LAST UPDATE | 4 Dec 2022
FIGHTING IN RUSSIA’S war in Ukraine is running at a “reduced tempo” and Ukrainian forces could have brighter prospects in coming months, the head of US intelligence has said.
Avril Haines alluded to past allegations by some that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s advisers could be shielding him from bad news – for Russia – about war developments, and said he “is becoming more informed of the challenges that the military faces in Russia”.
“But it’s still not clear to us that he has a full picture of at this stage of just how challenged they are,” the US director of national intelligence said yesterday at the Reagan National Defence Forum in Simi Valley, California, in the US.
Looking ahead, Haines said, “honestly we’re seeing a kind of a reduced tempo already of the conflict” and her team expects that both sides will look to refit, resupply, and reconstitute for a possible Ukrainian counter-offensive in the spring.
“But we actually have a fair amount of scepticism as to whether or not the Russians will be in fact prepared to do that,” she said. “And I think more optimistically for the Ukrainians in that timeframe.”
In recent weeks, Russia’s military focus has been on striking Ukrainian infrastructure and pressing an offensive in the east, near the town of Bakhmut, while shelling sites in the city of Kherson, which Ukrainian forces liberated last month after an eight-month Russian occupation.
Today, an interior ministry official said that more than 500 Ukrainian localities remain without power following weeks of Russian airstrikes on the electric grid.
“The enemy continues to attack the country’s essential infrastructure. Currently, 507 localities in eight regions of our country are cut off from electricity supplies,” deputy interior minister Yevgueny Yenin told Ukrainian television.
“The Kharkiv region is the worst hit with 112 isolated villages,” Yenin added.
Another 90 villages were cut off in the Donetsk and Kherson regions, he said, with others in the regions of Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia and Lugansk.
Yesterday, Ukrainian authorities – including Mykolaiv region governor Vitali Kim – had once again urged civilians to bear up in the face of continually deteriorating early winter conditions and regular power outages.
Repeated daily power cuts have left millions of people without heat or lighting while outside temperatures have dropped below zero Celsius in recent days.
With further strikes on the network widely expected, Ukrainians fear a difficult prolonged winter as well as a flood of departures by refugees from a war now into a tenth month.
Private Ukrainian energy operator DTEK said Thursday that nearly half of Ukraine’s electricity grid remains damaged after Russia began targeting Ukrainian energy facilities in October following a series of humiliating military defeats on the ground.
In his nightly address yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attacked Western efforts to hit Russia’s crucial oil industry, a key source of funds for Putin’s war machine, saying their $60-per-barrel price cap on imports of Russian oil was insufficient.
“It is not a serious decision to set such a limit for Russian prices, which is quite comfortable for the budget of the terrorist state,” Zelenskyy said, referring to Russia.
He said the $60-per-barrel level would still allow Russia to bring in $100 billion in revenues per year.
“This money will go not only to the war and not only to further sponsorship by Russia of other terrorist regimes and organisations. This money will be used for further destabilisation of those countries that are now trying to avoid serious decisions,” Zelenskyy said.
Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, the United States and the EU agreed on Friday to cap what they would pay for Russian oil at $60-per-barrel. The limit is set to take effect tomorrow, along with an EU embargo on Russian oil shipped by sea.
Russian authorities have rejected the price cap and threatened yesterday to stop supplying the nations that endorsed it.
In yet another show of Western support for Ukraine, US under secretary of state for political affairs Victoria Nuland yesterday visited the operations of a Ukrainian aid group that provides support for internally displaced people in Ukraine, among her other visits with top Ukrainian officials.
She assembled dolls out of wool in the blue-and-yellow colours of Ukraine’s flag with youngsters from regions including northeastern Kharkiv, southern Kherson, and eastern Donetsk.
“This is psychological support for them at an absolutely crucial time,” Nuland said.
“As President Putin knows best, this war could stop today, if he chose to stop it and withdrew his forces, and then negotiations can begin,” she added.
Additional reporting from © AFP 2022
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