‘There Will Be No Quick and Easy Solution’ – Ukraine at War Update for Jan. 7

AFP reported on Monday that “several dozen Ukrainian soldiers” have deserted while training in France, quoting a French military official, on the same day that Ukraine’s ground commander admitted “problems” of such soldiers going absent without leave in Western Europe.

“There have been a certain number of desertions, but they remain very marginal given the volume of people who have undergone training,” a French military official told AFP. “They were in French barracks, they had the right to go.”

“We don’t criminalize desertion in France,” the French official said. “If someone deserted, a French prosecutor had no authority to arrest that individual. And the right granted to the Ukrainian authorities on French soil is just a disciplinary right.”

AFP reported that the French army was training 2,300 soldiers from a brigade named “Anne of Kyiv,” after a Kyiv-born princess who married French King Henri in the 11th century.

According to the report, most of the soldiers were conscripts with no combat experience. They were accompanied by 300 Ukrainian supervisors. The other 2,200 soldiers in the brigade were trained in Ukraine.

“Yes, there are problems [with desertion], we are aware of them,” Land Forces Commander Mykhailo Drapaty said of the Anne of Kyiv unit, commenting to media.

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ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 7, 2025

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Asked about the reports of desertions, Drapaty said, “I will not refute it.”

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron struck an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone about the nature of the situation in Ukraine, saying that Kyiv should expect some concessions in any peace talks with Russia that are imminent.

Macron said on Monday that Ukraine should have “realistic” expectations on territory concessions.

“There will be no quick and easy solution in Ukraine,” Macron said in a speech to French ambassadors, warning that Ukrainians needed to have “realistic discussions on territorial issues.”

US peacefully certifies Trump’s victory, restoring democratic traditions, for now

Four years after American insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol at then-president Donald Trump’s behest, to violently contest the electoral victory of US President Joe Biden, the US Senate, led by the electorally defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, peacefully certified Trump’s 2024 presidential victory on Monday.

More than 1,580 defendants have been charged and 1,270 have been convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks that killed five people, including police officers and military veterans, as Trump encouraged his followers to fight against the certification of his loss.

His Vice President at the time, Michael Pence, was the leader of the Senate and one of the targets of the armed mob in 2021, but Pence explained later that he would not be dissuaded from discharging his constitutional duty.

The US Constitution requires the vice president to also serve as the leader of the Senate.

While Trump has promised revenge on those who stood in his way of overturning the certified 2020 election results and those involved in his other myriad criminal and civil convictions, he has not given specifics about how many or what categories of insurrection defendants he plans to pardon, although there will be some, he said. 

Even as Trump and his team, as part of those charges, threatened officials in the state of Georgia in 2020 to not verify the state vote that ultimately defeated him, in June of 2024, the Trump-picked king-makers of the US Supreme Court ruled that a President is immune from prosecution when exercising the “core powers” of the presidency. It remains to be legally parsed by the lower courts as to what an “official” duty of the president is, and what is not.

Trump, still a convicted felon for having falsified business records to hide his hush-money payments to a porn star with whom he had sexual relations, will take the oath of office on Jan. 20, after which he will be anointed the 47th president of the United States.

According to NBC News, the defense lawyer for the leader of the “Proud Boys” group, Enrique Tarrio, who led the insurrection, wrote a letter to Trump on the fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack asking for “a full and complete Presidential pardon from Trump, who has vowed to pardon some rioters after he takes office on Jan. 20.”

In the letter, attorney Nayib Hassan called Tarrio, 42, a “young man with an aspiring future ahead of him” who was “portrayed throughout the Government’s case as a right-wing extremist that promoted a neo-fascist militant organization,” when, in fact, the lawyer asserted, Tarrio was “nothing more than a proud American that believes in true conservative values.”

Biden plans to slap sanctions on transported Russian oil above $60 per barrel

According to the business wire service Reuters, the Biden administration in Washington plans to impose sanctions on Russian tankers carrying oil with contracts above $60 per barrel, an international price cap set by Western governments to keep Moscow from taking advantages of lowered supplies during its invasion of Ukraine.

Russia thus far has used a so-called “shadow fleet” of older ships to circumvent such restrictions. As a result of Moscow’s strategy to deviate from standard practices, and evade such sanctions, there have been several environmental disasters as a result.

One source told Reuters that the new US sanctions would likely include measures against not just organizations, but also individuals involved in networks that trade oil at prices above the cap.