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Yiry Ulshin surveyed a scene of ruin. Before him were the remains of what was once a school. Desks were covered in debris. A photo of the class of 2011 lay in the wreckage. There were abandoned crayons and year 3 books in Ukrainian and Russian. Beyond a bullet-scarred wall was a view of pine trees and sea.

My heart is hurting. Why did Russia do this? Ulshin, a Ukrainian army commander, asked.

The abandoned primary school is situated in Shyrokyne, in eastern Ukraine, on the frontline between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian forces. The village was once a resort. Tourists would stay in its guesthouses, walk along the sandy beach and paddle in the picturesque Sea of Azov.

Now it is a ghostly wreck. In 2014 Russia annexed Crimea, down the coast, and kickstarted a violent conflict in the Donbas region. The following year Ukrainian militias clawed back some of the provinces seaside strip including Shyrokyne, 14 miles east of the port city of Mariupol. My friend was killed in fighting here, Ulshin said.

Today the villages holiday complex resembles a phantasmagoric film set. An alley of pulverised flats leads on to a glass-strewn summer terrace. There is a rusted childs bicycle, a washing machine and a savagely twisted bonnet from a GAZ-53 truck. The ground is pitted with shell holes. Swimming is not advised: the beach is mined. A seagull floated above it.

The separatists did not retreat far, ensconcing themselves just beyond the hillside village of Vodyane, a mile away and visible from the net-covered former sanatorium that serves as the soldiers frontline base. Washing was hanging on a line; logs were piled up for fuel. Two days ago they fired a rocket at one of our cars, out on patrol, Ulshin said. It missed.

Was anywhere in the village safe? No, Ulshin said. Death happens when you dont expect it. The Russians [separatists] work very professionally. A sniper shot me in 2018. I lost so much blood, people thought I wasnt going to make it. But here I am. Ten of my men have been wounded.

Since autumn, Russia has assembled a potential invasion force of 100,000 soldiers on Ukraines borders. The latest signals are ominous. The Kremlin says military exercises will take place next month in Belarus, 90 miles north of the capital, Kyiv. According to the Ukrainian government, Russian forces are covertly stationed in rebel mini-fiefdoms in the cities of Donetsk adjacent to Mariupol and Luhansk.

So far, Putin has kept the world guessing as to what he plans to do. The EU and US have condemned Russian aggression and threatened sanctions. This week the UK flew defensive anti-tank weapons to Kyiv. The Biden administration is reportedly considering military help. On Wednesday the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, visited Kyiv. None of this is likely to stop a Russian incursion should Putin order one.

Look at history. All conflicts have an active phase and a less active one, Ulshin said. The Kremlin would not seize the whole of Ukraine, an enormous and bloody undertaking, he thought; instead it would pursue hybrid war, with the goal of toppling Ukraines Nato-aspiring government and replacing it.

Ukraines soldiers are motivated, professional and ready to defend their homes. But it is obvious they are badly outgunned. Ulshin said he had received some help from Lithuania in the shape of four lightweight bulletproof plates. In the near distance shots rang out, followed by a percussive boom from an auto-grenade launcher.

Ukraine lost much of its navy in 2014, when Russian special forces seized Crimea. Moscow eventually returned the Donbas, an ageing Soviet warship that now sits in Mariupols port alongside two small armoured artillery boats, the Ludny and Kremenchuk. This meagre collection is no match for Russias mighty Black Sea fleet.

Its old but reliable, Cptn Oleksandr Hrigorevskiy said, pointing to the Donbass bow machine gun. Stamped on the side was a date, 1954. The Russians trashed the ships communication system before handing it back, he said, and many of his former officer colleagues defected. The boat subsequently caught fire. It is now used as a command and repair ship.

The deck offers a sweeping view of the Azov Sea bathed in a raspberry light. At 9am each day sailors raise and salute the Ukrainian flag. At night the Russian port of Yeysk twinkles in the distance. The Azov and Black seas are a key commercial route for Russia, linked to a network of rivers and canals.

According to Hrigorevskiy, the Kremlin has annexed the Azov Sea by stealth. Under a 2003 agreement, Russia and Ukraine are supposed to share access. But Moscow now controls Crimeas Kerch Strait, the only way in and out. In 2018 it started impounding Ukrainian civilian vessels, dealing a death blow to Mariupol as a cargo port.

Of late, Moscow has declared large chunks of the internal sea off limits to Ukrainian boats, citing the need to carry out naval exercises. When the Donbas set off towards Kerch in December, sailing in international waters, Putins FSB spy agency accused Kyiv of an act of aggression. We watched a report on Russian TV. They play psychological games, Hrigorevskiy said.

Mariupol stands in the way of any potential Russian advance from the east. In 2014, Kremlin-backed separatists controlled the city for two months. Since then pro-Kyiv volunteers have moved to the area.

Anatoliy Lozar helped to liberate Mariupol, and subsequently married a local woman. He said Russian sentiment was still strong, especially among older residents. Television plays a big role, he said. You can get Russian state channels for free. You have to pay for Ukrainian ones. Lozar said most people in Mariupol vote for the opposition party of Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Moscow oligarch accused of treason and now under house arrest.

Over at Mariupols aerodrome, soldiers acknowledged that Moscow was likely to bomb the runway and other strategic military targets, should it attack. Yes, we cant defend physical infrastructure. But weve learned to spread our forces out, to minimise losses, Taras Eleyko said. He added: Putin is a card-sharp. He would need 600,000 troops to occupy Ukraine. He doesnt have that.

Eleyko was part of a travelling amateur theatre troupe from western Ukraine. The group had arrived at the military airport to entertain troops with a traditional mystery play known as a vertep. This one featured familiar characters such as an angel and devil, as well a crown-wearing Putin plus Joe Biden, who carried a stars and stripes flag.

The show took place in what was once the departure lounge, beneath a colourful communist-era mosaic. Someone had pasted Ukraines blue and yellow flag over the old hammer and sickle. The play ended with Death actually Olena Chebeliuk, a historian from Lviv chasing Putin off to hell. She wore a skeleton costume and carried a white scythe.

Were afraid Russia will invade and capture Ukraine. Our army is not very ready to fight, Chebeliuk said, speaking in fluent English. We dont really have Stingers or patriot missiles. We only have old Soviet rockets, many of them not in a good state. If there is a big war, I fear in the first weeks we will have many casualties.

Chebeliuk predicted that a Russian offensive would set off a partisan war. A lot of us are ready to fight. We will resist in every city, in every village. Ukrainians hate Putin, especially in the west of our country. I hope Putin is just pretending with his threats, to get something from the west and Biden.

Whenever Ukrainian rulers began acting like dictators the people rose up against them, she said, citing the 2014 revolution of dignity in Kyiv against the then president, Viktor Yanukovych. Chebeliuk rejected Putins recent claims that Ukraine and Russia were one people.

Russians have lived for 20 years in a dictatorship. They are happy, she said. We dont like dictators here. Putin is a bit of a dreamer. He wants to be the most powerful man in the world. If he tries to make a dictatorship in Ukraine he will fail.

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Fear and defiance on Ukraines frontline: We dont like dictators here - The Guardian

Well be fully surrounded by equal forces, the senior Ukrainian security official said.

In Washington, U.S. officials say they still assess that Mr. Putin has not yet made a decision to invade. They describe him as more a tactician than a grand strategist, and they believe that he is constantly weighing a host of different factors. Among them is how well he could weather the threatened sanctions on his banks and industry, and whether his demands that Ukraine stop veering toward NATO and that NATO stop spreading toward Russia are receiving enough attention.

But the U.S. officials say Mr. Putin may also have concluded that with the United States and other countries arming Ukraine, his military advantage is at risk of slipping away. Britains defense secretary, Ben Wallace, announced in an address to Parliament on Monday that the country would begin providing Ukraine with light, anti-armor defensive weapons. Mr. Putin may become tempted to act sooner rather than later.

U.S. officials saw Russias embassy evacuations coming. We have information that indicates the Russian government was preparing to evacuate their family members from the Russian Embassy in Ukraine in late December and early January, a U.S. official said in a statement.

Ukrainian officials say they saw the Russians leave.

But that leaves open the question of what, if anything, the Russians were signaling.

It is possible they were trying to bolster the case that the United States and its Western allies should take seriously their demands that Ukraine can never join NATO, and that troops, nuclear weapons and other heavy weaponry must be removed from former Warsaw Pact states, like Poland, that were once allied with the Soviet Union.

It could also be that the Russians were trying to indicate that an attack was brewing, though there were no other signals. In fact, the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border is not increasing at a rate that Pentagon officials expected a month ago.

The latest U.S. estimates are that about 60 battalion tactical groups, known as B.T.G.s and each with an average of 800 soldiers, are now in place at the border with Ukraine. Combined with other local forces, the Russians have about 77,000 troops at the border, with more on the way. Others put the figure at closer to 100,000 much depends on how different forces are counted but that is well short of the Pentagons estimate more than a month ago that the total number could rise to 175,000.

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Russia Thins Out Its Embassy in Ukraine, a Possible Clue to Putins Next Move - The New York Times

Putins response to this economic stagnation and the political peril it represented was to shift the basis of his regimes legitimacy from economic progress, which made Putin so popular in his first two terms in office, to Putin as the defender of a motherland besieged by the West, Aron told me. Putin concluded that if he was going to be a president for life, he had to be a wartime president for life.

Writing in The Hill, Aron quoted Russian opposition columnist Sergei Medvedev as recently observing: Putin has forged a nation of war that has battened the hatches and looks at the world through a lookout slit of a tank. The degree of military-patriotic hysteria [in] Russia today brings to mind the U.S.S.R. of the 1930s, the era of athletes parades, tank mock-ups and dirigibles.

This is classic wag-the-dog politics. Putin is a thug, but hes a thug with an authentic Russian cultural soul that resonates with his people. His obsession with the Soviet Union and his nostalgia for the power, glory and dignity it gave him and his generation of Russians run deep. He was not exaggerating when he declared in 2005 that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

And because Ukraine, and its capital, Kyiv, played a central role long ago in Russian history, and because Ukraine was a bulwark and breadbasket of the Soviet Union in its heyday, and because perhaps eight million ethnic Russians still live in Ukraine (out of 43 million), Putin claims that it is his duty to reunite Russia and Ukraine. He blithely ignores the fact that Ukraine has its own language, history and post-Soviet generation that believes its duty is to be independent.

For Putin, losing Ukraine is like an amputation, remarked political scientist Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Putin looks at Ukraine and Belarus as part of Russias civilizational and cultural space. He thinks the Ukrainian state is totally artificial and that Ukrainian nationalism is not authentic.

The reason Putin has accelerated his Ukraine threat which I would call marry me or I will kill you is that he knows that under Ukraines current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the process of Ukrainization has accelerated and the Russian language is being pushed out of schools and Russian television out of the media space.

Said Krastev: Putin knows that in 10 years the young generation in Ukraine will not be speaking Russian at all, and it will have no identification with Russian culture. Maybe best to act now, thinks Putin, before the Ukrainian Army gets bigger, better trained and better armed and while Europe and America are in disarray over Covid and in no mood for war.

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Opinion | Putin to Ukraine: Marry Me or Ill Kill You - The New York Times

Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops, with tanks and other heavy weapons, on itsborder with Ukraine in recent weeks, sparking fears that Europe is teetering on the brink of its first war in decades.

The threatening display has the West worried that Moscow is trying to overturn one of the outcomes of the Cold War, when Ukraine broke away from its political sphere and became an independent state.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has frequently said that the collapse of the former Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the 20thcentury.

After a series of diplomatic talks last week between Russia, the US, the EU and theNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO) failed, tensions have further escalated.

The White House has said that Russia could attack Ukraine at "any point", while NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week said that "there is a real risk for new armed conflict in Europe".

In Brussels, the mood is alsojumpy, with a top EU diplomat telling the BBC that"Europe is now closer to war than it has been since the break-up of former Yugoslavia".

Ukrainian President VolodymyrZelenskyreleased a video address to the nation on Wednesday, urging Ukrainian citizensnot to panic over fears of a possible invasion.

However, he said, the country hadbeen living with the Russian threat for many years and should always be prepared for war.

Poland's Foreign Minister,Zbigniew Rau, saidthe risk of war in Europe was greater than at any timein the past 30 years.

The United Kingdomhas responded by delivering a batch of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine this week, while Sweden and Denmark have both strengthened their presence near the region.

Russia hasdenied planning a new military offensive, but has made several demands, with the warning that it will take unspecified "military-technical measures" if they are stonewalled.

Moscow said it began its military build-up along the Ukrainian border because it could no longer "tolerate" NATO's eastward expansion and "gradual invasion" of Ukraine.

It has requested thatNATO commits to a binding promisenever to admit Kyiv to the alliance, and wants a formal assurance from the West to cease military co-operation with Ukraine.

So far, those demands have been met with a firm 'No'.

So how close is the situation to war?

Paul Dibb, emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, said the situation hadbecome dangerous, but that he did notbelieve there was a threat of major military action.

"Let's get one thing straight, [Mr Putin's] not going to try [to]invade and occupy the whole of the Ukraine Ukraine has 44 million people," he told the ABC.

Analysts suggest a more likely scenario is that of a limited Russian invasion along the separatist-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine that it seized in 2014.

Mr Putin might also launch a limited incursion into south-eastern Ukraine to join the country's industrial heartland, Donbas, with Russian-occupied Crimea.

"As we speak, there's evidence that further Russian troops are being brought in from the Russian far-east around Vladivostok into the area just north of Ukraine," Professor Dibb said.

"My view is [that], if Putin intended to have an a military attack, even a partial one, we'dsee those troops being built up further in the next few days and weeks."

This week, Russia has been further beefing up its presence near Ukraine with the arrival of troops in Belarus for planned military exercises between the two countries next month.

Belarus is a Russian ally and having troops on its territory would enable Moscow to invade Ukraine from the north.

Professor Dibb, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence, said the most likely initial scenario is thatRussia will mount more crippling cyber attacks.

Just last week, Ukraine was struck with a cyber attack that defaced its government websites.

The Ukranian government pinned the blame on Russia.

"My personal view is he may well start, as it did in Crimea, with a cyber attack And let's acknowledge that the Russians are very good at cyber, one of the best in the world," Professor Dibb said.

Cyber attacks could potentiallycut off electricity and energy supplies at the peak of winter, and allow Russia to spread disinformation and propaganda to Ukraine's 8.3 million Russian populationinto insurgency operations, he said.

Alexey Muraviev, a national security and strategic expert at Curtin University, also says Russia's priority is not the occupation of Ukraine, but instead to have its agreements met tostopNATO's expansion any further to the east.

"For Russia, occupation of Ukraine is not the number one or number two priority the Russians are more interested in reaching some consensus with Washington and Brussels," he told the ABC.

"I don't think they will make a move right now."

With Ukraine outside NATO and not benefiting from the alliance's security guarantees, the USand its European allies have made it clear that they are unlikely to directly intervene militarily if Russia strikes.

Instead, some have been sending military aid to Ukraine and haveraised the prospect of new sanctions on Russia, possibly the severest yet, in the event of an attack.

Germany's Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock whose talks with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, also ended with no breakthrough last week said Moscow wouldpay the price if it movedon Ukraine but thatdiplomacy was "the only way".

"Each further aggressive act will have a high price for Russia, economically, strategically, politically," she said.

US President Joe Biden predicts thatRussia will "move in" on Ukraine.

He said Moscowwould pay dearly for a full-scale invasion,with its businesses possibly losing access to the US dollar, but suggested there could be a lower cost for a "minor incursion".

The Biden administration has prepared a broad set of sanctions and other economic penalties to impose on Russia in the event of an invasion.

However, Mr Biden said NATO allies are not united on how to respond, depending on what exactly Mr Putin does, saying "there are differences" among them and that he was trying to make sure that "everybody's on the same page".

He added that a third summit with Mr Putin was "still a possibility" after the two leaders met twice last year.

Professor Dibb does not think new sanctions will have any impact "whatsoever" in deterring Mr Putin from making moves on his neighbour.

"Russians are hard people. Their history tells us that they used to absorbing hard measures," he said.

Russia has been subject to curbs since its annexation of Crimea, a conflict thathas seenmore than 14,000 people killed in nearly eight years of fighting between the Russia-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces inDonbas.

Further punitive measures were added after a former Russian spy was poisoned in Britain in 2018 and following an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election won by Donald Trump.

Professor Dibb warned thatMr Putin knows America and European countries are not willing to confront him with war, and that China will be watching closely.

"China and Russia are increasingly showing signs of being very, very close strategic partners, and not just politically and economically, but militarily," he said.

"If Russia uses military force and gets away with it, then China may be further encouraged to push ahead with its military threats to unify Taiwan."

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Russia's menacing forces near Ukraine spark fears of an invasion. How close is Europe to its first war in decades? - ABC News

The mood last week in Ukraine was eerily calm, despite talk of war. The first winter snow blanketed Kyiv. Many were still celebrating Orthodox Christmas which falls on 7 January or had left town for the holidays. Bars and restaurants rang out with Dean Martins Let It Snow!, while the fir trees in Independence Square looked like a mini-Narnia.

Sure, Russia might invade at any moment. But, as Ukrainians wearily point out, the country has already been at war for eight long years, ever since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and kickstarted a brutish conflict in the east of the country, which has claimed nearly 14,000 lives. Fridays dawn cyber-attack on government websites was merely the latest in a series of hostile acts.

What to do in the event of a military operation by Moscow, and whether to stay, flee or fight? The consensus at least according to surveys is that a third of the population is ready to take up arms. In the upmarket Podil district, with its art deco mansions, a new piece of graffiti read: Biy Moskaliv!(Beat Up Russians!)

Sitting in a law office just across the road, Serhii Filimonov explains what he intends to do, should the Kremlin attack. There are about 50 of us. We will meet and decide where we can best fight, he said. His group is made up of middle-class professionals: IT staff, designers, actors, journalists. Filimonov runs a security business and starred in a film shown at Venice.

None of this is likely to alarm Russias defence ministry, which has sent 100,000 troops to Ukraines border. These include the existing front between the Ukrainian army and the Moscow-run separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, as well as Belarus in the north, Crimea in the south and the breakaway Russian enclave of Transnistria in the west.

But the Kyiv creatives know how to shoot. All are combat-hardened veterans of the 2014 war. Filimonov took part in the bloody battle for Ilovaysk, when the Russian army trapped Ukrainian forces, and was wounded by an enemy mortar strike. After an operation to remove shrapnel, he returned to the front, serving as a volunteer against Moscow with the Azov battalion.

We have registered weapons. We will defend our homes, Filimonov said. Putin wants to go back to the borders of the Russian empire. You can see this in Belarus, Kazakhstan. Here in Ukraine he wants to create a tsarstvo a tsardom. This is a war of civilisations. Its the west versus Eurasia, democracy against slavery and authoritarianism. We want democracy and freedom.

Most experts agree that Russias vastly superior army, air force and navy could quickly seize Ukrainian territory. But Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Kyivs former defence minister, says the Kremlins conscript-heavy military will immediately face resistance, should it try to occupy towns and cities. Volunteers such as Filimonov and small army groups will launch bloody partisan attacks. There is definitely no panic. I dont see any panic at all, Zagorodnyuk told the Observer. He acknowledged Ukraines relative military weakness but he said Kyiv had around 500,000 soldiers including reservists. It was ready for guerrilla war on a huge scale, he said.

Masi Nayyem, a lawyer who founded the Podil practice, admitted he was looking forward to shooting at Russians again. In 2016 he fought with a paratrooper brigade in Avdiyivka, Ukraines frontline position outside rebel-held Donetsk. In peace time you have to be serious, responsible. In war you dont have any considerations or need to think about consequences. Its black and white, he said.

Talks between Russia and the US, Nato and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe ended last week in a dead end. The Kremlin has demanded assurances from the Biden administration that Ukraine and Georgia will never join Nato. In essence it wants to overturn the post-cold war order restoring central and eastern Europe as a zone of Warsaw Pact-style Russian influence, from which Nato troops and weaponry are banned.

Beneath the Kremlins shrill, tough-man rhetoric lies a mystery. It is unclear why Putin is moving with such strategic haste, demanding that the US and its allies rewrite international security rules in Russias favour. His demands are non-starters, as the USs negotiator and deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, put it. Putins possible goal, she suggested, was to establish a pretext for war.

Andrew Wilson, professor in Ukrainian studies at University College London, said the timing from the Kremlins perspective was opportune. Putin has jailed his chief domestic critic, Alexey Navalny, and squashed Navalnys opposition movement. Russia was awash with cash, thanks to rising energy prices. On the international stage the Kremlin faces off against a US administration it regards as weak and indecisive.

What could happen next? Creating a crisis to create opportunities is what they [the Russians] do, Wilson said. He added: I dont think a full-scale invasion is possibility number one. The Ukrainians have pretty successfully advertised the huge cost of invasion and occupation. But Putin has to have a win of sorts, either on European security or Ukraine itself.

All of which presents observers with a dilemma: how to report on a crisis which does not quite feel like a crisis, and appears largely to exist inside Putins head? It is evident that Russias president feels emotionally about Ukraine. Last summer he wrote a long essay stating that Ukraine and Russia were one people, divided by the whims of Bolshevik map-making and western meddling.

With nothing yet happening on the ground, theres nothing I can report to tell you something new and impactful, Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist and author admitted, saying it was hard to make sense of a conflict in which Ukraine often appears as a bystander. She added: We are caught in the position of waiting for the worst scenario without a chance to influence the outcome.

Gumenyuk said the Kremlins goal was to turn the clock back to the early 1970s, before the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki accords guaranteeing human rights a mistake, in the eyes of Moscows current hawkish leadership. Others have argued that Putins preferred geo-political model goes back further, to the imperialist 19th century, when mighty great powers over-rolled lesser ones.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times the eminent Russian political scientist Lila Shevtsova said the current stand-off over Ukraine had little in common with the political deals struck at Yalta in 1945, or at the congress of Vienna in 1815. Back then, the participants stuck to the rules. [Putins] aim, really, is a Hobbesian world order, built on disruption and readiness for surprise breakthroughs, she wrote.

How a surprise breakthrough might morph into war is a topic of conversation inside the Kyiv government of comic-turned-president Volodymyr Zelensky. Little was seen of him last week. Zelensky won a landslide victory in 2019 after campaigning on a platform of peace. Faced with Russian intransigence over the fate of Ukraines already occupied territories, he has moved towards Nato and the west.

US intelligence agencies say the risk of invasion is high. Their Ukrainian counterparts think Moscow may be planning a staged provocation. This could take the form of an attack on Russian citizens at the embassy or consulate perhaps or against Russian soldiers in Transnistria. The Kremlin would blame the attack on far-right Ukrainian nationalists, with the incident used for propaganda and as a casus belli.

Alex Kovzhun, a political strategist who advised Ukraines former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said the Kremlin needed to craft a compelling narrative. They are obsessed with their TV ratings. All of us Ukrainians are extras in their internal TV show. They are the protagonists. From time to time they change the bad guys. Ukraine is not their favourite location.

Kovzhun added: A fantastic postmodern storytelling device is the wink. In 2014 Putin winked when he said there were no Russian units in Crimea. Its a conspiracy. He invites all Russian TV viewers to share in this conspiracy. He used the wink in Salisbury. Everybody knew two Russian idiots travelled there to kill Sergei Skripal, as part of a special operation.

It is just possible, of course, that Putins brinkmanship is part of an elaborate bluff, the latest in a series of stress tests designed to reveal weaknesses among the wests ruling class and America. No one save for the man in the Kremlin can really know. But Filimonov thinks a storm is coming. We are convinced something will happen, he said. Putin needs Ukraine. An attempt to seize it is inescapable. We will fight until the end.

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Well fight to the end. Ukraine defiant in face of Vladimir Putins phoney war - The Guardian