WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
FORMER ITALIAN PM SILVIO BERLUSCONI BLAMES UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT FOR WAR WITH RUSSIA
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said power workers had done such a good job repairing the damage caused by Russian missile and drone strikes on Friday that most people had not had to face too many outages on Saturday and Sunday, but cautioned it was too early to declare victory on the energy front.
FIGHTING
* Ukraine's forces are holding their defences along the front line in the eastern region of Donetsk, including the besieged town of Bakhmut, with the fiercest battles for the cities of Vuhledar and Maryinka, Kyiv's top military commander said on Saturday.
* Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia's Wagner Group, said on Sunday that the mercenary force had taken the village of Krasna Hora, on the northern edge of Bakhmut.
* Prigozhin said on Saturday it could take two years for Moscow to control all of the two eastern Ukrainian regions whose capture it has stated as a key goal of the war.
* A 53-year-old woman was killed on Sunday morning after Russian forces shelled an apartment building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Nikopol, the regional governor said.
* Galina Danilchenko, the Russia-installed mayor of the Ukrainian city Melitopol in south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, said on Saturday one civilian died and two people were injured in overnight shelling by Ukrainian forces.
* Reuters could not verify the battlefield accounts.
NATO LEADERSHIP
* NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will end his term as planned in October, a spokesperson for the alliance said, after a newspaper reported a further extension was in the works.
WEAPONS
* British arms and military vehicles could be manufactured in Ukraine under licence, easing the country's dependence on supplies of arms from Western allies, the Telegraph newspaper reported on Sunday.
DIPLOMACY
* Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would not seek a meeting with Zelenskiy if he were still head of government, because he blames the Ukrainian president for the war with Russia, he said on Sunday.
* U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov discussed priorities, including air defence and artillery, for upcoming meetings of Kyiv's allies in Brussels, both sides said on Saturday.
* Russian Sports Minister Oleg Matytsin said calls from more than 30 countries to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from the 2024 Olympics were unacceptable, TASS news agency reported.
* Russian athletics stars are no strangers to being barred from international competitions, and the prospect of missing next year's Olympics over the invasion of Ukraine has piled onto years of frustration felt towards global sports bodies.
* NATO should hold an emergency meeting to discuss recent findings about September explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipelines, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said late on Saturday.
RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Polish leader warns of Russian victory
Russia may win the conflict in Ukraine if the Kiev government isn’t supplied with Western weapons in the coming weeks, Polish President Andrzej Duda has said.
During an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro on Saturday, Duda was asked if he thought the Russians could achieve victory in Ukraine.
"Yes, they can, if Ukraine doesn’t receive help very urgently," the Polish leader replied.
The Kiev authorities "don't have modern military infrastructure, but they have people," he explained.
"If we do not send military equipment to Ukraine in the coming weeks, [Russia’s President Vladimir] Putin may win. He can win and we don’t know where he’ll stop," Duda warned.
His comments didn’t go unnoticed by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who took to Telegram on Saturday to point out that even if Western weapons are supplied to Ukraine hurriedly – they won’t be able to change the outcome of the conflict.
The Kiev government and its foreign backers are "condemned" to defeat, she insisted, adding that the arms deliveries "won’t help you. They’ll only make things worse."
"Repentance for what they have done is the only way out for the West,"Zakharova wrote.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that NATO members, who in January promised to send dozens of main battle tanks to Ukraine, have developed"sudden misgivings" about fulfilling the pledge due, apparently, to not having enough armor to spare.
Germany said that 14 of its Leopard 2 tanks will arrive in Ukraine in late March. Berlin also announced that it was buying up almost 190 decommissioned Leopard 1s to be refurbished and sent to the front.
Poland, which has been one of the biggest backers of Ukraine among EU states, vowed to provide its neighbor with 14 Leopard 2s and 60 of its modified Soviet-era T-72 tanks.
However, such countries as the Netherlands and Denmark, which had been pressuring Germany to send its armor to Ukraine, are now claiming that they themselves can’t part with any of their Leopard 2s. Finland said it may only supply "a few" tanks, but most likely only after it joins NATO.
Western countries have also ruled out delivering F-16 fighter jets, a new demand made by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
On Thursday, the deputy head of Zelensky’s office, Igor Zhovkva, complained to Bloomberg that the Kiev forces had "like almost zero ammunition" left due to the high intensity of fighting with the Russians in the Donbass area.
** US officials basically admit they blew up Nord Stream – Russian FM
US officials are basically admitting that they were behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, which was perpetrated to prevent rapprochement between Moscow and Berlin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
“The US decided that we [Russia] have been cooperating too well with Germany over the past 20 or 30 years; or rather, the Germans cooperated with us too well,”he said in an interview published on the Foreign Ministry’s website on Sunday.
The “powerful alliance” based on Russian energy resources and German technology “began to threaten the monopoly position of many American corporations,” Lavrov explained.
So, Washington decided to destroy this alliance between Moscow and Berlin, and did it “literally” by attacking the pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany, he added.
“American officials are basically admitting that the explosions that occurred at Nord Stream 1 and 2 were their doing. They even speak about it with joy,” the foreign minister stated.
Lavrov was likely referring to a confession made by US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland during a Senate hearing in late January. “I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now... a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea,” she said at that time.
“The vileness of Western politicians is well known,” Lavrov continued, suggesting that “the plan, which is now being implemented through ‘inciting’ Ukraine against Russia and waging a war by the entire West against Russia by means of Ukraine, is to a large extent aimed at preventing a new rapprochement between Germany and Russia.”
The comments by Russia’s top diplomat come just days after iconic American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released a bombshell report, blaming Washington for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines last year.
According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted at the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise. They were detonated in late September, rendering the key European energy infrastructure inoperable.
US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson denied the report by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”No one among high-ranking American officials has even commented on the accusations made by Hersh.
For months, the Russian authorities have been pointing to the fact that the only side to benefit from the destruction of Nord Stream was the US, which has seen supplies of its more expensive liquefied natural gas to Europe increase massively since the explosions.
** Russian forces hit shops for assembling armored vehicles for Ukrainian army
Shops for assembling tanks and armored vehicles for the Ukrainian army at the Malyshev machine-building plant in Kharkov was hit by Russia’s high-precision weapons, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Sunday.
"A high-precision missile strike delivered by the Russian aerospace forces in Kharkov, shops for the assembly of tanks and armored vehicles for the Ukrainian army at the Malyshev plant were hit," he said.
Reuters/RT/TASS
