Key events
The UK’s military of defence reports that a group of former Wagner mercenary soldiers have been recognised officially as Russian military veterans.
It comes after the group merged into Russia’s national guard, and it follows speculation over how Wagner fighters would be treated following the mutiny and the death of their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, alongside other top brass, in an attack suspected to have been orchestrated by Moscow.
A Russian actress has been killed in a Ukrainian attack while performing to Russian troops in a Russian-controlled area of eastern Ukraine, according to her theatre.
The Russian theatre where actress Polina Menshikh, 40, worked said she had been killed while performing on stage in the Donbas region. Reuters could not verify details of the incident but military officials on both sides confirmed there had been a Ukrainian attack in the area on 19 November.
A Russian military investigator quoted by Russian state television said a school and cultural centre had been hit by HIMARS missiles in a village in the Donetsk region referred to as Kumachovo and known by Ukrainians as Kumachove, 60 km (37 miles) from the front line.
The unidentified investigator said one civilian, of whom he gave no further details, had been killed but made no mention of military casualties. The Russian defence ministry declined comment and has mentioned no casualties from the attack.
Ukrainian commanders said their forces had struck what they said was a Russian military award ceremony, targeting Russia’s 810th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade.
Robert Brovdi, a Ukrainian military commander, said in a post on social media that 25 people had been killed in the strike and more than 100 wounded.
Unverified video footage on pro-Russian Telegram channels showed soldiers watching Menshikh singing on stage with a guitar on the day the Russian military celebrates their missile and artillery forces.
Mid-song, the building is suddenly rocked by a blast and windows can be heard shattering before the lights go out and someone is caught on camera using an expletive.
Ukraine‘s Brovdi said the attack was “revenge for the 128th”, a reference to a Russian strike this month on soldiers from Ukraine‘s 128th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade in which the brigade said 19 of it soldiers were killed.
Miranda Bryant
Finland has said it will close all but one crossing point on its border with Russia in an effort to halt a flow of asylum seekers to the Nordic nation, as Estonia accused Moscow of mounting “a hybrid attack operation” on Europe’s eastern border.
The announcement yesteday came after weeks of tension on the 830-mile (1,330km) border across which Helsinki accuses Moscow of guiding refugees and migrants in an apparent act of revenge for the Nordic nation’s cooperation with the US.
From midnight tomorrow, said the Finnish prime minister, Petteri Orpo, the only open border crossing of Finland’s eight stations would be its northernmost at Raja-Jooseppi.
Estonia levelled similar accusations at Russia yesterday, saying Moscow was involved in “a hybrid attack operation” to bring people to its border in an attempt to undermine security and unsettle the Baltic state’s population.
Since last Thursday 75 people, largely from Somalia and Syria, had attempted to enter Estonia from Russia through the Narva crossing point, the Estonian public broadcaster ERR reported. None had asked for asylum and all had been turned back, the interior ministry said.
Estonia has made preparations to follow in the footsteps of Finland and close border crossings if “the migration pressure from Russia escalates”, the interior minister, Lauri Läänemets, told Reuters through a spokesperson.
Ukrainian child seized from children’s home adopted by Putin ally – BBC
Documents discovered by BBC’s Panorama show that the leader of a Russian political party, Sergey Mironov, 70, is named on the adoption record of a two-year-old girl taken in 2022 by his now wife.
Originally named Margarita, the children was one of dozens to go missing from Kherson regional children’s home when Russia took control of the city. The girl’s identity was changed in Russia, records cited by the BBC report.
The Ukrainian government says that some 20,000 children have been taken by Russian forces since the invasion. Russia claims it does not deport Ukrainian children but instead evacuates them to protect them from hostilities.
In March, the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab has alleged in a report that at least 6,000 children from Ukraine had been sent to Russian “re-education” camps in the past year.
The BBC reports:
The mystery surrounding Margarita began when a woman in a lilac dress turned up at Kherson’s children’s hospital, where the 10-month-old was being treated for a bout of bronchitis in August 2022. Margarita was the youngest resident of the local children’s home, which looked after children who had medical problems, or whose parents had lost custody of them or had died. Margarita’s mother had given up custody shortly after her birth, and her father’s whereabouts were unknown.
The woman in lilac introduced herself as ‘the head of children’s affairs from Moscow’. Soon after the woman left, the head of the home says she received repeated phone calls from a Russian-appointed official, who had recently been put in charge of the children’s home. The official demanded that Margarita be sent back to the home immediately. Within a week, Margarita was discharged from the hospital. The following morning, staff at the children’s home were asked to prepare her for a journey. Russian men – some in military-style camouflage trousers, one in black glasses and holding a briefcase – arrived to collect the girl.
Justin McCurry
North Korea has warned it will deploy new weapons and stronger armed forces along its heavily armed border with South Korea, as officials in Seoul claimed that Russia had helped Pyongyang carry out a satellite launch.
After closer collaboration between Pyongyang and Moscow, North Korea has provided Russia with large quantities of ammunition for its war in Ukraine, although both leaders have denied striking an arms deal.
In a sign of rising tensions on the peninsula, North Korea has said it would restore “all military measures” it had halted under a 2018 confidence-building agreement with South Korea.
South Korea had already said it would suspend some of the measures, which are designed to reduce the possibility of an accidental conflict along the demilitarised zone (DMZ), after North Korea launched a satellite – apparently successfully – for the first time late on Tuesday. Seoul added that it would step up surveillance along the DMZ.
A statement from North Korea’s defence ministry, according to the state-run KCNA news agency, said: “From now on, our army will never be bound by the 19 September North-South military agreement. We will withdraw the military steps, taken to prevent military tension and conflict in all spheres including ground, sea and air, and deploy more powerful armed forces and new-type military hardware in the region along the military demarcation line” – a reference to the border that has separated the countries since the end of the 1950-53 Korean war.
Dan Sabbagh
Ukraine has not reached a stalemate in its war with Russia because the west can help Kyiv by “dropping five more queens on the board”, according to an influential historian of eastern Europe.
Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor, argued that continuing high levels of military aid could allow Ukraine to prevail, in response to a recent interview given by Kyiv’s top military commander, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, suggesting that the war was deadlocked.
“I hate the stalemate analogy because war is not a game of chess,” Snyder said in an interview. “In chess, there are only so many pieces on the board, and the reason why you get into stalemate is that your pieces get into a certain arrangement.”
However, war did not mirror the board game, the historian argued, because the amount of resources or weaponry available to each side is not limited. “The reason why I hate the stalemate analogy is that it suggests we can’t just drop five more queens on the Ukrainians board, and we can do it any time.”
At the beginning of November, Zaluzhnyi acknowledged in an interview with the Economist that Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive was stalling. “Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” he said, prompting a debate about whether the statement was correct.
Reuters reports that Ukraine‘s efforts to revive sea exports in defiance of Russia’s military blockade have given a glimmer of hope to a teetering farm sector in which loss-making producers are abandoning some land in one of the world’s biggest grain belts.
Access to the Black Sea is critical if Ukraine is to preserve an agricultural industry that was the fourth-largest grain supplier globally before the conflict and in value terms accounted for half of Ukraine‘s total exports last year.
While makeshift export routes and abundant supply elsewhere have tamed record global food prices since last year, the strain on Ukrainian agriculture has worsened as a UN-backed export deal collapsed and EU neighbours baulked at land shipments.
Agriculture has suffered losses of over $25bn (£20bn) since the war began, Ukrainian grain trader association UGA estimates. Ukraine‘s grain exports so far in the 2023-24 season that started in July are running 28% below the year-earlier volume, according to agriculture ministry data.
The area planted with corn, its flagship grain export, has shrunk by a quarter since the start of the war and total crop planting could suffer a double-digit decline in 2024, producers say, as cash-strapped farms leave some land idle.
A new Black Sea shipping channel may offer a lifeline, like for Ukraine‘s depleted steel industry. “The sea corridor is essential for Ukrainian farming to survive,” Jean-Francois Lepy, head of grain trading at French agribusiness group InVivo, said. “Without a corridor there is going to be a serious problem in 2024-2025,” he said on the sidelines of this month’s Global Grain conference in Geneva.
The “humanitarian corridor” established by Ukraine‘s military in late August has expanded steadily, with Kyiv estimating over 3m tonnes of grain shipped so far. Its future remains clouded by military risks, with several vessels struck by mines or missiles, but Ukrainian producers are encouraged.
The bulk of Ukrainian crops have entered the winter season in predominantly good condition, analyst APK-Inform quoted the country’s state weather forecasters as saying today.
Ukraine is a grower of winter wheat, winter barley and winter rapeseed. “During the second 10-day period of November, agrometeorological conditions for the end of the growing season of winter crops were quite satisfactory,” APK-Inform quoted forecasters as saying in a report. “The condition of the plants before entering winter is mostly good.”
The state-run weather forecasting centre monitors weather conditions and their effects on crops, reports Reuters. The agriculture ministry this week said that farmers had completed winter crop sowing, seeding about 5.8m hectares (14.3m acres) as of 20 November.
The area included 4.02m hectares of winter wheat, or 92.3% of the expected area, the ministry statement said. Ukraine‘s winter wheat typically accounts for at least 95% of its overall wheat output.
A journalist working for Russian state television has died from injuries sustained in a drone attack in Ukraine, the network said today.
Moscow has repeatedly accused Kyiv of attacking reporters, reports AFP. Last month, it said three correspondents from the Izvestia news outlet were injured by shelling in the Donetsk region.
“Boris Maksudov, a military correspondent for the Rossiya 24 TV channel, has died,” Vladimir Solovyev, a prominent presenter on the state-controlled network announced on social media.
News that Maksudov had been wounded in Ukraine‘s Zaporizhzhia region was first reported yesterday by the Russian defence ministry, which said his injuries were not life-threatening.
“Boris Maksudov died a hero’s death, like a brave fighter”, said the CEO of the Russian media group Rossia Segodnia, Dmitry Kiselyov, according to state-run news agency RIA Novosti.
At least 15 media workers apart from Maksudov have been killed in Ukraine since Moscow launched its assault last February, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In May, AFP video journalist Arman Soldin was killed near the eastern Ukraine town of Bakhmut, which Russian forces captured this summer after months of intense fighting.
Ukraine is also to receive additional assistance from Ramstein partners including a German air defence package announced this week during a visit to Kyiv by the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius. Defence minister, Rustem Umerov, also announced a Dutch package and Estonian financing for help with information technology.
Ukraine’s military commander-in-chief, Gen Valery Zaluzhniy, said on Telegram that he had taken part in the meeting for the first time and described the situation along the 1,000km (600-mile) front as “complicated but controllable”.
Zelenskiy has long pointed to improved air defence as a key element to help keep Ukrainian cities safe from Russian air strikes – including on energy infrastructure – as wintry weather takes hold.
At different points in the war, about to extend into its 21st month, Russia has launched attacks on Ukrainian power stations and other infrastructure. Missile and drone strikes have also hit apartment blocks and other civilian sites, though Russia denies targeting civilians.
Summary
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy has welcomed the formation by western allies on Thursday of a 20-nation coalition to boost Ukrainian air defences, “enabling our cities and villages to be better protected”.
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Zelenskiy said the group was formed at a virtual meeting of the Ramstein group examining Ukraine’s military needs. Germany said it and France would be taking on leading roles. “Not everything can be disclosed publicly at this time, but the Ukrainian air shield is becoming stronger every month,” Zelenskiy said.
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Lithuania said it delivered a new package of military aid to Ukraine comprising three million bullets, remote detonation systems and winter equipment.
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The Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta shipped a record high 29.4m tonnes of Ukrainian grain between January and October, Reuters reported, citing the port authority.
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The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said he urged Vladimir Putin to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine and withdraw all troops, in the first G20 video call the Russian president participated in since the conflict. Speaking at the virtual G20 meeting, Putin said Russia had always been “ready for talks” to end the “tragedy” of war, but then blamed Kyiv for the lack of such talks.
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Zelenskiy has said Ukraine’s troops face “difficult” defensive operations on parts of the eastern front as winter cold settles in. Forces in the south were still conducting offensive actions, he said.
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Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is threatening to block Ukraine’s candidacy for membership of the EU. European leaders will meet on 14 and 15 December to discuss Ukraine’s EU bid.
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The European Council president, Charles Michel, said he expected a “difficult” meeting next month about Ukraine joining the EU. He promised to do “everything in my power” to bring about a decision in December.
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The EU has approved a further €1.5bn (£1.3bn) payment in macro financial assistance to Ukraine. It is the 10th payment made as part of an €18bn programme to keep the Ukrainian economy moving.
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The Kremlin said there were “no revisions” to its policy of pardoning prisoners in exchange for fighting in Ukraine. It followed local media reports of a Russian “satanist” killer who was released.
