Switzerland has shipped a first instalment of Leopard 2 tanks to Germany, which replaces tanks its northern neighbour is sending to Ukraine, as pledges of billions in aid from Europe and the US are tied up amid political wrangling.

The European Union will aim to boost ammunition deliveries to Ukraine as it tries to make up for delays in meeting an ambitious target of sending one million artillery rounds by March, Estonia’s defence minister said.

Ukraine said Russia hit an electricity substation in the central Dnipropetrovsk region in the biggest drone strike since 2 January, which also targeted military and civilian infrastructure near the front line.

Russia, in a new push to expand its influence in Africa, is recruiting an armed force to replace the Wagner Group’s mercenaries across the continent.

Russia to deploy new weapons on disputed Kuril Islands

Russia plans to deploy new weapons on islands that are at the centre of a decades-long territorial dispute with Japan, according to former president Dmitry Medvedev, the current deputy head of the country’s Security Council.

The strategic role of the Kuril Islands would increase, “including stationing new weapons there”, Medvedev said on Tuesday on the X social media platform. “We don’t give a damn about the ‘feelings of the Japanese’ concerning the so-called Northern Territories. These are not ‘disputed territories,’ but Russia.”

The four islands known as the Northern Territories in Japan were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War 2. The dispute has prevented the two sides from concluding a peace treaty to formally end the war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and the late former Japanese leader Shinzo Abe met 25 times until the latter’s resignation as prime minister in 2020 to try to reach an agreement on the islands, without success.

In recent years, Moscow has built up military installations there. Changes to the Russian Constitution Putin initiated in 2020 also made it illegal to hand over any part of Russian territory.

Medvedev’s comments came in response to remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who said his country remained committed to resolving the territorial dispute and sealing a peace treaty with Moscow, according to Russia’s state-run Tass news service.

Swiss export tanks to replace German gear sent to Ukraine

Switzerland shipped a first instalment of Leopard 2 tanks to Germany, which replaces tanks its northern neighbour is sending to Ukraine, as pledges of billions in aid from Europe and the US are tied up amid political wrangling.

The first nine Leopard 2 A4 tanks were handed over to Germany’s Rheinmetall Landsysteme on Tuesday, the Swiss defence procurement authority armasuisse said. Sixteen more tanks will be sent in the coming days, it added, without disclosing the price at which the tanks were sold.

The government had agreed to export the tanks only on the condition that they would not be passed on to Ukraine, to ensure Switzerland stuck to its tradition of military neutrality. Nevertheless, it marks a milestone as the first time the Swiss actively backed European military aid for Ukraine, by ensuring Germany can replenish its tank stocks.

Rheinmetall also agreed to place orders for other military equipment with Swiss defence manufacturers as part of the deal, armasuisse said.

Read more on support for Ukraine:

• Germany set to double Its Ukraine military aid under Scholz plan
• Switzerland refuses to take sides in ever more divided world
• Swiss stash of Leopard tanks spurs debate on how to help Ukraine

EU seeks ammunition boost for Ukraine in bid to approach goal

The European Union will aim to boost ammunition deliveries to Ukraine as it tries to make up for delays in meeting an ambitious target of sending one million artillery rounds by March, Estonia’s defence minister said.

While the bloc agreed last year on the deadline, only one-third of the rounds had been delivered to Ukraine, with another 30% due by March, Hanno Pevkur said in an interview in Brussels. The goal at the time wasn’t backed by money, he added on the eve of a meeting of EU defence ministers due on Wednesday.

“We’re lacking still around one-third of that,” Pevkur said. “This is why we need to send a clear signal that we have either the shells from stocks or the money.” Pevkur added he expected his counterparts to commit at their meeting to finding the rounds or funding for shells for Ukraine.

The EU agreed early last year to send the one million rounds to Ukraine after a push by Estonia to make the pledge. EU officials told its 27 member states late last year that it was likely to fall short of its ammunition target, despite efforts to ramp up the bloc’s defence industry.

Just as Ukraine faces shortages in financial and military aid from allied nations, Russia has been bolstered by an influx of supplies from North Korea, which, according to a South Korean legislator, shipped one million shells to Russia last year.

Estonia’s Pevkur said at least seven other countries, including Poland and the Nordics, were ready to pledge more money toward the goal. Even if the EU was unlikely to meet the March deadline, having fresh funding for production meant the rounds would eventually be sent to Ukraine, he added.

The bloc is also bracing for a showdown with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the EU leader closest to Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a summit of leaders on Thursday. Leaders will try to agree on a €50-billion aid package for Ukraine that Hungary blocked in December.

Ukraine agriculture ministry’s website hit by cyberattack

The website of Ukraine’s agriculture ministry has been damaged in an ongoing cyberattack, the ministry said.

The website, a portal where key harvest statistics and export permits are published, has been unavailable since Monday and it would take time to fully restore it, according to an emailed statement. The ministry didn’t provide details about the source of the attack or what data may be lost.

Ukraine has recorded thousands of cyberattacks against government offices and critical systems since January 2022, a month before Russia’s full-scale military invasion. Most recently, a powerful cyberattack against the country’s largest mobile provider Kyivstar disrupted phone and internet services, disabling some digital banking and air raid sirens, in December. The company said it suspects Russia of being behind the intrusion.

Russia hits Ukraine grid in biggest drone strike in weeks

Ukraine said Russia hit an electricity substation in the central Dnipropetrovsk region in the biggest drone strike since 2 January, which also targeted military and civilian infrastructure near the front line.

The attack caused a fire, damaging electrical equipment and disrupting power supplies, the Energy Ministry said. Industrial consumers were being connected to reserve lines while repairs were carried out, national grid operator Ukrenergo said on Facebook, without giving details.

Russia launched 35 Shahed drones overnight, of which 15 were downed across eight regions of Ukraine, the Air Force in Kyiv said on its Telegram channel. Fuel and energy infrastructure near the front lines and other civilian and military facilities there and at the Russian border were targeted, according to the statement.

Russia hires its own Africa army to succeed Wagner’s mercenaries

Russia, in a new push to expand its influence in Africa, is recruiting an armed force to replace the Wagner group’s mercenaries across the continent.

The Africa Corps would bolster Russia’s military presence with what it says would be a network of planned Defence Ministry-controlled bases, in a bid to revive Moscow’s Cold War-era clout on the continent at a time of steeply declining Western influence. It would also allow the Kremlin to consolidate control of Wagner’s business network in Africa, including potentially lucrative mining interests, following the death last year of the group’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“It’s a recognition on the part of the Kremlin that there’s an opportunity to exploit,” said J Peter Pham, former US special envoy to the Sahel. “If it’s formalised, especially with the French withdrawal, it’s certainly going to be a much more significant and potentially lasting shift in geopolitical and diplomatic alignments.”

French troops fighting insurgents in the Sahel left both Mali and Burkina Faso after the military ousted the civilian government and moved closer to Russia.

The Africa Corps, which controversially shares the name of Adolf Hitler’s expeditionary force, aims to enlist new recruits and former Wagner fighters by mid-year to deploy to at least five Russia-friendly countries — Burkina Faso, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic and Niger — according to the group. Wagner was technically disbanded following Prigozhin’s death, but remains active.

But it remains to be seen where it will be able to find the 20,000 soldiers that a person close to the Russian Defence Ministry said the group seeks. At its peak, Wagner’s African operations numbered at most several thousand personnel and Russia is already trying to recruit at least another 250,000 troops to fight in Ukraine this year.

At the same time, transitioning to an official military role will collapse the arm’s-length relationship to Wagner’s operations that gave the Kremlin plausible deniability against United Nations allegations of war crimes in Africa made against the mercenary group.

“There is a downside for the Russians as well, which is that you no longer have deniability,” said Pham, the former senior US diplomat. “If you rebrand those forces as part of the army, you now own that problem.”

Moscow’s approach has started small. Last Wednesday, about 100 Russian troops arrived in Burkina Faso to provide security for Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the soldier who seized power in a 2022 military coup, the group said in a statement posted on its Telegram channel.

But it has ambitious plans, seeking to build a regional headquarters in the Central African Republic, where over the past six years Wagner has waged a brutal campaign on behalf of the president and embedded itself in the national security apparatus in exchange for diamonds and gold.

Zelensky hasn’t fired army chief, says spokesperson

Volodymyr Zelensky hasn’t dismissed Ukraine’s army chief, a presidential spokesperson said — ending an evening of speculation that the popular general had been fired.

“Definitely not,” Serhiy Nykyforov said on Monday by phone amid talk of Valery Zaluzhnyi’s removal. “The president didn’t dismiss the commander-in-chief.”

Local media and social networks had been awash with unverified reports about Zaluzhnyi’s departure — a step that would risk a public backlash as a December poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology put his approval rating at 92%. Support in that survey for his exit was just 2%.

Talk about a rift between Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi has built over the past year as a counteroffensive by Ukraine’s military found little success in beating back invading forces from neighbouring Russia.

The army chief in a November interview described the war as a stalemate — an assessment that the president’s office challenged.

Russia’s seaborne crude exports battered by winter storms

Russia’s seaborne crude shipments fell further last week, with flows from a key Pacific port that supplies Chinese buyers halted for five days by high winds and freezing temperatures.

About 3.09 million barrels a day of crude were shipped from Russian ports in the four weeks to 28 January, tanker-tracking data monitored by Bloomberg show. That was down by about 250,000 barrels a day from the revised figure for the period to 21 January.

The more volatile weekly average fell by about 120,000 barrels a day to an eight-week low of 2.8 million. Exports were hit by the storm that closed Kozmino and by four days of maintenance at the Baltic port of Ust-Luga, where loadings had been interrupted earlier by a Ukrainian drone strike on a nearby processing plant.

Russia has said it will cut oil exports by 500,000 barrels a day below the May-June average during the first quarter, after several other members of the Opec+ group agreed to make further output curbs. The Russian cut will be shared between crude shipments, which will be reduced by 300,000 barrels a day, and refined products. The four-week average crude measure was about 500,000 barrels a day below the May-June level. DM