Ukraine Breaking News Today Live on 03-31-2024

The head of Russia’s FSB accused the West of masterminding the March 22 attack, now the former head of the Russian Interpol bureau accuses the west of exerting mind control over the terrorists.

Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) accused Ukraine on Tuesday of orchestrating the attack on Crocus City Hall with Western assistance, without offering any evidence. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said the accusations were “absurd.”

Speaking on Russia’s Channel One main daytime political talk show “Time Will Tell” on Saturday, Major General Vladimir Ovchinsky, who had been the head of Moscow’s Interpol office from 1997-1999 made an even more astonishing claim than that made by the FSB that Kyiv had “trained militants in the Middle East.”

Ukraine’s top spy indicated that Russia’s supply of Kh-101 missiles has likely decreased.

Russia has been building up a stockpile of Kalibr cruise missiles and may strike Ukraine with them soon, Ukrainian Military Intelligence (HUR) Chief Kyrylo Budanov said on Ukrainian television Sunday, March 31.

Through March, Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. According to Budanov, Russia has lately been using the Kh-101 cruise missiles, as they’re considered more effective than the Kalibrs.

The European Union “closed the sky” to the Turkish airline Southwind Airlines because of their links with Russian entities.

The European Union has closed its airspace to the Turkish airline Southwind Airlines because of suspected links to Russia, the Turkish tourism news site Turizm Guncel reported on Saturday. The decision was prompted by sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia before and after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Germany’s Bild said Finnish authorities were the first to initiate an investigation into Southwind after it had proposed a new route between Antalya to Helsinki.

During its 33 days of occupation, the Russian military is alleged to have committed more than 9,000 war crimes in the Bucha district and killed more than 1,400 civilians, including 37 children.

President Volodymyr Zelensky honored the memory of Ukrainians killed by Russian occupation forces during their occupation of the sleep Kyiv suburb of Buch at the beginning of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Zelensky placed an icon lamp at the Wall of Remembrance near the Church of St. Andrew the First-Called and All Saints in Bucha.

Police say they’ve been able to gather a massive amount of data on the alleged war criminals, including their phone numbers and the names of their relatives.

Ukrainian police officers have identified more than 1,000 Russian troops who invaded Bucha at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 – including more than 100 military personnel who it alleges committed war crimes.

“The city was under occupation for 28 days. Kidnapping, torture, rape, looting and murder of civilians, including children, is not a complete list of what the Russian military committed there during this time. Ukrainian police officers carefully documented these war crimes for the International Criminal Court,” Ukraine's National Police wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday, March 31.

The bar owner and his two employees face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.

The owner of a popular gay bar in the Russian city of Orenburg has been arrested for “extremism,” rights groups said Sunday, as authorities crack down on the LGBTQ community.

Police and local nationalists raided the Pose bar in Orenburg earlier this month during a drag show, later arresting its administrator and artistic director in the first criminal case of its kind.

While winning the war with Russia remains the overriding priority for Ukraine, not allowing things to get out of hand internally is also of crucial importance.

These are tough and confusing days for embattled Ukraine. Uncertainty about when the desperately needed Western military support will arrive persists. So does the vagueness about when the Ukrainian leadership and parliament will get their act together to ensure that a proper mobilization law befitting the country’s “to be, or no to be” struggle against barbaric Russian imperialism is passed and implemented.

Now, on top of this, a series of abrupt and unexplained personnel changes within President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inner circle has blurred matters even more just as Russia has stepped up its daily missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and its efforts to break through on the front.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Ukrainians to stay strong and not to allow daily Russian shelling to break their spirits.

In front of tens of thousands of Catholics on Easter Sunday at Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City, Pope Francis called for Russia and Ukraine to do a full prisoner swap.

“In calling for respect for the principles of international law, I express my hope for a general exchange of all prisoners between Russia and Ukraine,” AFP quoted Pope Francis saying.

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

A three-ship convoy left a port in Cyprus on Saturday with 400 tons of food and other supplies for Gaza as concerns about hunger in the territory soar. World Central Kitchen said the vessels and a barge carried enough to prepare more than 1 million meals from items such as rice, pasta, flour, legumes, tinned vegetables and proteins. Also on board were dates, traditionally eaten to break the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan. It was not clear when the ships would reach Gaza. The first ship earlier this month delivered 200 tons of food, water and other aid - SCMP

Three United Nations observers and a translator were wounded on March 30 when a shell exploded near them as they were carrying out a foot patrol in south Lebanon, UN peacekeeping mission Unifil said, adding that it was still investigating the origin of the blast. Unifil said in a statement that the targeting of peacekeepers is “unacceptable”. Two security sources had earlier told Reuters the observers were wounded in an Israeli strike.

Sudden big changes at the top in Kyiv have generated uncertainty and speculation.

Last week saw a major personnel reshuffle within President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political entourage.

The changes were unexpected and no explanations were provided other than a hint from the Ukrainian leader that he wanted to make his presidential office more “efficient.”

In response, Moscow launched a furious tirade at the International Olympic Committee, arguing the IOC's restrictions on Russian athletes amounted to “neo-Nazism.”

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said on Saturday that Russian and Belarusian athletes “were not welcome” at the Olympics being staged in the French capital this year.

“I want to tell Russian and Belarusian athletes that they are not welcome in Paris and to tell Ukrainian athletes and all the Ukrainian people that we support them very strongly,” Hidalgo said in a video posted by Ukrainian YouTube channel, United News. 

Latest from the British Defence Intelligence.

• Recent imagery analysis has identified four barges positioned at the entrance to the Black Sea Fleet facility of Novorossiysk Sea Port. This is an effort to enhance the defences of the port against ottocks from Ukrainian Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USVs).
• Due to an increased risk of Ukrainian strikes in their traditional homeport of Sevastopol, Novorosslysk port now serves a crucial role in sheltering the Black Sea Fleet's most valuable assets.
• The former Commander of the Block Sea Fleet, Admiral Viktor Sokolov was replaced following Ukrainion successes in the use of USs against Russian targets both at sea and in port. His replacement, Vice Admiral Sergei Pinchuk, has likely sought to improve the survival chances of Russian vessels by adopting further preventative and defensive measures, including narrowing the entrance gap to port facilities.

Why the West needs to get out of its debilitating slumber, face harsh realities, and ensure that Ukraine defeats Russia.

I feel enormous frustration, seeing how the West is letting Ukraine down. Tens of thousands of brave Ukrainians have been killed and millions have been forced to flee. Meanwhile, the West drip-feeds Ukraine with out-of-date arms, though a few hundred courageous foreign volunteers have fallen in Ukraine. 

To begin with, the West (the United States!) should not restrain Ukraine but encourage it to hit hard in the whole of Russia. How can Russia's terrorist bombing of the whole of Ukraine be tolerated? The West must support Ukrainian bombing of any military target in Russia.

According to Artem Lysohor, the head of the Luhansk regional military administration, residents of Russian-occupied parts of Luhansk are being offered about $1,000 to disparage the Ukrainian military.

Residents of the Russian-occupied cities of Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk – in Ukraine’s Luhansk region in the east – are being offered 100,000 rubles ($1,080) to create “written testimonies about war crimes” committed by the Ukrainian military, Artem Lysohor, the head of the Luhansk regional military administration said in a post on Telegram.

To receive the money, you should claim that you suffered from Ukrainian military shelling, Lysohor said.

The Russian missile destroyed an administrative building. A fire broke out but was quickly extinguished.

One man died and others may be trapped under rubble in a Russian missile attack on “critical infrastructure” in the western region of Lviv Sunday morning March 31, the head of the Lviv Regional Military Administration, Maksym Kozytskyi, posted on Facebook.

Kozytskyi said that the Russian missile destroyed an administrative building. A fire broke out, but was quickly extinguished by firefighters, he said.

New study details how Russia continues to con the world and what needs to be done to counter this.

A knockout study by the Institute for the Study of War (“ISW”), just out March 27, is a must read for all the leadership of the West, and particularly, the US Administration and Congress.

Vladimir Lenin’s famous statement, that “a lie told often enough becomes the truth” has been the mainstay of Russia’s successful program of lies and deception since 1917. This powerful quote encapsulates the power of dishonesty and manipulation to sway public opinion. And this stratagem was amplified by Stalin, the KGB and all the Russian rulers since.

While explosions are deafening Ukrainian soldiers at the front, the din from abrupt personnel changes at the top in Kyiv is also numbing.

Ukrainians have become dizzy in recent days both from the noise of Russian drones and missiles launched at our cities every night and from the clammer of daily news which has baffled even the most experienced political scientists.

There has been no Ukrainian ambassador to the UK for almost eight months. On July 21, 2023, the previous ambassador and former foreign minister Vadym Prystaiko was fired because he dared to gently criticize President Zelensky for undiplomatic language during his state visit to London. Great Britain, however, has remained a reliable partner, providing military assistance in large quantities.

The Russian attacks damaged two high-rise buildings and 21 private houses.

Two civilians were wounded and 16 localities were attacked by Russian forces in the Kherson Region on Saturday, March 30, Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, posted on Telegram.

“Yesterday, the enemy fired at Antonivka, Sadove, Tiahynka, Inzhenerne, Mykhailivka, Beryslav, Kizomys, Zolota Balka, Poniativka, Stanislav, Shliakhove, Osokorivka, Lvove, Bilozerka, and the city of Kherson. The enemy also launched missile attacks on the Beryslav district. The Kherson district was attacked by two Shahed-131/136. Two people were injured as a result of the Russian aggression,” he wrote.

When the war came down on his home, Ukraine’s best-known sculptor felt compelled to transform the destruction into a defiant act of creative transformation.

It’s rare to come across someone who seems to turn everything they touch into a work of art, charged with meaning beyond physical matter.

Mikhail Reva is unquestionably such an artist. A big man, now 64, he looks as if he’s spent his whole life hewing stone and casting bronze. And he more or less has.

Ukraine repelled the barrage of attacks with fighter planes, anti-aircraft missiles, mobile fire groups, and electronic warfare equipment.

Ukraine’s air defense destroyed 18 Russian missiles and drones targeting Ukraine in a barrage of overnight attacks March 30-31.

As Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk reported on his Telegram, the Ukrainian Air Force took down nine Kh-101/Kh-555 cruise missiles and nine of the Iranian-made Shahed 136/131 drones.

Despite its many flaws, the United States is the only nation equipped to forestall genocide. The passage of a Ukraine aid package in Congress is a litmus test of its moral leadership.

Astonishingly, there are still people among us who were alive during the 1915-1920 Armenian genocide and who have since lived through the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Shoah of the Jews, the Cambodia, Darfur, and Myanmar genocides, and so on. Indeed, the past century has been a uniquely wicked one.

But one doesn’t have to be a centenarian to have seen horror on an epic scale. As an aid worker, I witnessed atrocious things in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the early 1990s, where at least a quarter of a million people perished. And in April of 1994, almost exactly 30 years ago, I had a close-up view of the1994 Rwandan genocide in which some 800,000 mainly Tutsi civilians were slaughtered, many by machete.

The French government is pushing defense companies to ramp up production to meet the needs of its own army and to ensure continued support to Ukraine after more than two years of war with Russia.

France's defense minister said Paris would deliver “hundreds” of armored personnel carriers and anti-aircraft missiles as part a new aid package to Ukraine in its war against Russian invaders.

“To hold such an extensive front line, the Ukrainian army needs for example our VAB vehicles: it's absolutely essential for troop mobility,” Sebastien Lecornu told La Tribune newspaper in an interview published late Saturday.