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The latest developments from the Ukraine war.

Now is not the time for elections, Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday, trying to put to rest a growing debate amid Russia's grinding invasion.

"Now is the time for defence, for battle, on which the fate of the state and people depends, and not for farce, which only Russia expects from Ukraine," Zelenskyy said in a speech. "I think this is not the time for elections.

We must come together, not divide ourselves, not disperse ourselves in quarrels or other priorities, he added.

On Friday, Ukrainian foreign ministerDmytro Kuleba said the Ukrainian president was "weighing the pros and cons" of holding elections.

If Russia had not invaded in February 2022, legislative elections would have taken place this October, and presidential elections in March 2024.The introduction of martial law has suspended these votes.

However, Kyiv now finds itself in a dilemma.Western allies, notably the US, are pressing Ukraine to hold elections, with some commentators arguing they could burnish Ukraine's democratic credentials in contrast with an increasingly authoritarian Russian state.

Yet, there are many obstacles. Nearly 20% of Ukraine is occupied by Russia, millions of Ukrainians have fled the country, soldiers on the frontline would struggle to vote, and any election would face critical security risks.

We all understand that today, in times of war, when the challenges are numerous, it is absolutely irresponsible to introduce the subject of elections in society, Zelenskyy insisted.

The notorious leader of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov has said a "large group" of former Wagner mercenaries are training his AKHMAT special forces.

AKHMAT, widely considered Kadyrov's private army, would "be joined by fighters who have excellent combat experience and have proven themselves as brave and efficient warriors," claimedthe Putin-backed warlord.

"I am confident that in the upcoming battles they will fully live up to their reputation."

Wagner mercenaries have played a key role in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, especially the months-long bloody battle for Bakhmut.

However, since the group's leaderYevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash after leading a brief mutiny against Moscow in June, the future of the mercenary group has been unclear.

Writing on Telegram,Kadyrov said that before hisAKHMAT force carried out missions, they needed to "undergo coordination" to "significantly increase their effectiveness" on the frontline.

He said "tactical shooting courses, field medicine, training for snipers, machine gunners, sappers, and artillerymen" were part of an "extensive training programme".

Chechens are fighting on both sides in Ukraine. Those under Kadyrov have reportedly been used to discipline and reportedly even execute dissenting Russian soldiers, as well as intimidate civilians in Ukraine.

However, analyst Harold Chambers previously told Euronews they were "better at social media than fighting", questioning their real combat effectiveness beyond TikTok and Instagram footage.

Read more on this story here.

NATO member states on Tuesday condemned Russia's decision to formally withdraw from the landmark treaty limiting conventional military forces in Europe.

Russia first decided to suspend its participation in the 1992 treaty on conventional weapons in Europe in 2007,but Moscow only announced its formal withdrawal from the treaty this Monday.

Moscow's war against Ukraine has dealt a fatal blow to the multi-treaty arms control regime that has helped maintain the balance of power in Europe for decades.

The NATO allies announced in a communiqu that they "condemn Russia's decision to withdraw from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), and its war of aggression against Ukraine, which is contrary to the objectives of the Treaty".

The membership also announced their intention to "suspend [Russia's] participation in the CFE Treaty for as long as necessary", the statement added.

For its part, the US said that it would be "unacceptable" for it and the NATO allies to remain committed to a treaty abandoned by Russia.

"The suspension of CFE obligations will strengthen the Alliance's defence and deterrence capability by removing restrictions that impact our plans, deployments and exercises", said US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

The CFE treaty imposed for the first time legal and verifiable limits on the forces of the 30 countries that signed the agreement. It was seen as the cornerstone of the security arrangements agreed at the end of the Cold War.

According to NATO, it led to the destruction of some 100,000 items of military equipment, including tanks, artillery and attack helicopters.

See the original post:
Zelenskyy rules out elections, Wagner training Chechen special forces - Euronews

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday he does not believe it is the right time for elections, amid a debate among the countrys leaders on the possibility of a presidential vote in 2024.

All elections including the presidential vote set to take place next spring are technically cancelled under martial law that has been in effect since the war began last year.

We must decide that now is the time of defence, the time of battle, on which the fate of the state and people depends, Zelensky said in his daily address.

He said it was a time for the country to be united, not divided, and added: I believe that now is not the (right) time for elections.

03:42

Ukraine says Russian strike killed over 50 in one of the deadliest attacks of the war

Ukraine says Russian strike killed over 50 in one of the deadliest attacks of the war

He cautioned that polling would be difficult to hold due to the large number of Ukrainians abroad and soldiers fighting on the front.

Parliamentary elections that would have taken place last month were also cancelled due to the war.

Zelensky, who was elected in 2019, said in September he was ready to hold elections if it was necessary and was in favour of allowing international observers to monitor the vote.

The Ukrainian leaders approval rating skyrocketed after the war began, but the countrys political landscape has remained fractious despite the unifying force of the war.

Former presidential aide Oleksiy Arestovych announced this week that he would run against his former boss, after criticising Zelensky over the slow pace of the countrys counteroffensive.

Zelensky not ready for Russia talks; Ukraine investigates deadly strike

On Monday, Ukraines commander-in-chief said his assistant, a major in rank, was killed when a booby-trapped birthday present he had been given exploded.

My assistant and close friend, Major Hennady Chastyakov, was killed in tragic circumstances on his birthday in a family setting, General Valery Zaluzhny wrote on the Telegram messaging app. An unknown explosive device went off in one of his presents.

The Ukrainska Pravda online news outlet said a security source was told by Chastyakovs wife that the gift was a bottle of liquor in the form of a grenade that he had brought home. It exploded when he opened it.

Chastyakovs 13-year-old son suffered serious injuries.

The source told Ukrainska Pravda that Chastyakov, 39, was a graduate of a military academy and fully trained in handling grenades.

Zaluzhny has had a high profile in the more than 20-month-old Russian invasion. Last week, he wrote an essay in the Economist magazine saying the war had entered a new phase of attrition that was to Russias advantage and calling for more sophisticated technology for Ukraines military.

EU weighs advancing Ukraines membership bid as Russia war drags on

The sprawling front line between the two warring sides has barely moved in almost a year, despite Ukraine launching a counteroffensive back in June to claw back Russian-occupied territory.

On Monday Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had successfully destroyed a major Russian ship in the Kerch shipyard in annexed Crimea.

The Ukrainian president has regularly met Western leaders to try to secure more air defences and stave off international fatigue with the conflict, which has now lasted for more that 600 days.

Zelensky has also been forced to deny that the conflict has reached a deadlock, but admitted on Sunday that it had reached a difficult situation.

Additional reporting by Reuters

Link:
Ukraines Zelensky says it is not the time for elections - South China Morning Post

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FIVE MONTHS into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has managed to advance by just 17 kilometres. Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut in the east to take a town six by six kilometres. Sharing his first comprehensive assessment of the campaign with The Economist in an interview this week, Ukraines commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, says the battlefield reminds him of the great conflict of a century ago. Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate, he says. The general concludes that it would take a massive technological leap to break the deadlock. There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.

Read more of our recent coverage of theUkraine war

The course of the counter-offensive has undermined Western hopes that Ukraine could use it to demonstrate that the war is unwinnable, forcing Russias president, Vladimir Putin, to negotiate. It has also undercut General Zaluzhnys assumption that he could stop Russia by bleeding its troops.That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war. But not in Russia, where life is cheap and where Mr Putins reference points are the first and second world wars, in which Russia lost tens of millions.

An army of Ukraines standard ought to have been able to move at a speed of 30km a day as it breached Russian lines.If you look at NATOs text books and at the maths which we did, four months should have been enough time for us to have reached Crimea, to have fought in Crimea, to return from Crimea and to have gone back in and out again, General Zaluzhny says sardonically.Instead he watched his troops get stuck in minefields on the approaches to Bakhmut in the east, his Western-supplied equipment getting pummelled by Russian artillery and drones. The same story unfolded on the offensives main thrust in the south, where inexperienced brigades immediately ran into trouble.

First I thought there was something wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought maybe our soldiers are not fit for purpose, so I moved soldiers in some brigades, says General Zaluzhny. When those changes failed to make a difference, the general told his staff to dig out a book he once saw as a student. Its title was Breaching Fortified Defence Lines. It was published in 1941 by a Soviet major-general, P.S. Smirnov, who analysed the battles of the first world war. And before I got even halfway through it, I realised that is exactly where we are because just like then, the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor.

That thesis, he says, was borne out as he went to the front line in Avdiivka, also in the east, where Russia has recently advanced by a few hundred metres over several weeks by throwing in two of its armies. On our monitor screens the day I was there we saw 140 Russian machines ablazedestroyed within four hours of coming within firing range of our artillery. Those fleeing were chased by first-person-view drones, remote-controlled and carrying explosive charges that their operators simply crash into the enemy. The same picture unfolds when Ukrainian troops try to advance. General Zaluzhny describes a battlefield in which modern sensors can identify any concentration of forces, and modern precision weapons can destroy it. The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other, he says.

This time, however, the decisive factor will be not a single new invention, but will come from combining all the technical solutions that already exist, he says. In a By Invitation article written for The Economist by General Zaluzhny, as well as in an essay shared with the newspaper, he urges innovation in drones, electronic warfare, anti-artillery capabilities and demining equipment, as well as in the use of robotics.

Western allies have been overly cautious in supplying Ukraine with their latest technology and more powerful weapons. Joe Biden, Americas president, set objectives at the start of Russias invasion: to ensure that Ukraine was not defeated and that America was not dragged into confrontation with Russia. This means that arms supplied by the West have been sufficient in sustaining Ukraine in the war, but not enough to allow it to win. General Zaluzhny is not complaining: They are not obliged to give us anything, and we are grateful for what we have got, but I am simply stating the facts.

Yet by holding back the supply of long-range missile systems and tanks, the West allowed Russia to regroup and build up its defences in the aftermath of a sudden breakthrough in Kharkiv region in the north and in Kherson in the south late in 2022. These systems were most relevant to us last year, but they only arrived this year, he says. Similarly, F-16 jets, due next year, are now less helpful, suggests the general, in part because Russia has improved its air defences: an experimental version of the S-400 missile system can reach beyond the city of Dnipro, he warns.

The delay in arms deliveries, though frustrating, is not the main cause of Ukraines predicament, according to General Zaluzhny. It is important to understand that this war cannot be won with the weapons of the past generation and outdated methods, he insists. They will inevitably lead to delay and, as a consequence, defeat. It is, instead, technology that will be decisive, he argues. The general is enthused by recent conversations with Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, and stresses the decisive role of drones, and of electronic warfare which can prevent them from flying.

General Zaluzhnys assessment is sobering: there is no sign that a technological breakthrough, whether in drones or in electronic warfare, is around the corner. And technology has its limits. Even in the first world war, the arrival of tanks in 1917 was not sufficient to break the deadlock on the battlefield. It took a suite of technologies, and more than a decade of tactical innovation, to produce the German blitzkrieg in May 1940. The implication is that Ukraine is stuck in a long warone in which he acknowledges Russia has the advantage. Nevertheless, he insists that Ukraine has no choice but to keep the initiative by remaining on the offensive, even if it only moves by a few metres a day.

Crimea, the general believes, remains Mr Putins greatest vulnerability. His legitimacy rests on having brought it back to Russia in 2014. Over the past few months, Ukraine has taken the war into the peninsula, which remains critical to the logistics of the conflict. It must know that it is part of Ukraine and that this war is happening there. On October 30th Ukraine struck Crimea with American-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles for the first time.

General Zaluzhny is desperately trying to prevent the war from settling into the trenches. The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state, he says. In the first world war, politics interfered before technology could make a difference.Four empires collapsed and a revolution broke out in Russia.

Mr Putin is counting on a collapse in Ukrainian morale and Western support. There is no question in General Zaluzhnys mind that a long war favours Russia, which has a population three times and an economy ten times the size of Ukraine. Lets be honest, its a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. And for usthe most expensive thing we have is our people, he says. For now he has enough soldiers. But the longer the war goes on, the harder it will be to sustain. We need to look for this solution, we need to find this gunpowder, quickly master it and use it for a speedy victory. Because sooner or later we are going to find that we simply dont have enough people to fight.

Read a more detailednew essayby General Zaluzhny on this topic.

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Originally posted here:
Ukraine's commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs to beat Russia - The Economist

Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced additional security assistance to meet Ukraine's critical security and defense needs. This includes the drawdown of security assistance from DoD inventories valued at up to $125 million to meet Ukraine's immediate battlefield needs, as well as $300 million in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) funds to strengthen Ukraine's air defenses over the long term. This announcement includes the Biden Administration's fiftieth tranche of equipment to be provided from DoD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021, including additional air defense capabilities, artillery ammunition, anti-tank weapons, and other equipment to help Ukraine counter Russia's ongoing war of aggression. This package utilizes assistance previously authorized for Ukraine during prior fiscal years under Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA). Specific capabilities in this package include:

Under USAI, the DoD will provide Ukraine with:

Unlike Presidential Drawdown, which draws equipment down from DoD stocks as well as defense services, education, and training, USAI is an authority under which the United States procures capabilities from industry for Ukraine. This announcement represents the beginning of a contracting process through USAI to provide additional capabilities to Ukraine's Armed Forces. This package makes use of $300 million of USAI availableunder the Continuing Resolution that Congress recently passed, and exhausts the remaining USAI funds currently available to support Ukraine. The Administration continues to call on Congress to meet its commitment to the people of Ukraine by passing additional funding to ensure Ukraine has what it needs to defend itself against Russia's brutal war of choice. The United States remains committed to working with some 50 Allies and partners who are providing Ukraine with the capabilities it needs to defend itself now and deter Russian aggression well into the future. Our allies and partners have stepped up to provide approximately $35 billion in security assistance to Ukraine. Under the leadership of the United States, this global coalition has enabled Ukraine's courageous forces to successfully defend Ukraine's sovereignty and independence and take back more than half of the territory seized by Russian invaders. Security assistance for Ukraine is a smart investment in our national security. It helps to prevent a larger conflict in the region and deters potential aggression elsewhere, while strengthening our defense industrial base and creating highly skilled jobs for the American people. This security assistance package signals the United States' continued commitment to support the Ukrainian people in the face of Russian aggression.

Read the original post:
Biden Administration Announces New Security Assistance for Ukraine - Department of Defense

The day Hamas attacked Israel, I unexpectedly reunited with my best friend in Kyiv.

Since Russias full-scale invasion in February last year, our paths had barely crossed. As a lecturer, researcher and volunteer, I went back and forth between Ukraine and Britain. My friend, meanwhile, traveled across Ukraine as a local producer for foreign journalists covering the war. It was important work. But on Oct. 7, a media trip my friend had been organizing to eastern Ukraine was canceled. The crew instead left for the Middle East.

They leave Ukraine because the front is moving slowly, my friend told me when we met at her place in Kyiv. The journalists will be back in no time once we liberate any significant patch of land.

Liberate another significant patch of occupied territories and discover another mass grave, I thought. That would, for a few days, refresh the worlds memory of what Ukraine is up against. The delivery of a dozen more tanks might follow, perhaps, along with some renewed talk of commitment. But with enough weapons to keep fighting but not to win, Ukraine is at a stalemate, as Gen. Valery Zaluzhny recently confirmed. Those of us not in the trenches must continue selling Ukrainian resistance to the world, telling our stories in the hope of support.

For 20 months, I have been churning out essays on why the world should stay focused on Ukraine. I have written them in a bomb shelter in Lviv, in a train packed with refugees in Poland, in a bathroom during an air raid in Kyiv and on the back seat of a car returning from near-frontline towns. Now, from the comfort of a London library, I try once again to persuade readers that they should not look away from my homelands struggle for survival, even as another part of the world is erupting in unspeakable violence.

But the words wont come. I refuse to compete for attention.

To captivate capricious and yet lifesaving international interest, Ukrainians film TikTok videos in the trenches and award-winning documentaries on the sites of Russian war crimes. One moment they show breathtaking bravery; the next they show their wounds. Be it NATO summits or TED talks, Ukrainians are using all available platforms to retell the tale of the underdog, in myriad voices, to keep the world invested in our existential fight.

And yet this high-stakes storytelling infantilizes Ukrainians: It turns us into children vying for the adults attention. Our allies play the role of easily distracted, perpetually fatigued spectators who cannot face the unadorned truth of the invasion. The truth, however, is there in full view at the center of the picture, like the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbeins majestic 1533 painting The Ambassadors.

Taking advantage of my temporary stay in London, I recently went to the National Gallery to stare at that portrait of two learned men in their best furs and velvets. Between them, inexplicably rising up from the floor, is a strange shape that somewhat resembles a mollusk. When looked at from the right angle, the distorted gray figure reveals itself to be a skull. It hints at the futility of furs and velvets, of verbal acrobatics and dances at the edge of the abyss. Holbein disrupts the vision of earthly riches and pursuits with the final truth of death.

After 20 months of writing our friends obituaries and watching our hometowns turn to rubble under enemy fire, Ukrainians have become overfamiliar with the concept of violent and sudden death. We share playlists for our own funerals and complain about having to wear fancy pajamas in case we are murdered in our sleep during another nightly visit of Iranian drones or Russian rockets.

But the threat of annihilation has not made us more willing to concede. According to a recent poll, 80 percent of Ukrainians still oppose any territorial concessions to Russia, even if this means that the war will last longer. As torture chambers and mass graves in the liberated territories of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson regions lay bare, Russian occupation does not present Ukrainians with a choice between life and freedom. Russia takes both, and then it takes some more.

Despite all our storytelling, what we seem to have failed to communicate to our allies is that the annihilation promised to us by Russia is not reserved for Ukrainians alone. By mining Ukrainian fields and bombing agricultural infrastructure, Russia promises starvation to parts of Asia and Africa that rely on Ukraines food exports. By weaponizing energy, Russia feeds right-wing reaction in Europe, as populist politicians exploit social discontent. By occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, pulling out of a nuclear test ban treaty and rattling its nuclear saber, Russia normalizes nuclear blackmail.

It simply wont stop at Ukraine. Every few days, propagandists on Russian state television fantasize about invading Poland, the Baltic States or Finland. The failure to convincingly punish Russia for its initial invasion of Ukraine almost a decade ago led to the escalation in 2022 and inspired others disregard for international law, including those now active in the Middle East. The alternative to punishment is an increasingly post-democratic and fragmented world where those who fight to preserve freedom are left to their own devices.

Ukrainians fight in full knowledge that no compromise with evil will contain it. This is the truth that our allies need to contemplate, absorb and act upon without having to be endlessly reminded of it.

Original post:
Opinion | I'm a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention - The New York Times