Latest news on Russia and the war in Ukraine

Monitors from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported hearing explosions near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as Russia hit the country with a new wave of attacks.

Rafael Grossi, IAEA chief, made a repeated call for a security zone to be established around the plant, which is Europe’s largest of its kind and currently occupied by Russian forces.

A representative for Russian state nuclear energy company Rosenergoatom, Renat Karchaa, called the comments baseless and a “provocation.”

— Natasha Turak

Several of Ukraine’s regions have to implement emergency power cuts because of outages caused by Russia’s wave of attacks on Thursday, Ukrainian state news channel Suspilne reported.

“Currently, ten regions of Ukraine are already using emergency power outages due to a power shortage in the network after yesterday’s Russian shelling, and the restoration of damaged facilities is ongoing,” it wrote on its official Telegram channel.

Millions of Ukrainians are enduring regular power outages, enduring freezing winter temperatures as Russia targets critical infrastructure and energy facilities.

— Natasha Turak

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for more sanctions on Russia after a wave of missile and drone attacks on Thursday left at least 11 people in Ukraine dead.

“This Russian aggression can and should be stopped only with adequate weapons. The terrorist state will not understand anything else. Weapons on the battlefield. Weapons that protect our skies,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Thursday.

“New sanctions against Russia, i.e. political and economic weapons. And legal weapons – we need to work even harder to establish a tribunal for the crime of Russian aggression against Ukraine.”

The Russian attacks on civilians came a day after Western allies pledged to send battle tanks to Ukraine, something European allies like Germany had until then been reluctant to do for fear of provoking Moscow.

— Natasha Turak

Japan on Friday announced additional sanctions in response to Moscow’s latest actions in Ukraine, banning exports to Russia of key strategic goods and freezing assets of dozen individuals.

Japan will prohibit Russia-bound shipments of goods that can be used to enhance military capability, including semiconductor equipment and components, robots, power generators, explosives and vaccines, according to the trade ministry.

The new export ban will take effect on Feb. 3, it said.

Japan also froze assets of an additional three entities and 22 individuals in Russia and 14 pro-Moscow individuals related to the “annexation” of the southeastern Ukraine region.

— Reuters

For months, Wagner has been locked in a bloody battle of attrition to take the towns of Bakhmut and Soledar in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Western and Ukrainian officials have said it is using convicts as cannon fodder to overwhelm Ukraine’s defenses. 

Videos and photographs of the graves first appeared on social media channels in the Krasnodar region in December. Reuters geolocated these images to the Bakinskaya cemetery and reviewed satellite imagery of the site from Maxar Technologies and Capella Space.

Satellite pictures show that the Wagner plot was empty in the summer, had three rows of graves by the end of November and was three-quarters full by early January. Virtually the entire plot was used by Jan. 24.

Read the full story from Reuters here.

— Reuters