Live – Ukraine: According to Zelensky, the situation around Bagmouth is “more and more complicated”

“Our pilots and our anti-aircraft units and other specialists from our Air Force are doing a wonderful job,” the Ukrainian president said in his daily address. “But for our partners we can only fully protect our skies when the ban on air traffic is fully lifted.”

Ukraine has asked its Western allies for weeks to provide fighter jets to fight an invasion launched by Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged on Monday evening that the situation for his troops around Bagmouth in the east of the country was becoming more difficult.

“The situation is getting more and more complicated,” he said in his daily message. “The enemy is systematically destroying everything that can be used to defend our positions,” he added, calling the Ukrainian soldiers involved in the battle “real heroes.”

The European Union on Monday announced a one-year extension of its sanctions against Belarus over the continued repression of the Alexander Lukashenko regime and its support for the Russian-led war in Ukraine.

The ban has been extended until February 28, 2024, the European Council, a body representing the 27 EU member states, announced on Monday.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, visiting Kiev, announced on Monday the transfer of $1.2 billion in budget support to Ukraine.

“This is the first tranche of nearly $10 billion in budget support that the United States will provide in the coming months,” he said during a speech.

“Maintaining an effective government is essential to Ukraine’s ability to respond to Russian aggression,” he said.

Vladimir Putin on Monday excoriated American actor Steven Seagal, the former Hollywood star who has become a staunch defender of the Russian president in recent years and, most recently, for his attacks on Ukraine.

The Russian president signed a decree awarding the actor an “Order of Friendship” for “his great contribution to the development of international cultural and humanitarian cooperation,” said a document posted on the Russian government’s official legal website.

Seventy-year-old aikido expert Steven Seagal was one of America’s action movie stars of the 1980s and 1990s. As his career waned, the native of Lansing, Michigan gradually grew closer to authoritarian leaders, particularly the head of the Kremlin.

In 2016, he retained his American citizenship and received a Russian passport from the hands of Vladimir Putin. Founded from Russia, he joined a nationalist party in 2021.

Ukraine will be ready to launch a counteroffensive in the spring, said Vadim Skibitsky, a representative of Ukraine’s security intelligence. A comment to DW.

However, he said the exact timing of the attack would depend on several factors, including the supply of Western weapons.

One of the strategic objectives of the counteroffensive was an attempt to “drive a wedge between Crimea and the Russian mainland on the Russian front in the south.”

The objective of the counteroffensive is to liberate all occupied parts of Ukraine, including Crimea. “We will not stop until the country is restored to its 1991 borders,” stressed the representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence.

According to the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Service, Moscow has less than 100 high-precision cruise missiles, which are mostly used in bombers – “Kalibr”, X-101, X-555.

“That’s why the Russians decided to use the aircraft to increase their offensive capabilities,” service representative Andrei Chernyak said in a comment. RBC-Ukraine.

According to him, Russia still has thousands of missiles, but uses them more than it produces: “They can no longer produce more than 30-40 missiles per month. The old missiles they have in service fail to hit the target. Malfunctions or limited kill radius”.

Ukrainian intelligence also indicates that the Russian military has not abandoned the idea of ​​destroying Ukraine’s energy system. Apart from the energy sector, the enemy wants to destroy the fuel and energy sector to stop the supply of petroleum products.

Two Russian soldiers captured in Ukraine in 2022 have been sentenced to 9 and 10 years in prison for bombing residential areas in eastern Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said in a statement on Monday.

“Following investigations, irrefutable evidence has been collected of the guilt of two more militants who joined the ranks of the occupying groups of the occupying countries in the beginning of the large-scale invasion,” explained the press release issued by the press agency. Reuters. Both “actively took part in attacking Ukrainian cities on the Eastern Front”.

“Any attempt to come up with plans that would allow the conflict to move in a peaceful direction deserves attention. The plan of our Chinese friends also receives this great attention,” the Kremlin spokesman said. Dmitry Peskov.

“Meanwhile, there are currently no preconditions for negotiations on Ukraine, and the special operation is progressing toward its objectives,” he continued.

“Crimea cannot be returned to Ukraine, the peninsula is an integral part of Russia,” he added.

Moscow on Monday described as “absurd” new sanctions imposed by the European Union on Russia, a year after an attack in Ukraine targeting 121 individuals and companies.

“All this is ridiculous. We can see them putting anyone under sanctions (…) to create new lists,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, while allowing the measures “are not going to ban” people.

One year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brussels on Friday evening approved the tenth set of economic sanctions against Russia.

NATO membership talks between the two Nordic countries of Turkey, Sweden and Finland will resume on March 9 and will be held in Brussels, where the Atlantic alliance’s headquarters are located, a Turkish minister announced on Monday.

After several anti-Turkish and anti-Islamic demonstrations in Stockholm, Turkey halted the talks in late January, postponing the trilateral meeting initially planned for February.

While acknowledging some progress in the talks, the head of Turkish diplomacy assessed on Monday that “satisfactory action has not been taken by Sweden”.

Sweden is accused of harboring Kurdish militants and sympathizers, particularly the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which it describes as “terrorists”.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered the worst human rights abuse we know today,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the start of the 52nd session of the Human Rights Council (HRC), which will last nearly six weeks.

At the opening ceremony of the 52nd session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Dürk also condemned the return of “old dictatorships and “aggressive wars from the past. And with global consequences, we saw it again in Europe with Russia’s senseless aggression against Ukraine.

Ukrainian Ambassador Yevheniia Filipenko appealed for “strengthening” of the resolution defining the investigators’ mandate, but it is not certain that the final text reflects this desire, as Kiev and its Western allies must convince some countries reluctant to criticize Moscow. To increase the number of boycotters.

Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned in the Ukrainian documentary yearThe possibility of a Russian defeat was reported on Sunday The Times. According to the Ukrainian president, this hypothesis would mean the end of the regime of Vladimir Putin, who has been in power since the early 2000s.

The Ukrainian president predicted that the Russian leader would be ousted by a member of his inner circle. “There will definitely come a time when the weakness of Putin’s regime will be felt within the state. Then predators will devour a predator. They will find a reason to kill a killer,” he said.

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The Human Rights Council (HRC) has never sat for such a long time. This United Nations session begins on Monday in Geneva, Switzerland. It ends on Thursday.

Almost 150 senior leaders will speak, including heads of French, American, Chinese, Iranian and Ukrainian diplomats, which is also a record.

Moscow is expected to send its deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabko, on Thursday. Despite calls from NGOs, there is no certainty that ambassadors will walk out of the room during his speech as he did last year, as his leader, Sergey Lavrov, intervened via video conference.

Tensions will be high at the end of the session during a vote on whether to continue the work of investigators on Ukraine, who will submit their first written report on March 20 after already reporting on war crimes in September.

This straightforward salute is dedicated to the war in Ukraine, 368 days after the Russian offensive began.

Two people were killed and three others wounded in Khmelnytskyi, western Ukraine, officials said. One of the dead was a rescue worker killed in the line of duty, Khmelnytskyi’s mayor, Oleksandr Simsichin, reported in a telegram about the “damaged buildings” from the strikes.

A short time later, the governor of the Khmelnytskyi region, Sergey Kamali, informed him by telegram of the death of the second rescuer, who was wounded in the hospital.

In total, Russia launched “14 Iranian-made Shahed combat drones” against Ukraine, the Ukrainian Air Force said Monday morning, and 11 of these drones were shot down by anti-aircraft defenses.