Astana, Kazakhstan
Reuters
Russia should be finished calling up reservists in two weeks, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, promising an end to a divisive mobilisation that has seen hundreds of thousands of men summoned to fight in Ukraine and huge numbers flee the country.
Putin also said Russia had no plans “for now” for more massive air strikes like those it carried out this week, in which it fired more than 100 long range missiles at targets across Ukraine.
A woman stands near her destroyed car near an old mill, built around 1885, also destroyed during a Russian missile attack in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine on 14th October. PICTURE: Reuters/Stringer
Putin ordered the mobilisation three weeks ago, part of a response to Russian battlefield defeats. He has also proclaimed the annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces and threatened to use nuclear weapons.
UKRAINE COMPLETES EXHUMATION OF SOLDIERS AT LYMAN MASS GRAVE
Ukrainian investigators have completed the exhumation of soldiers in one of two mass graves discovered after Russian troops retreated from the town of Lyman in eastern Donetsk region, police said on Friday.
“Police have removed the bodies of 34 Ukrainian defenders from the mass grave,” Donetsk regional police said in a statement. “Work continues at a second location where more than 120 civilians are buried. The fate of each person who died will be determined.”
Forensic technicians and officers work at what appears to be a mass grave declared by regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko as found in the town of Lyman, recently retaken by the Ukrainian army, in this undated handout image obtained by Reuters on 7th October. PICTURE: Donetsk Region Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko/Handout via Reuters/File photo.
The soldiers’ bodies have all been transferred to a morgue and will be returned to their relatives for burial once identification has taken place and the cause of death is determined, the police said.
Since 29th September, Donetsk police said they had found the bodies of 144 people, 85 of them civilians, with 108 exhumed from makeshift graves, and the rest found in buildings or on the streets.
“Most of the dead – 85 – are civilians,” they said. “Some of them have signs of violent death, in particular shrapnel injuries.
Ukraine’s top prosecutor told a joint news conference with International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan in The Hague on Thursday that Ukraine had 28 investigative teams on the ground in areas recently recaptured by Ukrainian forces.
Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said retreating Russian troops had left evidence of illegal detention and torture of civilians and deportations. Khan, who opened an ICC investigation in March, would not be drawn on when his office might file its first case, saying he would move forward “when the evidence is sufficient”.
In Lyman, graves marked as holding the bodies of people killed in May, when Russians were battling to seize Lyman, include those for children as young as one, Reuters reported this week. Reuters could not independently determine the causes or timing of the deaths.
Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly accused Russian troops of committing atrocities in occupied territories, a charge Moscow denies.
– ELAINE MONAGHAN/Reuters
Russia has since seen the first signs of public criticism of the authorities since the war began and officials have acknowledged some mistakes. Members of ethnic minorities and rural residents have complained of being drafted at higher rates than ethnic Russians and city dwellers.
Defending the order, Putin said the front line was too long to defend solely with contract soldiers.
He said 222,000 out of an expected 300,000 reservists had already been mobilised. “This work is coming to an end,” he told a news conference at the end of a summit in Kazakhstan. “I think that in about two weeks all the mobilization activities will be finished.”
Since the mobilisation order was given, Russian forces have continued to lose ground in eastern Ukraine and the south.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, once again said Ukraine’s forces would retake all of its territory.
“Yes, they still have people to throw on the battlefield, they have weapons, missiles, they have [Iranian-made] Shaheds which they use against Ukraine,” he said. “They still have the possibility to terrorize our cities and all Europeans, blackmailing the world. But they have no chance of succeeding and will have none because Ukraine is moving forward.”
Zelenskiy also said he had spoken to Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “We discussed possibilities for acting together in the interests of our countries and our peoples. I believe that the results we need are possible,” he said, giving no details.
The US Government accused the Saudis of kowtowing to Russia – as it wages the war in Ukraine – when the OPEC+ oil producer group it leads announced this month it would cut its oil production target.
New troops take casualties
A Western official said some of the newly mobilised Russian troops were already on the battlefield taking casualties, and that their presence was unlikely to turn the tide. “It is clear that they have been fielded with very, very limited training and very, very poor equipment,” the official said.
The official also suggested Russia had too few missiles to sustain attacks like those this week: “Russia is rapidly exhausting its supply of long-range precision munitions, in particular its air-launched cruise missiles.”
Ukraine’s top general, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, struck an upbeat tone after his country’s rapid advances in the northeast and south.
“The strategic initiative is in our hands, so the main thing is not to stop,” Zaluzhnyi said after speaking by phone with the commander in chief of Europe’s combined NATO forces, U.S. General Christopher Cavoli.
Ukraine’s General Staff said on Facebook late on Friday that Ukraine’s forces had destroyed large amounts of Russian arms and equipment in Antratsyt south of Luhansk, where Ukraine hopes to recapture major towns after its successes in Kharkiv region.
It said Russian forces had launched more artillery and air strikes on towns including Konstantynivka southwest of Bakhmut, their main target in Donetsk region, and Zaporizhzhia city.
Reuters was not able to verify the battlefield reports.
Separately, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko put his country on what he called a heightened state of terrorism alert on Friday, the latest gesture hinting at growing pressure to join the war.
Lukashenko, Putin’s closest international ally, has allowed Russian forces to use Belarus as a staging ground but so far kept his own troops out. This week he announced Russian troops would be joining Belarusian forces near the Ukrainian border.
– With reporting by Reuters bureaux
