Every week we wrap up essential coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, opinion and more.
US and Europe flirt with risk of defeat for Ukraine
Ukraine is being outgunned: it is estimated Russia fires 10,000 artillery shells a day to Ukraine’s 2,000. Kyiv’s battlefield prospects are sketchy as Republicans in the US Congress hold up further military aid. The Senate passage of an aid bill this week has left the matter in the hands of the House of Representatives, where Republican opposition to further assistance to Ukraine is more hawkish.
While Europe grapples with having to plug the gap left by US political divisions, Ukraine risks slow-motion defeat from 2025. Russia has managed a transition to a war economy. Analysis by Estonia has concluded that Moscow’s factories will produce about 4.5m shells in 2024 – more than 12,000 a day – and defence spending has gone up to 7.5% of GDP.
The US failure to agree aid for Ukraine is already having an impact on the battlefield, Nato’s secretary general warned this week, at the end of a defence ministers’ meeting.
Jens Stoltenberg said he still believed Congress would eventually approve the stalled $60bn (£50bn) package, but warned: “The fact that the US has not been able to make a decision so far has already had consequences. It is impacting the flow of support,” the Nato chief told reporters in Brussels on Thursday.
“To some extent, this can be compensated by increased support from other allies,” Stoltenberg said, adding that while Canada and European nations were giving more to Nato, the reality was that the US was “by far the biggest ally” and “it’s vital that they continue to provide support” to Kyiv.
One Nato official at the summit warned that some of Ukraine’s land units were rationing their use of artillery shells, and warned that Russia had made “significant gains” around Avdiivka.
However, Ukraine has proven masterful at alternative battlefield strategies, focusing on developing at least a million small and cheap “first-person view” attack drones during 2024. Meanwhile the Kremlin’s generals have still not shown they are able to attack effectively. There are some technologies that in effect only the US can supply in volume to Ukraine, such as Patriot interceptors, critical in the air defence of Kyiv particularly against potent Russian Iskander and Kinzhal missiles. Dan Sabbagh weighed up the factors in favour and against each side.
Putin casts his vote
Vladimir Putin has said he would prefer a Joe Biden presidency to a Donald Trump one and mocked the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for his “lack of sharp questions” during their recent interview.
The Russian president told a Russian state journalist he regarded Biden – who is struggling to secure approval for billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine – as a “more experienced, predictable, an old-school politician” and dismissed worries over Biden’s age and mental acuity, saying he had not noticed any issues with his American counterpart during a meeting in 2021, Pjotr Sauer reports. “Even then [three years ago], people were saying that he was incompetent, but I did not see anything of this sort,” he said. “Yes, he kept looking at his papers, but to be honest I kept doing the same. So there was nothing peculiar.”
Commenting on Putin’s remarks at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said that Putin had given him “a great compliment, actually”.
Trump has recently been lobbying Republican lawmakers to vote against the Senate-approved $95bn military aid package, and has repeatedly threatened not to protect Nato members he believes do not pay enough to maintain the alliance.
In the same interview on Russian state TV on Wednesday, Putin also said he did not get “much pleasure” from last week’s two-hour interview with the conservative presenter Carlson, because the questions had not been sharp enough. “To be honest, I thought that he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions. I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond in the same way,” Putin said.
Russia’s ‘Kalashnikov economy’
On Thursday, Putin visited Uralvagonzavod, the country’s largest producer of main battle tanks, where workers boasted that it had been among the first to establish round the clock production. The Russian leader promised funding to help train an additional 1,500 qualified employees for the plant.
Early in 2023, the Russian government transferred more than a dozen plants, including several gunpowder factories, to the state conglomerate Rostec in order to modernise and streamline production of artillery shells and other key elements in the war effort, such as military vehicles.
The Kazan gunpowder plant, one of the country’s largest, took on more than 500 workers in a December hiring spree that increased average monthly salaries at the plant more than threefold, from 25,000 roubles (£217) to 90,000 roubles (£782), according to Alexander Livshits, the plant’s director. Job adverts offer night shifts from midnight to 8am and protection from military service for those trying to avoid the frontlines, Andrew Roth reports.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its third year, the massive Russian investment in the military, projected this year to be the largest as a share of GDP since the Soviet Union, has worried European war planners, who have said Nato underestimated Russia’s ability to sustain a long-term war.
“We still haven’t seen where is Russia’s breaking point,” said Mark Riisik, a deputy director in the policy planning department of Estonia’s defence ministry. “Basically one-third of their national budget is going on military production and on the war in Ukraine … But we don’t know when it will actually impact on society. So it’s a little bit challenging to say when will this stop.”
Richard Connolly, an expert on Russia’s military and economy at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in London, called it a “Kalashnikov economy”, which he said was “quite unsophisticated but durable, built for large-scale use and for use in conflicts”.
He said: “The Russians have been paying for this for years. They’ve been subsidising the defence industry, and many would have said wasting money for the event that one day they need to be able to scale it up. So it was economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”
Wartime’s secret needs and wants
“I hope my ex has been killed by a rocket,” says one message. “I feel ashamed that I miss my cats more than my own dad,” writes somebody else. “I want to kill my father for his Soviet beliefs,” confesses a third. “I can’t wank,” confides one person. Another: “I wank every day.” And someone else: “I want to have amazing sex before the nuclear strike, but in two months, I haven’t had the emotional resources to even open Tinder.”
These anonymous wartime “secrets” that artist Bohdana Zaiats collated using an online Google form are displayed at the Jam Factory arts centre Lviv, western Ukraine. It is one of the most fragile and vulnerable moments in the Jam Factory’s opening exhibition, titled Our Years, Our Words, Our Losses, Our Searches, Our Us. The show zooms in on such raw emotion, bringing together works that express the tender quiddities of inner lives in ways that journalism or documentary cannot. But it also zooms out – on to a historical panorama stretching back as far as the 19th century, one that is frequently troubling, painful and complex, Charlotte Higgins wrote.
