Day 317 of the Invasion of Ukraine: Zelensky Rejected Putin’s Ceasefire

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Here are the highlights of events related to the war in Ukraine over the past 24 hours:

Moscow does not see a desire in Washington for a political solution in Ukraine

“All the recent actions of the US, including the decision to grant a new package of military aid to Kyiv, which will include US Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, directly show the lack of desire in Washington to find a political solution for Ukraine.” This was stated by the Russian ambassador to the USA Anatoly Antonov to journalists. “Even the unilateral ceasefire we announced on Christmas Day is called an 'attempted breather' here.”

“All this means that Washington is determined to fight with us ‘to the last Ukrainian’, and the fate of the people of Ukraine does not concern the Americans at all,” said the Russian diplomat.

According to him, the decision of the US administration to transfer Bradley fighting vehicles to Kyiv "is a confirmation that the United States will not listen to the repeated calls of the Russian side to take into account the possible consequences of such a dangerous line of behavior."

According to Antonov, it should finally become obvious to the entire world community that since 2014, the United States has unleashed a real proxy war with Russia, supporting Nazi criminals in Kyiv.

There can be no talk of any "defensive character" of the transferred weapons for a long time, the ambassador said.

According to him, with its actions, the American administration "only incites the Ukrainian radicals to new terrible deeds", and with each new delivery of weapons from the USA, "they feel greater impunity" and "with particular cynicism, they continue to kill civilians in Donbas, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of the Russian Federation," added Anatoly Antonov.

Zelensky: Putin's "truce" aims to hinder our progress in the east

Ukraine has said there will be no ceasefire until Russia withdraws its forces from occupied Ukrainian territories.

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a ceasefire along the entire contact line in the Ukraine conflict zone to be effective from 12 noon today until midnight on 7 January. Thus, the head of state responded to Patriarch Kirill's call for a Christmas truce.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is using the so-called "truce" to prevent the Ukrainian army from moving east. This was commented by the Ukrainian head of state Volodymyr Zelensky in his evening video address.

"Now they want to use Christmas as a cover to temporarily stop the movement of our guys in Donbas and bring equipment, ammunition and mobilized military closer to our positions. What will this lead to? Only to another increase in losses. The whole world knows that the Kremlin is using the lulls in the war to continue it with renewed vigor."

Zelensky also addressed the Russian citizens with the words:

"The war will end either when your soldiers withdraw or when we drive them out".

Russian President Vladimir Putin aims to take a breather, US President Joe Biden said in connection with Putin's proposal for a 36-hour ceasefire on the occasion of the Nativity of Christ, which the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates on January 7.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will welcome any truce at Christmas "knowing that it will not replace a just peace in accordance with the UN Charter and international law," a UN spokesman said. He said Guterres had disbanded the fact-finding mission surrounding the July attack on the Olenivka prison in Donetsk region, which is under the control of pro-Russian separatists. The UN mission has not received security guarantees, the spokesman added. Both Russia and Ukraine have called for an investigation into the attack, which killed Ukrainian soldiers.

Meanwhile, the US and Germany announced that they would supply Ukraine with additional military aid.

Germany will also provide another Patriot air defense system after the one donated by Washington last month. And the new package of US military aid to Kyiv will amount to $2.85 billion, making it the largest shipment of military equipment Washington has ever sent to Ukraine.

Germany to provide “Patriot” to Ukraine

Germany will follow the US in providing the Patriot missile defense system to Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and US President Joe Biden said in a joint statement after talks on Thursday.

“In late December, the United States announced its donation of a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine. Germany will join the United States in delivering an additional Patriot air defense battery to Ukraine," the statement said.

Earlier it was reported that the two countries agreed that Germany would provide Ukraine with Marder infantry fighting vehicles, and the United States with Bradley military vehicles.

They fought for the motherland. A murderer, drug dealer and thieves recognized among Wagner's pardoned mercenaries

Russian journalists identified some of the prisoners who fought for Wagner, whose pardon was announced by the owner of the private military company Yevgeny Prigozhin. Among the criminals who were pardoned and released from serving their sentences, there is also a man who was sentenced for murder, reports the publication "Meduza".

They fought for the homeland - among them is a murderer, convicted of robbery, organizing a criminal group and the production of amphetamines. Journalists from "Meduza" and the BBC participated in their identification.

On the morning of January 5, Prigozhin announced that the members of the first group of prisoners recruited by PMC "Wagner" to be sent to the front in Ukraine had fulfilled their six-month contracts and received a pardon. RIA Novosti agency published a video of these people (their faces were blurred), and RIA FAN, owned by Prigozhin, published their photos.

The Russian edition of the BBC identified among the prisoners 34-year-old Anatoly Salmin from the Leningrad region, who has been convicted many times, including for murder. In 2011, he was jailed for nine years for drowning a friend he went fishing with.

St. Petersburg veterinarian Dmitry Karavaychik, who in 2019 was sentenced to 17 years for manufacturing and selling amphetamine, was also pardoned. His wife Diana Gribovskaya was also involved in the case. She got 16 years.

Karavaychik himself claims that the police planted amphetamine on him, and that he sold crushed pills allegedly as drugs to raise money to develop artificial limbs for animals. In the press, Karavaychik was compared to the main character of the series Breaking Bad, the teacher Walter White, who produced amphetamines.

Among the prisoners is Alexander Suetov, who received a 10-year prison sentence in 2020 as the organizer of a criminal group that raided jewelry stores in St. Petersburg, as well as Denis Kinev, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2011 for robbery. Another war veteran, Stanislav Usachev, as of 2016 had received a year and one month in prison for stealing a car. Probably, after these sentences, both Kinev and Usachev committed other crimes.

Reports that PMC Wagner was recruiting Russian prisoners for the war with Ukraine, promising them pardons if they fought for six months, began to emerge in the summer of 2022. In September, associates of opposition leader Alexei Navalny released a video of Yevgeny Prigozhin offering to prisoners in the Mari El colony to become mercenaries.

As noted by Mediazone, in September-October the number of prisoners in Russian colonies decreased by 23,000 people - more than as a result of amnesties in previous years. The publication links this reduction to Wagner's recruitment to the PMC. In December, the agency noticed that the Federal Penal Service had stopped publishing data on the number of prisoners in Russian prisons.

The US: Prigozhin wants to get his hands on the extraction of salt and gypsum from the mines near Bakhmut

The United States believes that the head of Russia's private military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is interested in taking control of salt and gypsum production from mines near the Ukrainian-controlled town of Bakhmut, a White House official said, cited by Reuters and BTA.

There are indications that Prigozhin’s "obsession" with Bakhmut was materially motivated, the American representative noted.

The US has previously accused Russian mercenaries of exploiting natural resources in the Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan and elsewhere to help finance Moscow's war in Ukraine. Russia categorically rejects these claims.

Prigozhin, who has been sanctioned by Western countries for his role in "Wagner", yesterday said goodbye to the first group of Russian prisoners who were amnestied and released after agreeing to fight in Ukraine. He urged them to avoid the temptation to kill when they return to civilian life.

According to the White House representative, the Wagner company, which has nearly 50,000 mercenaries, lost more than 4,100 people in Ukraine, with 1,000 of them killed in late November and early December near Bakhmut. The wounded soldiers from "Wagner" are about 10,000.

Late last month, the White House said the Wagner company had accepted a military shipment from North Korea to help Russian forces in Ukraine.

Ukraine announced a record collapse of its economy, but it is smaller than expected

The Ukrainian economy has contracted by less than a third (30.4%) in 2022, with a possible deviation of 2%.

However, the data announced by the Minister of Economy, Yulia Sviridenko, points to the biggest collapse of the gross domestic product in the history of the country since its independence from the Soviet Union.

There are no numbers in the Economic Ministry announcement, but by 2021, the country's GDP is $200 billion.

The largest decline was recorded in the second quarter (second half of spring and most of summer) of 2022. "This is objectively the worst result for the time of independence, but it is slightly better than most experts expected, when speculations ranged between 40 and 50 percent," she says.

Last fall, the World Bank predicted that Ukraine's GDP would shrink eight times faster than Russia's in 2022 - by 35%, compared to a 4.5% decline for Russia (but the same institution expected in April this indicator would be 45 percent). The forecast of the International Monetary Fund was similar. Moscow actually announced an even smaller drop of 3 percent. Confirmation of these data would mean that the relative decline of the Ukrainian economy compared to the Russian one is even greater.

Inflation in the country is currently around 30% and is expected - even with a projected slight decline - to remain high, around 20%.

In support of Ukraine, the European Union and its members have announced the provision of a total of 52 billion euros - military, financial and humanitarian aid - a slightly smaller amount is promised by the United States. At the same time, according to an estimate by the Kyiv School of Economics, the damage to the infrastructure alone was 127 billion dollars, and this was as of September, before the beginning of a series of attacks on energy facilities carried out by Russia.

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