The military situation is becoming increasingly difficult around the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday as many of Ukraine’s battlefields turn to mud. “In the Bakhmut sector, the situation is constantly becoming more difficult,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly address. “The enemy is constantly destroying everything that can be used to protect our positions for fortification and defence.” Russia’s defence ministry claimed its forces destroyed a Ukrainian ammunition depot near the town – the focal point of Russia’s advances in eastern Ukraine – also shooting down four Himars missiles and five drones launched by Ukrainian forces.
Russia’s Pulkovo airport in St Petersburg temporarily suspended all flights on Tuesday amid unconfirmed media reports of an unidentified object such as a drone being seen nearby. Some flights were diverted back to Moscow while the airport was shut for around an hour. Russia’s ministry of defence later announced there had been a training exercise between air defences and civilian aviation authorities.
Emergency services put out a fire at an oil depot in southern Russia overnight after a drone was spotted flying overhead, the RIA news agency said on Tuesday. The fire in the Russian town of Tuapse, Krasnador, was reported at 2.30am local time and spread to an area of about 200 sq metres before it was extinguished. “The oil tanks were not affected. There was no spill of oil products. No injuries,” said Sergei Boyko, who leads the local administration.
The Russian ministry of defence has stated that it foiled two attempted Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil using drones overnight. It said “28 February, at night, the Kyiv regime attempted to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to attack civilian infrastructure in the Krasnodar territory and the Republic of Adygea.”
A drone that was downed in the Moscow region had probably been intended to attack civil infrastructure, according to the region’s governor. The drone was downed on Tuesday near a gas distribution station close to the city of Kolomna, 110km (70 miles) south-east of Moscow, the Russian state-run Ria Novosti news agency reported, citing local emergency services.
A hacking attack caused some Russian regional broadcasters to put out a false warning on Tuesday urging people to take shelter from an incoming missile attack, the emergencies ministry said. “As a result of the hacking of servers of radio stations and TV channels, in some regions of the country information about the announcement of an air alert was broadcast. This information is false and does not correspond to reality”. A similar attack caused commercial radio stations in some Russian regions to send air alarm messages on Wednesday 22 February.
Vladimir Putin has told Russia’s FSB security service to step up its intelligence activity and stop “sabotage groups” entering the country. In a speech to FSB officials, the Russian leader instructed the agency to strengthen its activity to counter what he described as growing espionage and sabotage operations against Russia by Ukraine and its western allies.
Putin also admitted that FSB members have been killed in Ukraine in his speech to security service members. “Unfortunately, there are losses in our ranks,” he said.
Peskov has said that Russia is open to negotiations to end the conflict in Ukraine, but insisted Moscow would “never compromise” on what he described as new “territorial realities”. “There are certain realities that have already become an internal factor. I mean the new territories. The constitution of the Russian Federation exists, and cannot be ignored. Russia will never be able to compromise on this. These are important realities,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
Ukraine will become a Nato member in the “long term”, the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said. The Nato chief stressed that the immediate priority was Ukraine remaining an independent country in the face of the Russian invasion.
Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, is due to visit Beijing on Tuesday for a meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping, in a high-profile trip symbolising the widening gulf between the US and China over the war in Ukraine. Xi’s meeting with Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, is seen internationally as a sign of where Beijing’s sympathies lie.
