At least 11,000 Ukrainian children are reportedly being detained at 43 re-education camps across Russia, thousands of miles from home, the UK’s Ministry of Defence said on X.
Russia may begin full mobilisation after the 2024 Russian presidential election on 17 March, secretary of the national security and defence council of Ukraine, Oleksii Danilov, has suggested.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has met Fox Corp CEO, Lachlan Murdoch, in the Ukrainian capital in what Kyiv said was a “very important signal” of support. “The Head of State (Zelenskiy) thanked Lachlan Murdoch for his visit and emphasised that it is a very important signal of support at the time when the world’s attention is blurred by other events,” the president’s office wrote.
Ukraine sacked two senior cyber defence officials on Monday, a government official said, as prosecutors announced a probe into alleged embezzlement in the government’s cybersecurity agency.
US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, met with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in an unannounced visit to Kyiv, and said that American support to Ukraine would continue “for the long haul”, the Associated Press reported. Zelenskiy said Austin’s visit was “a very important signal for Ukraine.” “We count on your support,“ he added, thanking Congress as well as the American people for their backing. Austin announced $100m in new military aid to Ukraine during his visit.
Russian shelling killed three people on Monday and damaged power lines and a gas pipeline in the central Dnipropetrovsk and southern Kherson regions of Ukraine, authorities said. An elderly woman was killed and a man injured in Russian artillery strike on the town of Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk’s governor said.
“A power line and a gas pipeline were damaged,” Serhiy Lysak, the governor, said on Telegram. On Monday morning, two drivers were killed when Russian forces shelled a private transport company parking lot in Kherson, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said. These claims have not been independently verified.Zelenskiy dismissed the commander of the military’s medical forces, Maj Gen Tetiana Ostashchenko, and said “new priorities had been set” in the operations of Ukraine’s military after a meeting with defence minister Rustem Umerov. “There is little time left to wait for results. Quick action is needed for forthcoming changes,” the Ukrainian president said.
The Ukrainian army said it had pushed Russian forces back “three to eight kilometres” from the banks of Dnipro river, which if confirmed would be the first meaningful advance by Kyiv’s forces months into a disappointing counteroffensive. Ukrainian and Russian forces have been entrenched on opposite sides of the vast waterway in the southern Kherson region for more than a year, after Russia withdrew its troops from the western bank last November.
A Ukrainian teenager who was taken to Russia from the occupied city of Mariupol during the war and prevented from leaving earlier this year returned to Ukraine. Bohdan Yermokhin, who turned 18 on Sunday, appealed to Zelenskiy this month to help bring him back to Ukraine. “I believed I would be in Ukraine, but not on this day,” Yermokhin told Reuters while eating at a petrol station after crossing into Ukraine.
About 3,000 mostly Ukrainian trucks, including those carrying fuel and humanitarian aid, were stuck on the Polish side of the border on Sunday due to a more than 10-day blockade by Polish truckers, Ukrainian authorities said.
Polish truckers earlier this month blocked roads to three border crossings with Ukraine to protest against what they see as government inaction over a loss of business to foreign competitors since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.Air defence units in Moscow intercepted a drone targeting the city late Sunday, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said units in the Elektrostal district in the capital’s east had intercepted the drone. No casualties or damage were initially reported. Air defences had also thwarted a drone attack on the Russian capital overnight to Sunday, authorities said earlier.
Russia launched 20 Iranian-made Shaded drones targeting Kyiv and the Cherkasy and Poltava regions overnight to Sunday, the Ukrainian military said, of which 15 were shot down. The overnight strikes on Kyiv were the second attack on the Ukrainian capital in 48 hours, said the city’s military administration spokesperson, Serhii Popko.
Five people including a three-year-old girl were injured in Russian artillery shelling of Kherson on Sunday morning, Ukrainian interior minister Ihor Klymenko said. “All of them sustained shrapnel wounds. The child and the grandmother were walking in the yard. Enemy artillery hit them near the entrance,” Klymenko said on the Telegram messaging app.
Pro-war Russian nationalist Igor Girkin, who is in custody awaiting trial for inciting extremism, said he wanted to run for president even though he understood the March election would be a “sham” with the winner already clear. Girkin, who is also known by the alias Igor Strelkov, has repeatedly said Russia faces revolution and even civil war unless President Vladimir Putin’s military top brass fight the war in Ukraine more effectively. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer who helped Russia to annex Crimea in 2014 and then to organise pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine, Girkin said before his arrest that he and his supporters were entering politics.
