Paris and Berlin “will support Ukraine until the end” of the conflict, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Friday, traveling to Germany. Earlier in the week, Washington had said the same, accompanying its words with $400 million in additional aid. Ditto on the side of the United Kingdom, when Emmanuel Macron estimated Wednesday on Twitter that “any strike against civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime and cannot go unpunished”. In short, this week again the international community assured kyiv of its support. But over there, on the spot, the cold is there, weakening troops and morale, while the Kremlin continues to spray the country with cruise missiles. Russia will “achieve its objectives” in Ukraine, even dropped Vladimir Putin to conclude the week, which ends this Friday, on the 275th day of conflict.
Keep Bakhmout and Crimea at all costs
Kherson is liberated, kyiv shelled and without electricity. On the ground, despite the setbacks, Moscow is not giving up to the point of firing a rain of 70 cruise missiles this week, ensuring that it is only targeting military infrastructure. In the South, Crimea remains strongly controlled by the Russian forces on the spot “on alert”. The Ukrainian peninsula was targeted by a drone attack on Tuesday. The second in a few weeks. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and bases its Black Sea Fleet there. kyiv aims to reconquer it and continues to recover territories in the neighboring region of Kherson.
Elsewhere on the front, Ukrainians and Russians clashed Tuesday on the tip of Kinbourne, a piece of land nestled at the tip of the left bank of the Dnieper in southern Ukraine, south of Mikolaiv, according to Ukrainian authorities.
Finally, in Bakhmout, the Russian paramilitary group Wagner is not disarming “despite all military logic”, according to our colleagues from France Info. The city located north of Donetsk, emptied of most of its 70,000 inhabitants, is now 60% destroyed, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kirilenko. There, Wagner is said to have recruited “with a vengeance in the prisons, dangling amnesties and high salaries”. “They are used as cannon fodder,” explains Dimitri Minic, researcher at the French Institute of International Relations. Still, “Wagner’s relentlessness seems futile” and that the capture of Bakhmout would not change anything in the operational situation in the region, according to the experts: “His capture would simply be a pinhole in the Ukrainian system. »
Count the dead and victims of the cold
There are civilian victims, of course. Their numbers have been increasing since February 24 and the start of what Moscow still calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine. And, as of Friday, patients from Kherson hospitals were still being evacuated due to “constant” Russian strikes, according to the governor. The day before, at least 11 people had been killed and 50 injured in a Russian bombardment on Kherson. On Wednesday, three others were killed and six others injured in kyiv. The same day, in Zaporozhye, the Ukrainian emergency services announced the death of a newborn, killed by a Russian strike on a maternity hospital.
And then there are these millions of Ukrainians, including nearly half of the inhabitants of kyiv, still without power for days or even weeks, in temperatures that have become wintery. In her kyiv apartment, where the gas for cooking and heating has been disconnected, Albina Bilogoub explained that her children now all sleep in one room to keep warm: “It’s our life. A sweater, then a second, a third. We live like that now. This strategy by Moscow to bomb energy infrastructure, carried out since October against the backdrop of military setbacks, has been denounced as “war crimes” by kyiv’s Western allies and as a “crime against humanity” by the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Visiting Ukraine on Friday, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly also announced new humanitarian aid to Ukrainians who have been suffering for nine months now, including ambulances and “support” for “survivors of sexual violence perpetrated by the Russian army.
Threatening if oil prices are capped
In the middle of the week, Vladimir Putin warned of “serious consequences” in the event of a cap on the price of Russian oil, while the countries in favor of such a measure must soon announce their decision. “Such actions run counter to the principles of trade relations and will most likely lead to serious consequences for the global energy market,” the Russian president said in a phone call with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Chia. al-Sudani, according to a Kremlin statement.
The coalition of states, which includes the G7, the European Union and Australia, has indeed indicated that it wishes to impose a cap on the price of Russian oil and that it will announce the limit envisaged “in the coming days”. . The objective is to arrive at a maximum price for Russian hydrocarbons that can be put in place before the entry into force of new European sanctions, planned from December 5.
Capping the price of oil sold by Russia should make it possible to reduce its financial resources and thus its ability to continue the offensive in Ukraine, but also to contain the rise in energy prices. However, this price must remain higher than the production price, to encourage Russia to continue selling it.
Cut the valves of the power plants
The three nuclear power plants of Khmelnytsky and Rivne (West) and that of Pivdennoukrainsk (South) were disconnected on Wednesday by the automatic protection system following Russian strikes that hit many Ukrainian electrical installations. The three power plants under kyiv’s control, which can be seen on the map above, could be reconnected to the electricity grid as of Thursday, the Ministry of Energy announced on Telegram on Thursday, specifying that these installations should start delivering electricity by “tonight”.
Across the country, “the situation is generally difficult” but in some regions, “the supply of electricity has already increased”, assured Minister German Galouchchenko quoted in the press release from his ministry. According to him, “critical infrastructure across the country” has been able to be reconnected to the electricity grid.
Russia fired more than 70 cruise missiles into Ukraine on Wednesday, deepening the energy crisis after weeks of bombardment that particularly targeted energy infrastructure. According to the Ministry of Energy, these strikes left without electricity “the vast majority of consumers” in the country, which had around 40 million inhabitants before the start of the Russian invasion launched on February 24.