Russia claimed to have captured a village in eastern Ukraine as part of its months-long push towards the town of Bakhmut. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Klishchiivka, 9 km south of Bakhmut, had been “liberated”. The claim could not be independently verified. Ukrainian officials initially did not comment. Russian proxy forces in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic earlier said they had taken control of Klishchyivka.
US officials have begun to persuade the Ukrainians to shift focus from Bakhmut to preparing for an offensive in the south. Joe Biden’s administration reportedly believes the Russians have high potential to eventually push Ukrainian forces out of the hotly contested city, which has seen some of the war’s most intense fighting to date. The German foreign intelligence service BND is also reportedly alarmed by the Ukrainian army’s losses in Bakhmut.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said he doesn’t think it’s realistic to expect Ukraine to oust Russian troops from its internationally recognized territory in 2023. “From a military point of view, I still maintain that starting this year it will be very, very difficult to militarily expel Russian forces from every inch of Russian-held Ukraine,” he told a press conference at the US Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.
Germany has declined to make a decision at a special international summit in Ramstein on whether to hand over Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. In Europe and the US, there had been hopes that Germany would at least allow leopards to be re-exported from countries like Poland and Finland, but despite days of pleading, Berlin’s newly appointed defense minister said no final decision had been made.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked Germany and Western allies to send their main battle tanks to Kyiv to open the Ramstein meeting. Urgent action is needed, the Ukrainian leader said, because “Russia is concentrating its last strength and trying to convince everyone that hatred can be stronger than the world.”
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the group of defense ministers supporting Kyiv is focused on “ensuring Ukraine has the capability it needs to thrive now.” After the Ramstein airbase meeting, Austin called Germany a “reliable ally.”
The Kremlin said supplying additional tanks to Kyiv would “not fundamentally change anything”. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said that Russia’s relations with the United States are at their “historic low” and that there is “no hope” of an improvement in bilateral relations “in the foreseeable future.”
A former US Navy SEAL has been killed in Ukraine, US officials said on Friday. Daniel W. Swift, a corporal 1st class who left his post in San Diego in March 2019, was injured in Dnipro and died of his wounds on Wednesday. Officials said he did not fight in an official capacity. The Navy said it “could not speculate as to why the former sailor was in Ukraine”.
EU countries are reportedly working on a 10th round of sanctions related to Russia. The next package of sanctions “will be somewhere around” the Feb. 24 anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a senior diplomat told Portal. EU officials are also seeking ministers’ approval for a seventh tranche of military aid to Ukraine worth €500 million.
The US will impose further sanctions on the Wagner Group, said White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. The US Treasury Department plans to designate Wagner as a major transnational criminal organization that would freeze all of the group’s US assets and prohibit Americans from providing Wagner with any funds, goods, or services.
Italian authorities are on the hunt for a Russian oligarch after two of his luxury yachts, seized under EU sanctions, mysteriously disappeared from a port in Sardinia. The yachts of Dmitry Mazepin, the billionaire owner of a mineral fertilizer company, disappeared within a few weeks last summer in the Sardinian port city of Olbia.