A summary of today's developments
Britain’s defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has confirmed reports that the UK is donating long-range Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine. Wallace said Ukrainians will have the “best chance to defend themselves”.
The US has serious concerns about the docking of a sanctioned Russian cargo vessel at a South African naval port in December and has raised those concerns directly with multiple South African officials, state department deputy spokesperson, Vedant Patel, told reporters. The US envoy to South Africa said he was confident a Russian ship had picked up weapons in South Africa, in a possible breach of Pretoria’s declared neutrality in the Ukraine conflict. South Africa’s government has begun an independent inquiry into the claims.
Poland’s defence minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, confirmed that the army was aware of a possible missile heading towards the country in December but failed to inform the government. Poland has been on alert for possible spillover of weaponry from the war in neighbouring Ukraine, especially since two people were killed near the border last November by what Warsaw concluded was a misfired Ukrainian air defence missile.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the country needs more time to prepare for a much-anticipated spring counteroffensive, 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 counteroffensives. 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 kilometres.”
Russia’s military operation against Ukraine is “very difficult” but certain goals have been achieved, Tass cited the 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 partly damaged, the governor, Alexander Bogomaz, said.
Belgorod’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, 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, claimed that in the last 24 hours Russians have killed three residents of the Donetsk region, and injured two more.
Updated
The US has serious concerns about the docking of a sanctioned Russian cargo vessel at a South African naval port in December and has raised those concerns directly with multiple South African officials, state department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters.
The US envoy to South Africa said he was confident a Russian ship had picked up weapons in South Africa, in a possible breach of Pretoria’s declared neutrality in the Ukraine conflict.
Updated
