Ukraine will become a Nato member subject to reforms, says secretary general
Ukraine will become a member of Nato, the military alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said.
Allies agree that Ukraine will become a member of Nato. At [the Nato-Ukraine] meeting, we will agree recommendations for Ukrainians … reforms, as we continue to support Kiev on this path to Nato membership.
This month Germany and the Netherlands pledged €10bn for Ukraine, he added. Romania added a F16 training centre for Ukrainian pilots. Allies including the US and Finland are sending more air defences and ammunition to protect Ukrainian cities from Russian attacks.
Stoltenberg also said that Sweden’s pending Nato membership “will make us all safer” and he called on Turkey and Hungary to complete its ratifications.
Key events
AFP has the following dispatch from Avdiivka, a town in Ukraine‘s eastern region of Donetsk, which has become the focus of the fighting amid a Russian assault on the strategically important former coal hub.
The only signs of life are a few chirping birds and barking dogs. The crump of explosions, some far away, some closer to home, is constant. Avdiivka has faced incessant attacks from Russian forces looking to surround and seize it.
Only around 1,350 people still live there, compared to 30,000 before the war. Russian troops hold large parts of the town just outside Donetsk – the regional capital under Russian occupation. The Ukrainians still defend an area approximately eight kilometres wide, from the city to the northwest.
In Avdiivka, there remains a solitary humanitarian aid centre, open in the basement of an uninhabited building and equipped with a generator. Each day, residents come to get warm, have a chat, a cup of coffee and charge their phones.
Until this summer Oksana worked as an executive in Ukraine‘s largest coking and chemical plant – a 340-hectares (850 acres) on the north side of Avdiivka. Only a handful of employees remain out of a pre-conflict workforce of 4,000. The Russians have moved in closer and taken up positions within sight of the plant’s tall chimneys. Ukrainian soldiers are still dug in defending the site. Oksana does not want to leave.
“We’ve spent 30 years investing everything we have in our house,” she said. “I shall be 50 on January 1. Why should I start again from scratch somewhere else?”
Ukrainian estimates of almost 1,000 Russian casualties a day in November ‘plausible’, says UK
The UK ministry of defence has described as “plausible” Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties running at a daily average of almost 1,000 in November.
This would, on the face of it, make November 2023 one of the most difficult months for Russian forces, with many of its losses coming from its assault on Avdiivka. The publication of the figures also betrays some bias without any comparative estimates on Ukrainian losses.
Ukraine’s national security adviser has claimed that Russia has instructed a network of its spies in Ukraine to destabilise society.
“They realise they cannot win this militarily so attempts at internal destabilisation have become the priority,” he said in an interview with the Times.
We made a big mistake in 1991 when we didn’t close down the KGB but just changed its name to SBU and the metastases of the KGB remained.
We are all adults here. Unfortunately, we recognise that we have not been able to clean up all of the security systems. So of course there are traitors that exist there. The fact that there is an ongoing trial over Oleh Kulinich [the former head of the SBU in Crimea] on charges of high treason is a solid proof of that.
Danilov wrote last week for the online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda: “The perfect situation for Russia and Putin is for Ukraine to return to the state of ungovernability and complete anarchy that it experienced in 1917-1921, when the war was waged from within and without.
“These measures pursue the goal of creating a critically negative public backdrop, sowing despondency and depression, increasing the number of those willing to compromise and reducing those who are confident of victory — ultimately leading to a coup d’état.”
One person killed and almost half a million left without power after storm in Black Sea area, says Russian news agency
Almost half a million people have been left without power and one person was killed after a storm in the Black Sea area flooded roads, ripped up trees and took down power lines in Crimea, the Russian state news agency Tass has said.
The storm also hit southern Russia and sent waves flooding into the beach resort of Sochi, blew the roof off a five-storey building in Anapa and damaged homes and schools in Kuban, the state news agency said.
It was part of a weather front that earlier left one person dead and hundreds of places without electricity amid heavy snowfall and strong blizzards in Romania and Moldova yesterday, reports AP.
The storm prompted several Crimean regions to declare a state of emergency after it became the strongest recorded in the past 16 years with wind speeds reaching 144km per hour, Tatyana Lyubetskaya, a Russia-installed official at the Crimean environmental monitoring department, told Tass.
The government in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, told people to stay at home today and closed government offices including schools and hospitals as strong winds are still expected.
The head of one Crimean region, Natalia Pisareva, said everyone in the Chernomorske area of western Crimea had lost water supply as well as central heating because pumping stations had lost power. There were also reports of a problem with a gas pipeline in Saky, western Crimea.
A storm has left more than two thousand towns and villages in war-torn Ukraine without power on Monday, the government has said, piling pressure on the country’s fragile power grid.
The energy infrastructure has been targeted systematically by Russian forces and Kyiv has warned that Moscow is preparing fresh strikes on key facilities this winter.
“In total, 2,019 settlements in 16 regions are cut off from the grid,” the interior ministry said. In the southern city of Odesa, which has been subjected to repeated Russian strikes, authorities said they had helped 1,624 people who had been trapped due to snow.
Regional authorities said the temperature had fallen to below freezing with reports of gusts of up to 72 kilometres an hour, reports AFP.
Yekaterina Duntsova, who wants to run for Russian president, said the Kremlin should end the conflict in Ukraine, free political prisoners and undertake major reform to halt the slide towards a new era of “barbed wire” division between Russia and the West.
Nearly 32 years since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union stoked hopes that Russia would blossom into an open democracy, Duntsova, 40, said she was afraid as she spoke to Reuters in Moscow.
“Fear is present but it is conscious,” said Duntsova, who this month announced she wanted to run for president in the March 2024 election. “Any sane person taking this step would be afraid – but fear must not win.”
She said she had to choose her words carefully given laws which can be used to prosecute those criticising what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation”, and that she had been warned about speaking too much to foreign correspondents.
The divorced former regional TV journalist who has three children refused to use the word “war” to describe the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two due to Russian law. “Sooner or later every armed conflict ends, and I hope that it ends as soon as possible,” Duntsova said. “The people are very tired of what is going on. But that weariness is not voiced.”
Duntsova needs to collect 300,000 signatures to be allowed to stand. Russian state media ignore her.
Yekaterina Duntsova, a 40-year-old journalist and single mother of 3 from Rzhev, announced her bid for Russian presidency last week. “I am not scared because my family and loved ones are supporting me. They are ready, so I am ready too,” she told me. https://t.co/y9oTgz9Mie
— Leyla Latypova (@LatypovaLeyla) November 22, 2023
Exports of civilian goods used by military to Russia from Turkey increasing
Exports to Russia from Turkey of civilian goods used by the military such as microchips and telescopic sights are increasing, causing concern to the US and the EU, which seeks to prevent such items entering the country.
The Financial Times reports that over the first nine months of this year, Turkey reported $158m of exports of such “high-priority” goods to Russia and former Soviet countries suspected of being conduits to Moscow – far above 2022.
Brian Nelson, the US Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, is to visit Turkey this week to discuss “efforts to prevent, disrupt, and investigate trade and financial activity that benefit the Russian effort in its war against Ukraine”.
“With some of the third-party countries like Turkey, we’re really at a weaker enforcement position than we’d ultimately like to be,” Emily Kilcrease, a former deputy assistant US trade representative, told the FT. “We really have to lean on those countries to take enforcement actions in their own jurisdictions, to get at the specific entities that are facilitating the trans-shipment.”
Kilcrease added that if Turkey did not make changes, then “the US and its partners are going to have to take enforcement action”.
Charlotte Higgins
Daniil Melnyk is one of up to 50,000 Ukrainians who have lost limbs during the Russian invasion. With photographer Marta Syrko, he is sharing his story to battle stigma around disability.
Official figures put the number of Ukrainians who have undergone amputations at 20,000 since the start of the full-scale invasion, though experts on the ground suspect the real figure is much higher, perhaps as many as 50,000.
The numbers are edging towards those of the first world war (historians estimate that 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had amputations between 1914 and 1918). The scale of what is happening is obvious on the streets of Ukraine’s cities. And yet, Syrko noticed that this reality was not being reflected in the Ukrainian media.
Jon Ungoed-Thomas
Many of the countries that have sanctioned Russia over the war in Ukraine need to take urgent action to disrupt the supply of technology for its electronic warfare campaign, according to a report.
The dossier compiled by Ukraine and circulated to the major countries which have imposed sanctions identifies key Russian firms involved in the development and production of electronic military equipment. It says the UK and other countries have not yet sanctioned some of the firms involved.
It identified what it claims is technology made by British firms in some of the advanced electronic equipment engaged in the conflict, and says more effective action is required to block the use of foreign components.
The report states:
The effectiveness of Russian electronic systems largely depends on access to imported components that are widely used in the production of such systems … Specific steps should be taken immediately to reduce the Russian military-industrial complex’s capability.
Senior military commanders in Ukraine are concerned at recent advances by Russia in the electronic warfare battle. In a recent article in the Economist, Valery Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, wrote: “[Electronic warfare] is the key to victory in the drone war.
Summary
Welcome, as we resume the Guardian’s coverage of the Russian war against Ukraine. Here are the developments making news this morning.
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Russia is having to pull air defence systems out of Kaliningrad, its external province on the Baltic Sea, to replace those it has lost in the Ukraine war, according to an intelligence update from the UK’s Ministry of Defence. “This follows an increase in losses of SA-21 air defence systems in Russian-occupied Ukraine in late October 2023.”
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The move shows that Russia is so overstretched by the conflict that it is having to accept additional risk to strategically important Kaliningrad, which is bordered on three sides by Nato member states, according to the MoD.
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The Russian military death toll in Ukraine has reached 324,830, according to estimates provided by the Ukrainian military.
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Russia sent waves of kamikaze drones into Ukraine on Saturday in what Kyiv said was the most intensive drone attack since the start of the war. Five people were wounded by falling debris, while several buildings were damaged as about 17,000 people in the Kyiv region were left without electricity, reports said. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 74 of the 75 drones.
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In Russia, 24 drones reportedly attacked the Moscow region and three other provinces to the south and west, while two Ukrainian missiles were launched over the Azov Sea. One person was injured in the city of Tula, south of Moscow, when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, it was reported.
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Russian troops continue attempts to advance near Avdiivka with Ukrainian forces repelling attacks to its north-east, west and south-west. According to reports by the Ukrainian general staff, Russia has conducted airstrikes in support of ground operations geared toward encircling the city on the outskirts of Donetsk.
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Russian soldiers “seek to reoccupy” the town of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, according to the spokesperson for Ukraine’s ground forces, Volodymyr Fitio. “The enemy intends to advance to the settlement of Sinkivka in order to develop their further success in the offensive on Kupiansk,” he said.
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Ukraine’s arms industry minister has called for the country to turn itself into the “arsenal of the free world” and provide weapons for export. Oleksandr Kamyshin aims to revive the state sector and coordinate private enterprises to boost export of weapons.
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Many of the countries that have sanctioned Russia over the war in Ukraine need to take urgent action to disrupt the supply of technology for its electronic warfare campaign, according to a report. It names companies whose parts have been found in Russian equipment.
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Ukraine needs more air defences to protect grain export routes, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said at the Grain from Ukraine summit on food security in Kyiv, which was attended by leaders from European countries including Switzerland and Lithuania.
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About 2,100 vehicles are unable to get into Ukraine because of a Polish blockade. According to an update by Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry reported by the Kyiv Independent, the flow of traffic at the Dorohusk-Yahodyn crossing – usually 680 lorries a day – is down to a few dozen every 24 hours.
