Russia-Ukraine updates: Belarus threatens to join war if attacked

The United Kingdom and Poland have agreed on the importance of accelerating support to Ukraine in the coming weeks, according to 10 Downing Street.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Polish President Andrzej Duda met at Downing Street with European security and support for Kyiv top issues on the agenda.

“The Prime Minister paid tribute to Poland’s resilience and international leadership following the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, and said it was clear the UK and Poland were entirely aligned on their steadfast support for the country,” Downing Street said in a statement.

“Reflecting on the wider impact of the invasion, the Prime Minister reiterated his commitment to European security and said the recent extension of the UK’s Sky Sabre deployment to Poland underlined that.”

Israel will expand existing aid to Ukraine and help rebuild the country, foreign minister Eli Cohen has said, during the first official Israeli visit to Kyiv since Russia’s invasion a year ago.

Cohen wrote in a tweet that he made the promise in a meeting with Zelenskyy, adding they agreed that Iranian activity in Ukraine deserved condemnation and required “practical steps” from the international community.

Zelenskyy said the men discussed “deepening bilateral cooperation in various areas” and he was grateful for Israel’s humanitarian aid. They discussed Israel’s participation in post-war reconstruction, he said in a Telegram post, adding, “Ukraine could use Israel’s experience in de-mining.”

Moscow’s parliamentary speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has called last year’s explosions on the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany a “terrorist attack”, blaming Biden.

He instructed the Duma, or Russian parliament, to determine the damage done to the gas pipelines last September when a series of blasts caused suspicious leaks.

Volodin said only further investigations into the incidents could lead to compensation from foreign entities. The legislators pressed, once again, for a United Nations investigation into the acts of sabotage.

The explosions were directed against Russia and Germany, Volodin said. The United States had “carried out” the attack, he said.

Billionaire financier George Soros has said that if Russia was defeated in the Ukraine war it would result in the dissolution of what he called the “Russian empire”, something he said would be greeted by former Soviet republics.

Soros said the United States would support Ukraine, but that Biden had warned Zelenskyy that there were limits and that World War III had to be avoided. Soros didn not disclose the source of his information.

A hedge fund manager turned philanthropist, Soros said that the Russian army was badly led, ill-equipped and demoralised, but that Putin had turned to the Wagner mercenary group to thwart the Ukrainian military.

“The countries of the former Soviet Union can hardly wait to see the Russians defeated in Ukraine because they want to assert their independence,” Soros told the Munich Security Conference, according a text of his speech released by his office.

“This means that a Ukrainian victory would result in the dissolution of the Russian empire. Russia would no longer pose a threat to Europe and the world,” he said. “That would be a big change for the better.”

A top Estonian defence leader has warned that if Putin is not stopped now, he could entangle the region in a larger conflict, perhaps one with even greater security implications for the US.

That’s because Russia has shown it will keep trying to retake territories that were once part of the Soviet Union and, so far, economic sanctions and its significant military losses in Ukraine have not changed Putin’s larger goals, said Kristjan Mäe, the head of the Estonian Ministry of Defense’s NATO and EU department, as US defence secretary Lloyd Austin visited the Baltic nation.

Estonia, which borders Russia, was forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union during World War II and gained its independence only with the Soviet collapse in 1991. It joined NATO and the European Union in 2004.

“If we do not solve this war at this moment, where it is, first of all, there’s going to be a bigger war,” Mäe said.

American warplanes have intercepted Russian military aircraft near the state of Alaska for the second time this week, the joint US-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has said.

The “routine” intercept of the four Russian planes – which included Tu-95 bomber and Su-30 and Su-35 fighter aircraft – took place on Tuesday, NORAD said in a statement.

“Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace,” it said.

This was the second intercept – when an aircraft makes visual or electronic contact with another plane – in two days, with the first taking place on Monday.

“NORAD … assesses that this Russian flight activity is in no way related to recent NORAD and US Northern Command operations associated with airborne objects over North America during the last two weeks,” it added.

The United States and its allies plan a major array of new sanctions against Russia for the February 24 anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine, a senior US official has said.

“You will see around the 24th a big new package of sanctions from both the US and all of our G7 partners,” Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, told reporters.

“These sanctions will deepen and broaden in certain categories where we have been active before, particularly in limiting the flow of technology to the Russian defence industry,” she said.

Nuland said the package will also target individuals, expand banking restrictions and crack down on evasion of existing sanctions, including in third countries.

Russia has switched its aerial attack tactics to fool Ukraine’s air defences, using decoy missiles without explosive warheads and deploying balloons, a senior Ukrainian official has said.

“The Russians are definitely changing tactics” as the war approaches its anniversary, Mykhailo Podolyak, Zelenskyy’s adviser, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The goal of the decoy missiles, Podolyak said, is to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defence systems by offering too many targets.

“They want to overload our anti-aircraft system to get an extra chance to hit infrastructure facilities,” Podolyak said, adding that Ukraine’s air defences are adapting to the challenge.

The Berlin Film Festival is under way with audience and producers taking part in person for the first time since the pandemic.

The war in Ukraine is one of the stand-out parts of this year’s Berlinale. The festival’s artistic director, Carlo Chatrian, says the films are trying “to make us be more aware of all these matters, but at the same time, to give an insight from a very personal point of view” of the conflict.

Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane reports from Berlin, Germany.

Ukraine faced its toughest week so far this year on the eastern front, where its defenders lost more ground to Russian forces but committed enormous resources to holding Bakhmut, a coal-mining town that has acquired emblematic importance to both sides.

Russian troops have been launching probing attacks on a wide front in Donetsk, half of which they now occupy. But their main effort has been to take Bakhmut, whose eastern outskirts they hold.

“[We are] storming house by house, square metre by square metre. Hard work is going on,” said Yevgeny Prigozhin, the financier behind Wagner paramilitary company, which is heavily involved in the fighting for Bakhmut.

But Russian forces have become bogged down in this fight, and in the 51st week of the war, they changed tactics.

Germany plans to adjust its Energy Security Act to allow a quick sale of Russian energy group Rosneft’s stake in the Schwedt refinery without the need for prior nationalisation, a draft law has shown.

Under the planned adjustment to the law, the condition of prior nationalisation of assets put under government trusteeship could be withdrawn if the sale of the assets is needed to ensure that Germany’s energy sector remains functional, the draft law, seen by Reuters on Thursday, showed.

Germany took control of the Schwedt refinery, which was majority owned by Rosneft, and put Rosneft Deutschland under a trusteeship of the German industry regulator but Rosneft still holds 54.17 percent of the refinery.

The European Commission has abandoned plans to sanction Russia’s nuclear sector or its representatives in its next sanctions package, Politico has reported, citing three diplomats.

The head of the EU executive, the European Commission, had originally told EU countries that it would try to draw up sanctions targeting Russia’s civil nuclear sector, but that plan has now failed, according to the report.

The United Kingdom’s support for Ukraine will not change if the main opposition Labour Party wins power in an election next year, Labour leader Keir Starmer has said during a visit to Ukraine.

The UK has been a leading supporter of Ukraine under the governing Conservatives, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has followed predecessor Boris Johnson’s example by visiting Kyiv. Johnson is popular in Ukraine, and has a street named after him.

But an election is widely expected next year in the UK, and opinion polls give Labour a strong lead over the Conservatives.

“Should there be an election next year and a change of government, the position on Ukraine will remain the same,” Starmer said while visiting the town of Irpin outside Kyiv.

Russia’s defence ministry says Ukraine has returned 101 prisoners of war (POWs) from territory controlled by Kyiv in the latest such swap between the two sides.

“Aircraft of the military transport aviation of the Russian Aerospace Forces will deliver the released servicemen to Moscow for treatment and rehabilitation in medical institutions of the Russian Defence Ministry,” the ministry said.

Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff said 100 troops and one civilian had been returned to Ukraine.

Nearly all had been defending the besieged southern city of Mariupol before it fell to Russian forces, Andriy Yermak said on Telegram.

Moldova’s parliament has approved a pro-Western government led by new Prime Minister Dorin Recean after he pledged to revive the economy and chart a course towards the European Union.

Recean, 48, was nominated on Friday by President Maia Sandu to replace Natalia Gavrilita whose government resigned following a difficult 18 months in office marked by economic turmoil and alleged meddling by Russia.

Recean, a former interior minister and presidential aide, secured the approval of 62 lawmakers in the 101-seat parliament after outlining his policy plans in a programme entitled, “Prosperous, Secure, European Moldova”.

“We want to live in a safe world where international treaties are respected, where problems between countries are resolved through dialogue, where there is respect for small states,” the programme declared.

US defence secretary Lloyd Austin has said Washington is ready to defend the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania if required, and will keep a “persistent” military presence in the region.

“We are committed to Article 5, you can bet on that,” Austin said, citing the requirement in the NATO charter that each member of the alliance defend each other if they come under attack.

Speaking in Tallinn after talks with Estonian leaders, he also said the US will continue to keep a “persistent, rotational” military presence in the region.

“The United States remains steadfastly committed to the freedom and sovereignty of our Baltic allies,” he told reporters.

The head of Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group has predicted that Bakhmut will fall under Moscow’s control within a couple of months.

The Wagner Group, swelled by prison recruits, has for months led Russian attempts to seize the city, which sits in the partly occupied eastern Donetsk region.

In an interview with a pro-war military blogger, Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin forecast Bakhmut would be seized in March or April, depending on how many soldiers Ukraine commits to its defence and how well his own troops are supplied.

“Because there are a huge number of problems that need to be solved. Naturally, it will also depend on whether we continue to be bled,” he added, referring to the end of prisoner recruits.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said he was aware that Russia would attack Ukraine on the evening before Moscow launched its invasion.

“I went to bed. But it was a very short night because I knew that at some stage, within hours, someone was going to wake me up – and that was exactly what happened,” Stoltenberg told the AFP news agency.

“Around four o’clock, I was called by my chief of staff, and he just briefly told me that they have started, meaning the invasion has started. [It was] No surprise, because we knew,” he added.

Stoltenberg had warned for months prior to February 24, 2022, that Russia might invade Ukraine as Moscow deployed military units near the two countries’ shared border in preparation for its eventual attack.

US President Joe Biden will host German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington on March 3 for talks focused on Ukraine, the White House has said.

“At the one-year mark of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the leaders will discuss our ongoing efforts to support Ukraine, impose costs on Russia for its aggression, and strengthen transatlantic security,” the White House said in a statement.

The meeting will take place several days after the anniversary of Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine.

Despite strict government censorship and the threat of jail, residents of Russia’s capital are finding subtle ways to express alarm and dissent about the Kremlin’s year-long offensive in Ukraine.

The messages are barely visible but are omnipresent throughout Moscow – scrawled on signposts, graffitied on walls, or pasted as stickers on drain pipes.

“Write. Speak. Don’t be silent about the war!” is the plea of one Muscovite who carved the words into a wooden bench partially covered in snow in the centre of the capital.

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