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As the war enters its 636th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Tuesday, November 21, 2023.

Fighting

• Ukraine said fighting intensified around the Russian-occupied eastern town of Bakhmut. Volodymyr Fityo, a spokesperson for Ukrainian ground forces, said Russia was focusing its attacks on Klishchiivka, a nearby village that was retaken by Ukrainian forces in September. “Eleven attacks have been repelled in the past 24 hours,” he said. “The enemy is trying to dislodge our men from defensive positions around Klishchiivka.” Russia’s defence ministry said it had beaten back more than 30 Ukrainian attacks in and around Bakhmut in the past week.
• Ukrainian authorities said three people were killed and one injured in Russian shelling in the southern Kherson and the central Dnipropetrovsk regions. Some power lines and a gas pipeline were also damaged.
• Ukrainian police said a soldier and a woman died when a grenade exploded in a Kyiv apartment. The cause of the blast, which injured a second man, was not immediately clear.
• The United States State Department said it was barring Russian Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov and Russian Guard Corporal Daniil Frolkin from entering the US over their alleged involvement in human rights violations in the Ukrainian town of Andriivka.

Politics and diplomacy

• Ukraine fired its two top cyber-defence officials – Yury Shchyhol, head of the State Special Communications Service of Ukraine, and his deputy Victor Zhora – amid an ongoing investigation into corruption over software purchases.

• Fox Corp Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch travelled to Kyiv where he met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine said the meeting was a “very important signal” of support at a time when the Israel-Gaza war has diverted global attention from the war in Ukraine. Zelenskyy said Fox News journalist Benjamin Hall, who was badly wounded covering the conflict last year, and Jerome Starkey, a journalist with the United Kingdom tabloid The Sun were also at the meeting.
• In an interview with The Sun that was also published in the UK’s Times newspaper, which is part of the same media group, Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to stoke tension from the Balkans to the Middle East. “Ukraine today [is] in the centre of these global risks of this Third World War,” Zelenskyy said. Urging Ukraine’s allies to maintain their military support, he acknowledged the lack of progress on some parts of the battlefield, but noted successes in the Black Sea. “We really deployed part of the Russian fleet,” he told the paper. “We did it.”
• Russia placed Ukrainian singer Jamala, who won the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest, on its wanted list. The independent Russian news site Mediazona said Jamala, whose real name is Susana Jamaladinova, had been charged under a law that bans spreading fake information about the Russian military and the war in Ukraine. Jamala, a Crimean Tatar, has long been a critic of Russia and told Zelenskyy last year that her priority was to “remind that foreigners came to my house to kill and mutilate life, to destroy and rewrite my culture”. She responded to the Russian arrest warrant on Instagram with a facepalm emoji.
• A Japanese delegation led by senior industry and foreign ministry officials and including business representatives visited Ukraine for talks ahead of next year’s Ukraine Recovery Conference, which will be hosted by Japan.

Weapons

• US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin made an unannounced visit to Kyiv and unveiled an additional $100m package to provide artillery munitions, interceptors for air defence and anti-tank weaponry. Austin promised Zelenskyy that US support would be for the “long haul”. He also met with Defence Minister Rustem Umerov.

Investors reportedly concerned they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in the tech startup.

Some investors in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, are exploring legal recourse against the company’s board, sources familiar with the matter have told the Reuters news agency, after the directors removed CEO Sam Altman and sparked a potential mass exodus of employees.

Sources said investors are working with legal advisers to study their options. It was not immediately clear if these investors will sue OpenAI.

Investors worry they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft owns 49 percent of the for-profit operating company, according to sources familiar with the matter. Other investors and employees control 49 percent, with 2 percent owned by OpenAI’s nonprofit parent, according to Semafor.

OpenAI’s board fired Altman on Friday after a “breakdown of communications”, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

By Monday, most of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees threatened to resign unless the company replaced the board.

Venture capital investors usually hold board seats or voting power in their portfolio companies but OpenAI is controlled by its nonprofit parent company OpenAI Nonprofit, which according to OpenAI’s website was created to benefit “humanity, not OpenAI investors”.

As a result, employees have more leverage in pressuring the board than the venture capitalists who helped fund the company, said Minor Myers, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.

“There is nobody exactly who is in the seat of an injured investor,” he said.

That is a feature, not a bug of OpenAI’s structure, which started out as a nonprofit but added a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 to raise capital. Keeping control of operations lets the nonprofit preserve its “core mission, governance, and oversight,” according to the company’s website.

Nonprofit boards have legal obligations to the organisations they oversee. But those obligations, such as the duty to exercise care and avoid self-dealing, leave a lot of leeway for leadership decisions, experts said.

Those obligations can be further narrowed in a corporate structure such as OpenAI, which used a limited liability company as its operating arm, potentially further insulating the nonprofit’s directors from investors, said Paul Weitzel, a law professor at the University of Nebraska.

Even if investors found a way to sue, Weitzel said they would have a “weak case”. Companies have broad latitude under the law to make business decisions, even ones that backfire.

“You can fire visionary founders,” Weitzel said.

Apple famously fired Steve Jobs in the 1980s, before bringing him back about a decade later.

“They have a long way to go.” 28 premature babies, evacuated from Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza are now being treated in Egypt after safely being transported through the Rafah border crossing. The WHO says they are receiving the specialized medical care they need.

Trump’s lawyer argues the order violates free speech while judges say his rhetoric could threaten the integrity of his upcoming trial.

United States appeals court judges have signalled scepticism towards Donald Trump’s bid to overturn a gag order imposed on the former president in a federal criminal case in which he is accused of illegally trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

It forbids Trump from publicly maligning any prosecutors, potential witnesses or court employees involved in the case.

Trump lawyer D John Sauer argued on Monday that the order violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech while judges on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia asked whether Trump’s charged rhetoric would threaten the integrity of his upcoming trial.

“I don’t hear you giving any weight at all to the interests in a fair trial,” Judge Cornelia Pillard told Sauer.

Pillard is one of three judges who heard Trump’s appeal of the gag order imposed by US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case.

Chutkan ruled that public statements by Trump or his lawyers criticising prosecutors, court staff and potential witnesses could influence witnesses and lead to threats against people involved in the case.

But Chutkan permitted Trump to “criticize the Justice Department, President Biden and herself. She also allowed him to maintain that the prosecution itself was a partisan retaliation against him,” The New York Times reported.

“The order is unprecedented, and it sets a terrible precedent on future restrictions on core political speech,” Sauer said during the two-hour hearing.

Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, has assailed officials involved in a range of criminal and civil cases he faces. He has called US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the federal election-related charges, a “deranged lunatic” and a “thug”.

Trump’s remarks about prosecutors and witnesses have pit his right to freedom of speech against the need for a fair trial next year.

The gag order has been suspended during Trump’s appeal. Trump has pleaded not guilty in the case as well as all three other criminal cases.

The judges asked Department of Justice lawyer Cecil VanDevender whether the order was written too broadly.

“We have to use a careful scalpel here,” said Judge Patricia Millett, a Democratic judicial appointee like the other two on the panel.

VanDevender said the order still allows Trump to make broad arguments about the integrity of the case.

“He can say, ‘This is a politically motivated prosecution brought by my political opponent,’ ‘The Department of Justice is corrupt,’ and ‘I will be vindicated at trial,’ – all of that stuff,” VanDevender said.

The judges did not indicate when they will rule.

A partly Israeli-owned cargo vessel has been hijacked by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.

The Iran-backed Houthis say the move was a response to Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Israel described the incident as an “Iranian act of terrorism”. Tehran has rejected the allegation.

So, what impact could this have? And what are the possible military and economic implications?

Presenter: Folly Bah Thibault

Guests:

Trita Parsi – Executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington, DC-based think-tank

Mehran Kamrava – Professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar and author of the book The Impossibility of Palestine: History, Geography, and the Road Ahead

Farea Al-Muslimi – Research fellow on Yemen and the Gulf at Chatham House