Russia-Ukraine war: Kyiv to receive ‘hundreds’ of tanks from several nations, says Lithuania | Ukraine

The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, has said the EU “must spare no effort” in helping Ukraine join the EU during a visit to Kyiv where he met Volodymyr Zelenskiy and members of his government.

Michel delivered an address to Ukraine’s parliament, hailing the country’s resilience amid Russia’s invasion and saying “Ukraine is the EU and the EU is Ukraine”.

He said:

I dream that one day, I hope soon, a Ukrainian will hold my job as president of the European Council, or as president of the European parliament, or the commission.”

Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, tweeted a photo of him with Michel in the capital, and said the pair discussed the country’s path to EU membership and defence assistance.

Here are some of the latest images we have received from Bakhmut, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine.

Moldova has requested air defence systems from its allies with the aim of strengthening its capabilities as the war in neighbouring Ukraine continues, its president, Maia Sandu, said.

Moldova’s spy chief, Alexandru Musteata, warned last month of a “very high” risk of a new Russian offensive towards his country’s east and said Moscow still aimed to secure a land corridor through Ukraine to the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria.

Moldova has long had Russian troops based in Transnistria, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in eastern Moldova. The area has been controlled by pro-Russia separatists since 1992, after a short war when Moscow intervened on the side of the rebels.

Russian efforts to destabilise Moldova have so far failed, Sandu told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Lithuania’s defence minister, Arvydas Anušauskas, has said several countries will announce sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine at tomorrow’s meeting of defence ministers at the Ramstein airbase in Germany.

Anušauskas told Reuters:

Some of the countries will definitely send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, that is for sure.

The total number of armoured vehicles pledged at tomorrow’s meeting would go into hundreds, Anušauskas said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to the Ukrainian president, has called on allies to “stop trembling at Putin and take the final step” to send tanks to Kyiv.

“True leadership is about leading by example, not about looking up to others,” he said in a tweet likely aimed at Germany, after a German government source said Berlin will send German-made tanks to Ukraine as long as the US agrees to do likewise.

It’s 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where things stand:

• A group of 11 countries have pledged a raft of new military aid for Ukraine, ahead of a crunch meeting on arms for Kyiv in Germany on Friday. The aid from countries including Estonia, Latvia and Poland will include tens of stinger air defence systems, s-60 anti-aircraft guns, machine guns and training, according to a statement.
• Britain plans to send 600 Brimstone missiles to Ukraine to support the country in its fight against Russia, defence minister Ben Wallace has announced. Speaking at a meeting with other defence ministers at the Tapa army base in Estonia, Wallace outlined a previously announced package of military support for Ukraine, including sending Challenger tanks. “We’re in it for the long haul,” he said.
• Sweden’s government has announced a new package of military aid to Ukraine that will include armoured infantry fighting vehicles and the Archer artillery system. Estonia’s defence minister, Hanno Pevkur, announced his country will send military equipment to Ukraine worth €113m in its latest package of support. Denmark announced it will donate 19 French-made Caesar howitzer artillery systems to Kyiv.
• The US and German defence ministers met today as Berlin faces pressure to allow the transfer of German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine. The meeting between Lloyd Austin and Boris Pistorius came as a German government source told Reuters that Berlin would allow Leopard tanks to be sent to Ukraine to help its defence against Russia if the US agreed to send its own tanks. But US officials have publicly and privately insisted that Washington has no plans to send US-made tanks to Ukraine for now, arguing that they would be too difficult for Kyiv to maintain and would require a huge logistical effort to simply run.
• Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has signalled that it could send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine as part of a wider coalition even without Germany’s approval. “Consent is of secondary importance here, we will either obtain this consent quickly, or we will do what is needed ourselves,” Morawiecki said.
• The Kremlin has said Russia will achieve its goals in Ukraine “one way or another” and the sooner Kyiv accepts its demands, the sooner the conflict will end. The Kremlin has repeatedly said Russia is ready to halt military operations if Ukraine meets its demands, but Moscow has not publicly outlined details of its negotiating position or what it is seeking from Kyiv in order to end hostilities.
• The Kremlin said on Thursday that Ukrainian strikes on Russian-annexed Crimea would be “extremely dangerous” after the New York Times reported that US officials were warming to the idea of helping Kyiv strike the peninsula. “This will mean raising the conflict to a new level that will not bode well for European security,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters at his daily briefing. Crimea, which is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine, was annexed by Russia in 2014.
• Dmitry Medvedev, the hawkish longtime ally of Vladimir Putin, has warned of a nuclear escalation if Russia is defeated in Ukraine, saying that western politicians “repeated like a mantra: ‘To achieve peace, Russia must lose’”, but “it never occurs to any of them to draw the following elementary conclusion from this: the loss of a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war”. Peskov later said the comments made by the deputy chairman of the security council of Russia were fully in accordance with Russia’s nuclear doctrine.
• Boris Johnson has urged the west not to fall for Russia’s threat of nuclear war but instead increase its supply of heavy weaponry to Ukraine. The former UK prime minister appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss Ukraine – with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, joining via video link.
• The number of children confirmed dead in Wednesday’s helicopter crash in Brovary is one, Ukraine’s state emergency services has said, not three, as previously stated. The crash took place near a nursery outside Kyiv, killing interior minister Denys Monastyrskiy and 14 other people. As of Thursday morning 16 victims were still in hospital, including six children, and 14 people were confirmed dead, including the child, according to the head of Kyiv region, Olekskiy Kuleba.
• A Swedish court has sentenced two brothers to prison for spying for Russia and its military intelligence service GRU for a decade. Iranian-born Peyman Kia, 42, was sentenced to life, while his younger brother, Payam Kia, was sentenced to nine years and 10 months. Between 2014 and 2015, Peyman Kia worked for Sweden’s domestic intelligence agency, and worked with a top-secret unit within the agency that dealt with Swedish spies abroad, according to local media. The case is believed to be one of the most damaging instances of espionage in Sweden’s history.
• Serbian and pro-Ukraine activists have filed criminal complaints against Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group and its supporters, accusing it of recruiting Serbs to fight in Ukraine. “We have reasonable suspicion that Vulin … gave orders, directives and guidelines that the activities of the Wagner Group in Serbia should not be prevented,” the group’s leader said.
• Ukraine has suffered a threefold growth in cyber-attacks over the past year, with Russian hacking at times deployed in combination with missile strikes, according to a senior figure in the country’s cybersecurity agency. The attacks from Russia have often taken the form of destructive, disk-erasing wiper malware, said Viktor Zhora, a leading figure in the country’s SSSCIP agency.

Hello everyone. It’s Léonie Chao-Fong here still, with all the latest developments from the Russia-Ukraine war. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.

Denmark becomes the latest country to send further military support to Ukraine, announcing that it will donate 19 French-made Caesar howitzer artillery systems to Kyiv.

The Danish defence minister, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, said in a statement:

We have been in continuous contact with the Ukrainians about the Caesar artillery in particular and I am happy that we have now received broad support from the Danish parliament to donate it to Ukraine’s freedom struggle.

Serbian and pro-Ukraine activists filed criminal complaints against Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group and its supporters on Thursday, accusing it of recruiting Serbs to fight in Ukraine, Reuters reports.

Čedomir Stojković, a Belgrade-based lawyer who also leads the October civic group, said that those accused include Russia’s ambassador to Serbia, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, and Aleksandar Vulin, the head of Serbia’s state Security and Information Agency.

“We have reasonable suspicion that Vulin … gave orders, directives and guidelines that the activities of the Wagner Group in Serbia should not be prevented,” he said.

Stojković said that Botsan-Kharchenko, who enjoys diplomatic immunity, could not be prosecuted in Serbia but that he should be ordered to leave the country.

Once a criminal complaint is filed, it is up to the state prosecutor to decide whether or not to proceed.

Neither Russian embassy to Belgrade nor the BIA replied to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Poland’s prime minister has signalled that it could send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine as part of a wider coalition even without Germany’s approval, raising pressure on Berlin before a crunch meeting of allies on more military aid for Kyiv.

“Consent is of secondary importance here, we will either obtain this consent quickly, or we will do what is needed ourselves,” the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, told the private broadcaster Polsat News late on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

A government spokesperson was not immediately available to comment on whether Morawiecki meant Poland or a group of countries could send tanks without Germany’s consent. Poland had repeatedly signalled that it would only send the tanks as part of a larger coalition.

“The most important thing is for Germany, but not only Germany … to offer their modern tanks, their modern heavy weapons, because Ukraine’s ability to defend its freedom may depend on that,” Morawiecki said.

Poland and Finland have said they would provide Leopards if Germany lifts its veto as part of a wider coalition, and other countries have indicated they are ready to do so too.

The British ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, has joined the backlash against comments yesterday by Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign secretary.

In his lengthy annual new year press conference yesterday, Lavrov compared the behavious of the west towards Russia with Hitler and Napolean, saying that, using Ukraine as a proxy, “they [the west] are waging war against our country with the same task: the ‘final solution’ of the Russian question. Just as Hitler wanted a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question, now, if you read Western politicians … they clearly say Russia must suffer a strategic defeat.”

Responding to a call for Jewish organisations to condemn the comments by Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, the British ambassador in Kyiv tweeted:

I don’t think it’s just Jewish organisations that should be calling out this insufferable Russian state sponsored antisemitism. It’s been going on for ages, repeatedly articulated, and it has repercussions for everyone when states reduce Holocaust history in this cynical way.

Reuters reports that Lavrov has caused outrage before with remarks about Hitler. Last May he said the Nazi leader had “Jewish blood”, drawing angry protests from Israel.