WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Russian President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged that his army could be fighting in Ukraine for a long time, but for now there will be no second call-up of soldiers.

FIGHTING

* Russian shelling killed 10 people and wounded many others in the town of Kurakhove in eastern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.

* Belarus plans to move military equipment and security forces on Wednesday and Thursday in what it says are checks on its response to possible acts of terrorism, the state BelTA news agency reported.

* Twin strikes on air bases deep inside Russian territory have dealt Moscow a major reputational blow and raised questions about why its defences failed, analysts said.

* The United States has made clear to Ukraine its concerns about any escalationof the war with Russia, but it respects Ukrainian sovereignty, including decisions about how Kiev uses weapons supplied by Washington, White House security spokesman John Kirby said.

* Kyiv's mayor Vitali Klitschko warned of an "apocalypse" scenario for the city this winter if Russian air strikes on infrastructure continue. Russia has fired more than 1,000 rockets and missiles at Ukraine's power grid, Interfax Ukraine news agency said.

ENERGY

* Russia is still working on how to respond to a price cap imposed by Western powers on sales of Russian oil, the Kremlin said. Options include banning oil sales to some countries and setting maximum discounts at which it would sell its crude, the Vedomosti daily reported.

DIPLOMACY AND POLITICS

* The United Nations is examining "available information" about accusations that Iran supplied Russia with drones, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, as he faces Western pressure to inspect downed drones in Ukraine.

* The European Commission on Wednesday proposed a ninth package of sanctions on Russia including almost 200 more individuals and entities.

* Time magazine named Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy 2022's "Person of the Year".

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

The 2014 ceasefire brokered by Berlin and Paris in Minsk was an attempt to give Kiev time to strengthen its military and was successful in that regard, former German chancellor Angela Merkel argued in an interview published on Wednesday. 

In an extensive interview about her 16 years in power, Merkel told the Zeit magazine her policy towards Russia and Ukraine was correct, even if not successful.

“I thought the initiation of NATO accession for Ukraine and Georgia discussed in 2008 to be wrong,” Merkel said.

“The countries neither had the necessary prerequisites for this, nor had the consequences of such a decision been fully considered, both with regard to Russia's actions against Georgia and Ukraine and to NATO and its rules of assistance.”

She described the September 2014 Minsk agreement as “an attempt to give Ukraine time.” France and Germany had brokered a ceasefire after the failure of Ukraine’s attempt to subdue the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk by force.

“[Ukraine] used this time to get stronger, as you can see today,” Merkel continued.

“The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltsevo in early 2015, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”

The defeat at Debaltsevo resulted in the second Minsk protocol being signed in February 2015. Merkel said that it was “clear to all of us that the conflict was frozen, that the problem had not been solved, but that gave Ukraine valuable time.”

Meanwhile, she defended the decision to build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for Russian gas, since refusing to do so would “have dangerously worsened the climate” with Moscow given the situation in Ukraine. It just so happened that Germany couldn’t get gas elsewhere, she added.

Asked for any self-criticism, Merkel told Zeit that “the Cold War never really ended because Russia was basically not at peace,” and that NATO “should have reacted more quickly to Russia's aggressiveness” in 2014. 

Pyotr Poroshenko, who became president of Ukraine after the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev, told the domestic audience in August 2015 that Minsk was a ruse to buy time for a military build-up. He admitted as much to the West in July 2022, in an interview with German media.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, which have since voted to join Russia alongside with most of the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye, and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.

** While the US distanced itself from Ukraine’s drone strike at two air bases hundreds of kilometers inside Russia, the German government’s spokesman said on Wednesday that Kiev doesn’t have to limit its war effort to Ukrainian territory.

“Ukraine has a right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter,” Steffen Hebestreit told journalists, when asked to comment on reports of explosions at the Russian airfields. “Ukraine is not obligated to limit defense efforts to its own territory.”

Two strategic bomber bases in Ryazan and Saratov regions came under attack by drones on Monday morning, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Three service members were killed and several more injured, while two airplanes suffered minor damage. The attack did not disrupt the planned strike against Ukrainian military logistics later in the day.

The attack came on the same day as revelations that the US had modified HIMARS rocket launchers so Ukraine could not use them for longer-range missiles, allegedly because the White House wanted to avoid escalation with the Kremlin.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Tuesday that Washington has “neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia,”but instead provided them with “the equipment that they need to defend themselves.”

Moscow has repeatedly warned the US and NATO that providing heavy weapons to Ukraine risks crossing Russia’s “red lines,” and involving them in the conflict directly. Washington and its allies insist they are not a party to the hostilities, but continue arming Kiev.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has pledged to invest much more into his military, so that Berlin can become “the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be, a bridge builder within the European Union.” However, German media have noted that it will take until 2026 to hit the NATO-mandated goal of spending 2% of the GDP on the armed forces.

Reuters/RT