Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, has released a video which he says shows his fighters in the important eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. A post on Telegram shows uniformed men raising a Wagner banner at a badly damaged building. The video was geolocated east of Bakhmut, about 1.2 miles from the town center, where Wagner fighters have been for some time.
US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will focus on war aid to Ukraine on Friday and could also address concerns that China could provide lethal aid to Russia, a senior U.S. government official said.
Scholz has urged China not to send weapons to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. and instead urged Beijing to pressure Moscow to withdraw its forces.
The US on Friday will announce a new military aid package for Ukraine worth around $400 million, consisting mostly of ammunition. Two officials and one person familiar with the package have told Portal.
The hosts are the USA War planning exercises in Germany for Ukrainian military officers to help them think battlefield decisions in the next phase of the conflict, officials have said.
A meeting of senior diplomats from the Group of 20 developed and developing countries in New Delhi ended with no agreement on the war in Ukraine. Most G20 members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine, with Russia and China disagreeing, G20 President India said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke for less than 10 minutes on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in New Delhi, according to a US State Department official. Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington stands ready to support Ukraine’s defenses for as long as necessary, the official said in what is believed to be their first face-to-face meeting since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Blinken said he told Lavrov Washington would push for the war in Ukraine to be ended through diplomatic terms agreed to by Kiev. Blinken said he had also urged Moscow to reconsider its “irresponsible decision” and return to participating in the New Start nuclear deal, and he had also urged Russia to release jailed US citizen Paul Whelan.
Ukrainian forces are holding their positions in the devastated city of Bakhmut to the east and are under constant attack from Russian troops. Russia says capturing Bakhmut would pave the way to full control of the rest of the strategic Donbass industrial region bordering Russia, one of the main objectives of the invasion it launched on February 24, 2022. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has put up fierce resistance.
Russia has attacked a five-story apartment block in Zaporizhia, killing four and wounding eight others. The Zaporizhia Regional Military Administration said Russia appeared to have used an S-300 missile in the attack. A spokesman for Russian proxies in the partially occupied region, which the Russian Federation allegedly annexed, said – without providing any evidence – that the airstrike was the result of actions by Ukraine’s air defenses.
The Kremlin claimed Russia was under attack by “terrorists” after conflicting reports of gun battles emerged from the Bryansk and Kursk regions. the Russian media accuses Ukrainian “sabotage groups”. Reports of fighting in Russia near the Ukrainian border began Thursday morning. The head of the Bryansk region claimed that a “sabotage group opened fire on a moving car. One resident was killed; a 10-year-old child was injured.”
In Ukraine, the reports were quickly interpreted as a “false flag” attack by Russia to discredit Ukrainian forces. “The story about [the Ukrainian] sabotage group [Russia] is a classic deliberate provocation,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president. There was no immediate video or photo of the fighting to corroborate the reports of deaths.
Vladimir Putin planned to hold a meeting of the Security Council, Russia’s main military decision-making body, on Friday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Peskov said Putin also canceled a trip to Stavropol.
Evidence collected from Kherson in southern Ukraine shows that Russian torture centers were not “accidental”. but instead planned and funded directly by the Russian state, according to a team of Ukrainian and international lawyers led by a British lawyer.
A new team of nuclear experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency has taken up its post at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine after a delay of almost a month, said IAEA chief Rafael Grossi. In a statement, Grossi said the presence of IAEA observers on the station was “essential to reduce the risk of a nuclear accident”.