Ukraine’s ministry of defence claimed in total to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed overnight, including nine over Kyiv. Two emergency service workers were killed and three other people injured during a drone attack on Khmelnytskyi, according to the city’s mayor.
Russian forces have escalated shelling and infantry assaults in the Bilohorivka, Svatove-Kupiansk and Kreminna areas of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk province, according to the region’s Ukrainian governor Serhiy Haidai. “Western offensive heavy equipment is on the way and therefore in any week the military command can conduct an operation following the same plan as they did in the Kharkiv region,” Haidai said.
Belarusian anti-war partisans claim to have severely damaged a Russian military aircraft in what an opposition leader has called the “most successful diversion” since the beginning of the war. BYPOL, the Belarusian partisan organisation, said it had used drones to strike the Machulishchy airfield 12km from Minsk, severely damaging a Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs). The damage to the aircraft has not been independently confirmed, although both Russian and Belarusian military bloggers have reported explosions on Sunday at the airfield. One also confirmed “damage to a Russian military transport plane”.
Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Monday that talks with Sweden and Finland regarding their Nato membership bids would resume on 9 March, after a delay in January in the wake of a Qur’an-burning protest. The meeting will take place in Brussels and will include discussion on the implementation of the memorandum signed between the countries. It later emerged that the Qur’an-burning incident in Stockholm was funded by a far-right journalist with links to Kremlin-backed media.
Respect for human rights has gone into reverse, the United Nations chief warned Monday, calling for a renewal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 75 years after its signing. Pointing to the war raging in Ukraine, and threats to rights from soaring poverty, hunger and climate disasters, António Guterres said the declaration was “under assault from all sides”. He said the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most massive violations of human rights” being witnessed in the world today. “It has unleashed widespread death, destruction and displacement,” he said.
The UK’s ministry of defence has claimed that “Russia will likely be concerned that unexplained explosions are occurring” in and around Mariupol, a location “at least 80km away from the frontline … [which] it had probably previously assessed as beyond the range of routine Ukrainian strike capabilities.”
The US is “confident” that China is considering providing lethal equipment to support Russia in Ukraine, according to the CIA director, William Burns. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Burns said he was “confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment” but noted “we also don’t see that a final decision has been made yet, and we don’t see evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment”.
China has always maintained communication with all sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including Kyiv, a foreign ministry spokesperson told a regular news briefing on Monday.
Russia is paying “a great deal of attention” to China’s peace plan to end Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and its details will need to be analysed in detail, the Kremlin has said. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said any initiatives that might bring peace closer were worthy of attention, but that Russia was continuing to prosecute its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine and that, for now, he didn’t see any signs suggesting a peaceful resolution could be achieved.
Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev said in remarks published on Monday that the continued arms supply to Kyiv risks a global nuclear catastrophe, reiterating his threat of nuclear war over Ukraine. Medvedev’s apocalyptic rhetoric has been seen as an attempt to deter the US-led Nato military alliance and Kyiv’s western allies from getting even more involved in the war.
Vladimir Putin has accused the west of seeking to “dismember” Russia and to turn the vast country into a series of weak mini-states. In an interview with the state TV channel Rossiya on Sunday, the Russian president claimed the US and its Nato allies wanted to “inflict a strategic defeat on us”. The aim, he said, was to “make our people suffer”.
Putin has claimed Russia had no choice but to take into account the nuclear capabilities of Nato as the US-led military alliance was seeking the defeat of Russia. “In today’s conditions, when all the leading Nato countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television, according to Tass. “They tried to reshape the world exclusively on their terms. We had no choice but to react,” he said, adding that the west was complicit in Ukraine’s “crimes”.
Gleb Pavlovsky, a Russian political scientist and Vladimir Putin’s former adviser who later became one of his most prominent critics, has died at the age of 71, according to local reports.
