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After almost eight months, the war in Ukraine hangs in the balance. Ukrainian counter-offensives continue to make progress, while Russian forces are still pressing elsewhere.

But on the internet, it's a very one-sided affair.

"This is a meme nation," says Olena, a Kyiv entrepreneur who manages teams of social media volunteers.

"If this was a war of memes, we would be winning."

Olena is not her real name. Due to the sensitive nature of the work she and her teams carry out on behalf of Ukraine's defence ministry, she has asked to remain anonymous.

Her teams work round-the-clock, reacting within hours to news from around the country, producing punchy videos, often set to music, for the ministry's audiences at home and abroad.

Just as Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky tailors speeches to foreign parliaments to take account of local history, culture and sensibility, so Olena's five-strong international team target their messages.

Images of red roses, chocolates, the Paris skyline, followed by the guns in action, were set - perhaps inevitably - to the sound of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's breathless Je T'aime Moi Non Plus.

With nods to a Macron-Zelensky bromance, it was suggestive and thoroughly tongue-in-cheek.

The tune? You guessed it: Abba's Money, Money, Money.

Thanks to the team's efforts, the defence ministry's Twitter feed now has 1.5m followers around the world. Some of the videos have been viewed more than a million times.

"The main idea is to speak to the international audience and show that Ukraine is actually capable of winning," she says. "Because nobody wants to invest in losers."

Targeting Russian audience

With a wealth of videos depicting Russian military setbacks being posted on social media platforms, the team is not short of material. But they've learned through trial and error what works and what doesn't.

"We started displaying dead Russian bodies," Olena says. "And then we realised that it actually didn't work. It only united them against us."

The team then tried to appeal to the consciences of Russian soldiers by showing images of dead Ukrainian civilians. Again, it seemed to fall on deaf ears.

"We realised they were actually proud of it. They were not condemning this at all," she says. "We realised that we have to do this in a much more sophisticated way."

Now the volunteers scrutinise Russian social media platforms, looking to press buttons and probe weaknesses in specific parts of the country.

"If you do it in Saratov you have to know what's going on in Saratov," Olena says. "If you do it in Nizhny Novgorod, you have to know what's going on in Nizhny Novgorod."

It's extremely hard to gauge the impact this work is having, but Vladimir Putin's recent partial mobilisation has given the volunteers lots of material to work with.

"We were waiting for the mobilisation," Olena says. "We knew that it would be very demoralising for them."

The single richest seam of material is to be found on the messaging service Telegram. Olena calls it "the Wild Wild West".

The volunteers providing material for the defence ministry are just a small part of a vast, vibrant, fiercely patriotic and wildly irreverent community reacting to events on the ground, sometimes with amazing speed.

Scores of Telegram channels attract huge numbers of followers.

One, called "Ukrainian Offensive", has 96,485 followers. Its slogan is "fighting on the civil-meme frontlines of the information war since 2014."

It provides a diet of military updates, out-and-out trolling of Moscow and occasional digs at Western media coverage (including the BBC).

Like most other channels, it doesn't shy away from showing suffering, including footage of dead or dying Russian soldiers.

But the country didn't turn into a nation of digital ninjas overnight. Eight years of war in the eastern Donbas region has given people lots of time to hone their skills, from countering disinformation to circulating humorous content designed to boost morale.

More on the information war:

The current social media environment, says Ihor Solovey, head of Ukraine's Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, reflects a rare convergence of official and popular sentiment.

"We're witnessing perhaps the first time in history when civil society trusts the state and is helping it," he told me.

"The armed forces do their own thing, while society is creating content, memes, creative works on their own. Because everyone feels responsible for their own future."

What, if anything, is Russia throwing back at Ukraine?

Strangely, given Russia's reputation for troll farms and shady scammers with alleged links to the Kremlin, the answer seems to be: not much.

Earlier this month, two well-known Russian pranksters did manage to con Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba into thinking he was talking to a former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul.

Excerpts were broadcast on Russian state media, in which Mr Kuleba appeared to admit that Ukraine was responsible for recent attacks in Crimea and Russia - although the prank was conducted before the 8 October Kerch Bridge explosion.

But if Russia does have a similarly inventive internet army, Olena says she has seen little sign of it.

"Russians haven't managed to come up with anything interesting," she says. "No humour, no beauty. Not even pain. No compassion."

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How Ukraine is winning the social media war

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After almost eight months, the war in Ukraine hangs in the balance. Ukrainian counter-offensives continue to make progress, while Russian forces are still pressing elsewhere. But on the internet, it's a very one-sided affair. "This is a meme nation," says Olena, a Kyiv entrepreneur who manages teams of social media volunteers.

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It was interesting to explore an article that was written by the Chinese about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Generally, the Chinese framed the U.S. and its allies as main aggressors in the war. At times the language gave the impression that russia was already at war with the united states. It was also just generally opposite of a lot of US reporting.

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One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest aides said on Tuesday that Moscow was now fighting the US-led NATO military alliance in Ukraine and that the West was trying to wipe Russia from the political map of the world.

"The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv - this is a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and above all the United States and Britain," Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper.

"The Westerners' plans are to continue to pull Russia apart, and eventually just erase it from the political map of the world."

The US had sown chaos in Afghanistan, Vietnam and the Middle East, and has been trying for years to undermine Russia's "unique" culture and language, Patrushev said.

"There is no place for our country in the West," he said.

In response, he said Russia would achieve economic sovereignty and financial independence, while also building up its armed forces and special services to deter any potential aggressor.

When asked about Patrushev's remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said NATO and the US were part of the Ukraine conflict.

"They have de facto already become an indirect party to this conflict, pumping Ukraine with weapons, technologies, intelligence information and so on," Peskov told a regular news conference.
Oklahoma training
Russia's special military operation in Ukraine has triggered one of the deadliest European conflicts since World War II and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Meanwhile, about 100 Ukrainian troops will head to Oklahoma's Fort Sill as soon as next week to begin training on the Patriot missile defense system, getting Kyiv closer to obtaining the long-sought protection against Russia's missile attacks, The Associated Press reported.

The number of Ukrainians coming to Fort Sill is approximately the number it takes to operate one battery, and they will focus on learning to operate and also maintain the Patriot, Pentagon spokesman Air Force General Pat Ryder said on Tuesday.

The US pledged one Patriot battery in December as part of several large military assistance packages it has provided to Ukraine in recent weeks. Last week, Germany pledged an additional Patriot battery.

Each Patriot battery consists of a truck-mounted launching system with eight launchers that can hold up to four missile interceptors each, a ground radar, a control station and a generator. The army said it currently has 16 Patriot battalions.

On the battlefield, fighting for salt mining town Soledar raged in subzero temperatures on Wednesday as Russia's paramilitary group Wagner claimed it had taken control, with its fighters training their fire on a pocket of resistance in the town center.

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Russia now fighting NATO in Ukraine, Putin's top aide says

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One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest aides said on Tuesday that Moscow was now fighting the US-led NATO military alliance in Ukraine and that the West was trying to wipe Russia from the political map of the world.

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In recent years, a small group of scholars has focussed on war-termination theory. They see reason to fear the possible outcomes in Ukraine.

Hein Goemans grew up in Amsterdam in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, surrounded by stories and memories of the Second World War. His father was Jewish and had hidden "under the floorboards," as he put it, during the Nazi occupation. When Goemans came to the United States to study international relations, he recalled being asked in one class about his most formative personal experience of international relations. He said that it was the Second World War. The other students objected that this wasn't personal enough. But it was very personal for Goemans. He recalled attending a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Amsterdam by Canadian forces, in May of 1985. Many of the Canadian soldiers who took part in the liberation were still alive, and they re-created the arrival of Canadian troops to liberate the city. Goemans remembers thinking that the people of Amsterdam would be too blasé to attend the commemoration, and being moved that he was wrong. "The entire city was packed with people by the roadside," he told me recently. "I was really surprised at how deeply it was felt."

Goemans, who now teaches political science at the University of Rochester, wrote his dissertation on war-termination theory-that is, the study of how wars end. A great deal of work, Goemans learned, had been done on how wars start, but very little on how they might conclude. There were, perhaps, historical reasons for this oversight: the nuclear armament of the United States and the Soviet Union meant that a war between them could end human civilization; not just some dying, but the death of everything. The study of war during the Cold War thus gave rise to a rich vocabulary about deterrence: direct deterrence, extended deterrence, deterrence by punishment, deterrence by denial. But the Cold War ended, and wars kept happening. Goemans saw an opportunity for an intellectual intervention.

In his dissertation, and in his subsequent book, " War and Punishment," Goemans laid out a theory of how and why some wars ended quickly and others dragged brutally on. The war in the title was the First World War; the "punishment" was what leaders in Germany, in particular, feared awaited them if they brought home anything less than a victory. When Goemans's book came out, in 2000, it was the first modern full-length study devoted entirely to the problem of war termination, and it helped launch the field.

Traditionally, Goemans writes, wars were thought to end because one side surrendered. "Until the vanquished quits, the war goes on," as one author put it, in 1944. But the empirical record showed this to be at best an incomplete account. It usually took two sides to start a war, even if they had different culpability, and it usually took two sides to end it; the vanquished may accept the terms that were proposed last week, but what was to keep the winner from inventing new terms? The classic example from the First World War was the Bolsheviks' refusal, in the wake of their seizure of power in Russia, to continue the fight against Germany; proclaiming "neither war nor peace," they simply left the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. " Literally the vanquished quit," Goemans writes. But the Germans, instead of accepting this, kept advancing into Russia. Only after the Bolsheviks agreed to even harsher terms than had been proposed just three weeks earlier did the Germans agree to their exit from the war.

More recent theoretical literature had acknowledged the two-sidedness of war, Goemans writes, but here, too, important aspects had been missed. War theory imported from economics the concept of "bargaining," and wars were thought to begin when the bargaining process-over a piece of territory, usually-broke down. The most common cause of the breakdown, according to war theorists (and again borrowing from economics), was some form of informational asymmetry. Simply put, one or both sides overestimated their own strength relative to their opponent's. There were many reasons for this sort of informational asymmetry, not least of which was that the war-fighting capacity of individual nations was almost always a closely guarded secret. In any case, the best way to find out who was stronger was to actually start fighting. Then things became clear quite quickly. Many wars ended in just this way, with the sides reëvaluating their relative strengths and opting to make a deal.

But there were other kinds of wars, in which factors besides information predominated. These factors, in part because they did not play prominent roles in economics, were less well understood. One was the fact that contracts in the international system-in this case, peace deals-had little or no enforcement mechanism. If a country really wanted to break a deal, there was no court of arbitration to which the other party could appeal. (In theory, the United Nations could be this court; in practice, it is not.) This gave rise to the problem known as "credible commitment": one reason wars might not end quickly is that one or both sides simply could not trust the other to honor any peace deal they reached. In his 2009 book " How Wars End," Goemans's colleague Dan Reiter used the example of Great Britain in the late spring of 1940, after the fall of France. Britain was losing the war and had no certainty that the United States would enter in time to save it. But the British fought on, because they knew that no deal with Nazi Germany could be trusted. As Winston Churchill put it to his Cabinet, in his inimitable way: "If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground."

The other factor that had been ignored in the literature, according to Goemans, was domestic politics. States were considered unitary actors with set interests, but this left out the internal pressures placed on the government of a modern nation-state. Goemans created a data set of every leader of every war-fighting country between 1816 and 1995, and coded each according to a tripartite system. Some leaders were democrats; some were dictators; and some were in between. According to Goemans, democrats tended to respond to the information delivered by the war and act accordingly; at the very worst, if they lost the war but their country still existed, they would get turned out of office and go on a book tour. Dictators, because they had total control of their domestic audience, could also end wars when they needed to. After the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was such a leader; he simply killed anyone who criticized him. The trouble, Goemans found, lay with the leaders who were neither democrats nor dictators: because they were repressive, they often met with bad ends, but because they were not repressive enough, they had to think about public opinion and whether it was turning on them. These leaders, Goemans found, would be tempted to "gamble for resurrection," to continue prosecuting the war, often at greater and greater intensity, because anything short of victory could mean their own exile or death. He reminded me that on November 17, 1914-four months after the First World War began-Kaiser Wilhelm II met with his war cabinet and concluded that the war was unwinnable. "Still, they fought on for another four years," Goemans said. "And the reason was that they knew that if they lost they would be overthrown, there would be a revolution." And they were right. Leaders like these were very dangerous. According to Goemans, they were the reason that the First World War, and many others, had dragged on much longer than they should have.

I recently spoke to a number of war-termination theorists, including Goemans, to see what the theoretical perspective could tell us about the war in Ukraine. The theorists turned out to be an engaged and lively group, most of them glued to Twitter and Telegram, in multiple languages, as they tried to follow the war in real time. They believed the wars that they had studied could shed light on the current conflict. Apparently, they were not the only ones who thought so. The war theorist Branislav Slantchev, one of Goemans's former students and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, told me that in August he'd been asked to participate in a Zoom symposium on war termination convened by a U.S. intelligence agency.

Reiter, the author of "How Wars End," was intrigued by the fact that the conflict in Ukraine was such an old-fashioned war. There was very little cyber warfare, and Russia had used just a few hypersonic missiles. He said that, on the Russian side, "it's artillery, armor, infantry, brutality against civilians. That's the twentieth century." And on the Ukrainian side it was the same: "They have reasonably sophisticated weapons, coupled with enough training, coupled with a lot of bravery. Things have not changed as much as we had thought."

Tanisha Fazal, a scholar at the University of Minnesota who is writing a book on battlefield medicine, was struck by the low ratio of Russian wounded to killed. The historical ratio in the last hundred and fifty years has been around three or four to one. In recent wars, such as in Afghanistan, the U.S. had managed to get the wounded-to-killed ratio as high as ten to one, meaning that fewer soldiers were dying after being wounded. The Russians were estimated to be back down to four to one. The reason, Fazal said, was that the Russians have not managed to establish air superiority; they cannot get their wounded soldiers out quickly enough, and therefore many of them die.

More broadly, the war had exhibited many traits that were familiar to theorists of war. Vladimir Putin's initial miscalculation that he could overrun Ukraine in a matter of days was a classic case of informational asymmetry; it was also a classic instance of a repressive regime being fed poor information by its own people. Everyone agreed that we were faced with a "classic" credible-commitment problem. Russia claimed that it could not trust Ukraine to not become, in essence, a NATO state; Ukraine, for its part, had no reason to trust a Russian regime that had repeatedly broken promises and invaded it in February with no provocation. But the resolution of the credible-commitment problem was complicated. In the Second World War, it was resolved by the destruction of the Nazi regime, the rewriting of Germany's constitution, and the partition of Germany. But not many wars end with such absolute outcomes.

To add to the complications, this war, like others, is dynamic. A great deal has happened since Russia invaded Ukraine on the morning of February 24th. The revelations of Russian weakness and Ukrainian strength have buoyed the Ukrainian public; the discovery of the massacres of civilians at Bucha and now Izyum have enraged it. If once there was space in Ukrainian public opinion for concessions to Russia, that space has now closed. "Sometimes war generates its own causes of war," Goemans said.

Dozens of outside actors have been pulled into the conflict: the thirty countries of NATO, on the side of Ukraine; Belarus, for now, on the side of Russia. "This is a large European war, something we thought we would not see," Goemans said. "It's trench warfare, like World War One. And it's for the existence of Ukraine as a state." The implications are enormous. "This will shape the rest of the twenty-first century. If Russia loses, or it doesn't get what it wants, it will be a different Russia afterward. If Russia wins, it will be a different Europe afterward." The scope and complications of the war foreclose a quick resolution. "This is what made World War One so big, this is what made World War Two so big," Goemans said. "It's not just 'I want a piece of territory because my ethnic brethren are there.' It's-all this shit."

When we first spoke, in early September, Goemans predicted a protracted conflict. None of the three main variables of war-termination theory-information, credible commitment, and domestic politics-had been resolved. Both sides still believed that they could win, and their distrust for each other was deepening by the day. As for domestic politics, Putin was exactly the sort of leader that Goemans had warned about. Despite his significant repressive apparatus, he did not have total control of the country. He kept calling the war a "special military operation" and delaying a mass mobilization, so as not to have to face domestic unrest. If he started losing, Goemans predicted, he would simply escalate.

And then, in the weeks after Goemans and I first spoke, events accelerated rapidly. Ukraine launched a remarkably successful counter-offensive, retaking large swaths of territory in the Kharkiv region and threatening to retake the occupied city of Kherson. Putin, as predicted, struck back, declaring a "partial mobilization" of troops and staging hasty "referendums" on joining the Russian Federation in the occupied territories. The partial mobilization was carried out in a chaotic fashion, and, as at the beginning of the war, caused tens of thousands of people to flee Russia. There were sporadic protests across the nation, and these threatened to grow in size. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces continued to advance in the east of their country.

In a terrifying blog post, Goemans's former student Branislav Slantchev laid out a few potential scenarios. He believes that the Russian front in the Donbas is still in danger of imminent collapse. If this were to happen, Putin would need to escalate even further. This could take the form of more attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, but, if the goal is to stop Ukrainian advances, a likelier option would be a small tactical nuclear strike. Slantchev suggests that it would be under one kiloton-that is, about fifteen times smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It would nonetheless be devastating, and would almost certainly lead to an intense reaction from the West. Slantchev does not think that NATO would respond with nuclear strikes of its own, but it could, for example, destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet. This could lead to yet another round of escalation. In such a situation, the West may be tempted, finally, to retreat. Slantchev urged them not to. "This is it now," he wrote. "This is for all the marbles."

"Branislav is very worried," Goemans told me, "and he is not a scaredy-cat." Goemans was also worried, though his hypothetical time line was more extended. He believes that the new Russian reinforcements, however ill-trained and ill-equipped, and the onset of an early winter will pause the Ukrainian campaign and save the Russians, for the moment. "People think it's going to be over quickly, but, unfortunately, war doesn't work like that," he said. But he also believes that Ukraine will resume its offensive in the spring, at which point the same dynamic and the same dangers will be back in play. "For a war to end," Goemans said, " the minimum demands of at least one of the sides must change." This is the first rule of war termination. And we have not yet reached a point where war aims have changed enough for a peace deal to be possible.

The theorists' predictions for what would happen next depended, in part, on how they evaluated the variables. Would the Russian front in the Donbas really collapse, and, if so, how soon? If it did collapse, how much of the information about it would the Kremlin be able to control? These things were unpredictable, but one had to make predictions. Dan Reiter, for example, was slightly more sanguine than Goemans about Putin's ability to sell a partial victory to the Russian people, because of his mastery of the Russian media. To Reiter, Putin was enough of a dictator that he would be able to back off.

Despite being the preëminent theorist of credible commitment, Reiter believes that the war could end short of an absolute outcome, such as the destruction of the Russian Federation. "You really don't like to leave in place a country that is going to offer some kind of lingering threat," he said. "However, sometimes that's just the world you have to live in, because it's just too costly to actually remove the threat completely." He saw a future in which Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire and then gradually turned itself into a "military hedgehog," a prickly country that no one would want to invade. "Medium-sized states can protect themselves even from very dangerous adversaries," Reiter said. "Ukraine can make itself more defensible into the future, but it will look a lot different as a country and as a society than it did before the invasion." It would look more like Israel, with high taxes, military spending, and lengthy mandatory military service. "But Ukraine is defensible," Reiter said. "They've proven that."

Goemans was feeling more worried. Once again, his thoughts took him to the First World War. In 1917, Germany, faced with no hope of victory, decided to gamble for resurrection. It unleashed its secret weapon, the U-boat, to conduct unlimited operations on the high seas. The risk of the strategy was that it would bring the United States into the war; the hope was that it would choke off Great Britain and lead to victory. This was a "high variance" strategy, in Goemans's words, meaning that it could lead to a great reward or a great calamity. In the event, it did lead to the U.S. entering the war, and the defeat of Germany, and the Kaiser's removal from power.

In this situation, the secret weapon is nuclear. And its use carries with it the risk, again, of even greater involvement in the war by the U.S. But it could also, at least temporarily, halt the advance of the Ukrainian Army. If used effectively, it could even bring about a victory. "People get very excited about the front collapsing," Goemans said. "But for me it's, like, 'Ah-h-h!' " At that point, Putin would really be trapped.

For the moment, Goemans still believes that the nuclear option is unlikely. And he believes that Ukraine will win the war. But that will also take a long time, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. ♦

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nato (north atlantic treaty organization)

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In recent years, a small group of scholars has focussed on war-termination theory. They see reason to fear the possible outcomes in Ukraine. Hein Goemans grew up in Amsterdam in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, surrounded by stories and memories of the Second World War.

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Local news sources sometimes report on major issues in addition to reporting local issues. Personally I found that the day generally reported on more lighthearted or minor aspects of the Russia Ukraine conflict rather then the big headlines being featured in other news networks. This article was a great example of this.

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Kyiv, Ukraine - With next year's Paris Olympics on the horizon and Russia's invasion looking more like a prolonged conflict, Ukraine's sports minister on Friday renewed a threat to boycott the games if Russia and Belarus are allowed to compete and said Kyiv would lobby other nations to join.

Such a move could lead to the biggest rift in the Olympic movement since the Cold War era.

No nation has declared it will boycott the 2024 Summer Games. But Ukraine won support from Poland, the Baltic nations and Denmark, who pushed back against an International Olympic Committee plan to allow delegations from Russia and ally Belarus to compete in Paris as "neutral athletes," without flags or anthems.

"We cannot compromise on the admission of Russian and Belarusian athletes," said Ukrainian Sports Minister Vadym Huttsait, who also heads its national Olympic committee, citing attacks on his country, the deaths of its athletes and the destruction of its sports facilities.

A meeting of his committee did not commit to a boycott but approved plans to try to persuade global sports officials in the next two months - including discussion of a possible boycott.

Huttsait added: "As a last option, but I note that this is my personal opinion, if we do not succeed, then we will have to boycott the Olympic Games."

Paris will be the final Olympics under outgoing IOC head Thomas Bach, who is looking to his legacy after a tenure marked by disputes over Russia's status - first over widespread doping scandals and now over the war in Ukraine.

Bach's views were shaped when he was an Olympic gold medalist in fencing and his country, West Germany, took part in the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He has condemned that decision ever since.

Russia has cautiously welcomed the IOC's decision to give it a path to the Olympics but demands it drop a condition that would leave out those athletes deemed to be "actively supporting the war in Ukraine."

Russian Olympic Committee head Stanislav Pozdnyakov, who was a teammate of Ukraine's Huttsait at the 1992 Olympics, called that aspect discriminatory. The IOC, which previously recommended excluding Russia and Belarus from world sports on safety grounds, now argues it cannot discriminate against them purely based on citizenship.

The leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania urged the IOC to ban Russia and said a boycott was a possibility.

"I think that our efforts should be on convincing our other friends and allies that the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes is just wrong," Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said. "So boycotting is the next step. I think people will understand why this is necessary."

The IOC said in a statement that "this threat of a boycott only leads to further escalation of the situation, not only in sport, but also in the wider context. It is regretful that politicians are misusing athletes and sport as tools to achieve their political objectives."

It added bluntly: "Why punish athletes from your country for the Russian government starting the war?"

Poland's sports minister Kamil Bortniczuk said as many as 40 countries could jointly condemn Russian and Belarusian participation at Paris in a statement next week but that it could stop short of a boycott threat. He told state news agency PAP that the IOC was being "naive" and should reflect on its position.

Denmark wants a ban on Russian athletes "from all international sports as long as their attacks on Ukraine continue," said Danish Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt.

"We must not waver in relation to Russia. The government's line is clear. Russia must be banned," he said. "This also applies to Russian athletes who participate under a neutral flag. It is completely incomprehensible that there are apparently doubts about the line in the IOC."

Asked by The Associated Press about the boycott threats and the IOC plan, Paris 2024 organizing committee head Tony Estanguet would not comment "about political decisions."

"My job is to make sure that all athletes who want to participate will be offered the best conditions in terms of security, to offer them the chance to live their dream," he said in Marseille.

Ukraine boycotted some sporting events last year rather than compete against Russians.

Huttsait said a boycott would be very tough, saying it was "very important for us that our flag is at the Olympic Games; it is very important for us that our athletes are on the podium. So that we show that our Ukraine was, is, and will be."

Marta Fedina, 21, an Olympic bronze medalist in artistic swimming, said in Kyiv she was "ready for a boycott."

"How will I explain to our defenders if I am even present on the same sports ground with these people," she said, referring to Russian athletes. She noted her swimming pool in Kharkiv, where she was living when Moscow invaded, was ruined by the war.

Speakers at the Ukrainian Olympic Committee's assembly meeting raised concerns about Moscow using Paris for propaganda and noted the close ties between some athletes and the Russian military.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday if athletes from the two countries compete, "it should be absolutely clear that they are not representing the Russian or Belarusian states." Los Angeles will host the 2028 Olympics.

If the IOC's proposal takes effect, Paris would be the fourth straight Olympics where Russian athletes have competed without the national flag or anthem. The Russian teams at the Winter Olympics in 2018 and 2022 and the Summer Olympics in 2021 were all caught up in the fallout from a series of doping cases.

The last time multiple countries boycotted an Olympics was in 1988, when North Korea and others refused to attend the Summer Games in South Korea. The North Korean team was a no-show at the Tokyo Games in 2021, citing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. The IOC barred it from the following Winter Games in Beijing as a result, saying teams had a duty to attend every Olympics.

Although the IOC set the tone of the debate by publishing advice on finding a way to help Russia and Belarus compete, decisions must be made for the governing bodies of individual sports that organize events on the 32-sport Paris program.

Those organizations, many based in the IOC's home of Lausanne, Switzerland, run their own qualifying and Olympic competitions and decide on eligibility criteria for athletes and teams.

The International Cycling Union signed on to the IOC's plan ahead of its Olympic qualifying events to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as "neutrals."

Track and field's World Athletics and soccer's FIFA were among most sports that excluded Russian athletes and teams within days of the start of the war. Tennis and cycling let many Russians and Belarusians continue competing as neutrals. Other governing bodies are more closely aligned with the IOC or traditionally have strong commercial and political ties to Russia.

One key meeting could be March 3 in Lausanne of the umbrella group of Summer Games sports, known as ASOIF. It is chaired by Francesco Ricci Bitti, a former IOC member when he led the International Tennis Federation, and includes World Athletics president Sebastian Coe.

ASOIF declined comment Friday, though noted this week "the importance of respecting the specificity of each federation and their particular qualification process" for Paris.
Graham Dunbar in Geneva, Bishr El-Touni in Marseille, France, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland, contributed.

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Ukraine pushes to exclude Russia from 2024 Paris Olympics

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Kyiv, Ukraine - With next year's Paris Olympics on the horizon and Russia's invasion looking more like a prolonged conflict, Ukraine's sports minister on Friday renewed a threat to boycott the games if Russia and Belarus are allowed to compete and said Kyiv would lobby other nations to join.

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AP/Efrem Lukatsky

The nation's leading news networks have corespondents on the ground covering the Russian military's continued assault on Ukraine, which began in full force overnight Wednesday.

Several of the network's most touted foreign correspondents, military embeds and war reporters have spent much of the last several days in Eastern Europe as Russian troops amassed on the Ukrainian border and western intelligence officials warned of an impending attack.

Those warnings came to fruition late Wednesday night, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a major "military operation" in Ukraine, prompting several of the nation's largest broadcasters to break in with live coverage of the unfolding crisis.

Here is a sample of who is on the ground in Ukraine and what they are reporting.
Richard Engel, Erin McLaughlin for NBC

.@RichardEngel is on the ground in Ukraine with the latest update following Russia's overnight attacks. pic.twitter.com/vYsAZpxl8U

- TODAY (@TODAYshow) February 24, 2022

McLaughlin delivered a live report from Kyiv late on Wednesday, during which she told viewers she and the network's team in the Ukrainian Capital city began hearing blasts late Wednesday night.

"We're hearing explosions on all sides of the location that I am standing," she said of the blasts which began before 6am local time. "People waking up to their windows shaking here."

Engel, a longtime foreign correspondent for NBC, reported from Mariupol, situated not far from where Russian troops have been exchanging mortar fire with Ukrainian opposition forces.

"There is a sense of tragedy, there is a great fear here. People do not know what is coming," he said. "Yes there are those who are determined to stay and fight for their nation ... and there are those who simply don't have any other choice."

Before relocating to Mariupol, Engel had spent the last several days reporting from a trench in the Donbas region of Ukraine, with rockets between Russian forces and Ukrainian military flying overhead.
Clarissa Ward, Matthew Chance for CNN
Ward and Chance are two of the several reporters CNN has stationed in Ukraine covering the ongoing invasion.

Chance was broadcast live on CNN's air Wednesday evening putting a flak jacket on as rocket fire erupted in the background of his live shot from Kyiv.

"I just heard a big bang right here behind me," Chance said before putting the jacket on. "The United States has warned the Ukrainians that it is possible there could be airstrikes ... I don't remember anything like this in the years that I've been coming to Kyiv and reporting from here."

Ward gave a report Thursday morning from a subway station in the city of Kharkiv where hundreds of people, children and animals were hiding from Russian airstrikes, unsure of what happens next.

"I talked to a woman upstairs who was crying because of her sense of panic and fear and desperation. Not knowing where they can go and what they can do," Ward said. "But how long can people stay here without any sense of what's going to happen?"

Stunning reporting from @clarissaward sheltering in a subway station in Kharkiv where hundreds of people, children and dogs are hiding from airstrikes, in scenes reminiscent of the Blitz pic.twitter.com/I7hHEtOKue

- Nora Neus (@noraneus) February 24, 2022

Steve Harrigan and Trey Yingst for Fox News
Harrigan and Yingst have been leading Fox's coverage on the ground of the developing invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces.

"The real question in this is how far is Vladimir Putin going to go? He declared an operation in Eastern Ukraine and yet here in the Capital City Kyiv, six hours away, we are hearing explosions. So is this capital city of 3 million people part of the attack or not? Or is it simply going to be surrounded and sealed off? Right now what we can only imagine in the darkness is that key points in the city are being hit. Communications, airports, defense ministry, police," Harrigan, a veteran foreign corespondent said on Wednesday night. "Certainly a terrifying night for people here. Ukrainians, many of them in disbelief that they could be fighting with their neighbor, many relatives, families intertwined, and yet it's come to this."

Yingst, clad in a helmet and flak jacket late Wednesday night said Russia has been using the "type of weaponry that will likely be used against large cities in this country."

"We are looking at things from cruise missiles to ballistic missiles and ground troops in Ukraine. We know that there were 200,000 Russian forces on Ukraine's border," Yingst said. "This was really the worst case scenario that everyone was talking about. Ukraine getting hit from multiple different angles. The fact is, this country, while they were preparing for the possibility of a Russian invasion, it's always been very clear that this level of a sustained attack in multiple different locations around the country just simply would not be able to be defendable for the Ukrainian military."
Holly Williams and Charlie D'Agata for CBS News
Several of the major networks broke into regularly scheduled programming once the shelling began on Wednesday night. Among them was CBS News, which broadcast a special report with leading anchor Norah O'Donnell.

Live on the ground in Kyiv, reported Charlie D'Agata told CBS viewers he could hear fighter jets and loud explosions overhead.

D'Agata was seen live on air ducking as a fighter jet flew overhead during his live shot.

Holly Williams, who is stationed in Kharkivare said on Thursday morning there are "grave fears that this could end up being the biggest land war in Europe since World War II."

"It was just minuted between President Putin appearing on Russian state TV ... and the missile strikes landing around Kyiv," Williams reported.

Reporting from the ground in Kharkiv, Ukraine, @HollyMAWilliams says there are "grave fears that this could end up being the biggest land war in Europe since World War II," after the city was rocked by possibly "dozens" of "loud explosions" overnight. pic.twitter.com/SWD485PiaU

- CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) February 24, 2022

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The correspondents on the ground covering the crisis in Ukraine

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The nation's leading news networks have corespondents on the ground covering the Russian military's continued assault on Ukraine, which began in full force overnight Wednesday. Several of the network's most touted foreign correspondents, military embeds and war reporters have spent much of the last several days in Eastern Europe as Russian troops amassed on the Ukrainian border and western...