Kyiv Post Daily Thread – The Latest News From and About Ukraine on March 16

Daniel Rice, a special advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi of Ukraine, believes that China will not supply Russia with weapons because Bejing has seen every mistake made by Vladimir Putin.

Read the full story here.

Polish President Andrzej Duda on Thursday said the EU member would deliver an initial batch of four Soviet-designed MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine soon.

"In the coming days we will first transfer, if I remember correctly, four fully operational planes to Ukraine," Duda told reporters.

"Additional planes are currently in preparation, under maintenance, and will probably be transferred successively," he added.

Read the full story here.

A United Nations investigation into human rights violations since Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not concluded that a genocide has taken place within Ukraine, its chair said Thursday.

"We have not found that there has been a genocide within Ukraine," Norwegian judge Erik Mose, the head of the investigation team, told a press conference in Geneva, though he added that "we have noted that there are some aspects which may raise questions with respect to that crime ... but we have not yet put in any conclusion here."

One person has been killed and two injured after a fire broke out in the Border Guard Department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) building in Rostov-on-Don, the TASS media agency has reported.

According to local Telegram channels, an explosion was allegedly heard before the fire broke out on Thursday March 16. According to unconfirmed reports, the fire broke out at an ammunition depot. The area of the fire has already reached 800 square meters.

Read the full story here.

A recent intelligence analysis by Britain’s Ministry of Defense said the Russian army has suffered heavy losses in tanks and other armored vehicles from Ukraine-fired “Remote Anti-Armour Mine systems (RAAM).”

Kyiv Post has compiled a guide to the weapon which you can read here. 

The Kremlin said Thursday that Russia was not a threat to Finland, ahead of the Finnish president's visit to Turkey, which is expected to approve Helsinki's NATO bid.

Finland and Sweden dropped decades-long policies of military non-alignment and applied to join the western alliance last May in the wake of Moscow's offensive in Ukraine.

"We have many times expressed regret over Finland and Sweden's move toward membership and said many times that Russia does not pose a threat to these countries," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"We do not have any dispute with these countries... They have never posed any threat to us and, logically, we did not threaten them," Peskov said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suspended negotiations with Sweden but looks ready to ratify Finland's membership.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said Turkey had reached a decision on ratifying his country's NATO bid and said he will visit Istanbul this week to hear it from Erdogan. Turkey and Hungary are the only countries that have yet to ratify the countries' applications, which must be accepted by all 30 existing members of the alliance.

Russia sees NATO enlargement as an existential threat to its security and has used Ukraine's wish to join the alliance to justify the offensive.

Polish counterintelligence has dismantled a Russian spy ring, Poland’s defence minister said Thursday.

“The whole network has been dismantled,” Mariusz Blaszczak told Polish public radio PR1. “It was an espionage group... collecting information for those who attacked Ukraine.

“The threat was real,” he added, without giving further details.

Read the full story here.

From a small, non-descript house in a badly bombed village in eastern Ukraine, Andrii "Tuman", who goes by his call sign meaning "fog", commands his battalion around the clock to hold intensifying Russian attacks at bay.

What Ukrainian forces have long described in the city of Bakhmut is also playing out to the north in Luhansk region - more Russian troops, weapons and aggressive tactics that Moscow hopes will produce a badly needed breakthrough.

Medics reporting to Tuman described heavy casualties in recent weeks, further evidence that the grinding warfare along the front that runs across eastern and southern Ukraine is coming at a high cost to both sides.

You can read more on Reuters. 

On March 16, 2022, Russia’s Aerospace Force dropped two bombs on the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theatre in Mariupol. According to Ukrainian official reports, at least 600 civilians were sheltering in the basement of the building at the time.

Two days later, Mariupol City Council reported that nearly 130 survivors had been pulled from the basement. A week on, it reported, citing eyewitnesses, that the bombs had killed about 300 people.

Read the full anniversary report here. 

Russia’s unprovoked, barbaric war on Ukraine has forced the world to confront many unsettling questions. One of the most important is: Where is multilateral diplomacy when you need it?

Read Kuleba's full piece at The Hill.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense continues to cement its position as the cheekiest defense ministry in the world, after mocking Russia for losing yet another aircraft in the skies over Ukraine.

Read the full story here.