US Sec of State Blinkin, IS a busy man….Wang said at the Munich conference that world leaders need to think “about what kind of efforts we can make to stop this war.” Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to deliver a “peace speech” Friday, the anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Key developments
- Blinken said “we’ve made very clear” to China that providing lethal support to Russia for its war “would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship,” according to an advance transcript of his interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan. Washington’s concern “is based on information” that indicates Chinese companies are considering boosting their aid to Russia from nonlethal to lethal, he said.
- Blinken is in Turkey on an official visit. He will attempt Sunday to persuade Ankara to support Finland’s and Sweden’s bids to join NATO, Reuters reported. Adding countries to the military alliance requires unanimity among its members, and Turkey is the main holdout.
- Russia’s ambassador to Washington responded after Vice President Harris accused Russia of committing “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine in a speech at the Munich conference. Anatoly Antonov accused the Biden administration of attempting to “demonize” Russia, and claimed Washington was trying to “justify its own actions to foment the Ukrainian crisis,” according to a transcript published Sunday by Tass, a Russian state-owned news organization.
- The European Union’s foreign policy chief expressed support for an Estonian proposal to jointly procure munitions to help arm Ukraine. Josep Borrell said in Munich that he “completely” agrees with the proposal, outlined by Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, for E.U. member states to pool resources to buy artillery shells for Ukraine. “We are working on that and it will work,” Borrell said.
Battleground updates
- Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov says he plans to form a mercenary group to compete with the Wagner Group, which has been fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine. Kadyrov regularly lavishes praise on Putin, who installed him as leader in 2007. More than 30,000 Wagner Group fighters, led by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, have been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion last year, the United States said last week.
- The United States is focused on providing weapons that can be used in a Ukrainian counteroffensive this spring, Blinken told ABC News’s Martha Raddatz on “This Week.” Raddatz had asked whether the Pentagon should be sending F-16s to help Zelensky’s forces, but Blinken said Ukraine should not “get fixated on any particular weapons system.” He stressed that training and maintenance were important factors in deciding which supplies should be sent.
- Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said the United States needs to “start training Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 now.” “I’m not worried about provoking Putin,” he told Raddatz. “I want to beat him. And how do you beat him? You beat him by giving the Ukrainians the military capability to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.” Graham, who was at the Munich conference this weekend, agreed with Harris’s assertion that Russia had committed crimes against humanity and called for Putin to face a tribunal.
- Russian forces struck the region of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine Sunday morning, according to Gov. Vitaliy Kim. Two settlements were hit with artillery around 6 a.m. local time, Kim said. According to preliminary information, no one was killed or injured, though Kim said the extent of the damage was still being clarified.
- Balloons spotted by Ukraine’s Armed Forces over Kyiv and Dnipro in the past week were probably Russian, said Britain’s Defense Ministry. The balloons, which carried radar reflectors, “likely represent a new tactic by Russia to gain information about Ukrainian air defence systems and compel the Ukrainians to expend valuable stocks of surface to air missiles and ammunition,” the ministry said. One such balloon may have drifted from Ukraine into Moldovan airspace, the ministry said, leading that country to temporarily close its airspace on Feb. 14.
- The United States has spoken with Elon Musk’s SpaceX about the use of its Starlink satellite technology in Ukraine, Blinken told NBC’s Chuck Todd in an interview that aired Sunday. A SpaceX executive accused the Ukrainian military this month of using Starlink to power drones and said the company had taken steps to prevent unauthorized uses of its communication technology. When asked whether the U.S. government had spoken with Musk and Starlink about the restriction, Blinken said: “Well, I can’t share any conversations we’ve had other than to say we’ve had conversations.”….
image of US Sec of State exiting a Turkish Blackhawk Helicopter…Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters