neighbouring market. It also brought down numerous electricity cables and pylons, leaving civilians cold and in the dark. “For the first two days after the Russians left I wandered around in a daze. Then we got to work,” Danyliuk said.
He and his team fixed up windows so they had somewhere to sleep. They began repairing the damage. Russian soldiers left booby traps: grenades and trip wires. In 45 days, power was restored. Then, beginning in October 2022, the Kremlin launched a wave of missile and drone attacks against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. This led to blackouts, electricity rationing and a scramble to buy generators.
UK says Russia plotting to sabotage Ukrainian grain tankers with sea mines
Britain has accused Russia of plotting to sabotage civilian tankers loaded with Ukrainian grain by planting sea mines on the approaches to the country’s Black Sea ports, Dan Sabbagh reported this week.
Based on what it said was declassified intelligence, the UK said Russia did not want to directly attack merchant ships using Ukraine’s newly created humanitarian corridor with missiles, but instead try to destroy them covertly.
Russia would then seek to blame Ukraine for the loss of any shipping in an attempt to evade responsibility, the British Foreign Office continued, and the UK said it was going public in order to deter Moscow from carrying out the plan.
Putin escalates nuclear rhetoric with threat to resume testing
Vladimir Putin has ramped up his nuclear rhetoric, saying his country had successfully tested the nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable Burevestnik strategic cruise missile, as he suggested Russia could resume nuclear testing for the first time in more than three decades, Pjotr Sauer reported.
The Russian president said in a speech on Thursday at the annual Valdai Discussion Club in the Black Sea resort of Sochi that Russia had also almost completed work on its nuclear-capable Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile system, which is capable of carrying at least 10 nuclear warheads on each missile.
“In the event of an attack on Russia, no one has any chance of survival,” he said, adding that he was “not sure if we need to carry out nuclear tests or not”.
How the Ukraine war has changed the EU
“The EU has changed. There is no turning back. We have turned out the lights behind us and there is basically only one way.”
The words of the Danish politician and EU commissioner Margrethe Vestager at a conference in May neatly reflect the mood among the Brussels elite, taken aback at their own ability to shed EU bureaucratic torpor, defend Ukraine, embrace enlargement and move closer to fulfilling Ursula von der Leyen’s ambition for the EU to become a “geopolitical force”.
Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, Josep Borrell, the EU foreign and security chief, argued the EU had grown up, “making more progress in a week toward the objective of being a global security player than it had in the previous decade”. The example of Ukraine’s brave resistance gave the EU a newfound sense of purpose, writes Patrick Wintour.
