February 10, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine news

Russian forces struck Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia city and the northeastern Kharkiv region with dozens of missiles overnight into Friday, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.

The Soviet-era S-300, designed to take down combat aircraft, has been crudely repurposed by Russia to hit ground targets during its war on Ukraine.

Russian forces also fired C-300 surface-to-air missiles from across the border in Belgorod and from the occupied city of Tokmak in southern Ukraine, the air force added.

Air raid sirens are in effect across Ukraine on Friday morning as officials warned of a potentially widespread Russian missile attack.

The air force said Russia attacked critical infrastructure overnight from the Black Sea with seven Iranian-made Shahed drones and six cruise missiles.

Air raid sirens are in effect across Ukraine on Friday morning as officials warned of a potentially widespread Russian missile attack.

Explosions have already been reported in the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia and the Kharkiv region and the threat of missile strikes is being reported elsewhere in the country.

Maksym Marchenko, head of the Odesa region military administration in Ukraine's south, said on Telegram there is "enemy aviation in the sky" and that "Kalibr-type missiles carriers are in the sea."

Ukrainian officials reported sporadic Russian attacks Thursday night with Iranian Shahed drones — the kind of air-defense-exhausting assault that has often preceded a wider wave of missile strikes. There do not appear to have been casualties from the Shahed attacks.

The head of the Kyiv city military administration said Friday there is “a major threat of missile strike.”

Power outages: DTEK, the energy supply company, has introduced emergency power outages in the capital and region of Kyiv, and central region of Dnipropetrovsk in anticipation of Russian strikes. Earlier, an official in Zaporizhzhia city said Russian forces had targeted energy infrastructure.

Russian forces struck Ukraine's southeastern Zaporizhzhia city 17 times in just an hour early on Friday, according to a Ukrainian official.

Anatoliy Kurtiev, secretary for the Zaporizhzhia City Council, said on Telegram that the strikes targeted energy infrastructure. It is unclear if Russian forces used missiles or rockets.

France will not send fighter jets to Ukraine in the coming weeks, but “excludes absolutely nothing” in the future, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday.

Macron explained that Ukrainian troops are unfamiliar with French aircraft and it could take months to train them, so they are choosing to focus on other more urgent needs.

Speaking to reporters in the early hours of Friday at the end of a summit of EU leaders, attended by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Macron said: "It is clear however that artillery equipment will allow for ground offensives and to hold the line of defense."

He added that "allies must prioritize equipment that will be the most useful, and fastest, for Ukraine to achieve its end goal" in its fight against Russia.

Arms for Ukraine: In an address to the European Parliament Thursday, Zelensky thanked all the countries that have provided weapons and military assistance to Ukraine, while stressing that his country still needs modern tanks, long-range missiles and modern fighter jets to protect its security, which he said is also Europe’s security.

A day earlier in Paris, Macron told Zelensky that France is “determined” to assist Ukraine in its war against Russia. “We stand by Ukraine, determined to help it to victory,” he said. “Ukraine can count on France and its allies to win the war, Russia should not and will not win the war.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a heartfelt appeal to lawmakers in Brussels on Thursday to allow his country to become part of the European Union, insisting that Europe is Ukraine’s “home.”

During an address to the European Parliament, Zelensky said his country and the EU share the same values, and that the “European standard of life” and the “European rules of life” are “when the law rules.”

“I am here in order to defend our people’s way home.”

Zelensky’s emotional message was designed to try to connect with EU parliamentarians as he continues to push for Ukraine to join the bloc.

He underlined that Ukraine shares values with Europe, rather than with Russia, which he said is trying to take his country back in time.

The president warned European lawmakers that Russia wants to return Europe to the xenophobia of the 1930s and 1940s. “The answer for us to that is no,” he said. “We are defending ourselves. We must defend ourselves.”

Plea for arms: Zelensky thanked all the countries that have provided weapons and military assistance to Ukraine, while stressing that his country still needs modern tanks, long-range missiles and modern fighter jets to protect its security, which he said is also Europe’s security.

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola introduced Zelensky ahead of his address, telling him: “Ukraine is Europe and your nation’s future is in the European Union.

“We have your back. Freedom will prevail.”

Read more here.

Iran appears to be modifying the attack drones that it’s providing to Russia so that the explosive warheads can inflict maximum damage on infrastructure targets inside Ukraine, according to a new investigative report obtained exclusively by CNN.

An unexploded warhead from an Iranian Shahed-131 drone found in the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa in October 2022 was examined last month by the UK-based investigative organization Conflict Armament Research, along with the Ukrainian military. CAR provided its findings first to CNN.

The group’s analysts believe the warheads, which measure just under 2 feet (0.6 meters) long, were hastily modified with poorly fitted layers of dozens of small metal fragments that on impact scatter across a large radius. In addition to the fragments, there are also 18 smaller “charges” around the circumference of the warhead that, when melted by the blast, can pierce armor and create a kind of “360-degree” explosive effect.

The accumulation of those elements essentially maximize the warhead’s ability to shred targets such as power stations, distribution grids, transmission lines and large, high-power transformers. They also make repair efforts substantially harder.

Warheads targeting battlefield assets such as tanks or artillery pieces might be designed differently, Spleeters explained, with a frontal shaped charge that is used for more concentrated targets. The warhead examined by CAR, though, has a radial shaped charge effect, which can result in a larger area of impact.

Some background: Iran has given Russia hundreds of drones to use in its war in Ukraine, many of which have targeted Ukraine’s power grid and energy facilities, leaving civilians without heat, electricity or running water during the freezing winter months. Last month, the Institute for the Study of War found that Russian forces had become increasingly reliant on the drones — so much so that their stockpile of the drones is already running low, just months after Iran began sending them.

Read more here.

More than three months after the body of an American killed fighting alongside the Ukrainian military was retrieved from opposing forces, his family says his remains are back in the US after an arduous wait.

Joshua Jones, a 24-year-old from Memphis, Tennessee, traveled to fight alongside Ukraine after the Russian invasion began last February. He was killed in August, according to officials with the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), a self-declared Russian-backed separatist region.

In October, after working behind the scenes for weeks with government officials for the return of their son, the family learned Jones’ body had been transferred to Ukrainian custody by the Russian military, much to the family’s relief. In a tearful phone call, Jones’ father, Jeff Jones, told CNN, “We got him back!”

Read more here.

Russia is on the offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, though without “much success” so far, according to the area's Ukrainian leader.

“We can conclude that a certain escalation has already begun. And we can say de facto that this is part of the full-scale offensive that Russia has been planning,” Serhiy Hayday, head of Luhansk region military administration, said in a television interview posted to his Telegram channel.

The Russian push is coming west from the area of the Russian-occupied city of Kreminna in northeast Ukraine. Ukrainian forces had for some time been trying to disrupt a key road between Kreminna and Svatove, to the north, which has represented the front line for months.

The uptick in Russian attacks has also been noted by the Ukrainian military’s General Staff in its regular updates.

Pro-Kremlin Russian military bloggers have also written cautiously about a push toward Ukrainian-held territory.

“We managed to locally recapture small settlements, which were occupied by the enemy in the course of action at the end of the fall,” blogger Evgeny Poddubny wrote on his Telegram channel. “Overall, the initiative is on our side, although the situation is difficult.”

CNN's Vasco Cotovio and Yulia Kesaieva contributed reporting to this post.

Private military contractor Wagner will have to look for new fighters beyond Russia’s prison system, a fertile recruiting ground for the past nine months, according to its boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The Russian oligarch did not give any reason for the decision, but there are several plausible explanations for the change of tack. The pool of recruits may have dwindled, the Ministry of Defense may have intervened, or the operation may have stretched Prigozhin’s finances. Alternatively, Prigozhin may have been told that his way of war no longer fits Russian priorities on the battlefield.

After signing up between 40,000 and 50,000 prisoners from jails across Russia, the number of volunteers from prison may have shrunk so far that the campaign is no longer delivering.

Figures just released by the Russian Penitentiary Service may support that. They showed that the prison population decreased by 6,000 between November and January, compared to a drop of 23,000 inmates between September and October last year.

Captured fighters: This week CNN spoke with two Wagner fighters who had been recruited from Russian prisons and fought on the front lines in Ukraine before being captured.

They said that dozens of prisoners, some with just weeks left of their sentences, had signed up after visits from Prigozhin in August and September. They said he had arrived at their prisons in a helicopter and made bold promises about wages and other benefits, as well as a pledge that their criminal records would be expunged.

CNN could not independently confirm the claims. The interviews were carried out in the presence of Ukrainian security officers but the captured fighters spoke at length about their Wagner experiences. (CNN told the prisoners that they were free to stop the interview at any time. CNN is not revealing their identities.)

Read the full analysis here.