Winter’s approach sets the clock ticking for Ukraine and Russia

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.

The Russian mobilization — its first such call-up since World War II — is sparking protests in Russian cities, with fresh demonstrations Sunday.

It is also opening splits in Europe about whether fighting-age Russian men fleeing in droves should be welcomed or turned away.

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.

But the think tank said Ukrainian forces are still gaining ground in their counteroffensive, launched in late August, that has spectacularly rolled back the Russian occupation across large areas of the northeast and which also prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new drive for reinforcements.

The partial mobilization has triggered an exodus of men seeking to avoid the draft — and sharp differences of opinion in Europe about how to deal with them.

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.

His counterpart in Latvia, also an EU member and bordering Russia, said the exodus poses “considerable security risks” for the 27-nation bloc and that those fleeing can’t be considered conscientious objectors against the invasion.

Many “were fine with killing Ukrainians, they did not protest then,” the Latvian foreign minister, Edgars Rinkevics, tweeted. He added that they have “plenty of countries outside EU to go.”

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…