Severe losses for Russia
Ukraine made comprehensive gains in the east and south – including in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk, the four territories Russia illegally claimed to have annexed last week – forcing Russian troops to retreat on both fronts.
In Kherson alone, Ukrainian forces have retaken 400 sq km of territory so far in October, Ukraine’s southern military command says. Ukraine has recaptured 29 settlements in the oblast since 1 October, according to Oleksii Hromov, deputy chief of the main operational department of the Ukrainian army’s general staff.
Even Vladimir Putin appeared to concede the severity of the military reversals, Isobel Koshiw and Peter Beaumont reported. The Russian president said in a televised video call with teachers that he expected the “situation in the new territories will stabilise”.
But military experts say Russia is at its weakest point in the war so far, with massive losses of troops and equipment, coupled with its decision to wait so long before mobilisation, making significant gains unlikely in the short term.
“For months now Russia has been getting weaker,” said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at St Andrews University. “It has been bleeding its army on the field, it’s been losing a huge amount of equipment. On the other hand, the Ukrainians have been getting stronger; they have better-trained forces and better military equipment.”
Ukraine’s gains did not stop the upper and lower houses of Russia’s parliament voting unanimously to approve the illegal incorporation of the four regions into Russia.
Ukrainian brigades achieved their biggest breakthrough in the region since the war started, bursting through the frontline and advancing rapidly along the Dnieper river. Luke Harding wrote that Lyman’s recapture by Ukrainian troops is Russia’s largest battlefield loss since Ukraine’s lightning counteroffensive.
As Ukrainian troops retook towns, they uncovered mass burial sites and evidence of torture chambers. Ukrainian forces retook the town of Lyman in Donetsk on Sunday and have since found more than 50 graves, with some marked only with numbers.
Peter Beaumont reported from the devastated city once home to 27,000 people, of whom “only hundreds remain, moving around the ruined streets by bicycle or on foot”, and spoke to the civilians following Ukrainian forces south.
In a comment piece, Kier Giles says that after its losses, Russia will undoubtedly find new means to test Ukraine’s resolve – and western politicians and citizens should be ready.
On Friday, Julian Borger, the Guardian’s world affairs editor, covered comments from Joe Biden, the US president, who raised the spectre of global “Armageddon” if Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon to try and advance his aims in Ukraine.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” Biden said. “We’ve got a guy [Putin] I know fairly well. He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.
“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
US intelligence agencies believe that Putin has come to see defeat in Ukraine as an existential threat to his regime, which he associates with an existential threat to Russia, potentially justifying, according to his worldview, the use of nuclear weapons.
Borger also examined whether Putin’s nuclear threats are really likely to lead to Armageddon.
Russian media loses patience with Putin after retreat
Russia’s retreat from Lyman has sparked vociferous criticism of the handling of the war on Russian state television. Vladimir Solovyov, host of a primetime talkshow on state TV channel Russia 1 and one of the Kremlin’s biggest cheerleaders, said on air on Sunday: “We need to pull it together, make unpopular but necessary decisions and act.”
Pjotr Sauer reports that pro-war military bloggers are painting “a bleak picture of deteriorating Russian morale, blaming a lack of rotation and army exhaustion for the failings in southern Ukraine”.
A Russian war reporter for state TV, Roman Saponkov, wrote to his Telegram followers that Russia was losing in Kherson. “Friends, I know you’re waiting for me to comment on the situation. But I really don’t know what to say to you. The retreat from the north on the right bank is a disaster.”
Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation announced that it would restore its network to oppose the partial mobilisation aimed at bolstering Russia’s forces in Ukraine, close Navalny ally Ivan Zhdanov said in a video published on social media. Russian authorities have designated Navalny’s organisations “extremist” after months of increasing repression against his supporters, putting FBK employees, volunteers and sympathisers at risk of prosecution and imprisonment.
The Russian justice ministry, meanwhile, has declared one of the country’s most popular rappers to be a “foreign agent”, a legal designation that has been used to hound Kremlin critics. Oxxxymiron – real name Miron Fyodorov – was added to a list of foreign agents alongside four journalists and Dmitry Glukhovsky, a prominent writer.
The rapper has called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “catastrophe and a crime”, left Russia and given concerts in Turkey, Britain and Germany titled “Russians Against the War”.
A daring escape
As Russia’s partial mobilisation continued, Julian Borger reported on the daring escape of two Russians desperate to avoid conscription. The pair sailed approximately 300 miles across the Bering Sea, which separates Russia and the US, to the village of Gambell on St Lawrence, a remote Alaskan island, where they have appealed for asylum.
“Many Gambell residents are ethnically closer to Siberian Yupik coastal communities than to other Alaskans. Such crossings across the dangerous seas of the strait are rare in recent decades. Twelve Siberian men made the crossing in 2014, marking the first such crossing in 14 years,” Borger reports.
“In 1948, the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, ordered a stop to crossings by traditional communities, suspecting some of the visitors were Soviet spies. The ban was referred to as the ‘Ice Curtain’.”
Forbes Russia reported that the number of people who have left the country since Putin ordered the draft could be as high as 700,000, citing a Kremlin source.
Flight ticketing data has pointed to a surge of people leaving, Reuters reports. The number of one-way tickets sold from Russia rose 27% from 21 September to 27 September compared with the week prior, according to Spain-based ForwardKeys, which analyses booking reservations.
Opec slashes output
On Thursday, the Opec oil cartel and its allies agreed to a bigger than expected cut in oil production targets despite significant pressure from the US.
The Opec+ group of oil-producing nations signed up to a cut in output of 2m barrels a day, surpassing predictions earlier in the week of cuts of 1m to 1.5m barrels, squeezing supplies in a tight market. It was the first such major cut since a landmark curb on production at the start of the Covid pandemic.
Julian Borger wrote about anger in Washington in response to the deal.
Energy prices soared after Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, pushing inflation to decades-high levels that have put pressure on economies across the world. But they have fallen in recent months on concerns over dwindling demand and a slowdown in the global economy.
Martin Chulov, the Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, wrote about Putin’s deepening relationship with the Saudi Arabian crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman: “They both started wars in neighbouring countries, hold significant sway over energy markets, are known to brook no dissent and to covet spots in history. Russia’s embattled president and Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler seem to have a lot in common. Nearly eight months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, relations between Riyadh and Moscow are at a high point.”
Ukraine’s deminers continue a years-long effort in the east
Peter Beaumont spent time with Ukraine’s deminers who, even before the war, were facing a years-long effort to clear mines from Ukraine’s east. “The country was ranked fifth in the world for civilian casualties caused by mines and in the top three for anti-vehicle mine incidents.
“Local demining experts are warning that even if the war were to end tomorrow, it will take at least a decade to clear the threat,” Beaumont reports.
“While efforts by the Ukrainian state emergency services, the military and local and international NGOs have been highly sophisticated, footage shared on social media has also shown riskier approaches, including video of soldiers triggering mines with branches and even thrown tyres.”
