Russia-Ukraine War Briefing - Carole Landry (NYT)

 

November 28, 2022

By Carole Landry Editor/Writer, Briefings Team

Welcome to the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing, your guide to the latest news and analysis about the conflict.

The Kremlin played down speculation from pro-Russian military bloggers that it was preparing to withdraw from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex. E.U. diplomats met again to finalize a plan to cap the price of Russian oil,after failing to agree on Friday.

War crimes investigators exhumed the bodies of six men who had been killed, execution-style, from a communal grave in a village near Kherson.  Get the latest updates here. Track the invasion with our maps.

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.

Russian troops are trying to strangle the city from the east and south, according to Ukrainian soldiers. For months, both sides have thrown masses of troops and matériel into battle there, my colleagues Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Natalia Yermak and Tyler Hicks report.

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.

The war is now chewing up those modest stockpiles of weapons as Europeans, along with the U.S., race to arm Ukraine.

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.

In Ukraine

Russia is planning to launch another wave of missiles targeting energy infrastructure this week, the Ukrainian military said.  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.  Alyona Synenko wrote about her wedding in Odesa amid blackouts and bombs.

Around the world

The foreign minister of Belarus, who led a failed attempt to thaw relations between his country and the West, died suddenly over the weekend. Thousands of Russians are crossing the U.S. southern border, but contrary to their expectations of asylum, many of them are being put into immigration detention centers. 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.  Russia has postponed a meeting with U.S. officials to discuss the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries.  President Volodymyr Zelensky will join the DealBook Summit via videolink on Wednesday.  From Opinion: Lulu Garcia-Navarro shares suggestions for holiday giving to global organizations helping people in war zones.

We also recommend

There is no large Ukrainian diaspora in Maine, but Ukrainian flags are on display in a show of solidarity.  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

Email your thoughts to warbriefing@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward you the briefing? Sign up here.

Russia-Ukraine War Briefing - New York Times

Do New York Times, 11/11/2022: 

Welcome to the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing, your guide to the latest news and analysis about the conflict.

By Carole Landry

Editor/Writer, Briefings Team

• A Russian missile strike on an apartment building in Mykolaiv killed seven people.
• Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more than 100,000 Russian troops had been killed or wounded and that Ukraine had probably suffered a similar number of casualties.
• President Vladimir Putin will skip next week’s summit of leaders of the Group of 20 in Indonesia. U.S. officials say President Biden will be “unapologetic” about the U.S. defense of Ukraine at the meeting. 

Get the latest updates here. Track the invasion with our maps.

Videos posted on social media showed crowds cheering Ukrainian soldiers in Freedom Square in Kherson, Ukraine.via Reuters

What’s next after Kherson

Ukrainian forces were greeted by cheering crowds as they entered Kherson today after Russia withdrew its forces from the southern city. Residents raised the Ukrainian flag in the main square in celebration.

The loss of Kherson, the only regional capital to be captured by Russia in nearly nine months of war, is a humiliation for Putin. Six weeks ago, he announced that Russia was annexing Kherson and three other regions of Ukraine and vowed that they would “forever” belong to Russia.

For Ukraine, the return of Kherson is one of its most significant victories of the war. President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was a “historic day.”

So what happens now? Despite this blow to Russia, analysts agree that the war is far from over. Here’s a look at what might lie ahead.

A flare-up in fighting: Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine, said the withdrawal would free up troops — thought to be among his army’s best trained and battle-hardened — to fight elsewhere on the front line. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defense minister, expects an escalation in fighting in eastern Ukraine. “The only way Surovikin could realistically sell the idea of the Kherson retreat to Putin was by offering the promise of assured success in the east,” wrote Zagorodnyuk, now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research organization based in Washington. “Ukraine must therefore brace for a major escalation in the Donbas region in the coming weeks.”

A woman wept after Ukrainian troops entered Snihurivka, a town in the Kherson region.

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

A winter war: Some U.S. officials have suggested that the fighting could slow down over the winter because conditions would be more difficult. That appears to be a point of contention among some analysts, who say that it is not in Ukraine’s interests to ease up. “Winter weather could disproportionately harm poorly equipped Russian forces in Ukraine, but well-supplied Ukrainian forces are unlikely to halt their counteroffensives due to the arrival of winter weather and may be able to take advantage of frozen terrain to move more easily than they could in the muddy autumn months,” the Institute for the Study of War wrote. Ukraine is about to receive an additional $400 million in U.S. military aid that includes air defense systems and cold weather gear.

Peace talks: Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has made the case in internal meetings that the Ukrainians have achieved about as much as they could reasonably expect on the battlefield before winter sets in, and should try to cement their gains at the bargaining table, reports Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent. Other advisers to President Biden disagree. Some U.S. officials say that peace talks remain a distant prospect and that both sides think continued fighting will strengthen their eventual negotiating positions.

The endgame: Western and Ukrainian officials are starting to envisage what a stable conclusion to the war might look like, The Economist reports. Will Ukraine become a new Finland, forced to cede land and remain neutral? Or another West Germany, with its territory partitioned and its democratic half absorbed into NATO? Another template is Israel, which has been able to defend itself against hostile neighbors with extensive U.S. military support. Last night, Biden told reporters that the conflict would not be resolved “until Putin gets out of Ukraine.”