Russia-Ukraine updates: US warns China over lethal aid to Russia

Russian online bank Tinkoff, run by TCS Group Holding, has said it would suspend trading in euros from Monday following the imposition of a further set of European Union sanctions.

The EU agreed to a 10th round of punitive measures late on Friday to punish Russia for invading Ukraine a year ago. The package includes cutting off more banks, among them Tinkoff and the private Alfa-Bank, from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system.

“Withdrawals in euros will be available. Euro trading will be suspended from Feb. 27, 2023,” Tinkoff said in a statement, adding that trading in other currencies would not be affected.

In a separate statement, Tinkoff said it had prepared countermeasures to the sanctions that would allow a transfer of assets to a new non-sanctioned company within three weeks.

As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, CIA Director William Burns has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being “too confident” in his military’s ability to grind Ukraine into submission.

Burns, in a television interview, said the head of Russia’s intelligence services had displayed in their November meeting “a sense of cockiness and hubris” that reflected Putin’s own beliefs “that he can make time work for him, that he believes he can grind down the Ukrainians, that he can wear down our European allies, that political fatigue will eventually set in.”

That conversation, in which Burns warned of the consequences if Russia were to deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, was “pretty dispiriting”, Burns said.

United States Republican Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, has cited reports that drones are among the lethal weapons China has considered sending to Russia.

McCaul said Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing to visit Moscow next week for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin has alluded to a Xi visit, but the timing has not been confirmed by Russia or China.

Russia and China signed a “no limits” partnership in February 2022, shortly before Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Economic links between Russia and China have deepened while Moscow’s connections with the West have shrivelled.

The US is “confident” that China is considering providing lethal equipment to support the Russian forces invading Ukraine, according to CIA Director William Burns.

Such a step by China would be “a very risky and unwise bet”, the intelligence chief said in an interview aired Sunday on the CBS network’s Face the Nation programme.

“I hope very much that they don’t,” Burns said.

His comments, along with others by national security adviser Jake Sullivan, constituted the latest blunt US warning to China to stop short of providing lethal weapons to Russia.

The US has made clear behind closed doors that if China provides lethal aid to help Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, it would have serious consequences, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan says.

“Beijing will have to make its own decisions about how it proceeds, whether it provides military assistance, but if it goes down that road, it will come at real costs to China,” Sullivan said in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union programme.

Ukraine’s prime minister says a reconciliation between Moscow and Kyiv is not possible within the next century.

“Reconciliation, cooperation – no, not in the next 100 years,” Denys Shmyhal said in an interview with the German weekly magazine Focus. “Russia must first change, be democratised, demilitarised and denuclearised.”

When asked about how Russia should be disarmed, Shmyhal listed further sanctions, a refusal to cooperate with Russia, confiscation of Russian assets and further military aid to Ukraine as prospects.

Moscow ally Algeria plans to reopen its embassy in Kyiv, which has been closed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the foreign ministry says.

“This decision comes within the framework of safeguarding the interests of the Algerian state,” a ministry statement said, adding that the embassy would reopen soon. It did not provide details.

A charge d’affaires will run the mission when it reopens, it said.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced the planned reopening during a television broadcast on Friday, acknowledging Algeria’s longstanding relations with Russia.

Murky water trickles slowly from a filthy drainpipe into her grimy container. Seconds tick by, ramping up the risk that Emilia Budskaya could lose life or limb to Russian artillery strikes torturing her front-line city in eastern Ukraine, but she and her daughter need water.

Gashes from shrapnel in the courtyard walls around her testify to the dangers of being outside, exposed and without the body armor that Ukrainian soldiers defending Vuhledar wear when they venture from their bunkers.

But mother and daughter eke out another day in the ruins.

And so they wait – tick, tick, tick – for the container to fill, for Budskaya to then pour the water into plastic bottles and – tick, tick, tick – for her to then start the process again until their bottles are filled.

Picking their way through the debris and mud, they carry their bounty back to the dark basement that now passes for their home.

“We have no water, nothing,” Budskaya says. “I’m getting rainwater to wash dishes and hands.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has shown TV journalists the temporary accommodation in which he says he has been living since the beginning of Russia’s invasion.

“This is where I live,” Zelenskyy said in the film by journalist Dmytro Komarov, broadcast on Friday by Ukrainian TV’s 1+1 channel. The president also said he was there when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022.

A clip of the film was posted on Twitter by Zelenskyy’s domestic political adviser Anton Gerashchenko. In the video, the windows of the makeshift accommodation are covered with thick curtains. Pillows and a flowered bedspread lie on a single bed, and a television, a chair and a desk can also be seen.

Zelenskyy also showed the camera team his walk-in wardrobe, including several olive green and camouflage jackets and military boots.

There has been no development for months in the discussion of possible NATO security guarantees for Ukraine, a German government spokesperson says.

“At the recent meeting of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron with Ukrainian leader [Zelenskyy], this issue played no role at all,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The statement followed a recent report by The Wall Street Journal that said some of NATO’s biggest European members are floating a defence pact with Ukraine.

Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Osama bin Javaid says Putin’s most recent televised statements show he is continuing to portray the invasion of Ukraine as a wider existential struggle with the West.

“President Vladimir Putin, in his interview, has said that this is not just an issue of war with Ukraine,” he said. “This is an existential issue for Russia. He’s accused the West and the NATO alliance of trying to dismember Russia, saying that since the time of the Soviet Union and now with the Russian Federation, their aim remains the same: to make Russia disintegrate.

“This is something we have been hearing from him in the buildup to the one-year anniversary. Another thing that Putin has said which is of note is again about the nuclear capabilities of not just the United States but also other Western powers, saying that for Russians to consider their defence, they have to take all of it into account.”

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius says he is sceptical of China’s 12-point plan to end the war in Ukraine.

Pistorius cited unconfirmed reports that China is negotiating to provide weapons to Russia even as it portrays itself as a peacemaker in the conflict.

“When I hear reports – and I don’t know whether they are true – according to which China may be planning to supply kamikaze drones to Russia while at the same time presenting a peace plan, then I suggest we judge China by its actions and not its words,” he told German public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk in an interview.

A more than five-week session of the UN Human Rights Council is to open on Monday, with a senior Russian envoy expected to attend.

The council, made up of 47 member countries, takes up an extensive array of human rights issues and typically meets three times a year.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, known more for his expertise on defence matters, is to attend on Thursday, marking the highest level of representation since Moscow suspended its council membership. It did so as the UN General Assembly was expected to strip it of its seat on the council.

Last year, scores of diplomats walked out of the council chamber as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared by video. The walkout signalled opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine days earlier.

Switzerland “cannot be neutral” about Russia’s war on Ukraine and must allow weapons deliveries to Kyiv, Ukraine’s envoy to the country says.

“Our country is fighting not only for its survival but for all of Europe, for the free world,” Ambassador Iryna Venediktova said in an interview with the SonntagsZeitung newspaper.

“For that, we need weapons, as many as possible. They will decide the fate of all of us,” she said, adding that she respects Swiss neutrality but urges Bern to “please let other countries send their Swiss-made weapons to Ukraine.”

She made the comments as Swiss legislators have increasingly questioned the country’s longstanding neutrality while debating sending military aid to Ukraine.

China has proposed a 12-point peace plan to end the fighting in Ukraine, which calls for an end to Western sanctions on Russia and urges Moscow and Kyiv to hold peace talks.

The plan also calls for creating humanitarian corridors for civilians.

Al Jazeera’s Inside Story explores the proposal and if it could lead to compromise between Kyiv and Moscow.

Russia has halted supplies of oil to Poland via the Druzhba pipeline, PKN Orlen’s CEO says, adding that the Polish refiner would tap other sources to plug the gap.

The halt in supplies via the pipeline, which has been exempted from EU sanctions imposed on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, came a day after Poland delivered its first Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

“Russia has halted supplies to Poland, for which we are prepared,” PKN Orlen Chief Executive Daniel Obajtek wrote on Twitter. “Only 10 percent of crude oil has been coming from Russia, and we will replace it with oil from other sources.”

Orlen said it could fully supply its refineries via sea and that the halt in pipeline supplies would not impact deliveries of gasoline and diesel to its customers.

Many African nations have held onto their neutral positions a year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But even if official positions have not moved, some countries are showing more willingness to appear closer to Russia, Piers Pigou, the International Crisis Group’s senior consultant for Southern Africa, told Al Jazeera.

They include South Africa, who is currently holding joint military drills with China and Russia. The demonstration of close ties would be hard to imagine a year ago and underscores a changing attitude found elsewhere on the continent.

“The problem, of course, is the optics of [South Africa’s naval engagements at] this time,” Pigou said. “It’s astonishing that they wouldn’t have known sometime in advance that the timing of this thing would be awkward. But they don’t seem to care too much about that.”

Read more here.

Protesters in Paris and Berlin have called for peace in Ukraine and the end of Western arms deliveries.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Berlin, where they condemned the government’s supply of arms to Ukraine.

The organisers were criticised before the protest for downplaying Ukraine’s right to defend its territory from Russian aggression and failing to distance themselves from the far right and far left, for whom pro-Russia views are common.

One of the organisers, opposition lawmaker Sahra Wagenknecht of The Left party, said there was no place for neo-Nazis at the rally but anyone who wanted peace “with an honest heart” was welcome.

Read more here.