January 26, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine news

Germany will fund the purchase of 20 million euros ($21.8 million) worth of Starlink satellite terminals for Ukraine, Kyiv's minister of digital transformation said Wednesday.

“Expressed my gratitude to the German people for a new batch of 10,000 Starlinks, which we’ll get next month,” Mykhailo Fedorov said in a Telegram post .

The small, easy-to-use satellite dishes made by Elon Musk’s private rocket company SpaceX have been universally hailed as a game-changing source of communication for Ukraine’s military, allowing it to fight and stay online even as cellular phone and internet networks have been destroyed in its war with Russia. 

Germany's Foreign Ministry said a third of the terminals will benefit the Ukrainian armed forces directly, noting the expanded internet access will also help the Ukrainian people.

US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he plans to send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, reversing his longstanding resistance to Kyiv's requests for the highly sophisticated but maintenance-heavy vehicles.

His announcement came after Germany said it would send 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Kyiv from its own stock, ending an apparent standoff that saw Berlin officials indicate they would only send tanks if the US did too.

Here's what you need to know:

Watch CNN's Jim Sciutto break down the latest on the tanks:

CNN's Kevin Liptak, Stephanie Halasz, Sophie Tanno and Sugam Pokharel contributed reporting to this post.

The historic center of the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and sites in Yemen and Lebanon were added to the World Heritage List Wednesday by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

All three sites were simultaneously added to UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger.

UNESCO's founding Convention obliges all members — among whom are Russia and Ukraine — to "not take any deliberate measures that directly or indirectly damage their heritage or that of another State Party to the Convention."

Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, said in a statement that he hoped the listing would help protect Odesa from the war.

The statement said the decision would give Ukraine access to "technical and financial international assistance" to protect and rehabilitate the city center.

Read more here.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday the decisions by the United States and Germany to send main battle tanks to his country proved “freedom is only getting stronger.”

He thanked "Mr. President Biden, I thank the Congress, I thank every American family" as well as "Mr. Chancellor, all German politicians and public figures."

Providing more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine was critical to the war effort, he added.

Ukraine’s “wish list” for Western-supplied weapons includes fighter jets, Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told CNN on Wednesday.

But he said Kyiv's first priority was air defense systems so it could prevent Russia from carrying out air and missile strikes.

“We have to close our sky, to defend our sky,” Reznikov said. “That’s priority number one. After that, we need to get more armed vehicles, tanks, artillery systems, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), et cetera, et cetera. We have people, but we need weaponry.”

Even in disarray, the message ends up being one of unity.

After weeks of Poland and other NATO members openly pressuring Germany to permit the dispatch of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, finally it appears the United States and some of its European Union allies will send armor — a move that was unthinkable months ago — to the front line against Russia.

It is a momentous decision, partly because these — unlike the air defense systems, or the anti-tank missiles — are not defensive weapons. Like the artillery and rocket systems that preceded them, they are intended to hit Russia’s troops hard in a ground offensive. But unlike those systems, they are unequivocally about Ukraine retaking territory. This is new, and fierce, and it portrays a NATO unafraid.

The combined US and European decision to send tanks to Ukraine is not the display of fractious democracies it might appear to be.

Throughout the weeks of dispute and badgering around Berlin’s reluctance to assist Kyiv, some in Moscow will have heard something different to disunity: a West contemplating sending its most aggressive armor to a state it considered unfit even to discuss NATO membership seriously with a year ago.

An alliance of the size, and varying histories, of NATO would always have some disagreements on how to handle the largest land war in Europe since World War II.

Poland has experienced the Soviet grasp, with many of its citizens able to remember how that version of Russian imperialism felt. Germany — under the Nazis — last let its tanks loose in the continent’s worst episode of bloodshed yet. Many senior figures in its towering Social Democratic Party (SPD) — home of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — have been perilously close to the Kremlin. It would have been somewhat remarkable had these European powers all been on an identical page about this fight from day one.

But America’s plans to send a largely symbolic 30 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, according to two US officials familiar with the deliberations, have emboldened Germany enough to drop its objections to the Leopard. It provided a NATO umbrella for the move, even if it will take months, maybe years, to get the logistically complex American main battle tank into play.

Read the full analysis here.

Two Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the eastern city of Bakhmut said Wednesday they feared an attempted encirclement by Russian forces, though they did not expect a dramatic change in the coming days.

The unnamed soldier, with whom CNN has been in constant contact for weeks, said “there are intense street battles for every house in the east, northeast and southeast,” but added that, while the Russian threat continued to grow, he did not believe Moscow's forces were likely to make any significant progress in the coming days.

“This is very worrying for us, and for everyone who is sane, especially those who saw what happened to the people surrounded in Soledar. And we were there. And no one wants it to happen again," the soldier said.

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister acknowledged that Russia is “intensifying their pressure” on Bakhmut.