Ukraine Update….184 days into the Russian move on the Ukraine

• Sullivan was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019 and agreed to stay in Moscow at President Biden’s request. Since the invasion of Ukraine began, he has been the main U.S. interlocutor in Moscow. He retires from a decades-long career in public service with five administrations.
• Elizabeth Rood, the deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Moscow, will assume duties as chargé d’affaires until Sullivan’s successor arrives, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky again urged the European Union to ban tourist visas for Russians. Zelensky said Sunday that he spoke with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen about the bloc’s next round of E.U. sanctions on Moscow. “Europe is a land of values, not Disneyland for supporters of terror,” Zelensky said in his nightly address. “Visa restrictions will definitely demonstrate this.”
• Nearly 600 Ukrainians have returned from Russian captivity, Oleksandr Smirnov, head of the National Information Bureau, said in a television interview Sunday. Of that group, about 100 are civilians and about 500 are members of the military, he said. Ukraine has confirmed nearly 40,000 forcible deportations, Smirnov said, but the true number is probably far higher. Experts say that disappearances are part of Russia’s campaign of terror and that the war crimes are especially difficult to track and prosecute.
• Thirteen more ships transporting 252,000 tons of Ukrainian grain left the ports of Odessa on Sunday, according to the Ukrainian Infrastructure Ministry. The ships were headed to eight countries around the world in what the ministry called the largest caravan leaving Ukraine since a deal was brokered to export grain in July.
• The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant lost its connection to its last main external power line but was still supplying the national grid through a reserve line, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a news release Saturday. “One reactor is still operating and producing electricity both for cooling and other essential safety functions,” it said. Access to three other mainlines was lost earlier, the IAEA said, and the most recent disconnection occurred Friday evening due to shelling.

• Mykolaiv was struck by “massive” shelling overnight, the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych, said Sunday. Twenty-six residential buildings, three health facilities, two schools, a hotel and a museum were damaged in the strikes, Senkevych wrote on Telegram. Photos from the southern city show a building that functions as a primary care center and family clinic with its windows blown out and piles of debris on the floor. Sunday strikes also damaged buildings in Voznesensk and Ochakiv, to the northwest and southwest of Mykolaiv, according to the regional governor, Vitaliy Kim.
• “Our military meter by meter is liberating the south of Ukraine,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Zelensky, said in a Telegram post, amid an uptick in fighting there. Arestovych urged patience as he said a counteroffensive in the south would take time to bear fruit. The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, wrote that “the ongoing counteroffensive will likely not result in immediate gains” while Ukrainian forces “seek to disrupt key logistics nodes that support Russian operations in the south and chip away at Russian military capabilities.”
• Missiles hit the northeastern city of Kharkiv overnight into Sunday, striking a restaurant in the Kyivskiy district, local authorities said. The effort to prevent a fire from spreading to a nearby forest took eight fire tankers and about 50 emergency workers and was ongoing early Sunday, the state emergency service said. A woman was killed and two other people were injured in strikes Saturday across the Kharkiv region, according to Oleh Synyehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional administration.
• “Russian forces continue to suffer from morale and discipline issues,” the British Defense Ministry said Sunday in its daily assessment of wartime intelligence. A major issue for Russian forces deployed in Ukrainian territory is probably insufficient pay, particularly unpaid combat bonuses, the ministry said….

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