November 9, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Representatives for Brittney Griner have confirmed they do not know her current location or condition after attorneys for the US basketball star said she was being transferred to a Russian penal colony on Wednesday.

Some background: Last month, Griner lost her appeal against a nine-year drug sentence following her detention in February and conviction in August for deliberately smuggling drugs into Russia. She has repeatedly apologized for bringing a small amount of cannabis into the country, where she played basketball in the off-season.

Russian penal colonies are known for their lack of hygiene and access to medical care, with inmates often subjected to manual labor.

Russian forces hit the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro with self-detonating drone attacks early Wednesday, seriously wounding four and causing a large fire to break out, according to a spokesman for the Odesa regional administration.

CNN cannot independently confirm Bratchuk’s claim. 

Some context: Self-detonating drones have played a significant role in the conflict since Russia launched its invasion in late February. They are capable of circling for some time in an area identified as a potential target and striking only once an enemy asset is identified.

Russia has launched a series of drone attacks across Ukraine in recent weeks, striking vital civilian infrastructure and sowing terror in Ukrainian cities far from the front lines of the war.

US women’s basketball star Brittney Griner is in the process of being moved to a Russian penal colony where she is due to serve the remainder of a nine-year drug smuggling sentence that was upheld in late October.

Griner “is now on her way to a penal colony,” her attorneys said in a statement to CNN Wednesday.

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Kyiv's forces destroyed two Russian ammunition depots in southern Ukraine on Tuesday, according to the Ukrainian military.

Ukraine's Operational Command South said on Facebook Wednesday that the depots were in Snihurivka, Mykolaiv region, and Kostromka, in neighboring Kherson.

The command also listed losses for Russia across southern Ukraine over the past 24 hours, including four tanks, a "Tor-M2" anti-aircraft missile system, an "Acacia" self-propelled howitzer, two mortars and nine armored vehicle units.

Some 55 Russian troops were also killed, it added.

The statement said Russian forces were seeking out Ukrainian resistance activists and attempting to disrupt channels of information by dismantling mobile communication towers.

CNN cannot independently verify the Ukrainian military’s claims. 

Some context: Russia has probably lost half its main battle tanks and used up the majority of its precision-guided weapons in a war that has become a “massive strategic failure” for the Kremlin, Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said Tuesday. 

Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin leader of Russia's Chechnya region, has dismissed as "enemy propaganda" reports that his loyalist troops suffered heavy losses in recent fighting in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine.   

In a video posted to his Telegram account late Tuesday, Kadyrov responded to Ukrainian claims that many Chechen troops from the Akhmat battalion had been killed in the city of Lysychansk. Ukraine's General Staff said earlier that at least 30 Chechen fighters had been killed when their unit was destroyed and up to 15 others wounded.

He claimed Chechen squads were "doing very well" in Ukraine, adding his troops were preparing "more surprises" for Ukrainian forces. "These are not empty words,” he warned.

Chechen fighters: Kadyrov has been accused by international and independent observers of gross human rights violations in his home territory and beyond. He leads sizeable paramilitary forces that —  while formally a part of Russian security structures —  have personal loyalty to him. 

Russia has probably lost half its main battle tanks and used up the majority of its precision-guided weapons in a war that has become a “massive strategic failure” for the Kremlin, Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said Tuesday. 

Kahl said Russia has suffered “tens of thousands of casualties” since the war began in February, which is “orders of magnitude” more than the Soviet Union suffered in Afghanistan. 

Kahl noted that there is considerable bipartisan support for Ukraine moving forward, but what that support looks like and what Ukraine’s military needs going forward may change.

Amid fierce fighting in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the "situation is complicated along the entire front line."

He said Russian forces "suffer extremely large-scale losses, but their order has not changed — to reach the administrative borders of Donetsk region. We do not surrender a single centimeter of our land there. And I thank all our heroes who hold positions in Donbas."

In the southern Kherson region, Zelensky said Ukrainian units were acting "carefully, thoroughly and in the interests of liberating our entire territory. We are strengthening our positions, breaking Russian logistics, consistently destroying the potential of the occupiers to keep the south of our country in occupation."

Zelensky said work continued to restore normal life in the liberated areas. In two districts of Kharkiv region, he said, "more than a thousand households have their gas and electricity supply restored." 

Across the country, repair work continued on energy facilities, he said.

"As of this evening, about 4 million Ukrainians in 14 regions and the city of Kyiv are cut off from electricity supply. But the majority of them are under stabilization power cut off schedules, not emergency ones." The schedules implement 12 hours of power cuts a day.

The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has said that American support for Ukraine is “unwavering” and will continue until the nation "wins this war.”

When asked about reports that US officials have urged Ukraine to signal that they are still open to diplomatic discussions with Russia, amid concerns that public support for the country's war effort could wane, Thomas-Greenfield demurred.

The international community, she said, “wants justice for the people of Ukraine.”

“Any negotiations that take place have to take place with Ukraine in the driver’s seat," she said. "They have to determine that, when they are ready for those negotiations, with the backing and support of the international community, following the charter that Russia has violated.”

The US and Russia have agreed to hold talks on the single existing nuclear treaty between the two countries in the near future, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Tuesday.

The New START treaty limits all deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons by Russia and the US.

The treaty — the only one left regulating the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world — was extended by five years in February 2021 during the first weeks of Joe Biden’s presidency.

It requires both countries to allow on-site inspections of its nuclear weapons-related facilities by the other. Those inspections were paused in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A resumption of the inspections is expected to be a topic of discussion at the upcoming meetings, US officials said.

Diplomatic relations between Russia and the US are in the doldrums following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine with no end to the war in sight but US officials have viewed it as a positive development that Moscow has continued to express interest in the treaty, despite Putin’s alarming nuclear threats as the conflict rages on.

Russia has expressed a willingness to discuss extending the treaty and the US has said that negotiations would only happen once the on-site inspections resume.

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