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Snow and cold in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin this week. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Humanitarian fears for winter
Millions of Ukrainians are bracing for a winter of worsening hardship. Russian airstrikes have knocked out power and other utilities, depriving households of electricity, heating and water. The attacks are raising fears about a collapse of Ukraine’s energy grid, which would push many vulnerable Ukrainians to the brink.
For more insight on the crisis, I spoke to Denise Brown, the U.N.’s resident coordinator in Ukraine, who is responsible for overseeing the international humanitarian response. Denise took up her position in August and has since been traveling around the country to see how people are coping. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
Denise, let’s start with your recent travels. Where have you been, and what is the situation there?
In the past two weeks, I’ve been to Kherson twice, Mykolaiv and the Sumy region.
In Kherson, two weeks ago, I saw empty grocery stores, there was nothing, not a crumb. Supply chains were disrupted. Many older people were still there and were very happy to see us. You could sense their relief.
When I was back there this past Sunday, it was different. First of all, it was much colder. They are re-establishing the power lines, but because of the mines, progress is slow. Electricity is linked to water, which is linked to heating, so it was cold.
There were three grocery stores open. And the one that was empty two weeks ago was full, and there were 500 people waiting to get into the grocery store. I felt that after the hope and relief two weeks earlier, people were worried, extremely worried.
During a power blackout in Kyiv this week.David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
What is the biggest humanitarian concern heading into winter?
What I worry about is the damage to the energy infrastructure. We knew that winter was coming. In our humanitarian response plan, there’s a very specific component dedicated to winter. We planned for that. But it’s the damage to the energy infrastructure which is the new dimension, which is overwhelming and which gives all of us cause to worry. The humanitarian community has been reaching 13 million people since the war started. As the energy infrastructure damage grows, if, at some point it all disappears, what then? That’s the question.
The generators are super, super important. How many generators can we bring in to run the hospitals, to run the heating centers, to run everything? How many can everybody bring in? From our humanitarian community, we believe we can bring in 2,000. And the spare parts that have been requested that have to come from outside the country to keep the system up and running. It’s an absolute primary objective: To keep people safe, you need electricity, water and heating. That’s the biggest worry, everybody’s biggest worry.
Where are the most vulnerable?
I think right now it is the Kherson, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. The data that we have suggests that, which is why I spend most of my time going back and forth to these areas. When we go to these areas, we see a lot of elderly people, who didn’t have the means to move or didn’t want to leave their homes behind. We also worry about women alone with children. We worry a lot about people with disabilities who may be on their own. We tend to focus a lot on those groups, to provide them with support not just materially, but also psychologically.
People have been living in communities under temporary Russian control. On the faces of people, I see stress and anxiety. I’ve been greeted by screams and cries in some places.
Moving forward, there will be huge gaps if the energy structure collapses. The worst-case scenario from my point of view is people left on their own: the elderly, women with children, people with disabilities. We need to make sure we know where they are. If we don’t, that’s a big problem. The linkage to local organizations is key. Because they are present in those areas.
Loaves of bread to be distributed to civilians in Bakhmut yesterday.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Are you seeing any signs of a possible exodus, a new wave of refugees?
We haven’t noticed any movement across the borders. I don’t think Ukrainians want to leave. I think they want to stay. They have been through a lot already. I think they want to see this through.
How long do you think the war will last? Are you planning for a long war?
I’m only thinking about humanitarian assistance and ensuring that we are meeting the needs created by this war.
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Ukrainian embassies in several countries have been targeted with “bloody packages” containing animal eyes, the foreign ministry said. In Spain, six letter bombs were mailed to several offices, including the Ukrainian embassy.
German government officials set up a climate foundation as a conduit for funds to build Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
The U.S. is facing resistance from the United Arab Emirates in its push to seize the luxury superyacht Madame Gu, which is linked to the Russian steel magnate Andrei Skoch.
From Opinion: The United States is entering an era of intense “great power” rivalry that is without precedent in the living memory of most of its citizens, Stephen Wertheim writes.
A military hospital in Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s Donbas region, on Friday. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Russia’s battle for Bakhmut
Russian forces are largely digging into defensive positions for the winter. But Russia is also mounting a desperate attempt to capture Bakhmut, a city that has become a destructive vortex for both countries’ militaries in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
At the city’s only military hospital, doctors report an almost unending stream of Ukrainian casualties. By midday Friday, they had counted 50 wounded. The day before, 240 people had come through the hospital’s doors.
The attacking Russians are suffering far worse, cut down by artillery and machine-gun fire, Ukrainian soldiers say.
Newly mobilized Russian soldiers “are just taking a rifle and walking right down, like in Soviet times,” a Ukrainian medic said. “He gets killed, and the next one comes up the same way.”
Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut on Friday.Tyler Hicks
Russia’s fighting force in Bakhmut is led by the Wagner Group, a private mercenary outfit with direct ties to the Kremlin. After Russia’s retreat from Kherson earlier this month,rank-and-file forces redeployed from the south are now supporting Wagner Group fighters, according to a U.S. defense official and Ukrainian soldiers.
Ukraine has sent floods of reinforcements, including Special Forces troops and territorial defense fighters, according to soldiers, local residents and a U.S. defense official. It has also deployed large quantities of Western-supplied shells and rockets.
“In the six months that I’ve been in Bakhmut, I have never seen our artillery working like this,” a Ukrainian soldier in the city said, referring to the volume of Ukrainian shells fired.
Analysts say that Russia’s military is unlikely to succeed in capturing Bakhmut, given the degradation of its forces and ammunition shortages after a series of setbacks. Still, Russia can turn the city into a resource-intensive black hole for Ukraine, taking troops away from other priorities, including future offensives.
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Ukrainian soldiers firing artillery at Russian positions near Bakhmut this month.Libkos/Associated Press
The Western weapons shortage
When the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago, European nations drastically reduced their armories, thinking that a land war in Europe would never happen again. They were wrong.
Russia and Ukraine are also burning through weaponry and ammunition at their own staggering paces. In Afghanistan, NATO forces might have fired 300 artillery rounds a day and had no real worries about air defense. But Ukraine can fire thousands of rounds daily and remains desperate for air defense against Russian missiles and Iranian-made drones.
“A day in Ukraine is a month or more in Afghanistan,” one defense expert said.
Last summer in the Donbas region, the Ukrainians were firing 6,000 to 7,000 artillery rounds each day, a senior NATO official said. The Russians were firing 40,000 to 50,000 rounds per day. By comparison, the U.S. produces 15,000 rounds each month.
The West is scrambling to find increasingly scarce Soviet-era equipment and ammunition that Ukraine can use now and is sending strong signals to defense industries that longer-term contracts are in the offing. There are even discussions about NATO investing in old factories in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria to restart the manufacturing of Soviet-caliber 152-mm and 122-mm shells for Ukraine’s Soviet-era artillery.
In total, NATO countries have so far provided some $40 billion in weaponry to Ukraine, roughly the size of France’s annual defense budget.
The Russians, too, are having resupply problems of their own. Moscow is also trying to ramp up military production and is reportedly seeking to buy missiles from North Korea and more cheap drones from Iran.
More about weapons
High-tech cannons supplied by the U.S. and its allies are burning out after months of overuse, or being damaged in combat. Repair work is being done at a facility in Poland set up by the Pentagon’s European Command.
The Pentagon is considering a Boeing proposal to supply Ukraine with cheap, small precision bombs fitted onto rockets, allowing Kyiv to strike far behind Russian lines, Reuters reported.
What else we’re following
To provide comprehensive coverage of the war, we often link to outside sources. Some of these require a subscription.
Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe, told The Economist Asks podcast that Ukraine has achieved “an irreversible momentum” in the war and could declare victory by the summer.
European officials are accusing the U.S. of profiting from the war by selling natural gas and weapons at inflated prices, Politico reports.
A Russian disinformation campaign alleging that the U.S. supported secret biological weapons labs in Ukraine is likely to undermine negotiations at a global conference, Bloomberg reports.
From exile in Lithuania, the supporters of the jailed Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny are spearheading antiwar efforts in a way that is unthinkable at home.
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back Wednesday. — Carole
Ukrainians ride an armoured vehicle, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Donesk region, Ukraine, October 3 2022. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra
Summary
Ukraine making gains in two of four regions annexed by Russia
Retaking of strategic hub of Lyman improves access to the Donbas
Elon Musk proposal for ending war draws Ukrainian condemnation
Ukraine says it took 31 Russian tanks out of action in south
SVIATOHIRSK/KYIV, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Ukrainian forces have broken through Russian defencesin the south of the country while expanding their rapid offensive in the east, seizing back more territory in areas annexed by Russia and threatening its troops' supply lines.
Making their biggest breakthrough in the south since the war began, Ukrainian forces recaptured several villages in an advance along the strategic Dnipro River on Monday, Ukrainian officials and a Russian-installed leader in the area said.
Ukrainian forces in the south destroyed 31 Russian tanks and one multiple rocket launcher, the military's southern operational command said in a nightly update, without providing details of where the fighting occurred.
Reuters could not immediately verify the battlefield accounts.
The southern breakthrough mirrors recent Ukrainian advances in the east even as Russia has tried to raise the stakes by annexing land, ordering mobilisation, and threatening nuclear retaliation.
Ukraine has made significant advances in two of the four Russian-occupied regions Moscow last week annexed after what it called referendums - votes that were denounced by Kyiv and Western governments as illegal and coercive.
In a sign Ukraine is building momentum on the eastern front, Reuters saw columns of Ukrainian military vehicles heading on Monday to reinforce the rail hub of Lyman, retaken at the weekend, and a staging post to press into the Donbas region.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine's army had seized back towns in a number of areas, without giving details.
"New population centres have been liberated in several regions. Heavy fighting is going on in several sectors of the front," Zelenskiy said in a video address.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk - one of two regions that make up the Donbas - said Russian forces had taken over a psychiatric hospital in the town of Svatovo, a target en route to recapturing the major cities of Lysychansk and Sivierodonetsk.
"There is quite a network of underground rooms in the building and they have taken up defensive positions," he told Ukrainian television.
In the south, Ukrainian troops recaptured the town of Dudchany along the west bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects the country, Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed leader in occupied parts of Ukraine's Kherson province, told Russian state television.
"There are settlements that are occupied by Ukrainian forces," Saldo said.
Dudchany is about 30 km (20 miles) south of where the front stood before Monday's breakthrough, indicating the fastest advance of the war in the south. Russian forces there had been dug into heavily reinforced positions along a mainly static front line since the early weeks of the invasion.
While Ukraine has yet to give a full account of the developments, military and regional officials did release some details.
Soldiers from Ukraine's 128th Mountain Assault Brigade raised the blue and yellow national flag in Myrolyubivka, a village between the former front and the Dnipro, according to a video released by the defence ministry.
Serhiy Khlan, a Kherson regional council member, listed four other villages recaptured or where Ukrainian troops had been photographed.
"It means that our armed forces are moving powerfully along the banks of the Dnipro nearer to Beryslav," he said.
Russian missiles struck the northeastern city of Kharkiv killing a woman, its governor said on a messaging service, while Ukraine's General Staff said Russian reinforcements were arriving from Siberia and Syria.
Reuters was unable to verify the developments.
'ABILITY TO ATTACK'
The southern advance is targeting supply lines for as many as 25,000 Russian troops on the Dnipro's west bank. Ukraine has already destroyed the river's main bridges, forcing Russian forces to use makeshift crossings.
A substantial advance down river could cut them off entirely.
"The fact we have broken through the front means that ... the Russian army has already lost the ability to attack, and today or tomorrow it could lose the ability to defend," said Oleh Zhdanov, a military analyst based in Kyiv.
Ukraine appears to be on course to achieve several of its battlefield objectives, giving it "a much better defensive position to ride out what probably will be a tamping down of the hot fighting over the winter", Celeste Wallander, a senior Pentagon official, said on Monday.
Just hours after a concert on Moscow's Red Square on Friday where Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed the provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia to be Russian territory forever, Ukraine recaptured Lyman, the main Russian bastion in the north of Donetsk province.
Billionaire Elon Musk on Monday asked Twitter users to weigh in on a plan to end the war which included proposing U.N.-supervised elections in the four occupied regions and recognising Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014, as Russian.
The plan drew immediate condemnation from Ukrainians, including Zelenskiy. read more
Russia's flagging fortunes have led to a shift in mood on state media, where talkshow hosts have been acknowledging setbacks and searching for scapegoats.
"For a certain period of time, things won't be easy for us. We shouldn't be expecting good news right now," said Vladimir Solovyov, the most prominent presenter on state television.
The commander of Russia's western military district, which borders Ukraine, has lost his job, Russian media reported, the latest top official to be fired after defeats.
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The New York Times, Kyiv Oct. 4, 2:47 p.m.
Moscow Oct. 4, 2:47 p.m.
LIVE38 minutes ago
Russia-Ukraine WarZelensky Promises Fair Treatment of Ukrainians in Reclaimed Territory
Ukrainian soldiers driving near the village of Oskil in eastern Ukraine, during a media tour arranged by the Zelensky government on Monday.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is seeking to reassure Ukrainians living in territory the country has reclaimed that they would be treated fairly.
“Our approach has always been and remains clear and fair: If a person did not serve the occupiers and did not betray Ukraine, then there is no reason to consider such a person a collaborator,” Mr. Zelensky said Monday in his nightly speech.
The question of what constitutes collaboration is not always clear cut, with many activities intertwined with daily life.
Russia still partly controls four regions of Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — a territory larger than Portugal. Including areas that Russian forces and their proxies seized in 2014, Moscow controls about one-sixth of Ukrainian territory. Additionally, an untold number of Ukrainians have been forcibly deported to Russia.
“Hundreds of thousands of our people were in the temporarily occupied territory,” Mr. Zelensky said on Monday. “Many helped our military and special services. Many simply tried to survive and waited for the return of the Ukrainian flag.”
Mr. Zelensky assured them that his government was focused on getting their lives back to normal as soon as possible by restoring necessities like transportation and postal services.
“Life is returning,” he added. “It is returning wherever the occupiers were driven out.”
He also took the chance to capitalize on reports of anger in Russia over President Vladimir V. Putin’s conscription order. He said his military officers were confronting troops ill-prepared to wage war.
“We can already see those who were taken just a week or two ago,” Mr. Zelensky said. “People were not trained for combat; they have no experience to fight in such a war. But the Russian command just needs some people — any kind — to replace the dead.”
The military draft Mr. Putin ordered on Sept. 21 to bolster his battered forces has set off nationwide turmoil and protest, bringing the war home to many Russians who had felt untouched by it. Many men have been drafted who were supposed to be ineligible based on factors like age or disability.
On Monday, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in the far east said that half of the men called up there, numbering in the thousands, should not have been drafted and had been sent home and that the region’s military commissar had been dismissed.
Moscow still holds the advantage in firepower and has threatened the use of a nuclear weapon to defend what it now calls Russian territory, and it has demonstrated repeatedly that it can rain destruction on Ukraine.
Cycling past a destroyed Russian tank in the recently liberated village of Pisky-Radkivski on Monday.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
PISKY-RADKIVSKI, Ukraine — The Russian soldier lay in the undergrowth, slammed against a tree. Still in full combat uniform with body armor and boots, he had been missed by the crews gathering the dead.
A week after Ukrainian troops seized back the village of Pisky-Radkivski, in the Kharkiv region, in a sweeping counteroffensive that forced Russian troops into retreat across northeastern Ukraine, the horror of war was all too evident.
“I cannot breathe in my house from the smell,” said Valentina Eliseeva, 73, a bent woman in slippers who pointed out where the soldier’s corpse lay. “The smell is so bad. When will they take it away?”
The successful counteroffensive in northeastern Ukraine has reclaimed vast areas of territory, including Lyman, a crucial railway hub about 25 miles south of Pisky-Radkivski in Donetsk — one of the four regions of Ukraine that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said last week his country was annexing and treating as its own. On Monday, Russian forces were still on the retreat in the northeast while Ukrainian forces also reported progress in the south — adding to the Kremlin’s embarrassments as it faces unusually public criticism of its war effort at home.
The battle lasted just one day in Pisky-Radkivski, but the power and accuracy of the Ukrainian assault was evident. Burned-out tanks sat still in their positions, at a crossroads and in the woods at the northern edge of the village. Russian uniforms, sleeping bags and rations lay abandoned among the fir trees opposite Ms. Eliseeva’s house.
Ukrainian artillery knocked out the tanks and killed at least eight Russian soldiers here, said Anatolii, 52, a retired engineer whose house was damaged in the strikes. “It is a strategic crossroads,” he said. “They shelled all around us.”
Most of the bodies had been removed by professional crews who tour the battle zone in white vans emblazoned with a red cross and the number 200, the code the military has used since Soviet times for cargo of dead soldiers. But they had not picked up the body by the tree, which was missing its head.
Image
People worked to repair their damaged home in the recently liberated village of Pisky-Radkivski on Monday.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
On a road past several villages to the south, a forensic team was picking up Russian bodies at the scene of an ambush. A Ukrainian soldier protested, but the forensic team explained quietly that Russian bodies could be exchanged for Ukrainian soldiers. The soldier helped lift a decomposed body into a black body bag, then leaned over to retch in the grass.
Down the road, soldiers from a Ukrainian tank crew pulled up near the body of another dead Russian soldier, who lay twisted where he had fallen, his face blackened and his body swollen.
Weary and dirty, the tank crew showed little concern for the Russian bodies, but seemed tense and angry from their recent battles. They had been fighting for 51 days without a break and were still wearing their summer uniforms, said one of them, who gave his code name as Positiv.
“We liberated four villages and planted the Ukrainian flag, but other units took the credit,” he said. “So many of our soldiers died,” he added. “So many young guys, 20-year-olds. So many.”
Retreat From Key City: Russian forces withdrew from the strategically important city of Lyman, in Donetsk Province, on Oct. 1. The retreat was a significant setback for Moscow, coming just a day after Mr. Putin declared the region to be Russian territory.
