No explanation was given immediately for the latest changes in a wide-reaching personnel shakeup over recent months. It included the dismissal on Tuesday of Oleksii Danilov, who served as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, and Valerii Zaluzhnyi as head of the armed forces on Feb. 8. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom earlier this month.
Ukraine’s air force said Saturday that Russia launched 12 Shahed drones overnight, nine of which were shot down, and fired four missiles into eastern Ukraine.
Russia unleashed a barrage of 38 missiles, 75 airstrikes and 98 attacks from multiple rocket launchers over the last 24 hours, Ukraine’s armed forces said in social media posts.
Two people were killed and one wounded in Russian shelling in Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk province, regional Gov. Vadym Filashkin said Saturday.
Ukrainian energy company Centrenergo announced Saturday that the Zmiiv Thermal Power Plant, one of the largest thermal power plants in the eastern Kharkiv region, was completely destroyed following Russian shelling last week. Power outage schedules were still in place for around 120,000 people in the region, where 700,000 people had lost electricity after the plant was hit on March 22….
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- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said if his country does not get promised US military aid blocked by disputes in Congress, then its forces will have to “retreat, step by step, in small steps”.
- US authorities asked American companies to stop shipping goods to more than 600 foreign parties over fears the items could be diverted to Russia for use in its invasion of Ukraine. The US Department of Commerce sent letters to at least 20 companies that make and sell products found in missiles and drones recovered inside Ukraine….
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Mar 30, 2024 – ISW Press
The Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (ROC MP), a Kremlin-controlled organization and a known tool within the Russian hybrid warfare toolkit, held the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on March 27 and 28 and approved an ideological and policy document tying several Kremlin ideological narratives together in an apparent effort to form a wider nationalist ideology around the war in Ukraine and Russia’s expansionist future. The ROC MP intensified Kremlin rhetoric about Russia’s war in Ukraine and cast it as an existential and civilizational “holy war,” a significant inflection for Russian authorities who have so far carefully avoided officially framing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as any kind of “war.”