Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered his troops to withdraw from the occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson on November 10 in a major military set back.

I think I understand the Russian "withdrawal" from Kherson. They have no doubt dug in lots of artillery across the river and spent the last few weeks carefully working out the dope to hit any spot in the city accurately. Now they want the Ukrainians to come in.

I guess that's an interesting problem. The Ukrainians can't really hold one bank without dislodging Russia from the other. They need to get their own artillery set up on their side.

They'll probably spend the winter shelling each other across the water.

Prigozhin, a Russian businessman who founded the Wagner private military group, was responding to an unverified video distributed on Telegram that showed a man identified as a former Wagner mercenary being executed after admitting that he had changed sides in September to "fight against the Russians".

In the footage, the man, who gave his name as Yevgenny Nuzhin, 55, was shown with his head taped to a brick wall. He said he was abducted in Kyiv on October 11th and came around in a cellar.

"I got hit over the head and lost consciousness and came around in this cellar," he said. "They told me I was to be tried."

As he said those words, an unidentified man loitering in combat clothing behind Nuzhin, smashed a sledgehammer into the side of his head and neck.

Nuzhin collapsed onto the floor and the unidentified man delivered another blow to his head.

Reuters was unable to immediately verify the video which appeared on the Grey Zone Telegram channel, one of several that Russian media said was linked to the Wagner group. The video was posted under the title "The hammer of revenge".

Asked to comment on the execution video, Prigozhin said in remarks released by his spokeswoman that the video should be called "A dog receives a dog's death"...

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ukraine/update-1-sledgehammer-execution-of-russian-mercenary-who-defected-to-ukraine-shown-in-video-1391605.html

Sledgehammer execution of Russian mercenary who defected to Ukraine shown in video



Wow. Things went medieval in Russia...

Staged. The moment of head smash is not shown.

...A man who filmed the torture and beheading of a Syrian prisoner is identified as member of Russian private military company Wagner with ties to the Kremlin.

The footage is thought to have been filmed in an oil field west of Palmyra, Syria, in 2017.

A snippet of the video first emerged at the time of the incident but the full version that shows the extent of the torture was only released last week.

In the clip, a man can be seen laying on the ground and is surrounded by a small group of four men all dressed in camouflage.

The group break the victim's legs with a sledgehammer before crushing his chest, beheading him and cutting off his lower arms.

They then hang his corpse by his legs and set the body on fire.

The victim was identified as Mohammed Taha Ismail al-Abdullah, a Syrian national, who was accused of deserting from a unit that was loyal to the country's president.

Russian media outlets have since claimed to have successfully used facial recognition software to identify one of the soldiers involved.

The Kremlin's press secretary said: 'We have no information and no relationship to these people.' Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin

The Novaya Gazeta newspaper say that one of the men, named as Stanislav D, was known to have been employed in Wagner units - a Russian private military company - in Syria.

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pounded Ukraine’s energy facilities Tuesday with its biggest barrage of missiles yet, striking targets across the country and causing widespread blackouts. A senior U.S. intelligence official said missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, where two people were killed.

A second person confirmed to The Associated Press that apparent Russian missiles struck a site in Poland about 15 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The Russian Defense Ministry denied being behind “any strikes on targets near the Ukrainian-Polish border” and said in a statement that photos of purported damage “have nothing to do” with Russian weapons.

A NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the alliance was looking into reports of a strike in Poland. The U.S. National Security Council said it was also looking into the reports.

“We are aware of the press reports alleging that two Russian missiles have struck a location inside Poland on the Ukraine border,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday. “I can tell you that we don’t have any information at this time to corroborate these reports and are looking into this further.”

Wherever you fall on this missile strike, I have a feeling it’s going to be tough to believe anything that’s coming out of the news now.

Biden spoke after he convened an “emergency” meeting of the Group of Seven and NATO leaders in Indonesia Wednesday morning for consultations on the explosion that killed two people in the eastern part of Poland near the Ukraine border.

“There is preliminary information that contests that,” Biden told reporters when asked if the missile had been fired from Russia. “It is unlikely in the lines of the trajectory that it was fired from Russia, but we’ll see.”

Following Biden’s statement Tuesday, a NATO military official told CNN the missile had been tracked by an alliance aircraft flying above Polish airspace at the time of the blast.

“Intel with the radar tracks [of the missile] was provided to NATO and Poland,” the NATO military official added. The NATO official did not say who launched the missile, or where it was fired from.

Escalation fears ease after NATO, Warsaw say missile that hit Poland was Ukrainian stray

WARSAW/BRUSSELS/NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Nov 16 (Reuters) - A missile that hit Poland was probably a stray fired by Ukraine's air defences and not a Russian strike, Poland and NATO said on Wednesday, easing global concern that the war in Ukraine could spill across the border.

Nevertheless, NATO's chief said that Moscow, not Kyiv was ultimately to blame, for starting the war in the first place and launching the attack that triggered Ukraine's defences.

"This is not Ukraine's fault. Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.