Ukraine receives machine guns, surveillance gear from Canada as Russian threats mount

Ukraine has received a plane load of machine guns, surveillance gear and rifles as part of a Canadian military assistance package, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said on Saturday.

“We received military aid in the form of rifles, machine guns with optical sights, night vision & surveillance devices & military equipment. Thank you for this important & timely decision,” Reznikov wrote in a tweet.

Explosions in eastern Ukraine

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Meanwhile, two regions in eastern Ukraine where government and separatist forces have been fighting since 2014 were hit by more than 1,400 explosions on Friday, monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said, pointing to a surge in shelling.

The two Russian-backed, self-proclaimed republics in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions are at the center of a surge in tensions between Moscow and the West over a vast Russian military buildup near Ukraine.

The OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission that is deployed in the conflict zone said it had logged 553 explosions in Donetsk.

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A further 860 were reported in neighboring Luhansk. Both numbers were valid as of 1630 GMT on Friday, it said in a statement released late on Saturday.

The monitoring mission confirmed one civilian casualty in a government-controlled area of Donetsk.

It put the total number of ceasefire violations on Friday at more than 1,500 compared with 870 the day before when monitors reported 654 explosions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday he had an “urgent” phone conversation with the French President Emmanuel Macron and discussed possible ways of immediate de-escalation and political-diplomatic settlement in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine has reported an increase in ceasefire violations by Russia-backed separatists recently, and Kyiv’s Western allies are concerned that Russia is poised to launch a military offensive against Ukraine. Russia denies any plans to attack its neighbour.

“(I)Informed about the aggravation on the frontline, our losses, the shelling,” Zelenskiy wrote in a tweet.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, where he also met with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, Zelensky said, “I don’t know what the president of the Russian Federation wants, so I am proposing a meeting.” He added Russia could pick the location for the talks.

“Ukraine will continue to follow only the diplomatic path for the sake of a peaceful settlement.”

Russian leader Vladimir Putin oversaw strategic nuclear exercises involving the launch of hypersonic ballistic missiles and other weapons on Saturday, the latest show of strength at a time of acute tension with the West over Ukraine.

Putin watched the drills from a “situation centre” in the Kremlin, sitting alongside his close ally, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

The drills involved launches from warships, submarines and warplanes as well as from land that struck targets on land and at sea, the Kremlin said.

Two ballistic missiles were launched – one from a site in northwest Russia and the second from a submarine in the Barents Sea – hitting targets thousands of miles away in the far east peninsula of Kamchatka, it said.

Russia’s RIA news agency aired footage showing a split screen of various top senior military chiefs as well as Putin, who ordered the drills to begin.

The Kremlin has said the exercises are part of a regular training process and denied they signal an escalation of the standoff.

They follow a huge series of manoeuvres by Russia’s armed forces in the past four months that have included a build-up of troops – estimated by the West to number 150,000 or more – to the north, east and south of Ukraine. Russia denies planning to attack Ukraine.

“In the context of the current situation on our western borders, this will certainly be perceived as a signal,” said Dmitry Stefanovich, a research fellow at the Moscow-based IMEMO RAS think tank.

“The signal to the West is not so much ‘don’t interfere’, but instead designed to say that the problem is not Ukraine and actually much wider,” he said.

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Putin and other top officials frequently refer to the fact that Russia, together with the United States, is one of the world’s leading nuclear powers.

In the footage aired by RIA, Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov told Putin: “The main purpose of the exercise is to train the strategic offensive forces’ actions aimed at delivering a guaranteed defeat of the enemy.”

Ships and submarines from the Northern and Black Sea Fleets launched Kalibr cruise missiles and Zircon hypersonic missiles at sea and land targets, the Kremlin said.

The Defence Ministry released footage of aircraft launching a Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missile and striking a land target.

— With files from The Associated Press