U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recalls critical infrastructure damage in the Zaporizhnyia nuclear power plant in Kyiv
A senior official said that power and cellular connection had been restored in the city near the nuclear power plant that is under Russian control.
In a telegram posted Sunday, Rogov said that water will be restored in the near future.
The risk of storming the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant remains high, despite Rogov’s statement that Ukrainians have concentrated significant number of militant in Zaporizhzhia direction.
The Ukrainian authorities have attempted to deliver humanitarian supplies to the city multiple times but they have not been allowed in by the Russian forces.
At least 19 people were killed and 105 others were injured in Russian missile attacks across Ukraine on Monday, according to preliminary data, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said Tuesday.
Critical and civil infrastructure was hit in 12 regions and the capital, where more than 30 fires broke out, the emergency services said, adding the blazes have been put out.
As of early Tuesday morning, some areas in the regions of Kyiv, Lviv, Sumy, Ternopil, and Khmelnytsky remained without power, the emergency services said.
US President Joe Biden has condemned the Russian attacks. The US would provide help to defend the country, according to Biden.
Yesterday, Russia hit at least 11 Ukrainian cities with missiles in its broadest aerial assault against civilians since the invasion’s early days. Many people were sheltered for a short time after the destruction. Some of them went back to their lives. As my colleague Megan Specia, a Times foreign correspondent, left a shelter in the capital of Kyiv, she saw residents walking dogs and riding electric scooters.
Russia said Thursday its forces would help evacuate residents of occupied Kherson to other areas, as Kyiv continued to make gains in its offensive to retake the southern Ukrainian region.
Natalia Humeniuk spoke about the situation on national television and said that the Russians felt squeezed between our forces and the Dnipro. Ukrainian commanders have set a goal to liberate Kherson by the winter.
The Institute for the Study of War claims that Ukrainian troops have crossed the Oskil River in order to push Russian forces eastwards, with Moscow likely readying to defend Starobilsk and the Luhansk region.
Saldo claimed cities throughout Kherson, one of four Ukrainian regions Russia claimed to have annexed in violation of international law, were being hammered by dangerous airstrikes.
If residents in the Kherson region want to protect themselves from the consequences of missile strikes, they should go to other regions and take their children with them.
The deputy head of the Kherson region’s military administration said that the civilian transports were not an “evacuation.”
Stremousov has criticized the decision-makers in Moscow and on the battlefield. Last week, he blamed the military setbacks in Kherson on “incompetent commanders” who have not been held accountable for their mistakes.
With the war likely to slow down as the weather gets cold, experts say the next weeks of the conflict are very important, and there’s a possibility of a spike in intensity if each side tries to hit another blow.
Not for the first time, the war is teetering towards an unpredictable new phase. Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program, said that this is the third, fourth and possibly fifth different war that they have been observing.
Recent days have meanwhile shown that sites beyond the current theater of ground fighting are far from immune to attacks. It remains unclear exactly how the Kerch bridge bombing was carried out – and Kyiv has not claimed responsibility – but the fact that a target so deep in Russian-held territory could be successfully hit hinted at a serious Ukrainian threat towards key Russian assets.
Giles said that anything that could be described as a victory by the Ukrainians is more plausible now. “The response from Russia is likely to escalate further.”
The strikes throughout the week were evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin was not happy after a number of setbacks in the war.
Russians are playing for the whistle: What are they waiting for? The Russian role in the recent war with Ukraine, as revealed by the senior Ukrainian military official
According to Oleksii Hromov, a senior Ukrainian military official, Kyiv’s forces have captured over 100 settlements in the last two months, as they advanced in the Kherson region. On Wednesday, Ukraine said it had liberated more five settlements in its slow but steady push in Kherson.
There was a suggestion built up in the West and in Russia that Ukraine couldn’t take control of the battlefield, but counter-offensives have shown that there is more to the war than meets the eye.
“The Russians are playing for the whistle – (hoping to) avoid a collapse in their frontline before the winter sets in,” Samir Puri, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the author of “Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine,” told CNN.
If the Russians can get Christmas with their frontline looking like it is, that will be a huge success.
Landing a major blow in Donbas would send another powerful signal, and Ukraine will be eager to improve on its gains before temperatures plummet on the battlefield, and the full impact of rising energy prices is felt around Europe.
There are a lot of reasons why the Ukrainians get things done quickly. The winter energy crisis in Europe, and energy infrastructure and power being destroyed in Ukraine is always going to be a test of resilience forUkraine and its Western backers.
NATO has promised to stand behind Ukraine regardless of when the war starts, but many European countries have been dependent on Russian energy and are at risk of a cost-of-living crisis which could endanger public support.
After Russia launched missiles on Monday and Tuesday, much of the power supply to the central regions ofUkraine was disrupted by Ukrenergo, but that has since been restored. But Ukrainian Prime Minister has warned that “there is a lot of work to do” to fix damaged equipment, and asked Ukrainians to reduce their energy usage during peak hours.
Experts believe it remains unlikely that Russia’s aerial bombardment will form a recurrent pattern; while estimating the military reserves of either army is a murky endeavor, Western assessments suggest Moscow may not have the capacity to keep it up.
“We know – and Russian commanders on the ground know – that their supplies and munitions are running out,” Jeremy Fleming, a UK’s spy chief, said in a rare speech on Tuesday.
“Russia’s use of its limited supply of precision weapons in this role may deprive Putin of options to disrupt ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensives,” the ISW assessed.
Exactly how much weaponry and manpower each side has left in reserve will be crucial to determining how the momentum will shift in the coming weeks. After intercepting 18 cruise missiles on Tuesday, theUkrainian government urged its western allies to get better equipment to defend against future attacks.
“The barrage of missile strikes is going to be an occasional feature reserved for shows of extreme outrage, because the Russians don’t have the stocks of precision munitions to maintain that kind of high-tempo missile assault into the future,” Puri said.
Some help for Putin may be on the way, however. The announcement by Alexander Lukashenko that the countries would form a group of troops raised fears of deepened military cooperation between the countries and possibly an invasion by Russia. Observers say there is a possibility of some level of involvement in the Ukrainian threats to the security of Belarus.
Giles said that the reopening of the northern front would be a new challenge for the country. It would provide Russia a new route into the Kharkiv oblast (region), which has been recaptured by Ukraine, should Putin prioritize an effort to reclaim that territory, he said.
Now Zelensky will hope for more supplies in the short-term as he seeks to drive home those gains. More than half of Russian missiles and drones were brought down by the Ukrainian military during the second wave of strikes Tuesday, according to the leader.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that Ukraine needed “more” systems to better halt missile attacks, ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels.
He said that the air defense systems provided by NATO Allies are making a difference because many incoming missiles were shot down by the Ukrainian air defense systems.
The IRIS-T that arrived this week from Germany is a badly needed modern system according to Bronk.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/europe/ukraine-russia-war-next-stages-intl/index.html
The first time that Russia had targeted energy infrastructure in Ukraine: Sergei Surovkin in his first interview since Putin took office as head of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine
Giles said that there are many ways that Russia can attempt to make the war even more personal for the people of Ukraine and the governments in Europe that support them.
This week’s air strikes may point towards that endeavor; Ukraine’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko told CNN that around 30% of energy infrastructure in Ukraine was hit by Russian missiles on Monday and Tuesday. The minister said that this was the first time in the war that Russia had targeted energy infrastructure.
The coming weeks are therefore crucial both on the battlefield, as well as in Europe and around the globe, experts suggest. Giles said that where Putin goes next will depend on how the rest of the world responds. “Russia’s attitude is shaped by the failure of Western countries to confront and deter it.”
Saldo offered residents the option of relocating to cities “in any part of Russia,” and said the Russian government would provide housing vouchers to those who wished to move further from the fighting.
“We will not surrender the city, and we will fight to the end,” he said, adding that residents whose homes might be damaged from shelling could receive compensation from the Russian government.
Earlier in October, Ukrainian forces in the Kherson region pushed the Russian line back by 20 miles, according to the President’s office and Deep State, an independent monitoring group.
In his first interview since he was appointed to lead the armed forces of Russia in Ukranian, General Sergei Surovkin said the situation was very difficult and that there were some hard decisions to make.
We will operate so that the safety of civilians and our soldiers is maximized. That is the priority of the Russian Defense Ministry, according to the Zvezda channel.
The Institute for the Study of War suggested that deporting Ukrainian citizens to Russia is a way to get them to leave occupied areas.
A plan for the winter heating centers in the Russian capital, Kamensko-Kostant-Stas – the city’s director of municipal security
The Director of the Department of Municipal Security, Roman Tkachuck, expressed fears later in the afternoon that the city was not ready for an emergency, but had a plan in case of one.
If the city is left without water or electricity, some residents were encouraged by the mayor to stay with friends and family outside of the city.
The goal of his plan is for us to die or to leave our land so that he can have it. That is what the Russian president wants, said pugilist Wladimir Klitschko.
If there is an emergency in the winter, each district of the city will have about 100 heating centers. Warming centers will have heat, lighting, toilets, canteens, places to rest and warm clothes and an ambulance crew will be on duty near such centers.