Ukraine Update…697 days into the Russian Conflict…Part 2

The fight continues in the US Congress over aid to Ukraine…..

The shootdown of a Russian transport with Ukraine POW’s has both sides knocking each other for the situation…

• Russia and Ukraine continue to dispute the circumstances surrounding the crash of a Russian military transport plane in the border region of Belgorod on Wednesday. The crash killed all 74 people on board. Russia claims the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoWs who were to be swapped, and that Ukrainian forces shot it down.

• Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied that it hit the plane, but said Moscow had created a “deliberate threat to the life and safety” of its PoWs by failing to warn Kyiv to deconflict the airspace before the swap. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said: “It is clear that the Russians are playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners, the feelings of their loved ones and the emotions of our society.”

• Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, has told Reuters that the list shared in Russian media of Ukrainian prisoners of war claimed to have been on board the plane that crashed over Belgorod region on Wednesday has discrepancies in it. “We found Ukrainian citizens in the list who have already been previously exchanged,” he said. Reports in Russia have said that investigators will need DNA samples in order to identify the dead.

• Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesperson Andriy Yusov insisted in an interview with Radio Svoboda that Kyiv had not received either a written or verbal request from Russia to secure airspace around the area of Belgorod, and that two other Russian military transport planes, an An-26 and an An-72, were simultaneously in the airspace.

• A Moscow court has jailed Igor Girkin, a prominent ultra-nationalist critic of Vladimir Putin. A former officer for Russia’s FSB security service, Girkin was arrested last summer in his apartment and charged with “calls for extremism” after months of public criticism in which he accused Putin of failing to pursue the war in Ukraine with enough vigour.

• Darya Trepova, 26, has been jailed for 27 years for delivering a bomb that exploded in the hands of a pro-war military blogger last year, killing him on the spot. The Russian woman was convicted by a St Petersburg court of charges including terrorism in connection with the death Vladlen Tatarsky. He was killed by a bomb concealed inside a statuette in his likeness that Trepova had presented to him as a gift during a talk he was giving in a St Petersburg cafe.

• The Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly (Pace) in Strasbourg has unanimously adopted a resolution about the fate of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred and deported by Russia. It calls on national parliaments to adopt resolutions “recognising these crimes as genocide” and asks the international community to collaborate with Ukraine to trace and repatriate missing children. The international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant in March 2023 for Vladimir Putin for overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children.

• Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, visited Kyiv, while Vladimir Putin was in Russia’s Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Lithuania. The Kremlin said the visit had not been intended as a message to Nato members.

• Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has responded to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán wanting more talks between the two nations over Sweden’s application to join Nato by suggesting the pair meet in Brussels. Orbán had extended an invitation for the discussion to take place in Budapest. The speaker of Hungary’s parliament, László Kövér, has said there is no urgency to resolve the situation, and that attempts by opposition parties to convene an emergency session of parliament to debate it are likely to fail….

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