Russia ultimatum amid fierce Ukraine fight

Dan Peleschuk and Herbert Villarraga | December 27, 2022

Russian forces have shelled and bombed towns and cities in eastern and southern Ukraine on Tuesday, a day after Russia’s foreign minister said Kyiv must accept Moscow’s demands for ending the war or else suffer defeat on the battlefield.

Those demands include Ukraine recognising Russia’s conquest of a fifth of its territory. Kyiv, armed and supported by the United States and its NATO allies, has vowed to recover all occupied territory and to drive out all Russian soldiers.

Britain’s defence ministry said in its latest update of the military situation in Ukraine that fighting was particularly intense around the strategic eastern city of Bakhmut in Donetsk province and Svatove, further north in Luhansk province.

Donetsk and Luhansk, which make up the industrial Donbas, are both claimed by Russia along with two southern Ukrainian regions.

“Russia continues to initiate frequent small-scale assaults in these areas (of Bakhmut and Svatove), although little territory has changed hands,” the British ministry tweeted.

Reuters footage showed fires burning in a large residential building in Bakhmut, while debris littered the streets and most buildings had had their windows blown out.

“Our proposals for the demilitarisation and denazification of the territories controlled by the regime, the elimination of threats to Russia’s security emanating from there, including our new lands, are well known to the enemy,” TASS news agency quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying late on Monday.

“The point is simple: Fulfil them for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.”

In his nightly video message on Monday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the situation along the frontline in Donbas “difficult and painful”.

After suffering a series of defeats in its “special military operation”, Russia is now seeking a battlefield victory by capturing Bakhmut, an industrial city with a pre-war population of 70,000, now reduced to about 10,000 mostly elderly residents.

Gaining control of the city could give Russia a stepping stone to advance on two bigger cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

Over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in the areas of two settlements in Luhansk province and six in Donetsk, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said on Tuesday.

It also reported more Russian shelling of Kherson city, in the Zaporizhzhia region and of settlements in the Kharkiv region of northeast Ukraine near the border with Russia.

Oleh Zhdanov, a military analyst based in Kyiv, also cited heavy fighting around elevated areas near Kreminna in Luhansk region as well as around Bakhmut and Avdiivka in Donetsk.

“The arc of fire in Donetsk region continues to burn,” Zhdanov said in a social media video post.

Zelenskiy said as a result of attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure nearly nine million people were currently without power – equal to about one-quarter of Ukraine’s population.

President Vladimir Putin had planned a swift operation to subdue Ukraine when he ordered the invasion on February 24, but Russia has suffered many embarrassing battlefield setbacks.

In the latest attack to expose gaps in Russia’s air defences, a drone believed to be Ukrainian penetrated hundreds of kilometres through Russian airspace on Monday, causing a deadly explosion at the main base for its strategic bombers.

Moscow said it had shot down the drone at its Engels air base, where three service members were killed. Ukraine did not comment, under its usual policy on incidents inside Russia.

A suspected drone struck the same base on December 5.

Putin repeated on Sunday that he was open to negotiations but only on Moscow’s terms, a stance Kyiv and the West have rejected. Kyiv and Western countries say Russia is engaged in a brutal, imperialist land grab.