French President Emmanuel Macron, right, met Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin for talks to defuse the situation along the Ukraine-Russia border. Picture: AFP   The striking table, which is 6m long, has become a feature of Mr Putin’s meetings with foreign leaders after the months that he has spent in virtual isolation because of the pandemic. He typically requires anyone meeting him to quarantine for two weeks ­beforehand, a fact that has kept him insulated even from many of his own advisers as the crisis over Ukraine has unfolded.

Macron said Europe and NATO could guarantee the sovereignty of their former Soviet bloc members while giving Moscow assurances that its security worries had been taken into account. “We must protect our European brothers by offering a new balance that can preserve their sovereignty and peace. At the same time this has to be done while respecting Russia and understanding its modern traumas,” he said. It was now Europe’s responsibility to “build an historic solution”, he added. “I believe President Putin is available for this.”

Russia was within its rights to seek to negotiate security guarantees, he said. “The security and sovereignty of Ukraine or any other European state cannot be a subject for compromise, while it is also legitimate for Russia to pose the question of its own security.” He was referring to Russian demands that NATO commit itself never to make Ukraine a member and also to recognise that Russian interests must be a factor in the security arrangements of former Warsaw Pact countries now in western alliances. NATO has rejected the demands as non-starters.

Macron, who is pursuing an independent French policy initiated by President de Gaulle in the 1960s, wants to build on a concept called “indivisible security” that was enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki accords that opened the way to détente with the Soviet Union. The expression meant that all states in the region recognised that the security of each one was inextricably linked with the security of all the others. Western governments note that Macron’s talk about a new security order is close to the language used by the Kremlin in its demands for a complete reset of the European security system.

Civilians participate in a Territorial Defence unit training session on February 5 in Obukhiv, Ukraine. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Macron’s enthusiasm is not shared by the United States, the eastern Europeans or conservatives in Germany, who on Sunday accused the Social Democrat chancellor of feebleness in the face of Russian aggression. “I’m amazed at how badly this government is doing,” Friedrich Merz, 66, the leader of the Christian Democrat opposition, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

The US forecast of casualties in the event of a Russian invasion was its most chilling assessment yet. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said yesterday (Sunday) Russia could invade “any day” and that “if war breaks out it will come at an enormous human cost to Ukraine, but we believe that based on our preparations and our response, it will come at a strategic cost to Russia as well.”

The US has also been at loggerheads with the Ukrainian government, with Kyiv dismissing claims by US officials that the 100,000 Russian troops stationed on Ukraine’s border could invade at any moment. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Zelensky of Ukraine, said “the chance of finding a diplomatic solution for de-escalation is still substantially higher than the threat of further escalation”.

However, Europe has become highly dependent on Russian oil and gas, after turning off its nuclear and coal, and gas-fired power plants.

It would also fit Mr. Putin’s usual tactic of taking territory by force and then pivoting to diplomacy to secure his gains. Whether it’s feint or fiction, the pressure by Ukraine and its allies on Russia must only increase. Kharkiv and Mariupol now resemble the gutted ruins Mr. Putin created in Aleppo and Grozny. Yet the weapons Ukraine needs to stop long-range artillery, missile attacks and aerial bombing are still being held back by the U.S. and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations.

That should be the real story, not any controversy about President Biden saying Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power.” No free-world leader should hesitate to state plainly that the world would be a far better place if Mr. Putin were no longer in charge in Russia, and one way to help make that come about is to say it. Making it clear that Russia will be a pariah until Mr. Putin is gone is the best way to shake his support among elites, military commanders and ordinary Russians.

The problem came when the White House attempted to walk back the remark, calling it an ad lib that did not reflect a U.S. policy about “regime change” in Russia. This retreat added fuel to my concerns about an internal split in the White House between those who sense the opportunity to toss Mr. Putin into the dust bin of history and those who are afraid of any change in the status quo and who would rather deal with the devil they know.

The latter would be an echo of August 1 1991, when President George H.W. Bush gave his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, reportedly penned by Condoleezza Rice, cautioning Ukraine against rushing to independence from the Soviet Union. Three weeks later Ukraine ignored that advice and declared independence. The Soviet Union collapsed within months.

The updated 2022 recipe calls for keeping Mr. Putin at the negotiating table for the Iran nuclear deal and not giving Ukraine the jets and other offensive weapons it needs to win the war. Everything I hear from other NATO members is that the U.S. has become the obstacle, and an explanation is required. Allowing Mr. Putin to keep an inch of Ukrainian soil after bombing civilians should be unimaginable. Conceding large areas of eastern Ukraine to the invader in exchange for a cease-fire would only give Mr. Putin time to consolidate and rearm for next time—and there will always be a next time. No peace deal should weaken the strong sanctions that have finally arrived, eight years late.

The only drawback to the end of the Cold War was the loss of the moral clarity provided by a clear and present evil. Aside from a handful of fellow travelers and useful idiots, even Ronald Reagan’s critics couldn’t doubt the accuracy of his calling the Soviet Union “an evil empire” in a 1983 speech, as startling as it was to hear a politician speak so plainly in moral terms. It was also a tonic for those of us inside the Soviet Union to hear what we knew to be true said aloud by the leader of the free world.

Mr. Biden’s age may be a negative for some, but he remembers the Cold War. Gaffe or not, his remark reflected accurate instincts: Mr. Putin must go. But the war in Ukraine is also a distraction from his flailing domestic agenda. It’s hard to talk about economic and social issues in the U.S. when a real war is leading the news every night.

So who in Washington is calling the shots on Ukraine? If the Biden administration wants Ukraine to win, someone in the White House should say it and do what is necessary to make it possible. If the U.S. is offering deals to Mr. Putin or pressuring Ukraine to accept anything less than sovereignty over 100% of its territory, we should know. Tactical ambiguity can be useful, but a lack of strategic and moral unity and consistency leads to catastrophe.

Mr. Putin’s Russia is a bankrupt gas station run by a mafia that prefers to spend its time and money in London and New York. Offering any carrots to these war criminals would set the stage for a return to the appeasement and corruption that brought us to this deadly phase. It would also shake the foundation of collective defense in the region. As Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks told me last week, “We are afraid not of Russian tanks, but of Western weakness.”

The outcome in Ukraine will define a new world order, for good or ill. Taiwan and China are watching closely. Xi Jinping’s natural alliance with his fellow dictator is looking less attractive after the free world’s outpouring of support for Ukraine. The U.S. can restore its leadership of the free world, or it can lead from behind while democracy continues to lose ground.

The West fell asleep when the Cold War ended. Ukrainians are sacrificing everything to shake President Biden, the White House and the world awake.

On Monday the Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere raised the military’s alert level, saying: “This is the most severe security situation in several decades.” He said while there were no indications that Russia was expanding its warfare to other countries, the “increased tensions make us more exposed to threats, intelligence operations and influence campaigns”.

Within hours of the latest Russian attacks, the mayor of Kyiv, Vitaly Klitschko said that workers had repaired some of the damage and water had been restored to around 60 per cent of homes. Electricity was expected to return late in the evening, he said.

Mr Cleverly promised the delivery of more than 800 generators and British support to repair the energy infrastructure. Britain has already provided £2.3 billion of British military assistance – more than any other country apart from the United States and £220 million of humanitarian aid.

“We will continue to work with Ukrainians to help them keep the lights on and the water going, not just here and now, but to help energy resilience in the future,” Mr Cleverly said. He said the G7 meeting in Germany on Thursday would discuss ways to encourage Russia to rejoin the Black Sea Grain initiative which allows for grain exports where more than 60 per cent goes to low and middle income countries, including Ethiopia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

“It would be unconscionable for those lands to be made to suffer because of Putin’s setbacks in Ukraine,” Mr Cleverly said. “I urge Russia to stop impeding this vital initiative that is feeding the hungry across the world and agree to its extension.”

The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, said Russia cannot guarantee the safety of shipping of the grain ships, saying such a deal is “hardly feasible” following the drone attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet on Saturday. Meanwhile the Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu announced on Monday that the conscription of 300,000 military personnel – which had been in place since September 21 has finished and military recruitment would now be taken up by volunteers.

As well as Kyiv, other major Ukraine towns in the regions of Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Mikolaiv, Lviv, Zhytomyr, Kirovohrad and Chernivtsi were attacked by cruise missiles fired from Russian Tu-90 and T-60 aircraft flying north of the Caspian Sea and the Rostov region. Ukraine energy minister Herman Halushchenko said the “barbaric attacks” hit electric substations, hydropower and heat generation facilities.

Fragments from one Russian rocket, shot down by Ukrainian air defence, landed in neighbouring Naslavcea in Moldova in the first “spillover” of the conflict which is now approaching its ninth month.

Russia unleashed more than 50 cruise missiles across Ukraine during Monday’s morning peak hour, causing water supply problems and power cuts. “From 7am (4pm, AEDT) on October 31, Russian occupiers carried out several waves of missile attacks against critical infrastructure in Ukraine,” the Ukrainian army said on Telegram, adding “more than 50 X-101/X-555 cruise missiles were launched” from Russia.

Russia’s army said it had struck military and energy infrastructure targets. “The Russian armed forces continued strikes with high-precision long-range air and sea-based weapons against the military command and energy systems of Ukraine,” the defence ministry said in a statement. “The strike targets were achieved. All assigned objects have been hit,” it said.

Damage was reported at energy facilities in different parts of the country, including several along the Dnipro river which provides hydro-electric power. Cherkasy and Kremenchuk, both situated along the Dnipro, came under fire. Cherkasy regional officials said a critical infrastructure site in the region was attacked and the area was without power. In the north of the country, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said “Russia has hit a critical infrastructure facility in the city.”

It appears that Monday’s strikes are similar to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strikes on October 10, which were in response to the crippling of the Crimea bridge over the Kerch strait, where missiles were launched from the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea

Smiles, flowers from local people and mines planted by the Russians greeted Ukrainian soldiers. “We see attractive, smiling faces, flowers, embroidered towels which we display on our vehicles,” said Andriy Zholob, the commander of a medical unit. “We see children running to meet us and greeting us,” said the man from the western city of Lviv, who worked as an orthopaedist before the Russian invasion in February.

One Ukrainian soldier who had just entered Kherson city showed videos of the approach to the town. In one, a young woman shouts: “Glory to Ukraine!” as she blows kisses towards troops. In another clip, dozens of civilians near a bus stop adorned with the blue and yellow national colours greeted the troops with applause, flowers and cries of: “Our rescuers!” “It’s like that everywhere,” said the soldier, who cannot be identified for security reasons.

Kherson, a strategically important city in southern Ukraine, with a pre-war population of 280,000 was the only provincial capital the Russian army was able to capture. Its surrender is seen as a personal humiliation for Putin. “Ukraine is gaining another important victory right now,” Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, wrote on Twitter. “Whatever Russia says or does, Ukraine will win.”

Moscow said it had withdrawn all its soldiers and military hardware from Kherson, pulling back to heavily fortified positions on the east side of the Dnipro river that divides Ukraine. It had admitted two days earlier that missile strikes had destroyed its army’s supply lines to the city and left its soldiers isolated. The retreat signals the end of Russia’s hopes of controlling the southern coastline of the Black Sea and seizing the cities of Odessa and Mykolaiv.

In Kherson, locals pulled down a propaganda billboard emblazoned with the words: “Russia is here forever.” It went up less than six weeks ago, after Putin signed a decree annexing the wider Kherson region, along with three others, in the east and south.

Russian soldiers could be seen running across a pontoon next to the Antonivskyi bridge, which the Kremlin said had been partially destroyed to avoid a Ukrainian pursuit. Russian state media later published a video that showed a huge explosion on the bridge.

Sporadic Russian artillery fire continued throughout the withdrawal. In Lymany, a village 40km from Kherson, Ukrainian soldiers hurried to take cover in a bunker as a rocket whizzed over their headquarters. “Their infantry is retreating and they are trying to provide cover for them,” said a commander who goes by the call sign Vesily (Jolly). “But there have been fewer rocket attacks recently. That’s a good sign.” His troops were weary but exuberant, Vesily said, after liberating a number of villages over the past few days. “There’s not much left of the settlements. One is nothing but ruins. That’s what Russia leaves behind: ruins, death and rubbish.”

Officials in Kyiv had urged caution, amid fears that the Kremlin could be setting a trap by faking a withdrawal. Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to President Zelensky, had said earlier that Russia was seeking to turn Kherson into a booby-trapped “city of death”. Yesterday that caution appeared to have been replaced with exuberance: soldiers near the front hugged each other and laughed as they prepared to enter the city.

Then come the distant booms, the shorter punch of a mortar round blasting off on the roadside, and, occasionally, the bone-chilling, fizzing whoosh of an incoming artillery shell that sends us diving for cover on the frozen fields. This is the daily, constant, percussive chorus of war in the Donbas, where Ukrainian and Russian artillery, rocket and tank crews are slugging it out, trading blows in a fierce, but largely inconclusive struggle to break a months-long deadlock.

"We have a target," said Roman, a Ukrainian tank unit commander, suddenly pulling off his gloves, clambering up onto the slippery, snow-covered turret of a dark green T-72 tank, and swinging open a heavy steel hatch. Another crew member, Vlad, scrambled out of a nearby fox hole, where he had been warming his grimy hands over a fresh fire, to help out. Seconds later, a skull-shaking explosion echoed across the valley and towards Bakhmut, as a US-supplied tank shell tore out of the gun barrel with a flash of orange, heading towards Russian positions on the opposite hillside.

"T-72s are old tanks - this one's the same age as me," said Bogdan, a 55-year-old Ukrainian volunteer, turning to pat the huge, squat, Soviet-era machine behind him. "I used to drive one of these nearly 40 years ago - I can't believe I'm doing it again. But it works. It does the job."

"But a Leopard would be better," said Volodymr, another member of their three-man crew, with a low chuckle.

Plans to send German-made Leopard tanks and UK Challengers to the front lines here in the Donbas have been greeted with visible excitement by Ukrainian forces, who have been taking heavy casualties in recent weeks, around Bakhmut, and, more particularly, during the ferocious struggle for the nearby town of Soledar.

"There were very heavy losses. It's very pitiful. It's hard," said Danylo, an officer in charge of repairing tanks for the 24th Mechanised Brigade. He said the current deadlock would not be broken unless foreign tanks arrived in significant numbers. "Yes, we'll be stuck here. We need these [Western tanks] to stop Russia's aggression. With infantry, covered by tanks, we'll win for sure," he said.

"Leopards, Challengers, Abrams - any foreign tank is good for us! I think we need at least 300. And we need them now!" said Bogdan.

The Ukrainians all acknowledged that Russia had more modern tanks but were scathing about their tactics.

"The Russian tanks are a bit better than ours. They're fully modernised. But mostly the Russians are strong because they push forwards en masse, advancing over the bodies of their own soldiers. Our commanders care more about the lives of their crews, so we try to destroy [the enemy] while losing as few of our own men as possible," said Bogdan.

A more senior company commander in the 24th Brigade, with the code name Khan, took us to a rear position, past fresh trenches being dug in the fields by specialised machines, where several tanks were hidden under camouflage nets in a wooded area.

"These T-72s have proved effective in winter conditions. But they're old, and not really suited for modern warfare. These days it's all about drones and the latest technology." Khan said he believed it would take very little time for his crews to adapt to more modern European equipment. "If you're a tank driver you're already someone of above-average intelligence. They'll be able to learn and adapt quickly," he said.

Suddenly, an incoming Russian artillery shell landed several hundred metres away. Seconds later, another landed closer, and then closer still, sending soldiers and journalists diving for cover.

The war in Ukraine has, in many ways, been a distinctly old-fashioned conflict, based on attrition, on devastating artillery strikes, and on dug-in positions reminiscent of the trenches of World War One. But the war has also revealed the limitation of tanks - most clearly in the first weeks of the conflict when nimble Ukrainian infantry destroyed many huge Russian armoured columns with shoulder-launched rockets.

"In the old days, it was all about tanks. Now it's about these new rocket systems," said Volodymr. But the coming months could yet see Western tanks - if deployed quickly, and in large numbers - play a decisive role.

A Ukrainian success would help justify Kyiv’s controversial determination to cling on to Bakhmut, despite horrendous losses and, at one point in late February and early March, almost having thousands of troops in the city encircled. Inversely, a failed offensive would validate Russia’s strategy of using the city to maul Ukraine’s best fighting units. “It’s too early to judge the impact of the battle of Bakhmut on the war,” said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at the Center for Naval Analyses who visited Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut in February. “This will be clearer in hindsight.”

While neither side has disclosed its casualties, many thousands of soldiers on both sides have died on the Bakhmut front, according to Western estimates. Many more have been injured. “It’s really hell. I have never seen anything like it before in this war,” one Ukrainian lieutenant-colonel in Bakhmut said. The decision to cling to Bakhmut, fighting street to street and house to house, had tied up Russian forces and prevented a Russian offensive in another direction, he added.

Even as Ukraine lost its last foothold of destroyed high-rises on Bakhmut’s westernmost edge this weekend, it pulled off several successful counteroffensives northwest and southwest of the city in previous weeks. By gaining valuable high ground, Ukraine has made it much more difficult for Russia to use its new control of Bakhmut as a springboard for further advances into Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donetsk region.

On the Russian side, most of the fighting in the Bakhmut area was conducted by the Wagner paramilitary group owned by President Vladimir Putin’s former chef Yevgeny Prigozhin, who sent tens of thousands of inmates recruited in Russian prisons to storm Ukrainian positions in near-suicidal missions.

Fierce fighting, he acknowledged, has battered Wagner’s combat potential to such a point that it had to transfer positions on its flanks to regular Russian troops. These positions have since been retaken by Ukrainian forces. Wagner plans to withdraw its forces from Bakhmut on Thursday, to rest and rebuild, as regular Russian troops take over, Prigozhin said.

Ukraine has repeatedly said that it plans a major offensive, aiming to regain Russian-occupied land in the south and east of the country. Moscow currently controls some 18% of Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk region that it seized in 2014.

Earlier this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his top generals came under criticism from some Ukrainian and Western commanders for throwing resources, including little-trained Territorial Defense troops, into Bakhmut, as they elevated the city to the symbol of Ukrainian resistance. In his speech to the U.S. Congress in December, Zelensky compared the battle for “Fortress Bakhmut” to the battle of Saratoga, the pivotal moment in the American war of independence. The then-speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, held up a Ukrainian flag inscribed by Bakhmut’s defenders.

This weekend Zelensky was attending the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, to lobby for more military assistance, including F-16 jet fighters, when Ukraine’s last defenses in Bakhmut collapsed. “They destroyed everything; there are no buildings,” Zelensky said at his meeting with President Biden. “It’s a tragedy. For today Bakhmut is only in our hearts. There is nothing in this place, just the ground and a lot of dead Russians.”

Prigozhin explained last fall that Russia’s true aim wasn’t Bakhmut as such but creating a “meatgrinder” that would chew up Ukraine’s armed forces, creating conditions for a subsequent Russian breakthrough deep into Ukraine. At the time, Gen. Syrskiy dismissed the city as not having strategic military significance.

While Ukraine did incur high losses in Bakhmut, it didn’t tap in to the new brigades trained and equipped for the planned offensive. Meanwhile, Wagner, the most combat-capable Russian force in Ukraine, has been mauled by the fighting Bakhmut, especially after losing its access to the fast-dwindling pool of prison recruits because of political conflict between Prigozhin and the leadership of the Russian ministry of defense.

Prigozhin has repeatedly posed in front of rows of dead Wagner soldiers, complaining that the deaths had been caused by the ministry’s failure to provide him with enough ammunition. Other Russian commanders have said that Wagner actually received a higher ammunition quota than other Russian units and that ammunition now is generally in short supply.

The Russian winter offensive that the Bakhmut “meatgrinder” was meant to enable, meanwhile, has failed, with catastrophic Russian losses in personnel and equipment and minimal advances in Moscow’s attempted assaults on the areas of Avdiivka and Vuhledar south of Bakhmut. Pointing out the staggering amount of Russian troops and ammunition used up in Bakhmut, and the lack of potential for further Russian offensives after seizing the city, Igor Girkin, a former Russian intelligence colonel who played a key role in fomenting unrest in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, described Wagner’s success as a pointless and Pyrrhic victory. “It wasn’t worth the expended forces and means,” he said.

Ukraine has used that time to rearm and to bulk up its military. Following Zelensky’s visits to Washington and European capitals, the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies made a strategic decision to supply Ukraine with Western-made tanks and infantry-fighting vehicles such as Bradleys and Marders for the first time, training and equipping nine new Ukrainian army brigades as part of Kyiv’s strike force for the planned offensive.

These brigades, alongside several others independently trained and equipped by Ukraine, are nearly ready, Ukrainian officials say. When and where the expected offensive will start, of course, is one of Kyiv’s most tightly guarded secrets. Russians will know when the offensive kicks off, Zelensky said Sunday.

“The most important thing accomplished by Ukraine [in Bakhmut] is that we managed to exhaust the Russians,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Kyiv-based National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government-backed think tank. “We have managed to inflict as much damage as possible, created this window of opportunity we’re going to exploit, and managed to get weapons and training.”

Russia’s effort in Bakhmut centered on trying to encircle the city from the north and the south, cutting off the remaining supply routes leading to Ukrainian-controlled territory west of the city. In late February and early March, Wagner seemed on the verge of being able to achieve that objective, which would have forced Ukrainian defenders to withdraw or risk being surrounded and running out of ammunition and food.

That is when many Ukrainian commanders and US officials urged a pullback from Bakhmut, fearing that the city’s garrison would meet the fate of the defenders of Mariupol, thousands of whom had surrendered last May, after months of trying to hold out in the ruins of the besieged Azov Sea port. But Ukrainian counterattacks in March ensured that a lifeline to Bakhmut remained. This meant that Russian forces in the past three months have been forced to fight street to street, assaulting one high-rise after another, in grinding urban warfare that disproportionately favored the defenders.

“The Russians have kept advancing by simply leveling the city, building by building.,” said a Ukrainian company commander in Bakhmut who initially advocated for an early pullout but said that he changed his mind in April. The casualty ratio then tilted once again in Ukraine’s favor, to perhaps as high as five-to-one, he said. “They kept pushing, and we kept destroying them.”

The men who carried out the raid were Russian, but they were wearing Ukrainian camouflage, holding NATO-standard rifles and driving American-made Humvees into battle, under the watchful eye of Ukrainian reconnaissance teams. Another showed a Russian helicopter flying at low altitude over the area, trailing flares to combat anti-aircraft missiles. Ukrainian forces later reported shooting down an Mi-8 helicopter north of Belgorod city. Fighting was also reported in Dronovka, 40km to the north.

The Freedom of Russia Legion said on Telegram that it had “liberated” the village of Kozinka and entered Graivoron with the Russian Volunteer Corps. “We are Russians just like you. We are distinguished only by the fact that we no longer want to justify the actions of criminals in power and took up arms to defend our land and your freedom,” the group said. “Today is the time for everyone to take responsibility for their ­future. It’s time for the Kremlin’s dictatorship to end.”

One video showed a bearded soldier smiling to the sound of outgoing artillery fire and repeating altered lyrics to a Russian punk rock song called Everything is Going ­According to Plan.

Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov blamed “a sabotage and reconnaissance group of the Ukrainian armed forces” for the attack. He said an “anti-terror ­regime” would take effect in Belgorod, giving increased powers to security services and placing ­restrictions on the public. At least six people were injured by shrapnel in the attack, he said, urging people to evacuate the area.

Although Russian partisan units have made two previous forays across the border, this was the first time they had tried to seize settlements with heavy artillery and hold them. The assault prompted civilians to flee en masse from the border area, with videos on social media showing chaotic traffic jams and columns of buses on the move.

The GUR spokesman insisted Ukrainian forces were not ­involved in the attack, but that they shared with the partisans a “unified vision of Putin’s criminal war against Ukraine” and the need for a “democratisation of Russia”. “What is happening highlights the need to create a demilitarised zone outside the territory of Ukraine on the border territories of Russia, where no military will threaten Ukraine nor the population of the territories of the Russian Federation,” he said. He claimed that the Russians had evacuated a site for the storage of nuclear weapons in the area.

Intelligence documents leaked online in April by US Airman Jack Teixeira suggest Ukraine had been planning a similar operation for some time. “Ukraine provides comprehensive support to Russian volunteers ready to liberate Russian territories from President Putin’s tyranny by armed means,” one document reads. “Such detachments are equipped with various qualitative types of NATO weapons; the personnel has passed respective training for usage of such weapons and has successful combat experience from various parts of the frontline in Ukraine. The reporting speaks of volunteer infiltration operations into Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod oblasts being planned for March-April 2023 in order to seize control over territories and ­declare newly created states.”

Comments

Rod: So I suppose Putin will be announcing another Special Military Operation to defend Russian-speaking Russians from Russians invading Russia from Russia? Like 18

RobX: Well Putin said he wanted a buffer between Russia and NATO states. Maybe he just got his wish. Like 63
Victoria: Brilliant!  Just so.