Ukraine Breaking News Today Live on 08-11-2024

900 days of Russia’s full-scale war; Russia’s one-sided view of history and morality; Belarusian dictator Lukashenka blusters on.

900 Days of Russia’s full-scale War – The siege of Leningrad recalled

Incredible to believe that today is 900 days since Russia launched its barbaric full-scale war against Ukraine. And more than 10 years since it annexed Crimea, seized part of the Donbas and began a simmering war in Eastern Ukraine. So, let’s try and put this into some sort of perspective. If we look for a modern example of a devastatingly brutal siege lasting as long as this, then the case of what Leningrad endured when it was encircled by Axis forces in World War II springs to mind. Dubbed the 900-Day Siege, in fact it lasted for 867 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The world in focus, as seen by a Canadian leading global affairs analyst, writer and speaker, in his review of international media.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged for the first time that his military is conducting a cross-border offensive inside Russia's western Kursk region. In his video address late on Saturday, Mr Zelensky said Ukraine's military was pushing the war onto "the aggressor's territory". Kyiv launched its surprise attack on Tuesday, rapidly advancing more than 10km (six miles) inside Russia - the deepest raid since Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In his address, President Zelensky thanked Ukraine's "warriors", and said he had discussed the operation in Russia with the country's top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi. "Ukraine is proving that it can indeed restore justice and ensure the necessary pressure on the aggressor," he added. Russia has so far struggled to halt the Ukrainian advance, with more than 76,000 people evacuated from the Kursk region and a "counter-terror" regime imposed across three border areas. This means authorities in Kursk, Belgorod and Bryansk regions can restrict the movement of people and vehicles and use phone tapping among other measures. The fighting appeared to be ongoing on Saturday night, with Kursk Governor Aleksei Smirnov saying early on Sunday that there were injured people in a "treacherous" Ukrainian attack. He earlier reported that 13 people were injured late on Saturday when the wreckage of a downed Ukrainian missile fell on a multi-storey building in the regional capital Kursk. The governors of Russia's neighbouring Voronezh and Belgorod regions also reported a Ukrainian drone attack overnight. They did not mention any injuries. - BBC

BBC Verify has confirmed the authenticity of a video showing armed Ukrainian soldiers in control of a key Russian gas facility in Sudzha owned by the Gazprom company. “The video alone does not verify the claim that Ukrainian troops have taken the whole town,” BBC said

Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia posted a social media video demanding Maduro allow free political expression.

Venezuela's opposition candidate called Saturday for President Nicolas Maduro to end "violence and persecution," hours after the country's high court said its upcoming ruling on the disputed July 28 election cannot be appealed.

Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, who claims to have won the election by a wide margin, posted a social media video demanding Maduro allow free political expression.

A quick assessment of what we know about the surprise Ukrainian assault into Russia, and what might be Ukraine’s strategic and operational objectives.

In a 1973 lecture, Sir Michael Howard described the impact of surprise, and the necessity of military institutions to prepare their people to absorb, and adapt around, surprises on the battlefield and beyond. He described how “this is an aspect of military science which needs to be studied above all others in the Armed Forces: the capacity to adapt oneself to the utterly unpredictable, the entirely unknown.”

Sir Lawrence Freedman, has written that, “a surprise attack, conceived with cunning, prepared with duplicity and executed with ruthlessness, provides international history with its most melodramatic moments.” Surprise is an important continuity in human competition and warfare. The desire to surprise an adversary is central to the Eastern and Western traditions of war.

Membership of the independent church loyal to the Kyiv patriarchate has swelled since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged on Saturday (10 August) to “strengthen our Ukrainian spiritual independence”, suggesting that the country’s leadership was moving towards effectively banning the branch of the Orthodox Church that has links to Moscow.

A majority of Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians, but the faith is split into one branch with traditional links to the Russian Orthodox church and an independent church, recognised by the world Orthodox hierarchy since 2019.

The latest on Ukraine's surprise counter-offensive strike into Russia's Kursk region.

Thousands of Ukrainian troops are taking part in an incursion aiming to destabilize Russia by showing up its weaknesses, a top Ukrainian official has told AFP as the assault entered its sixth day.

"We are on the offensive. The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses and to destabilize the situation in Russia as they are unable to protect their own border," the security official said on condition of anonymity.

A renowned exiled Russian political analyst reminisces about the contribution of the recently deceased UK scholar and human rights campaigner, Peter Reddaway.

Dear Bohdan Nahaylo! 

Thank you so much for your very thorough and moving “In Memoriam” devoted to our outstanding contemporary Peter Reddaway who passed away several weeks ago. He was both a scholar and a visionary.

Chechen complicit in murder of leading Kremlin critic freed to fight in Ukraine

A Chechen convicted for his role in the murder of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov has been pardoned by Vladimir Putin and will now join Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

Temirlan Eskerkhanov was imprisoned in 2017 for the 2015 assassination of the former deputy prime minister. Four other men convicted for their part in the killing will remain behind bars after turning down the opportunity to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense.

This Russian army isn't their father’s Soviet Army. They are their great-great grandfather’s meatgrinder of an army that fled the battlefields of WWI – led by an equally one-dimensional general.

Not only has Vladimir Putin, the putative emperor of Russia, been proven to have no clothes, but as evidenced daily in Kursk, the Russian Army militarily speaking has been caught stark naked as well by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

Ukraine’s stunning counteroffensive in Kursk that began on Aug. 6 is proving to personally be a major embarrassment to Putin and his regime – and it is continuing to gain steam capturing Russian territory at a faster rate than what Moscow has been able to achieve in the Donbas after months of bloody fighting and 100,000+ casualties.

Returning to Ukraine is an inconvenience for most expats in the absence of direct flights, but the need to transit through third countries made the journey impossible for the Masood family.

When the Masood family returned to Pakistan for a family visit in 2020, little did they know that that would be the last time they would feel the seaside breeze of Odesa.

“We couldn’t go back to Ukraine, [when] my daughter came to Pakistan for the first time after her birth,” Kokab Ali, her mother, told Kyiv Post.

The Ukrainian naval forces and the HUR attacked an Black Sea platform where Russians had set up maritime GPS spoofing equipment to endanger civilian shipping.

The naval forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in partnership with the Main Intelligence Agency (HUR) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, hit an offshore gas platform, to which the Russian forces had brought equipment and military personnel.

The corresponding video was published on his Facebook page by spokesperson of the Ukrainian Naval Forces, Lt. Cmdr. Dmytro Pletenchuk.

The 2024 half-year results for land market deals show companies are more reluctant to buy land than before the war, and the market is showing first signs of seasonality.

Starting from Jan. 1, 2024, companies were legally free to purchase land in Ukraine with first results showing no sign of the feared monopoly, dollar price lower than pre-war, and the Poltavska region proving popular among buyers in the agricultural market. 

Agricultural companies accounted for 83.5 percent of all transactions among legal entities purchasing land plots, acquiring 14,500 hectares (358,000 acres) during the first five months of 2024, according to the authors of the “Land Market Review Ukraine”report by the Agrocentre of Kyiv School of Economics.

In a scene from “Atlas” which depicts robots attacking people, real-life footage from Azov's battles in Mariupol, where hundreds died were used.

A Ukrainian soldier noticed that a scene from the Netflix's science fiction movie “Atlas” which depicts robots attacking people was using actual footage filmed by Azov during the Mariupol battles, which he noted on his X (formerly Twitter) page on Aug. 7.

“I decided to watch the Netflix film ‘Atlas,’ which is about a machine uprising against humans, and one of the first scenes showed video of robots attacking people. However, it's a real video clip filmed by Azov during the Mariupol battles,” he wrote.

In his nightly address on Saturday, the Ukrainian president only mentions “pushing onto the aggressor’s territory” while keeping all details hidden behind the veil of operational security.

In the first official word from the government in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky during his nightly address on Saturday acknowledged Ukraine’s push onto Russian soil, five days after Ukraine began its operation, which took not only Russia by surprise, but seemingly Ukraine’s allies also.

Zelensky only said that he and Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) Commander-in-Chief, had discussed “our actions to push the war out into the aggressor’s territory.”

Saturday night in Kyiv air defenses were activated amid concern that Moscow might launch air raids in response to Ukraine’s recent offensive inside Russia. Rescuers later found a father and son dead.

A man and his four-year-old son were killed in an overnight Russian missile attack near the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, the emergency service said Sunday.

Explosions rang out Saturday night in the center and east of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, AFP journalists noted, as the Ukrainian Air Force said two Russian missiles were headed toward the city. 

Europe's press discusses the reasons for the offensive and the reactions from the Kremlin so far.

Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting in the Russian border region of Kursk since Tuesday. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) estimates that Ukrainian forces have managed to overcome two Russian defensive lines and at least one military base. Drone footage shows that Western tanks are being used. Here are some of the comments by international analysts.

Kyiv's dual strategy