Russia Ukraine war: Putin ‘loses entire brigade’ in more painful losses

The authoritarian leader of Belarus has said that Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict.

Alexander Lukashenko, who is an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, described the current state of the conflict as “head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying”.

“There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position,” he said.

Thyroid cancer, Parkinson’s disease, leprosy or declining in the aftermath of a stroke – just a few of the many unproven ailments rumoured to have afflicted the Russian leader in recent years.

Just this week, the Kremlin were forced to deny rumours that Vladimir Putin had suffered a cardiac arrest in his bedroom, months after they were forced to deny that he had soiled himself.

Since gripping the reins of power in 1999, Putin has established himself as one of the most infamous politicians in modern history, with a vicelike grip over Russia.

Read the full article below

Delays in Western military aid handed Moscow time to build heavily fortified defences which have largely held up against months of intense assaults – and constraints in ammunition and weaponry now mean both armies may struggle to sustain the current pace of the war, some analysts believe.

With the prospect of a Middle East conflict likely to further stretch Washington – Ukraine’s largest backer – ahead of a US presidential election in November 2024, Vladimir Putin’s strategy may now be to preserve the current state of the front line and “wait it out”, Western experts say.

Read the full article below

The head of Ukraine’s state grid operations said Russian strikes on energy systems damaged 70 large facilities last autumn and winter.

Volodymyr Kudrytskyi told Voice of America that about half of Ukraine’s power system was damaged in the campaign.

He said: “Any lower-level facilities were damaged in frontline areas by artillery strikes, small transformer points or regional substations. There are probably hundreds, thousands of them.”

Soldiers who don’t follow the suicidal Kremlin orders now risk gunfire from both sides of the war, says Askold Krushelnycky in Ukraine:

So brutal is the conflict in the heavily fortified battlefields around the city of Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine, that Western intelligence suggests some Russian commanders are now executing soldiers who refuse to advance into the tempest of rocket and gunfire.

A Ukrainian drone crashed into a nuclear waste storage facility at the Kursk nuclear power plant in western Russia on Thursday, damaging its walls, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Saturday.

The ministry said in a statement that Kyiv must have known that its actions could have caused a full-scale nuclear catastrophe.

Moscow said on Friday that it had thwarted the drone attack in the country’s south, where two news outlets said an explosion had damaged the facade of a warehouse storing nuclear waste.

As rumours swirl about the health of the Russian president, Mary Dejevsky explains what the death of Putin could mean for Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world:

The Russian president, who recently turned 71, was said to have suffered a stroke at his residence outside Moscow and to be in intensive care or, at the very least, under the beady eye of his doctors.

Talks on Ukraine‘s plan for peace kicked off in Malta on Saturday, with the participation of more than 65 countries — but not Russia, Maltese and Ukrainian officials said.

The two-day meeting of national security delegates is the third round of such talks in recent months. Ukraine sees them as an opportunity to win support for president Volodymyr Zelensky’s 10-point peace plan from countries across the globe, especially as the conflict in the Middle East risks shifting the focus away from Ukraine.

Russia, which wasn’t invited to any of the meetings, has dismissed the initiative as biased.

“Ukraine‘s diplomatic efforts are paying off, as international support for the Ukrainian peace formula is growing,” the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak, wrote on X — formerly known as Twitter — ahead of the opening session.

Soldiers who don’t follow the suicidal Kremlin orders now risk gunfire from both sides of the war, says Askold Krushelnycky in Ukraine:

So brutal is the conflict in the heavily fortified battlefields around the city of Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine, that Western intelligence suggests some Russian commanders are now executing soldiers who refuse to advance into the tempest of rocket and gunfire.