On Friday, November 18, Ukraine asked for help from the European Union as half of its energy infrastructure was destroyed and power outages multiplied. Heavy artillery and missile fire cut off electricity supplies to 40% of the country’s population at the start of winter, the Associated Press reported. Ukraine’s power grid chief said the freezing temperatures were putting additional pressure on energy networks.
Ukraine has called on the European Union for “additional support” to get through the winter as nearly half of its energy infrastructure has been put “out of order” by massive Russian strikes.
“Almost half of our energy system has been put out of order,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Chmygal told a press conference on Friday, calling for “additional support” from the EU. Many Ukrainians are facing the onset of winter with little or no electricity and no hot water, as the first snowfall of winter fell across the country on Thursday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday dismissed the idea of a “short truce” with Russia, arguing it would only make things worse. “Russia is now looking for a short truce, a respite to regain strength. This could be seen as the end of the war, but such a respite will only make the situation worse,” said the Ukrainian leader at the international forum on safety of Halifax, Canada.
“A truly real, lasting and honest peace can only come from the complete destruction of Russian aggression,” he added. The White House had reiterated earlier in the day that only Volodymyr Zelensky was in a position to approve the opening of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, rejecting any notion of American pressure to do so on kyiv.
Asia-Pacific leaders said they “mostly” condemned the war in Ukraine in the final statement from the APEC summit released on Saturday, adding their voice to international pressure on Russia. After a day and a half of talks in Bangkok, the 21 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum agreed on a joint statement criticizing the conflict and global economic upheaval sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed that it was causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy,” the statement said. This final statement was endorsed by all members, including Russia and China, which refrained from publicly criticizing Moscow for the invasion.
More than 100 Ukrainians were detained and then disappeared in Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, during the Russian occupation, in what appears to be a planned campaign, according to a study by the American University Yale published on Friday. The Conflict Observatory, a Yale University Public Health Department research group whose work is supported by the US State Department, has documented 226 extrajudicial detentions and enforced disappearances in Kherson.
Half of those imprisoned “do not appear to have been released”, according to the report, which stresses that their fate has been unclear since the withdrawal of Russian forces from Kherson on November 11. A quarter of the 226 people concerned were allegedly tortured and four died in custody or shortly thereafter. The majority of these acts were perpetrated by the Russian military and the Russian security services (FSB), according to the study.
Two Russian fighter jets “approached dangerously and unprofessionally” earlier this week NATO ships cruising in the Baltic Sea for a routine operation, the Atlantic Alliance said on Friday. The incident occurred Tuesday morning, when the two Russian aircraft approached the ships to “an altitude of 300 feet (91 meters) and a distance of 80 yards (73 meters)” without their pilots respond to communications, NATO naval command said.
“NATO deemed the interaction unsafe and unprofessional because it was conducted in a known danger area, which was activated for air defense training, and because of the altitude and proximity of the planes,” according to a statement. “The interaction increased the risk of miscalculations, errors and accidents.” The statement said NATO forces “acted responsibly” in the incident, in accordance with maritime regulations.
Russia on Friday accused Ukraine of having “brutally” executed more than 10 of its soldiers who had laid down their arms, denouncing a “war crime”. “No one will be able to present the deliberate and methodical killing of more than 10 Russian soldiers who were immobilized (…), with direct shots in the head, as a ’tragic exception'”, declared the Russian Ministry of Defense. This accusation comes after the publication on Russian social networks of two videos of about thirty seconds each, presented by these Russian sources as showing the execution of soldiers who had just surrendered to the Ukrainian forces.
In the first video, taken with a mobile phone, we see a group of men in military fatigues coming out one after another with their hands up from a building in the courtyard of a house and lying face down ground, under the injunction of soldiers wearing a yellow armband and holding them at gunpoint. At the moment when a last dark silhouette appears on the left, the video is abruptly interrupted at the same time as a burst sounds. The second video, taken from a height, possibly with a drone, shows a dozen bodies lying amid pools of blood. One of the bodies appears to have been hit in the head.
