The New York Times reports: Friday afternoons at the Chop-Chop Barbershop in central Moscow used to be busy, but at the beginning of a recent weekend, only one of the four chairs was occupied. “We would usually be full right now, but about half of our customers have gone,” said the manager, a woman named Olya. Many of the clients — along with half of the barbers, too — have fled Russia to avoid President Vladimir V. Putin’s campaign to…
The Intercept reports: In September, a video surfaced online apparently showing Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman and close associate of Vladimir Putin, speaking to a group of incarcerated men in the yard of a Russian prison. Prigozhin was encouraging them to join the Wagner Group, the infamous mercenary organization he founded, and fight in Ukraine as a way out of prison. The video signaled Prigozhin’s first apparent confirmation that he does, in fact, control Wagner. While Prigozhin had been known…
Reuters reports: Ukraine said Russia had destroyed almost a third of its power stations over the past week as Moscow stepped up a pre-winter campaign to strike infrastructure, a move the West says is a calculated attempt to disrupt and demoralise. Missiles struck power generating facilities in a clutch of Ukrainian cities home to millions of people and several people were killed. Moscow acknowledged targeting energy plants, while Ukraine said water infrastructure had also been hit. “The situation is critical…
The New York Times reports: The Iranian-made drones that Russia sent on Monday to divebomb Ukraine’s capital delivered the most emphatic proof yet that Tehran has become a rare, increasingly close ally to the Kremlin, offering both weapons and international support that Russia sorely lacks. There is no deep love between Russia, newly a pariah for attacking another country, and Iran, for decades one of the most strategically isolated nations in the world. But the two authoritarian governments, both chafing…
The Guardian reports: Germany’s interior minister has sacked the country’s cybersecurity chief, after allegations he had turned a blind eye to a firm with links to Russian security circles. Arne Schönbohm, the president of the German Federal Office for Information Security, was released from his duties with immediate effect on Tuesday, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported, citing security sources. A spokesperson for the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, confirmed that Schönbohm would be barred from his office, as “necessary public…
Politico‘s Maura Reynolds: We’ve recently had Elon Musk step into this conflict trying to promote discussion of peace settlements. What do you make of the role that he’s playing? Hill: It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and…
The Washington Post reports: Police and military officers swooped down on a Moscow business center this week unannounced. They were looking for men to fight in Ukraine — and they seized nearly every one they saw. Some musicians, rehearsing. A courier there to deliver a parcel. A man from a Moscow service agency, very drunk, in his mid-50s, with a walking disability. “I have no idea why they took him,” said Alexei, who, like dozens of others in the office…
Mick Ryan writes: Since the beginning of their invasion, Russia’s military has been forced by the Ukrainians to continually re-assess their strategic objectives. This is not unusual in warfare. While political objectives shape how war is conducted and what battles are fought, so too do battles reshape political objectives. The Ukrainian resistance, and their defeat of the Russians in the north of the country early in the war, have unhinged the Russian overall campaign for Ukraine. This has been the…
The Guardian reports: Russian soldiers have shot dead a Ukrainian musician in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson, according to the culture ministry in Kyiv. Conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko declined to take part in a concert “intended by the occupiers to demonstrate the so-called ‘improvement of peaceful life’ in Kherson”, the ministry said in a statement on its Facebook page. The concert on 1 October was intended to feature the Gileya chamber orchestra,…
The New York Times reports: Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX, abruptly reversed himself on Saturday, saying that his company would continue to fund the operation of the Starlink internet service in Ukraine, where it has become a digital lifeline for both soldiers and civilians. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, drew criticism on Friday when he said on Twitter that his company could not “indefinitely” fund Ukraine’s use of Starlink. The service has been crucial for the…
The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk said Friday that his space company could not keep funding the Starlink satellite service that has kept Ukraine and its military online during the war, and he suggested he was pulling free internet after a Ukrainian ambassador insulted him on Twitter. A Starlink cutoff would cripple the Ukrainian military’s main mode of communication and potentially hamstring its defenses by giving a major advantage to Russia, which has sought to jam signals and phone service…
Laura Thornton writes: When Tesla chief executive Elon Musk tweeted his support for Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine, he used some highly revealing language. Crimea should be Russian, he tweeted, because of “Krushchev’s mistake”—a reference to Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev’s redrawing of internal Soviet borders. That particular wording has never been part of the U.S. debate about Ukraine, but it is the standard language used by the Kremlin for its claims on Ukrainian land. It’s not the only talking point Musk…
John McLaughlin writes: In October 1989, I was in what was then West Germany. It was one month before the Berlin Wall was breached — a stunning moment that would lead in short order to the collapse of communist East Germany and the reunification of the German state less than a year later. In hindsight, the discussions I had in West Germany that fall were almost as remarkable as the globe-changing events that followed; every German leader I met with…
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, former defense minister of Ukraine, writes: For too long, the global democratic coalition supporting Kyiv has focused on what it should not do in the invasion of Ukraine. Its main aims include not letting Ukraine lose and not letting Russian President Vladimir Putin win—but also not allowing the war to escalate to a point where Russia attacks a NATO country or conducts a nuclear strike. These, however, are less goals than vague intentions, and they reflect the West’s…
The New York Times reports: In just two days this week, Russian forces fired more than 100 cruise missiles and dozens of exploding drones at cities across Ukraine, far more than the nation’s aging air defenses were ever expected to encounter. And yet fewer than half made it to their targets, Ukrainian officials say. Ukraine’s success in knocking down those projectiles, and the death and destruction caused wherever missiles slipped through, has reinvigorated calls by officials in Kyiv for Western…
The Associated Press reports: Olga Lopatkina paced around her basement in circles like a trapped animal. For more than a week, the Ukrainian mother had heard nothing from her six adopted children stranded in Mariupol, and she was going out of her mind with worry. The kids had spent their vacation at a resort in the port city, as usual. But this time war with Russia had broken out, and her little ones — always terrified of the dark —…