Ukraine Update…303 days into the Russian move on the Ukraine…Cease fire?

• Putin’s cease-fire began at noon Friday and is scheduled to run through Saturday, Orthodox Christmas. The Kremlin said the move was a response to an appeal from the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Kirill is a fierce supporter of Putin and his bloody invasion of Ukraine. The truce applies to the entire front.
• Some Ukrainians celebrated Christmas on Dec. 25 rather than the traditional Orthodox date, in part to distance themselves from Russia.
• Some regional officials reported shelling around the time the cease-fire began, and fighting appeared to continue in Soledar, a city in the Donetsk region.
• President Biden said he thinks Putin is “trying to find some oxygen” after 10 months of war and tens of thousands of casualties on the Russian side. He made the remark in a White House briefing. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a tweet that the “so-called” cease-fire would not bring freedom or security to Ukrainians.
• The Biden administration announced Friday a $2.8 billion military aid package for Ukraine, the largest drawdown from U.S. defense stockpiles to date, and said it will include Bradley Fighting Vehicles, additional howitzers and various types of ammunition. The drawdown is part of $3.75 billion in new military assistance, including $682 million to allies and $225 million to build the “long-term capacity” of Ukraine’s military. The decision to supply Bradley Fighting Vehicles was first announced in a joint statement between Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday, and marks a significant policy shift after months of resisting Kyiv’s pleas for tanks. In his nightly address, Zelensky praised the aid package as “exactly what [Ukraine] needed.”

• Shortly after the cease-fire was due to come into force at noon Friday, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said Russian shells had hit residential areas in the eastern Donetsk region. Around the same time, Yaroslav Yanushevych, the head of the military administration in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, said one person was dead and four were injured after a Russian attack. The exact timing of both attacks was unclear.
• Russia has “overtly committed” to supporting militias from the Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics, a British intelligence update said Friday. The militias were “formally integrated into the Russian armed forces on 31 December 2022. President Putin presented the formations with their battle colors during a visit to Rostov-on-Don.” However, it added that the militias “remain divisive” within the Russian system and are widely viewed as a “significant drain on Russian finances.”
• There is currently no need for mass mobilization in Ukraine to fight the war, Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a television interview. “But everything will depend on the situation at the front,” he said. “We do not have such a great need for people, as in Russia,” he added. “We need weapons … and equipment.”
• The United Nations is disbanding a fact-finding mission it had formed to investigate a deadly attack on a prison in eastern Ukraine. In July, an explosion at Olenivka killed scores of Ukrainian prisoners of war — an attack that Moscow and Kyiv blamed on each other. U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said in a briefing Thursday that the team could not deploy without clear safety and access guarantees. “We didn’t feel we had received them,” he said….

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image….Members of the US Army 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, drive Bradley Fighting Vehicles from the railway station near the Rukla military base in Lithuania, on October 4, 2014.PETRAS MALUKAS/AFP VIA Getty……