WINTER WAR: Russia’s slow war in Ukraine heats up.
Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels clashed heavily for a third straight day at a flashpoint town Tuesday, as thousands of locals remained without power after a deadly surge in fighting.
The industrial hub of Avdiivka came under attack on Sunday from insurgents seeking to wrest back territory controlled by Kiev during the nearly three-year war.
It’s cold. “…temperatures drop to -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Farenheit) at night and the homes in Avdiivka are in dire need of heating.”
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “is worried that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election and praise for Russia’s Vladimir Putin may add fuel to a conflict that began shortly after Ukraine’s 2014 ouster of its Moscow-backed leader and tilt toward the West.”
There are back and forth accusations over which side started the fighting in Avdiivka but “An AFP reporter saw the separatists shell the town of about 20,000 people with repeated rounds of Grad multiple rocket systems and artillery fire from the early morning.”
RELATED: The EU says the fighting in Avdiivka is a blatant violation of the Minsk ceasefire accord.
France and Germany helped broker the Minsk accords with Moscow and Kiev, and European Union leaders tied implementation to a series of sanctions, including very damaging economic restrictions, against Russia.
Fighting in eastern Ukraine has waxed and waned since then, with Brussels insisting repeatedly there can be no change to the sanctions regime until the accord sticks.
Another supposedly indefinite ceasefire went into effect December 23, 2016. But it hasn’t been respected.
DEEP BACKGROUND FROM AUGUST 2016: Russia is paying an economic price for the Ukraine war. That price has domestic political implications.
For example, in 2014 the government announced a $70 billion ten year program to revive the moribund Russian space program. That has since been cut to $20 billion. What a lot of Russians noticed (and discuss on the Internet) is that the $70 billion spending plan was announced right after Russia had taken Crimea from Ukraine and while world oil prices were plunging. The government apparently did not consider either of these developments would do any long-term damage to Russia. So many Russians wonder what else their leaders have misinterpreted.
Scroll through the update and you’ll find a section devoted to Ukraine. It has background on the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic — two state-lets within Ukraine the Kremlin created.