Selenskyj warns of a world war if China gets involved.
Russia is scouting targets in the North Sea.
The latest news in the Ukraine war.
Zelenskyj
warns of
world war
: China must not become an ally of Russia
Is Putin
threatening
a coup?
Kremlin boss is coming under increasing pressure
"
Ukraine
is running out of
bullets
": Estonia warns of an ammunition emergency - the EU quantifies Russia's consumption
This
news ticker
on
military events in the Ukraine war
is continuously updated.
Update from February 20, 6:20 p.m .:
Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) visited hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers on Monday who are currently at the Munster military training area.
They are trained on the Leopard 2 battle tank and the Marder infantry fighting vehicle.
Pistorius was impressed by how quickly the Ukrainians became familiar with the German weapon systems.
Twelve hours a day, six days a week, the Ukrainians in Lower Saxony complete the Bundeswehr tank training course in just five weeks.
Usually it lasts months.
But the soldiers are "highly motivated," says Lieutenant Colonel Markus D., who trains on the Marder.
"They know what they're doing it for."
+
Federal Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius (SPD, r), the Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksij Makejev (M), and Brigadier General and Commander of the Panzer Troops School Björn Schulz (l).
© Christian Charisius/dpa
By the end of March, the tanks promised by Germany should arrive in Ukraine, Pistorius confirmed.
"Training is a very special strength of our Bundeswehr," emphasized the Defense Minister.
Germany is adapting “flexibly to the needs in Ukraine”.
Since the start of the Russian war of aggression, "1,200 Ukrainian soldiers have been trained in complex areas - i.e. beyond basic training" in Germany, says Pistorius.
"By the end of this year there will be over 3,000." This shows that the support "is not just about material and quantities, about weapons and ammunition".
Zelenskyj warns of world war – Putin's Russia targets North Sea for sabotage
Update from February 20, 4:05 p.m .:
The Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns against Chinese support in the Ukraine war.
"It is important for us that China does not support the Russian Federation in this war," said the 45-year-old in an interview with Die
Welt
.
"Because if China were to ally with Russia, there would be a world war, and I think China is aware of that."
However, he currently sees no signs of Chinese intervention.
At the Munich Security Conference, China announced a peace plan for the Ukraine war.
At the same time, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned against arms deliveries from China to Russia.
+
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns of a world war if China interferes in the conflict.
© Efrem Lukatsky/dpa
Update from February 20, 2:35 p.m .:
Critical offshore infrastructure such as internet cables, gas pipelines and wind turbines have become the target of potential Russian sabotage activities in the Dutch part of the North Sea.
Russia is secretly mapping this infrastructure and engaging in activities "that indicate preparations for disruption and sabotage," according to a joint report by the military intelligence agency MIVD and the domestic and foreign intelligence agency AIVD.
Russian actors have scouted out the energy system in the North Sea in recent months.
"It's the first time we've seen that," explains MIVD boss Jan Swillens.
Is Putin threatening a coup?
“There is no loyalty in Russia”
Update from February 20, 12:05 p.m .:
President Putin is coming under increasing pressure: According to the Russian elite, he needs a victory in Ukraine to ensure his own survival.
"There is no loyalty in Russia," a Russian billionaire told The
Washington Post
.
Doubts about Putin's brutal war tactics are growing, the report says.
For many businessmen and state officials, Putin's losses in the Ukraine war would have wiped out the progress made in the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
According to the report, however, the majority of the oligarchs still fear the Kremlin boss and have so far remained silent.
"The elite know it was a mistake but are still afraid to do something themselves," says former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev.
Update from February 20, 10:55 a.m .:
The Ukraine war continues with undiminished severity: Both Russia and Ukraine reported successes on Monday morning.
According to the Nexta
portal,
there was once again an air alarm throughout the country in the morning.
Ukraine reported 20 strikes on "personnel" and "equipment" hotspots of invading forces on Sunday.
Russia lost 820 soldiers, including six tanks and seven artillery systems.
This information cannot be independently verified.
However, warnings of an ammunition emergency on the Ukrainian side came from the EU on Monday.
Meanwhile, according to the state agency TASS, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said Russian troops had captured a “strategically important hill” near the settlement of Bilohorivka in Luhansk Oblast.
The Ukrainian website pravda.com.ua, citing Kiev's general staff, reported that Russia was continuing offensives near Bakhmut, Kupiansk, Lyman, Avdiivka and Shakhtarsk.
Civilians were also killed in the Cherson area.
"Ukraine is running out of bullets": Estonia warns of an ammunition emergency - the EU quantifies Russia's consumption
Update from February 20, 10:40 a.m .:
According to Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu, Ukraine is facing an ammunition problem in the defense against Russia.
"Ukraine is running out of bullets," Reinsalu said on the sidelines of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
"Today we have the situation that Russia uses as many projectiles in one day as the EU produces in one month," added the minister.
The current production capacities of the European armaments industry are "absolutely unacceptable".
Estonia has been promoting a European procurement program for some time.
According to the Foreign Minister, this involves artillery ammunition with a caliber of 155 millimeters.
The aim is to initially deliver one million artillery shells.
Reinsalu put the costs at four billion euros.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said everything would be done to provide sufficient ammunition.
According to Borrell, Russia is currently firing around 50,000 artillery shells a day in the war against Ukraine.
Update from February 20, 6:05 a.m .
: Volodymyr Zelenskyj claims to have been informed by generals about the situation at the front.
The Ukrainian President did not give any details in his recent video address.
"The situation is very difficult," he said, referring to the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
"We fight.
We break the enemy invader and inflict very heavy losses on Russia," said Zelenskyy.
The more casualties Russia suffers in Bakhmut, Wuhledar and other places in Donbass, the sooner Ukraine can end the war with victory.
Ukraine war: Kiev reports dead in Kherson region
Update from February 19, 9:20 p.m .:
According to Ukrainian information, three people were killed in Russian attacks in the Cherson region on Sunday.
Four other people, including two children, were injured when a grenade hit the yard of a house in the village of Burgunka in the southern Ukrainian region, the regional administration said on the online service Telegram.
In the village, an eight-year-old boy was also injured by Russian fire.
In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, including Kherson.
In mid-November Moscow ordered its troops to withdraw from the city.
In Russia, the governor of the Belgorod border region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, told Telegram that a young woman was killed by Ukrainian shelling in the village of Novaya Tavolshanka.
Light battle tanks from France for Ukraine
Update from February 19, 4:22 p.m.:
Light battle tanks for Ukraine: France will start delivering in the coming days.
The training of Ukrainian soldiers on the AMX-10 armored personnel carriers is also "close to completion", and delivery will begin "already at the end of next week".
This is what Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu said in an interview with the daily
Le Parisien
published on Sunday .
Ukraine War: Another Wagner Group?
Update from February 19, 3 p.m.:
Another Wagner troupe?
Chechen ruler Kadyrov also wants to build up a military force based on the example of Prigozhin's mercenaries.
The two show up together.
Update from February 19, 11:28 a.m
.: The Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov has "probably" rejected an "offer" by the Wagner mercenary financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.
This is what the US Institute for War Studies (ISW) reports in its latest analysis of the Ukraine war.
For Prigozhin it is about more “authority” in Russia.
According to the ISW, the offer was a proposal to conduct an "information attack" against the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Prior to that, Prigozhin announced that the Wagner Group had “nothing to do” with the Russian military.
The ISW now assesses the matter in such a way that for Kadyrov "the formal ties to the Kremlin are more useful than an alliance with Prigozhin could be".
Ukraine-News: Russia is probably using guided missiles of the Kalibr type
Update from February 19, 9:38 a.m
.: On Saturday, Russia again fired at Ukraine with rockets, including Kalibr-type guided missiles.
Impacts were reported in the western Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi.
According to the authorities, two people were injured and several houses were damaged.
Weapons in the Ukraine war: Russia increases production of hypersonic missiles
Update from February 18, 9:48 p.m .:
According to its own statements, the Russian defense industry has significantly increased the production of hypersonic missiles of the Kinshah ("Dagger") type.
“It's been put on the assembly line for a long time, initially it didn't require large numbers.
Now we're increasing," said the head of the Russian armaments holding Rostec, Sergey Chemezov, on Russian television on Saturday.
According to him, Russia has increased production enormously in all areas of the armaments industry.
"In some cases 50 times as much," Chemezov said.
Accordingly, the ammunition factories in particular have significantly increased their output.
However, Russian military bloggers recently reported that the units at the front were suffering from a lack of ammunition.
Chemezov, who is considered a close confidant of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, also said that Russia would produce 300 new attack helicopters by the end of the year.
That's about the amount the Ukrainian military says they've shot down since the war began.
Ukraine News: New offensive in summer 2023?
Update from February 18, 8:10 p.m .:
An early offensive by Ukraine?
According to former CIA chief General David Petraeus, this summer Ukrainian troops will be able to push back Russian forces further, depending on arms supplies and strategy.
It requires successful combined arms warfare - a complementary approach in which multiple types of combat units support each other - to be successful, Petraeus told US broadcaster
CNN
at the Munich Security Conference.
"They can cause the enemy to collapse and ideally collapse - and that is at least locally possible this summer - and hopefully sufficient to sever the land bridge that Russia has established, allowing it to engage along the south-east coast of Ukraine with the Connect Crimea,” pointed out Petraeus, who was US and coalition commander of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and later served as director of the CIA.
So you can start isolating Crimea and "split up" Russian forces.
Ukraine War: Ukrainian and Russian troops engage in skirmishes
Update from February 18, 6:20 p.m .:
The Ukrainian news platform Ukrinform reports on several combat operations: In the southern direction, the rocket and artillery units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine carried out more than 70 fire attacks per day.
This prevents the Russian sabotage reconnaissance group from landing on one of the islands in the Dnipro Delta and destroying the enemy boat and personnel.
“Our missile and artillery units have completed more than 70 fire missions.
In another attempt by the hostile DRG to land on one of the islands in the Dnipro Delta, a converted civilian motorboat and its personnel were destroyed," the platform quoted the task force "South" as saying on Facebook.
According to the command, as a result of combat operations, Ukrainian defenders disabled ten Russian soldiers.
In addition, two enemy Orlan-10 drones, an electronic battle station, as well as an anti-tank missile complex and a large-caliber artillery piece belonging to the invaders were destroyed.
Update from February 18, 3:20 p.m .
: Russian military reports success in the Ukraine war: Vladimir Putin’s Russian military claims to have successfully taken another town in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine.
"In the Kupyansk area, the village of Khryanykivka in the Kharkiv region was completely liberated by offensive actions of Army Group West," Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Saturday (February 18).
By autumn, Russian troops in the region had suffered defeat and had to withdraw almost entirely from the area.
Russian military reports success: capture of village in Kharkiv region
Hryanykivka is a few kilometers east of the Oskil River, which the Russians initially wanted to build up as a new line of defense when they retreated from the Ukraine war last fall.
But then Putin's troops had to retreat much further.
The front largely ran along the Kharkiv-Luhansk regional border.
They were only able to hold out in the north, which borders on Russia.
In the meantime, the Russian military has been able to at least partially regain control of the region and, given the current developments in the war in Ukraine, has been able to report that some towns in the north-east of the country have been regained.
Ukraine war: US government reports 9,000 dead Wagner mercenaries
First report from February 18, 2:00 p.m.:
Washington, DC - In the Ukraine war, reports and estimates of high losses in Vladimir Putin's army keep coming up.
For example, Russia is said to have recently lost an entire elite brigade.
But while reports repeatedly refer to the Wagner Group's high losses, the US government has now released an assessment of the soldiers actually killed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a mercenary force in Ukraine known as Putin's cook, of whom fear is growing in the Kremlin .
According to this, about 9,000 Wagner mercenaries are said to have been killed in combat operations in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
"About half of those men have fallen since mid-December," said National Security Council communications director John Kirby on Friday (February 18/local time) at the White House in Washington, DC
"Cannon fodder" in the Ukraine war: Wagner group "literally throws recruits into a meat grinder"
According to US intelligence, around 30,000 Wagner troops have been wounded or killed since the war began almost a year ago.
However, such information from the war zone can often hardly or only with great difficulty be confirmed by an independent party.
Kirby said of the Wagner group's handling of the Ukraine war, led by "Putin's cook" Yevgeny Prigozhin: "They treat their recruits - mostly convicts - basically like cannon fodder.
They literally throw them in a meat grinder, in an inhuman way, without hesitation.”
Wagner group in the Ukraine war: high losses of the mercenaries in Bachmut
In his statement, Kirby referred primarily to the current heavy fighting for the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
There, too, Wagner mercenaries are deployed, who have to beg for ammunition due to the power struggle between Putin's defense minister and his cook, Prigozhin.
The British Ministry of Defense on Friday gave the figure of 40,000 to 60,000 soldiers killed on the Russian side since the start of the Ukraine war.
The total number of dead or injured on the Russian side was put by London at 175,000 to 200,000.
According to estimates, the "loss rate" for the Wagner mercenaries was probably up to 50 percent in the war in Ukraine.
List of rubrics: © Christian Charisius/dpa
