A summary of today’s developments
Russia’s defence ministry said its forces carried out a “massive strike” on critically important energy facilities of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex on Friday. Ukraine’s energy minister, German Galushchenko, has said Russia hit power facilities in six regions with missiles and drones, causing blackouts across most of the country. Ukraine’s state-run energy operator Ukrenergo has said the situation in the country’s energy system is challenging but controlled.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, has said it could take two years for Russia to fully control the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, two regions whose capture Moscow has stated as a key goal of the war. “If we have to get to the Dnipro, then it will take about three years,” Prigozhin added, referring to a larger area that would extend to the vast Dnipro River that runs roughly north to south, bisecting Ukraine.
Russian forces must capture the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut to proceed with their campaign, Prigozhin said in the same interview, while acknowledging that Ukrainian troops were mounting fierce resistance. Russian forces have been attempting to encircle and capture Bakhmut, a city in the eastern Donbas region, which has become the focal point of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and of Moscow’s drive to regain battlefield momentum.
Russia is ready for negotiations with Ukraine, but without preconditions, state media have reported the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Vershinin, as saying. In an interview with state-run Zvezda television, Vershinin said it was not Ukraine, but the US and the EU that should make the decision on talks with Russia. Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, who headed the country’s negotiating team in the early phases of the conflict, said “talks are out of the question”.
Half of Russia’s main battle tanks in Ukraine have probably been captured or destroyed in combat, a senior US defence official has said. Celeste Wallander, the assistant defence secretary for international security affairs, did not provide an exact figure for the number of tanks lost since Russia invaded last February but her estimate comes as Ukraine is set to receive an influx of heavy western tanks from its supporters.
The “increasingly direct rivalry between the Russian ministry of defence and Wagner” is likely a “key factor” in the alleged termination of the Russian mercenary group’s prisoner recruitment drive, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said. Wagner founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Thursday that the group had “completely stopped” recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine. The MoD intelligence update states that the regular Russian military had “likely now also deployed the vast majority of the reservists called up under ‘partial mobilisation”.
Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, has said he and Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the Turkish embassy in Kyiv to commemorate the victims of Monday’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Ukraine has sent 88 rescue experts to help search flattened buildings for survivors, erect tents and offer first aid. The team includes specialists in search and rescue operations, doctors, dog handlers and firefighters.
Russia’s sports minister, Oleg Matytsin, has said Ukraine’s call to ban Russian athletes from the 2024 Paris Olympics was “unacceptable”, state media are reporting. He described the call as “a blatant desire to destroy the unity of international sport and the international Olympic movement”. His remarks came as a group of 35 countries will demand that Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from the 2024 Olympics, according to the Lithuanian sports minister, Jurgita Šiugždinienė.
A proposed resolution for adoption by the UN’s general assembly has underlined the need for peace ensuring Ukraine’s “sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity”. The draft resolution from supporters of Ukraine, on the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is broader and less detailed than Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s 10-point peace plan he announced in November.
Zemfira, one of Russia’s most popular singers, has been placed on a list of “foreign agents” on grounds that she supported Ukraine and criticised Russia’s “special military operation” in that country, according to the Russian justice ministry. The ministry has added several other people to its “foreign agents” list, including opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, and activists Aleksandra Kazantseva and Tatyana Nazambaeva for “LGBT propaganda”.
Immigration authorities in Argentina are cracking down on Russian women who since the invasion of Ukraine have started travelling to Buenos Aires to give birth in order to gain Argentinian citizenship for their children. The director of Argentina’s immigration office, Florencia Carignano, said on Friday that a judicial investigation has been launched into what she described as a lucrative business that promises Argentinian passports for the Russian parents.
Here is the full story on the boss of the Russian mercenary Wagner group saying it could take Russia two years to seize the entire east of Ukraine which suggests at least some key figures in Moscow are gearing up for a protracted conflict, writes Luke Harding and Dan Sabbagh.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has emerged from the shadows to become a high-profile figure since the start of the war, suggested Russia’s focus was now on capturing the rest of the Donbas region it has not occupied since the start of the war nearly a year ago.
Doing so would take “about one and half to two more years of work”, the ally of president Vladimir Putin said. If the goal was to occupy all of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River, this would “take about three years”, he said.
Ukrainian officials expect an imminent Russian onslaught, possibly before the first anniversary of the start of the war on 24 February, although a renewed advance on the capital, Kyiv, is not thought likely, after an advance failed badly last year.
