WAR IN UKRAINE: December 7, 2022
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 287
Time magazine says it has chosen Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the "spirit of Ukraine" as its person of the year for 2022 for standing up in the face of Russia's invasion. Said TIME: “For proving that courage can be as contagious as fear, for stirring people and nations to come together in defense of freedom, for reminding the world of the fragility of democracy—and of peace—Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine are TIME’s 2022 Person of the Year.”
Time also issued a shout-out to Ukrainian media: dozens of journalists have died while covering Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “All the while, journalists risked their lives to tell these stories. “The challenge is to find a way to talk about it so that the world continues to care,” says Olga Rudenko, the editor of the Kyiv Independent.”
Russian forces attacked the central Ukrainian regions of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhya with kamikaze drones and heavy artillery, officials said on December 7, as heavy fighting continued in the east. Meanwhile, the UN humanitarian chief on December 6 decried the "colossal" torment Ukraine is suffering from Russia's destruction of its infrastructure - RFE/RL
The U.S. State Department said there was no confirmation the strikes on Russia airfields were carried out by Ukraine, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has "neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia."
Estonia will not be able to help new Ukrainian refugees at the same level as before. Prime Minister Kaia Kallas stated this in an interview with Radio 4. "If you look at how Russia is bombing civil infrastructure, energy infrastructure and trying to make life in Ukraine absolutely impossible, then everyone is leaning towards the fact that there will be the next wave of refugees. It is interesting that until now this has not happened, we do not see in the numbers, that a new wave is coming," Kallas said. According to her, Estonia is no longer able to help refugees from Ukraine at the previous level, but Finland has said it can accept more.
Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine Oleksandr Tkachenko says more than 1,000 cultural sites in Ukraine had been destroyed since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. — Ukrinform reports. “These are mostly libraries and clubs, but among them, there is an enormous number of cultural heritage sites that are either damaged or completely destroyed. We face an extreme challenge as to what to do.”
Required reading…
Victory Over Russia Is the Only Way to Rescue the Kidnapped Ukrainians
Officials from the war-torn nation estimate that as many as 2.8 million residents have been forcibly relocated to Russia since the invasion began.
Weeks before Russia’s military leaders announced a retreat from the Ukrainian regional capital of Kherson, they began forcibly taking the Ukrainian residents of the region deeper into occupied Russian territory and shipping some of them off to the Russian interior. These forced deportations are part of a larger program that has taken at least hundreds of thousands of people, and it is one that Russia had reportedly been planning since before it even invaded Ukraine.
“It is kidnapping, pure and simple,” first lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska recently told a crowd in London, describing how Russia has spread those who have been plucked from their homes in Ukraine all across Russia, where their fates remain uncertain. Ukraine has surprised the world with its victories on the battlefield, but there are no easy answers to how it can bring its people home when and if the shooting finally stops.
Read the full analysis by Doug Klain in the New Republic here