December 7, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Our live coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine has moved here.

Medics wheel in a soldier for treatment

A constant stream of Ukraine’s fittest bodies, now torn by metal and punctured by bullets, are rushed to a specialist trauma hospital in the city of Kramatorsk on Wednesday afternoon after being wounded in the bloody battle for the eastern town of Bakhmut. 

Only hours earlier, they were the adrenaline-pumped vanguard of the Ukrainian army’s attempt to take on the Russian troops – among them mercenaries that hold much of the area. Now they wait, cold and pale, for their turn on the operating table.

Chief surgeon Dr. Vitaly Malanchuk is often the first to assess the men’s injuries.

“We’re dealing with shrapnel wounds and gunshot wounds,” he says. “People can have severed limbs, with large facial defects… Plus there’s polytrauma, where different organs are involved.”

“Polytrauma” is what a layperson would call many holes in the body.

Doctors lift a patient onto a bed to have CT scan

The surgical team has treated around 100 patients a day over the past few weeks and operated on around half of them. It’s intense work, performed under the threat of missile attacks from Russian-held territory just 30 kilometers away. The pace of arrivals means there’s no time to shelter when air raid warnings sound here. 

Tape on the windows appears the only attempt to mitigate damage from any blast.

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Ukrainian officials and lawmakers have in recent months urged the Biden administration and members of Congress to provide the Ukrainian military with cluster munition warheads, weapons that are banned by more than 100 countries but that Russia continues to use to devastating effect inside Ukraine. 

The Ukrainian request for the cluster munitions, which was described to CNN by multiple US and Ukrainian officials, is one of the most controversial requests the Ukrainians have made to the US since the war began in February. 

Senior Biden administration officials have been fielding this request for months and have not rejected it outright, CNN has learned, a detail that has not been previously reported. 

Cluster munitions are imprecise by design, and scatter “bomblets” across large areas that can fail to explode on impact and can pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines. They also create “nasty, bloody fragmentation” to anyone hit by them because of the dozens of submunitions that detonate at once across a large area, Mark Hiznay, a weapons expert and the associate arms director for Human Rights Watch, previously told CNN. 

Top US officials have publicly stated that they plan to give the Ukrainians as much support as they need to give them an upper hand at the negotiating table with Russia, should it come to that. But Western military equipment is not infinite, and as stockpiles of warheads dwindle, the Ukrainians have made plain to the US that it could use the cluster munitions currently gathering dust in storage.

For Ukraine, cluster munitions could address two major issues: The need for more ammunition for the artillery and rocket systems the US and others have provided, and a way of closing Russia’s numerical superiority in artillery.

The Biden administration has not taken the option off the table as a last resort if stockpiles begin to run dangerously low. But sources say the proposal has not yet received significant consideration in large part due to the statutory restrictions that Congress has put on the US’ ability to transfer cluster munitions. 

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The Kherson and Donetsk regions of Ukraine endured Russian shelling, according to local officials. Meantime, repair work on critical energy infrastructure is ongoing following extensive damage caused by Russian strikes.

Here are the top headlines to know:

Germany plans to supply Ukraine with 18 RCH 155 wheeled howitzers, according to the government’s updated list of arms deliveries to Ukraine.

The delivery is in “preparation/implementation” phase, according to the list. 

Germany will also be providing an additional 100 drone defense sensors and jammers, two hangar tents and seven load-handling trucks, according to the list.

Germany and the Netherlands have already sent 14 self-propelled howitzers PzH2000 to Ukraine, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition. 

The RCH 155 is a modernized version of the PzH 2000 on wheels instead of tracks and with a higher degree of automation and crew safety, according to the company producing the howitzer, Krauss Maffei Wegmann. The German government legally cleared the way for RCH 155s to be sent to Ukraine in late September.

A frame from a video posted on Telegram shows smoke rising from fighting near Bakhmut.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says 10 civilians were killed Wednesday in a Russian rocket attack on the town of Kurakhove in Donetsk. Additionally, he said four police officers were killed by Russian mines in Kherson in the south.

In what he said had been a long and difficult day, Zelensky accused the Russian army of “a very brutal, absolutely deliberate strike at Kurakhove, precisely at civilians. At ordinary people. At the market, elevator, gas station, bus station, residential buildings,” he said in his daily video message.

He said battles continue to rage around Bakhmut in Donetsk.

Zelensky said that among the dead in Kherson was the chief of police of the Cherkasy region in northern Ukraine, Mykhailo Kuratchenko, who had gone to the south to help with “stabilization” measures after Kherson was liberated last month.

On energy: The Ukrainian president said that for now the energy situation is improving but it will not reach its maximum capacity.

Zelensky said Kyiv and Lviv regions were among the most affected by outages.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a conference in Moscow, Russia, on November, 24.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that the threat of nuclear war is increasing.

In a meeting at the Kremlin with Russia’s Human Rights Council, Putin said “In terms of the threat of nuclear war, you are right, such threat is increasing. As for the idea that Russia wouldn’t use such weapons first under any circumstances, then it means we wouldn’t be able to be the second to use them either — because the possibility to do so in case of an attack on our territory would be very limited,”

Putin added, “Nevertheless, we have a strategy… namely, as a defense, we consider weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons — it is all based around the so-called retaliatory strike — that is, when we are struck, we strike in response.”

The Russian leader said that US nuclear weapons were located in large numbers on the European continent, while Russia had not transferred its nuclear weapons to other territories and is not planning to do so, but “will protect its allies with all the means at its disposal, if necessary.”

Putin says he still views nuclear weapons as a deterrent measure. “We have not gone crazy. We are aware of what nuclear weapons are. We have these means, they are in a more advanced and modern form than those of any other nuclear country, this is obvious,” he said.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, on November 9.

The European Union is “stepping up the pressure on Russia” with another package of sanctions, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Wednesday.

The package — the EU’s ninth — adds another nearly 200 individuals and entities to its sanctions list. It includes armed forces, members of the Russian parliament and defense industrial companies.

The EU will also sanction three more Russian banks, including a full transaction ban on the country’s regional development bank, “to further dry out Putin’s war chest,” she added.

The measures will also cut Russia’s access to drones, both directly and via third-country suppliers such as Iran, she said.

The bloc will also impose new controls on exports, with a focus on dual-use goods such as chemicals, nerve agents, electronics and IT components, which “could be used by the Russian war machine,” she added.

EU Commission Vice President Josep Borrell said the latest measures are a direct consequence of the weaponization of winter by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“He wants to disrupt electricity, heating, and water supplies for millions of civilians across Ukraine. We are responding with the 9th package of sanctions against those who are instrumental in this brutal war,” he said on Twitter.

Artillery and mortar fire has picked up on both sides of the front lines in the eastern Donetsk region, according to accounts from both the Ukrainian military and authorities in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.

On the Ukrainian side, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the president’s office, said that at least eight people were killed and five injured in an attack on the town of Kurakhove.

Kurakhove is west of the city of Donetsk; the shelling may have been in retaliation for Ukrainian fire on the city, which is held by the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, over the last three days.

To the north, in the town of Yampil, according to Tymoshenko, “the occupiers used cluster munitions. The central square of the city and the administrative building came under fire.”

Yampil was liberated in September as Ukrainian forces pushed Russian units back into Luhansk. 

Other impacted areas: The Ukrainian military says that Russian artillery has fired at several settlements in Luhansk and Kharkiv — as Russia consolidates new defensive lines in the east.  

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War says that Ukrainian forces have “likely made recent gains in north-eastern Kharkiv,” and have probably retaken the settlement of Kyslivka, some 25 kilometers (more than 15 miles) northwest of the strategic hub of Svatove where Russian forces are concentrated. 

The Ukrainian General Staff said Russia was focusing its efforts on assaults toward the cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka in Donetsk, both of which have been under fire for months but remain in Ukrainian hands.

It said Russians continued to bombard Ukrainian settlements in recently liberated parts of Kherson along the west bank of the river Dnipro.

After a lull in the Russians’ use of Iranian-made attack drones, the General Staff said one was shot down Wednesday.

Suspicious packages continue to be sent to Ukrainian diplomatic missions abroad, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a Facebook post on Wednesday. 

“Over the past two days, suspicious packages have been received at the embassies in Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Denmark, as well as the consulate in Gdansk,” said Kuleba. 

According to Kuleba, this brings the total number of threats to 31 cases across 15 countries: Austria (1), Croatia (1), Czech Republic (2), Denmark (1), France (1), Hungary (2), Italy (4), Kazakhstan (1), Netherlands (1), Poland (6), Portugal (2), Romania (2), Spain (5), Vatican (1), and the United States (1).

Some of the packages have included the eyes of animals and others crude explosive charges, he noted.

Kuleba went on to say that all the suspicious packages display the same alleged “sender’s address,” which is a “car dealership in the German town of Sindelfingen.” There is no evidence that the address had anything to do with the packages.

The packages were usually sent from post offices that weren’t equipped with video surveillance systems, and the “attackers” had also avoided leaving traces of DNA, according to Kuleba’s Facebook post.

“This, in particular, indicates the professional level of this action,” he said. “For a week now, Ukrainian embassies and consulates have been operating in the mode of enhanced security measures, police cordons… and forensic experts.”

“The ongoing campaign of terror against Ukrainian diplomats is unprecedented in its scale not only in the context of Ukraine but also at the global level,” said Kuleba. “I do not recall cases in history when so many embassies and consulates of one country were subjected to such massive attacks in such a short period of time. But no matter how hard the enemies try to intimidate the Ukrainian diplomacy, they will fail. We continue to work for victory.”

Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, announced that it is moving troops and military equipment, citing “counter-terrorism threats,” according to state news agency BelTA. 

The announcement comes amid heightened tension along Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus, which was used as a platform by Russian troops during the invasion in February. 

“During this period, it is planned to move military equipment and personnel of the national security forces, temporarily restrict the movement of citizens (transport) along certain public roads and areas of the terrain, and use imitation weapons for training purposes,” BelTA reported, citing Belarus’ Security Council. 

Belarus has also announced the beginning of military drills in line with “the autumn conscription campaign for new recruits to receive basic military training.”

Over the weekend, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Belarus and met with President Alexander Lukashenko — which Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the Office of President of Ukraine, said “will be added to the indictment’s materials as a distribution of criminal roles.”

Belarusian troops have not taken part in the conflict, a position reiterated by Lukashenko in October.

Russian opposition figure and former Moscow city councillor Ilya Yashin is escorted inside the Basmanny district court prior to a hearing on his detention in Moscow, Russia, on July 13.

A Moscow court has postponed a sentencing hearing for the jailed Kremlin critic Ilya Yashin, who is accused of spreading fake news about the Russian army, until Friday, according to a post on Yashin’s official Telegram account.

“The announcement of the verdict was postponed to Friday, December 9, at 12:00 PM Moscow time in the Meshchansky court,” the post said.

Yashin, a prominent opposition leader and former municipal deputy, has been accused of spreading fake information about the Russian army and faces up to nine years in prison. 

Russian investigators say his statements about the killings of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha by Russian forces are a criminal offense under recently introduced Russian legislation, which considers discrediting the Russian armed forces as illegal. 

In a closing statement on Monday, also posted on his Telegram account, Yashin made a statement addressing the judge, President Vladimir Putin and the Russian public:

Yashin, also a close ally of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, came to prominence during the protests between 2011 and 2012, which he helped organize against Putin’s re-election for the third term and unfair elections.

Yashin remained a fierce Putin critic for years and served as a municipal deputy in small Moscow municipality before being barred from running for a public office again.

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at market stalls hit by shelling in Donetsk, in Russian-controlled Ukraine, on December 6.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that he had discussed Ukrainian shelling of settlements in the eastern Donbas region with the Russian-appointed head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin.

“Denis Pushilin called me. Indeed, the strikes are directly hitting the residential areas, no one can be unaware of this, but everyone is silent. As if nothing is happening,” said Putin at a meeting with members of the Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights.

Putin also said that not all students chose to demobilize after authorities announced the demobilization of students in the region, which encompasses the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

“But I must say that not all students of Donbas took advantage of this right to demobilization,” he added.

In late September, Moscow declared it was annexing the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as Russian territory — which is illegal under international law — after holding so-called referendums in the regions that were universally dismissed as “shams” by Ukraine and Western nations.

Local authorities in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region have reported frequent shelling of the city this week, in which several people have been killed and injured.

Russia is looking to temporarily “freeze” the conflict in Ukraine in order to “regroup and then launch a bigger offensive,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday.

Speaking at an event hosted by the Financial Times, Stoltenberg said it was Russia’s intention “to try to have a kind of short break or a short freeze of the conflict so Russia can recover their troops, regroup and then launch a bigger offensive later on, because now Ukraine has the momentum.” 

Stoltenberg said last week that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “failing in Ukraine,” pointing to Ukraine’s success in pushing Russian forces out of territories around Kyiv and Kharkiv, as well as the liberation of Kherson city, which he said was a sign of Russia’s “weakness.”

In an undisclosed location near the Russian border, many newly released Ukrainian prisoners of war were able to speak with their families for the first time in months.

Most of the group is from Mariupol, the southern port city that Ukrainian and Russian troops fiercely fought over — and the soldiers bear both physical and emotional scars, CNN’s Will Ripley reported.

One of two rescued women, a radio intelligence operator, became emotional when she told Ripley that she was subjected to lies from the Russians and forced to pledge loyalty to Russia. Another woman’s 6-year-old child and husband are still in occupied Mariupol, and she has no way of contacting them, she said.

Watch his report here:

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03:13 - Source: CNN

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia will continue the “fight for its national interests” by “all means available” if necessary.

“We will proceed from what we have. There can be only one answer from our side — a consistent fight for our national interests. We will continue to do so and let no one count on anything else … First of all, of course, we will focus on peaceful means. But if nothing else remains, then we will defend ourselves with all available means at our disposal,” he said at the Kremlin.

Out of the 300,000 men called up for the partial mobilization, 150,000 are currently in Ukraine, he told a meeting of Russia’s Human Rights Council. “Among them only 77,000 are in combat units, while the rest are in the territorial defense forces or receive additional training,” Putin said.

An additional mobilization does “not make sense” currently, he added, saying there is no need for it from the state of the defense ministry.

Putin also promised to resolve the issue of the equipment shortages for Russian troops in Ukraine.

According to Putin, the so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine is a “long process,” but he described the emergence of new territories and the Sea of Azov as part of the Russian Federation as a “significant result.”

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby speaks during a press briefing at the White House, November 28, in Washington D.C.

The White House sought to distance the US Wednesday from recent reported Ukrainian attacks on Russia, saying that the US will “respect” Ukraine’s decisions on the battlefield but has not encouraged escalation.

National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby deferred to Ukraine for confirmation of who was responsible for recent reported strikes on Russia, but said the US has neither “encouraged” nor “enabled” any such attacks.

“We are providing them information to help them defend themselves. We certainly are providing them resources and material weapons to defend themselves. But they make their own decisions. And the whole idea, the whole principle behind this war is one of sovereignty and unlike the Russians, we respect Ukrainian sovereignty. When we give them a weapons system, it belongs to them, where they use it, how they use it, how much ammunition they use, to use in that system, those are, those are Ukrainian decisions and we respect that,” he added.

But any escalation outside of Ukraine’s borders, he said, is “not good” for US national security interests.

“We have clearly had conversations with [Ukraine] about accountability on weapons systems. We certainly have made it very clear our concerns about escalation. But in the end, these are Ukrainian decisions that they have to make and that they have to speak to one way or the other,” he told CNN.

A priest accused of leaking information about the positions of Ukrainian troops to Russia has been sentenced to 12 years in prison, according to the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).

The SBU said the rector of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the city of Lysychansk “passed to the occupiers information about the combat positions of Ukrainian troops in the city, as well as in the area of Severodonetsk” in the Luhansk region. 

The SBU said the priest had also “informed” the Russians about locals who could potentially resist the occupation.

The priest was detained in April, two months before Lysychansk fell to Russian forces.

The SBU said the priest had been recruited by Russia during a visit there in 2014 and had since been in constant contact with a leader of the separatist self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic.

The SBU also said it had collected evidence against two other Russian informants in the same region, including a second priest in Luhansk.

It alleged that two Ukrainians had been kidnapped after he provided the Russians with information. The SBU said the priest was currently in occupied territory.

Some background: The Ukrainian government has begun taking action against some Orthodox Church premises and priests and proposed a new law that would ban the operation of religious organizations “affiliated with centers of influence” in Russia.

The SBU raided a historic Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, on Nov.r 22 as part of an effort to counter suspected “subversive activities” of Russia’s special services.

“All bodies responsible for ensuring national security must intensify measures to identify and counter the subversive activities of Russian special services in the religious environment of Ukraine. And apply personal sanctions — the surnames will be made public soon,” Zelensky said.

In May, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church officially broke allegiance with the Russian Orthodox Church and its leader Patriarch Kirill over the war.

Smoke rises from the area of Kursk airport outside Kursk, Russia, on December 6.

The fire at an airport in Russia’s Kursk region alleged by Russian officials to have been caused by a Ukrainian drone strike on Tuesday has been extinguished, a senior local official said on Wednesday. 

Over 200 people from several departments battled for more than a day to put out the fire, the governor of the Kursk region, Roman Starovoyt, said in a statement published on his Telegram.

On Tuesday, the governor alleged a drone attack hit an oil tanker near Kursk airfield. 

Kursk is located about 90 kilometers (nearly 56 miles) from the Ukrainian border. On Monday, Russia blamed Ukrainian forces for two attacks on airfield across Russia. 

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has offered no comment on the explosions. Officially, the targets are well beyond the reach of the country’s declared drones. However, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted a cryptic message on Tuesday, hinting at the possibility that Kyiv was indeed behind the attacks.

The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights published a report on Wednesday that looks at 441 killings of civilians in the northern Ukrainian regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy. 

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said the report details the murder of civilians for “cutting firewood and buying groceries” in the regions previously occupied by Russian forces following the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. 

The Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions were taken back following a Russian withdrawal in late March. 

Türk just concluded a four-day visit to the Ukrainian capital.

“There are strong indications that the summary executions documented in the report constitute the war crime of [willful] killing,” he added.

In his statement, Türk listed the levels of assistance needed for the Ukrainian people, including 17.7 million people requiring humanitarian assistance and 9.3 million in need of food and livelihood assistance. 

One-third of the population have been forced to leave their homes, according to his statement, while 7.89 million have fled the country and 6.5 million have been internally displaced. 

Türk also said in the statement that he spent some of his visit in a bomb shelter on Monday as Russia launched another wave of missile attacks. He also visited the towns of Bucha and Izium.

Türk also noted the impact that Russia’s attacks on critical infrastructure will leave on the Ukrainian people.

“I fear that there is one long, bleak winter ahead for Ukraine. The consequences of the war on the enjoyment of human rights for people in the country have already been devastating, and the prognosis is very worrying,” he said.