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In a letter obtained by the Financial Times, Ukraine's Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov appealed to his counterparts in the 27 member states on Friday to provide Kyiv with 250,000 artillery shells a month to ease a critical shortage that limits the country's progress on the battlefield, .
Reznikov writes that his country’s forces are "only firing a fifth of the rounds they could" because of a lack of supplies. The request far exceeds the help the EU is discussing sending.
Reznikov writes that artillery plays a “crucial role in eliminating the enemy’s military power.” On average, Ukraine was firing 110,000 155mm-calibre shells a month, he says — a quarter of the amount used by Russia.
"Ammunition availability might be the single most important factor that determines the course of the war in 2023, and that will depend on foreign stockpiles and production," U.S. defense experts Michael Kofman and Rob Lee wrote in December for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Nearly 10,000 Russian soldiers have willingly surrendered themselves to the Ukrainian army via the "I want to live" hotline, Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War reported, according to
Launched in September 2022 by Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence, the 24-hour hotline allows Russians to willingly surrender themselves or their units to the Ukrainian army. Russian military personnel are held in compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
In addition to the hotline, there is also a chatbot and a website in Russian run by Ukraine's Defense Ministry with information about the program.
In the $400 million military aid package for Ukraine the U.S. announced on Friday are — for the first time — armored vehicles that can launch bridges, The Associated Press reported.
The war had largely slowed to a stalemate during the winter, with both sides firing at each other across the Dnieper River. Both sides are expected to launch offensives as temperatures warm.
The Armored Vehicle Launched Bridge is a portable, 18-meter folding metal bridge that is carried on top of a tank body. Providing that system to Ukraine now could make it easier for Ukrainian troops to cross rivers to battle with Russian forces.
A few people rip up readily available posters of Moldovan President Maia Sandu, scatter the shreds to the ground, and stomp on them, all to the delight of onlookers in the Moldovan capital on February 28, .
The latest anti-government protest in Chisinau was organized by a group calling itself the Movement for the People and backed by members of Moldova's Kremlin-friendly Shor Party, whose founder and leader, Ilan Shor, was convicted of fraud in 2017 for the theft of $1 billion from three Moldovan banks in 2014.
Sandu recently revealed chilling details of an alleged coup plot that comes amid fears Russian President Vladimir Putin could widen his war in Ukraine to Moldova by exploiting his troops on the ground in the breakaway pro-Russian Transnistria region. The Kremlin might not go that far, experts say, but nevertheless Moscow is eager to not only exploit Chisinau's current vulnerability but to try to distract Kyiv and its Western backers as well.
Ukraine is using mobile DNA labs to rapidly process DNA samples of the dead in under 100 minutes, . The cutting-edge labs provided by Western donors including the French authorities and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation in the United States, are being driven around the country in police vans allowing teams to process evidence in real time.
The use of the DNA machines will speed up the identification of thousands of dead and the collection of war crime evidence for tens of thousands of cases that Ukraine is building against Russia since the invasion of February 2022, say Ukraine’s authorities.
There currently are four such laboratories in the Kharkiv Oblast, one of them in Izium.
Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor, Yuriy Belousov, warned there could be as many as 100,000 Ukrainian civilians killed since the Russian invasion, and that they still have 3,300 bodies that are yet to be identified.
Ukraine is building over 24,600 war crime cases against Russia, according to Vasyl Maliuk, head of Ukraine’s Security Service.