On any given day in Russia’s war on Ukraine there is a lot going on: routine Russian missile attacks against towns and cities; new strikes by Ukrainian artillery against Russian assets; vast movements of war materiel by road, rail and air; air defences trying to take out drones, helicopters and planes; and probing attacks on the ground from both sides, some that do little more than test the other’s defences, though others shift the front lines. These front lines stretch right across the east and south of the country, with separate operational dynamics in the districts of Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Crimea has increasingly been drawn into the action, and naval activities in the Black Sea continue.
Naturally we get fixated on one aspect of the war at a time. This past week we have been trying to work out what is happening with the Ukrainian offensive in the south. At other times the main preoccupation has been with evidence of war crimes or grain exports. Even as we wait for more news about the current battles there have been alarming developments in and around the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia, where Russia is engaged in one of its dangerous games of brinkmanship, seeing if it can extract some benefit from a dangerous situation before – hopefully – it pulls back.
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