Here is the situation as it stands on Monday, February 27, 2023:
Fighting
- Ukraine’s armed forces said Russia is continuing to concentrate its main efforts on offensive actions along the Kupiansk, Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Shakhtar parts of the front line.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Eduard Moskalyov as commander of the joint forces of Ukraine, which are engaged in battles in the Donbas region.
- Members of Belarus’s exiled government and partisans in the country said a Russian A-50 surveillance aircraft was damaged in a drone attack at an airfield near the capital, Minsk.
Diplomacy
- The United States has warned China of serious consequences if it provides arms to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Beijing, which last week introduced a 12-point plan to seek peace in the conflict, has denied it plans to send weapons.
- German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius on Sunday reacted with scepticism to a Chinese ceasefire proposal for the war in Ukraine.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people – and said he was forced to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities.
- Former Russian president and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev said the continued arms supply to Kyiv risks a global nuclear catastrophe, reiterating his threat of nuclear war over Ukraine.
- The European Union has decided to increase pressure on Moscow “until Ukraine is liberated” as it adopted a 10th package of sanctions on Russia on Saturday, a day after the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine.
- The UN Human Rights Council will begin a session in Geneva on Monday, with Russia set to send its highest-level envoy since Moscow terminated its membership following a vote by the UN General Assembly to suspend it in the wake of the invasion.
