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Ukraine Evacuates Civilians as Temperatures Drop Ukraine is bracing for a brutal winter as Russian missile strikes have damaged nearly half of the country’s electrical grid, according to Kyiv, potentially leaving millions of people without heating while temperatures plummet.As many as 10 million Ukrainians do not have power as a result of Russia’s bombardment, Ukrainian officials have warned, while rolling blackouts and water supply shortages have become commonplace across the country. In recently liberated Kherson, some people are now collecting wood for heat in lieu of a stable power supply.

These people are not oligarchs per se, but they're people who sit in positions that have some kind of authority over important cash flows - particularly in the oil and gas business,' such as firms Gazprom, Lukoil, Novatek or Gazprombank. 'The sanctions have been devastating for Russia... as a result the pie has been seriously diminished, and a lot of people want to keep their own personal cash flow at the level they had before the war started. 'And so everyone is looking around to redistribute pieces of the pie. Bill Browder, who once ran Russia's largest foreign investment fund,...

On Saturday, the Ukrainians hit the Kerch Strait Bridge, which leads from Russia to Crimea, with something—a missile, explosives planted by naval commandos, a truck laden with explosives. No one who knows is saying for sure.(snip)The tactical questions of how the Ukrainians pulled off this strike and of whether lasting damage has occurred are interesting and important but currently unresolvable publicly. What can, however, be more profitably discussed is what this tells us about where the Russia-Ukraine war is headed. “Battles are the principal milestones of secular history,” Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough. The...

Key figures including Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin are using military defeats to undermine defence chief Sergei Shoigu. Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine. The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats...

As for the economic aspect of Putin's mobilization, most commentators focus on the disastrous consequences for the skilled labor market and the loss of jobs by companies. This is all true: for example, back in July Putin admitted at a meeting with his ministers that a shortage of a million skilled workers is expected in the IT industry alone over the next two years, and now it is clear that this shortage will only get worse. According to a Rosstat survey of entrepreneurs, the lack of qualified workers is one of the top 5 factors limiting industrial production growth, and...