That vast dark expanse above the Black Sea is Ukraine, shown on a satellite photo last week after Russian missile storms knocked out power to most of the country.

• Why it matters: Vladimir Putin is weaponizing winter. Kyiv — once comfortable and modern — is beginning winter without power and sometimes water, as Ukraine's mettle is tested in a brutal new way.

Ukraine still has an abundance of resilience and defiance, AP's John Leicester reports from the capital:

• When a play recently finished in Kyiv, the actors took their bows, then let loose with wartime patriotic zeal: "Glory to Ukraine!"
• "Glory to the heroes!" the audience yelled back.

Bundled against the cold, everyone then trooped out of the dark, unheated theater, barely lit with emergency generators — and headed back to the hard realities of their new life.

• Rolling power cuts are the norm. When water supplies were knocked out last week, residents lined up in the cold to fill plastic bottles at outdoor taps. Some collected rainwater from drainpipes.

🖼️ The big picture: Russia says its waves of cruise missiles, and use of exploding drones to hit energy facilities, are aimed at reducing Ukraine's ability to defend itself, AP adds.

• But the civilian hardships suggest the intention is also to martyrize minds — to torment Kyiv and other cities so Ukrainians surrender and sue for peace. So far, it's having the opposite effect.

👀 What we're watching: European officials pledged Friday to send more support to help mitigate Russian efforts to turn off the heat and lights.

"Down with the Chinese Communist Party! Down with Xi Jinping!"

• Those chants — reported today in Shanghai, China's most populous city — are very rare public protests against the country's leadership.
• Protests are flaring across China, including in Beijing, against arduous COVID restrictions.

Why it matters: The wave of civil disobedience is unprecedented in mainland China since Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago, Reuters reports.

• Room for dissent has been all but eliminated under Xi. Citizens vent mostly on social media, where they play cat-and-mouse with censors.

In Shanghai, as a large group of police looked on, the crowd held up blank sheets of paper as a protest symbol against censorship.

• By evening, hundreds of people had gathered again near one of the cordons, some holding blank sheets of paper.
• At Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, dozens of people held a peaceful protest against COVID restrictions.

Frustration boiled over after a fire Thursday that killed 10 people in a high-rise building in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, where some residents have been locked down for 100 days.

• Internet messages assert residents weren't able to escape because the building was partially locked down. City officials deny that.

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Bob Iger threw a retirement party for himself at his Brentwood home last year. We're told he lavished praise on several former colleagues — while barely mentioning his successor, Bob Chapek, who sat at a separate table.

• Why it matters: The two were already at war. A year and a day later, Chapek was humiliated once again when he was blindsided by the board's announcement that Iger was returning to take his job.

The party anecdote is part of an account today in The Sunday Times of London (paywall), which quotes a person close to the company:

• "[I]f it weren't for the fact that this is Hollywood, and there is such reverence for Iger — and probably a healthy degree of fear — this would be the greatest movie or mini-series imaginable."

Crypto entrepreneurs who began frequenting Miami’s clubs out of the blue have "completely disappeared," Andrea Vimercati, director of food and beverage at Moxy Hotel group, tells the Financial Times (subscription).

• "They wanted to show that they didn't have any limits," Vimercati recalled. "They were ordering 12 or 24 bottles of the most expensive champagne and just showering themselves without even drinking."

What's happening: As Bitcoin soared, the crypto crowd descended on Miami beginning in the spring of '21 to flaunt their "wealth." Now, Bitcoin has hit a two-year low, and the Bahamas-based exchange FTX has collapsed.

🥊 The bottom line: On the dance floor, crypto kids acted as if there was no tomorrow, the FT notes. Turns out, they were right.

At age 99, Henry Kissinger is "obsessed" with limiting the destructive power of artificial intelligence — which could be more devastating than the biggest bomb, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes.

• Why it matters: Kissinger says AI is the new frontier of arms control.

If the great powers don't find ways to limit AI's reach, "it is simply a mad race for some catastrophe," Kissinger told Ignatius during a video interview for a recent forum in D.C.

• "Even today we have fighter planes that can fight … air battles without any human intervention," the former Secretary of State said. "It is the elaboration 50 years down the road that will be mind-boggling."

💡 The big idea: Kissinger suggested U.S. and China create, at first, relatively small institutions that could inform national leaders about the dangers, and stay in touch with each other on how to ameliorate risks.

• Kissinger spoke on Nov. 16 to the Nancy and Paul Ignatius Program, named for the columnist's parents.

YouTube of the program.

For the first time, women outnumber men in the New York Philharmonic — an all-male ensemble for most of its 180 years, The New York Times reports (subscription).

• The orchestra now has 45 women and 44 men.

27 of the 30 violinists are women.

Lionel Messi scored in front of 89,000 spectators in Qatar yesterday as Argentina beat Mexico 2-0 — the biggest crowd for a World Cup match since 91,000 watched the 1994 final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.

• The record World Cup crowd was 173,850 at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro in 1950, for Uruguay's 2-1 victory over host Brazil in the final game of that tournament, AP reports.

🇦🇷 Go deeper: BBC, "'Where there is Lionel Messi, there is hope for Argentina."

This is Lobsta Mickey — a long-lost, 700-pound statue of Mickey Mouse with giant lobster claws, which resurfaced at the Concepts sneaker store in Boston.

• The statue was last seen 17 years ago at Quincy Market, where it entertained tourists and shoppers — then disappeared into city lore after it was sold in 2005 at an auction organized by Disney.

Deon Point, Concepts creative director, told The Boston Globe (paywall) he spent five years following online threads — before finally spotting a listing for the relic on eBay.

• The discolored, crumbling Mickey was on a New Jersey lawn.

Point hired a local artist to refurbish and repaint the statue.

• Go deeper.