Ukraine Update…291 days into the Russian move on the Ukraine

Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

• Earlier on Friday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry denied a Japanese newspaper’s report that the country had provided weapons to Russia, after White House claims Thursday that North Korea has been covertly supplying Russia with artillery rounds. “We can confirm that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to Wagner, which paid for the equipment,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday.
• As of the next Russian school year, which begins in September 2023, basic military training is to be required in schools, according to the country’s Education Ministry, state media outlets reported Friday.
• Ukraine is set to open 10 new embassies across Africa, Zelensky announced Friday. “There is colossal economic potential and considerable diplomatic avenues” for Ukrain in the Global South, he said during his nightly address, Reuters reported.
• Wagner mercenary forces have been particularly active in and around the city of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, John Kirby, the communications coordinator for the National Security Council, said Thursday, adding that 40,000 of the estimated 50,000 Wagner personnel fighting in Ukraine are convicts recruited from Russian prisons. The founder and controller of the Wagner Group, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a key ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s, denounced the reports of North Korean weapons shipments as “gossip and speculation.”
• Putin publicly called his invasion of Ukraine a “war” for the first time Thursday. The change sparked angeramong critics of the Russian president who pointed out that others had been prosecuted for challenging the Kremlin-approved euphemism “special military operation” previously used to describe the war. A municipal lawmaker from St. Petersburg, Nikita Yuferev, published a complaint against Putin on Twitter, in which he said he had asked the prosecutor general to investigate the Russian president for violating the Kremlin’s own laws.

• Russian attacks on the southern Kherson region have continued, the local governor said Friday, with two people killed as Russian forces shelled the region 61 times the previous day. In the regional capital, which has the same name, civilian buildings were struck as the city was shelled 30 times, Yaroslav Yanushevich wrote on Telegram. The Washington Post is unable to independently verify his report.
• A car exploded in the Russian-held city of Melitopol, the Russian news agency Tass reported Friday. At least two people were injured, according to Vladimir Rogov, the head of the pro-Moscow We Together with Russia movement in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, who told Tass that “the causes and circumstances are being investigated.” In September, an explosion hit a crowded market in Melitopol on the eve of an illegal Russian referendum to annex Zaporizhzhia and four other Ukrainian regions. Russian and Ukrainian authorities exchanged blame for that blast.
• The Kremlin’s spokesman said Friday that there had been “no preliminary contacts” between Russia and the United States on any future contact between the two countries’ leaders. Asked about President Biden’s previous comments that he would be willing to meet Putin if he showed an interest in ending the war, spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated Moscow’s position that “any conflict ends at the negotiating table” but added that the “special military operation” would end when Russia achieved the “goals” it had “set for itself.”….

More…