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U.S. could give Ukraine energy help as temperatures fall below freezing
U.S. could give Ukraine energy help as temperatures fall below freezing; rumors of imminent Russian mobilization in Kherson grow
Temperatures are plummeting in Ukraine as each day passes. The capital Kyiv can expect temperatures below freezing this week, with even colder weather in the countryside. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s energy infrastructure remains destroyed in places and severely damaged and compromised in many parts of the country.
It’s been reported that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken could announce on Tuesday new assistance to help restore Ukraine’s power transmission ability. Blinken arrived in Romania on Monday evening ahead of meetings with NATO allies and Group of Seven foreign ministers.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told some NATO diplomats visiting Kyiv that transformers are the biggest element of the country’s power infrastructure that needs to be restored.
Speculation is mounting that Russia could soon try to mobilize men in the occupied part of Kherson, in southern Ukraine.
The Center of National Resistance said Monday that “Russians are bringing riot police to carry out the mobilization of men in the southern temporarily occupied territories.” It said this could take place in December. Ukraine called on residents in the region to leave the region immediately so they don’t “become a resource for the enemy.”
Ukraine is ready to repel new Russian missile attack, air force says
Ukraine’s Air Force said it’s ready to repel a new missile attack by Russian forces, adding to a warning from the country’s president yesterday that civilians should prepare for a new wave of bombing.
“Ukrainians are ready to repel another air attack,” the spokesperson for Ukraine’s Air Force Command, Yurii Ihnat, said on Telegram Tuesday.
“Ukrainians experienced the worst in February-March, when hundreds of rockets flew at our heads every day, Russian aircraft flew in many regions, and active air battles took place. Is it possible to scare us with something else?,” the statement said.
Ihnat said that Russia did not have “so many high-precision long-range missiles left” while the commander of Ukraine’s Air Force had “assured us that we are ready, our missiles are loaded, and we will fight back no matter how many missiles” Russia launched.
Ihnat did not give any details as to the evidence of a forthcoming Russian attack, or as to how many missiles it had left with analysts agreeing that it’s difficult to gauge what weapons Moscow has left in its arsenal.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Monday that Russia was preparing new missile attacks that could be even more destructive than those experienced by the country last week that left around 6 million people without power.
“We understand that the terrorists are planning new strikes. We know this for a fact,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Sunday. “And as long as they have missiles, they, unfortunately, will not calm down.”
Anxiety is rising in Moscow over the war and how it could end, analysts note
Political analysts from Russia say anxiety is rising in Moscow as the country’s forces face what’s likely to be months more fighting and military losses, and even starts to consider it may be defeated.
That would be catastrophic for Putin and the Kremlin, who have banked Russia’s global capital on winning the war against Ukraine, analysts said, noting that anxiety was rising in Moscow over how the war was progressing.
“Since September, I see a lot of changes [in Russia] and a lot of fears,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and founder and head of political analysis firm R.Politik, told CNBC.
“For the first time since the war started people are beginning to consider the worst case scenario, that Russia can lose, and they don’t see and don’t understand how Russia can get out from this conflict without being destroyed. People are very anxious, they believe that what is going on is a disaster,” she said Monday.
NATO will ramp up aid for Kyiv, says Putin uses winter as ‘weapon of war’
NATO allies will ramp up aid for Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin is using winter as a weapon of war because his forces are failing on the battlefield, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday.
“I think we all have seen these pictures taken from satellites where you see Europe in light and then you see Ukraine dark…so there is a huge task to rebuild all of this,” Stoltenberg said.
“President Putin is trying to use winter as a weapon of war,” he told reporters as NATO foreign ministers gathered in Bucharest for a two-day meeting which he said would serve as a platform to mobilise more support for Ukraine.
NATO foreign ministers will focus on increasing military assistance for Ukraine such as air defence systems and ammunition, even as diplomats acknowledge supply and capacity issues, but also discuss non-lethal aid.
Part of this non-lethal aid – goods such as fuel, medical supplies, winter equipment and drone jammers – has been delivered through a NATO assistance package that allies can contribute to and which Stoltenberg aims to increase.
Stoltenberg’s comments were echoed by several ministers from the 30-member alliance, who were also be joined by Finland and Sweden, as they look to secure full membership pending Turkish and Hungarian ratifications.
Russia seems to have abandoned a major part of its ‘military doctrine,’ UK says
Over the last three months, Russian forces in Ukraine have likely largely stopped deploying as Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs), according to the latest military intelligence update from Britain’s Ministry of Defence.
It said that “the BTG concept has played a major part in Russian military doctrine for the last ten years, and saw battalions integrated with a full range of supporting sub-units, including armour, reconnaissance and (in a departure from usual Western practice) artillery.”
However, it noted that several intrinsic weaknesses of the BTG concept have been exposed in the high intensity, large-scale combat of the Ukraine war so far.
“BTGs’ relatively small allocation of combat infantry has often proved insufficient” and the “decentralised distribution of artillery has not allowed Russia to fully leverage its advantage in numbers of guns.”
In addition, few BTG commanders have been empowered to flexibly exploit opportunities in the way the BTG model was designed to promote, the ministry noted.
Russia could be about to mobilize men in occupied southern Ukraine
Speculation is mounting that Russia could try to mobilize men in the occupied part of Kherson, in southern Ukraine, in December.
The Center of National Resistance, a part of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces to support Ukrainian resistance efforts, said on its website that “Russians are bringing riot police to carry out the mobilization of men in the southern temporarily occupied territories.”
It said riot police units from Dagestan had arrived on the left bank of the Dnipro river of the Kherson region, together with employees of the military commissariats from the pro-Russian, so-called “people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, to conduct the mobilization.
“The newly arrived occupiers do not hide that in December the personnel will be involved in the illegal conscription of residents of the region with Russian passports. However, it is not exclusive that all men will fall under the ‘mobilization’, and not only the holders of enemy passports.”
Russian forces withdrew from the western bank of the Dnipro river to the eastern (or “left”) bank earlier in November. They have built up defensive lines and fortifications on that side of the river. Russia has already attempted to “Russify” occupied areas by handing out Russian passports and promoting Russian language and culture while suppressing that of Ukraine.
The Center of National Resistance called on the residents in the “TOT,” or “temporarily occupied territory,” to leave the region “and not become a resource for the enemy.”
Blinken could announce help for Ukraine’s power transmission
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday will announce new assistance to help restore Ukraine’s power transmission ability in the face of Russian attacks targeting the country’s energy grid, a senior State Department official said.
Blinken arrived in Romania on Monday evening ahead of a meetings with NATO allies and foreign ministers from the Group of Seven advanced economies.
Ukraine’s foreign minister told some NATO diplomats visiting Kyiv earlier in the day that transformers were the biggest element of the country’s power infrastructure that needed to be restored.
Kherson region shelled 258 times in the past week, Zelenskyy says
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia continues to pound the southern region of Kherson, a part of which Russian forces withdrew from several weeks ago.
“This day, as well as every single day, the occupants again shelled Kherson and the communities of the region. In just one week, the enemy shelled 30 settlements of our Kherson region 258 times,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Monday. Russian forces had also damaged a pumping station supplying water to Mykolaiv, he added.
“Ukraine will never be a place for destruction. Ukraine will never accept orders from these ‘comrades’ from Moscow. We will do everything to restore every object, every house, every enterprise destroyed by the occupiers,” Zelenskyy said.
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The powerhouse typhoon is the equivalent of a very strong Category 4 hurricane as it approaches the northernmost island of the Philippines before turning to the north, continuing its damaging path.
Violent Typhoon Mawar, which pounded Guam with destructive winds and flooding downpours earlier this week, is continuing to churn west across the Pacific Ocean and will impact more landmasses in the western Pacific and eastern Asia next week, according to AccuWeather forecasters.
Despite already achieving the status of strongest tropical cyclone on the planet so far this year, Mawar may strengthen further and then aim for portions of the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan beginning Sunday, with more flooding rainfall and strong winds expected.
Super Typhoon Mawar is seen on AccuWeather Enhanced RealVue™ satellite May 27, 2023.
As of Saturday afternoon, local time, Mawar was a powerful typhoon centered several hundred miles to the west-northwest of Guam, packing winds equivalent to that of a strong Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale (maximum sustained winds of 130-156 mph, or 209-251 km/h).
According to the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA), the governing body which monitors and tracks tropical cyclones in this portion of the western Pacific tropical basin, the ‘violent’ designation is given to typhoons with maximum sustained winds of at least 121 mph (194 km/h).
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“Mawar is forecast to maintain intensity, or even strengthen slightly, as it continues to track westward across the Philippine Sea into this weekend,” said AccuWeather Lead International Forecaster Jason Nicholls.
The Philippine Sea is a marginal sea located within the western Pacific Ocean, bounded by the Philippines to the west and the Mariana Trench to the east.
The AccuWeather EyePath® forecast calls for Mawar to peak at the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane (maximum sustained winds of at least 157 mph, or 252 km/h). After that, the storm will maintain or lose some wind intensity as it begins to impact land again.
“The typhoon is expected to bring heavy rain and strong winds to northern Luzon in the Philippines from later Sunday through Tuesday, local time,” said Nicholls.
Much like what happened in Guam earlier this week, the eye of the typhoon is expected to remain to the north of Luzon when it approaches early next week. However, there will still be impacts, and AccuWeather meteorologists warn that the storm is likely to be the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane around then.
“The amount of rain that falls and the strength of the wind in the Philippines will depend on how close the storm gets before making an expected turn to the north,” added Nicholls. Despite that uncertainty, even the outer rain bands of a tropical system like Mawar can bring flooding downpours and damaging wind gusts.
As Mawar approaches the Philippines, the country’s weather bureau, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), took over from the JMA in monitoring the typhoon as of early Saturday morning, local time. At that point, the typhoon gained the designation of ‘Betty’ in the Philippines.
In this photo provided by the U.S. Coast Guard, downed tree branches litter a neighborhood in Yona, Guam, Thursday, May 25, 2023, after Typhoon Mawar passed over the island. The powerful typhoon smashed the U.S. territory of Guam and continued lashing the Pacific island with high winds and heavy rain Thursday, knocking down trees, walls and power lines and creating a powerful storm surge that threatened to wash out low-lying areas. (Chief Warrant Officer Adam Brown/U.S. Coast Guard via AP)
Ahead of the expected impacts this weekend, officials in the Philippines are preparing. Sea trips around the archipelago nation are being suspended, an official with the Philippine Ports Authority told CNN. Additionally, operators of smaller boats are being warned against fishing and sailing in the waters off the coast.
By next week, after Mawar impacts the Philippines, AccuWeather forecasters expect the typhoon to take aim at portions of Japan and Taiwan as it begins to slow in forward speed.
“Despite an expected loss in wind intensity as the typhoon churns to the north, Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and eastern Taiwan could also endure impacts during the middle and latter portion of the week,” said Nicholls. “Eventually, the southern Japan mainland could endure impacts by next weekend.”
Mawar has already caused substantial damage
Mawar has already carved a powerful and destructive path since it was first designated as a tropical system over the open waters of the Pacific back on May 19. Just two days later, it became the first typhoon of the 2023 season and the strongest storm the planet has seen so far this year less than a week later.
Although typhoons regularly impact Guam, Mawar has since achieved a strength, both in wind intensity and minimum central pressure, not seen in the tropical basin as a whole since deadly Typhoon Surigae in 2021 or in that specific part of the basin near Guam since Typhoon Damrey in 2000.
When it impacted Guam on Wednesday, the typhoon unleashed strong winds of over 140 mph (225 km/h) snapped trees, ripped roofs off of buildings and brought more than 2 feet of rain in just hours.
“We’re looking out our door and what used to be a jungle looks like toothpicks, like a scene from the movie ‘Twister,’ with trees just thrashed apart,” Landon Aydlett, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Guam, told The Associated Press.
While damage and power outages were widespread, the AP reported that there were no fatalities and only minor injuries as Mawar moved through.
President Biden approved a disaster declaration for the island late Thursday, which will allow federal funding to flow to the United States territory to aid in the recovery effort in the coming days and months.
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The country’s defence ministry says Russian ‘intelligence-gathering’ aircraft spotted near its coasts along the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Japan.
Japan scrambled fighter jets after spotting Russian “intelligence-gathering” aircraft off its coasts along the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Japan on Thursday, the country’s defence ministry has said.
One Russian aircraft travelled from Japan’s north down along part of its west coast, while the other took a similar route along the opposite coast and returned the same way, the Joint Staff office run under the defence ministry said in a brief statement.
“In response, fighters of the Air Self-Defence Force’s Northern Air Force and other units were scrambled,” it added.
There was no further information on the incident, which comes days after Japan hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit of Group of Seven (G7) – a grouping of rich nations – in Hiroshima city.
Japan has joined Western allies in sanctioning Moscow over its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and has warned of the threat posed by Russia.
Its latest security document, which once called for enhanced ties and cooperation with Russia, now warns that Moscow’s military posturing in Asia and cooperation with China are “a strong security concern”.
Last May, Chinese and Russian military jets carried out joint flights near Japan immediately after a meeting of the United States-led Quad grouping in Tokyo. India and Australia are other members of Quad.
And more recently, Moscow has carried out military exercises, including test-firing missiles, in the Sea of Japan.
Russia considers Japan to be a “hostile” country – a designation it shares with all European Union countries, the US and its allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia.
Tokyo had complex relations with Moscow before the invasion of Ukraine in February, and the two sides have yet to sign a post-World War II peace treaty.
Attempts to do so have been hampered by a long-running dispute over islands controlled by Russia, which calls them the Kurils.
France has banned domestic short-haul flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to cut carbon emissions.
The law came into force two years after lawmakers had voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours.
The ban all but rules out air travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, while connecting flights are unaffected.
Critics have described the latest measures as “symbolic bans”.
Laurent Donceel, interim head of industry group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told the AFP news agency that “banning these trips will only have minimal effects” on CO2 output.
He added that governments should instead support “real and significant solutions” to the issue.
Airlines around the world have been severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with website Flightradar24 reporting that the number of flights last year was down almost 42% from 2019.
The French government had faced calls to introduce even stricter rules.
France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.
But this was reduced to two-and-a-half hours after objections from some regions, as well as the airline Air France-KLM.
French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir had earlier called on lawmakers to retain the four-hour limit.
“On average, the plane emits 77 times more CO2 per passenger than the train on these routes, even though the train is cheaper and the time lost is limited to 40 minutes,” it said.
It also called for “safeguards that [French national railway] SNCF will not seize the opportunity to artificially inflate its prices or degrade the quality of rail service”.
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