Every week we wrap up essential coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, opinion and more.
Most extensive Russian shelling of the year
During the week, Russia shelled more than 100 settlements in a single 24-hour period, in what Ukraine said was the biggest bombardment so far this year.
The Russians have fired millions of shells on cities, towns and villages since invading in February 2022, reducing several settlements to rubble across the eastern part of Ukraine. “Over the last 24 hours, the enemy shelled 118 settlements in 10 regions,” Igor Klymenko, the Ukrainian interior minister, wrote on social media on Wednesday. “This is the highest number of cities and villages that have come under attack since the start of the year.”
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief has warned that the war is moving towards a grim new stage of static and attritional fighting, a phase that could allow Moscow to rebuild its military power. Luke Harding digested Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s frank article in the Economist. “Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” Zaluzhnyi was quoted as saying in an interview published alongside the article. “Ukraine’s armed forces need key military capabilities and technologies to break out of this kind of war. The most important one is air power.”
Harding writes that it remains to be seen if the delivery of F-16 jets promised by the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium will help Ukraine on the battlefield. They are likely to arrive sometime next year.
Russian soldiers accused of killing family of nine
The Russian occupation has arrested two of its own soldiers on suspicion of machine-gunning to death a family of nine, including two young children, in their home in the invaded eastern Ukrainian town of Volnovakha. Pjotr Sauer reported the story.
The Ukrainian government said it had also begun investigating the crime. Ukrainian officials said they believed Russian soldiers killed all members of the Kapkanets family on 27 October for refusing to give them their house.
Russian prosecutors said the two soldiers detained came from Russia’s far east and that the reason for the killings appeared to be a “domestic conflict”.
It is the first known case of Russia arresting its own soldiers on suspicion of killing Ukrainian civilians since it invaded in 2022, despite ample evidence collected by independent human rights groups, journalists and the UN showing that Russian soldiers have systematically committed war crimes during the invasion.
No painting over Putin sympathies in Serbia
Armed with a brush and a bucket of grey paint, the Russian anti-war activist Ilya Zernov walked through Belgrade until he reached a large mural that said “Death to Ukraine” on the side of an apartment block. As Zernov, 19, started painting over the mural, he said he was cornered by three Serbian men who ordered him to stop. “One of them pulled out a knife … He then punched me in the right ear,” said Zernov, who fled his home town of Kazan shortly after Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine.
The attack left him with a perforated eardrum, but Zernov said he was glad he managed to at least partly cover the mural. “As a Russian, I felt it was my responsibility to do something. The graffiti glorified violence.”
Zernov is one of the estimated 200,000 Russians to have left for Serbia since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. They have opened cafes and galleries, registered more than 2,000 new businesses and given a boost to the property market. But in a country where Putin’s regime enjoys significant support, activists like Zernov have faced harassment and expulsions, as Pjotr Sauer explained.
Belgrade has long performed a delicate balancing act between its EU aspirations on the one hand and its centuries-old ethnic and religious ties with Russia. Its president, Aleksandar Vučić, has refused to introduce sanctions against Russia, while Moscow continues to serve as Serbia’s main ally in opposing the independence of Kosovo.
Feeling unsafe in Belgrade, Zernov has since left the city for Berlin.
Dagestan mob storms airport in search of Jewish passengers
On Sunday a Russian mob rioted at an airport and Vladimir Putin’s propagandists tried to blame faraway Ukraine and the west for masterminding it all.
A mob descended on Makhachkala airport in Russia’s Muslim-majority, North Caucasus internal republic of Dagestan on Sunday evening in search of Jewish passengers on a plane that arrived from Israel, which is at war with Hamas in Gaza.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, on Monday put out the line that the riot was the result of a “provocation” orchestrated from outside Russia, with Ukraine playing a “direct and key role”. Earlier in the day, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, made claims of “external information influence”. Later, Russian authorities made 80 arrests of alleged riot participants.
Many pointed out how far away an airport in Dagestan is from Ukraine and its pressing concerns. No evidence was produced for the Russian allegations. At a White House briefing, the US national security spokesman John Kirby said: “Classic Russian rhetoric, when something goes bad in your country, you blame somebody else. The west had nothing to do with this. This is just hate, bigotry and intimidation, pure and simple.”
Sergei Melikov, the head of the Dagestan region, said on radio: “We should be ready, this is not the last protest. They will continue to try to rock this caucasian boat.” Andrew Roth filed the report.
Art from pounded pavement
Some artists use paintbrushes. Zhanna Kadyrova uses an AK-47. And for her latest show, she braved unexploded mines to turn the shrapnel-hit roads of a formerly occupied town into astonishing art, Charlotte Higgins wrote from Kyiv.
The sizeable rectangles of asphalt – actual bits of road – are pitted and scarred from violent showers of shrapnel. These slices of road surface, complete with traces of white lines, come from Irpin, the commuter town on the western fringes of Kyiv occupied by the Russian troops last year – and the scene of some of the worst fighting in the early days of the full-scale invasion.
After the town’s liberation, and with the permission of the mayor, Kadyrova had these chunks cut out of the street. “They are readymades,” says the artist outside her studio in Kyiv. “Part of their titles are the precise coordinates of where we found them.”
Ukraine roots out Russian casino mafia
Ukrainian officials seeking to oust Russian actors from its gambling industry are going to emulate the methods of the US authorities in the 1980s when they rooted out the Italian mob from the casinos of Las Vegas, Daniel Boffey wrote.
Gambling was legalised in Ukraine shortly before the full-scale invasion in February 2022 and has been profitable avenue for Russians wanting to make money and collect the personal data of Ukrainian gamblers. The gambling regulator started revoking licences in September 2022 and Volodymyr Zelenskiy has sanctioned over 400 individuals and legal entities related to Russian gambling businesses.
Olena Vodolazhko, a member of Ukraine’s gambling and lottery regulator, said the regulator had received an invitation to Nevada from the US Gaming Control Board to discuss reforming the Ukrainian system and kicking out Russian influence.
In the 1970s, the FBI launched investigations along with the regulatory bodies into the involvement of organised crime. Vodolazhko said Ukraine hoped to follow the “best practice” of US regulators and law enforcement organisations.
