Dealing with the implications of what a LONG WAR would be for the Ukraine and the West……
It is said that Putin is moving to make basic military training in the nation’s schools….
The fight for Bakhmut continues….
F-16 talk continues…..
Both side’s waiting to lanuch their Spring offense’s….
Russian forces were wrestling for control of villages in eastern Ukraine near the beleaguered city of Bakhmut over the weekend, the latest flash point in a battle that Moscow views as crucial for its push to seize the whole of the eastern region of Donbas.
Ukraine’s general staff said on Sunday that its soldiers had repelled attacks on the small village of Blahodatne and several other settlements in the area. The statement came a day after Russia’s Wagner group, a private military company that has conducted much of the fighting around Bakhmut on Moscow’s behalf, claimed that its forces had captured Blahodatne.
“Blahodatne is under our control,” Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman and the head of the Wagner group, said on Saturday in a statement posted on a website for one of his companies. Russia’s defense ministry has not confirmed the report and the claim could not be independently verified. Mr. Prigozhin has sought to cast his mercenaries as the most effective fighting forcein the area and previously has claimed credit for battlefield advances ahead of Kremlin confirmation.
Blahodatne lies between Soledar, a salt-mining town that Russian forces recently captured after weeks of intense fighting, and a road that runs north from the city of Bakhmut. The road serves as a crucial supply line for Ukrainian forces defending the city….
[Zelensky] He also reiterated his plea for Western nations to supply Ukraine with more potent weapons, including the Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, to help Kyiv defend against Russian attacks from places far from the front line. Kyiv has long argued that it needs the U.S.-made weapons to strike Russian targets in places such as Crimea — which have been used to launch missile and drone attacks across Ukrainian cities, with devastating effect. Washington has so far resisted Kyiv’s calls, concerned that providing Ukraine with a weapon capable of hitting targets inside Russia could escalate the nearly year-long conflict.
“We have to make time our weapon. We must speed up the events, speed up the supply and opening of new necessary weaponry options for Ukraine,” Zelensky said during his address.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
- “In the first half of the [20th] century, too many mistakes were made in Europe that led to horrific tragedies. There was also a major Olympic mistake. The Olympic movement and terrorist states should definitely not intersect,” Zelensky said during his nightly address.
- Germany and Poland are set to begin tank training programs for Ukrainian forces in days as they rush deliveries for spring. Ukraine has said that it needs at least 300 tanks to support a large-scale spring offensive. Several days of nonstop negotiations last week broke a stalemate among Kyiv’s allies, paving the way for the delivery of German-made Leopard 2 tanks and, eventually, the U.S. M1 Abrams.
- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz defended the decision to supply tanks, but he said Germany would avoid sending troops or bringing NATO into a war against Russia, according to a government readout of Scholz’s interview with Tagesspiegel. In the interview, which published this weekend, Scholz said his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin should continue because they show that the West will not budge from its demand that Russian forces leave Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti that Putin is open to more talks, though none are scheduled.
- Britain’s Defense Ministry said Ukrainian tank operators have arrived in the United Kingdom to receive training on how to use the Challenger 2 tanks that London recently pledged to send Kyiv. The ministry posted photos of more than a dozen individuals, with their faces blurred, disembarking from a Royal Air Force plane.
- Intense fighting continues on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, where Western and Ukrainian officials and military analysts have warned that Moscow is probably gearing up for a major offensive in the spring, in a bid to regain the upper hand after a string of Ukrainian military successes in recent months.
- Ukraine’s energy system remains under heavy strain, with the country’s electric transmission operator warning on Sunday that Russian attacks on Thursday “caused significant damage” to parts of the high-voltage network. Ukrenergo saidone of the country’s thermal power plants was shut down for technical repairs, further reducing the electricity supply. Repair work is ongoing, it added.
- Russian artillery struck a hospital, a school, residential buildings and municipal facilities in Kherson on Sunday, Zelensky said in his nightly address. Three people were killed and six injured, he said, adding that the regional authority needed blood donations to treat the wounded. Two of the wounded were nurses, he added.
- Five people were killed and at least 15 wounded in Russian attacks against villages and towns in Donetsk overnight, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said. Private homes and businesses were damaged, he said.
- Russia and Belarus tested Kinzhal hypersonic missiles as part of a two-week joint air drill between the countries, the news agency Interfax reported, citing a television station affiliated with the Belarusian Defense Ministry. Kinzhal missiles can sustain hypersonic speeds — more than five times the speed of sound — and follow low trajectories, and are maneuverable, so they are difficult even for sophisticated air defense systems to detect. Russia has previously used them in Ukraine.
- A Russian official dismissed a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that explosions are occurring “almost daily” outside the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Renat Karchaa, an adviser to the head of Russia’s Rosenergoatom nuclear power engineering company, described the U.N. nuclear agency’s report as a “provocation,” according to Russian news agency Tass. The plant is Europe’s biggest, with six nuclear reactors.
- The Russian Education Ministry’s move to incorporate elements of basic military training into the country’s secondary school curriculum beginning in the next school year is a sign of “the increasingly militarised atmosphere in wartime Russia,” the British Defense Ministry said. “Similar training was mandatory in schools up to 1993,” shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it added…..