Russia-Ukraine updates: Fierce battle in eastern Vuhledar

The US Department of the Treasury’s top sanctions official will warn countries next week that they could lose access to G7 markets if they do business with entities subject to Washington’s sanctions.

Treasury official Brian Nelson will travel to Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey the week of January 29 and meet with government officials, as well as businesses and financial institutions, according to a statement.

“Individuals and institutions operating in permissive jurisdictions risk potentially losing access to G7 markets on account of doing business with sanctioned entities,” the Treasury said.

Poland’s armed forces recruited 13,742 new professional soldiers last year, defence minister Mariusz Blaszczak has said.

He added the number is a “record since the abolition of conscription”. Compulsory service ended in Poland in 2008.

Poland’s armed forces have a total of 164,000 servicemen and women, including 36,000 members of volunteer homeland security units.

Warsaw is currently raising investments in defence since the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, with Poland’s army due to expand to 250,000 professional soldiers and 50,000 homeland security members.

German arms-maker Rheinmetall is ready to greatly boost the output of tank and artillery munitions to satisfy strong demand in Ukraine and the West, CEO Armin Papperger has told Reuters.

Papperger spoke to the news agency days before Germany’s defence minister bosses are due to meet with new defence minister Boris Pistorius.

Pistorius aims to kick off talks on how to speed up weapons procurement and boost ammunition supplies in the long term after almost a year of arms donations to Ukraine have depleted German military’s stocks.

Rheinmetall makes a range of defence products but is probably most famous for manufacturing the 120mm gun of the Leopard 2 tank. Demand for certain munitions has surged both within Ukraine and as Western allies seek to backfill their own stocks.

Ukraine and its Western allies are engaged in “fast-track” talks on the possibility Kyiv receiving more long-range missiles and military aircraft, a top Ukrainian presidential aide has said.

On an online video channel, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Zelenskyy, said Ukraine’s supporters in the West “understand how the war is developing” and the need to supply aeroplanes capable of providing cover for the armoured fighting vehicles.

That comes after the US and Germany pledged at the beginning of the month to send the long-sought combat vehicles.

Podolyak said that some of Ukraine’s Western partners maintain a “conservative” attitude to arms deliveries, “due to fear of changes in the international architecture.”

Turkey and Sweden are again at odds as the Nordic country, along with Finland, attempts to join NATO.

The latest blockade in negotiations came after a far-right activist destroyed a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.

Turkey, like all NATO members, holds a veto over Sweden’s bid to join the alliance. Al Jazeera’s Inside Story examines if the two countries can overcome their difference.

Russia’s defence ministry has accused Ukrainian forces of attacking a hospital in the eastern Luhansk region, leaving 14 dead and injuring 24 others.

The ministry said in a statement that on Saturday morning in the town of Novoaidar, “the Ukrainian armed forces deliberately attacked the building of a district hospital” with a US-made HIMARS multiple-launch rocket system.

The ministry added that 14 were killed and 24 wounded among the “hospital patients and medical staff”.

There was no immediate response to the allegations from Ukraine. The claim could not independently be verified.

British intelligence has said Russia is deliberately misrepresenting the number of its casualties in its invasion of Ukraine.

On Saturday, the Ministry of Defence in London pointed to an attack on a Russian military shelter in the Donetsk region on New Year’s Eve.

Russia reported the deaths of 89 soldiers. British intelligence reports, however, say it is highly likely that there were more than 300 victims.

UK officials said that illustrates the “pervasive presence of disinformation in Russian public announcements”.

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has once again called on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headed by Thomas Bach not to allow Russian athletes to compete at Summer and Winter Games.

“It is obvious that any neutral flag of Russian athletes is stained by blood,” said the president on social media.

The statement came after the IOC leadership announced its intention to open up opportunities for athletes from Russia and Belarus to participate under a neutral flag.

Nearly half of Ukraine’s power infrastructure has been damaged by Russian attacks.

It has led to widespread energy shortages and power cuts, affecting people and businesses, including food and drink companies.

Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler reports from Kyiv.

The director of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp memorial has compared the recent killing of people in Ukraine by Russian forces with similar suffering experienced during World War II.

Marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, set up on Polish soil by Nazi Germany where more than 1.1 million people — most of them Jews — perished in gas chambers and from starvation, cold and disease, the memorial site’s director compared Nazi crimes to those Russians have recently committed in Ukrainian towns such as Bucha and Mariupol.

Read the full story here.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said before an EU-Ukraine summit next week that Kyiv had unconditional support from the bloc and that the country needed to prevail against Russian attacks to defend European values.

“We stand by Ukraine’s side without any ifs and buts,” von der Leyen said in a speech on Saturday at an event of her party, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, in Duesseldorf, Germany.

Ukraine “is fighting for our shared values, it is fighting for the respect of international law and for the principles of democracy and that is why Ukraine has to win this war”, she said.

Ukraine has said it would summon Hungary’s ambassador to complain about a “completely unacceptable” remark Prime Minister Viktor Orban made about Ukraine.

Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko, writing on Facebook, said Orban had told reporters that Ukraine was a no man’s land and compared it with Afghanistan.

Russian forces continue ground attacks around Bakhmut on the western outskirts of Donetsk city, and in Vuhledar area.

Three people have been killed and at least two others wounded after Russian forces struck a residential neighbourhood in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka, the regional governor said.

Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote on the Telegram that four apartment buildings and a hotel had been damaged and that rescuers and police officials were at the site to “carefully document yet another crime by the Russian occupiers”.

Earlier, Kyrylenko said four people had been killed and at least seven wounded from Russian strikes over the past 24 hours.

A senior Ukrainian presidential aide has slammed the International Olympic Committee accusing it of siding with Russia days after it said the Olympic Council of Asia had offered Russian and Belarusian athletes a chance to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

IOC “proposes to the world promotion of violence, mass murders, destruction”, Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter, adding. that is why “it insists Russian athletes should participate in contests as real ‘ambassadors of death'”.

#IOC proposes to the world promotion of violence, mass murders, destruction. That's why it insists 🇷🇺 athletes should participate in contests as real "ambassadors of death"… Sport doesn't exist outside politics – sport promotes it. Thus, the IOC promotes the 🇷🇺 anti-human policy

— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) January 28, 2023

Earlier, President Zelenskyy said Ukraine would launch an international campaign to prevent Russian athletes from being allowed to compete in the 2024 Games.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova responded by saying any attempt to squeeze Moscow out of international sport was “doomed to fail”.

As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its 339th day, we take a look at the main developments.

Read here.

Both Germany and the US have agreed to send tanks to Ukraine. Berlin will supply its Leopard 2 and Washington, the M1 Abrams.

They are considered essential for Ukraine if it is to take back territory captured by Russia early in the war. But will such new weaponry change the course of the conflict?

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov will hold a meeting with Lynne Tracy, the new US ambassador to Moscow, early next week, the RIA news agency reports.

Tracy arrived in Moscow earlier this week. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova previously said the new US ambassador would not improve ties between the two countries because of what she called Washington’s ongoing “hybrid war” against Russia.

The UK Ministry of Defence says Russia “highly likely” suffered more than 300 casualties in a strike on a military accommodation in the city of Makiivka near Donetsk city on January 1. If confirmed, the toll would represent one of the deadliest attacks on Russian forces since the start of the war.

“We assess that the majority were likely killed or missing, rather than wounded,” the ministry said in its daily bulletin published on social media.

Russia had previously said that 89 of its soldiers were killed in the attack.

Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 28 January 2023

Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/rQI3IVrDMH

🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/QA2OBo1rpk

— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) January 28, 2023

President Zelenskyy says the situation at the front remains acute, particularly in the eastern Donetsk region where Russia is stepping up an offensive.

Zelenskyy, in an evening address, said Russian forces were not just storming Ukrainian positions but also destroying the towns and villages around them.

Moscow says Latvia’s ambassador has two weeks to leave Russia, accusing the EU Baltic country of “total Russophobia”.

The latest expulsion comes after Russia downgraded diplomatic relations with Estonia earlier in the week and ordered its ambassador to leave the country, having made the same accusation against Tallinn.

Estonia retaliated, asking the Russian ambassador to leave Tallinn, and in solidarity, Latvia also ordered the Russian ambassador to leave and said it was downgrading diplomatic ties.

Ukrainian troops are locked in a “fierce combat” with Russian soldiers for control of the town of Vuhledar southwest of Donetsk as the two sides battle along the southern front.

Both sides claimed success in the small administrative centre of apartment blocks surrounded by flat fields, a short distance from the strategic prize of the village of Pavlivka.

“The encirclement and subsequent liberation of this city solves many problems,” said Denis Pushilin, the Moscow-appointed leader of the Donetsk region.

But Kyiv said the town, which had a pre-invasion population of about 15,000, remained contested. “There is fierce combat there,” Ukrainian military spokesman Sergiy Cherevaty told local media.