February 21, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine news

China is willing to work with other countries to achieve an early ceasefire and lasting peace in Ukraine, the country's top diplomat Wang Yi said while visiting Budapest on Monday, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

Wang, who was named Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s top foreign policy adviser last month, is due to arrive in Russia this week, a year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

Neither Russia nor China has specified whether Wang would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said "we do not exclude a meeting" between Wang and Putin. 

China’s Foreign Ministry said earlier the visit to Moscow will provide an opportunity for China and Russia to continue to develop their strategic partnership and “exchange views” on “international and regional hotspot issues of shared interest.”

Some background: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Wang on Saturday in Munich, Germany, and warned “about the implications and consequences” if Beijing increases its support for Russia’s war effort, according to a US readout of the meeting.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned China not to give any support to Russia, saying it could lead to another world war.

The visit Monday by US President Joe Biden was an important day for Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an evening address. 

The specific steps "to liberate our still-occupied territories and to guarantee reliable security for our country and for all the peoples of Europe" are known, Zelensky said. "All we need is determination." 

Zelensky thanked the American people, members of Congress from both parties and members of Biden's team for helping strengthen the alliance between the two countries.

To counter a growing number of Russian troops, Ukraine needs more ammunition, in addition to other pledges of military support from allies, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.

Russia is massing “almost twice the number of soldiers that were there at the beginning of the war" in Ukraine, he said, adding that the next few weeks will be crucial.

“For that, time is of essence. Speed means lives. We need to respond quickly. Not only more support, but to provide it quicker,” Borrell added.

The best way to get ammunition to Ukraine quickly is to share existing European army stockpiles so that there is no time wasted waiting for them to be produced, he said.

Borrel also said a 10th package of sanctions against Russia was also discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday, announcing they have been “presented as a Regulation for the Council to approve," which should happen in the “next hours, or next days."

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia's capacity to produce weapons should not be overestimated, as he urged allies to expand sanctions against entities producing Russian missiles.  

“Our partners have a tool in their hands to suppress this production, which is sanctions,” Kuleba told Christiane Amanpour at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend in an interview that aired Monday on CNN.  

Addressing growing concerns in Europe that ammunition supplies are diminishing, Kuleba stated “there will never be enough ammunition as long as the war continues”.  

“Yes, if you ask me what we need the most here and now, I’d say artillery munitions. If you ask me [to] imagine that’s solved, what is next, I’d say Howitzers to use this ammunition,” the foreign minister said. 

“Businesses need contracts and to have contracts you need money. Therefore, if governments want to support Ukraine, they can finance their own companies by contracting their production of ammunition and other weapons, and that’s what we are working on.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that a world war could break out if China supported Russia against Ukraine.   

Zelensky said he has personally appealed to the Chinese leadership through direct channels and publicly “not to offer any support” to Russia in the war. 

“From the early 1990s, at the Budapest Memorandum and for all the agreements reached since then, China has always kept its commitments. I personally hope that the international community will join together to support my 10-point peace plan, where American, Chinese and major power guarantees to defend world security are covered,” Zelensky told the newspaper.  

The Ukrainian president said Ukraine’s relationship with China has always been “very good.” 

“We have had intense economic relations for many years, and it is in everyone's interest that they do not change. The global challenge is to thwart any risk of nuclear conflict,” he said.  

On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS' "Face the Nation" that Washington is concerned that China is considering providing “lethal support” to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Around 7 p.m. ET on Saturday night, President Joe Biden was out in Washington on a Valentine’s week date-night, lingering over rigatoni with fennel sausage ragu before returning with his wife to the White House.

The next time he was seen in public was 36 hours later, striding out of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv into a bright winter day, air raid sirens wailing a reminder of both the risks and reason for visiting Ukraine as it nears a second year of war.

Cloaked in secrecy and weighted with history, Biden’s trip was the work of months of planning by only a small handful of his senior-most aides, who recognized long ago the symbolic importance of visiting the Ukrainian capital a year after Russia tried to capture it.

Yet it was more than symbolism that drove Biden to endure the significant risk of visiting an active war zone without significant US military assets on the ground.

In conversations behind closed doors at the Mariinsky Palace on Monday, Biden sought to engage President Volodymyr Zelensky in a detailed and urgent discussion about the next phase of the war, which US officials describe as having arrived at a critical juncture.

How the war advances in the coming months will depend in large part on the continued support of the United States, which Biden pledged Monday would be unceasing. If his message was meant as a reassuring one for Ukrainians, it was also intended as a reminder to Americans that the stakes of the conflict extend well beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Read more here.

President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine sparked anger and embarrassment among many of Russia’s hawkish military pundits on Monday, increasing pressure on Vladimir Putin as the Russian leader prepares to justify his stuttering invasion in a national address.

Biden’s historic visit came days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, providing a symbolic boost to Kyiv at a crucial juncture in the conflict.

But the visit caused fury in Russian pro-military and ultranationalist circles, as it upstages Putin on the eve of a major address in which the Russian president is expected to tout the supposed achievements of what he euphemistically calls a “special military operation.”

“Biden in [Kyiv]. Demonstrative humiliation of Russia,” Russian journalist Sergey Mardan wrote in a snarky response on his Telegram channel. “Tales of miraculous hypersonics may be left for children. Just like spells about the holy war we are waging with the entire West.”

Russian army veteran and former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Igor Girkin meanwhile suggested that Biden could have visited the front lines in eastern Ukraine and escaped unharmed.

Girkin is among a number of hardline military bloggers — some of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers and provide analysis of the conflict for large swaths of the Russian population — who have repeatedly criticized what they consider a “soft” approach on the battlefield by Putin’s generals.

Read more here.