The Ukraine military assured a shaky President Biden that American weapons would not be used to target anything IN Russia….
THAT promise has not been kept….
Ukraine forces have closed so close to the Russian borders that Russian towns are feeling the war …..
Update….Ukraine power plant is back on line…..But NOT supply electricity to the Ukraine….
On Friday, Ukraine reportedly struck the base of the Russian 3rd Motorized Rifle Division near Valuyki, just nine miles north of the Russia—Ukraine border. Russian officials did not acknowledge that a military target was hit but said one civilian died, and the local electrical grid experienced a temporary disruption.
Russia blamed the attacks on Ukraine, but Kyiv did not claim responsibility for striking targets in Russian territory.
Kyiv has assured U.S. officials that donated weapons would not be used to strike targets inside Russia proper. But Ukrainian forces are now so close to the border that they can hit targets using their own less-advanced weaponry.
That Russian citizens are starting to seriously feel the impact of the war directly is another new source of pressure on Putin, who returned home this weekend from a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Uzbekistan where he faced a remarkable public rebuke by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and questions about the war from Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In a stunning public rebuke, Modi told Putin that “today’s era is not an era of war, and I have spoken to you on the phone about this.” That followed an acknowledgment by Putin that he had heard “concerns and questions” about the war from the Chinese president.
Ukraine has made stunning advances in the Kharkiv region, in the northeast of the country, in the past two weeks. During its advances, it has also uncovered hundreds of mass graves and stories of Russian forces terrorizing residents in the liberated city of Izyum….
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Valuyki and Krasny Khutor are among dozens of small settlements in Russia that the Russian military uses as a staging ground, putting them in the middle of Moscow’s faltering invasion and Kyiv’s mounting counteroffensive.
The local governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, has ordered the evacuation of hundreds of people and shut down schools in border towns over the past months. But now the authorities in Belgorod are under increasing pressure from unnerved residents who are experiencing what many Ukrainians have lived with for months: nighttime explosions, destroyed homes and sometimes casualties…..
After nearly a week offline, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine resumed receiving electricity from the country’s power grid, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, said on Saturday. The restoration came after engineers finished repairing a high-voltage line damaged by shelling.
The restored line, one of four primary external connections at the sprawling nuclear power plant, will furnish the station with the electricity needed to cool its six nuclear reactors and perform other critical safety functions, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement.
Before the line was fixed on Friday, the plant — the largest in Europe — had been relying on three backup power lines, as well as electricity that it had produced, to power the essential equipment dedicated to cooling spent fuel rods. Ukraine turned off the final reactor at the plant on Sept. 11 as a safety measure after determining that keeping it going as fighting continued nearby could lead to nuclear catastrophe. The plant, at full operation, provided about a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity supply….