TV philosopher Richard Precht has acknowledged a misconception about Ukraine. Before withdrawing from the city of Kherson, Russian troops destroyed all infrastructure in the city. All current voices and developments on the Ukraine war can be found in our ticker.
More on the course of the war in Ukraine.
9:36 a.m .: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presented a video at the G20 summit with a plan for a possible end to the Russian war. This requires a withdrawal of Russian troops and a restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, said the head of state on Tuesday at the meeting of the 20 leading industrialized and emerging countries on the Indonesian island of Bali. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who is representing Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, took part on behalf of Russia.
“I want this aggressive Russian war to end justly and based on the United Nations Charter and international law,” Zelensky said, according to the speech transcript. “Effective security guarantees” are necessary for Ukraine after the war.
For the creation of a post-war security architecture, Zelenskyj proposed an international conference at which a Kiev agreement could be concluded.
Zelenskyy also demanded an extension of the agreement on export of Ukrainian grain, concluded through Turkey and the UN. Since the end of the Russian blockade in the Black Sea, the country has exported more than 10 million tons of food, he said.
8:27 a.m .: Author and TV philosopher Richard David Precht has admitted that he made misjudgments at the beginning of the Ukraine war. “Bringing Ukraine into a position of strength has been much more successful than almost all observers, including myself, dared to hope,” said Precht on Monday evening at the “Rheinische Post” meeting in Düsseldorf.
“Back then, with a few exceptions, the military experts all made the same prognosis, saying that Ukraine would lose this war within days, weeks, maybe a month or two.”
“We only now know how incredibly strong the Ukrainian army was from the start, before the arms deliveries came,” Precht claimed. “In this respect, I naturally made the wrong assumption that it’s not worth defending yourself if the war is lost in a week or two. One can see how one can deceive oneself.”
At the end of June, Precht was one of the signatories to an open letter calling for negotiations to end the Ukraine war as quickly as possible. In addition, the celebrities questioned whether arms deliveries from the West were the right way. They were sharply criticized for this by the then Ambassador of Ukraine in Germany, Andriy Melnyk.
1:30 a.m .: According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russian troops destroyed the entire infrastructure in the city before withdrawing from the city of Kherson. “In Kherson there is no electricity, no communication, no Internet and no television,” Zelenskyy said in a video message after his visit to the city on Monday evening. “All important facilities in the city and in the region are mined.” During his visit to the city, Zelenskyy described the recapture of Cherson as “the beginning of the end of the war”.
Most of the liberated Kherson region has been without power since November 6, according to state-owned electricity utility Ukrenergo.
Tuesday, November 15, 12:46 a.m.: Ukraine is seeking international help to repatriate thousands of children who, according to Kiev, have been kidnapped to Russia. There are at least 11,000 children whose names are known, said President Volodymyr Zelenskyj in his evening video address on Monday. “But those are just the ones we know about. In truth, more have been kidnapped.”
The head of the presidential office in Kyiv, Andriy Yermak, discussed the problem in a large online conference on Monday. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the ambassadors of the Group of Twenty large industrialized and emerging countries (G20) also took part. The annual G20 summit is currently taking place in Indonesia.
“Our goal is to stop the violent kidnapping or deportation of children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation,” Yermak said, according to official statements. Everything must be done to bring these children back and reunite them with their families.
The Russian military and Russian authorities do confirm that children are being brought to Russia from Ukraine. They would be taken to safety from the combat zones or come to Russia for treatment or recovery. There are also reports of Ukrainian children being put up for adoption in Russia. The Ukrainian child rights officer Dariya Gerassymtschuk spoke of 10,764 abducted children.
Selenskyj thanked Guterres for his willingness to take on the issue of the children. “It takes the power of the whole world to bring back all the deportees,” he said.
2:55 p.m .: US President Joe Biden and China’s head of state and party leader Xi Jinping have, according to US information, condemned Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Both sides also agreed that “nuclear war should never be fought,” the White House said after a presidential meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali on Monday.
1:50 p.m.: With winter approaching, Poland is preparing to take in more refugees from Ukraine. “Significantly more than 100,000 places” have been prepared in collective accommodation for immediate use, Integration Minister Agnieskza Scigaj told Radio Plus on Monday.
There are currently no signs on the Polish-Ukrainian border that the number of refugees is increasing again. According to Scigaj, around five to six percent of the approximately 20,000 people who enter Poland from Ukraine every day, according to the Polish border guards, are refugees. The other crossings are normal border traffic.
Poland’s Deputy Interior Minister Bartosz Grodecki said the talks with the Ukrainian government showed that Kyiv was trying to keep as many refugees from embattled areas in its own country as possible. Poland is helping in the neighboring country with the construction of container villages that are equipped with their own power and heating units. According to Grodecki, around 1.3 million Ukraine refugees are currently living in the country.
12:32 p.m .: The Russian newspaper “Kommersant”, citing a source, reports that delegations from Russia and the United States will meet in the Turkish capital Ankara on Monday.
Sergey Naryshkin, head of the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR, is said to be part of the Russian delegation, according to Kommersant. This meeting has not yet been publicly announced.
Kremlin spokesman Peskov said Monday he could “neither confirm nor deny” a report of talks between Russian and US officials.
10:31 a.m .: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj visits Cherson, which has been liberated by Russian troops. The news agency said, citing government sources. An eyewitness to the Reuters agency first reported it.
9:42 a.m .: According to their own statements, the Ukrainian military has withdrawn the accreditation of several Western journalists after their reporting from the recently recaptured Cherson region. “Recently, some media representatives have ignored the existing bans and warnings and started reporting from Kherson without the consent of the commanders and responsible PR departments of the military even before the stabilization measures were completed,” the general staff justified the coercive measure on Facebook on Monday.
The entry does not indicate which journalists are affected. According to media reports, however, at least six correspondents from the television channels CNN and Sky News have lost their accreditation.
At the end of last week, the Russian army evacuated the north-western part of the Kherson region, including the regional capital itself. The Ukrainian military, as a precautionary measure, has only slowly moved into the areas. President Volodymyr Zelenskyj named demining in Cherson and the surrounding area as one of the most important immediate measures.
9:00 a.m.: According to British estimates, the coming winter will have a significant impact on the fighting in Ukraine. “Changes in daylight hours, temperature and weather present unique challenges for combatants,” the Ministry of Defense said in London on Monday. “All decisions made by the Russian general staff will depend in part on the onset of winter.” Because the hours of daylight are significantly decreasing, there will be fewer offensives and more static defense lines.
The winter conditions, with more rain and strong winds and snowfall, led to cold injuries and would pose additional challenges to the already low morale of the Russian armed forces, the ministry said. But they also posed problems for the maintenance of the equipment. “Basic exercises such as weapon cleaning must be adapted to the circumstances, and the risk of weapon malfunctions is increasing,” it said in London. At the same time, the authority emphasized that Ukrainian soldiers were also affected by the conditions.
Monday, November 14, 7:18 a.m.: After the withdrawal of Russian troops from Cherson, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported “atrocities” by the soldiers in the region. “The bodies of those killed were found: civilians and soldiers,” Zelenskyy said in his daily video message on Sunday evening. In the Kherson region, the Russian army committed “the same atrocities” as in other parts of our country that it was able to penetrate.
The Ukrainian head of state announced that “every murderer” would be “found and brought to justice”. 400 Russian “war crimes” have been documented, he added. He did not say whether this figure referred solely to the Cherson region.
Around nine months after the start of the war, Moscow had ordered the withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Cherson and the north of the region of the same name in view of the progress of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. On Friday, the Russian army completely evacuated the regional capital.
The withdrawal represented a bitter defeat for Russia. Cherson was the only regional capital that the Russian troops had captured. For Moscow, the region is also of great strategic importance in order to be able to continue the offensive in the direction of Mykolaiv and the Black Sea port of Odessa.
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