Russia Nato-Ukraine Council meets

At the request of Kiev, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has convened a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council.

According to alliance spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah, the meeting today will focus on the situation on the battlefield and the most important military needs of the country under attack from Russia. Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov is to join the meeting via video conference.

The NATO spokesperson cited Russia's recent heavy waves of attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and civilians as the background to the meeting. The Nato-Ukraine Council met for the first time last year at the Nato summit in Lithuania at the level of heads of state and government. The new body was created for exchanges in crisis situations.

Russia has carried out heavy airstrikes on Ukraine in recent nights. According to initial reports from the Ukrainian authorities, at least four people were killed - two by a missile hit on a hotel in Kryvyi Rih and two more by drone strikes on Zaporizhzhya. There were also air raids in many regions of Ukraine on Wednesday night, particularly in the east of the country and on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which is annexed by Moscow.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X: "We will undoubtedly respond to Russia for these and all other attacks."

Reports: Fires in Russian oil depots

During the night, several fires broke out in oil depots in the Russian region of Rostov following explosions, as reported by Russian and Ukrainian media. The governor of the region bordering Ukraine, Vasily Golubev, reported on his Telegram channel that four enemy drones had been shot down. There were no casualties. He did not initially comment on possible damage. The information could not be independently verified.

Heavy fighting continues in eastern Ukraine

Meanwhile, Russian troops continued their assault around the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Heavy fighting raged near Torezk in the vicinity of the settlement of Nju Jork (New York), as the General Staff in Kiev announced in its situation report. Nine attacks had been repulsed. Twenty-five Russian attacks were registered near Pokrovsk. These attacks were also repulsed, it said. The information could not be independently verified.

The situation there was "far from easy", said Selenskyj. "They are 100,000, we are 100,000," he said, describing the balance of power. The Russian soldiers have no choice but to continue attacking. "Because if they retreat, they will be shot by the Russian army."

The bloody exchange of blows between Russian attackers and Ukrainian defenders also continued at Chassiv Yar. "We used to see between 10 and 20 attacks by Russian stormtroopers every day," said Oleh Kalashnikov, spokesman for the Ukrainian brigade deployed there. "Now there are fewer of them, but the intensity has increased." Chassiv Yar is now a pile of rubble.

The former commander of US troops in Europe, General Ben Hodges, saw no particular danger for Ukraine in the slow advance of Russian troops from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk. Russia had taken Avdiivka, 50 kilometers away, in February and had only now, almost six months later, come close to Pokrovsk. "And that with almost 1,000 dead per day," Hodges told the Ukrainian agency RBK. "These are not exactly the quick strikes of Marshal Zhukov." Georgy Zhukov had led the Red Army to successes in the battles for Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin during the Second World War.

The Russian General Staff was certainly determined to concentrate on its offensive towards Pokrovsk and Torezk. "They could do what their grandfathers did 80 years ago, which is to allow some breakthroughs in other parts of the front and wait to strike later," Hodges said. "But I don't think they have the expertise or the resources of their grandfathers, and many of the best Soviet soldiers were, of course, Ukrainian."

Medvedev: Must protect Russia's new territories

According to Russia's ex-President Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian army must protect the areas of Ukraine it has conquered and which have since been annexed by Moscow. "We have every opportunity to achieve these goals," said the Vice-Chairman of the National Security Council. By the "new regions of the Russian Federation" he meant the regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia has now annexed these four regions and the Crimean peninsula and considers them to be national territory.

Most of the objectives of the special operation, as Moscow officially calls the war of aggression against Ukraine, have been achieved. "And now there are slightly different goals, which also have real consequences on the ground," emphasized Medvedev at a party event in Moscow. "We have four new subjects of the federation, which is good for our country, because it is our country." But these regions would have to be defended. It was unclear whether Medvedev was hinting at further territorial conquests in order to possibly establish buffer zones around the annexed territories.

SDA