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European Union
November 1, 2023 The EU has limited influence in managing a geopolitical crisis on its periphery, including due to its exhaustion from Russian aggression against Ukraine. It must choose to be omnipresent or intelligently select the priorities where it imposes its presence, based on a prudent cost-benefit analysis of the available resources and the objectives set. The EU can combine the management of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza with the ceasefire; consolidate support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression; accelerate the enlargement process with the aim of stabilising and securing its immediate neighbourhood in the Western Balkans and the Eastern Partnership - Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. The Hamas terrorist operation took by surprise Israel's Western partners. The EU concluded that the situation in the region is rather part of the geopolitical mandate of American diplomacy. The United States wrongly assessed the capabilities of Israel's defence and security apparatus. One of the reasons for the lack of attention to this conflict, shown by the United States and the EU, is the mobilisation of resources (political attention and available material resources) to counter Russian aggression against Ukraine. Another reason can be considered Western concern to deter China's military measures against Taiwan, following the Russian scenario in relation to Ukraine, carried out in February 2022. In addition to the casualties reported by Israel and the Palestinian side, there are citizens of at least 37 countries who are held captive in Gaza or having died at the hands of Hamas. This aspect outlines the international nature of the crisis, as well as the multiple pro-Palestinian protests held in Western capitals, including Brussels. The EU's declared efforts to de-escalate the conflict will fail, as the dynamics of the crisis depend on the status quo of civilians in Gaza. To restore the humanitarian situation, the EU, together with the US, will have to condition its political-diplomatic support for Israel on a ceasefire. Otherwise, the EU risks losing its moral authority in the eyes of the Global South. The EU has moved closer to a division at the level of the member states on how the EU should handle in the case of the Middle East crisis. In some cases, public opinion tends to support the Palestinian cause, in others European societies contain large Muslim minorities (2023: France – 6.7mn, Germany – 5.5mn, etc.), who are sensitive to events in Gaza. The (in)actions of the governments of the EU states and Brussels can have consequences on public order in Europe today and, respectively, political-electoral effects in the near future. Some 800 European diplomats and officials criticised the lack of a balanced speech by the president of the Commission, who, by positioning herself in favour of Israel, damaged the credibility of European diplomacy. The visit of European Commission von de Leyen and the statements from Israel caused confusion in the offices of EU Council President Michel and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Borell, who deal with EU foreign policy. In an episode of mandate overreach, Várhelyi, head of Enlargement and Neighborhood Policy, stated that humanitarian aid to Gaza would be immediately interrupted following the Hamas attacks on October 7. At the same time, the commissioner responsible for crisis management, Lenarčič, flatly contradicted Várhelyi and reiterated that humanitarian aid continues: €27.9mn were budgeted for 2023. The EU subsequently announced that it was tripling humanitarian aid to €75mn. There are more hidden dividing lines between member states. In the UN General Assembly vote, eight EU states (including France, Spain and the Netherlands) voted in favour of the ceasefire in Gaza, four opposed this resolution and 15 abstained. Despite the UN vote, Michel insisted that the European Council meeting on the same day would have demonstrated unity within the EU, when he advocated not for a ceasefire but for humanitarian “pauses'. Realisation of the European perspectives for the Eastern Partnership states - Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia - deepening of European integration in these countries requires aiming the construction of functional states, which prevent political crises, socioeconomic declines, mass migrations and depopulation. The fact that the attention of the United States is absorbed by the situation in the Middle East and that aid to Israel seems to have become a priority, generates some discomfort in Kyiv. The EU has previously reiterated that the effectiveness of its support will depend on the sustainability of US assistance. As of February 2022, the EU had allocated more than €82bn to support Ukraine, not counting the costs of supporting the more than 5mn Ukrainian refugees in EU states. There is already a lack of financial resources within the EU, which has requested to supplement the budget with some €66bn, but the proposal was met with objections from member states. Due to the decrease in financial resources, the EU is increasingly leaning towards the idea of transferring to Ukraine the benefits derived from Russian money (more than €200bn) frozen in the states of the EU through the post-2022 sanctions, for reconstruction needs. Ukrainian leaders demand the opening of accession negotiations with the EU. The European Commission's report on Ukraine, will be presented in early November. There are decisions that President Zelensky must make, and prior to that the Rada dominated by his party, Servant of the People, has had to restore anti-corruption tools. The opening of the negotiating chapters could be delayed throughout 2024, even if the European Council adopts a favourable decision at the end of December. The shortcomings of the reforms that the Moldovan authorities must implement as part of the EU requirements are justified by the Moldovan side with hybrid threats of Russian origin or with anti-reform resistance within state institutions. In reality, discrepancies between the government's pro-European political ambitions and the quality of reforms are increasing. Moldova could lose the opportunity to start accession negotiations, only if the EU takes into account deficiencies in the field of justice or electoral legislation. Contrary to the recommendations of the Venice Commission and even the Constitutional Court of Moldova, the government restricted the right to be elected of several candidates in local elections. The bans were motivated by the ruling Action and Solidarity Party (PAS) representatives as a remedy to counter the attempts of the 'criminal group' led by Şor (sanctioned by the EU, US, etc.) to influence the results of the local elections on November 5. PAS maintains close political contacts with political factors in Brussels. In Georgia there are valid doubts about meeting the EU requirements to obtain candidate country status. The failed attempt to remove President Zurabishvili for promoting the European perspective, with some procedural deviations from constitutional prerogatives, denotes a crisis in the political process of European integration. However, the decision on Georgia's candidate country status does not depend on its degree of readiness, but on the EU's geopolitical calculations on the performance of the Russian factor in the region. (Source: intellinews)
Russia
11/01/2023 Late on Sunday, October 29, hundreds of protesters stormed the Makhachkala airport in Russia's Muslim-majority Dagestan, seeking to attack Jewish passengers arriving from Israel. Several police officers were injured during the chaotic scenes, and more than 80 were initially detained. Russian media reported today that 15 anti-Israeli rioters who stormed the airport have been sentenced - some to eight days of administrative arrest while others received sentences of 60 hours of community service. (Source: dw)
1 Nov 2023 In September 2022, Putin signed a decree that gives Russian nationality to anyone who has served on the front line for six months. Muslims are Russia’s fastest-growing population stratum. Dire demographic problems and oil wealth turned Russia into a magnet for millions of labour migrants from ex-Soviet Central Asia. Some Crimean Tatars, a Muslim community of about 200,000 in the annexed peninsula, became part of this influx as they share ties with Turkic-speaking nations of Central Asia, a region their forefathers had been deported to en masse in 1944. Public opinion is dominated by rampant nationalism, xenophobia and often portrays Muslim newcomers as hostile and alien. Muslim labour migrants have faced hate attacks, arbitrary detentions and arrests, police brutality, extortion and threats for decades. The immigrants are accustomed to authoritarian rule and police brutality in their countries of origin, often know little about their civil rights in Russia, do not have access to lawyers, and may not speak much Russian. Very few make their cases public, fearing persecution of their families. Russia’s mostly Muslim, impoverished and corruption-choked North Caucasus is one of the few regions with high birth rates, and hundreds of thousands also move to Moscow and other big cities. Moscow only has five official mosques, and tens of thousands of believers throng areas around them during Muslim holidays. Most labour migrants choose to attend informal “prayer houses”, which some locals and police see as hotbeds of “extremism”. During their raids on prayer houses Russian police finds “problems” – both imaginary and real, such as a lack of registration, a blurred stamp, or an expired work permit. The labour migrants are locked up and forced to enlist in military service, facing several kinds of threats to ensure their cooperation. Russian far-right nationalists help organise raids on “prayer houses”. Zov (Call), a group whose closed Telegram channel has 141,000 subscribers, routinely informs police about Muslim gatherings. As part of a nationwide series of raids dubbed “Illegal 2023”, police have been combing construction sites, markets, farms, restaurants, apartment buildings, hostels and “prayer houses” – or simply rounding up anyone who does not look Slavic. The Illegal 2023 investigations are “tied to organisation of illegal migration, trade in drugs and psychotropic substances, arms trade and border crossings”, Ministry of Internal Affairs spokeswoman Vovk said. 'Since at least May 2023, Russia has approached Central Asian migrants to fight in Ukraine with promises of fast-track citizenship and salaries of up to $4,160,' the British Defence Ministry said in September. A red Russian passport eliminates many of the problems with police and bureaucratic hurdles that migrants face. An Uzbek man whose wife and child are Russian nationals, was told that without a military contract and participation in the special military operation, they won’t even accept his citizenship application. Even if a labour migrant already has a Russian passport, recently adopted laws allow authorities to take it away with ease. “If you are a Russian national but are not ready to fulfil your military duty, a decision should be made to strip such a man of his citizenship,” Russia’s top investigator Bastrykin told a military conference in mid-October. Bastrykin said earlier that migrants have a “constitutional duty to defend the nation that accepted them” and that enlisting them should be a “priority”. Police in St Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city said they handed conscription papers to 56 labour migrants with Russian passports after just one raid on a market on September 6. A month earlier, about 100 labour migrants were served with conscription papers, it said. There have even been calls to abolish age limits for migrants so that they can be forced to serve in the military. The conscription age in Russia is between 18 and 30. “You became a Russian national at age 50 – go serve at 50,” lawmaker Zhuravlyev said on October 24. The Russian military faces a shortage of manpower on the front lines, exacerbated by Russia’s low birthrates and a population loss of hundreds of thousands of people a year in the rapidly aging nation of 143 million. The September 2022 “partial” mobilisation triggered an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russian men, making labour migrants more attractive targets. The Kremlin is afraid to declare a second round of mobilisation in advance of the March 2024 presidential election. The emphasis is on recruiting migrants, as their loss on the front line will not affect Russia politically or economically. So far, there has only been a single public incident associated with the forced conscription of migrants. Last October, two Tajik nationals were forcibly sent to a training camp before departure to Ukraine. Aminzoda and Rakhmonov, heard their commanding officers 'insult their religion', they got hold of a machine gun and killed 11 people and injured 15 others. The two were shot dead and pronounced “terrorists” by authorities. (Source: aljazeera)
November 1, 2023 As one of many sanctions measures put in place against Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February last year, the G7 group of richer nations brought in a price cap on crude oil last December followed by a similar measure for products in February this year. The cap was designed to try and deny buyers of Russian crude the use of Western-supplied services, including shipping and insurance, unless cargoes are sold at or below the capped price. Russia’s swift build-up of a so-called shadow fleet of tankers – estimated to number more than 600 ships – has circumvented these sanctions measures, has made the West’s oil price cap “unenforceable”, according to the World Bank’s latest Commodity Markets Outlook report. While Russia’s exports to the European Union, the US, Britain and other Western countries fell by 53% between 2021 and 2023, these have been largely replaced with increased exports to China, India and Turkey – up 40% over the same period, according to data carried in the report. “The price cap on Russian crude oil introduced in late 2022 appears increasingly unenforceable given the recent spike in Urals prices,” the World Bank said, referring to the benchmark Russian crude, currently quoted in the mid-$70s per barrel range, well above the G7-led $60 price cap for Russian crude. “It seems that by putting together a shadow fleet, Russia has been able to trade outside of the cap; the official Urals benchmark recently breached the cap for more than three months, averaging $80 per barrel in August,” the report noted. The rise of shadow or dark fleet has seen many vintage ships given an extra stay of execution. Tankers still working above 20 years of age made up just 1% of the global tanker fleet pre-covid and were still a rarity at 3% before the invasion of Ukraine in late February last year. They’re now on track to make up 11% of all tanker demand by mid-2025, according to data from brokers Braemar. (Source: splash247)
Ukraine
November 1, 2023 'Modern positional warfare and how to win it.' Having launched the large-scale armed aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the russian federation provoked the beginning of an unprecedented global security crisis. Russian great-power chauvinism multiplied by sick imperial ambitions gradually turns the military conflict it began in the centre of Europe into an armed confrontation between democratic and authoritarian political regimes with the prospect of its spread to other regions of the planet with similar geopolitical models (Israel and the Gaza Strip, South and North Koreas, Taiwan and China, etc.). The insufficient effectiveness of the existing global political regulatory mechanisms, primarily the UN and the OSCE, leaves ukraine no choice but to restore its territorial integrity after the large-scale armed aggression within the internationally recognized borders of 1991, exclusively by military force, in which its Armed Forces (AF) play a decisive role. Having entered the war with a stronger enemy, which has a lot of weapons and a much greater mobilization capabilities, ukraine was not only able to stop it, but also to conduct a successful counteroffensive in 2022 and stave the enemy off along many axes. The prolongation of a war, as a rule, in most cases, is beneficial to one of the parties to the conflict. "In our particular case, it is the russian federation, as it gives it the opportunity to reconstitute and build up its military power," Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, tells. An analysis of the current situation in which the Armed Forces of ukraine and other components of the state Defence Forces are placed shows that in order to find a way out of the positional form of warfare, it is necessary to: gain air superiority; breach mine barriers in depth; increase the effectiveness of counter-battery; create and train the necessary reserves; build up electronic warfare (EW) capabilities. Modern art of war involves gaining air superiority to successfully conduct large-scale ground operations. The Armed Forces of ukraine entered the war with 120 tactical aircraft, out of which only 40 were considered to be technically suitable for utilization, and 33 medium and short-range anti-aircraft missile battalions, of which only 18 had fully serviceable equipment, Zaluzhnyi informs. The next prerequisite that transforms the nature of current hostilities into a positional form is the widespread use of mine barriers by both the enemy and ukraine's troops. 'In the russian-ukrainian war, as in the wars of the past, the role of missile forces and artillery in fires remains quite significant, and depending on the conditions, axes and areas of operations varies from 60 to 80% of the total volume of tasks executed, he tells. Compared to ukraine, the russian federation has almost three times more mobilization human resources. The prolonged nature of the war, limited opportunities for the rotation of soldiers on the line of contact, gaps in legislation that seem to legally evade mobilization, significantly reduce the motivation of citizens to serve with the military, Zaluznhny notes. This leads to the lack of ukraine's ability to achieve superiority over the enemy in reserves by increasing their number. Even before the events of 2014, the military and political leadership of the russian federation paid considerable attention to the development of electronic warfare. An illustrative example of this is the creation in 2009 of a separate branch of the armed forces of the russian federation – the electronic warfare troops. In addition, as part of the russian armed forces, a powerful air component of electronic warfare has been created, which ensures the effective employment of troops (forces) and high-precision weapons. "Relying on the strategic superiority in military, economic, human, natural resource and scientific potential and relatively appropriate conditions for its implementation" - he writes - the occupying armed forces are still not able to fully implement the plans of the russian general staff. Countermeasure to the achievement of military-political objectives by the aggressor state comes at a high cost for ukraine and its Armed Forces. The Armed Forces of ukraine and other components of the Security and Defence Forces involved in repelling armed aggression, practically along the entire line of contact between the parties and in the border areas with the russian federation, faced the need to overcome the military parity problem. Its existence is stipulated by the reasons related to parity in the air, minefields, counter-battery and electronic warfare, and the creation of reserves. 'The need to avoid the transition to a positional form of hostilities, such as the "trench war" of 1914-1918, necessitates the search for new and non-trivial approaches to breaking the military parity with the enemy' Zaluzhnyi writes. Key takeaways: "The transition of the war to a positional form leads to its prolongation and carries significant risks for both the Armed Forces of ukraine and the state as a whole. "In addition, it is beneficial to the enemy, who is trying in every possible way to reconstitute and increase its military power. "To get out of the positional form at the current stage of warfare, first of all, it is necessary to: gain air superiority; breach mine barriers in depth; increase the effectiveness of counter-battery and electronic warfare; create and prepare the necessary reserves. "The widespread use of information technology in military affairs and the rational organization of logistics support play a significant role in finding a way out of the positional form of warfare. 'The need to avoid transitioning from a positional form to a manoeuvrable one necessitates searching for new and non-trivial approaches to break military parity with the enemy', Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, wrote. (Source: economist): https://tinyurl.com/4t8umym8
1 November 2023 Last week, the authorities ordered the forced evacuation of children from 31 towns and villages close to the frontline. The orders came after Russia renewed offensives in parts of the Donetsk region and fighting intensified in Kherson region. In addition to free transport to safety, Ukraine initially gives all forced evacuees money - around £45 per adult, £70 per child or vulnerable adult - and a place to live. The adults will be expected - eventually - to work. While millions of Ukrainians have fled the war abroad, the Ukrainian government estimates there are nearly five million internally displaced people in the country. Forced evacuees are taken in by communities all over Ukraine. (Source: bbc)
Ukraine
November 1, 2023 / October 30, 2023 At the end of last year, during his previous visit to Washington, Zelensky received a hero’s welcome. The White House sent a U.S. Air Force jet to pick him up in eastern Poland a few days before Christmas and, with an escort from a NATO spy plane and an F-15 Eagle fighter, deliver him to Joint Base Andrews outside the U.S. capital. That evening, Zelensky appeared before a joint session of Congress to declare that Ukraine had defeated Russia 'in the battle for minds of the world.' A few right-wing Republicans refused to stand or applaud for Zelensky, but the votes to support him were bipartisan and overwhelming throughout last year. This time around, the atmosphere had changed. In recent months, the issue of corruption has strained Zelensky’s relationship with many of his allies. Ahead of his new visit to Washington, the White House prepared a list of anti-corruption reforms for the Ukrainians to undertake. These proposals targeted the very top of the state hierarchy, one of the aides who traveled with Zelensky to the U.S. told. “These were not suggestions,” says another presidential adviser. “These were conditions.” In early September, Zelensky fired his Minister of Defense, Reznikov, a member of his inner circle who had come under scrutiny over corruption in his ministry. He had not been personally involved in graft, one presidential adviser says, pointing to the inflated prices the ministry paid for supplies, such as winter coats for soldiers and eggs to keep them fed. “But he failed to keep order within his ministry.” One of Zelensky’s foreign policy advisers urged him to call off the trip in late September, warning that the atmosphere was too fraught. Assistance to Ukraine had become a sticking point in the debate over the federal budget. Congressional leaders declined to let Zelensky deliver a public address on Capitol Hill. His aides tried to arrange an in-person appearance for him on Fox News and an interview with Winfrey. Neither one came through. Instead, on the morning of Sept. 21, Zelensky met in private with then House Speaker McCarthy before making his way to the Old Senate Chamber, where lawmakers grilled him behind closed doors. Most of Zelensky’s usual critics stayed silent in the session; Senator Cruz strolled in more than 20 minutes late. The Democrats, for their part, wanted to understand where the war was headed, and how badly Ukraine needed U.S. support. “They asked me straight up: If we don’t give you the aid, what happens?” Zelensky recalls. “What happens is we will lose.” At the National Archives in Washington it did not go as planned. Zelensky was running late. That afternoon, his meetings at the White House and the Pentagon delayed him by more than an hour. When he finally arrived to begin his speech at 6:41 p.m., he looked distant and agitated. His delivery felt stilted, as though he wanted to get it over with. After the speech, while handing out medals, he urged the organizer to hurry things along. He later said, the reason was the exhaustion he felt that night, not only from the demands of leadership during the war but also the persistent need to convince his allies that, with their help, Ukraine can win. “Nobody believes in our victory like I do. Nobody,” Zelensky told after his trip. Back to Kyiv. On first day a longtime member of his team tells that, most of all, Zelensky feels betrayed by his Western allies. They have left him without the means to win the war, only the means to survive it. 'But his convictions haven’t changed'. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. 'He deludes himself,' one of his closest aides tells in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.” Zelensky’s stubbornness, some of his aides say, has hurt their team’s efforts to come up with a new strategy, a new message. As they have debated the future of the war, one issue has remained taboo: the possibility of negotiating a peace deal with the Russians. Zelensky remains dead set against even a temporary truce. But how they would react to the signals they had received, especially the insistent calls for Zelensky to fight corruption inside his own government? Some of the accusations have been hard to deny. Even the firing of the Defense Minister did not make officials 'feel any fear,' because the purge took too long to materialize. The President was warned in February that corruption had grown rife inside the ministry, but he dithered for more than six months, giving his allies multiple chances to deal with the problems quietly or explain them away. In August, a Ukrainian news outlet known for investigating graft, Bihus.info, published a damning report about Zelensky’s top adviser on economic and energy policy, Shurma, a former executive in the energy industry, who has a brother who co-owns two solar-energy companies with power plants in southern Ukraine. Even after the Russians occupied that part of the country, cutting it off from the Ukrainian power grid, the companies continued to receive state payments for producing electricity. The anticorruption police, an independent agency known in Ukraine as NABU, responded to the publication by opening an embezzlement probe into Shurma and his brother. But Zelensky did not suspend his adviser. Instead, in late September, Shurma joined the President’s delegation to Washington, where he was glad-handing senior lawmakers and officials from the Biden Administration. Ten days later, Congress passed a bill to temporarily avert a government shutdown. It included no assistance for Ukraine. 'People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow,” a top presidential adviser in early October said. Zelensky, asked about the problem, acknowledged its gravity and the threat it poses to Ukraine’s morale and its relationships with foreign partners. 'Fighting corruption is among his top priorities, he assured'. The President gave strict orders for his staff to avoid the slightest perception of self-enrichment. The typical salary in the President’s office comes to about $1,000 per month, or around $1,500 for more senior officials, far less than they could make in the private sector. “We sleep in rooms that are 2 by 3 meters,” about the size of a prison cell, says Yermak, the presidential chief of staff, referring to the bunker that Zelensky and a few of his confidants have called home since the start of the invasion. “We’re not out here living the high life,” he tells in his office. Zelensky also suggested that 'some foreign allies have an incentive to exaggerate the problem, because it gives them an excuse to cut off financial support'. 'It’s not right,' he says, 'for them to cover up their failure to help Ukraine by tossing out these accusations.' And the fading enthusiasm for a war with no end in sight? Public support for aid to Ukraine has been in decline for months in the U.S., and Zelensky’s visit did nothing to revive it. Some 41% of Americans want Congress to provide more weapons to Kyiv, down from 65% in June, when Ukraine began a major counteroffensive, according to a survey taken shortly after Zelensky’s departure. That offensive has proceeded at an excruciating pace and with enormous losses. Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. 'This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.” In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.” On Aug. 11 Zelensky fired the heads of the draft offices in every region of the country. The reputation of the draft offices had been tainted. The move backfired as recruitment nearly ground to a halt without leadership. As conscription efforts have intensified around the country, stories are spreading on social media of draft officers pulling men off trains and buses and sending them to the front. Those with means sometimes bribe their way out of service, often by paying for a medical exemption. Twenty months into the war, about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory remains under Russian occupation. The cold of early fall had taken hold. Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have damaged power stations and parts of the electricity grid, leaving it potentially unable to meet spikes in demand when the temperature drops. Blackouts would likely be more severe this winter, and the public reaction in Ukraine would not be as forgiving, senior officials in charge of dealing with this problem told. 'Last year people blamed the Russians,” one of them says. “This time they’ll blame us for not doing enough to prepare.” “Freezing the war, to me, means losing it,” Zelensky says. 'Before the winter sets in, his aides warned to expect major changes in their military strategy and a major shake-up in the President’s team'. At least one minister would need to be fired, along with a senior general in charge of the counteroffensive, they said, to ensure accountability for Ukraine’s slow progress at the front. Some front-line commanders have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President, says one of Zelensky’s close aides. “They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line,” he says. 'But we can’t win a war that way." Some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top, a senior military officer said. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to 'retake' the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?” Zelensky can feel during his travels that global interest in the war has slackened. So has the level of international support. 'The scariest thing is that part of the world got used to the war in Ukraine,' he says. “Exhaustion with the war rolls along like a wave. You see it in the United States, in Europe. And we see that as soon as they start to get a little tired, it becomes like a show to them: ‘I can’t watch this rerun for the 10th time.’' With the outbreak of war in Israel, even keeping the world’s attention on Ukraine has become a major challenge. Palestinian terrorists had massacred many hundreds of civilians in southern Israel, prompting the Israeli government to impose a blockade of the Gaza Strip and declare war against Hamas. The focus of Ukraine’s allies in the U.S. and Europe, and of the global media, quickly shifted to the Gaza Strip. 'Zelensky wanted to help'. He asked the Israeli government for permission to visit their country in a show of solidarity. The answer appeared the following week in Israeli media reports: “The time is not right.” A few days later, President Biden instead of asking Congress to vote on another stand-alone package of Ukraine aid, bundled it with other priorities, including support for Israel and U.S.-Mexico border security. The package would cost $105 billion, with $61 billion of it for Ukraine. But it was also an acknowledgment that, on its own, Ukraine aid no longer stands much of a chance in Washington. (Source: time)
November 1, 2023 A Russian drone attack set ablaze the Kremenchuk oil refinery in central Ukraine Poltava region and knocked out power supply in three villages, while falling debris from downed drones damaged railway power lines in the nearby central Kirovohrad region. The fire at the refinery, which Moscow has targeted many times during the war and Kyiv says is not operational, was quickly put out, said Pronin, head of Poltava region's military administration. The extent of the damage was not clear. Ukraine's Air Force said air defences shot down 18 of 20 drones and a missile fired by Russia overnight before they reached their targets in an attack that sought to strike military and critical infrastructure. The Ukrainian military said Russia carried out another missile attack on Poltava region and southern Odesa region later today morning, with two missiles downed in the latter. (Source: reuters)
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