Tag: War and unrest

Army officers appear on Burkina Faso TV, declare new coup

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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — More than a dozen members of Burkina Faso’s army seized control of state television late Friday, declaring that the country’s coup leader-turned-president, Lt. Col. Paul Henri Sandaogo Damiba, had been overthrown after only nine months in power.

A statement read by a junta spokesman said Capt. Ibrahim Traore is the new military leader of Burkina Faso, a volatile West African country that is battling a mounting Islamic insurgency.

Burkina Faso’s new military leaders said the country’s borders had been closed and a curfew would be in effect from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. The transitional government and national assembly were ordered dissolved.

Damiba and his allies overthrew the democratically elected president, coming to power with promises of make the country more secure. However, violence has continued unabated and frustration with his leadership has grown in recent months.

“Faced by the continually worsening security situation, we the officers and junior officers of the national armed forces were motivated to take action with the desire to protect the security and integrity of our country,” said the statement read by the junta spokesman, Capt. Kiswendsida Farouk Azaria Sorgho.

The soldiers promised the international community they would respect their commitments and urged Burkinabes “to go about their business in peace.”

“A meeting will be convened to adopt a new transitional constitution charter and to select a new Burkina Faso president be it civilian or military,” Sorgho added.

Damiba had just returned from addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York as Burkina Faso’s head of state. Tensions, though, had been mounting for months. In his speech, Damiba defended his January coup as “an issue of survival for our nation,” even if it was ”perhaps reprehensible” to the international community.

Constantin Gouvy, Burkina Faso researcher at Clingendael, said Friday night’s events “follow escalating tensions within the ruling MPSR junta and the wider army about strategic and operational decisions to tackle spiraling insecurity.”

“Members of the MPSR increasingly felt Damiba was isolating himself and casting aside those who helped him seize power,” Gouvy told The Associated Press.

Gunfire had erupted in the capital, Ouagadougou, early Friday and hours passed without any public appearance by Damiba. Late in the afternoon, his spokesman posted a statement on the presidency’s Facebook page saying that “negotiations are underway to bring back calm and serenity.”

Friday’s developments felt all too familiar in West Africa, where a coup in Mali in August 2020 set off a series of military power grabs in the region. Mali also saw a second coup nine months after the August 2020 overthrow of its president, when the junta’s leader sidelined his civilian transition counterparts and put himself alone in charge.

On the streets of Ouagadougou, some people already were showing support Friday for the change in leadership even before the putschists took to the state airwaves.

Francois Beogo, a political activist from the Movement for the Refounding of Burkina Faso, said Damiba “has showed his limits.”

“People were expecting a real change,” he said of the January coup d’etat.

Some demonstrators voiced support for Russian involvement in order to stem the violence, and shouted slogans against France, Burkina Faso’s former colonizer. In neighboring Mali, the junta invited Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group to help secure the country, though their deployment has drawn international criticism.

Many in Burkina Faso initially supported the military takeover last January, frustrated with the previous government’s inability to stem Islamic extremist violence that has killed thousands and displaced at least 2 million.

Yet the violence has failed to wane in the months since Damiba took over. Earlier this month, he also took on the position of defense minister after dismissing a brigadier general from the post.

“It’s hard for the Burkinabe junta to claim that it has delivered on its promise of improving the security situation, which was its pretext for the January coup,” said Eric Humphery-Smith, senior Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft.

Earlier this week, at least 11 soldiers were killed and 50 civilians went missing after a supply convoy was attacked by gunmen in Gaskinde commune in Soum province in the Sahel. That attack was “a low point” for Damiba’s government and “likely played a role in inspiring what we’ve seen so far today,” added Humphery-Smith.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Friday that nearly one-fifth of Burkina Faso’s population “urgently needs humanitarian aid.”

“Burkina Faso needs peace, it needs stability, and it needs unity in order to fight terrorist groups and criminal networks operating in parts of the country,” Dujarric said.

Chrysogone Zougmore, president of the Burkina Faso Movement for Human Rights, called Friday’s developments “very regrettable,” saying the instability would not help in the fight against the Islamic extremist violence.

“How can we hope to unite people and the army if the latter is characterized by such serious divisions?” Zougmore said. “It is time for these reactionary and political military factions to stop leading Burkina Faso adrift.”

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Mednick reported from Barcelona. Associated Press writers Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.

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September 30, 2022
Russia vetoes UN resolution calling its referendums illegal

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UNITED NATIONS — Russia vetoed a U.N. resolution Friday that would have condemned its referendums in four Ukrainian regions as illegal, declared them invalid and urged all countries not to recognize any annexation of the territory claimed by Moscow.

The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 10-1 with China, India, Brazil and Gabon abstaining.

The resolution would also have demanded an immediate halt to Russia’s “full-scale unlawful invasion of Ukraine” and the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all its military forces from Ukraine.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said before the vote that in the event of a Russian veto, the U.S. and Albania who sponsored the resolution will take it to the 193-member General Assembly where there are no vetoes, “and show that the world is still on the side of sovereignty and protecting territorial integrity.”

The council vote came hours after a lavish Kremlin ceremony where President Vladimir Putin signed treaties to annex the Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, saying they were now part of Russia and would be defended by Moscow.

Thomas-Greenfield said the results of the “sham” referendums on whether the regions wanted to join Russia were “pre-determined in Moscow, and everybody knows it.” “They were held behind the barrel of Russian guns,” she said.

Adding that “the sacred principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity” at the heart of the U.N. Charter must be defended, she said, “All of us understand the implications for our own borders, our own economies, and our own countries if these principles are tossed aside.”

“Putin miscalculated the resolve of the Ukrainians,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “The Ukrainian people have demonstrated loud and clear: They will never accept being subjugated to Russian rule.”

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia defended the referendums, claiming that more than 100 international observers from Italy, Germany, Venezuela and Latvia who observed the voting recognized the outcomes as legitimate.

“The results of the referendums speak for themselves. The residents of these regions do not want to return to Ukraine. They have made a an informed and free choice in favor of our country,” he said.

Nebenzia added: “There will be no turning back as today’s draft resolution would try to impose.”

He accused Western nations on the council of “openly hostile actions,” saying they reached “a new low” by putting forward a resolution condemning a council member and forcing a Russian veto so they can “wax lyrical.”

Under a resolution adopted earlier this year, Russia must defend its veto before the General Assembly in the coming weeks.

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September 30, 2022
Nobel Prize season arrives amid war, nuclear fears, hunger

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This year’s Nobel Prize season approaches as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered decades of almost uninterrupted peace in Europe and raised the risks of a nuclear disaster.

The secretive Nobel committees never hint who will win the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics or peace. It’s anyone’s guess who might win the awards being announced starting Monday.

Yet there’s no lack of urgent causes deserving the attention that comes with winning the world’s most prestigious prize: Wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia, disruptions to supplies of energy and food, rising inequality, the climate crisis, the ongoing fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The science prizes reward complex achievements beyond the understanding of most. But the recipients of the prizes in peace and literature are often known by a global audience and the choices — or perceived omissions — have sometimes stirred emotional reactions.

Members of the European Parliament have called for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine to be recognized this year by the Nobel Peace Prize committee for their resistance to the Russian invasion.

While that desire is understandable, that choice is unlikely because the Nobel committee has a history of honoring figures who end conflicts, not wartime leaders, said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Smith believes more likely peace prize candidates would be groups or individuals fighting climate change or the International Atomic Energy Agency, a past recipient.

Honoring the IAEA again would recognize its efforts to prevent a radioactive catastrophe at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia atomic power plant at the heart of fighting in Ukraine, and its work in fighting nuclear proliferation, Smith said.

“This is really difficult period in world history and there is not a lot of peace being made,” he said.

Promoting peace isn’t always rewarded with a Nobel. India’s Mohandas Gandhi, a prominent symbol of non-violence in the 20th century, was never so honored.

But former President Barack Obama was in 2009, sparking criticism from those who said he had not been president long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.

In some cases, the winners have not lived out the values enshrined in the peace prize.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won in 2019 for making peace with neighboring Eritrea. A year later a largely ethnic conflict erupted in the country’s Tigray region. Some accuse Abiy of stoking the tensions, which have resulted in widespread atrocities. Critics have called for his Nobel to be revoked.

The Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi won the peace prize in 1991 while being under house arrest for her opposition to military rule. Decades later, she was seen as failing in a leadership role to stop atrocities committed by the military against the country’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority.

The Nobel committee has sometimes not awarded a peace prize at all. It paused them during World War I, except to honor the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1917. It didn’t hand out any from 1939 to 1943 due to World War II. In 1948, the year Gandhi died, the Norwegian Nobel Committee made no award, citing a lack of a suitable living candidate.

The peace prize also does not always confer protection.

Last year journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia were awarded “for their courageous fight for freedom of expression” in the face of authoritarian governments.

Following the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has cracked down even harder on independent media, including Muratov’s Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most renowned independent newspaper. Muratov himself was attacked on a Russian train by an assailant who poured red paint over him, injuring his eyes.

The Philippines government this year ordered the shutdown of Ressa’s news organization, Rappler.

The literature prize, meanwhile, has been notoriously unpredictable.

Few had bet on last year’s winner, Zanzibar-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose books explore the personal and societal impacts of colonialism and migration.

Gurnah was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa, and the prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers. It is also male-dominated, with just 16 women among its 118 laureates.

The list of possible winners includes literary giants from around the world: Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Norway’s Jon Fosse, Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid and France’s Annie Ernaux.

A clear contender is Salman Rushdie, the India-born writer and free-speech advocate who spent years in hiding after Iran’s clerical rulers called for his death over his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses.” Rushdie, 75, was stabbed and seriously injured at a festival in New York state on Aug. 12.

The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. poet Louise Glück in 2020 have helped the literature prize move on from years of controversy and scandal.

In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.

Some scientists hope the award for physiology or medicine honors colleagues instrumental in the development of the mRNA technology that went into COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives across the world.

“When we think of Nobel prizes, we think of things that are paradigm shifting, and in a way I see mRNA vaccines and their success with COVID-19 as a turning point for us,” said Deborah Fuller, a microbiology professor at the University of Washington.

The Nobel Prize announcements this year kick off Monday with the prize in physiology or medicine, followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and probably, though the date has not been confirmed, literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Oct. 7 and the economics award on Oct. 10.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor ($880,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10.

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Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Jill Lawless in London and Laura Ungar in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed.

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September 30, 2022
Russian strike kills 23 as Kremlin to annex Ukraine regions

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KYIV, Ukraine — A Russian strike on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia killed at least 23 people and wounded dozens, an official said Friday, just hours before Moscow planned to annex more of Ukraine in an escalation of the seven-month war.

Zaporizhzhia Regional Governor Oleksandr Starukh made the announcement in an online statement Friday. He said there were at least 28 wounded when Russian forces targeted a humanitarian convoy heading to Russian-occupied territory.

He posted images of burned out vehicles and bodies lying in the road. Russia did not immediately acknowledge the strike.

The attack comes as Moscow prepares to annex four regions into Russia after an internationally criticized, gunpoint referendum vote as part of its invasion of Ukraine. Those regions include areas near Zaporizhzhia, but not the city itself, which remains in Ukrainian hands.

Starukh said those in the convoy planned to travel into Russian-occupied territory to pick up their relatives and then take them to safety. He said rescuers were at the site of the attack.

The annexation — and planned celebratory concerts and rallies in Moscow and the occupied territories — would come just days after voters supposedly approved Moscow-managed “referendums” that Ukrainian and Western officials have denounced as illegal, forced and rigged.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday that four regions of Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — would be folded into Russia during a Kremlin ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin, who is expected to give a major speech. Peskov said the regions’ pro-Moscow administrators would sign treaties to join Russia in the Kremlin’s ornate St. George’s Hall.

In an apparent response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called an emergency meeting Friday of his National Security and Defense Council.

Zelenskyy also sought to capitalize on anti-war sentiment in Russia by issuing a special video directed at Russia’s ethnic minorities, especially those in Dagestan, one of the country’s poorer regions in the North Caucasus.

“You do not have to die in Ukraine,” he said, wearing a black hoodie that read in English “I’m Ukrainian,” and standing in front of a plaque in Kyiv memorializing what he called a Dagestani hero. He called on the ethnic minorities to resist mobilization.

The U.S. and its allies have promised to adopt even more sanctions than they’ve already levied against Russia and to offer millions of dollars in extra support for Ukraine as the Kremlin duplicates the annexation playbook it followed when it incorporated Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

Putin early Friday issued decrees recognizing the independence of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, steps he had taken in February regarding Luhansk and Donetsk and earlier for Crimea.

Ukraine has repeated its vows to recapture the four regions, as well as Crimea. For its part, Russia pledges to defend all its territory — including newly annexed regions — by all available means, including nuclear weapons.

Heightening the tensions are Russia’s partial military mobilization and allegations of sabotage of two Russian pipelines on the Baltic Sea floor that were designed to feed natural gas to Europe. Adding to the Kremlin’s woes are Ukraine’s success in recapturing some of the very land Russia is annexing and problems with the mobilization that President Vladimir Putin acknowledged Thursday.

Ukraine’s Western supporters have described the stage-managed referendums on whether to live under Russian rule as a bald-faced land grab based on lies. They say some people were forced to vote at gunpoint in an election without independent observers on territory from which thousands of residents have fled or been forcibly deported.

In unusually strong language, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters Thursday in New York that Russia’s annexation would violate the U.N. Charter and has “no legal value.” He described the move as “a dangerous escalation” and said it “must not be accepted.”

“Any decision by Russia to go forward will further jeopardize the prospects for peace,” Guterres said.

As a veto-wielding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, Russia bears “a particular responsibility” to respect the U.N. Charter, the secretary-general said.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Guterres conveyed the message to Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, on Wednesday.

In what would be a major blow to Moscow’s war effort, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Ukrainian forces may soon encircle Lyman, 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

“The collapse of the Lyman pocket will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping” in the northern Donetsk and western Luhansk regions and “may allow Ukrainian troops to threaten Russian positions along the western Luhansk” region, the institute said, citing Russian reports.

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September 30, 2022
Kremlin gets ready to annex 4 regions of Ukraine on Friday

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KYIV, Ukraine — Russia on Friday will formally annex occupied parts of Ukraine where it held Kremlin-orchestrated “referendums” in which it claimed that residents had voted overwhelmingly to live under Moscow’s rule. The Ukrainian government and the West have denounced the ballots as illegal, forced and rigged.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend a ceremony Friday in the Kremlin when four regions of Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — will be officially folded into Russia, spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday.

Peskov said the pro-Moscow administrators of those regions will sign treaties to join Russia during the ceremony at the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall. The official annexation was widely expected following the votes that wrapped up on Tuesday in the areas under Russian occupation in Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s announcement was met with swift rejection from European officials.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable,” said Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky, whose country currently holds the European Union presidency. “We reject such one-sided annexation based on a fully falsified process with no legitimacy.”

Lipavsky described the pro-Russia referendums as “theater play” and insisted the regions remain “Ukrainian territory.”

Other officials who denounced Russia on Thursday over the “sham” votes included the prime ministers of Italy and Denmark and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

“Under threats and sometimes even (at) gunpoint, people are being taken out of their homes or workplaces to vote in glass ballot boxes,” she said at a conference in Berlin.

“This is the opposite of free and fair elections,” Baerbock said. “And this is the opposite of peace. It’s dictated peace. As long as this Russian diktat prevails in the occupied territories of Ukraine, no citizen is safe. No citizen is free.”

Armed Russian troops had gone door-to-door with election officials to collect ballots in five days of voting. The suspiciously high margins in favor are being characterized by the West as a land grab by an increasingly cornered Russian leadership after Russian troops faced some embarrassing military losses in Ukraine.

Moscow-installed administrations in the four regions of southern and eastern Ukraine claimed Tuesday night that 93% of the ballots cast in the Zaporizhzhia region supported annexation, as did 87% in Kherson, 98% in Luhansk and 99% in Donetsk.

Ukraine too has dismissed the referendums as illegitimate, saying it has every right to retake those territories, a position that has won support from Washington.

The Kremlin has been unmoved by the criticism. After a counteroffensive by Ukraine this month dealt Moscow’s forces heavy battlefield setbacks, Russia said it would call up 300,000 reservists to join the fight. It also warned it could resort to nuclear weapons. In response, tens of thousands of Russian men have sought to leave the country.

On the battlefront Thursday, Ukrainian authorities said Russian shelling killed at least eight civilians, including a child, and wounded scores of others. A 12-year-old girl was pulled alive out of rubble after an attack on Dnipro, officials said.

“The rescuers have taken her from under the rubble, she was asleep when the Russian missile hit,” said local administrator Valentyn Reznichenko.

A Russian rocket attack on Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region still held by Ukraine, wounded 11 people and inflicted damage on the city, Mayor Oleksandr Honcharenko said.

Reports of new shelling came as Russia appeared to lose more ground around the key northeastern city of Lyman, which is coming as the Russian military is struggling with a chaotic mobilization of troops and trying to prevent fighting-age men from leaving the country, according to a Washington-based think-tank and the British intelligence reports.

The Institute for the Study of War, citing Russian reports, said Ukrainian forces have taken more villages around Lyman, a city 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The report said Ukrainian forces may soon encircle Lyman entirely, in what would be a major blow to Moscow’s war effort.

“The collapse of the Lyman pocket will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping in northern Donetsk and western Luhansk oblasts and may allow Ukrainian troops to threaten Russian positions along the western Luhansk” region, the institute said.

British military intelligence claimed the number of Russian military-age men fleeing the country likely exceeds the number of forces that Moscow used to initially invade Ukraine in February.

“The better off and well educated are over-represented amongst those attempting to leave Russia,” the British said. “When combined with those reservists who are being mobilized, the domestic economic impact of reduced availability of labor and the acceleration of ‘brain drain’ is likely to become increasingly significant.”

Russia’s partial mobilization has been deeply unpopular in some areas, however, triggering protests and scattered violence. Russian men have formed miles-long lines trying to leave at some borders and Moscow also reportedly has set up draft offices at its borders to intercept some of those fleeing.

On the subject of sabotage that has hit Russian gas pipelines to Europe this week, Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, claimed Thursday that the Nord Stream pipeline accidents would have been impossible without a government’s involvement.

“It looks like a terror attack, probably conducted on a state level,” Peskov told reporters. “It’s a very dangerous situation that requires a quick investigation.”

He dismissed media reports about Russian warships spotted in the area as “stupid and biased,” claiming that many more NATO aircraft and ships “have been spotted in the area.”

European officials have noted that Russia benefits from higher gas prices when supplies to Europe are disrupted.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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September 29, 2022
Live Updates: Russia-Ukraine War

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KYIV, Ukraine — STOCKHOLM — A fourth leak to the Nord Stream pipelines conveying natural gas from Russia to Germany has been reported off southern Sweden.

Earlier, three leaks had been reported on the two underwater pipelines. Seismologists detected two explosions were detected before reports of the leaks which officials believe were “deliberate actions.”

Some experts have said Russia is likely to blame for any sabotage — it directly benefits from higher energy prices and economic anxiety across Europe.

Sweden’s coast guards told Swedish news agency TT on Thursday that the fourth leak was off Sweden. All the leaks are in international waters.

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KEY DEVELOPMENTS:

— Russia poised to annex occupied Ukrain e after sham vote

— US: Focus new Russia sanctions on oil revenue, arms supplies

— Europe ramps up energy security after suspected sabotage

— Moscow tries to draft fleeing Russian men at the borders

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

KYIV — Authorities say Russian missile fire targeted the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro overnight, killing at least three people and wounded five others.

Valentyn Reznichenko, the governor of the wider Dnipropetrovsk region, said fire damaged homes, a market, cars, buses and electrical lines.

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KYIV — Authorities say the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has again been targeted by Russian missile fire.

Ukrainian military officials said Thursday a Russian Kh-59 missile struck Kryvyi Rih on Wednesday night. The Russian fire struck a grain depot while others were shot down.

Kryvyi Rih is some 350 kilometers (215 miles) southeast of Kyiv.

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KYIV — The Ukrainian military says it is sending undertrained fighters to the battle front as it tries to reinforce its positions in the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman.

The Ukrainian military’s general staff said Thursday that of seven Russian tanks sent to Lyman recently, Russian troops crashed two of them on the way there.

It also said troops manning the tanks did not undergo training on how to use the vehicle’s weapons.

The Ukrainian military did not elaborate on how it knew about the tank unit’s condition. But Ukraine’s intelligence services have played purportedly intercepted phone calls of Russian troops complaining about their conditions on the front line.

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KYIV — Britain’s military says the number of Russian military-age men fleeing the country likely exceeds the number of forces Moscow used to initially invade Ukraine in February.

The British Defense Ministry made the estimate in its daily intelligence briefing Thursday amid a Russian push to mobilize more troops to replenish losses its forces have suffered in Ukraine.

The ministry said those who are financially better off and better educated are over-represented amongst those attempting to leave Russia.

It added that the economic impact from the call-up as a result of a loss of labor in combination with a ‘brain drain’ “is likely to become increasingly difficult.”

——

KYIV — A Washington-based think tank says Ukrainian soldiers continue to advance around a key northeastern city occupied by Russian forces and may soon encircle it entirely.

The Institute for the Study of War, citing Russian reports, said Thursday that Ukrainian forces have taken more villages around Lyman, a city some 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

Lyman had been a key node in Russia’s front-line operations in the region before Ukrainian forces retook vast swathes of territory in the northeast earlier this month.

The institute said a possible collapse of the Lyman pocket would allow Ukrainian troops to “threaten Russian positions along the western Luhansk” region.

The institute suggested additional Russian losses would further erode morale amid a call-up of hundreds of thousands of men — the country’s first since World War II.

— Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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September 29, 2022