World
In Kyiv Suburb, Ukrainian Military Claims a Big Prize
IRPIN, Ukraine — Creeping ahead block by block, Ukrainian troopers in a reconnaissance unit on Tuesday discovered indicators of a retreating Russian military in all places: a charred armored car, deserted physique armor embellished with an orange and black St. George ribbon, a Russian navy image, and the standard blue-and-white striped underwear issued to Russian troopers, solid apart in a forest.
What they didn’t encounter was the Russian military in any organized state. After a month of savage road combating, some of the pivotal battles within the struggle to this point ended this week — a minimum of for now — with an unbelievable victory in Irpin for Ukraine’s outgunned and outnumbered navy. By Tuesday, Ukrainian forces had quashed any important Russian resistance on this strategic outlying city close to Kyiv, the capital.
Pockets of Russian troopers remained, posing dangers. A firefight erupted within the afternoon when Ukrainian troopers destroyed a lone Russian armored personnel provider in an in any other case empty neighborhood, based on a commander.
However Ukraine’s navy had basically recaptured Irpin, a city each strategically and symbolically vital because the closest the Russian military had gotten to Kyiv, simply three miles away. Its success in driving the Russians away could have factored into the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on Tuesday, when the 2 sides achieved what gave the impression to be their most substantive progress so far.
Moscow promised to scale back “by multiples” the depth of its navy exercise round Kyiv, an space that features Irpin, in impact acknowledging that its advance towards the capital had stalled and was a minimum of in some locations being pushed again.
With superior numbers and weaponry, Russia might all the time determine to mount one other assault on Irpin. And Ukrainian safety consultants expressed skepticism about Russia’s pledge to drag again. “They won’t abandon plans to take the capital,” Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former secretary of Ukraine’s Safety and Protection Council, stated in an interview.
Nonetheless, some folks noticed the recapture of Irpin as an ethical victory, even when road combating continued within the city and the navy positive aspects may be tentative.
Kyiv was all the time the largest prize of all for the Russian navy, because the seat of presidency and a metropolis ingrained in each Russian and Ukrainian id. However the Ukrainian navy’s efficiency within the vicious road combating in an arc of outlying cities and villages turned emblematic of the challenges Russian forces would face as they tried to encircle or seize the capital.
“Right this moment we’ve got excellent news,” President Volodymyr Zelensky stated in a videotaped deal with on Monday. “Our defenders are advancing within the Kyiv area, regaining management over Ukrainian territory.”
Mr. Zelensky stated that the city of Irpin was now “liberated.” He added, “Effectively completed. I’m grateful to everybody who labored for this consequence.” He stated some combating continued.
In its try and seize the capital, the Russian navy was bedeviled by logistical setbacks because it superior in lumbering tank columns into the city surroundings of Kyiv’s suburbs, the place armored autos are susceptible to ambushes. Over a month of combating, with Ukraine’s navy placing up fierce resistance, the losses piled up.
Western and Ukrainian officers have been saying for weeks that the Russians have taken heavy casualties in these suburban battles. That was on show on Tuesday, because the Ukrainian reconnaissance unit pushed right into a scene of destruction in a neighborhood of one-story properties in Irpin.
The vicious give-and-take of the combating for practically a month left a sprawl of burned or blown-up buildings, tank tracks within the roads and bullet cartridges scattered all about. Wires sagged from the utility poles.
The world had been a base for Russian particular operations troopers, or Spetsnaz, and ethnic Chechens combating on Russia’s facet, based on Western navy analysts and Ukrainian troopers.
Right here, as elsewhere within the combating round Kyiv, the Ukrainian navy achieved its battlefield success by deploying small, fast-moving items largely on foot that staged ambushes or defended websites with the good thing about native information. Many such items are based mostly in central Kyiv, commuting to the struggle zone by automotive.
The reconnaissance unit that patrolled Irpin on Tuesday, part of Ukraine’s navy intelligence company, makes use of as its base a shuttered bar in Kyiv, now cluttered with sleeping baggage, containers of ammunition and hand grenades.
At daybreak on a transparent, chilly morning on Tuesday, the troopers strapped on physique armor and pouches of ammunition, with a crackling noise of Velcro, then jumped in place to make sure their gear was properly connected. The bar’s stereo performed Ukrainian folks songs.
The entrance in Irpin was a fast drive away. The troopers filtered into the city in small teams of three or 4, to keep away from drawing Russian artillery, then regrouped in a maze of again streets.
“We’re defending our land,” stated a commander of one of many two squads, consisting of eight males every. He requested to be recognized solely by his first title, Bohdan. Whereas the Russian navy has pulled again in power, he stated, Ukrainian troopers nonetheless should search home to deal with within the metropolis to flush out pockets of remaining enemy troopers.
“We transfer right into a neighborhood and if there’s contact, we fireplace or name in artillery,” he stated of those operations. “If there isn’t a contact, properly, then it’s clear this territory is once more ours.”
Ongoing peace talks. Throughout peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, Russia promised it could “scale back navy exercise” close to Kyiv, and Ukraine stated it was able to declare itself completely impartial. Even so, weeks of additional negotiation could also be wanted to succeed in an settlement, and Russia seems decided to seize extra territory in jap Ukraine.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Key Developments
The mayor of Irpin, a as soon as quiet and leafy suburb with a prewar inhabitants of about 70,000, stated that each one however about 4,000 civilians had fled. The patrol encountered just one aged man, who waved from behind a window of a home.
Two hours into their rounds, the Ukrainians had been panting and sweating, dashing between partitions and into backyards, climbing out and in of damaged home windows. “They lived in these homes and so they had been firing on Kyiv from this neighborhood,” Bohdan stated of the Russians.
The excitement of their drone was practically all the time overhead, scouting the road in entrance of them.
By way of many of the day, there have been no sounds of small-arms fireplace anyplace on the town. Such fireplace would point out shut engagements between the 2 armies. The troopers handed a Russian navy identification doc, fluttering within the wind on the garden of a home, however didn’t contact it to examine the title, fearing a booby lure.
Irpin has loomed giant symbolically within the struggle not simply due to its adjacency to the capital. In regular instances, it was a city that conveyed nothing a lot because the ordinariness and tranquillity of a middle-class suburban life in Kyiv, with parks for bike driving and tree-lined streets. However the combating grew fiercer as Russia moved to encircle the capital, and the dying of a mom and her two youngsters fleeing town early within the battle — struck by a mortar as they crossed a bridge — got here to characterize the shattered sense of safety in once-safe communities.
In a city park, the Ukrainian patrol discovered a destroyed Russian armored personnel provider, burned in locations to a wealthy orange colour. Beside the car had been the standard blue-and-white undershirts utilized by Russian troopers, referred to as telnyashkas. Elsewhere, they discovered a cardboard field labeled Russian military meals. “Particular person Meals Ration,” the label stated. “Not for Sale.”
The troopers took selfies beside the incinerated armored personnel provider. Some sank to the pine duff to relaxation, gazing on the spectacle of the destroyed car the place Russian troopers had died. The our bodies had been retrieved earlier, although by whom was unclear.
“I don’t see the Russians as enemies,” stated a Ukrainian soldier who supplied solely his first title, Hennady, out of concern for his security. “They’re simply inert folks, doing issues with out realizing what they’re doing.”
The day had been quiet however immediately shifted with a cacophony of heavy machine gun fireplace and explosions from rocket-propelled grenades because the squad led by Bohdan, which had remained behind, encountered a Russian armored personnel provider. Why it remained on this place, in any other case empty of Russian troopers, was unclear. Later, a commander stated the car was destroyed.
Serhiy, one of many troopers, supplied a extra skeptical evaluation of Ukrainian positive aspects in Irpin. Whereas maybe the biggest occupied city was now recaptured, he stated, Ukraine’s management was unsure. “We’ve got a tentative frontline” now outdoors Irpin, he stated, “however the important thing phrase is tentative.”
“Their aim is Kyiv,” he added. “They’ll come again. They might want to cowl this floor once more.”
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv.
Before the answers to life’s questions fit in our pocket, you used to have to turn a dial. If you were lucky, Phil Donahue would be on, ready to guide you toward enlightenment. In a stroke of deluxe good fortune, Dr. Ruth Westheimer might have stopped by to be the enlightenment. He was the search engine. She was a trusted result.
Donahue hailed from Cleveland. The windshield glasses, increasingly snowy thatch of hair, marble eyes, occasional pair of suspenders and obvious geniality said “card catalog,” “manager of the ’79 Reds,” “Stage Manager in a Chevy Motors production of ‘Our Town.’” Dr. Ruth was Donahue’s antonym, a step stool to his straight ladder. She kept her hair in a butterscotch helmet, fancied a uniform of jacket-blouse-skirt and came to our aid, via Germany, with a voice of crinkled tissue paper. Not even eight years separated them, yet so boyish was he and so seasoned was she that he read as her grandson. (She maybe reached his armpit.) Together and apart, they were public servants, American utilities.
Donahue was a journalist. His forum was the talk show, but some new strain in which the main attraction bypassed celebrities. People — every kind of them — lined up to witness other people being human, to experience Donahue’s radical conduit of edification, identification, curiosity, shock, wonder, outrage, surprise and dispute, all visible in the show’s televisual jackpot: cutaways to us, reacting, taking it all in, nodding, gasping. When a celebrity made it to the “Donahue” stage — Bill Clinton, say, La Toya Jackson, the Judds — they were expected to be human, too, to be accountable for their own humanity. From 1967 to 1996, for more than 6,000 episodes, he permitted us to be accountable to ourselves.
What Donahue knew was that we — women especially — were eager, desperate, to be understood, to learn and learn and learn. We call his job “host” when, really, the way he did it, running that microphone throughout the audience, racing up, down, around, sticking it here then here then over here, was closer to “switchboard operator.” It was “hot dog vendor at Madison Square Garden.” The man got his steps in. He let us do more of the questioning than he did — he would just edit, interpret, clarify. Egalitarianism ruled. Articulation, too. And anybody who needed the mic usually got it.
The show was about both what was on our mind and what had never once crossed it. Atheism. Naziism. Colorism. Childbirth. Prison. Rapists. AIDS. Chippendales, Chernobyl, Cher. Name a fetish, Phil Donahue tried to get to its bottom, sometimes by trying it himself. (Let us never forget the episode when he made his entrance in a long skirt, blouse and pussy bow for one of the show’s many cross-dressing studies.) Now’s the time to add that “Donahue” was a morning talk show. In Philadelphia, he arrived every weekday at 9 a.m., which meant that, in the summers, I could learn about compulsive shopping or shifting gender roles from the same kitchen TV set as my grandmother.
Sex and sexuality were the show’s prime subjects. There was so much that needed confessing, correction, corroboration, an ear lent. For that, Donahue needed an expert. Many times, the expert was Dr. Ruth, a godsend who didn’t land in this country until she was in her late 20s and didn’t land on television until she was in her 50s. Ruth Westheimer arrived to us from Germany, where she started as Karola Ruth Siegel and strapped in as her life corkscrewed, as it mocked fiction. Her family most likely perished in the Auschwitz death camps after she was whisked to the safety of a Swiss children’s home, where she was expected to clean. The twists include sniper training for one of the military outfits that would become the Israel Defense Forces, maiming by cannonball on her 20th birthday, doing research at a Planned Parenthood in Harlem, single motherhood and three husbands. She earned her doctorate from Columbia University, in education, and spent her postdoc researching human sexuality. And because her timing was perfect, she emerged at the dawn of the 1980s, an affable vector of an era’s craze for gnomic sages (Zelda Rubinstein, Linda Hunt, Yoda), masterpiece branding and the nasty.
Hers was the age of Mapplethorpe and Madonna, of Prince, Skinemax and 2 Live Crew. On her radio and television shows, in a raft of books and a Playgirl column and through her promiscuous approach to talk-show appearances, she aimed to purge sex of shame, to promote sexual literacy. Her feline accent and jolly innuendo pitched, among other stuff, the Honda Prelude, Pepsi, Sling TV and Herbal Essences. (“Hey!” she offers to a young elevator passenger. “This is where we get off.”) The instructions for Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex says it can be played by up to four couples; the board is vulval and includes stops at “Yeast Infection,” “Chauvinism” and “Goose Him.”
On “Donahue,” she is direct, explicit, dispelling, humorous, clear, common-sensical, serious, vivid. A professional therapist. It was Donahue who handled the comedy. On one visit in 1987, a caller needs advice about a husband who cheats because he wants to have sex more often than she does. Dr. Ruth tells Donahue that if the caller wants to keep the marriage, and her husband wants to do it all the time, “then what she should do is to masturbate him. And it’s all right for him to masturbate himself also a few times.” The audience is hear-a-pin-drop rapt or maybe just squirmy. So Donahue reaches into his parochial-school-student war chest and pulls out the joke about the teacher who tells third-grade boys, “Don’t play with yourself, or you’ll go blind.” And Donahue raises his hand like a kid at the back of the classroom and asks, “Can I do it till I need glasses?” Westheimer giggles, maybe noticing the large pair on Donahue’s face. This was that day’s cold open.
They were children of salesmen, these two; his father was in the furniture business, hers sold what people in the garment industry call notions. They inherited a salesman’s facility for people and packaging. When a “Donahue” audience member asks Westheimer whether her own husband believes she practices what she preaches, she says this is why she never brings him anywhere. “He would tell you and Phil: ‘Do not listen to her. It’s all talk,’” which cracks the audience up.
But consider what she talked about — and consider how she said it. My favorite Dr. Ruth word was “pleasure.” From a German mouth, the word conveys what it lacks with an American tongue: sensual unfurling. She vowed to speak about sex to mass audiences using the proper terminology. Damn the euphemisms. People waited as long as a year and a half for tickets to “Donahue” so they could damn them, too. But of everything Westheimer pitched, of all the terms she precisely used, pleasure was her most cogent product, a gift she believed we could give to others, a gift she swore we owed ourselves.
I miss the talk show that Donahue reinvented. I miss the way Dr. Ruth talked about sex. It’s fitting somehow that this antidogmatic-yet-priestly Irish Catholic man would, on occasion, join forces with a carnal, lucky-to-be-alive Jew to urge the exploration of our bodies while demonstrating respect, civility, reciprocation. They believed in us, that we were all interesting, that we could be trustworthy panelists in the discourse of being alive. Trauma, triviality, tubal ligation: Let’s talk about it! Fear doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Or if it did, it was never a deterrent. Boldly they went. — And with her encouragement, boldly we came.
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
A projectile launched into Israel from Yemen overnight into Saturday struck Tel Aviv, resulting in mild injuries to 16 people, according to Israeli officials.
Israel’s military said after sirens sounded in central Israel that the projectile landed in Tel Aviv’s southern Jaffa area following failed attempts to intercept.
“Following the sirens that sounded a short while ago in central Israel, one projectile launched from Yemen was identified and unsuccessful interception attempts were made,” the military said on Telegram.
ISRAELI AIRSTRIKES TARGET YEMEN’S HOUTHI-CONTROLLED CAPITAL OF SANAA, PORT CITY OF HODEIDA
Israeli emergency services work at the scene of a missile strike that, according to Israel’s military, was launched from Yemen and landed in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, Israel, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have repeatedly launched missile attacks from Yemen against Israel since the war in Gaza began in October of last year, but the incident overnight represents a rare instance in which Israel failed to intercept.
Israel has retaliated by striking multiple targets in areas in Yemen controlled by the Houthis.
HAMAS’ GAZA DEATH TOLL QUESTIONED AS NEW REPORT SAYS ITS LED TO ‘WIDESPREAD INACCURACIES AND DISTORTION’
People gather at the scene of a missile strike that, according to Israel’s military, was launched from Yemen and landed in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, Israel, December 21, 2024. (Reuters)
“A short time ago, reports were received of a weapon falling in one of the settlements within the Tel Aviv district,” Israeli police said Saturday.
On Thursday, the Israeli military said it intercepted a missile launched from Yemen, with shrapnel resulting in extensive damage to a school near Tel Aviv.
A 50-year-old man was arrested at the scene of the attack in Magdeburg on Friday evening, but as of Saturday, the reason behind his actions remained unclear.
At least five people, including a toddler, have been killed and dozens injured after a car ploughed into a crowd at a busy outdoor Christmas market in Magdeburg, a city in eastern Germany.
Authorities are describing the incident as a “deliberate attack.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser are at the scene of the attack in Magdeburg. Faeser has confirmed that federal police are actively supporting the investigation into the tragedy.
Senate passes separate RFK stadium site bill after removal from federal spending bill
Sixers head to Cleveland to take on first place Cavaliers
Projecting Alabama's upcoming backfield for the 2025 season
Alaska health officials report increase in cases of childbirth-related hemorrhages • Alaska Beacon
Ex-Texas State running back Ismail Mahdi commits to Arizona
Colorado Rockies game no. 116 thread: Zac Gallen vs José Ureña
Why Marjorie Taylor Greene was ‘kicked out’ of the Freedom Caucus according to Rep. Buck
See it: Tesla crashes into Columbus convention center at 70 mph
Fox News Politics: Georgia the whole day through
Death of missing Oregon girl found in stream ruled homicide
Were undercover sources from other DOJ agencies present on Jan. 6? Grassley, Johnson demand answers
Scholz confirms 5 dead at Magdeburg Christmas market attack
Congress avoids a shutdown but leaves 'a big mess' for Trump and Republicans in 2025
Biden considers commuting the sentences of federal death row inmates: report
Last-minute budget bill to prevent US government shutdown prevails in House
-
Politics1 week agoCanadian premier threatens to cut off energy imports to US if Trump imposes tariff on country
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25782636/247422_ChatGPT_anniversary_CVirginia.jpg "Inside the launch — and future — of ChatGPT")
Technology1 week agoInside the launch — and future — of ChatGPT
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25789444/1258459915.jpg "OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever says the way AI is built is about to change")
Technology1 week agoOpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever says the way AI is built is about to change
-
Politics1 week agoU.S. Supreme Court will decide if oil industry may sue to block California's zero-emissions goal
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25546252/STK169_Mark_Zuckerburg_CVIRGINIA_D.jpg "Meta asks the US government to block OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit")
Technology1 week agoMeta asks the US government to block OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit
-
Politics1 week agoConservative group debuts major ad buy in key senators' states as 'soft appeal' for Hegseth, Gabbard, Patel
-
Business6 days agoFreddie Freeman's World Series walk-off grand slam baseball sells at auction for $1.56 million
-
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23951353/STK043_VRG_Illo_N_Barclay_3_Meta.jpg "Meta’s Instagram boss: who posted something matters more in the AI age")
Technology6 days agoMeta’s Instagram boss: who posted something matters more in the AI age