Ukraine Breaking News Today Live on 03-02-2024

Eight were confirmed dead, including a child and a baby, after an overnight drone strike on Odesa. Separate shelling attacks in the Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions killed another three.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday called on the West to rapidly deliver more air-defense systems as a wave of Russian missile, drone and artillery strikes killed at least 11 people.

Eight were confirmed dead, including a child and a baby, after an overnight drone strike on the southern port city of Odesa, a regional official said.

It needed to be said – that NATO was not ruling out any options – but it should have been said in concert. Now the resulting appearance of disunity is playing into Russia’s hands.

On Tuesday, Feb. 27, standing before 20 European heads of state and other officials at the Ukraine Summit in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters: “Should we give over our future to the American electorate? My answer is no. Let’s not wait for the outcome.”

The consensus answer, however, caught Macron off guard. It was essentially one of “Yes, let’s wait.”

The Ukrainian military has been having great success in shooting down Russian aircraft, bringing down 13 jets in as many days.

Russian A-50 planes, the eyes of the Russian Air Force’s bombers, have not appeared over the Sea of ​​Azov for a sixth day, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said on national television Saturday.

“This is a good and pleasant fact for us,” Ihnat said.

When what looked to be a Russian missile fell in Poland, NATO countries went to great lengths to portray it as accidental. The very effort reflects a serious dilemma.

The incident on Nov. 15, 2022, when a missile tragically ended the lives of two Polish nationals on a farm in the village of Przewodów, emerges as a pivotal moment of contention and solidarity. This event, far from being an isolated tragedy, has spiraled into a complex narrative involving NATO’s unity, disputed accounts of the missile’s origin, and the broader implications of Russian military activities in the region, with new perspectives emerging in the UK.

The immediate aftermath of the incident saw a swift and unified response from the Baltic states, demonstrating an unwavering readiness to support Poland, an act that underscored the solidarity within NATO. However, the narrative took an unexpected turn as both Poland and several other NATO members disputed the initial claims pointing towards Russia, instead suggesting that the missile had originated from Ukraine. The chorus of voices asserting this narrative was joined by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, during the G20 summit in Bali – a summit that also saw the participation of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – repeatedly endorsed the view that the missile was not of Russian provenance.

The world in focus, as seen by a Canadian leading global affairs analyst, writer and speaker, in his review of international media.

Many of the people treated for injuries following a rush on an aid convoy in Gaza on Thursday suffered gunshot wounds, the UN has said. UN observers visited Gaza City's al-Shifa Hospital and saw some of the roughly 200 people still being treated. Hamas, which governs Gaza, has accused Israel of firing at civilians, but Israel said there was a "stampede" after its troops fired warning shots. Leaders from around the world have called for a full investigation - BBC

The United States will begin air dropping food aid to the people of Gaza, President Joe Biden announced Friday, as the humanitarian crisis deepens and Israel continues to resist opening additional land crossings to allow more assistance into the war-torn strip. Speaking in the Oval Office, Biden said the US would be “pulling out every stop” to get additional aid into Gaza, which has been under heavy bombardment by Israel since the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. “Aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough,” the US president said, noting that “hundreds of trucks” should be entering the enclave - CNN

The minister of strategic industries has disclosed that Ukrainian defense industry capabilities are several times larger than the funding available to support it,“so right now we have to cherry-pick.”

Oleksandr Kamyshin, the Minister of Strategic Industries, stated in an interview with The Independent media outlet that amidst a brutal artillery war with Russia, Ukraine requires an amount of ammunition that “no single country can deliver.”

He said that even the United States couldn’t deliver the needed ammunition.

“What is being reported is a very serious matter,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said.

The German defense ministry on Saturday said it was checking whether a confidential videoconference on the Ukraine war had been wiretapped after a recording was posted on Russian social media.

The head of Russia's state-backed RT channel, Margarita Simonyan, on Friday, posted a 38-minute audio recording of what she claimed were German officers discussing striking Crimea.

Russia’s willingness to sabotage mutually beneficial international relations has mystified western observers for generations, as Winston Churchill wrote: “Russia is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.”

In his incisive book Russia’s War on Everybody: And What it Means for You, published in January 2023, Chatham House’s Russia expert Keir Giles clears away some of the fog.

Westerners’ confusion regarding Russia is a result of self-delusion, says Giles. Because they desire peaceful and productive international relations, they think Russia’s rulers (or “Russia” for short) must as well. They could not be more mistaken.

Syrsky said that when the commander “does not control the situation,” he's forced to make personnel changes.

Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrsky, who took command at the beginning of last month, stated that he is now at the eastern front and announced personnel changes among brigade commanders. 

“Within three days, it became completely clear why, in the case of the same staffing, weapons and military equipment, some brigades manage to hold back enemy attacks and hold their positions, while others do not,” Syrsky wrote on Telegram. 

It’s high time that the UK government and other democracies call a spade a spade and designate Russia as a terrorist state. This will facilitate a just peace that does not reward the aggressor.

In the invasion of Ukraine and occupation of Ukrainian land since 2014, Russia has committed many acts of terrorism. It is guilty of mass murder, extensive destruction of civilian properties, mass abduction, including the abduction of children on a systemic scale, rape, torture and environmental destruction. Evidence now being accumulated proves that Russia is a state sponsor of terrorism – a terrorist state.

We were recently part of a UK Friends of Ukraine Parliamentary delegation that heard from survivors of Russian terrorism in the village of Yahidne, in the Chernihiv region. From March 3, 2022 to March 30, 2022, Russian occupiers locked in an underground basement in Yahidne 380 men, women and children, the youngest just over a month old and the oldest was 93 years old.

Ukraine operators may have figured out a way to marry up a drone with a Korea-era landmine originally designed to blast massed infantry attacks with ball bearings. But it’s not confirmed.

A video first released by Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade, a combat unit raised and mostly recruited in greater Kyiv, showed a drone releasing an anti-personnel munition able to pound an area about the size of a basketball court with hundreds of projectiles.

Firefighters said that they had eliminated the fire in an area of 50 square meters.

An overnight Russian drone attack in Odesa destroyed 18 apartments in a high-rise building, killing five people, including one two-year-old, and at least eight more were injured.

Ukrainian emergency services reported on Facebook earlier that two dead bodies were dug out from the rubble, and that they had managed to rescue four people.

Ukraine aid has been blocked in the US House of Representatives and the impasse has impacted Ukraine which has been suffering battlefield setbacks due to a lack of ammunition.

Continued international support for Ukraine was top of the list in talks at the White House between Friday between US President Joe Biden and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

“I want to thank you for Italy’s unwavering support for Ukraine,” Biden said, speaking with his Italian counterpart in the Oval Office, AFP reported.

The arch-propagandist tried to capitalize further on Thursday’s claims by releasing the audio and full transcript of the conspiracy with the names of the Bundeswehr officers involved.

Kyiv Post reported that Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia’s RT television channel, said on Thursday she had an audio recording of high-ranking Bundeswehr officers discussing strikes on the Crimean Bridge.

On Friday she said she felt she had to responded to those who did not believe in the authenticity of the recording to prove it existed, saying: “This audio speaks for itself. At first, when I just published the first text about the existence of such audio, there were many skeptics. And the media called me and wrote: ‘No, it can’t be.’ This is the real audio.”

The Mriya's commander, Dmitry Antonov, told the Kyiv Post that the plane could have been saved, but that the crew “really wanted to help those who wanted to take Kyiv in three days.”

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported that it’s collected “indisputable evidence” that high-level officials at Antonov State Enterprise took actions that let Mriya – what had been not only the largest airplane in Ukraine but also the largest in the world – be destroyed by the Russians in the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Dmytro Antonov, Mriya's commander, told Kyiv Post that Mriya could have been saved, but management “apparently really wanted to help those who wanted to take Kyiv in three days.”

A young man was reported killed and three others injured, including a three-year-old child.

Overnight Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine's Kharkiv and Odesa regions killed at least two people, authorities reported early Saturday.

Odesa officials said a Russian drone attack damaged multiple high-rise apartment buildings in the port city, killing a young man and injuring several others, including a three-year-old child.

Repeated shoot-downs of more than a dozen of the Kremlin’s best jets took place about 18 months after key electronic defense systems were captured by Kyiv and could now be compromised.

The Ukrainian military is being tight-lipped on how its ground gunners just managed the shoot down of a reported thirteen (so far) of the Russia’s most advanced jets, in as many days.

But that Ukrainian and allied technicians have been able to pick over remains of multiple captured Russian airframes and their debris for more than a year and figure out ways to overcome avionics and electronic defense systems found in the debris, is well-documented.