Efforts to secure a ‘safe’ zone around the occupied Ukraine nucleaer plant, which is the largest in Europe is going nowhere…
Putin is trying to find friends in Africa and now in India….
Ukraine President Zelensky, like Russian Leader Putin, does NOT want to give up Bakhmut which the Russian’s and Ukraine each hold roughly half …….The place could be a ‘peace’ prize key….
Zelensky is still asking for more weapons to be delivered faster….
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“It is obvious that military activity is increasing in this whole region, so every possible measure and precaution should be taken so that the plant is not attacked,” the U.N.’s top nuclear official said.
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Russia and Ukraine are ramping up forces in the region of a nuclear complex, the U.N.’s watchdog warns.
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Read the letter a Russian girl wrote to her father before his sentencing over an anti-war comment.
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Putin’s top security adviser holds talks with India’s prime minister as Moscow seeks closer ties.
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Ukraine, Poland and six other countries call for Meta and other tech giants to fight disinformation.
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Germany, stressing its long-term commitment, promises additional military aid to Ukraine.
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Ukraine says it will use legal means to remove pro-Russian monks from a revered Orthodox site.
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The State Department proposes a joint tribunal with allies to try Russia’s leaders….
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Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
- Grossi’s visit is part of an ongoing effort to protect the plant by securing a deal with Russia and Ukraine, but negotiations have not succeeded so far. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Associated Press in an interview published Wednesday that he was not optimistic that a deal would materialize soon.
- “Even if a [protection] zone is established Russia will ignore it,” said Ivan Samoyduk, the Ukrainian deputy mayor of Enerhodar, the city where the plant is located. “The situation will only become less dangerous when the station is returned to the Ukrainian side.”
- Samoyduk said he has been in touch with civilians and plant workers in Enerhodar who report widespread abuse and allegations of torture at the hands of Russian forces in the area. “They intimidate, they do everything to make it impossible to have any will, any independence,” he said, so Russia can maintain its hold on the plant and the surrounding area.
- Zelensky said Ukrainian forces must hang on to the front-line city of Bakhmut. A loss there, he told the AP, would provide Russia’s leader with greater leverage to negotiate a peace deal that is unfavorable to Ukraine. “Our society will feel tired,” he said. “Our society will push me to have compromise with them.”
- In the past 21 days, the Russians have not made any progress in Bakhmut “whatsoever,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news briefing Wednesday.
- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said calls from some nations for a cease-fire in Ukraine could be a “very cynical trap” designed to allow Russia to consolidate the territory it has illegally seized and “use the time to rest and refit and then reattack.” While appeals for “the guns to be silent” can be tempting, Blinken said Tuesday, “we have to be very, very careful.” China called in February for a cease-fire, while Russia made a unilateral call for a 36-hour cease-fire the previous month during Orthodox Christmas.
- A Russian man is facing seven years in jail for criticizing Russia’s bombing of Kyiv and Mariupol on social media. Mikhail Simonov, 62, has been accused of spreading “fake news” about the army, under draconian wartime censorship laws. According to a report by Sota Vision, a Russian news outlet, Simonov posted on the Russian social media website VKontakte last year that Russia was “killing children and women.” Simonov was allegedly denounced by a woman who saw his post on her feed and called a government hotline. The woman told the Moscow court that she was angered by the “solid lump of liberalism” she saw on her the feed, and that Simonov had “hurt” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
- Russian forces occupy about 65 percent of the city of Bakhmut, according to analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, citing geolocated footage. Russian-backed fighters continue to make gains within the front-line city that has been the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting in recent months, the Washington-based think tank said. It added that Russian mercenaries fighting for the Wagner Group have probably seized an industrial complex in Bakhmut’s north.
- “The battle for Bakhmut today has already practically destroyed the Ukrainian army and, unfortunately, it has also badly damaged the Wagner private military company,” Wagner Group head Yevgeniy Prigozhin said in an audio message posted to social media Monday. He vowed to keep fighting for the city, the battle over which has assumed a symbolic significance for both sides, analysts say.
- Zelensky said the fighting in Ukraine could be over sooner “if the world is faster, if the world is more determined,” in an apparent appeal for accelerated support from the West. “Russian aggression can end much faster than is sometimes said,” he declared in his nightly address. In recent days, Kyiv has received tanks from Britain and Germany and armored vehicles from the United States…..