World
Attacks by Russia against Kherson, Eastern Ukraine, Increase
The Ukrainian military said that Russian forces attacked Kherson in southern Ukraine with more bombs and artillery on Wednesday and kept putting a lot of pressure on the eastern front lines.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces says that Russia fired hundreds of missiles at civilian targets in Kherson, a city it left in the middle of November. Russia says it didn’t aim at people, though.
The general staff reported that Russia also shelled 25 communities near Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. There was a report that some Russian troops were leaving their posts near Zaporizhzhia. The battlefield accounts were not independently verifiable by Reuters.
In the eastern province of Donetsk, a fierce battle raged near the city of Bakhmut, which is controlled by the Ukrainians. Northeast of Donetsk, in the province of Luhansk, close to the cities of Svatove and Kreminna, Ukrainian soldiers are advancing in an effort to breach Russian defences.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has made a 10-point plan for peace that asks Russia to recognise Ukrainian territory and pull its troops out.
The plan was rejected by the Kremlin, which reaffirmed its position that Kyiv must recognise the annexation that Russia carried out in September following referendums that Ukraine and the majority of other countries deemed to be fake. The four Ukrainian regions are Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south and Luhansk and Donetsk in the east.
With the accession of four areas into Russia, no peace proposal for Ukraine can ignore the current reality involving Russian territory, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday. Plans that ignore these facts are incompatible with being peaceful.
In a closed-door session with the Ukrainian parliament on Wednesday, Zelenskyy called for parliamentarians to stand together against Russian aggression while applauding Ukrainians for helping the West “find itself again.”
In his 45-minute speech, his final of the year, Putin declared that “our national colours are today an international emblem of courage and indomitability for the whole globe.”
“When you see blue and yellow, you know it’s about independence in any nation or continent.” “In honour of those who refused to give up, who stood, who brought the world together, and who will triumph,” he said.
Zelenskyy praised Ukraine’s troops and said that thanks to its forces, the world has witnessed the triumph of freedom.
Zelenskyy pointed out that since Russia invaded Ukraine ten months ago, 1,456 prisoners of war have been freed. Thousands of Ukrainian POWs are reportedly held by Russia, although exact numbers are unknown.
exportation of gas
Russia’s greatest gas and oil consumer, Europe, saw a post-Soviet low in Russian gas exports in 2022. Because of the battle and the mysterious explosions that destroyed Nord Stream 2, one of two important pipelines that run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea, European, Gazprom, and Reuters data show that Russia cut its pipeline exports by a lot.
The European Union has long talked about reducing its dependency on Russian energy, but when Moscow invaded Ukraine in February, Brussels really carried this out.
Using Chief Executive Officer Alexei Miller as a source, state-controlled Gazprom predicted that this year’s exports to countries outside the former Soviet Union will total 100.9 billion cubic metres (bcm).
This is a drop of almost 45% from 185.1 bcm in 2021. It includes supplies sent to China via the Siberian pipeline, which was used by Gazprom to send 10.39 billion cubic metres of goods last year.
As a result of explosions that damaged two Nord Stream pipelines, direct Russian gas deliveries to Germany, the biggest economy in Europe, were stopped in September.
Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and The Associated Press all contributed to the content of this article.