Putin recycles old grievances on Victory Day
Russia launched a fresh wave of drone, missile and airstrikes on cities across Ukraine this week, as Moscow stepped up attacks on the eve of its Victory Day parade commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany.
A tumultuous year of fighting has passed since Vladimir Putin last addressed Russian soldiers on Red Square in Moscow to mark the country’s victory over the Nazis.
But the Russian leader’s Victory Day message to the nation on Tuesday, made hours after more than a dozen Russian missiles were downed over Kyiv, was nearly identical to that of last year as he cast the war in Ukraine as an existential battle against an aggressive, Russophobic and woke west, writes Pjotr Sauer in his analysis of the celebrations.
What was left unspoken by the Russian president was the battering his army has received over the past 12 months in Ukraine, which was revealed by the scaled-down military parade that followed his speech.
The muted parade reflects a sense of unease after recent attacks on Russian soil, the Guardian writes in its editorial. Meanwhile, Russia is also becoming a cultural wasteland, writes William Fear.
Ukraine needs more time before its counteroffensive
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Ukraine needs more time before it can launch its much-anticipated counteroffensive against Russia, Luke Harding reported, adding that some armoured vehicles promised by the west have yet to arrive.
The president said newly formed brigades were ready to attack. “We can go forward and be successful. But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable. So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time.”
Zelenskiy’s comments in an interview with several media outlets including the BBC are the clearest sign yet that a major Ukrainian military push is unlikely to take place in the next few weeks.
The Czech president, Petr Pavel, a decorated retired general who was previously Nato’s principal military adviser, privately warned Ukraine’s leadership against the disaster of a rushed counteroffensive, Daniel Boffey reported this week.
Meanwhile, Peter Beaumont travelled to Kherson, where villages are preparing for the counteroffensive.
UK will send long-range Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine
Britain has become the first western country to provide Ukraine with the long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles that Kyiv wants to boost its chances in the counteroffensive, prompting a threat from the Kremlin of a military response. Dan Sabbagh and Luke Harding reported this story.
Hours after Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said he needed more western weapons to be confident of a victory this summer, Ben Wallace, the UK defence secretary, told MPs that the missiles – which cost more than £2m each – were “now going in, or are in the country itself”.
The gift of the missiles was supported by the US, Wallace added, although previously Washington had declined to give Ukraine long-range missiles of its own, fearing that the outcome could escalate hostilities in the 15-month war.
Zaporizhzhia plant facing ‘catastrophic’ staff shortage
Russia plans to relocate about 2,700 Ukrainian staff from Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Ukraine’s atomic energy company has claimed, warning of a potential “catastrophic lack of qualified personnel” at the Zaporizhzhia facility in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine.
Workers who signed employment contracts with Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom following Moscow’s capture of the Zaporizhzhia plant early in the war are set to be taken to Russia along with their families, Energoatom said in a Telegram post on Wednesday.
Russian forces were also evacuating residents from the area near the plant, with more than 1,600 people, including 660 children, evacuated so far, a Moscow-installed official in the region has said. The head of the UN’s nuclear power watchdog warned last weekend that the situation around the plant had become “potentially dangerous”.
Ukrainian soldiers struggle with post-traumatic stress
Volodomyr Kucherenko’s problems with post-traumatic stress began not with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, but eight years ago when the war began in the Donbas. In the midst of what was supposed to be a truce, he was resting with his unit, which included his brother-in-law, when they were mortared in the yard of a village house.
Injured in the leg during the first strike, his brother-in-law threw himself over Kucherenko to protect him from shrapnel as more rounds came in. The wounds he sustained protecting his comrade would prove fatal.
Kucherenko’s experience is far from unique, Peter Beaumont reports. After more than a year of brutal and continuing combat, Ukraine’s wounded – both physically and psychologically – have become an inescapable fact in a horrific war often fought at close quarters under shell fire.
French journalist killed in Russian rocket strike in Ukraine
A French journalist working for Agence France-Presse was killed in a Russian rocket strike near Bakhmut. Arman Soldin, a 32-year-old video coordinator, died on Monday when a Grad missile landed close to where he was lying, Luke Harding reported. Soldin was with Ukrainian soldiers in the town of Chasiv Yar, six miles (10km) from Bakhmut, where fighting has raged for months.
At least 11 journalists, fixers and drivers for media organisations have been killed covering the war in Ukraine, according to the group Reporters Without Borders.
Risk of cyber-attack is main Eurovision worry, says BBC
The risk of a cyber-attack is the “main worry” for broadcasters staging the Eurovision song contest on behalf of war-torn Ukraine, a BBC executive has said. Experts from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre have been drafted in to help thwart any attempts by pro-Russian hackers to sabotage the competition’s public vote on Saturday, Josh Halliday reports.
Kate Phillips, the BBC’s director of unscripted programmes, said there was no specific intelligence about an attack but that there were “so many contingency plans” in place if it happened. Phillips said the contest would have had high security in any event but the war in Ukraine meant “we have had to up it as much as we possibly can”.
Inside Ukraine’s most creative bomb shelter
In the early days of February 2022, Kharkiv artist Mykola Kolomiets had no idea of the momentous and deadly events that were coming his way. “No one believed that the war was going to start,” says Kolomiets, sporting an orange woolly hat and an infectious grin, “even though we were warned by the experts. My girlfriend joked that the studio would make the perfect bomb shelter.”
You can see why, Charlotte Higgins writes: the studio is a labyrinthine, subterranean series of interconnected rooms. What it lacks in natural light – I spot a single window, taped up against the possibility of shattering glass – it makes up for in colour.
