About 1,000 bodies – including civilians and children – have been exhumed in the recently liberated territories of the Kharkiv region, media reports say. This includes the 447 bodies found at the mass burial site in Izium.
Ukraine’s counter-offensive against Russian forces in the southern Kherson region is proving more difficult than it was in the northeast because of wet weather and the terrain, Ukraine’s defense minister said. Kyiv’s forces are piling pressure on Russian troops in the strategically important Kherson region occupied by Moscow since the beginning of its invasion, threatening President Vladimir Putin with another big battlefield setback, Reuters reported.
Ukraine’s defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Wednesday he did not believe Russia’s president Vladimir Putin would use nuclear weapons. Putin has repeatedly warned that Russia has the right to defend itself using any weapon in its arsenal, which includes the world’s largest nuclear stockpile.
About 70,000 civilians have been relocated from the right bank of the Dnipro river to the left bank in Kherson oblastthe Russian-appointed governor of the region told Russian media.
Ukraine’s government is advising refugees living abroad not to return until the spring amid mounting fears over whether the country’s damaged energy infrastructure can cope with demand this winter. The energy crisis comes as officials in Kyiv warned that the coming winter may herald the heaviest fighting of the war, around the southern city of Kherson where Russian forces have been digging in.
Up to 70 Australian defense force personnel will be deployed to the UK to train Ukrainian troops in the latest increase in the country’s support for Kyiv. The Australian government announced the decision late on Wednesday while emphasizing that the ADF members would not be entering Ukrainian territory.
The Kremlin also said assets in the four Ukrainian regions that Russia claimed it had annexed last month may in the future be transferred to Russian companies. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was obvious that “abandoned assets” could not be left inactive, and the government would deal with the issue.
Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, held a phone call with his Indian and Chinese counterparts and raised Russia’s concerns about the possible use of a “dirty bomb” by Ukraine, Shoigu’s ministry said. It followed a series of calls Shoigu has held since Sunday on the same topic with Nato defense ministers.
Over the past day, Russian forces have launched five rockets, 30 air strikes and more than 100 multiple-launch rocket system attacks. on more than 40 settlements all around Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian general staff of the armed forces. Russian forces have continued their sustained offense on the strategically placed towns of Bakhmut and Avdiivka in Ukraine’s industrial heartland of Donbas, killing one civilian yesterday in Bakhmut. However, Ukrainian authorities believe that Russian forces are digging in for the “heaviest of battles” in the strategic southern region of Kherson. Russian authorities spent yesterday relocating civilians in the region, blaming the upcoming onslaught of the Ukrainian armed forces for why they had to leave.
A Russian missile attack killed two people in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city. One of those who died was a pregnant woman. The office of the prosecutor general of Ukraine has launched a pre-trial investigation into the attack.
Vladimir Putin entered the invasion of Ukraine with the term “denazification” – now his security council is pivoting to the term “desatanization”. Alexey Pavlov, assistant secretary of the security council of the Russian Federation, is now claiming there were “hundreds of sects” in Ukraine where citizens have abandoned Orthodox values. Those who live in Ukraine can attest to that statement as being patently false.
The armed forces of Ukraine are estimating that about 480 Russian soldiers were killed yesterday alone, bringing the total to 68,900 personnel lost so far in the invasion of Ukraine.
The Nobel Foundation has made the decision not to invite the Russian and Belarusian ambassadors to its storied prize ceremony this year., even though the foundation typically extends an invitation to all ambassadors stationed in Sweden. “In view of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Foundation has chosen not to invite the ambassadors of Russia and Belarus to the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm,” the foundation said in a statement. The foundation jointly awarded this year’s peace prize to the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian human rights organization, in conjunction with Memorial, a Russian human rights group outlawed by the Kremlin, and the veteran Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, who is being held in prison. without trial in his native country.
Russia is purportedly recruiting members of Afghanistan’s highly respected national army commando corps to fight in Ukraine, Foreign Policy is reporting. These are the commandos that were trained by US Navy SEALs and British armed forces. About 20,000 to 30,000 of the volunteer commandos were left behind when the US left Afghanistan under Taliban control in August 2021.