March 8, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Russia has conducted “several” cyberattacks in Ukraine in recent weeks, but the level of hacking has still not been “what we had anticipated” prior to the war, Gen. Paul Nakasone, National Security Agency director, told lawmakers Tuesday.

The relatively muted Russian activity in cyberspace is due to defensive measures from the Ukrainians, “some of the challenges that the Russians have encountered, and some of the work that others have been able to prevent their actions,” said Nakasone, who also heads US Cyber Command, said at the House Intelligence Committee’s worldwide threats hearing.

US officials have watched and tracked “very carefully” three of four of the Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine, Nakasone said without elaborating.

US national security officials from multiple agencies have provided Ukrainian officials with cybersecurity assistance to track threats and recover from hacking incidents.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, there were a series of cyberattacks that disrupted the websites of Ukrainian government agencies and, in other cases, wiped data from agency networks. The White House blamed Russia’s GRU military agency for the first set of website-disrupting cyberattacks that occurred in January. Moscow denied the allegation.

Washington has poured millions of dollars into bolstering Ukraine’s cyber defenses following a pair of alleged Russian cyberattacks in 2015 and 2016 that cut electricity in parts of Ukraine.

America's oil and gas industry says it supports President Biden's plan to ban Russian oil, natural gas, and coal imports into the US.

"Our industry is prepared to comply with the import ban in response to this aggression," said Mike Sommers, president and CEO of the powerful American Petroleum Institute, on Tuesday, referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Some context: Russia accounts for a small amount of the total energy imports into the US — about 8% last year. The API is the largest trade group for the U.S. oil and gas industry, whose members include Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell.

Shell announced earlier on Tuesday that it will stop purchasing Russian crude oil and completely withdraw from the Russian energy industry "aligned with new government guidance.”

In his speech Tuesday, Biden acknowledged the oil and gas firms pulling out of Russia, but once again warned companies not to take advantage of soaring oil costs to raise prices and pad profits. 

Sommers told CNN in an interview last month that U.S. oil companies would not seek to capitalize on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying his members want to do what’s best for consumers around the world. 

Russia has launched “nearly 670” missiles since the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine, a senior US defense official told reporters on Tuesday.

Almost half of the missiles launched have been fired from Russia, “the other half largely from inside Ukraine,” the official said. “A little bit more than 70” missiles have been fired from Belarus, and “only a half dozen or so” are coming from the Black Sea, the official added.

Putin has “nearly 100 percent” of the combat power that he amassed for this invasion inside of Ukraine and Putin “still has 95 percent of the combat power that he started with,” the official added.

“The combat power available to him if you count his estimated losses just in terms of aircraft and vehicles that are either inoperable or not moving or not available to him, he still has a lot of combat power available,” the official said.

Most of Ukraine is covered by “some sort of Russian surface-to-air missile capability,” the official told reporters.

While Russians have more control of the airspace in some parts of the country, “up in the north more than anywhere else,” they don’t have control over the entire country, and the space overall remains contested, the official said.

“It’s very contested air space, and as I’ve said before, Russians have not achieved air superiority over the whole country,” the official said. “But as I’ve also said, there are parts of Ukraine where the Russians have been able to be more in control of the airspace, particularly you might imagine, up in the north more than anywhere else, but it changes, it’s very dynamic, every day.”

The city of Mariupol in the south of Ukraine has now been “isolated” by Russian forces, though Russian forces are only still bombarding the city and are not in Mariupol “in any significant way,” according to a senior US defense official.

CNN has previously reported that residents of Mariupol have been cut off from water and electricity for days.

The US is also seeing that Russian forces have not yet entered Mykolaiv, a key city that could be used as part of a coordinated assault against the city of Odessa, though there has been an increase in the bombardment and shelling of Mykolaiv, according to the official.

Russian forces are still trying to advance on the cities of Kharkiv and Chernihiv, but are still facing Ukrainian resistance and are making more progress in the south of Ukraine than elsewhere in the country, according to the official.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said a Russian general — Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov — was killed in battle near Kharkiv.

The short statement on Monday offered no proof of the death of Gerasimov, and gave no details of when he was killed.

Russian state media said nothing Tuesday about Gerasimov, although it did name other Russians killed in Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense did not immediately respond to CNN questions about Gerasimov on Tuesday, which is a national holiday in Russia.

Ukraine identified Gerasimov as “a Russian military commander, major general, chief of staff and first deputy commander of the 41st Army of the Central Military District of Russia” and said he was a veteran of Russian campaigns in Chechnya and Syria.

“A number of senior Russian army officers were also killed and wounded,” the Ukraine Defense Ministry statement said.

The ministry also alluded in its statement to communication problems that it says Russia’s army is facing. Christo Grozev, executive director of the open source investigative outlet Bellingcat, detailed in a Twitter thread that the information of the general’s death may have been gleaned from an intercept of a phone call on an unsecured network.

CNN has been unable to confirm those details.

Vitali Kim, Mykolaiv regional administrator, asked residents of the city to gather tires, which will be set on fire to impede the movement of Russian troops in the city. 

Once disoriented by the smoke, Kim said that Ukrainian forces would utilize weapons like rocket-propelled grenades to take out the vehicles. 

"We will stop them with smoke and will shoot them," he said. "We know the city. This is our city, we know it by heart."

Kim said that the Russian forces are regrouping. 

"We will avenge the victims in other cities — Kharkiv, Sumy, Kyiv," he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the UK House of Commons via video on Tuesday, saying “we will fight to the end,” echoing former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's famous wartime speech.

"We will not give up and we will not lose. We will fight until the end at sea, in the air. We will continue fighting for our land, whatever the cost," he said in his comments translated by an interpreter.

Zelensky also expressed his gratitude to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and asked the parliament to “strengthen the sanctions” against Russia and recognize it “as a terrorist state.” He reiterated his request with NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, asking Britain to find a way to make the “Ukrainian skies safe.”

“Do what you can, what you have to, what the greatness of your country and your people obliges you to,” he added.

He criticized NATO for not delivering what Ukrainians were “looking for."

“I don't want to offend anyone, but we felt the alliances are not working, they can't even close the skies. So there is a need to rebuilt European security from zero,” Zelensky said.

The Ukrainian president also used a portion of his remarks to describe how Russia's invasion has unfolded in the country.

“I would like to tell you about the 13 days of war. The war that we didn't start, and we didn't want it,” he told British lawmakers.  

“We do not want to lose what we have what is ours, our country, Ukraine,” Zelensky said, adding “Just the same way as you once didn't want to lose your country... And you had to fight for Britain.” 

The House of Commons gave Zelensky a standing ovation at the end of his address.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in a letter that the US House would vote today on a bill to ban imports of Russian oil and energy products. 

According to Pelosi, the bill contains "three major provisions that will further isolate Russia from the global economy and leave it weaker in every way."

She went on to list the components:

Earlier today, US President Joe Biden said his administration is banning Russian oil, natural gas and coal imports to the US in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The US will make the move unilaterally, without its European allies, due to disagreement among European nations about whether to ban Russian energy imports. EU countries have significantly more exposure to Russian energy than the US.

Dmytro Zhyvytsky, head of the regional administration in the Sumy region, has said that the evacuation route out of the city is about to close at 7:30 p.m. local/12:30 p.m. ET.

The city of Sumy has seen heavy attacks in the last few days and is almost cut off from the rest of the country. Twenty-one people were reported killed in the city in an airstrike Monday night.

"At the moment, citizens are being evacuated by their own vehicles. The organized column set off in the direction of the city of Romny. There are private cars there. They are accompanied by a Red Cross car," Zhyvytsky said on his Telegram channel.