March 3, 2023 Russia-Ukraine news

The White House will announce another round of military assistance for Ukraine on Friday, which is the same day that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will meet with President Joe Biden, according to National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby. 

Kirby declined to provide a dollar figure for Friday's announcement. He added that Biden and Scholz will discuss "additional support for Ukraine going forward."

The announcement comes just one week after the Biden administration announced another $2 billion in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funds. That funding was for purchases and new contracts for equipment for Ukraine, including:

Russian forces continue to press their offensive in the Bakhmut area as Ukrainian forces try to repel ongoing attacks near the key eastern city and nearby areas in the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian military's General Staff said in an evening update on Thursday. 

Over the past 24 hours, Russian forces launched rocket attacks on the cities of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk, located just 5 kilometers (about 3 miles) west of Bakhmut, and Zaporizhzhia, the General Staff said. 

There were unsuccessful Russian offensive attempts in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions, it added.

In the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson directions, Russian forces continue "to try to create conditions for an offensive" and have fired artillery at more than 40 settlement areas, it said.

Ukraine also responded with 13 strikes over the past day in areas where Russia has personnel and military equipment, the General Staff said, adding that the missile and artillery units hit one Russian ammunition depot.

Russian security officials claimed on Thursday that a small Ukrainian armed group had crossed the Russian border into the southern Bryansk region, allegations dismissed by Kyiv as a “classic deliberate provocation” by the Kremlin.

The Security Service of Russia (FSB) said in a statement via state-run news agency RIA Novosti on Thursday that the agency was carrying out operations to counter what it said were “armed Ukrainian nationalists who violated the state border” in the district. President Vladimir Putin later described the incident as a terrorist attack, and a local official said two civilians were killed.

CNN cannot independently verify the Russian claims, and local media have not carried any images of the supposed incidents, any type of confrontation or an alleged raid reported by Russian authorities.

US and Ukrainian officials have in the past warned that Russia has planned so-called “false flag” attacks along Russia’s border with Ukraine as a pretext for military escalation, including Russian claims ahead of last year’s full-scale invasion that Ukraine was sending “saboteurs” over the Russian border.

The Bryansk region shares a border to its south with Ukraine, and to its west with Belarus, the close Russian ally nation that helped facilitate Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

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Standing outside a Russian detention center in Kherson, days after the southern Ukrainian city was liberated, 29-year-old Ihor shivered as he recalled what he endured inside.

Kherson was the first large city and only regional capital Russian troops were able to occupy since the start of the invasion. Moscow’s armies took over the city on March 2, 2022, and occupied it for several months before being forced to withdraw in early November, after a months-long offensive by Ukrainian forces.

The detention center Ihor was held in was part of a network of at least 20 facilities that Ukrainian and international lawyers said was part of a calculated Russian strategy to extinguish Ukrainian identity.

The investigation found that Russian forces followed a very specific blueprint in several occupied areas, with clear patterns that point to the overarching plan of Moscow’s occupation of Ukraine.

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Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, shared a video on Thursday, which he said shows his fighters in the city of Bakhmut.

In the video, geolocated by CNN to the east of Bakhmut, uniformed men can be seen lifting a Wagner banner on the top of a heavily damaged building, with one of the men holding a guitar, presumably in reference to the private military group’s nickname, "the musicians."

Despite Prigozhin’s claim that his fighters had advanced to the city center, CNN geolocated the video to around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the center of Bakhmut — Wagner fighters have been there for a while. 

The town in the eastern Donetsk region has been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in recent weeks.

Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for the Eastern Grouping of Ukraine’s Armed forces, told CNN on Wednesday that Russian forces were employing more experienced fighters from Wagner’s ranks as they continued their assault on Bakhmut.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly revealed for the first time Thursday that the United States has put forward a “serious proposal” to secure wrongfully detained Paul Whelan’s release from Russia.

US officials have long stressed their commitment to bringing home Whelan, who has been detained in Russia since 2018, but the public disclosure that a deal is on the table marks a notable development in those efforts.

In a “brief engagement” with Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting Thursday, Blinken said he pressed the Russian foreign minister on Whelan’s detention and the offer.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Thursday that this “was not a proposal that the Russians heard for the first time today.” Price declined to give details on that proposal, but said it was one “that we have conveyed to them consistently in the past.”

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