“Ukraine – Russia”

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has said his troops have seized the key town of Mariinka in eastern Ukraine.

Mr Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin assault units had taken the “powerfully fortified” area just outside Donetsk, a Russian-held regional capital.

The commander of Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi said Ukrainian forces had moved to the outskirts of Mariinka.

Mariinka – seen as a gateway to Donetsk – has been almost completely destroyed.

Mariinka

🐘 T-64BV bursts into the northwestern outskirts of the city and destroys the positions of the Russians at close range. pic.twitter.com/TKBDmUpxkl

— GWAR69 🇩🇰🇺🇦 (@GwarWorin) December 26, 2023

Today, Russian media is rejoicing, boasting that the Russian army has, after 22 months, finally taken the town of Mariinka.

Here's what's left of Mariinka after Russians spent billions in artillery and 15,000 Russian lives there to "take" it. pic.twitter.com/vkB9v9FxPA

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) December 25, 2023

Russia has confirmed one of its warships has been damaged in a Ukrainian attack on a Black Sea port.

The airstrike took place at Feodosiya in Russian-occupied Crimea early on Tuesday morning.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said the large landing ship Novocherkassk was struck by Ukrainian aircraft carrying guided missiles.

The head of the Ukrainian Air Force said earlier its warplanes had destroyed the ship.

Heavy casualties suffered by both sides in the Ukraine war have ignited a race to replenish vehicles lost in combat and protect those that remain operational.

With Ukraine’s supply of Western-donated vehicles beginning to dry up after its counter-offensive failed to produce a breakthrough, and with Russia losing hundreds of tanks in failed eastern assaults, engineers are using every means at their disposal to plug the gaps in their forces.

Modern warfare is just a series of proxy wars.

The war in Ukraine is a proxy war. Ukraine is the proxy of America and NATO. To stem a Russian invasion, America and its NATO allies are helping Ukrainians defend their country against the invaders in every way save by putting “boots on the ground.” The question is just how long America and its allies will persevere and whether respective elected governments can, over time, convince their electorates that the benefits of continued support for Ukraine outweigh the costs, in this case almost entirely financial.

President Vladimir V. Putin’s confidence seems to know no bounds.

Buoyed by Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive and flagging Western support, Mr. Putin says that Russia’s war goals have not changed. Addressing his generals on Tuesday, he boasted that Ukraine was so beleaguered that Russia’s invading troops were doing “what we want.”

“We won’t give up what’s ours,” he pledged, adding dismissively, “If they want to negotiate, let them negotiate.”

But in a recent push of back-channel diplomacy, Mr. Putin has been sending a different message: He is ready to make a deal.

A plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner mercenary boss, was brought down by a bomb planted under its wing in a plot orchestrated by Vladimir Putin’s oldest ally, according to a new report.

Nikolai Patrushev, a former KGB officer, the powerful head of Russia’s security council, personally oversaw the planning of the operation, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing Western intelligence sources and a former Russian intelligence officer.

Prigozhin died when his private jet crashed over Russia’s Tver region on Aug 23, around two months after he led an armed rebellion against Moscow’s military leadership in June, in the biggest threat to Putin’s two-decade rule.

Western nations sent around 200 modern tanks and hundreds more armoured vehicles to Ukraine for its highly anticipated summer offensive.

The hope was that Ukraine could use them to break through the heavily prepared Russian defences.

But within the first week of that offensive the losses started to mount. Around a dozen Leopard tanks and US supplied Bradley armoured vehicles were damaged or destroyed in just one day – trapped in dense Russian minefields backed up by artillery fire.

Ukrainian refugees in Europe will be called up to bolster their country’s army, the Ukrainian defence minister has announced.

Rustem Umerov told the German newspaper Bild that men aged 25 to 60 would receive a summons to report to Ukrainian army recruitment centres. They would face unspecified sanctions if they failed to volunteer.

“We want fairness for everyone because it’s about our own country. We are sending them an invitation,” he said. “We are still discussing what should happen if they don’t come voluntarily.”

President Zelensky holds his annual press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday amid mounting concern over the future of western military aid and Ukraine’s ability to hold back a renewed Russian offensive.

It comes after a Ukrainian general said troops along the entire front line were facing ammunition shortages and had been forced to downsize some operations because of a decrease in foreign assistance.

“The volumes we have are not sufficient, given our needs,” General Tarnavskyi said on Monday.

As they stood shivering on the streets of Kupyansk, just eight kilometres from the Russian front line, Dave and Justin Smith worried that the war they’d come to Ukraine to fight is slowly being lost.

Not because the two Canadians have any doubts about the bravery or the commitment of the Ukrainians they fight alongside, but because they feel the West is becoming distracted and losing interest in the grinding conflict here.

Ukraine has warned it is already being forced to downsize some military operations because of a drop-off in foreign aid.

Top general Oleksandr Tarnavskyi said troops faced ammunition shortages along the “entire front line”, creating a “big problem” for Kyiv.

It comes as billions of dollars of US and EU aid have been held up amid political wrangles.

Ukraine said it hoped to boost its own ammunition industry with western help.

Russia’s red button is in the hands of God

During a service this autumn, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow wished a happy birthday to one of his congregants in the Church of Christ the Saviour. It was no ordinary salutation. Radii Il’kaev, who had just turned 85, was a nuclear physicist who had worked for much of his life in the secretive town of Sarov, the birthplace of the Soviet atomic bomb. Long before it became a centre of nuclear defence, the town had been home to a monastery where one of Russia’s most popular saints — Serafim — had lived and prayed.

Vladimir Putin says more than 600,000 Russian soldiers are in Ukraine, almost twice the number he started the war with. His “freeloading” adversary will soon run out of Western support. And in a sign of his growing confidence at his traditional end-of-year press conference, he insists that Ukraine’s forces have “failed everywhere” in their counter-offensive. But as the snow starts to fill trenches at the end of a second year of fighting he initially expected to be over in days, is he right?

Ukraine faces dwindling reserves of ammunition, personnel and Western support. The counteroffensive it launched six months ago has failed. Moscow, once awash in recriminations over a disastrous invasion, is celebrating its capacity to sustain a drawn-out war.

The war in Ukraine has reached a critical moment, as months of brutal fighting have left Moscow more confident and Kyiv unsure of its prospects.