December 8, 2022 Brittney Griner and Russia-Ukraine news

Winter weather conditions and ongoing fighting are hindering repairs to Ukraine's power grid, as technicians race to get energy infrastructure damaged in weeks of relentless Russian strikes back up and running.

Ukrainian state energy agency, Ukrenergo, said Thursday there was a "significant shortage of electricity in the system," adding that consumption limits had been exceeded and emergency outages introduced in several regions. The outages come as temperatures are plummeting below freezing across the country. 

“Frost, rain with snow and strong wind in many regions in the west of the country cause icing of wires and their damage," Ukrenergo said.

But the worst challenges are in the east of the country, where access to the sites are complicated by continued shelling and artillery fire.

“In the evening the enemy again hit several areas with massive artillery fire. The power grids are being inspected, where the situation allows. Repair work will begin after receiving access from the military," the agency added.

Emergency repairs are ongoing in Kyiv and Odessa.

Some background: Russia unleashed yet another wave of drone and missile attacks across Ukraine on Monday, targeting the country's energy infrastructure. Ukraine has been facing a wide-scale assault on critical infrastructure and power sources since early October, as part of Moscow's weaponization of winter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes on Monday caused extensive power outages in several regions, including Kyiv and Odesa.

The impact: Ukraine’s health ministry on Tuesday announced the suspension of planned surgeries in an effort to insulate the medical system from the impacts of rolling power outages. "They will be carried out when the situation around the supply of electricity stabilizes…all emergency medical care will be provided to patients in full," the statement said.

Ukrainian forces have shelled the western Russian city of Belgorod, according to the region's governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. 

Gladkov said on Telegram Thursday that the city, located about 35 kilometers (21 miles) from the Ukrainian border, had sustained damage to a power line caused by “shell fragment.”

Preliminary indications show there are no civilian casualties, he said.

Some context: It's not the first time Belgorod has been targeted, according to the governor. On Nov. 15, he claimed two people had been killed in the city by Ukrainian shelling.

The alleged shelling of Belgorod comes after Russia accused Kyiv of using drones to strike military airfields far inside its territory on Monday and Tuesday — an extraordinary breach of Moscow’s assumptions that it can protect its deep interior.

Nearly 10 months after his invasion of Ukraine began, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday acknowledged that the conflict is “going to take a while,” as he also warned of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war.

Speaking at a meeting of Russia’s Human Rights Council at the Kremlin, Putin said Moscow will fight by “all available means at our disposal,” in what he insists on calling a “special military operation,” but also said he saw no immediate need to mobilize more troops.

And without categorically ruling out the first use of nuclear weapons, Putin said he viewed the Russian nuclear arsenal as a deterrent rather than a provocation.

Read more here.

Ukrainian officials and lawmakers have in recent months urged the Biden administration and members of Congress to provide the Ukrainian military with cluster munition warheads, weapons that are banned by more than 100 countries but that Russia continues to use to devastating effect inside Ukraine.

The Ukrainian request for the cluster munitions, which was described to CNN by multiple US and Ukrainian officials, is one of the most controversial requests the Ukrainians have made to the US since the war began in February.

Senior Biden administration officials have been fielding this request for months and have not rejected it outright, CNN has learned, a detail that has not been previously reported.

Cluster munitions are imprecise by design, and scatter “bomblets” across large areas that can fail to explode on impact and can pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines. They also create “nasty, bloody fragmentation” to anyone hit by them because of the dozens of submunitions that detonate at once across a large area, Mark Hiznay, a weapons expert and the associate arms director for Human Rights Watch, previously told CNN.

Top US officials have publicly stated that they plan to give the Ukrainians as much support as they need to give them an upper hand at the negotiating table with Russia, should it come to that. But western military equipment is not infinite, and as stockpiles of warheads dwindle, the Ukrainians have made plain to the US that it could use the cluster munitions currently gathering dust in storage.

Read the full story here.

Germany plans to supply Ukraine with 18 RCH 155 wheeled howitzers, according to the government's updated list of arms deliveries to Ukraine.

The delivery is in "preparation/implementation" phase, according to the list. 

Germany will also be providing an additional 100 drone defense sensors and jammers, two hangar tents and seven load-handling trucks, according to the list.

Germany and the Netherlands have already sent 14 self-propelled howitzers PzH2000 to Ukraine, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition. 

The RCH 155 is a modernized version of the PzH 2000 on wheels instead of tracks and with a higher degree of automation and crew safety, according to the company producing the howitzer, Krauss Maffei Wegmann. The German government legally cleared the way for RCH 155s to be sent to Ukraine in late September.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says 10 civilians were killed Wednesday in a Russian rocket attack on the town of Kurakhove in Donetsk. Additionally, he said four police officers were killed by Russian mines in Kherson in the south.

In what he said had been a long and difficult day, Zelensky accused the Russian army of "a very brutal, absolutely deliberate strike at Kurakhove, precisely at civilians. At ordinary people. At the market, elevator, gas station, bus station, residential buildings," he said in his daily video message.

He said battles continue to rage around Bakhmut in Donetsk.

Zelensky said that among the dead in Kherson was the chief of police of the Cherkasy region in northern Ukraine, Mykhailo Kuratchenko, who had gone to the south to help with "stabilization" measures after Kherson was liberated last month.

On energy: The Ukrainian president said that for now the energy situation is improving but it will not reach its maximum capacity.

Zelensky said Kyiv and Lviv regions were among the most affected by outages.

As the young soldier lies motionless in the machine, a group of doctors huddle over a computer in an adjoining room.

The images from the CT scanner show shrapnel lodged deep in the left-hand side of the man’s brain. “He needs urgent surgery,” 37-year-old neurosurgeon Oleg Serkiz says.

As one patient is prepared for the operating table, paramedics in military fatigues deliver another soldier on a stretcher, and then another — a constant stream of Ukraine’s fittest bodies now torn by metal and punctured by bullets.

These men were rushed from the front line to a specialist trauma hospital in the city of Kramatorsk on Wednesday afternoon after being wounded in the bloody battle for the eastern town of Bakhmut. Only hours earlier, they were the adrenaline-pumped vanguard of the Ukrainian army’s attempt to take on the Russian troops – among them mercenaries that hold much of the area. Now they wait, cold and pale, for their turn on the operating table.

Chief surgeon Dr. Vitaly Malanchuk is often the first to assess the men’s injuries.

“Polytrauma” is what a lay person would call many holes in the body.

Read more here.

TIME magazine has named Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader whose attempt to fight off Russia’s invasion of his country has won widespread acclaim, as its person of the year, alongside “the spirit of Ukraine.”

Read more here.