What’s the news today?
As Russian bombing takes an appalling toll on the Ukrainian people,with civilian casualties mounting, and Putin hardening his rhetoric, the Pentagon has established a new hotline with Russia’s ministry of defence to prevent “miscalculation, military incidents and escalation” in the region as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine advances, a U.S. official told Reuters on Thursday.
The United States says it has no troops in Ukraine but it and NATO allies in Europe are worried about potential spillover, including accidents, as Russia’s stages the largest assault on a European state since World War Two.
The U.S. and its allies are also channeling millions of dollars worth of weaponry to Ukraine’s armed forces, which are using the arms against Russian troops, despite Moscow’s warnings against foreign interference.
“The Department of the Defense recently established a de-confliction line with the Russian ministry of defense on March 1 for the purposes of preventing miscalculation, military incidents, and escalation,” a senior U.S. defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirming a move first reported by NBC.
The U.S. military has successful created hotlines with Russia in the past, including during the war in Syria, where Moscow intervened on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.
There, the United States and Russia were waging parallel military campaigns, with the United States focused on battling Islamic State.
The move is just the latest effort to lower soaring tension between the United States and Russia, where President Vladimir Putin — in a clear warning to the West — announced last weekend he was putting his nuclear forces on high alert.
Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was quoted on Wednesday warning that a Third World War would be a nuclear conflict, remarks that added to growing unease.
The U.S. military said on Wednesday it would postpone a scheduled test launch of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.
“We recognize, at this moment of tension, how critical it is that both the United States and Russia bear in mind the risk of miscalculation and take steps to reduce those risks,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday, announcing the move.
Is this significant?
Yes. Although Putin holds the Russian equivalent of the nuclear briefcase, his commands have to be transmitted to and through a military command. While one doesn’t want to read too much into this, one can at least hope that there is a buffer between Putin’s commands and any subsequent action, with cooler heads than Putin’s on both ends of the hotline.
Meanwhile, talks are set to continue on creating humanitarian corridors for medicines to reach hospitals and people to escape. Ukraine is facing problems distributing medicines to pharmacies and hospitals due to the Russian invasion and wants to establish a humanitarian corridor for them, Health Minister Oleh Lyashko said on Wednesday.
Turkey and Black Sea access.
Turkey’s stance on Russian warships has raised hope of a reset in relations with west, the FT reports. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to curb passage of vessels has received praise in Kyiv.
In the run-up to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine, Moscow notified Turkey of its intention to send one of its most imposing warships, laden with cruise missiles, through the heart of Istanbul to join the impending onslaught.
But the Admiral Flota Kasatonov — and three other vessels that had been expected to traverse the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits — did not make the journey over the weekend, as Russia had planned, two western officials told the Financial Times.
On Monday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan indicated that he would invoke a clause in the 1936 Montreux Convention that allows Ankara to curb the passage of naval vessels belonging to warring parties. “We have the authority and we have decided to use it in a way that will prevent the crisis from escalating,” he said.
While the Turkish foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the four ships, diplomats believe that Turkey, for years viewed in western capitals as an unreliable Nato member that had grown too close to Moscow, asked Russia not to send them.
The decision to curb warships was a striking move from a leader who has fostered close ties with Putin. Ankara’s public criticism of the Russian invasion and its support for Ukraine has prompted some observers to ask if the conflict might trigger a recalibration of Turkey’s ties with the west. “Could this be a turning point? That is something we are asking ourselves,” said one senior western diplomat. “I think Erdogan is shocked — and maybe even feels betrayed — by what Putin has done.”
Turkey’s relationship with Russia has a long and complex history. Countless wars were fought between the Ottoman and Russian empires from the 18th century onwards — many of them over spheres of influence in the Black Sea and control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The country’s western-looking foreign policy establishment harbours an ingrained anxiety about the “bear in the north” and its expansionist tendencies.
Erdogan himself, however, forged a close relationship with Putin, a fellow strongman who, like him, harbours a profound mistrust of the west. The two men were drawn closer after a 2016 attempted coup d’état in Turkey that Erdogan believed was supported by the US. The Turkish president horrified Washington by buying an S-400 air defence system from Moscow and even floating the idea of buying Russian-made fighter jets.
Yet there have also been moments of high tension. Putin imposed economic sanctions on Ankara in 2015 after the Turkish air force shot down a Russian jet near the border with Syria, where Turkey and Russia back opposing sides — as they have done in battlefields in Libya and the Caucasus. Two years ago, in February 2020, 34 Turkish soldiers were killed in the Syrian province of Idlib in an attack that the US said was carried out by Russian warplanes.
Yet somehow the leaders have found ways to navigate those crises. “They understand each other, and they give each other slack,” said Selim Koru, an analyst at the Ankara-based think-tank Tepav.
Erdogan, who in the past has compared European leaders to Nazis for fairly minor diplomatic slights, has used careful language to criticise Moscow’s invasion.
Even as he suggested that he would limit the Russian navy’s access to the Turkish straits, he added: “We cannot dispense with either Ukraine or Russia.” Mevlut Cavusoglu, the country’s foreign minster, said he had requested all foreign warships — not just Russian ones — not to transit Turkey.
Still, Ankara’s stance has been welcomed by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, who said on Saturday that the Ukrainian people “will never forget” Erdogan’s “strong support” for his country. Armed drones, made by the Turkish president’s son-in-law, have become a key part of his armed forces’ arsenal.
Advocates of greater Turkish ties with the west suggest that the US should seize the opportunity to reboot the relationship. Washington could start by persuading Congress to approve a Turkish request to buy around 40 new F16 aircraft, wrote Rich Outzen, a former state department official, in an article for Turkey’s state-owned TRT World news service earlier this week. This would “cement an important relationship that has, and continues, to confer significant geopolitical value,” he said.
Yet others warn that it is naive to think that the Ukraine crisis will reaffirm the cold war-era partnership that was cemented by Turkey’s entry into Nato in 1952. “The prevailing opinion when you turn on TV stations [ in Turkey], even opposition stations, is that Nato lured Russia into this war,” said Koru.
Ankara is also economically dependent on Russia. Close to half of the country’s natural gas last year was supplied by Gazprom. The state-owned Rosatom is building Turkey’s first nuclear plant. Tourists from Russia and exports of fresh produce are a vital source of foreign currency. And, as the attack in Idlib two years ago vividly demonstrated, Turkey is vulnerable to retaliation by Moscow in Syria. “Turkey knows that obliterating this relationship [with Moscow] in return for something unrealistic from the west isn’t worth it,” said Onur Isci, an assistant professor of international relations at Ankara’s Bilkent University.
The risk for Ankara, analysts say, is that its attempt to maintain ties with Moscow could become increasingly untenable if the violence in Ukraine continues to escalate and Turkey faces pressure to close its airspace to Russian flights or sign up to western sanctions — or even push for its own warships to be allowed to enter the Black Sea.
Moscow, too, may yet seek to test Ankara’s allegiances. “What happens if Russia decides to violate the terms of Montreux, as it has done in the past?” asked the senior western diplomat. “Would Turkey try to intercept a Russian warship? Would we even want them to do that?”
What’s happening with Zaporizhzhia?
There have been multiple updating reports through the small hours about the situation at Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant. Reuters has an update:
A huge blaze in a building at the site of Europe’s biggest nuclear power station was extinguished on Friday and officials said the plant was operating normally, seized by Russian forces in heavy fighting that caused global alarm.
Officials said the fire at the Zaporizhzhia compound was in a training centre and not at the plant itself. An official at Energoatom, the state enterprise that runs Ukraine’s four nuclear plants, said there was no further fighting, the fire was out, radiation was normal and Russian forces were in control.
“Personnel are on their working places providing normal operation of the station,” the official told Reuters in a message.
However he said his organisation no longer had communication with the plant’s managers, control over the radiation situation there or oversight of potentially dangerous nuclear material in its six reactors and about 150 containers of spent fuel.
Russia’s defence ministry also said the plant was working normally. It blamed the fire on a “monstrous attack” by Ukrainian saboteurs and said its forces were in control.
The prospect that fighting at the plant could cause a potential nuclear disaster had set world financial markets tumbling.
Even with that scenario seemingly averted, Russia’s grip on a plant that provides more than a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity was a big development after eight days of war in which other Russian advances have been stalled by fierce resistance.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other Western officials said there was no indication of elevated radiation levels at the plant.
Earlier, a video from the plant verified by Reuters showed one building aflame, and a volley of incoming shells, before a large incandescent ball lit up the sky, exploding beside a car park and sending smoke billowing across the compound.
“Europeans, please wake up. Tell your politicians – Russian troops are shooting at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine,” Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address. In another address later he called on Russians to protest.
He also called on Russians to protest over the attack.
The mayor of the nearby town of Energodar about 550 km (342 miles) southeast of Kyiv said fierce fighting and “continuous enemy shelling” had caused casualties in the area, without providing details.
Give me a summary of the situation on the ground?
Thousands of people are believed to have been killed or wounded and more than 1 million refugees have now fled Ukraine since Feb. 24.
Russian forces advancing from three directions have besieged Ukrainian cities and pounded them with artillery and air strikes. Moscow says its aim is to disarm its neighbour and capture leaders it calls neo-Nazis. Ukraine and its Western allies call that a baseless pretext for a war to conquer the country of 44 million people.
Russia had already captured the defunct Chernobyl plant north of Kyiv, which spewed radioactive waste over much of Europe when it melted down in 1986. The Zaporizhzhia plant is a different and safer type.
Loud explosions could be heard in Kyiv on Friday morning and an air raid siren blared. Reuters journalists in the capital were not immediately able to determine the cause of the blasts.
Only one Ukrainian city, the southern port of Kherson, has fallen to Russian forces since the invasion was launched on Feb. 24, but Russian forces continue to surround and attack other cities.
The southeastern port city of Mariupol has been encircled by Russian forces and subjected to intense strikes, Britain said in an intelligence update on Friday.
“Mariupol remains under Ukrainian control but has likely been encircled by Russian forces,” the Ministry of Defence said. “The city’s civilian infrastructure has been subjected to intense Russian strikes.”
The northeastern cities of Kharkiv and Chernihiv have been under attack since the start of the invasion, but defenders are holding out.
Kyiv, the capital of 3 million people, has been shelled but has so far been spared a major assault, with Russia’s main attack force stalled for days in a miles-long convoy on a highway to the north. In Washington, a U.S. defence official said Russians were still 25 km (16 miles) from Kyiv city centre.
On Thursday, Russia and Ukraine negotiators agreed at peace talks on the need for humanitarian corridors to help civilians escape and to deliver medicines and food to areas of fighting.
In Russia itself, where Putin’s main opponents have largely been jailed or driven into exile over the past year, the war has been accompanied by a further crackdown on dissent. Authorities have banned reports that refer to the “special military operation” as a “war” or “invasion”. Anti-war demonstrations have been quickly squelched with thousands of arrests.
The last major independent broadcasters, TV Dozhd (Rain) and Ekho Moskvy radio, were shuttered on Thursday. The State Duma lower house of parliament introduced legislation on Friday to impose jail terms on people for spreading “fake” reports about the military.
The very latest?
The BBC reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency head has offered to travel to Chernobyl.
Here’s more from Rafael Grossi, head of the UN nuclear watchdog the IAEA, on the Russian attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
He says he has offered to travel to Chernobyl – the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986 – to negotiate with Ukraine and Russia on ensuring the security of Ukraine’s nuclear sites.
“I have indicated to both the Russian Federation and Ukraine my availability… to travel to Chernobyl as soon as possible,” he told reporters.
Both sides were considering the possibility, he added.
Grossi added that any trip would take place after his return from Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Saturday.
His message said “This is an unprecedented situation. Normally in diplomatic practice, one easy way out is to refer to precedent – it was done in this way last time this happened so this establishes some sort of practice or tradition. Unfortunately, here we are in completely uncharted waters. But what animates this initiative is the need to act and to heed this call for assistance bearing in mind the realities on the ground.”