live blog
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Grandi warns of a decline in aid. Former General Hodges doubts the West’s will to win. All developments in the live blog.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expects Hungary to be the last member country to ratify Sweden’s entry into the military alliance at the end of February. Then the Hungarian parliament will meet again, says Stoltenberg. After the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Sweden, which had previously been neutral, as well as Finland, applied for admission to NATO. Finland’s accession has already taken place.
The Kremlin has denied a report by the Bloomberg news portal that Russian President Vladimir Putin is considering talking to the US about ending the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin also rejected any possible return to the demand that Ukraine maintain a neutral status and not become a NATO member.
The report said Putin was “exploring” whether Washington was willing to talk and had reached out to the United States through indirect channels. The report quoted two people close to the Kremlin as saying that Putin “may be ready to abandon insistence on neutral status for Ukraine and even abandon opposition to possible NATO membership.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked by reporters about the report, particularly about whether Moscow was really ready to give up its demands for neutrality and NATO. “No, this is a false report. It absolutely does not correspond to reality,” Peskov said.
The black boxes from the Russian Il-76 military transport plane that crashed near the Ukrainian border on Wednesday have been taken to a special laboratory in Moscow for analysis. This is reported by the Reuters news agency, which cites Russian state media. Experts have already started restoring the flight data from the boxes, it said.
According to Russian news agencies, a Moscow court has decided that American journalist Evan Gershkovich must remain in custody until March 30, 2024. The 32-year-old reporter for the “Wall Street Journal” was arrested on March 29, 2023 while on a reporting trip in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on charges of espionage, which carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. Gershkovich denies the allegations.
The Russian Federal Security Service claimed that the reporter “according to the instructions of the American side, collected information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex, which constitutes a state secret.”
According to media reports, the Foreign Office has uncovered a Russian disinformation campaign on Platform X. As “Spiegel” reports, the aim of the campaign is to increase discontent against the traffic light government and undermine support for Ukraine.
On behalf of the Federal Foreign Office, experts analyzed Platform X using special software from December 20, 2023 to January 20. They came across a large network of false user accounts that spread German-language content. According to “Spiegel”, the experts identified more than 50,000 fake user accounts during the period, which posted a total of more than a million German-language posts. The allegations were often made in the contributions that the federal government was neglecting its own population in order to support Ukraine.
According to the report, the analysts attribute the current wave of attacks to the so-called doppelganger campaign, which became known in 2022 and is also targeting other European countries. The fake accounts lead to websites that imitate news media, including “Spiegel”. This is intended to suggest credibility.
When he took over the company, X owner Elon Musk announced that he would take decisive action against such bots. However, Musk dismantled many protections. Fake news and hate speech have increased since then.
Almost two years after the start of the Russian war of aggression, the UN refugee agency classifies the humanitarian situation in Ukraine as very serious and warns that aid will decrease. “The air strikes hit the front lines and the cities every day. And with every strike they bring destruction that affects civilians. Many people are losing their homes or are being displaced,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. The head of the UNHCR spent a week visiting aid projects in Odessa, Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Kiev.
The crash of a Russian military plane in the border region with Ukraine has led to a heated exchange between diplomats from both countries in the UN Security Council.
Former US general Ben Hodges has expressed doubts about the will of Western allies to win in supporting Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression. The year 2024 will be a year of industrial struggle, said the former commander of the US armed forces in Europe at a Bundeswehr symposium on Germany’s new defense plan.
“The Russians are realizing that they can’t take Ukraine down. Ukraine – right now – can’t take Russia down.” There is now a race to see whether Russia or the Western allies can ramp up their industry and produce ammunition more quickly. “From history we know that war is a test of will and a test of logistics. Undoubtedly, Ukrainians have a superior will,” he said. “Do Berlin, Washington, do we have a will that is superior to the Kremlin? At the moment I’m not sure. That’s the biggest danger for us,” said Hodges.
The Russian nationalist and war supporter Girkin has to be imprisoned after criticizing the government. Ukraine is launching an intelligence investigation into the plane crash on Wednesday. Thursday’s live blog for reading.