Publicist Peter Pomerantsev reflects on basements as one of the symbols of this war in an article for Time. It is in the basements that Ukrainians mostly hide from Russian shelling, it is in them that the occupiers set up torture chambers, or ― as in the village of Yahidne in the Chernihiv region ― they force hundreds of civilians to stay for weeks without the opportunity to go outside. However, if to look more broadly, the Russian Federation is trying to stuff all of Ukraine ― its freedom, language, history and vision of the future ― into the same conditional basement. "Russia seeks to lock Ukraine in its cellar of horrors and force it to repeat a distorted fantasy from the past, in which mass murders, war crimes, crimes against humanity and attempted genocide are absolutely real," he writes. Russia has no project of the future that it can offer itself, Ukraine and the world, writes Pomerantsev. The Russian project failed ― and in despair, local politicians and "thinkers" cling only to the past. It is the past that most of Putinʼs speeches refer to, it is the outdated Soviet symbols, rhetoric and even music that Russian propagandists use in this war ― and the incitement of nuclear hysteria is reminiscent of the 1970s. The more actively the world resists Russiaʼs retrograde efforts, the sooner the Russian Federation will stop dragging the whole world into the past, the author concludes.
"Russia’s latest military collapse happened like bankruptcy: gradually and then suddenly," ― this is how Foreign Policy magazineʼs military columnist Jack Detsch describes the offensive operation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kherson region. For weeks, the Ukrainians methodically shelled Russian military warehouses and bridges, and having achieved what they wanted, "went hunting." The most important thing in this story, Detsch writes, is that the Russian troops in the Kherson region are currently the most capable that remain in the Russian army. Due to Putinʼs voluntarist decision, they are forced to remain in the right-bank part of the region with cut off or significantly damaged supply routes ― and gradually wait for their destruction by the Ukrainian army. "These [Putinʼs] decisions are the cause of all of Russiaʼs current problems on the front lines," says Rob Lee, a former Marine who is now a senior researcher at the Eurasia Program at the Institute for the Study of Foreign Affairs. "Perhaps if the Russians had left the right bank and built high-quality fortifications on the left bank, they could have held the front line longer. They didnʼt do it ― now they risk losing many different territories at the same time."
The battle for Kherson is critical for Ukraine before the cold weather sets in, writes the Financial Times with reference to the American military and politicians. Returning the city to Ukrainian control would nullify Russiaʼs hopes to capture Mykolaiv and Odesa. At the same time, if this is not done before the spring, it will be more difficult to move because of the replenishment of the Russian army with mobilized men, who will somehow be taught to fight, as well as because of the trenches that the Russians will have time to dig along the front line. There are no guarantees that the Ukrainian army will be able to actively advance in winter: in the last three winters, the ground in the Kherson region did not freeze, and it was impossible to move on the roads. That is why the Americans decided to provide Ukraine with additional HIMARS systems now, as long as Kyiv holds the initiative in the war, and Russian troops are demoralized.