Ukraine Update…930 Days of the Russian Conflict….Long Range Ukraine Missile Decision?

POW exchange…..

Still no Biden ok annoucment for long range missile usage by Ukraine with Western missiles…

Russia says Biden HAS made up his mind….

Iran is open to talks after getting hit with more sanction with reports that Iran missiles are being shipped to Russia to use against Ukraine civilian targets….

Russia. keeps pounding border Ukraine locations and has made a gain in the Donbas region….

A threat to bomb Kyiv…..

 

• Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war, with each side releasing 103 people, the Interfax news agency cited Russia’s defence ministry as saying on Saturday. The ministry said the Russian soldiers exchanged on Saturday had been taken prisoner in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian forces captured territory there last month in their first major incursion into Russia.

• Ukraine has made a new call on the West to allow it to strike deeper into Russia after a meeting between US and British leaders a day earlier produced no visible shift in their policy on the use of long-range weapons. “Russian terror begins at weapons depots, airfields and military bases inside the Russian Federation,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak said Saturday.

• US historian and author Timothy Snyder on Saturday led a charity run in Kyiv to raise awareness of the conditions under which Ukrainian prisoners of war are held in Russia as the conflict approaches a third winter. The race came after a recent escalation in Russian missile and drone attacks, largely aimed at Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure.

• Iran’s foreign minister said that Tehran was open to diplomacy to solve disputes but not “threats and pressure”, state media reported on Saturday, after the US and three European powers imposed sanctions against the country’s aviation sector. Abbas Araqchi’s comments come a day after the European Union’s chief diplomat said the bloc is considering new sanctions targeting Iran’s aviation sector, in reaction to reports Tehran supplied Russia with ballistic missiles in its war against Ukraine.

• Nato could have done more to arm Ukraine to try to prevent Russia’s invasion in 2022, the outgoing head of the western military alliance said in an interview released on Saturday. “Now we provide military stuff to a war – then we could have provided military stuff to prevent the war,” Natosecretary general Jens Stoltenberg told German weekly newspaper FAS.

• Russian forces shelled 15 border areas of Ukraine’s Sumy region a total of 84 times on Friday, killing two people and wounding nine, the regional authority said. The authority, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said two people had died near the town of Yampil, Reuters reported.

• Russian forces have taken control of the village of Zhelanne Pershe in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the state-run TASS news agency cited the Russian defence ministry as saying on Saturday.

• Former British defence secretary Ben Wallace said the wrangling over Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles in Russia was just benefiting Vladimir Putin. The Tory former minister said: “I’m just disappointed that it’s yet again, another tug of war around another capability.”

• Senior Russian security official and former president Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday Russia could destroy Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with non-nuclear weapons in response to the use of western long-range missiles by Ukraine. Medvedev said Moscow already had formal grounds to use nuclear weapons since Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, but could instead use some of its new weapon technologies to reduce Kyiv to “a giant melted spot” when its patience runs out.

• Moscow knows that the West has made a decision on whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range missiles and has informed Kyiv, the TASS news agency cited Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Saturday. Ryabkov did not clarify what the purported decision was, but said that since Moscow’s verbal warnings to the West against further escalation have not worked, Russia would need to switch to sending signals in different ways.

• Joe Biden dismissed sabre-rattling threats made by Vladimir Putin as the US president met with the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, at the White House on Friday. Biden said he did not accept that Ukraine using western-made Storm Shadow missiles to bomb targets in Russia would amount to Nato going to war with Moscow. At a foreign policy summit on Friday afternoon, Biden said: “I do not think much about Vladimir Putin.”

• Earlier, Russia announced it had revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats in Moscow on accusations of espionage. Moscow’s FSB domestic spy agency said on Friday that it had acted on documents showing part of the Foreign Office was helping coordinate what it called “the escalation of the political and military situation” in Ukraine.

• Moscow’s ambassador to the UN told the security council on Friday that loosening the missile strike restrictions would mark an escalation to “direct war” between Moscow and Nato. Washington officials accused Putin of trying to scare Nato countries away from supporting Ukraine, reports Andrew Roth. In Europe, leaders played down Putin’s threats. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said: “I would not attach excessive importance to the latest statements from President Putin. They rather show the difficult situation the Russians have on the front.”

• Zelenskiy said the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s border region of Kursk had produced the desired result of slowing Moscow’s advance on another front in Ukraine’s east. The Ukrainian president said in Kyiv on Friday that Russia’s counterattack in Kursk produced no major successes – contradicting Vladimir Putin’s accounts of Russian advances on both fronts. Zelenskiy said Russia had about 40,000 troops on the Kursk front. “So far we have seen no serious [Russian] success.” Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday its troops had taken back 10 villages out of 100 that Kyiv had occupied. The battlefield reports of either side were not able to be independently verified……

More….

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 14, 2024Sep 14, 2024 – ISW Press