Russia-Ukraine updates: US to stand by Kyiv ‘as long as it takes’

Zelenskyy says Ukraine can only defend its skies if an “aviation taboo” is ended by its allies.

“Our pilots and anti-aircraft units and other experts of our air force are doing a great job,” he said in a speech. “But we will be able to completely protect our skies when the aviation taboo is fully lifted in relations with our partners.”

The president has been lobbying his allies to send fighter jets to Ukraine.

China has been “anything but an honest broker” in efforts to bring peace to Ukraine and “very clearly” has taken Russia’s side, US Department of State spokesman Ned Price says.

China has provided Russia with “diplomatic support, political support, with economic support, with rhetorical support,” Price said at a news briefing.

The EU says it has extended sanctions on Belarus by one year over Minsk’s continued repression of the opposition and its support for Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The bloc has hit Belarus with multiple waves of sanctions since strongman Alexander Lukashenko launched a campaign of repression against demonstrators protesting a disputed election in 2020.

Lukashenko, who has been in power for nearly three decades, is a key Putin ally.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Ukraine’s telecoms regulator say they have signed an agreement to cooperate on telecommunications infrastructure resilience, 5G networks and related security issues.

The FCC and the National Commission for the State Regulation of Electronic Communications, Radio Frequency Spectrum and the Provision of Postal Services of Ukraine announced the formal partnership at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The commissioner of the Ukrainian agency, Liliia Malon, noted the agreement’s importance given Ukraine’s damaged telecoms infrastructure after Russia’s 2022 invasion.

The United Nations rights chief has condemned Russia’s “senseless” invasion of Ukraine at the start of a Human Rights Council session at which countries want to strengthen scrutiny of Moscow’s alleged war crimes.

Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, in one of his first speeches to the 47-member council, warned that human rights gains were being reined back and even reversed, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example of oppression.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a separate speech that the war had triggered “massive violations” of rights.

The United States is transferring an additional $1.2bn to Ukraine as it fights to resist Russia’s invasion, according to US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

On a trip to Kyiv following US President Joe Biden’s surprise visit last week, Yellen met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and announced the transfer of “an additional amount of over $1.2bn” to his government.

This would be the first tranche of about $10bn the US will provide in the coming months, she said in a speech.

“Our economic support is helping keep the Ukrainian government and critical service providers operational under extraordinary circumstances,” including by paying civil servants, firefighters and teachers, she said.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has made a surprise visit to Kyiv to reaffirm US support for Ukraine and promote economic aid.

Yellen met with Zelenskyy and other top government officials days after the first anniversary of the war, repeating US assurances delivered by President Joe Biden a week ago.

“America will stand with Ukraine as long as it takes,” Yellen told Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.

Shmyhal said the two discussed further US sanctions on Russia aimed at weakening its economy and military and “confiscating frozen Russian assets and putting them to the benefit of the recovery of Ukraine”.

Russia’s alleged forced transfer of thousands of children from Ukraine is “probably the largest forced deportation in modern history”, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba says on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva.

“The most chilling crime is that Russia steals Ukrainian children,” Kuleba said in a video message to a packed room on the opening day of the five-week session, which will take up Russia’s alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

“This is a genocidal crime,” Kuleba charged.

Putin has presented Hollywood action star Steven Seagal a top state award for international humanitarian and cultural work, a state decree shows.

The decree announced the presentation of the Order of Friendship and mentioned Seagal’s work as the Russian foreign ministry’s special representative for humanitarian ties with the US and Japan.

The US-born actor and martial arts practitioner has worked in Japan and has long admired Putin, from whom he received a Russian passport in 2016. Seagal also has US and Serbian citizenship.

The actor backed Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 as “very reasonable”, joined a pro-Kremlin party in 2021 and visited a Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine last year where he met with a Russian-backed separatist leader.

Here are four maps we update daily, charting the latest war developments.

Konstantin Kosachev, a Russian senator, told Al Jazeera that China’s peace plan to end the Ukraine war is more “applicable” than the one Zelenskyy announced in December.

“We are definitely against the so-called peace plan which was introduced several months ago by Ukrainian President Zelenskyy,” Kosachev said. “This peace plan is absolutely unrealistic while the Chinese plan is more applicable.”

“At least it does not put the responsibility on one side; it does not put forward any one-sided demands, and [because of] that, this plan is definitely much more flexible, much more applicable, in comparison with the plan introduced earlier.”

Kosachev said Russia has been willing to negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine since April.

“Any peace talks with Ukraine will only take place if they take into account that they’re based on the real situation now on the ground and not on any predetermined preconditions,” he said, nixing Ukraine’s demand that Russia relinquish any annexed Ukrainian territory.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered “the most massive violations of human rights” in the world today, the head of the UN says.

The invasion “has unleashed widespread death, destruction and displacement”, Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“Attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure have caused many casualties and terrible suffering,” Guterres said.

He made the remarks as the Ukrainian military said Russia had launched attacks with exploding drones on several regions of the country from late Sunday into Monday morning, killing two people.

The Russian oil pipeline company Transneft says it has started pumping oil from Kazakhstan to Germany via Poland through the Druzhba pipeline and has halted deliveries to Poland.

The TASS news agency cited Transneft as saying the paperwork had not been completed for the supply of oil to Poland in the second half of February and that Polish customers had been cut off.

Oil “should have been pumped to Polish refineries in the second half of February”, a Transneft spokesperson said. “However, routing orders with confirmed resource and transit payment were not executed.

“In addition, operational changes were made to the schedule, excluding supplies for Polish consumers.”

Click here for a roundup of the key events from day 369 of the war.

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A Ukrainian court has imprisoned two captured soldiers accused of taking part in Russian shelling of residential areas in eastern Ukraine.

The Security Service of Ukraine said one of the soldiers received a 10-year sentence and the other was jailed for nine years.

It did not name the defendants or say when they were sentenced but said both had fought in eastern Ukraine and were captured last year.

“As a result of investigative actions, indisputable evidence on the guilt of two more militants who joined the ranks of the occupation groups of the aggressor country at the beginning of the full-scale invasion was collected,” it said.

Both “took an active part in the storming of Ukrainian cities on the Eastern Front”, it said.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence says its forces have destroyed a Ukrainian ammunitions depot near the eastern city of Bakhmut and shot down four HIMARS missiles and five drones launched by Ukrainian forces.

In a daily military update on its Telegram channel, the ministry also said “up to 60 Ukrainian servicemen, four motor vehicles and two D-30 howitzers have been neutralised” in the southern province of Kherson.

Al Jazeera was unable to verify the battlefield reports.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says talks with Sweden and Finland over their NATO membership bids would resume on March 9, but he adds that Turkey believes Sweden had still not fulfilled its obligations under an agreement signed last year.

“Unfortunately, we have not seen satisfactory steps from Sweden on the implementation of the Madrid memorandum,” Cavusoglu said at a news conference in Ankara.

“It is not possible for us to say ‘yes’ to Sweden’s NATO bid before we see these steps,” he said, noting that the March 9 meeting would be held in Brussels.

In January, Turkey cancelled talks with Sweden and Finland on their NATO applications after a Danish far-right politician burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock calls Putin’s suspension of Russia’s participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US “irresponsible”.

Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Baerbock said Putin, who announced the suspension last week, should be urged to return to the treaty.

The governor of Luhansk province, the largely Russian-occupied northern half of the Donbas region, says Moscow has been escalating shelling and infantry assaults in the Bilohoryvka, Svatove-Kupiansk and Kreminna areas for several weeks.

“There is no fleeing,” Serhiy Haidai told state television. “Our units do not leave territory. … Of course, everything can change at any moment.”

“On the other hand, Western heavy offensive equipment is on the way, and therefore in any week, the military command can conduct an operation following the same plan as they did in the Kharkiv region.” he said, referring to Ukraine’s recapture of a northeastern sector from Russian forces last year.

The Kremlin says it is worried about the state of affairs in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region and accuses Ukraine and other European countries of stirring up tensions there.

Last week, Moscow said any actions that threaten Russian soldiers in Transnistria would be seen as an attack on Russia itself.

The Kremlin has an estimated 1,500 soldiers in Transnistria, which it refers to as a “peacekeeping” force. Kyiv is concerned that those forces could be used to attack Ukraine from the west.

“Naturally, the situation in Transnistria is the subject of our closest attention and a reason for our concern,” Peskov told reporters.

“The situation is unsettled. It is being provoked, provoked from outside,” he said. “But we know that our opponents in the Ukrainian regime, the Kyiv regime, as well as those in European countries are capable of various types of provocation.”