Russia-Ukraine war live: Blinken says US did not ‘enable’ Ukraine strikes inside Russia

The US said it had not “enabled” Ukraine to carry out strikes inside Russia, after a spate of drone attacks on military-linked facilities deep within Russian territory.

“We have neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia,” the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told reporters.

More now on Europe’s energy crisis, via AFP:

Sky-high energy prices have caused numerous factories, particularly in Germany’s chemicals sector, which was highly dependent upon cheap Russian gas, to halt operations. But European nations were able to fill their gas reservoirs and no one has been cut off yet.

“Until February, the very idea of Europe without Russian energy was seen as impossible,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Bruegel thinktank in Brussels.

“What was impossible became possible.”

A warm autumn that allowed many consumers to put off turning on their heating also helped put Europe in better position for the winter. Overall, the reduction in EU gas consumption by consumers and industry was about 25% in October compared with the 2019-21 average for the month, according to calculations by Bruegel.

In Germany, where half of households use gas for heat, data shows consumption down by 20-35% depending on the week.

“That’s much more than anyone expected,” said Lion Hirth, a professor of energy policy at the Hertie School in Berlin.

“And that’s completely contradictory to the talk that we’ve been hearing from doomsday talkers saying, people just don’t respond. People just keep heating. People don’t change their behaviour. People don’t respond to prices.”

Poland is preparing to deploy the German Patriot air defence system on its territory, after Berlin refused to place the system in Ukraine, Poland’s defence minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, said on Twitter.

Germany last month offered Poland the Patriot system to help secure its airspace after a stray missile crashed and killed two people in Poland.

The minister later asked Germany to send the fire units to Ukraine instead, Reuters reported.

“After talking to the German defence ministry, I was disappointed to accept the decision to reject Ukraine’s support. Deploying the Patriots to the western Ukraine would increase the security of Poles and Ukrainians,” Blaszczak tweeted on Tuesday evening.

“So we proceed to working arrangements for placing the launchers in Poland and connecting them to our command system.”

Russian strikes on Zaporizhzhia region overnight

Thousands of Russian tourists have found a friendly holiday destination on Venezuela’s Isla de Margarita, a tropical gem with white-sand shores and turquoise waters, AFP reports.

Years of political and economic turmoil in Venezuela have frightened off most tourists, with western nations warning citizens not to travel there. So for thousands of Russians seeking sun-soaked holidays, but faced with visa and flight restrictions over the Ukraine war, it is a match made in Caribbean heaven.

President Nicolás Maduro, who sees tourism as a secret weapon to revitalise an economy showing timid signs of recovery after years of hyperinflation and a currency in freefall, has signed a deal with Russia, a strong ally, to receive 100,000 tourists by 31 December.

In the past two months, 3,000 Russian tourists have taken advantage of a new direct flight between Moscow and Isla de Margarita with Russia’s Norwind Airlines.

In news about some of the far-reaching implications of the war in Ukraine, China’s exports and imports shrank at their steepest pace in at least two and a half years in November, Reuters reports, as feeble global and domestic demand, Covid-led production disruptions and a property slump at home piled pressure on the world’s second-biggest economy.

Beijing is moving to ease some of its stringent pandemic-era restrictions, but outbound shipments have been losing steam since August as surging inflation, sweeping interest rate increases across many countries and the Ukraine crisis have pushed the global economy to the brink of recession.

The downturn was much worse than markets had forecast, and economists are predicting a further period of declining exports, underlining a sharp retreat in world trade as consumers and businesses slash spending in response to central banks’ aggressive moves to tame inflation.

Exports contracted 8.7% in November from a year earlier, a sharper fall from a 0.3% loss in October and marked the worst performance since February 2020, official data showed on Wednesday. They were well below analysts’ expectations for a 3.5% decline.

Belarus to move military equipment to ‘check response to terrorism’

Europe is likely to scrape through this winter without cutting off gas customers despite reduced Russian supplies, but even adjusting to colder homes and paying more may not be enough in coming years, analysts have told AFP.

Russia’s progressive reduction of gas supplies to Europe via pipeline triggered a bidding war for liquefied natural gas (LNG), sending prices sharply higher.

If certain countries like France and Spain froze prices for consumers, others like Belgium let suppliers more or less pass along the higher costs.

If previously natural gas was cheap and plentiful, it is now scarce and expensive.

The European wholesale reference price used to fluctuate little, hovering around 20 euros per megawatt hour. This year, it shot as high as €300 before dropping back to around €100.

“It’s the most chaotic time I’ve witnessed in all of those years,” Graham Freedman, a European gas analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, told AFP.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited troops close to front lines in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday.

Addressing servicemen later in the presidential palace in Kyiv, Zelenskiy said he had spent the day with troops in Donbas, theatre of the heaviest battles, and in Kharkiv region, where Ukrainians have retaken swaths of territory from Russian forces.

“Thousands of Ukrainians have given their lives so that the day might come when not a single occupying soldier will remain in our land and when all our people will be free,” Zelenskiy said.

Blinken: US has not ‘enabled’ Ukraine strikes inside Russia

Welcome and summary