As tensions remain high between Washington and Moscow after the United States accused Russian aircraft of “intercepted and rammed“American Reaper drone over the Black Sea, our colleagues at the BBC report that an Ilyushin Il-78M refueling plane was intercepted and briefly escorted by two British and German fighters as it approached the Estonian airspace without responding to the requests for identification requested by Tallin.
Meanwhile, in Russia, Putin is tightening rules on the international travel of civil servants over fears of further mass defections. The rules concerning non-official trips outside Russia are therefore stricter, some officials would have had their passports withdrawn.
At the same time, at an expanded meeting of the Board of Directors of the Prosecutor General’s Office, Vladimir Putin called on the employees of the department to put an end to attempts to destabilize the country: “I ask you to respond harshly to attempts to destabilize the socio-political situation in the country. And we must not relax the attention on important tasks of the prosecutor’s office”, said the master of the Kremlin. A call that sounds like an admission of weakness, at a time when several sources of information internal to Russia report tensions within the population.
At the same meeting, Attorney General Igor Krasnov acknowledged that payment problems were affecting the Russian army, which again underlines the inward curve of power in the face of pay problems, the existence of which he denied until recently. few but very present in the words of Russian soldiers and their families on social networks.
On the ground, while the Battle of Bakhmut continues to rage both in the trenches and in the media through media announcements, the Kremlin armies have bombarded eight Ukrainian regions in the past few hours. Attacks reported in Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhia and Luhansk oblasts in eastern, southern and northern Ukraine. The provisional toll reports 3 dead and 20 injured. A resurgence of violence which, according to several analysts, was intended to prevent Zelensky’s forces from assembling in order to launch the counter-offensive on Bakhmut and its region.
The conflict would indeed be experiencing a new major turning point after that of last summer which had seen the first Ukrainian counter-offensive break down the Russian positions established at the start of the invasion, and the arrival of the first heavy weapons such as tanks Leopard supplied by Poland is no stranger to this. It was enough for eight American senators (Democrats and Republicans) to write to the Secretary of State for Defense Lloyd Austin to tell him that the time had come to provide F-16s to Ukrainian troops to support them in this new phase of the war.
A letter that our colleagues from Politico were able to obtain and which comes as the Russian agency Tass relays the information that pseveral countries would intend to transfer MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. Tass relies on a statement by Piotr Muller, spokesman for the Polish government and who reportedly said this Wednesday morning: “We will announce details in due course. These decisions are made in a group of several countries. It is not my role to report this on behalf of these countries […] We have agreed that these decisions will be announced in accordance with the procedures “.
More details and information in our live commentary below: