"We want peace around the world," 70-year-old Kyiv resident Nina Albul recently told my colleague Hanna Palamarenko, "but we also want the world to know that it's okay for enslaved people to fight back." According to a poll by the independent Razumkov Centre, a majority of Ukrainians said they believe Ukraine is "heading in the right direction" in light of the war. This includes overwhelming domestic support for joining NATO and the European Union, despite both blocs expressing hesitation to Ukraine's membership for decades preceding the war.

• Blumenthal has joined other lawmakers particularly pro-Ukraine Republicans in pushing President Joe Biden to give Zelenskyy most of the weapons he requested, including long-range ATACMS missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft.
• Its heartbreaking to say, but its just bleak, Gideon.
• For democracies, long-term consensus in support for war has always been more complicated than for autocrats with no accountability.
• For its part, the Biden administration has started deliberations around the thorny question of whether helping Ukraine should entail retaking Crimea, which Russia seized and then annexed in 2014.
• So that he would be irreplaceable because he keeps the factions together and the flow of money to the right people.
• "We declared a special military operation because we had absolutely no other way of explaining to the West that dragging Ukraine into Nato was a criminal act," Mr Lavrov told the BBC.

Russia also intensified its bombing of cities on Tuesday, including in civilian areas. Footage "of the aftermath of a missile strike that hit Kyiv's main TV tower and a nearby Holocaust memorial showed a gruesome scene of blown-out cars and buildings and several bodies on fire," The Washington Post reports. The southern city of Mariupol suffered 15 hours of relentless shelling, while missiles also bombarded Kharkiv, allowing paratroopers to land in the eastern Ukrainian city. At 3am (UTC) President Vladimir Putin authorised a special military operation with troops entering the country from the north, east and south at 5am. Last Sunday, Putin ordered Russias nuclear forces be put on high alert, after the West imposed a number of crippling sanctions and which he described as taking unfriendly steps against his country. Ukrainian armed forces have fought back with fierce resistance, with Russia failing to take key cities within the first week of its invasion and remove President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Russias invasion of Ukraine in maps latest updates

Those who are against the war have left, and those who remain are adapting, Meister said. But the sizable swaths of terrain Ukraine wants to liberate will take time, and to even build the necessary forces will take six months, Donahoe estimated. But this winter, theyre expected to launch attacks across open plains, which would be harder to defeat, said Daniel Rice, a former U.S.

• Thats changed, with Germany now pledging to deliver Leopard 2 battle tanks and approving other countries requests to follow suit.
• It didn't, and the prospect of a breakthrough in 2024 is also unlikely, military experts and defense analysts told CNBC.
• If you complete the survey, youll have a chance to win a pair of Bose QuietComfort earbuds.
• A prominent war expert says the US is on the verge of lessening its support for, or even withdrawing from, NATO - with potentially catastrophic consequences for Europe.
• Senior officials from around 40 countries, including China, and India, held talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the weekend with the aim of agreeing on key principles that could underline a future settlement of the war.

The United States, as Ukraines most important military supporter, remains the center of gravity when it comes to an eventual outcome for the conflict. American leadership has so far been largely united in their support for Kyiv. Even technologically advanced, wealthy states in the Middle East eventually reached a point where theyre lobbing missiles at civilian cities, openly using chemical weapons and fighting in waves just people rushing across the field getting shot at, Jensen said. As the war enters its second year, the spigot of military aid is still gushing. But industrial capacities are spotty, and nations have started to scrutinize how much equipment they can spare while maintaining their own self-defense requirements and that of NATO.

So there is no incentive or theres no even belief or need or just there would be no sanity in the idea of decisively defeating Russia inside Russia. You have to defeat decisively the Russians in Ukraine to push them back. They want to take over entire Ukraine and perhaps even, being realistic about this, subsequently in Moldova and other parts of the former Russian empire, whether wed be the Czarist or the Communist one. Hein Goemans So I study war because its terrible, and because its truly terrible. I was raised, you know, in the Netherlands and with family members who had fought and who had died in the second world war in the camps and, you know, and elsewhere.

On the offensive this spring

But Mr Putin might take the risk if he felt it was the only way of saving his leadership. If he was, perhaps, facing defeat in Ukraine, he might be tempted to escalate further. We now know the Russian leader is willing to break long-standing international norms.

• Russian air strikes destroyed a government building where at least 10 people were reported dead, according to Ukrainian officials.
• President Putin declares victory and withdraws some forces, leaving enough behind to maintain some control.
• President Putin could seek to regain more parts of Russia's former empire by sending troops into ex-Soviet republics like Moldova and Georgia, that are not part of Nato.
• Diplomats say feelers are being stretched out to Moscow.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, also called for sending long-range missiles to Ukraine alongside advanced Gray Eagle and Reaper drones. Everything I have come to learn about the will and determination of the Ukrainians leads me to conclude retaking Crimea is within reach, and they need the artillery that will enable hitting targets the sites of missiles destroying infrastructure in Ukraine, he said. The challenge now is training and equipping an armored force big enough and sophisticated enough to envelop Russias fighting force. I would love to think the kinetic phase could end in 2023, but I suspect we could be looking at another three years with this scale of fighting, Roberts said.

Now the U.S. and European militaries are training Ukrainian forces in Europe. Most U.S. training takes place at U.S. military bases in Germany. And even though the fall of the Soviet Union was notable for its lack of bloodshed, many in Ukraine refer to today's conflict as a true "war of independence." All these measures were approved when both the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats. Some Republicans are saying the U.S. should stop funding Ukraine.