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‘Potentially, this is extremely dangerous,’ Kremlin foreign minister says
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A day in the life of a frontline medic in Donbas | On The Ground
The Kremlin has warned the West against sending long-range missiles to Ukraine as several countries pledge more support for Kyiv.
“Potentially, this is extremely dangerous, it will mean bringing the conflict to a whole new level, which, of course, will not bode well from the point of view of global and pan-European security,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier.
His comments came as Ukraine ramped up its calls for Western countries to send more aid as the war fast approaches its one-year anniversary.
Later in the afternoon, a group of 10 countries said in a statement they would send more support to Ukraine. The aid from countries including Estonia, Latvia and Poland will include tens of stinger air defence systems, s-60 anti-aircraft guns, machine guns and training, according to a statement.
Allies have mostly held off on sending the tanks requested by Ukraine. Britain was left as an outlier in pledging its Challenger 2 models after Germany blocked Poland and Lithuania from sending their own tanks.
CIA director William Burns visited Kyiv last week to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, according to a US official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mr Zelensky and his senior intelligence officials shared Kyiv’s key concerns about how long Ukraine could expect US and Western assistance to continue following Republicans’ takeover of the House, reported The Washington Post.
The CIA director conveyed to the war-time president about the urgency of the moment on the battlefield and acknowledged that at some point assistance would be harder to come by, The Post reported citing the people aware of the matter.
Mr Burns has briefed Zelensky repeatedly since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last February, passing on US intelligence findings about Moscow’s war plans and intentions.
CIA Director William Burns visited Kyiv last week to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Central African Republic (CAR) prime minister Felix Moloua held talks in Moscow with the leadership of Russia’s Defence Ministry, Russian news agencies reported.
The two sides discussed regional security issues and “noted the importance of Russian-Central African ties in the defence sphere”, Interfax news agency quoted the ministry as saying.
Russia has been jockeying with France in recent years for influence in Francophone Africa, not least in the CAR, a gold- and diamond-rich country of 4.7 million people.
Since 2018 the CAR government, which is fighting several rebel insurgencies, has been assisted by hundreds of Russian operatives including many from the private military contractor Wagner Group, prominent in Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine.
Western allies are discussing further military support for Ukraine amid intense pressure on Germany to authorise the release of its Leopard 2 battle tanks to bolster Kyiv’s forces in their fight against Russia.
Defence ministers and military chiefs from around 50 nations are expected to take part in the talks convened by US defence secretary Lloyd Austin at Ramstein – the main US airbase in Europe – in Germany today.
It follows the announcement at the weekend that the UK is to become the first nation to respond to president Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for modern western tanks with the dispatch of 14 British Army Challenger 2s.
Germany is under pressure to release its Leopard 2 battle tanks after the UK pledged 14 Challenger 2s.
The US has announced a $2.5bn package of military aid including armoured military vehicles, rockets and artillery shells for Ukraine in a major boost for the war-hit country which is losing ground against Russian attacks in the eastern sector.
Ukraine will now receive 59 Bradley fighting vehicles, 90 Stryker armoured personnel carriers, 53 mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles and 350 high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, the US Department of Defence said in a statement.
A staple in the US army, the armoured Bradley carries a powerful gun and has been used to carry Americans troops around battlefields since the mid-1980s.
The latest assistance package also includes additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), eight Avenger air-defence systems, tens of thousands of artillery rounds and about 2,000 anti-armour rockets, the defence department said.
Ukrainian forces fighting in the Donbas town of Soledar have admitted to “stepping back” from the site of heavy fighting, which Russian mercenary group Wagner claimed to have captured last week.
“It’s quite close. One kilometre,” a Ukrainian unit commander named Andriy told BBC yesterday.
He said his soldiers have withdrawn from the town in a controlled and tactical move before a planned counter-attack.
The Volodymyr Zelensky administration has not confirmed the fall of Soledar yet and has maintained that the “battle continues”.
“We have a tough situation here,” Andriy said, and added that the Ukrainian soldiers are killing “50-100 enemy people” every day.
Two Iranian-born Swedish brothers have been given lengthy prison sentences for spying for Russia and its military intelligence service GRU for a decade.
The oldest of the two naturalised Swedes, Peyman Kia, was sentenced to life, while his younger brother, Payam Kia, was sentenced to nine years and 10 months.
They had appeared before Stockholm District Court, where they faced charges of working together to pass information to Russia between 28 September 2011 and 20 September 2021. A life sentence in Sweden generally means a minimum of 20 to 25 years in prison.
Moldova has requested air defence systems from its allies as it looks to strengthen its capabilities as the war in neighbouring Ukraine continues, but Russian efforts to destabilise the country have so far failed, its president said.
“We have requested air surveillance and defence systems,” Maia Sandu said. “We understand that Ukraine is a priority and should receive that but we [also] hope to receive some.”
Several allies have sent air defence missiles to Ukraine over recent months to shield it from a brutal Russian bombing campaign which has knocked out power for millions across the country.
Moldova, which shares part of its power grid with Ukraine, has also suffered outages.
File photo: Sandu visits the town of Bucha, Ukraine last June
The Kremlin warned that Ukrainian strikes on Russian-annexed Crimea would be “extremely dangerous”, after The New York Times reported that US officials were warming to the idea of helping Kyiv attack the peninsula.
Crimea, which is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine, was seized by Moscow and declared annexed in 2014. President Vladimir Putin says the peninsula, like much of the Ukrainian land seized since February, is historically Russian.
Ukraine last summer fired a series of missile strikes on Russian airbases in Crimea. An attack on the Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea in October, which Ukraine never claimed responsibility for, was met by Russia with a devastating bombing campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure.
In a briefing on Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “The mere discussion of allowing Ukraine to be supplied with arms that would allow it to attack Russian territory … is extremely dangerous.
“It would mean taking the conflict to a new level, which would not bode well for global and pan-European security.”
File photo: People rest on a beach after explosions at a Russian military airbase in Crimea on 9 August
Boris Johnson has compared Vladimir Putin to “the fat boy in Dickens” who wants to “make our flesh creep” with threats of using nuclear weapons (Maryam Zakir-Hussain writes).
Speaking about Ukraine at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the former prime minister insisted that the Russian president would not resort to using nuclear weapons, dismissing the idea as “nonsense”.
He said: “Putin wants to present it as a nuclear stand-off between Nato and Russia. Nonsense. He’s not going to use nuclear weapons, okay. He’s like the fat boy in Dickens, he wants to make our flesh creep. He wants us to think about it. He’s never going to do it.”
“He’s not going to do it. Don’t go down that rabbit hole, stop it,” Mr Johnson added.
‘He wants to make our flesh creep,’ says Boris Johnson in Davos
The world is at risk of becoming complacement about the dangers posed by the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia atomic plant in Ukraine, the head of a UN nuclear watchdog said today.
Russian forces captured the plant, Europe’s largest, last March and it has repeatedly come under fire in recent months, raising fears of a nuclear disaster. Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is working to set up a safe zone around the facility.
Grossi, speaking to reporters in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, said a nuclear accident could happen any day and reiterated the situation at the plant was very precarious.
“I worry that this is becoming routine, that people may believe that nothing has happened so far, so is the director general of the IAEA crying wolf?” he said when addressing reporters during a visit to Ukraine.
“It [an accident] can happen any time and my duty is to do everything I can to prevent that from happening.”
IAEA chief Grossi on a visit to Chernobyl on Wednesday
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