Russia’s war on Ukraine latest news: Putin has no regrets

Article content

Russian President Vladimir Putin is showing no regrets for the war against neighbor Ukraine, insisting it is going to plan and playing down any nuclear standoff with the West.

DIPLOMACY

Article content

* U.S. President Joe Biden expressed skepticism about Putin’s comment that he had no intention of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. “If he has no intention, why does he keep talking about it?,” Biden said in an interview with NewsNation.

CONFLICT

* Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said 23 of his soldiers were killed and another 58 wounded in a Ukrainian artillery attack this week. The comments were unusual given that pro-Moscow forces have rarely admitted to major battlefield losses.

Article content

* Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure were forcing electricity cuts in the capital Kyiv and other places, officials said.

* “Shelling will not break us – to hear the enemy’s anthem on our land is scarier than the enemy’s rockets in our sky,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a Thursday night video address as he stood outside in the dark next to the wreckage of a downed drone.

* In Kherson, Ukrainian forces killed 44 Russian servicemen in the past 24 hours, according to Facebook post by the Ukrainian Armed Forces for the south. Ukrainian artillery and missile forces destroyed an ammunition depot and a hangar with equipment, the statement said.

* The Russian defense ministry, which said its forces had repelled attempted Ukrainian advances in the east, said it had destroyed a Ukrainian military factory producing solid rocket fuel, explosives and gunpowder near the town of Pavlograd in the Dnipropetrovsk Region. It said it had also shot down a Ukrainian air force Mi-8 helicopter.

Article content

* Reuters could not independently verify either side’s battlefield accounts.

* A senior Russian government official raised the possibility that Moscow could shoot down commercial Western satellites being used to help Ukraine’s war effort, as Russia pressed ahead with its bombing campaign against Ukrainian infrastructure.

ECONOMY

* Russia will retaliate if its state and citizens’ assets are confiscated by the European Union, the Foreign Ministry said.

QUOTES

“The historical period of the West’s undivided dominance over world affairs is coming to an end,” Putin told the Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of Russian specialists. (Compiled by Cynthia Osterman)