Russian putin Ukraine war

Germany will not “stand in the way” of Poland sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine; Russia claims more progress in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region.

Norway’s army chief has estimated 180,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in over the course of the conflict, while the figure for the Ukrainians is 100,000 military casualties and 30,000 dead civilians. “During offensive operations in the direction of Zaporizhzhia, units of the eastern military district took up more advantageous ground and positions,” the defence ministry said on Sunday. The EU has made anti-corruption reforms one of its key requirements for Ukraine’s membership to the bloc, after granting Kyiv candidate status last year. Downing Street said Rishi Sunak is “supportive” of Boris Johnson’s visit, despite warnings that it would undermine the current prime minister’s authority. Asked in an interview with French television station LCI what would happen if Poland sent its Leopard 2 tanks without German approval, Baerbock replied through a translator: “For the moment the question has not been asked, but if we were asked we would not stand in the way.” Scholz said future decisions on weapons deliveries will be made in coordination with allies, including the United States.

Germany said it would not fight Poland's move to ship the German-made tanks, which Ukraine has said are essential to fighting off a Russian advance.

It was a setback to [Kyiv’s hopes](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/world/europe/ukraine-germany-leopard-tanks.html?action=click&pgtype=LegacyCollection&state=default&module=styln-russia-ukraine&variant=show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc)to quickly receive weapons that President Volodymyr Zelensky has called [crucial to the next phase of the war](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/world/europe/tanks-ukraine-germany-us.html?action=click&pgtype=LegacyCollection&state=default&module=styln-russia-ukraine&variant=show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc). [crashed in a fireball in a Kyiv suburb](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/world/europe/ukraine-helicopter-crash.html?action=click&pgtype=LegacyCollection&state=default&module=styln-russia-ukraine&variant=show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc), killing [a member of Mr. Opinion polls show that half of Germans do not want to send tanks. Most important, the Ukrainians say, Germany’s hesitance threatens to hamper their ability to hold off or turn around an anticipated Russian offensive this spring. It has been as much a psychological shock to Germany as a political one, undercutting many of its assumptions about Russia; about its president, Vladimir V. Army leaders decided in the 1990s that the service needed a more mobile strike force that could go anywhere in the world in just four days. [Bradley infantry fighting vehicles](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/world/europe/what-is-the-bradley-fighting-vehicle.html) and other weapons as part of a $2.5 billion military aid package for Kyiv. Strykers were initially built with flat-bottomed hulls, which proved vulnerable to improvised bombs set to detonate underneath them by insurgents in Iraq. And Russia’s recent claims to have captured the small eastern towns of Berlin has pushed for Washington to send Abrams tanks to Kyiv, a request the Biden administration has shown no interest in granting. Polish officials have been among the loudest voices urging [Germany to sign off](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/world/europe/leopard-2-tanks-ukraine.html), which it is legally required to do as the tank’s maker. military stockpiles to a foreign country.

Russia has passed a new law banning so-called "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations".

"A free Russia," he tells me, thinking about the question carefully. "Russia is not being isolated, we have a conflict with the Western world!" "And the best idea they have is to find a new scapegoat - LGBT people." I think it is our sovereign right to have legislation that we like to have." Back in Danya's flat, he shows me some of the costumes he has lovingly designed for his drag act. "The war is lost, the economy is destroyed, and the authorities need to show people what they have risked their lives for," says Piotr. He dismisses accusations that the law is discriminatory, saying people's private lives will be respected. As the book is wrapped in plastic, I must buy it to look inside. But the fear generated by the legislation is already leading to censorship: online cinemas have deleted LGBT-themed films and TV series and edited out gay scenes. Since the law was passed, Danya has decided to leave Russia and move to France. In his flat in central St Petersburg, he shows me the exhibits from his short-lived LGBT museum - Russia's first. The risks are much higher."

Germany's foreign minister said Sunday that, if asked, Berlin would not block Poland from sending German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine from its own supply ...

“Given the technological superiority of Russian weapons, foreign politicians making such decisions need to understand that this could end in a global tragedy that will destroy their countries.” “This is after the Russian Federation has been bombing Ukraine for 11 months, massively killing civilians, but Ukraine and the world have to silently endure it and not resist...” First, things will be very difficult for Russia," he said.

Ukraine has called on the West to provide the German-made tanks which they say will help them defeat Russia. But Germany is yet to provide the armoured vehicles ...

So physically getting Leopards to the fight is relatively straightforward. That also makes maintenance and repair - vital aspects of any weapons system - easier too. In a joint statement on Saturday the foreign ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania told Germany "to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine now". The Leopard 2 tanks were specifically designed to compete with the Russian T-90 tanks, which are being used in the invasion. Germany's foreign minister Anna Baerbock has said she "would not stand in the way" of Poland if they were to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Ukraine has called on the West to provide the German-made tanks which they say will help them defeat Russia.

Germany has declined to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine or allow other nations to transfer the tanks in their inventories.

](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/01/21/uranium-imports-russia-nuclear/?itid=lk_inline_manual_28)News that Russian state-owned nuclear power company Rosatom is suspected of supplying the Russian arms industry has elevated prospects that the United States and Western allies might place sanctions on the company, which exports uranium for nuclear reactors. Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said that, “at worst, some long-term Russian supply contracts could not be executed, and that would perhaps raise the price of electricity 1 or 2 percent.” The Polish government has condemned Berlin’s hesitancy as “unacceptable” and said it stands ready to send some of its own, though it requires Germany’s legal authorization before doing so.

Berlin says it will not 'stand in way' of Poland sending Leopard tanks; Zelenskiy says 'no return to what used to be in the past'

Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, the governor of Sumy, has posted a video to the Telegram messaging app that he claims shows the aftermath of Russian shelling on the village of Boyaro-Lezhachi, which is close to his region’s border with Russia. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s comment on Sunday, that her country would not “stand in the way” of Poland sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine, is causing some confusion in Berlin. “In recent years, the Estonian leadership has purposefully destroyed the entire range of relations with Russia. It quotes what it describes as a representative of the region claiming that eight Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the attack, and 12 more injured. Russia has said it is downgrading diplomatic relations with the Nato member Estonia, accusing Tallinn of “total Russophobia”. “Germany was not isolated”, Pistorius said of last Friday’s meeting at the Ramstein air base. The German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s comment on Sunday that her country would not “stand in the way” of Poland sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine has caused some confusion in Berlin. The top Moscow-installed official in the Russian-occupied parts of the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine said late on Sunday that he had visited the town of Soledar, which Russia claimed to have captured earlier this month. “During offensive operations in the direction of Zaporizhzhia, units of the eastern military district took up more advantageous ground and positions,” the defence ministry said on Sunday. “It’s important that we as an international community do everything to defend Ukraine, so that Ukraine wins”, she told press at a meeting of the EU’s foreign affairs council in Brussels. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said during his visit to South Africa that Ukraine was rejecting peace talks and the longer this continued, the harder it would be to resolve the conflict. Germany’s approval for the re-export of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine is of secondary importance as Poland could send those tanks as part of a coalition of countries even without its permission, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said on Monday.

Poland will ask Germany for permission to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. About 180000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the war, Norway's army ...

[said](https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/pistorius-scholz-leopard-101.html), as pressure mounts on Europe’s largest economy. Germany will decide “soon” on whether to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine or approve the export of German-made equipment by other countries, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius

How to reckon with the ideology of “Anna Karenina,” “Eugene Onegin,” and other beloved books.

But was I really going to inflict myself, in my capacity as an eternal student of Russian literature, on another former territory of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union? During the war, generations of Russian literary youths—among them, Pushkin and Tolstoy—went to the region. The Russian World imagines a transnational Russian civilization, one extending even beyond the “triune Russian nation” of “Great Russia” (Russia), “Little Russia” (Ukraine), and “White Russia” (Belarus); it is united by Eastern Orthodoxy, by the Russian language, by the “culture” of Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and, when necessary, by air strikes. Pushkin was at the center of the storm. In the months following my trip, I often heard the Ukrainian critique of Dostoyevsky replaying in my mind, getting in arguments with past me, and resonating with other reservations I’d had, in recent years, about the role of Russian novels in my life. (Tolstoy—a vocal pacifist for the last three decades of his life—gets a pass.) As the visiting author of two books called “The Possessed” and “The Idiot,” I got to hear a certain amount about people’s opinions of Dostoyevsky. As a student, I had often been asked whether I had Russian relatives and, if not, why I was so interested in “the Russians.” Was I perhaps studying the similarities between Peter the Great, who had Westernized Russia, and Atatürk, who had Westernized Turkey, where my relatives were from? I had chosen these books precisely for the universal quality expressed in titles like “Fathers and Sons,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “Dead Souls.” Anyone in a Dostoyevsky novel who went on an unreadable rant was bound to be contradicted, in a matter of pages, by another ranting character holding the opposite view: a technique known as dialogism, which features prominently both in Russian novels and in my own thinking. On the way, I stopped in Kyiv and Lviv: cities I had only ever read about, first in Russian novels, and later in the international news. My book “The Possessed”—a memoir I had published in 2010, about studying Russian literature—had recently been translated into Russian, along with “The Idiot,” an autobiographical novel, and I was headed to Russia as a cultural emissary, through an initiative of PEN America and the U.S.

Poland will file a request for German approval to send its Leopard tanks to Ukraine, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said, adding that it was a formality ...