‘I don’t see justice in this war’: Russian soldier reveals rot at core of Ukraine invasion
Pavel Filatiev knew the consequences of what he said. The former paratrooper understood that he risked prison, that he would be called a traitor and shunned by his former comrades. His own mother had urged him to get out of Russia as soon as he could. He said it anyway. “I see no justice in this war. I don’t see truth here,” he told Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer over a hidden coffee table in Moscow’s financial district. It was his first time personally sitting down with a reporter since returning from the war in Ukraine. Pavel Filatiev fled his homeland after publishing a 141-page account detailing his experiences on the front line. Photo: Egor Slizyak Two weeks ago, Filatyev published a 141-page bombshell: a daily account of how the paratrooper unit was sent to mainland Ukraine from Crimea to enter Kherson and seize the port. It is the most detailed volunteer account by a Russian soldier who participated in the invasion of Ukraine. Filatiev described how his depleted and poorly equipped unit invaded mainland Ukraine behind a hail of rockets in late February, with little in the way of logistics or targets, and no idea why the war was being fought. “It took me weeks to understand that there was no war on Russian soil at all and that we had just attacked Ukraine,” he said, his fingers shaking with anxiety as he lit another cigarette. “We were sitting under Mikolaiv’s artillery fire,” he explained. “At that point I already thought we’re out here doing bullshit, what the hell do we need this war for? And I really had this thought: “God, if I survive, then I’m going to do everything I can to stop this.”
Ukraine insinuates that it is behind the attack in Crimea
A series of mysterious and devastating strikes in occupied Crimea destroyed a key rail hub used to resupply Russian troops and a military airbase this week, Luke Harding reports. Smoke rises above an electrical transformer substation, which caught fire after an explosion in Dzhankoi, Crimea, on August 16. Photo: Taken from Reuters/Reuters Smoke billowed into the sky near Dzhankoi on Tuesday, while several explosions appeared to destroy a Russian ammunition depot and an electricity substation about 125 miles (200 kilometers) from the front line with Ukrainian forces. According to Russian media, a new explosion occurred at a military airfield in the village of Hvardeyskye, not far from the Crimean regional capital, Simferopol. While not officially claiming responsibility for the strike, Kiev officials reacted with glee on social media “The reasons for the explosions in the occupied territories can be different, very different, in particular, I quote the definition of the occupiers themselves, ‘bugs,’” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thought in an afternoon speech. Kyiv have beaten Crimea three times in a week, in clinical and flamboyant style. Russia’s logistics and weapons dumps have been badly affected. Smoke rises above the site of an explosion at a Russian ammunition depot in Crimea. Photo: AP
‘It’s madness’: Putin turns nuclear plant into front line
The situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is dangerous, Luke Harding and Christopher Cherry said from Nikopoli, the Ukrainian-controlled city 7 kilometers away on the opposite bank of the Dnieper River. The plant – Europe’s largest – is now on the front line between Russian-occupied and Ukrainian-controlled territory. Russia uses the sprawling area as a military base from which it bombards the nearby towns of Nikopol and Marhanets. According to Ukraine’s state energy company Energoatom, Russia has fired at the plant multiple times. The shells landed near the fire station and the director’s office, not far from a radioactive source storage facility. A Russian soldier stands guard near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant outside the Russian-controlled town of Enerhodar. Photo: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters The International Atomic Energy Agency requested access and called on the Russians to demilitarize it to avoid a potential nuclear disaster. A former senior official, who spoke to Luke Harding on the condition of anonymity, said the Russians were shelling the plant from surrounding villages and roads in a bid to raise the stakes in negotiations with Kyiv. But the Kremlin is also trying to do something unprecedented: steal another state’s nuclear reactor, he adds. Engineers are working to connect the facility to the power grid in occupied Crimea and cut it off from Ukrainian homes. One reactor has already been shut down. It’s a sinister game of radioactive Russian roulette, set in a country that experienced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv covered the moment Zelenskiy promised his forces would target Russian soldiers who fired at or from the plant. Russia is resorting to “covert nuclear blackmail,” Zelensky claimed. A “terrorist state”, threatened “the whole world” with Armageddon. He urged the UN and the international community to do something.
Ukraine aims to wreak havoc on Russian forces, adviser Zelenskiy says
Ukraine is engaged in a counteroffensive aimed at creating “chaos within Russian forces” by striking the attackers’ supply lines deep into the territory, according to a key adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Mykhailo Podolyak told Dan Sabbagh and Luke Harding that there could be more attacks in the “next two or three months” similar to those that hit Crimea. Speaking from the presidential offices in Kyiv, Podolyak said: “Our strategy is to destroy logistics, supply lines and ammunition depots and other items of military infrastructure. It creates chaos within their own forces.” Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, in the sandbagged corridors of the presidential administration building. Photo: Christopher Cherry/The Guardian The adviser, often described as the country’s third most powerful figure, said Kiev’s approach contrasted with Moscow’s use of blunt artillery power to gain territory in the Donbas region in the east, which has seen Russian troops to destroy cities like Mariupol and Severodonetsk. to gain ground. “So Russia has kind of taught everybody that a counterattack takes massive amounts of manpower like a giant fist and it just goes in one direction,” he said, but “a Ukrainian counterattack looks very different. We don’t use the tactics of the 60s and 70s, of the last century.”
“A referendum is not right”: occupied Kherson faces uncertain future
“A city with Russian history,” proclaim billboards across the Ukrainian city of Kherson, which has been occupied by the Russian army since the first days of March. Others display the Russian flag or quotes from Vladimir Putin. For the past five months, Moscow has appointed an occupation administration to run the Kherson region and ordered schools to teach the Russian curriculum. Locals are encouraged to apply for Russian passports to access pensions and other benefits. The next stage of the Kremlin’s plan is a referendum, to add a dubious sense of legitimacy to these events on the ground and create a pretext to bring Kherson and other occupied parts of southern Ukraine to Russia, using an updated version of Crimea of 2014 playbook. “You must remember that there was never any talk of a referendum in Kherson. no one thought of it before the war. Now it will be a referendum at gunpoint,” Kostyantyn, who worked in IT before the occupation, told Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer. A Russian soldier guards an area in Kherson as a replica of the Soviet victory banner marking the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II flies in the background. Photo: APA replica of the Soviet Victory Banner flies next to a World War II monument in the city of Kherson. Photo: Andrey Borodulin/AFP/Getty Images
Calls for a visa ban on Russia are growing
Thousands of Russians have flocked to Europe on short-term visas since the country invaded Ukraine, Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer report. Some have sought an escape from repression, while the summer has brought Russian tourists who simply want to escape to the beach. Now some European politicians are calling for an end to short-term visas that allow Russians to holiday in the EU as the war in Ukraine rages. “They need to see a free world,” said Ilya Krasilshchik, a Russian online publisher who has been threatened with prosecution in Russia for opposing the war and is currently in Europe. “The experience of the Soviet Union shows that closing borders does not lead to regime change.” The British son of a Russian businessman who holds a passport said wealthy Russians would likely find a way around any ban. “The elite will always find a way to get to Europe,” he said. “Many of my generation went to school here. We have lived long enough in the West to get residence permits or a second passport… There will always be gaps for those with money.”
title: “What Happened In The Russia Ukraine War This Week Stay Up To Date With Must Read News And Analysis Ukraine Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Linda Roseman”
‘I don’t see justice in this war’: Russian soldier reveals rot at core of Ukraine invasion
Pavel Filatiev knew the consequences of what he said. The former paratrooper understood that he risked prison, that he would be called a traitor and shunned by his former comrades. His own mother had urged him to get out of Russia as soon as he could. He said it anyway. “I see no justice in this war. I don’t see truth here,” he told Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer over a hidden coffee table in Moscow’s financial district. It was his first time personally sitting down with a reporter since returning from the war in Ukraine. Pavel Filatiev fled his homeland after publishing a 141-page account detailing his experiences on the front line. Photo: Egor Slizyak Two weeks ago, Filatyev published a 141-page bombshell: a daily account of how the paratrooper unit was sent to mainland Ukraine from Crimea to enter Kherson and seize the port. It is the most detailed volunteer account by a Russian soldier who participated in the invasion of Ukraine. Filatiev described how his depleted and poorly equipped unit invaded mainland Ukraine behind a hail of rockets in late February, with little in the way of logistics or targets, and no idea why the war was being fought. “It took me weeks to understand that there was no war on Russian soil at all and that we had just attacked Ukraine,” he said, his fingers shaking with anxiety as he lit another cigarette. “We were sitting under Mikolaiv’s artillery fire,” he explained. “At that point I already thought we’re out here doing bullshit, what the hell do we need this war for? And I really had this thought: “God, if I survive, then I’m going to do everything I can to stop this.”
Ukraine insinuates that it is behind the attack in Crimea
A series of mysterious and devastating strikes in occupied Crimea destroyed a key rail hub used to resupply Russian troops and a military airbase this week, Luke Harding reports. Smoke rises above an electrical transformer substation, which caught fire after an explosion in Dzhankoi, Crimea, on August 16. Photo: Taken from Reuters/Reuters Smoke billowed into the sky near Dzhankoi on Tuesday, while several explosions appeared to destroy a Russian ammunition depot and an electricity substation about 125 miles (200 kilometers) from the front line with Ukrainian forces. According to Russian media, a new explosion occurred at a military airfield in the village of Hvardeyskye, not far from the Crimean regional capital, Simferopol. While not officially claiming responsibility for the strike, Kiev officials reacted with glee on social media “The reasons for the explosions in the occupied territories can be different, very different, in particular, I quote the definition of the occupiers themselves, ‘bugs,’” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thought in an afternoon speech. Kyiv have beaten Crimea three times in a week, in clinical and flamboyant style. Russia’s logistics and weapons dumps have been badly affected. Smoke rises above the site of an explosion at a Russian ammunition depot in Crimea. Photo: AP
‘It’s madness’: Putin turns nuclear plant into front line
The situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is dangerous, Luke Harding and Christopher Cherry said from Nikopoli, the Ukrainian-controlled city 7 kilometers away on the opposite bank of the Dnieper River. The plant – Europe’s largest – is now on the front line between Russian-occupied and Ukrainian-controlled territory. Russia uses the sprawling area as a military base from which it bombards the nearby towns of Nikopol and Marhanets. According to Ukraine’s state energy company Energoatom, Russia has fired at the plant multiple times. The shells landed near the fire station and the director’s office, not far from a radioactive source storage facility. A Russian soldier stands guard near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant outside the Russian-controlled town of Enerhodar. Photo: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters The International Atomic Energy Agency requested access and called on the Russians to demilitarize it to avoid a potential nuclear disaster. A former senior official, who spoke to Luke Harding on the condition of anonymity, said the Russians were shelling the plant from surrounding villages and roads in a bid to raise the stakes in negotiations with Kyiv. But the Kremlin is also trying to do something unprecedented: steal another state’s nuclear reactor, he adds. Engineers are working to connect the facility to the power grid in occupied Crimea and cut it off from Ukrainian homes. One reactor has already been shut down. It’s a sinister game of radioactive Russian roulette, set in a country that experienced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv covered the moment Zelenskiy promised his forces would target Russian soldiers who fired at or from the plant. Russia is resorting to “covert nuclear blackmail,” Zelensky claimed. A “terrorist state”, threatened “the whole world” with Armageddon. He urged the UN and the international community to do something.
Ukraine aims to wreak havoc on Russian forces, adviser Zelenskiy says
Ukraine is engaged in a counteroffensive aimed at creating “chaos within Russian forces” by striking the attackers’ supply lines deep into the territory, according to a key adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Mykhailo Podolyak told Dan Sabbagh and Luke Harding that there could be more attacks in the “next two or three months” similar to those that hit Crimea. Speaking from the presidential offices in Kyiv, Podolyak said: “Our strategy is to destroy logistics, supply lines and ammunition depots and other items of military infrastructure. It creates chaos within their own forces.” Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, in the sandbagged corridors of the presidential administration building. Photo: Christopher Cherry/The Guardian The adviser, often described as the country’s third most powerful figure, said Kiev’s approach contrasted with Moscow’s use of blunt artillery power to gain territory in the Donbas region in the east, which has seen Russian troops to destroy cities like Mariupol and Severodonetsk. to gain ground. “So Russia has kind of taught everybody that a counterattack takes massive amounts of manpower like a giant fist and it just goes in one direction,” he said, but “a Ukrainian counterattack looks very different. We don’t use the tactics of the 60s and 70s, of the last century.”
“A referendum is not right”: occupied Kherson faces uncertain future
“A city with Russian history,” proclaim billboards across the Ukrainian city of Kherson, which has been occupied by the Russian army since the first days of March. Others display the Russian flag or quotes from Vladimir Putin. For the past five months, Moscow has appointed an occupation administration to run the Kherson region and ordered schools to teach the Russian curriculum. Locals are encouraged to apply for Russian passports to access pensions and other benefits. The next stage of the Kremlin’s plan is a referendum, to add a dubious sense of legitimacy to these events on the ground and create a pretext to bring Kherson and other occupied parts of southern Ukraine to Russia, using an updated version of Crimea of 2014 playbook. “You must remember that there was never any talk of a referendum in Kherson. no one thought of it before the war. Now it will be a referendum at gunpoint,” Kostyantyn, who worked in IT before the occupation, told Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer. A Russian soldier guards an area in Kherson as a replica of the Soviet victory banner marking the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II flies in the background. Photo: APA replica of the Soviet Victory Banner flies next to a World War II monument in the city of Kherson. Photo: Andrey Borodulin/AFP/Getty Images
Calls for a visa ban on Russia are growing
Thousands of Russians have flocked to Europe on short-term visas since the country invaded Ukraine, Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer report. Some have sought an escape from repression, while the summer has brought Russian tourists who simply want to escape to the beach. Now some European politicians are calling for an end to short-term visas that allow Russians to holiday in the EU as the war in Ukraine rages. “They need to see a free world,” said Ilya Krasilshchik, a Russian online publisher who has been threatened with prosecution in Russia for opposing the war and is currently in Europe. “The experience of the Soviet Union shows that closing borders does not lead to regime change.” The British son of a Russian businessman who holds a passport said wealthy Russians would likely find a way around any ban. “The elite will always find a way to get to Europe,” he said. “Many of my generation went to school here. We have lived long enough in the West to get residence permits or a second passport… There will always be gaps for those with money.”
title: “What Happened In The Russia Ukraine War This Week Stay Up To Date With Must Read News And Analysis Ukraine Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-03” author: “Glenn Baldridge”
‘I don’t see justice in this war’: Russian soldier reveals rot at core of Ukraine invasion
Pavel Filatiev knew the consequences of what he said. The former paratrooper understood that he risked prison, that he would be called a traitor and shunned by his former comrades. His own mother had urged him to get out of Russia as soon as he could. He said it anyway. “I see no justice in this war. I don’t see truth here,” he told Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer over a hidden coffee table in Moscow’s financial district. It was his first time personally sitting down with a reporter since returning from the war in Ukraine. Pavel Filatiev fled his homeland after publishing a 141-page account detailing his experiences on the front line. Photo: Egor Slizyak Two weeks ago, Filatyev published a 141-page bombshell: a daily account of how the paratrooper unit was sent to mainland Ukraine from Crimea to enter Kherson and seize the port. It is the most detailed volunteer account by a Russian soldier who participated in the invasion of Ukraine. Filatiev described how his depleted and poorly equipped unit invaded mainland Ukraine behind a hail of rockets in late February, with little in the way of logistics or targets, and no idea why the war was being fought. “It took me weeks to understand that there was no war on Russian soil at all and that we had just attacked Ukraine,” he said, his fingers shaking with anxiety as he lit another cigarette. “We were sitting under Mikolaiv’s artillery fire,” he explained. “At that point I already thought we’re out here doing bullshit, what the hell do we need this war for? And I really had this thought: “God, if I survive, then I’m going to do everything I can to stop this.”
Ukraine insinuates that it is behind the attack in Crimea
A series of mysterious and devastating strikes in occupied Crimea destroyed a key rail hub used to resupply Russian troops and a military airbase this week, Luke Harding reports. Smoke rises above an electrical transformer substation, which caught fire after an explosion in Dzhankoi, Crimea, on August 16. Photo: Taken from Reuters/Reuters Smoke billowed into the sky near Dzhankoi on Tuesday, while several explosions appeared to destroy a Russian ammunition depot and an electricity substation about 125 miles (200 kilometers) from the front line with Ukrainian forces. According to Russian media, a new explosion occurred at a military airfield in the village of Hvardeyskye, not far from the Crimean regional capital, Simferopol. While not officially claiming responsibility for the strike, Kiev officials reacted with glee on social media “The reasons for the explosions in the occupied territories can be different, very different, in particular, I quote the definition of the occupiers themselves, ‘bugs,’” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thought in an afternoon speech. Kyiv have beaten Crimea three times in a week, in clinical and flamboyant style. Russia’s logistics and weapons dumps have been badly affected. Smoke rises above the site of an explosion at a Russian ammunition depot in Crimea. Photo: AP
‘It’s madness’: Putin turns nuclear plant into front line
The situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is dangerous, Luke Harding and Christopher Cherry said from Nikopoli, the Ukrainian-controlled city 7 kilometers away on the opposite bank of the Dnieper River. The plant – Europe’s largest – is now on the front line between Russian-occupied and Ukrainian-controlled territory. Russia uses the sprawling area as a military base from which it bombards the nearby towns of Nikopol and Marhanets. According to Ukraine’s state energy company Energoatom, Russia has fired at the plant multiple times. The shells landed near the fire station and the director’s office, not far from a radioactive source storage facility. A Russian soldier stands guard near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant outside the Russian-controlled town of Enerhodar. Photo: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters The International Atomic Energy Agency requested access and called on the Russians to demilitarize it to avoid a potential nuclear disaster. A former senior official, who spoke to Luke Harding on the condition of anonymity, said the Russians were shelling the plant from surrounding villages and roads in a bid to raise the stakes in negotiations with Kyiv. But the Kremlin is also trying to do something unprecedented: steal another state’s nuclear reactor, he adds. Engineers are working to connect the facility to the power grid in occupied Crimea and cut it off from Ukrainian homes. One reactor has already been shut down. It’s a sinister game of radioactive Russian roulette, set in a country that experienced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv covered the moment Zelenskiy promised his forces would target Russian soldiers who fired at or from the plant. Russia is resorting to “covert nuclear blackmail,” Zelensky claimed. A “terrorist state”, threatened “the whole world” with Armageddon. He urged the UN and the international community to do something.
Ukraine aims to wreak havoc on Russian forces, adviser Zelenskiy says
Ukraine is engaged in a counteroffensive aimed at creating “chaos within Russian forces” by striking the attackers’ supply lines deep into the territory, according to a key adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Mykhailo Podolyak told Dan Sabbagh and Luke Harding that there could be more attacks in the “next two or three months” similar to those that hit Crimea. Speaking from the presidential offices in Kyiv, Podolyak said: “Our strategy is to destroy logistics, supply lines and ammunition depots and other items of military infrastructure. It creates chaos within their own forces.” Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, in the sandbagged corridors of the presidential administration building. Photo: Christopher Cherry/The Guardian The adviser, often described as the country’s third most powerful figure, said Kiev’s approach contrasted with Moscow’s use of blunt artillery power to gain territory in the Donbas region in the east, which has seen Russian troops to destroy cities like Mariupol and Severodonetsk. to gain ground. “So Russia has kind of taught everybody that a counterattack takes massive amounts of manpower like a giant fist and it just goes in one direction,” he said, but “a Ukrainian counterattack looks very different. We don’t use the tactics of the 60s and 70s, of the last century.”
“A referendum is not right”: occupied Kherson faces uncertain future
“A city with Russian history,” proclaim billboards across the Ukrainian city of Kherson, which has been occupied by the Russian army since the first days of March. Others display the Russian flag or quotes from Vladimir Putin. For the past five months, Moscow has appointed an occupation administration to run the Kherson region and ordered schools to teach the Russian curriculum. Locals are encouraged to apply for Russian passports to access pensions and other benefits. The next stage of the Kremlin’s plan is a referendum, to add a dubious sense of legitimacy to these events on the ground and create a pretext to bring Kherson and other occupied parts of southern Ukraine to Russia, using an updated version of Crimea of 2014 playbook. “You must remember that there was never any talk of a referendum in Kherson. no one thought of it before the war. Now it will be a referendum at gunpoint,” Kostyantyn, who worked in IT before the occupation, told Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer. A Russian soldier guards an area in Kherson as a replica of the Soviet victory banner marking the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II flies in the background. Photo: APA replica of the Soviet Victory Banner flies next to a World War II monument in the city of Kherson. Photo: Andrey Borodulin/AFP/Getty Images
Calls for a visa ban on Russia are growing
Thousands of Russians have flocked to Europe on short-term visas since the country invaded Ukraine, Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer report. Some have sought an escape from repression, while the summer has brought Russian tourists who simply want to escape to the beach. Now some European politicians are calling for an end to short-term visas that allow Russians to holiday in the EU as the war in Ukraine rages. “They need to see a free world,” said Ilya Krasilshchik, a Russian online publisher who has been threatened with prosecution in Russia for opposing the war and is currently in Europe. “The experience of the Soviet Union shows that closing borders does not lead to regime change.” The British son of a Russian businessman who holds a passport said wealthy Russians would likely find a way around any ban. “The elite will always find a way to get to Europe,” he said. “Many of my generation went to school here. We have lived long enough in the West to get residence permits or a second passport… There will always be gaps for those with money.”
title: “What Happened In The Russia Ukraine War This Week Stay Up To Date With Must Read News And Analysis Ukraine Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-10-25” author: “Joey Alexander”
‘I don’t see justice in this war’: Russian soldier reveals rot at core of Ukraine invasion
Pavel Filatiev knew the consequences of what he said. The former paratrooper understood that he risked prison, that he would be called a traitor and shunned by his former comrades. His own mother had urged him to get out of Russia as soon as he could. He said it anyway. “I see no justice in this war. I don’t see truth here,” he told Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer over a hidden coffee table in Moscow’s financial district. It was his first time personally sitting down with a reporter since returning from the war in Ukraine. Pavel Filatiev fled his homeland after publishing a 141-page account detailing his experiences on the front line. Photo: Egor Slizyak Two weeks ago, Filatyev published a 141-page bombshell: a daily account of how the paratrooper unit was sent to mainland Ukraine from Crimea to enter Kherson and seize the port. It is the most detailed volunteer account by a Russian soldier who participated in the invasion of Ukraine. Filatiev described how his depleted and poorly equipped unit invaded mainland Ukraine behind a hail of rockets in late February, with little in the way of logistics or targets, and no idea why the war was being fought. “It took me weeks to understand that there was no war on Russian soil at all and that we had just attacked Ukraine,” he said, his fingers shaking with anxiety as he lit another cigarette. “We were sitting under Mikolaiv’s artillery fire,” he explained. “At that point I already thought we’re out here doing bullshit, what the hell do we need this war for? And I really had this thought: “God, if I survive, then I’m going to do everything I can to stop this.”
Ukraine insinuates that it is behind the attack in Crimea
A series of mysterious and devastating strikes in occupied Crimea destroyed a key rail hub used to resupply Russian troops and a military airbase this week, Luke Harding reports. Smoke rises above an electrical transformer substation, which caught fire after an explosion in Dzhankoi, Crimea, on August 16. Photo: Taken from Reuters/Reuters Smoke billowed into the sky near Dzhankoi on Tuesday, while several explosions appeared to destroy a Russian ammunition depot and an electricity substation about 125 miles (200 kilometers) from the front line with Ukrainian forces. According to Russian media, a new explosion occurred at a military airfield in the village of Hvardeyskye, not far from the Crimean regional capital, Simferopol. While not officially claiming responsibility for the strike, Kiev officials reacted with glee on social media “The reasons for the explosions in the occupied territories can be different, very different, in particular, I quote the definition of the occupiers themselves, ‘bugs,’” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thought in an afternoon speech. Kyiv have beaten Crimea three times in a week, in clinical and flamboyant style. Russia’s logistics and weapons dumps have been badly affected. Smoke rises above the site of an explosion at a Russian ammunition depot in Crimea. Photo: AP
‘It’s madness’: Putin turns nuclear plant into front line
The situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is dangerous, Luke Harding and Christopher Cherry said from Nikopoli, the Ukrainian-controlled city 7 kilometers away on the opposite bank of the Dnieper River. The plant – Europe’s largest – is now on the front line between Russian-occupied and Ukrainian-controlled territory. Russia uses the sprawling area as a military base from which it bombards the nearby towns of Nikopol and Marhanets. According to Ukraine’s state energy company Energoatom, Russia has fired at the plant multiple times. The shells landed near the fire station and the director’s office, not far from a radioactive source storage facility. A Russian soldier stands guard near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant outside the Russian-controlled town of Enerhodar. Photo: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters The International Atomic Energy Agency requested access and called on the Russians to demilitarize it to avoid a potential nuclear disaster. A former senior official, who spoke to Luke Harding on the condition of anonymity, said the Russians were shelling the plant from surrounding villages and roads in a bid to raise the stakes in negotiations with Kyiv. But the Kremlin is also trying to do something unprecedented: steal another state’s nuclear reactor, he adds. Engineers are working to connect the facility to the power grid in occupied Crimea and cut it off from Ukrainian homes. One reactor has already been shut down. It’s a sinister game of radioactive Russian roulette, set in a country that experienced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv covered the moment Zelenskiy promised his forces would target Russian soldiers who fired at or from the plant. Russia is resorting to “covert nuclear blackmail,” Zelensky claimed. A “terrorist state”, threatened “the whole world” with Armageddon. He urged the UN and the international community to do something.
Ukraine aims to wreak havoc on Russian forces, adviser Zelenskiy says
Ukraine is engaged in a counteroffensive aimed at creating “chaos within Russian forces” by striking the attackers’ supply lines deep into the territory, according to a key adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Mykhailo Podolyak told Dan Sabbagh and Luke Harding that there could be more attacks in the “next two or three months” similar to those that hit Crimea. Speaking from the presidential offices in Kyiv, Podolyak said: “Our strategy is to destroy logistics, supply lines and ammunition depots and other items of military infrastructure. It creates chaos within their own forces.” Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, in the sandbagged corridors of the presidential administration building. Photo: Christopher Cherry/The Guardian The adviser, often described as the country’s third most powerful figure, said Kiev’s approach contrasted with Moscow’s use of blunt artillery power to gain territory in the Donbas region in the east, which has seen Russian troops to destroy cities like Mariupol and Severodonetsk. to gain ground. “So Russia has kind of taught everybody that a counterattack takes massive amounts of manpower like a giant fist and it just goes in one direction,” he said, but “a Ukrainian counterattack looks very different. We don’t use the tactics of the 60s and 70s, of the last century.”
“A referendum is not right”: occupied Kherson faces uncertain future
“A city with Russian history,” proclaim billboards across the Ukrainian city of Kherson, which has been occupied by the Russian army since the first days of March. Others display the Russian flag or quotes from Vladimir Putin. For the past five months, Moscow has appointed an occupation administration to run the Kherson region and ordered schools to teach the Russian curriculum. Locals are encouraged to apply for Russian passports to access pensions and other benefits. The next stage of the Kremlin’s plan is a referendum, to add a dubious sense of legitimacy to these events on the ground and create a pretext to bring Kherson and other occupied parts of southern Ukraine to Russia, using an updated version of Crimea of 2014 playbook. “You must remember that there was never any talk of a referendum in Kherson. no one thought of it before the war. Now it will be a referendum at gunpoint,” Kostyantyn, who worked in IT before the occupation, told Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer. A Russian soldier guards an area in Kherson as a replica of the Soviet victory banner marking the 77th anniversary of the end of World War II flies in the background. Photo: APA replica of the Soviet Victory Banner flies next to a World War II monument in the city of Kherson. Photo: Andrey Borodulin/AFP/Getty Images
Calls for a visa ban on Russia are growing
Thousands of Russians have flocked to Europe on short-term visas since the country invaded Ukraine, Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer report. Some have sought an escape from repression, while the summer has brought Russian tourists who simply want to escape to the beach. Now some European politicians are calling for an end to short-term visas that allow Russians to holiday in the EU as the war in Ukraine rages. “They need to see a free world,” said Ilya Krasilshchik, a Russian online publisher who has been threatened with prosecution in Russia for opposing the war and is currently in Europe. “The experience of the Soviet Union shows that closing borders does not lead to regime change.” The British son of a Russian businessman who holds a passport said wealthy Russians would likely find a way around any ban. “The elite will always find a way to get to Europe,” he said. “Many of my generation went to school here. We have lived long enough in the West to get residence permits or a second passport… There will always be gaps for those with money.”
