The onset of autumnal weather, with rains making fields too muddy for tanks, is beginning to cloud Ukraine's efforts to take back more Russian-held territory before winter freezes the battlefields, a Washington-based think tank said Sunday.
Russia, meanwhile, pressed on with its call-up of hundreds of thousands of men to throw into the seven-month war, seeking to reverse its recent losses. It also deployed suicide drones Sunday against the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, Ukrainian authorities said. No casualties were immediately reported.
For Ukrainian and Russian military planners, the clock is ticking, with the approach of winter expected to make fighting more complicated. Already, rainy weather is bringing muddy conditions that are starting to limit the mobility of tanks and other heavy weaponry, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Lithuania, a European Union member-country that borders Kaliningrad, a Russian Baltic Sea exclave, said it won't grant them asylum. “Russians should stay and fight. Against Putin," Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted. Officials in other EU nations, however, say Europe has a duty to help, and fear that turning away Russians could play into Putin's hands, feeding his narrative that the West has always hated Russians and that the war is being waged to safeguard their country against Western hostility.
Ukraine and its Western allies say the referendums in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south and the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions have no legal force. The votes are set to wrap up Tuesday but are being dismissed in Ukraine and the West as a sham, with footage showing armed Russian troops going door to door to pressure Ukrainians into voting.
At least 2,000 people have been arrested in recent days for similar demonstrations around the country. Many of those taken away immediately received call-up summons.
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