Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the Ukraine war, from news and features to analysis and opinion.
Putin preparing for major new offensive in new year
Senior Ukrainian officials say Vladimir Putin is preparing for a major new offensive in the new year, Isobel Koshiw and Peter Beaumont reported, despite a series of humiliating battlefield setbacks for Russia in recent months.
In an interview with the Guardian, Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said that while Ukraine was now able to successfully defend itself against Russia’s missile attacks targeting key infrastructure, including the energy grid, evidence was emerging that the Kremlin was preparing a broad new offensive.
Reznikov’s comments echoed similar remarks made to the Economist this week – including from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the head of the armed forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and the chief of ground forces, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskii.
The briefings appeared to be part of a broad, coordinated effort to warn against complacency among western allies and highlight the continuing threat Russia poses to Ukraine.
Deadlocked enemy forces slog it out in ‘Bakhmut meat grinder’
Ukraine’s current defining battle is taking place in the eastern Donetsk city of Bakhmut. Once home to 72,000, the civilian population has dwindled to 12,000 over the past six months, surviving in basements and supplied by mobile grocery trucks that enter the city when they can.
A widespread assessment that Russian forces have until mid-December before the onset of full winter conditions forces a slowing of their efforts has supplied one motive for the sense of urgency, Peter Beaumont writes from the region.
A recent assessment for the Institute for the Study of War determined that even if Russia succeeded in a controlled Ukrainian withdrawal from the city, Bakhmut itself offered them little operational benefit.
“The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding and attrition-based combat around Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut.”
Safety of Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant hangs in balance
The Russian shell that struck in the night had taken away the wall of a top-floor apartment, and in its place was just freezing air blowing off the Dnieper River – and a view of Europe’s biggest nuclear power station on the other bank.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant’s silhouette – with its two fat cooling towers and the row of six squat blocks – has become globally familiar since it was dubbed the most dangerous place on Earth: six nuclear reactors on the frontline of a catastrophic war.
On a fairly typical night last week, the Russians on the left bank of the river fired 40 shells and rockets into Nikopol, a town on the Ukrainian-held right bank, falling on its rows of krushchevky, five-storey blocks of flats built for factory workers in the 1960s and named after the Soviet leader of the time.
After 10 months of war, the blocks are half empty, so there are fewer people to kill. The only reported casualty on this particular night was a 65-year-old man who was taken to hospital, and whose flat now afforded such a comprehensive view of the power plant.
By the next morning, the repairs had already begun. Julian Borger had this report.
Was the Viktor Bout exchange deal a win for Moscow?
The Russian arms dealer is back in Moscow after the prisoner swap for US women’s basketball star Brittney Griner. Kremlin officials say it’s a “capitulation by America” – but others believe Bout is a declining asset. Was the Viktor Bout exchange deal really a win for Moscow? Andrew Roth asked this week.
Both Russia and Bout had long denied suspicions that he was an asset for the Russian spy services, and in his first remarks after arriving, Bout seemed to nod and wink at the belief that he held some secret value for the Kremlin. “I don’t think I’m somehow important for Russian politics,” he said, before adding a line now common in Russian war films and military circles: “We don’t abandon our own, right?”
Russians connected to the Kremlin have treated the swap as greatly advantageous but analysts gave a more careful evaluation, noting that Bout has already served more than a decade in prison and most of his contacts and knowledge will have withered with time.
Putin won’t hold end-of-year press conference
Vladimir Putin will not hold a year-end press conference for the first time in at least a decade, Andrew Roth reports, in what Kremlin-watchers view as a break with protocol due to his war in Ukraine. The marathon press conferences are traditionally an occasion for the Russian president to burnish his image, a campy spectacle that allows Putin to play the populist on national television each December.
On Monday, the Kremlin announced it would not be holding the press conference this year. There would also be no new year reception at the Kremlin, officials said, possibly a decision influenced by the reluctance to celebrate because Russia’s war in Ukraine has not gone to plan. Putin mentioned a potential settlement to end his war in Ukraine on Friday while still claiming that his “special military operation” was going to plan.
“The settlement process as a whole, yes, it will probably be difficult and will take some time. But one way or another, all participants in this process will have to agree with the realities that are taking shape on the ground,” the Russian president said during remarks at a press conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. His remarks came just days after he appeared to be girding Russians for a protracted war in Ukraine, saying that his military operation could be a “long-term process”.
Crimea is Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s greatest bargaining chip
This week, Patrick Wintour took a look at the differing views on how Ukraine might approach the question of Crimea.
In a little noticed intervention, the former British prime minister Boris Johnson – seen as a bosom ally of Volodymyr Zelenskiy – made the startling statement that if Russian troops were returned to lands they held inside Ukraine before the 24 February invasion, that would represent a basis for reopening talks between Ukraine and Russia.
The statement implies Ukraine would have to accept that the removal of Russian troops from Crimea would not be a precondition for the start of talks. In proposing this, in a piece last week in the Wall Street Journal, Johnson was making an admission made in private by many diplomats that a militarily enforced return of the Crimean peninsula – which was annexed by Russia in 2014 in a move rejected by the UN – to full Ukrainian control is fraught with risk.
Historically and ethnically, Crimea is different from the rest of Ukraine, the argument goes. There are also 30,000 Russian forces dug in with little available Ukrainian amphibious access. Crimea’s retention in some form is so precious to Vladimir Putin that if he felt it were slipping from his grasp, some fear he may act on his threat to deploy tactical nuclear weapons – the escalation that terrifies, and holds back, Washington and Europe.
Moldovans weigh political future as Ukraine war hits economy
Electricity blackouts, stray missiles and 35% inflation: collateral damage from Russia’s war on Ukraine has plunged neighbouring Moldova into a crisis that goes beyond higher energy bills. “I see elderly people crying in front of the shop window. It’s not that they can’t afford salami, they can’t even afford the basics like milk,” Carolina Untilă, who works in a corner shop in the suburbs of the capital, Chișinău, told the Guardian’s Paula Erizanu. Moldova’s dependence on energy imports is driving record inflation. Prices of some products have doubled; in her shop, grocery sales have halved, Untilă says.
To alleviate the burden of winter, as the former Soviet republic weans itself off almost total energy reliance on Russia, the government has had to turn to its western partners for emergency financial support. Russia’s state gas company, Gazprom, slashed supplies to Moldova in October, while reliance on Ukrainian electricity interconnectors has made the country an indirect casualty of the violence, as Kyiv stopped exporting electricity to Moldova in October after Russian airstrikes on its critical infrastructure.
