Monday, March 6

Russia’s war against Ukraine

A burned-down building in Bakhmut on Feb. 27, 2023. (Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff via Getty Images)

UK Defense Ministry: Freshly mobilized Russian soldiers ordered to storm Ukrainian positions with ‘firearms and shovels.’ According to the March 5 U.K. Defense Ministry’s intelligence update, Russian soldiers are forced into hand-and-hand combat due to lack of ammunition. The reservists were thus ordered by the Russian Command to assault a Ukrainian concrete strong point with only “firearms and shovels.”

General Staff: Russians place air defense systems in residential quarters of Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast. Nova Kakhovka is 50 kilometers northeast of Kherson, the region’s capital city. It stands on the east bank of Dnipro River, right across from the Ukrainian-held territories on the west bank.

Budanov: Russia likely to run out of ‘military tools’ by end of spring. Russia has “wasted huge amounts of human resources, armaments, and materials” during the war in Ukraine, and it will likely run out of offensive potential by late spring, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said in an interview with USA Today published on March 5.

Air Force: Modern fighter jets needed to counter new Russian gliding bomb. Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat confirmed on March 6 that Russia has used new 1.5-ton UPAB-1500B gliding bombs for the first time, designed to hit highly-protected objects at a range of up to 40 kilometers against Ukraine.

Energy minister: Negotiations on Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant reach ‘dead end.’ Speaking on the national television, Herman Halushchenko called again for demilitarilization of Europe’s largest nuclear plant, as well as for all employees of Russian state-owned nuclear power conglomerate Rosatom to leave the territory.

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CNN: Ukrainian pilots in US for evaluative F-16 training. However, a U.S. official told CNN there were no new updates on supplying Ukraine with F-16s and no immediate plans to increase the number of Ukrainian pilots in the U.S.

Deputy Defense Minister: Russia’s tactics becoming more and more ‘terroristic.’ “The Russians are in despair, due to the lack of success at the front, their tactics are becoming more and more terrorist, they are shelling the regions, killing the civilian population, destroying the infrastructure,” said Oleksandr Pavliuk.

Authorities: Russia’s proxies in occupied regions put teenagers on military register. According to the Luhansk Regional Military Administration, boys born in 2006 are now to be put on the military register by Russia’s proxies in the occupied regions of Luhansk Oblast. Ukrainian authorities do not have direct access to the temporarily occupied areas, and appear to report this information relying on their local sources.

TVN 24: Ambulances intended for Ukraine set on fire in Poland. A 35-year-old suspect has been arrested. Both ambulances were supposed to depart to Ukraine on March 4 within a humanitarian convoy organized by the Moc Przyszłości Foundation.

Zelensky: World is strong enough to punish Russia for war against Ukraine. “Step by step, we are moving towards ensuring that the terrorist state is held fully responsible for what has been committed against our state, against our people,” Zelensky said at the United for Justice conference, which was attended by a number of lawyers from Ukraine, Europe, and other countries.

Read our exclusives

Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut: ‘Our troops are not being protected’

Russia’s relentless assault on Bakhmut is sacrificing waves and waves of unprepared men being sent to their deaths. But multiple defenders of this embattled city in Donetsk Oblast feel that they are in a similar boat, according to interviews with more than a dozen soldiers currently fighting in or around Bakhmut.

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The human cost of Russia’s war

Russian shelling kills married couple in Kharkiv Oblast. Russian troops on March 5 shelled the village of Budarky in Kharkiv Oblast, killing a married couple in a car, the regional prosecutor’s office reported.

Governor: Russia shells Kupiansk, Kharkiv Oblast, killing 1. A 65-year-old man was killed when a projectile hit a residential building.

3 killed, including 2 children, in Russian shelling of Kherson Oblast. Kherson Oblast authorities reported on March 5 that Russia struck Poniativka in the southern region with mortars, deliberately aiming at a residential building.

Police: 2 people still missing after March 2 Russian missile strike on Zaporizhzhia. In the days after the strike, understood to have been carried out by a Russian S-300 air defense missile, first responders resuced a total of eleven people alive from the rubble, according to the State Emergency Service.

General Staff: Russia has lost 153,120 troops in Ukraine as of March 5. This number includes 930 casualties Russian forces suffered just over the past day.

International response

Turkish foreign minister: Ankara working ‘hard’ to extend Black Sea grain deal. “We are working hard for the smooth implementation and further extension of the Black Sea grain deal,“ Mevlut Cavusoglu said during his speech at the United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries in Doha, as quoted by Reuters.

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Today’s Ukraine Daily was brought to you by Francis Farrell, Sofiya Doig, Olga Rudenko, Asami Terajima, Oleg Sukhov, Natalia Datskevych, and Lili Bivings.

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