Heavy fighting continued in eastern Ukraine, but the course of the front hardly changed. According to British experts, however, Russia is preparing for further setbacks. New Russian defense lines are even being built in Crimea. In Poland, meanwhile, further rocket attacks are expected. The 268th day of the war at a glance.
Heavy fighting in the Donbass – front line is stagnating
In the Donbass coal and steel region in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian troops are fighting fiercely, with the front line hardly changing at the moment. The Ukrainian General Staff reported artillery and tank shelling on villages such as Vodyane, Krasnohorivka and Maryinka near the town of Avdiivka. The Kiev information was not independently verifiable, but in this case it was consistent with reports from Russian military bloggers. According to the situation report of the Ukrainian general staff, another focus of the fighting is the region around the city of Bakhmut. There, Ukrainian positions were fired on with tanks, mortars, tube and rocket artillery. Here, too, the course of the front has remained practically unchanged for months.
There was also heavy artillery fire on the Kupyansk front. This important railway junction in the Kharkiv region was recaptured in September’s rapid advance by the Ukrainian army. Since then, however, the Ukrainians have made little progress towards the east. According to local authorities, Russian troops fired at a village in the Zaporizhia region at night with the S-300 system missiles, which were actually intended for anti-aircraft defense. A building was destroyed but no one was injured.
Russia is digging trenches in Crimea
Russian authorities begin building defense lines on Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, annexed in 2014. The fortifications were intended to guarantee the “safety of the Crimean residents,” said Moscow’s head of administration, Sergey Aksyonov, at a meeting of the Crimean administration. First and foremost, however, security should be guaranteed in the part of the adjacent Cherson region that is still occupied by Russians. From there a narrow isthmus leads to the Crimea. At the end of last week, the Russian occupation cleared the right bank of the Dnipro River and with it the regional capital, Cherson.
London: Russia prepares for setbacks
According to British military experts, new Russian trenches are also being built near the Crimean border and the Seversky Donets River between the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. London sees this as evidence that Russia is preparing for further setbacks in Ukraine. This emerges from the daily intelligence update from the Ministry of Defense in London. According to the report, after withdrawing from the western bank of the Dnipro River, Russian forces in most of the country they occupied are focusing on regrouping and making defensive arrangements.
“Some of the sites are up to 60 kilometers behind the current front line, suggesting that Russian planners are making preparations in the event of further major Ukrainian breakthroughs,” the London statement said. However, it is also likely that Russia will try to redeploy some of the troops withdrawn from the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson to reinforce its offensive operations near the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.
Millions of Ukrainians without electricity
Russian missile attacks appear to be damaging Ukraine’s power grid even more than previously known. “Almost half of our energy system has failed,” Prime Minister Denys Schmyhal said, according to the Unian news agency. Ukraine therefore needs additional support from the European Union in the field of energy and also financially.
Poland expects more rocket hits
After the fatal rocket hit on Polish territory, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda expects more incidents of this kind. “Unfortunately, we have to be prepared in a certain sense for the fact that accidents as a result of the war can happen again on our border,” said Duda. Poland will do everything to ensure that this does not happen. But unfortunately it is impossible to protect yourself from an event like the rocket impact, Duda continued. Military experts explained to him that no anti-missile defense system would have been able to intercept this projectile on Polish territory because there was not enough time.
Russia accuses Ukraine of executions
The Russian Foreign Ministry has accused Ukraine of executing Russian prisoners of war by shooting them in the head. Referring to a video circulating on Russian social media, it said it showed “the deliberate and methodical killing of more than 10 immobilized Russian soldiers by degenerate Ukrainian troops with direct shots to the head.” The recording shows the “disgusting nature” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his regime. The authenticity of the video could not be verified, and the Ukrainian government has not issued a statement. In fact, in the video, scores of Russian soldiers surrendered and lay hands up in front of a building where they had previously been hiding. Then another Russian soldier stepped out of the building and opened fire on the Ukrainian soldiers. They returned fire, apparently killing both the attacker and the Russian soldiers who had previously surrendered. Whether the latter were actually executed afterwards or died in the exchange of fire cannot be clarified.
Melnyk is Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister
The former Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, has been appointed Deputy Foreign Minister. This decision was made by the Cabinet of Ministers in Kyiv, Ukrainian media reported, citing government representative in Parliament Taras Melnychuk.
In the morning, Melnyk had sent a message from snowy Kyiv to underline the seriousness of the situation for Ukrainians in view of the snowfall and the Russian missile offensive. The politician, who is now working in the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine, addressed this directly to Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “Morning, Mr. Chancellor from Kyiv,” he tweeted with a selfie showing him in front of a snow-covered park bench. “It’s minus 5 degrees.” One in four of his compatriots, ten million Ukrainians, remained without electricity and water. “Don’t you want to give Mr. Putin an ultimatum to stop his rocket terror? Or wait until it’s too late and all Ukrainians freeze to death?”
Spare parts for delivered German tank howitzers are missing
Planning errors when ordering spare parts are increasingly jeopardizing the operational readiness of the German self-propelled howitzers in the Ukraine. After the delivery of a total of 14 self-propelled howitzers 2000, the Federal Ministry of Defense apparently failed to order spare parts packages in time to regularly repair the weapon systems, reports the “Spiegel” in its current issue. Most of the systems are now in need of repair due to intensive use at the front in eastern Ukraine. True, recently six German howitzers were brought to Lithuania for overhaul. However, since the necessary spare parts were not available either from industry or from the Bundeswehr, the technicians had to cannibalize one of the howitzers and leave it in Lithuania.
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