Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said the country needs more time to prepare for a much-anticipated spring counter-offensive, saying “We can go forward and be successful. But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable. So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time.”
Zelenskiy said the army had combat brigades that were ready, but were still short of promised armoured vehicles, which were slowly arriving. He stressed that Ukraine was not prepared to cede any territory for peace, saying: “Everyone will have an idea. They can’t pressure Ukraine into surrendering territories. Why should any country of the world give Putin its territory?”
Zelenskiy again denied any Ukrainian responsibility for the drone incident over the Kremlin, saying: “They constantly look for something to sound like a justification, saying: ‘You do this to us, so we do that to you.’ But it didn’t work. Even for their domestic public, it didn’t work”. Russia has accused Washington and Kyiv of masterminding the attack, which it described as an assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin was not in the Kremlin at the time, and no injuries were caused by the drones.
A Ukrainian military commander has said that Russian forces in Bakhmut had been pushed back by up to 2km in some areas, after counter offensives. Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, who heads Ukraine’s ground forces, made the comments in a post on Telegram. He said: “In some areas of the front, the enemy could not resist the onslaught of the Ukrainian defenders and retreated to a distance of up to two kilometers.”
Russia’s military operation against Ukraine is “very difficult” but certain goals have been achieved, Tass cited Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying on Wednesday. Russia has succeeded in severely damaging Ukraine’s military machine and this work will continue, he added.
A Ukrainian drone attacked an oil storage depot in the Russian border region of Bryansk, the local governor has claimed in a post on his Telegram channel on Thursday. There were no casualties after the attack on the facility near the town of Klintsy, owned by Russia’s Rosneft oil company, though one storage tank was partially damaged, the governor Alexander Bogomaz said.
Belgorod’s governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has claimed that seven settlements in the Russian region have been left without electricity after Ukrainian shelling over the border.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, has claimed that in the last 24 hours Russians have killed three residents of Donetsk region, and wounded two more.
Sweden’s national prosecutor said on Thursday a 50-year-old man had been charged with illegally spreading classified information about a large number of defence installations. Sweden is hoping to be ratified as a member Nato later this year.
Russia’s oil pipeline operator on Wednesday Transneft said that a filling point on the Europe-bound Druzhba pipeline in a border area between Russia and Ukraine had been targeted in a “terrorist” attack, according to the Tass news agency. Transneft said nobody was injured in the incident, which it called a “terrorist attack”, according to Reuters.
France’s anti-terrorism prosecution office on Wednesday announced it had opened an investigation for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity after an AFP video journalist was killed on Tuesday by Grad rocket fire near Chasiv Yar, in eastern Ukraine.
Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin complained Wednesday that his fighters were still not getting enough shells from the official defence ministry. In an audio statement, he said the defence ministry had been holding long meetings on the shell issue but there had been no breakthrough. “We’re not receiving enough shells, we’re only getting 10%,” Prigozhin said, reported Reuters.
The French parliament has called on the EU to formally label the Wagner group terrorists. France’s parliament unanimously passed a non-binding resolution aimed at encouraging the 27 members of the EU to put Wagner on its official list of terrorist organisations.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday he thought the Ukraine Black Sea grain deal could be extended for at least two more months, as officials held the first day of talks on an extension in Istanbul. Russia has said it would not extend the pact beyond 18 May unless a list of demands is met to remove obstacles to its own grain and fertiliser exports. Cavusoglu was speaking to reporters on his return from a trip to Moscow.
