Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, has issued a decree providing for conscripts serving in the two-year-old war against Russia to be discharged into the reserves within the next two months. The decree will allow some respite for service members who have been engaged in the military since even before Russian troops poured over the border in February 2022. In addition, those discharged will be exempt from further call-ups for 12 months.
Joe Biden has given the presidential state of the union address in the US, assailing Donald Trump for kowtowing to Russia. Biden, who has been pushing Congress to provide additional funding to Ukraine, had a message for Putin: “We will not walk away.” Biden used the speech to push, again, for a $95bn aid package for weapons to Ukraine and aid to Israel that has been blocked by the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and said: “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.”
Russia and Ukraine attacked each other with drones over Thursday night and Friday morning. Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired 37 Iranian-type Shahed kamikaze drones and three missiles. “As a result of combat operations, 33 Shaheds were shot down in the Kirovograd, Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv regions.” In Moscow, the defence ministry said 16 Ukrainian drones were intercepted inside Russia: 15 over the southern Volgograd region, the closest part of which is around 300km from the frontlines in eastern Ukraine. Another drone was shot down in the Belgorod border region, the Russian defence ministry said.
In the north-east Ukrainian Kharkiv region, a Russian strike injured five people, including a three-year old child, said the governor, Oleg Synegubov.
Ukraine’s former commander in chief, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, is to be its next ambassador to the UK, a month after he was fired by the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, from his job leading the military.
Zelenskiy is due to visit Turkey on Friday and meet Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The presidents of Ukraine and Turkey are expected to discuss the war, the Black Sea grain deal and bilateral relations.
Ihor Zhovkva, a top Ukrainian diplomatic adviser, told CNN that it could not be ruled out that a Russian missile strike directly targeted Zelenskiy and the visiting Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as they visited Odesa. Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, has denied it was deliberate.
Britain is providing 10,000 drones to arm Ukraine in its fight against Russia, the UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, has announced during a visit with Zelenskiy in Kyiv. The weaponry will include 1,000 kamikaze drones and models that target ships.
Norway will provide €140m to buy artillery shells for Ukraine, under the Czech-led ammunition initiative, the Ukrainian defence ministry has said.
The Czech Republic is suspending intergovernmental consultations with neighbour and former federal partner Slovakia after its foreign minister, Juraj Blanár, met his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. It comes amid concerns Slovakia is shifting away from western policy on supporting Ukraine.
EU lawmakers have approved giving Ukrainian food producers access for a further year, rejecting a series of amendments that could have added restrictions. The European Commission has proposed import duties and quotas on Ukrainian farm produce be lifted for another year to June 2025.
The recently elected Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, has issued a stark warning that Europe stands in a new prewar era just as it did before the second world war. “We are living in new times, in a prewar epoch. In fact, for some of our brothers, it is no longer even a prewar time. It is a full-scale war in its most cruel form,” he told fellow prime ministers and hundreds of MEPs attending a congress in Bucharest, Romania.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said a Belarusian man who had been planning “an act of terrorism” inside Russia on behalf of Ukraine was killed in the Russian region of Karelia. RIA cited the FSB as saying that the man had intended to blow up an administrative building in the city of Olonets, about 250km from the Finnish border.
The EU’s largest political party on Thursday endorsed Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for a second five-year term at the helm of the bloc’s powerful Commission. As the two-day European People’s party (EPP) meeting came to a close on Thursday, von der Leyen warned of the expected rise of populists in the bloc’s upcoming elections and Russia’s attempt “to wipe Ukraine off the face of (the) earth”.
Democrats in the US House of Representatives are investigating SpaceX over whether Russian forces have accessed the Starlink satellite internet service, according to a letter sent to the company.
India’s embassy in Moscow confirmed the death of a citizen recruited by the Russian army, days after a relative told Agence France-Presse (AFP) he had been sent to fight in Ukraine. The embassy did not state the circumstances behind Mohammed Afsan’s death but said it was in touch with his family and Russian authorities.
