The fighting around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut is “particularly intense,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said, not suggesting that the city has finally fallen to Russia, as Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Wagner’s Mercenaries, claims.

Ukrainian military in BakhmutPhoto: AA/ABACA / Abaca Press / Profimedia

The latest on the war in Ukraine, day 404, LIVETEXT:

06:15 Chancellor Olaf Scholz, official visit to Romania / Meetings with Presidents Klaus Iohannis and Maia Sandu

04:31 ​Zelensky: “Racism” must suffer a total defeat: military, economic, political, legal. Ukraine will return all its territories

A brief summary of recent events:

  • US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called for the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Hershkovich during a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday, who said Washington should not politicize the case.
  • Prominent Russian war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in a bomb blast at a cafe in St. Petersburg on Sunday, in what appears to be the second killing on Russian soil of a figure closely linked to the war in Ukraine.
  • Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner’s mercenary group in Russia, said that his forces raised the Russian flag on the administrative building of the city of Bakhmut. Oleg Zhdanov, a well-known Ukrainian military observer, said that the fighting had reached the center of the city.
  • German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall is building a military maintenance and logistics center in Satu Mare, which will begin operations this month to service weapons used during the war in Ukraine
  • Six civilians were killed and eight were injured as a result of Russian shelling of the city of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine, a high-ranking Ukrainian official said. Kostyantynivka, where about 70,000 people lived before the war, is only 20 km west of Bakhmut.
  • Russia will move its tactical nuclear weapons near Belarus’ western borders, a Russian official in Minsk said on Sunday, placing them in close proximity to NATO, likely to further escalate the conflict between Moscow and the West.
  • Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ oil producers, including Russia, announced further output cuts of about 1.16 million barrels per day on Sunday in a surprise move that analysts said would send prices immediately higher.
  • Ukraine sharply criticized Russia’s takeover of the leadership of the UN Security Council on Saturday, as Vladimir Putin is accused of war crimes. Zelensky called this step “absurd and destructive”.
  • Growing speculation in Russia about changes in the Russian military command likely indicates that Moscow may soon restructure its military command following the failure of Russia’s winter offensive.
  • A priest and several believers from Khmelnytskyi region beat a military man in one of the churches of the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate on Sunday.
  • Former leader of Russian Donbas separatists Igor Girkin, Donetsk local collaborator Pavlo Gubarev, propagandist Maxim Kalashnikov and others announced the creation of the so-called “club of angry patriots”.
  • The “Wagner Group” is now a full-fledged army, the number of which is equal to the servicemen of Hungary or Slovakia, said the spokesman of the Eastern Military Command of Ukraine, Serhiy Cherevaty.
  • Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC) Oleksiy Danilov announced 12 steps for the liberation of Crimea.
  • In addition to the loss of soldiers during combat operations, the Russian army has significant losses due to a very large number of incidents, most of which are due to alcohol abuse.

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  • htm”>Sunday’s events related to Russian aggression were broadcast LIVE on HotNews.ro