In a video address Wednesday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had summoned his top military and defense chiefs for a report “on the situation with the plane.”
Zelensky did not specifically confirm the deaths of POWs, but spoke in a grave tone. The president said that he had spoken to Ukraine’s military leadership regarding its “use of the air force” — an implicit acknowledgment that Kyiv downed the aircraft — and that the military intelligence directorate “is engaged in finding out the fate of all prisoners.”….
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Hungary on Sweden NATO entry …
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary pledged on Wednesday to push legislators to vote for Sweden’s admittance into NATO, as he faced mounting pressure as the last holdout blocking its entry to the military alliance.
But Mr. Orban’s intervention, which offered no timeline for a vote and repeated a longstanding assertion that a final decision is not his to make, even though he essentially controls Parliament, left unanswered a question that has shadowed Hungary’s long foot-dragging over NATO’s expansion.
Why “are we messing with the Swedes?” an opposition legislator, Tamas Harangozo, asked nearly a year ago when Mr. Orban’s party, whose large majority in Parliament invariably follows his instructions, abruptly dropped plans to vote on Sweden’s NATO membership.
That question took on urgent relevance this week when Turkey’s Parliament voted to accept Sweden into NATO. That left Hungary as the last big obstacle impeding efforts to boost Europe’s security in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine….
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 24, 2024
Jan 24, 2024 – ISW Press
A Russian Il-76 military transport aircraft crashed in Belgorod Oblast, Russia, on January 24. Geolocated footage posted by various Russian sources shows the Il-76 crashing in Yablonovo, Belgorod Oblast (about 50km northeast of Belgorod City). The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that the Il-76 was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) and was en route to a pre-arranged POW exchange at the Kolotylivka border-crossing checkpoint between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian MoD accused Ukraine of hitting the plane with two unspecified missiles, killing the 65 POWs, six Russian crew members, and three Russian military personnel. Senior Russian propagandist and Editor-in-Chief of state-controlled outlet RT Margarita Simonyan published a list of the names of the Ukrainian POWs supposedly on the flight, but several Russian and Ukrainian sources noted that at least one of the alleged POWs had already been exchanged in a previous POW swap on January 3.