Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine is in a "new phase," President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with the Associated Press published on Dec. 1. “We have a new phase of war, and that is a fact...winter as a whole is a new phase of war,” he said. When asked about the counteroffensive, he acknowledged it had not gone as Ukraine had hoped, admitting that it "did not achieve the desired results."