Kremlin monitoring situation around Valery Zaluzhny after Ukraine military commander refused Volodymyr Zelenskiy request to step down
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that it was monitoring the situation around Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military commander, after western and Ukrainian media outlets said President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was trying to oust Zaluzhny.
The media reports, attributed to unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter, said that Zelenskiy in a meeting on Monday had offered Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, a new role but that the general had refused.
Commenting on the situation around Zaluzhny, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said:
Of course we are following this. There are still a lot of questions. [But] one thing remains obvious – the Kyiv regime has a lot of problems, things are not going well there.
It is obvious that the failed [summer] counter-offensive and the problems on the front are leading to growing contradictions among the representatives of this Kyiv regime. These contradictions will grow as the special military operation continues to be successful.
Key events
The European Commission proposed on Wednesday measures to limit agricultural imports from Ukraine and greater flexibility towards rules on fallow land in a bid to quell protests by angry farmers in France and other EU members.
The Commission said it would extend the suspension of import duties on Ukrainian exports for another year to June 2025. They were originally suspended in 2022 to help support Ukraine’s economy following Russia’s invasion.
French and Belgian farmers have set up dozens of blockades on highways and on access roads to a major container port on Wednesday to press governments to ease environmental rules and help protect them from rising costs and cheap imports.
Kremlin monitoring situation around Valery Zaluzhny after Ukraine military commander refused Volodymyr Zelenskiy request to step down
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that it was monitoring the situation around Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military commander, after western and Ukrainian media outlets said President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was trying to oust Zaluzhny.
The media reports, attributed to unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter, said that Zelenskiy in a meeting on Monday had offered Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, a new role but that the general had refused.
Commenting on the situation around Zaluzhny, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said:
Of course we are following this. There are still a lot of questions. [But] one thing remains obvious – the Kyiv regime has a lot of problems, things are not going well there.
It is obvious that the failed [summer] counter-offensive and the problems on the front are leading to growing contradictions among the representatives of this Kyiv regime. These contradictions will grow as the special military operation continues to be successful.
European Union leaders will propose on Thursday holding an annual debate on a planned €50bn aid package for Ukraine in an effort to overcome opposition from Hungary, according to draft summit conclusions.
The aid is to cover Ukraine’s needs for 2024-2027. Hungary has been pushing for an annual review with a veto right, which other EU members oppose.
In a new update to the draft summit conclusions, the EU leaders would hold yearly debates on the aid package based on reports by the European Commission.
The January 30 draft conclusions, seen by Reuters, say:
The European Council will hold a debate each year on the implementation of the facility with a view to providing guidance on the EU approach towards the situation stemming from Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Russia’s defence minister orders military manufacturers to increase production
Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has told military manufacturers to “stop fooling around” and further increase the production of self-propelled artillery systems.
Shoigu visited arms-producing factories in the Urals industrial city of Yekaterinburg on Tuesday and said Russia was increasing production of air defence missiles after a series of Ukrainian drone attacks that have targeted cities and energy infrastructure.
In video published by news site RBC on Wednesday from Shoigu’s factories tour, he chided the management of one plant for not producing enough self-propelled artillery.
He told the plant’s bosses
Listen, stop fooling around here, guys. We got busy with this in 2022. We should have had these machines operating at full capacity in 2023.
I’d like to receive within a week a specific proposal on how we’ll reach the indicators set by the president (Vladimir Putin) … this must be done, because all these orders are connected with the performance of very specific work on the battlefield.
The director said the factory had already increased production six-fold in the last two years.
Russia has placed its economy on a war footing and shifted defence plants to round-the clock production to meet the needs of its forces in Ukraine.
Its defence industry will supply the army with “several times” more military equipment this year than in 2022 and 2023, Interfax news quoted Deputy Defence Minister Alexei Krivoruchko as saying this month.
The Russian anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin has said he submitted 105,000 signatures in his support to the Central Election Commission (CEC) to underpin his bid to challenge Vladimir Putin in an upcoming presidential election.
Reuters reports:
The CEC will check the authenticity and quality of the signatures submitted by Nadezhdin and other would-be candidates and announce next month who will join Putin on the ballot paper.
Putin’s victory is widely seen as a foregone conclusion, but Nadezhdin has surprised observers with his trenchant criticism of what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
After a series of heating outages across Russia during an unusually cold winter, Nadezhdin said earlier this month that the country would be able to afford to spend more on its citizens if it was not pouring so much money into the military.
As a candidate nominated by a political party, he needed to gather 100,000 signatures across at least 40 regions in order to stand in the 15-17 March election.
Putin, who has chosen to run as an independent rather than as the candidate of the ruling United Russia party, needs 300,000 signatures but has already collected more than 3.5m, according to his supporters.
The Russian deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, has said there are no talks, neither with Ukraine nor the European Union, about an extension of the Russian gas transit deal, which expires in the end of 2024.
Under the five-year deal agreed between Moscow and Kyiv in 2019, Russia exports gas to Europe via Ukraine and pays Ukraine for the usage of its pipeline network.
China’s new defence minister, Dong Jun, held a video call with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, today, according to a defence ministry statement, in his first public engagement since being appointed last month.
Reuters reports:
Former navy chief Dong’s appointment came after his predecessor, Li Shangfu, disappeared from public view in August, throwing China’s military diplomacy in doubt.
Dong told Shoigu that the Chinese and Russian militaries will “promote bilateral military relations to reach an even higher level, in order to play an even bigger role in upholding global security and stability”, according to the Chinese defence ministry readout.
Dong added that both militaries will “firmly respond to global challenges and continue to enhance mutual strategic trust”.
The role of China’s defence minister is to be the public face of the People’s Liberation Army in its engagement with the media and with other armed forces.
China and Russia’s close military ties have been the target of western scrutiny, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Beijing has refused to condemn.
The Swedishprime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said he will meet his Hungarian counterpart in Brussels on Thursday, though no time has been set for a formal meeting.
Kristersson told reporters:
We will meet there (Brussels) and have a decent chance to have a chat before a meeting later.
Hungary is the only Nato member not to approve Sweden’s application yet.
EU’s Borrell says Ukraine needs more ammunition
Ukraine needs more ammunition, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has said before a meeting with EU defence ministers in Brussels.
We have to show that our clear commitment with Ukraine remains and continues.
He added that it was important to clarify the situation and “know where we are now, where we will be by March and by the end of the year”.
Ukraine’s air defences shot down 14 out of 20 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack that injured one person and damaged commercial buildings, the military said on Wednesday.
The Air Force said in a statement the Iranian-made Shahed drones and also three Iskander missiles targeted five Ukrainian regions in the south and the east.
The southern military command said one person was injured and agricultural warehouses and a shop were damaged in the Mykolayiv region where five drones were shot down.
Details on damage in other regions were not immediately available.
The UN’s top court will hand down its verdict today in a case brought by Ukraine against Russia for alleged terrorism financing and racial discrimination after its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Agence France-Presse reports:
Kyiv has accused Moscow of being a terrorist state whose support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine was a harbinger of the full-fledged 2022 invasion.
It wants Russia to compensate all civilians caught up in the conflict, as well as victims from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine.
The case predates Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The international court of justice (ICJ) will decide on Friday whether it has jurisdiction to rule in a separate case over that war.
Russia is also in the dock for alleged breaches of an international convention on racial discrimination due to its treatment of the Tatar minority and Ukrainian speakers in occupied Crimea.
During hearings on the case, Alexander Shulgin, Russia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, accused Ukraine of “blatant lies and false accusations … even to this court”.
Top Ukrainian diplomat Anton Korynevych retorted that Russia was trying to “wipe us off the map”.
He said:
Beginning in 2014, Russia illegally occupied Crimea and then engaged in a campaign of cultural erasure, taking aim at ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars.
The case started in 2017 and has seen lengthy exchanges in the ICJ’s Great Hall of Justice, plus thousands of pages of documents submitted to the judges.
Ukraine has also taken Moscow to court over maritime law and alleged human rights abuses.
In 2017, the ICJ rejected Kyiv’s initial request for emergency measures to halt Russia’s funding of separatists.
However it did order Moscow to refrain from imposing “limitations” on the Crimean Tatars or the use of Ukrainian on the peninsula.
The ICJ, based in The Hague, rules on disputes between states, and is separate from the international criminal court (ICC), which prosecutes war crimes by individuals.
ICJ rulings are final and cannot be subject to appeal but it has little power to enforce them. For example, it issued an emergency ruling ordering Russia to halt its invasion one month after tanks rolled over the border – to no avail.
Summary
Today’s Guardian live coverage of the war in Ukraine starts here. Let’s go through the major developments:
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy asked his most senior military commander, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, to step down but the popular general refused, triggering speculation that he might be dismissed by the president amid tensions between them. Oleksii Goncharenko, a Ukrainian opposition MP and ally of the general, told the Guardian that he understood that “yesterday the president asked Zaluzhnyi to resign but he declined to do so”.
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Ukraine will soon receive the first big batch of long-range missiles made by Boeing and Saab that promise to extend its range deep into Russian-held territory, according to reports. Ukraine needs the ground launched small diameter bomb (GLSDB) to supplement its 100-mile Atacms rockets from the US.
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EU nations have decided to approve an outline deal that would deliver Ukraine the taxes and profits from hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian central bank assets that have been frozen outside Russia because of its war against Ukraine. It is seen as a first step towards using the Russian assets – there are also calls to seize the entire sum outright for Ukraine’s benefit.
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Peers have criticised the UK government for failing to agree a deal with the former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich to spend £2.5bn from his sale of the London football club.
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EU leaders will meet on Thursday hoping to approve €50bn in support for Ukraine over the solitary opposition of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who is an ally of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
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Russian attack drones hit Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, on Tuesday, slightly injuring three people, triggering a fire and causing damage to apartment blocks and infrastructure, local officials said.
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Ukraine said it had carried out a successful cyber-attack that knocked out a server used by Russia’s defence ministry, temporarily disrupting communications for military units.
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Ukraine is likely to face a tough year fighting Russia in 2024, the CIA director, Bill Burns, has written in Foreign Policy, arguing that to cut off US aid would be an error of “historic proportions”.
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The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said on Tuesday that European countries must get ready to help Ukraine keep fighting “over the long term”, with or without American help. “If the United States were to make a sovereign choice to stop or reduce this aid, it should have no impact on the ground.”
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The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, has said he expects Russia’s offensive on the eastern frontline to fizzle out by early spring. He credited them with only “a few advances across some fields” and near Avdiivka. “Now it’s the enemy’s move. It will end, and I think ours will start.”
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A Ukrainian military spy official said on Tuesday that Russia was showing no willingness to return the bodies of dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war that it said died in a military plane crash in the Belgorod region last week. Russia has produced no proof there were Ukrainian prisoners on the plane.
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The Ukrainian government submitted to parliament on Tuesday an amended version of its bill to tighten army mobilisation rules. The parliament rejected the previous draft amid public outcry. A key provision in the legislation is a lowering to 25 from 27 the minimum age for the draft. Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said the army needs 450,000-500,000 more personnel.
There is growing evidence that Russia is using “shadow tanker fleets” to circumvent a western oil price cap, a committee of Britain’s House of Lords has warned.
Agence France-Presse reports:
Arguing Britain and its allies must maintain sanctions and military support for Ukraine for “as long as it takes”, the Lords committee urged “decisive action”.
A year ago the G7, European Union and Australia imposed the unprecedented price cap on Russian oil, hoping to starve President Vladimir Putin of revenue while ensuring he still supplied the global market. Initially successful, the US$60 (£47) per barrel price ceiling on Russian oil lost its impact once Moscow found new buyers and new tankers.
Companies based in the EU, G7 member states and Australia are banned from providing services enabling maritime transport, such as insurance, of oil above that price.
Recent assessments show Moscow has reduced its dependence on western shipping services and skirted the curb by building so-called shadow fleets of tankers and buying old ships while offering its own insurance.
The Lords’ European affairs committee reported:
We are concerned at the growing evidence that Russia has been able to circumvent sanctions, including through third states and uninsured shadow tanker fleets.
This is an issue where decisive action by the UK and its allies is needed.
The committee urged the government to detail “specific examples” of enforcement action.
But the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) is the latest to highlight the extent to which Russia is now able to get around the mechanism. In its December Russian oil tracker report released this month, it estimated “179 loaded Russian shadow fleet tankers left Russian ports in November 2023”.
Around 70% of the vessels were built more than 15 years ago, it said.
In October 2023, the shadow fleet was responsible for exports of around 2.3m barrels per day of crude oil and 800,000m barrels per day of petroleum products, according to the KSE.
The Lords committee welcomed the western sanctions regime imposed on Moscow since its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, in particular that it had been “broadly aligned”, but warned:
Divergence between sanctions regimes results in gaps and loopholes, weakening their effectiveness; it should be as limited as possible.