Ukraine missile attack injures civilians as Putin’s losses revealed

The European Union on Wednesday relented and granted Hungary access to billions of euros in frozen funds just as Prime Minister Viktor Orban appeared ready to defy his EU partners and veto the opening of membership talks and vital financial aid for Ukraine.

A year ago, the European Union’s executive branch blocked substantial amounts of money out of concern that democratic backsliding by Orban’s nationalist government could put the bloc’s budget at risk.

The billions withheld mostly concern “cohesion funds” earmarked for Hungary. This envelope of money, one of the biggest slices of the 27-nation bloc’s budget, helps countries maintain their infrastructure at EU standards. They must apply for the money to fund building and other projects.

With critical military supplies from Ukraine’s most important ally, America, in danger of drying up, Russia is stretching Ukraine’s air defences to the limit with an intensified onslaught using drones and ballistic missiles.

More than 50 people, including six children, were injured after Russia launched 10 ballistic missiles at the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, early on Wednesday.

Ballistic missiles are more difficult to detect than other types like cruise missiles or drones, whose entire journey is powered by engines. The important difference in ballistic missiles is that the last stage of their trajectory is unpowered giving less warning where they will land.

Askold Krushelnycky has the full report

U.S. lawmakers and the White House are discussing what level of border arrests should trigger stringent new asylum rules under a possible border security deal that would also include aid for Ukraine and Israel, a Republican senator said on Wednesday.

Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican involved with bipartisan talks over a border deal, said the White House had offered a proposal that included the creation of a new migrant expulsion authority similar to the COVID-era Title 42 policy.

“The administration has set something forward,” Tillis told reporters. “It’s not a detailed proposal, but it actually does define some of the contours that I think could dramatically reduce future flows.”

A group of Senate lawmakers have been negotiating a border agreement that would be paired with the Ukraine and Israel military aid. But they face a tight timeline to pass a bill amid opposition from both liberals and conservatives. Lawmakers are scheduled to leave Washington at the end of the week for a three-week holiday break.

The White House offer raised hopes that the Senate could act before Christmas on a bill the Republican-led House of Representatives could then take up in January. But some lawmakers warned that such a move would doom the legislation.

The House has pushed to pair aid for Ukraine with an enforcement-focused immigration bill known as H.R. 2., a measure Democrats have opposed.

Natalia Yermakova’s husband, Alexander, has been fighting in Ukraine for over a year after responding to President Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation call as a volunteer. Wounded in the leg, he was operated on and then sent back to the front.

A believer in what Russia calls its “special military operation” against Ukraine, Natalia is toiling as a volunteer in a “Family Battalion” in Moscow.

She is one of a group of around 40 mostly female relatives of mobilised men who thread camouflage netting, make signs to mark minefields, gather candles to be used in dug-outs, and put food parcels together in their free time.

As Putin positions himself to win a fifth presidential term in March, casting himself as the right man to lead a military campaign that the West says is a colonial-style war of aggression, it is people like Yermakova whom Putin is relying on to hold his support base together.

Her work takes place in an office belonging to the ruling United Russia party, which is adorned with Russia’s red, blue and white flag and portraits of politicians such as Putin.

There are similar groups working around Moscow, she said.

The relatives take turns accompanying the deliveries they assemble – in a more-than-30-year-old van – to the Russian military in what Yermakova calls “the new territories” – Ukrainian land annexed by Russia.

“We really want to support them (the soldiers) morally and emotionally and send them a message…that what they are doing there is needed by people here,” Yermakova told Reuters, while taking a break from threading a giant camouflage net.

The numbers represent a far greater tally than Russian officials have ever admitted to, and also outstrip Western estimates of Ukrainian losses.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with a total of 360,000 personnel in February last year. After failing in its attempts to rapidly capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Moscow has since launched several major recruitment drives to further bolster its numbers on the frontline, and replace tiring troops.

Russia’s best-known opposition figure Alexei Navalny has gone missing, from the one place you would have thought no one could go missing: a high-security Russian prison camp.

The most prosaic explanation for Navalny’s disappearance is that he is in the process of being transferred to another camp. In August, he was sentenced to an additional 19 years for offences, including “inciting and financing extremism”, which his supporters see as politically motivated.

Read the full comment piece by Mary Dejevsky here

10 Russian drones were shot down, most of them in the Odesa region, the Ukrainian air force said.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said in a report that Russian forces this year have “continued to use explosive weapons with wide area effects in their attacks on densely populated urban areas of Ukraine … both in areas close to heavy fighting and in cities far from the contact line”.

The governmental organisation added in the report published on Wednesday that Ukrainian armed forces, though on a much smaller scale, also shelled populated areas of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia, causing civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.

Poland’s new Prime Minister Donald Tusk, arriving at a European Union summit in Brussels, said that his role would be to strengthen European determination to effectively support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.

“Apathy on Ukraine is unacceptable,” Tusk said, adding that he will try to convince “some member states”.

Hungary locked horns with fellow European Union members on Wednesday over Ukraine‘s bid to join the bloc, aggravating a dispute that could hold up Kyiv’s membership drive and was set to overshadow an EU summit.