What happened in the Russia-Ukraine war this week? Catch up with the must-read news and analysis Ukraine

“I wanted to jail him,” Oleksandr Prokudin, Kherson’s police chief at the time and now the city’s governor, told Tom Burgis as he sat in the basement he uses for meetings since the Russians blew the roof off his office. The wealthy Ukrainian in his 50s had done a stint in the national parliament and won three terms as the mayor of the southern city of Kherson, but at the start of 2022 police had opened a case against him for ordering a contract killing. Every week we wrap up essential coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, opinion and more.

After Russia first invaded in 2014, the U.S. military stepped up training for the Ukrainian military in western Ukraine. U.S. trainers continued working in Ukraine right up until the full-scale Russian invasion a year ago. Putin illegally annexed four territories from Ukraine in September and now presents Ukraine's efforts — backed by the West — to take back its own territory as a fascist attack on the Russian homeland. "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."

Russia's economy is still working but sanctions are starting to have an effect

It is theoretically possible for the U.S. to sanction countries that maintain economic ties with Russia. The best precedent for this is perhaps the Helms–Burton Act, which extended U.S. sanctions on Cuba toward any foreign company doing business with both Cuba and the U.S. at the same time. When President Bill Clinton signed that law in 1996, several countries accused the U.S. of violating their sovereignty, passing their own laws to make the U.S. regulation effectively unenforceable. From the very beginning of the war, President Putin has drawn parallels between the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and the current military campaign against supposed "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine.

• His message was that progress has been slow, painful and limited, though he expressed hope that might change.
• Ukrainian forces, once equipped and trained for combined arms warfare and tank tactics, will be “designed to punch a hole through a defensive network,” Donahoe predicted.
• In fact, in his speeches about Ukraine, he criticizes the Soviet leadership for creating Ukraine, the Soviet republic that later became an independent country, on a whim.
• Those who spoke foreign languages, especially English, have had even more job options.
• He advocates for reforming the UN security council to “protect the world from abusive veto-users” as well as reform of the Rome statute that founded the international criminal court to give it jurisdiction over crimes of aggression.
• “These people are walking around the town, living among us, and they think they’re not guilty of anything.

That said, there wasn't much of a political will for third countries to sanction Cuba at the time. It's possible today's situation with Russia might make such a policy more politically palatable if the U.S. attempted it again, though I can't find any serious proposal in the government to do just that. Many Russian nationalists, though, perceive Ukraine as a breakaway region of greater Russia.

Russia attacks Ukraine: More coverage

For example, the tactic of repurposing dishwasher electronics for weapons, mocked in the West as a sign of desperation, probably means “somebody thought about that from the beginning,” he said. Perhaps Italian analyst Lucio Caracciolo was the most pessimistic of all. “This war will last indefinitely, with long pauses for cease-fires,” he said. At the same time, election season in the United States  — Ukraine’s most important backer — stands to spur arguments that a war in Europe of unknown duration is a costly nuisance for America. His message was that progress has been slow, painful and limited, though he expressed hope that might change. Mykhailo Podolyak, another close adviser to President Zelensky, agreed there were "several groups of people who want to take power in Russia".

The justice camp retorts that sanctions on Russia are just starting to bite; with more time and more and better weapons Ukraine can win. That, in turn, could pressure Putin to strike a peace deal or even bring about new Russian leadership, Herbst told me. The news from the battlefield, the diplomatic  noises off, the emotion of the grieving and displaced; all of this can be overwhelming. So let us step back for a moment and consider how the conflict in Ukraine might play out.

Many in the international community feared that the conflict could spread outside of Ukraine’s borders. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv was already an active NATO partner, sending a handful of troops to Afghanistan during the alliance’s mission in the country. Andrew Cottey, a professor in the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork, gave Euronews three possible outcomes for the war.

Instead, over the past year Ukrainian forces have consistently and successfully pushed back the invading troops. Yes, that war is Europe’s biggest in a generation, but it’s not Europe’s alone. The pain it’s producing extends to people in faraway lands already barely surviving and with no way to end it. And sadly enough, no one who matters seems to be thinking about them. The simple fact is that, in 2022, with so much headed in the wrong direction, a major war is the last thing this planet needs.

Ukraine's air defenses have been surprisingly effective against Russia's air force. Since the counteroffensive was launched in June, only a handful of villages have been recaptured. But it noted that US officials had said they were unaware of any such proposals and that they had no sign that the Russian president was serious about looking to bring his forces' invasion of Ukraine to a close. “If Russia were to use nuclear weapons, the West might then become directly involved in the war in Ukraine in terms of putting forces in [the country]. The suffering and destruction in Ukraine and the economic turmoil the war has produced in the West should be compelling enough reasons to end it.

Of these the most unlikely, such as peace negotiations, can be worth discussing to understand why they are unlikely or what would need to change to make them likely. So my self-assessment question is not whether my predictions are right, because I made few that were firm, but whether much happened that would surprise a regular reader of these posts. The city of Bakhmut, which has endured some of the heaviest fighting of the war, has been under Russian control for several months and, although Ukraine gained some ground in the surrounding areas over the summer, the battles continue. The town is sometimes described as the gateway to the city of Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russia and its proxy forces since 2014. Taking Avdiivka - which lies close by - would allow Russia to push the front line back, making it harder for the Ukrainian forces to retake the territory. At the same time, if we’re honest, we have to acknowledge that Ukraine may not achieve total military success in the next year or two.

• Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecasts a decisive Russian win against Ukraine.
• America has spent nearly $14bn on the war so far, and Congress has just allocated a further $40bn.
• The winter will be over and he can see what territory, if any, has been taken.

During President Putin's marathon state address on Feb. 21, he accused Western countries of attempting "to deprive Russia of these historical territories that are now called Ukraine," making war the only way to "protect the people in our historical lands." There seems to be some degree of sensitivity in Ukraine to Russia's claims it's waging a proxy war with the West over Ukraine. A lot of the Ukrainians I've talked to, while they appreciate the Western weapons supplies, say this is their war to fight. Apart from a few exceptions, almost all of the tens of thousands of people who have died in this war have been on Ukrainian territory. At some point, Ukraine will have to decide if there's a military solution to the conflict or if it has to look for another way out without conceding any kind of defeat, Barrons said.