Nine-year-old Artem Panchenko helps his grandmother stoke a smoky fire in a makeshift outdoor kitchen beside their nearly abandoned apartment block. The light is falling fast and they need to eat before the setting sun plunges their home into cold and darkness.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been packing Russia’s front lines with demoralized men with little to no military training and scant gear as he scrambles to sustain his military campaign amid mounting battlefield casualties.
Russia has approximately 300 Iranian drones left in its arsenal but plans to buy thousands more, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on Friday evening, even as on Sunday morning Iranian officials continued to deny the sale of any weapons to Moscow for use in the invasion of Ukraine.
A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin
For three years, my workdays began the same way. At 7:30 a.m., I woke up, checked the news, and drove to work at the Russian mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva. The routine was easy and predictable, two of the hallmarks of life as a Russian diplomat.
The difficult reality is that we may never know what would push Putin to make the decision to go nuclear…. The U.S. objective should be to deter him: make the potential cost to him so high that it would be suicidal for him even to try.
The clearest and most welcome statement was made by Biden himself in March: he stated, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
“While the majority of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Parliament chants ‘Death to America’ & supports the Khamenei loyal police for their barbaric actions the leader of the free world (Joe Biden) is silent. Why?” — Iranian Americans for Liberty, Twitter, October 2, 2022.
Nika Shakarami, a 17-year-old girl, was one of the many women who was arrested for burning her hijab. According to the forensic doctor, she was repeatedly raped, beaten and her dead body was delivered to her family with smashed nose and broken skull.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the energy ministry to work on building a gas hub in Turkey following talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the issue, NTV and other news channels reported on Friday.
The European Peace Facility (EPF), the EU’s off-budget fund to replace member states’ arms donations provided to Ukraine, is struggling to cover the bulk of incoming reimbursement requests, EURACTIV has learnt.
ON OCTOBER 10th more than 300 towns and cities across Ukraine were hit with the largest Russian air bombardment since the early days of the war. It was a suitably grisly way of marking the promotion of Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s new overall commander in Ukraine. Nicknamed “General Armageddon” by his colleagues, he has a fearsome reputation hardened over decades. General Surovikin is believed to have directed the war for months—but his formal appointment on October 8th marks a cruel new chapter. Who is he, and what does his promotion reveal about the Russian invasion?
How Putin’s War Has Hurt Russia in Central Asia and the Caucasus
The Kremlin has struggled to contain the fallout of its invasion of Ukraine. It did not imagine that its war would inspire sustained unity among Western countries, nor that the Ukrainian army would resist so well, nor that it would need to partly mobilize the Russian population, a drastic measure with potentially disastrous domestic consequences. A war intended to restore Russian strength has instead left the country weaker.