Summary of the day
Here are all the key developments in the Ukraine war today:
The Ukrainian air force said it struck Russia’s Novocherkassk navy ship during an air attack on Feodosia in Crimea, controlled by Russia. Ukraine said the ship had been destroyed, but Russia said it was only damaged. Footage circulating on several Russian news outlets on Telegram showed powerful explosions and fires over a port area.
The Ukrainian army chief, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi said he was not satisfied with the work of military draft offices that are responsible for mobilising troops to keep up the war effort against Russia. His comments came a day after Ukraine’s parliament published the text of a draft law containing reforms to the army draft programme, including lowering the age of men who can be mobilised to 25 from 27.
Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defence minister, said he wanted “to express deep gratitude” to the British government “for providing basic training to Ukraine’s combat air pilots”.
Russia claimed that its forces had stopped Ukraine’s counteroffensive and are now pushing forward on all fronts.
Japan’s Mitsui & Co has decided to pull its employees out of Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, citing several sources. The decision is yet another blow for the project. Fearing the backlash from US sanctions targeting the project, foreign shareholders have suspended their participation.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, will hold talks with his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, in Moscow on Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry has said. The ministers plan to discuss bilateral ties as well as the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
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Updated
The Ukrainian army chief Gen Valeriy Zaluzhnyi has said he is not satisfied with the work of military draft offices that are responsible for mobilising troops to keep up the war effort against Russia.
Reuters reports:
Zaluzhnyi spoke at his first wartime news conference a day after Ukraine’s parliament published the text of a draft law containing reforms to the army draft programme, including lowering the age of men who can be mobilised to 25 from 27.
The bill’s publication sparked controversy on social media, which appeared to be the prompt for the typically publicity-shy general into a rare effort to speak to the media.
The reforms are highly sensitive for a weary population in the midst of a 22-month-old war, which has no end in sight. Last week, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the military had proposed mobilising an additional 450,000-500,000 people into the army.
Zaluzhnyi acknowledged that figure, but said:
I would not publicly discuss these figures.
We had rather ambitious goals in 2023. I was not disappointed by the level of (foreign assistance) in 2023. Of course it was not the full (amount requested), but it allowed us to conduct confident military operations.
Tensions between Zaluzhnyi and Zelenskiy burst into the open in November after the general was quoted as saying the war was heading towards a stalemate because of the technological state of play on the battlefield, a comment that drew a rebuke from the president’s office.
Zelenskiy and his allies have consistently portrayed a less gloomy view of the war, in which they have said Ukraine can and will drive Russian forces out of every last inch of occupied territory.
Zaluzhnyi said the period since he made his comments had vindicated them:
I received lots of criticism for this, but in time people realised that I was absolutely right.
He said Ukraine and its allies had already identified solutions to the majority of the questions and problems he raised in his comments about the battlefield in November.
On the drafting effort, he said he would support the introduction of electronic army call-ups, a step that would replace or reinforce the current model in which draft officers hand out call-up papers to people in the street or at check points.
Updated
