Ukraine’s president and foreign minister have pleaded with the west to send more weapons to their military in the face of Russia’s intensifying assault on the eastern Donbas region. “We need the help of our partners – above all, weapons for Ukraine. Full help, without exceptions, without limits, enough to win,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly address on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, Dmytro Kuleba told the World Economic Forum in Davos that Nato was doing “virtually nothing” to help Ukraine.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Andrei Rudenko, said Moscow is ready to provide a humanitarian corridor for vessels carrying food to leave Ukraine in return for the lifting of some sanctions. Ukraine’s Black Sea ports have been blocked since Russia invaded, with more than 20m tonnes of grain stuck in silos in the country. Kuleba, poured scorn on Moscow’s claim and accused Russia of trying to “blackmail the world”.
Zelenskiy rejected the notion that his country should cede territory to make peace with Russia. “Symptomatic editorials began to appear in some western media stating that Ukraine must allegedly accept so-called difficult compromises by giving up territory in exchange for peace,” he said in his latest nightly address. Those who advise Ukraine to give up territory fail to see the ordinary people, he said, “who actually live in the territory they propose to exchange for the illusion of peace.” Oleksiy Arestovych, a presidential adviser, added: “No one is going to trade a gram of our sovereignty or a millimetre of our territory. Our children are dying, soldiers are being blown apart by shells, and they tell us to sacrifice territory. Get lost. It’s never going to happen.”
There are about 8,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war held in the Russian-backed self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, Luhansk official Rodion Miroshnik was quoted by Tass news agency as saying.
Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic, has said they cannot yet be 100% sure they have flushed every last Ukrainian fighter out of the Azovstal steel plant.
The deputy prime minister of the Russian-appointed Crimean government, Georgy Muradov, has said “The Sea of Azov is forever lost to Ukraine”. He is reported to have said “Ports in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions will never again be Ukrainian. I am sure that after the reunification of our regions with Russia, the Sea of Azov will again, as it was before, become exclusively an inland sea of the Russian Federation.”
Russia’s Ministry of Defence claims that as a result of their operations in the last 24 hours, more than 350 Ukrainian fighters were killed and 96 units of weapons and military equipment were disabled.
Russian forces shelled more than 40 other towns in Donbas on Wednesday, Ukraine’s military said, threatening to shut off the last main escape route for civilians trapped in the path of their invasion.
Russia’s failure to anticipate Ukrainian resistance and the subsequent complacency of Russian commanders has led to significant losses across many of Russia’s more elite units, according to Britain’s Ministry of Defence in its latest intelligence update on the war.
Russian forces have launched fresh assaults on towns in eastern Ukraine, with the city of Sievierodonetsk increasingly in danger of being totally encircled. The governor of Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai, said the area was now without gas supplies and had limited water and electricity after the last gas supply station was hit.
Ukraine’s governor of Kharkiv, Oleh Synyehubov, has said fighting is most intense in the Izyum region. He claimed “The Russians are trying to improve the tactical situation in the area of the city of Izyum and resume the offensive on Slovyansk.”
Police in Lysychansk are collecting bodies of people killed in order to bury them in mass graves, Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Gaidai said. Some 150 people have been buried in a mass grave in one Lysychansk district, he added, Reuters reports.
Maksym Kozytskyi, the governor of Lviv, said that for the first time since Lviv started accepting displaced people from elsewhere in Ukraine, there was not a single person who registered for temporary accommodation yesterday.
Russian lawmakers have voted to approve a new law that would eliminate age limits for military contract soldiers. Military experts say Russia is facing unsustainable troop and equipment losses in Ukraine after a series of military setbacks that have forced Moscow to reduce its war aims. Zelenskiy responded: “(They) no longer have enough young men, but they still have the will to fight.”
A senior United Nations official is due to visit Moscow in the coming days to discuss reviving fertiliser exports, Russia’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said, stressing that the talks were not linked to a resumption of Ukrainian grain shipments, Reuters reported.
Two alleged Wagner Group fighters from Belarus have been accused of murdering civilians near Kyiv, making them the first international mercenaries to face war crimes charges in Ukraine. Ukrainian prosecutors have released the names and photographs of eight men wanted for alleged war crimes – including murder and torture – in the village of Motyzhyn. Several are believed to have fought in Syria.
Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas said it would be “much more dangerous giving in to Putin than provoking him” during a speech in Stockholm and warned: “All these seemingly small concessions to the aggressor lead to big wars. We have done this mistake already three times: Georgia, Crimea and Donbas.”
Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said an Italian peace plan for Ukraine was a “fantasy”. Zakharova said at her weekly briefing: “You can’t supply Ukraine with weapons with one hand and come up with plans for a peaceful resolution of the situation with the other.”
Vitali Klitschko, mayor of Kyiv, has told the World Economic Forum in Davos that he believes Russia still hopes to take control of the Ukrainian capital. He said everyone in the world understands it is not “a special operation”, but that it is a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
German chancellor Olaf Scholz has told the World Economic Forum that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a thunderbolt, and that Russian president Vladimir Putin cannot be allowed to win or to dictate peace terms.
