Zelenskiy says troops have ‘stabilised’ battlefield positions

Ukrainian president says forces digging in despite shortage of military aid. What we know on day 772

• Russian attacks killed at least eight people in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, authorities have said, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused Moscow of targeting civilians. Drone attacks on Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv killed four people, including three rescuers responding to an earlier strike, the interior minister said. At least 12 others were injured. Separately, Russian artillery fire killed two – a married couple aged 53 and 51 – in the town of New York in the eastern Donetsk region, the regional prosecutor’s office said. Another strike killed a man in a tractor in the Kharkiv region, the governor said, and an aerial bomb killed an energy worker in the neighbouring Sumy region, Ukraine’s energy ministry said.
• Zelenskiy said his forces had managed to “stabilise” their positions on the battlefield, despite a “shortage of shells and a significant slowdown in supplies”. Russian forces had made their first territorial gains in nine months with the capture of the eastern city of Avdiivka in February. Zelenskiy said on Thursday that army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi had reported “on all points where the Russian army had expected to have success”.
• Russia’s foreign ministry said Sweden’s plans to set up a Nato military base on Gotland island in the Baltic Sea were a provocation that would turn the sea into an area of geopolitical confrontation, Russia’s RIA news agency reported. The ministry said on Friday this would increase risks for shipping in the Baltic. Gotland is critical for the control of the region’s sea lanes and gives Sweden and its Nato allies a profound advantage in securing the waters and the airspace off Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the Maritime Executive website has said.
• Russian forces claim to have entered a suburb of the city of Chasiv Yar in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The claim was made by an adviser to the Russian-appointed regional head on Friday, according to Russia’s RIA news agency. Chasiv Yar, about 10km (six miles) west of Bakhmut, has served as an important staging point for Ukrainian troops in the area and is now heavily fortified, it said. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
• Power for 350,000 residents was severed after an energy facility in the Kharkiv region was struck during Thursday’s attacks, officials said. Power supply limitations were later introduced in six Ukrainian regions, grid operator Ukrenergo said.
• Ukrainian drones killed two people in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, Moscow-installed official Andrey Alekseyenko said. In the Donetsk region, two civilians were killed and nine injured in Ukrainian attacks throughout the day, the Russian-installed regional chief said.
• Nato members have agreed to scour their arsenals for more air defence systems to protect Ukraine from Russian ballistic missile attacks, as the military alliance marked its 75th anniversary. “Allies understand the urgency,” Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said after the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, met Nato counterparts in Brussels on Thursday and stressed Ukraine’s call for more air defences. Kuleba said he also spoke to the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and called for more Patriot air defence systems “as soon as possible”.
• A resident of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk who helped Russia target a missile strike on a pizzeria last June has been jailed for life, prosecutors said. Thirteen people including novelist Victoria Amelina were killed when a Russian ballistic missile tore through the popular Ria Pizza restaurant on the evening of 27 June last year. The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said on Thursday that the man was recruited to carry out the task by an intelligence official in the Russian-controlled part of the eastern Donetsk region, who asked him to gather information about the restaurant.
• A fire broke out near the central market in the southern Russian city of Kursk on Thursday after air defence units downed a drone, one of four intercepted over the region, the governor said. Roman Starovoit reported no casualties.
• Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries may have disrupted more than 15% of Russian capacity, a Nato official said, adding that the alliance believed Moscow still lacked sufficient munitions and manpower to launch a successful offensive.
• Ukraine said it needed to completely decentralise its electricity grid to reduce its dependence on larger power stations, amid deadly Russian strikes on its energy infrastructure. The attacks were now “almost continuous”, said Volodymyr Kudrytsky, head of Ukrenergo, the grid operator. “Instead of having 15 or 20 large power plants, we will need to build hundreds of small ones that will be more resistant to these attacks due to their dispersion.”
• Finland said it would extend its border closure with Russia “until further notice”, after it was shut in December in response to a surge in migrant crossings. Finland, which joined Nato a year ago, has extended the closure several times, with the last extension set to expire on 14 April. The neighbouring countries share a 1,340km (830-mile) border.
• President Emmanuel Macron has condemned Russia’s “threatening” tone following rare phone talks between the French and Russian defence ministers that only served to underline the gaping gulf between Moscow and Europe two years into the invasion of Ukraine. The hour-long phone call took place as France is pulling out all the stops to host the Olympic Games in Paris this summer.

Source: The Guardian