What you need to know at dawn on Sunday December 11
Russian forces have “turned the city of Bakhmout into ruins”, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, as Ukraine’s military reported hits from missiles, rockets and planes in several parts of the country on Saturday. ” The situation remains very difficult” in several frontline towns, the Ukrainian president added in his nightly video address.
The Russian Ministry of Defense for its part affirmed on Saturday that Russian troops continued their Donbass offensive towards the town of Lyman, located 65 kilometers north of Bakhmout. But the spokesman for the Ukrainian government, Oleksandr Shtupun, assures that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in Donetsk and Luhansk.
In the west, drone attacks overnight from Friday to Saturday left much of Odessa province, including its namesake port city on the Black Sea, without power. Full restoration of electricity could take up to three months, regional governor Maksym Marchenko said. He urged families whose homes are without electricity to leave the area if possible.
“The war in Ukraine is not a war between two states, but between two systems: authoritarianism and democracy”, announced Oleksandra Matviichuk, Nobel Peace Prize winner. The world publish the full speech given on Saturday 10 December in Oslo by the President of the Center for Civil Liberties during the presentation of the prize, also awarded to the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski and the Russian NGO Memorial.
In exile, the belarusian dissent is trying to continue its democratic fight, describes our correspondent in Warsaw, Helen Welcome. Faced with the repression that is raging more than ever in Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus, thousands of dissidents have had no choice but to take the road to exile. But many are those who have not given up their fight so far.