Moscow will send opera singers, actors and circus performers to the front line to raise flagging morale as Russian troops complain of high deaths and dire conditions.
The Kremlin announced the formation of a “creative brigade” to entertain soldiers, and called for the donation of musical instruments.
It comes as Russia’s upper echelon appears to be on a fresh publicity drive to boost domestic support for its war in Ukraine after a series of embarrassing withdrawals.
Meanwhile in southern Ukraine, volunteers have made a Christmas tree out of camouflage netting to celebrate the festive season as well as “victory”.
The towering structure in the city of Mykolaiv will be donated to soldiers on the front line after the holiday season.
Low morale on Russia’s front line continues to be a “significant vulnerability across much of the Russian force”, according to the latest UK Defence Intelligence briefing.
Russian fighters complain of “high casualty rates, poor leadership, pay problems, lack of equipment and ammunition and lack of clarity about the war’s objectives”, the briefing says.
But sending creative brigades to entertain the Russian army is “unlikely to substantially alleviate these concerns”, says the intelligence report.
It noted that military music and organised entertainment have a long history in many armies, but in Russia it is strongly intertwined with the Soviet-era concept of “ideological political education”.
Kissinger: ‘Negotiate peace’
Veteran US diplomat Henry Kissinger has called for a negotiated peace between Ukraine and Russia to reduce the risk of another devastating world war.
But dreams of breaking up Russia could unleash nuclear chaos, warned the secretary of state under Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Mr Kissinger was an architect of the Cold War policy of detente towards the Soviet Union and has met Vladimir Putin multiple times since he first became president in 2000.
“The time is approaching to build on the strategic changes which have already been accomplished and to integrate them into a new structure towards achieving peace through negotiation,” Mr Kissinger wrote in The Spectator magazine.
“A peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed. The alternative of neutrality is no longer meaningful,” Kissinger wrote in his article “How to avoid another world war”.
Mr Kissinger said he had in May proposed a ceasefire under which Russia would withdraw to the front lines before the February 24 invasion but Crimea would be the subject of “negotiation”.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Washington in December. Photo: Getty
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces in eastern Ukraine.
CIA Director William Burns said in an interview published on Saturday that while most conflicts end in negotiation, the CIA’s assessment was Russia was not yet serious about a real negotiation to end the war.
Mr Kissinger, now 99, suggested if it proved impossible to return to the status quo established in 2014, internationally supervised referendums in territory claimed by Russia could be an option.
Mr Kissinger warned that desires to render Russia “impotent”, or even seek the dissolution of Russia, could unleash chaos. Neither Ukraine nor any Western state has advocated either path.
“The dissolution of Russia or destroying its ability for strategic policy could turn its territory encompassing 11 time zones into a contested vacuum,” Mr Kissinger said.
“Its competing societies might decide to settle their disputes by violence.
“Other countries might seek to expand their claims by force. All these dangers would be compounded by the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons which make Russia one of the world’s two largest nuclear powers.”
-with AAP
