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December 05, 2022

Might and Right

Ukraine

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Ukraine isn’t letting up.

After reclaiming more than half of the territory lost after Russia’s invasion in late February, including the major city of Kherson, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is planning to keep pushing against the Russians on the battlefield and in the arena of global diplomacy, as the New York Times explained.

“We are analyzing the intentions of the occupiers and are preparing a countermeasure – an even more powerful countermeasure than now,” Zelenskyy said in a recent nationwide video address, according to state-owned media agency Ukrinform.

Those comments came a day after Zelenskyy rejected entrepreneur Elon Musk’s half-hearted proposal for a peace deal in the region, reported The Hill. At around the same time, Axios published a story about how Zelenskyy now thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t use nuclear weapons in the war because doing so would likely further undermine Putin’s increasingly precarious domestic support.

On the battlefield, Ukraine has seized hundreds of Russian tanks and deployed them against the Russians, Forbes wrote. The country’s military has also been using inexpensive technology and drones to help target their Russian adversaries, CNN explained. Having recently lost the city of Kherson, Russia is now “indiscriminately” shelling it, the Economist added. As Voice of America described, Russia lacks experienced, trained troops to reclaim other areas along the front.

Diplomatically, European Union leaders recently signaled that they would be receptive to a United Nations-backed court to probe alleged Russian war crimes, the Associated Press reported. Those alleged crimes include torturing civilians, Deutsche Welle wrote, as well as looting and destroying schools and essential infrastructure in Kherson, as the Guardian noted. EU officials also told the Financial Times that they would be open to using frozen Russian assets to reconstruct Ukraine.

NATO is also extending offers of help and cooperation to other East European countries and ex-Soviet republics like Bosnia, Georgia and Moldova in a bid to forestall any Russian moves in those regions, Reuters reported.

These efforts show how Ukraine has managed to overcome those who said they would never be able to best the mighty Russian army. But, as CNBC wrote, the indomitable will to fight has made the conflict increasingly resemble the slow-moving impasse seen in World War I.

So far, in this fight between an indiscriminate aggressor and an indomitable defender, the hope of the latter is defeating the cynicism of the former.

This story originally appeared in the December 05, 2022 newsletter, Might and Right.