At least 1 wounded in Russia’s Belgorod region after missiles shot down, governor says

Russian President Vladimir Putin has discussed bilateral cooperation, including “joint infrastructure projects,” with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, according to a readout from the Kremlin published Monday.

Putin and Raisi held telephone talks and both the Iranian and Russian sides “gave a positive assessment of the level and dynamics of development of Russian-Iranian relations,” it said.

“Issues of bilateral cooperation in various fields, including the implementation of joint infrastructure projects, were discussed,” added the Kremlin.

Some context: Russia and Iran have deepened their relationship since the war in Ukraine began last year.

Tehran has provided hundreds of attack drones that Russia has used to strike Ukrainian cities, targeting energy infrastructure in particular.

On February 26, William Burns, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, said that the alliance between Russia and Iran is “moving at a pretty fast clip,” with evidence that Moscow has offered to help Iran’s missile program in exchange for military aid.

Russian forces continue to attack the eastern city of Bakhmut on Monday, according to a Ukrainian soldier from the State Border Guard Service.

“Unfortunately, the city has been under fire since early morning. Mostly with mortars and artillery,” the soldier said in a video released by the service on Monday.

The unnamed soldier said that Russian forces “are trying to push our flanks. But the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, together with its colleagues, is standing firm in its positions.”

“We are doing everything possible to prevent the enemy from entering the city,” he added.

Social media video uploaded Monday purports to show muddy tracks near Bakhmut where vehicles have been damaged and destroyed.

CNN is unable to geolocate the video. However, it is consistent with the accounts of Ukrainian soldiers, who have said that they have had to resort to using tracks to get in an out of Bakhmut as the Russian forces are able to strike the main roads into the city.

The video is also consistent with current conditions in the area, where frozen ground has turned to mud as temperatures have risen.

Ukrainian tennis player Marta Kostyuk refused to shake hands with her Russian opponent Varvara Gracheva after claiming victory in the final of the ATX Open in Austin, Texas, on Sunday. 

Kostyuk defeated Gracheva 6-3 7-5, collapsing to the court after converting match point. Tennis players usually shake hands at the end of matches, but Kostyuk refused to do so with Gracheva.

Kostyuk, who is from Kyiv, said at January’s Australian Open that she would not shake hands with Russian or Belarusian opponents.

She refused to shake hands with Victoria Azarenka, of Belarus, at the US Open in September.

The 20-year-old dedicated her maiden Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) singles title to her native country during the trophy presentation.

Kostyuk did not acknowledge the beaten finalist in her acceptance speech.

The tournament win, the first for a Ukrainian woman since Elina Svitolina in 2021, elevated Kostyuk to No. 40 in the WTA rankings.

Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas is set to form a new coalition government after securing an election win on Sunday.  

Kallas’s Reform Party secured 37 of the 101 seats in parliament, reported state broadcaster ERR. 

Kallas was first elected as prime minister in 2021 and has expressed a pro-European stance, as well as strong support for Ukraine.

Kallas now has to put together a 51-seat majority to form a coalition, working with one or more of the five other parties that secured seats in the next parliament.

The second-strongest party, far-right nationalist EKRE, came in at 17 seats, according to ERR.

According to the Estonian Electoral Commission, the election saw the highest turnout since Estonia regained independence in 1991, with 615,009 voters participating.

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the alleged border attack in the Bryansk region of Russia “in detail” during a meeting of the country’s security council on Friday, the Kremlin has said.

The council discussed ways of ensuring the security of strategic facilities guarded by special services during the weekly meeting, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on a conference call Monday.

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

“The situation connected with the terrorist act in Bryansk was discussed in detail,” Peskov said, adding that Moscow would “take measures” to prevent similar incidents in the future.

Peskov reiterated that the Kremlin classifies the Bryansk raid as “nothing else but a terrorist attack.”

Should Russian forces take the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, it wouldn’t constitute a “an operational or strategic setback” for the Ukrainian military, according to US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

“So the fall of Bakhmut won’t necessarily mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this fight. I think it will continue to be contested,” he added.

“What I do see is the Russians continuing to pour in a lot of ill-trained and ill-equipped troops,” said Austin. “And those troops are very quickly meeting their demise.”

Some context: Intense fighting is raging around Bakhmut and analysts say that Russian forces are making gradual gains as they seek to encircle Ukrainian units.

On Sunday, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said that geolocated video footage suggests that “Wagner Group forces continued to make advances in northeastern Bakhmut and advanced near the Stupky railway station,” which is north of the city.

“Ukrainian forces are unlikely to withdraw from Bakhmut all at once and may pursue a gradual fighting withdrawal to exhaust Russian forces through continued urban warfare,” added the ISW.

Intense fighting is raging around the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, where analysts assess that Russian forces are making gradual gains as they seek to encircle Ukrainian units.

In its Monday operational note, the Ukrainian military said Russia “continues its attempts to assault the city of Bakhmut” and surrounding settlements. It lists about six nearby settlements that came under fire.

On Sunday, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said that geolocated video footage suggests that “Wagner Group forces continued to make advances in northeastern Bakhmut and advanced near the Stupky railway station,” which is north of the city.

However, as yet, Russian forces do not appear to have crossed the Bakhmutka River — which runs along the eastern outskirts of the city — into central Bakhmut.

On Monday, two Bakhmut officials outside the city, including the deputy mayor, told CNN that military engineers have erected a temporary metal bridge to replace one that was destroyed late last week on the northern supply route into Bakhmut from Chasiv Yar. 

The deputy mayor said the main southern route into Bakhmut from Ivanivske is harder to use because another bridge has been destroyed.

An embedded Russian war correspondent, Evgeny Poddubny, claimed that some Ukrainian forces have begun retreating from Bakhmut. 

Officials in the Donetsk region say Russian artillery and missile fire continues to inflict damage on many settlements. 

Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk region military administration, said one person was killed and three wounded in Bakhmut.

A Russian missile strike on the nearby city of Kramatorsk destroyed a school, but preliminary information suggests there were no casualties, he added.

In the hotly contested area around Vuhledar, one person was wounded when the town came under Russian fire. The settlements of Avdiivka and Kurakhove also sustained damage.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu inspected infrastructure projects on a visit to the occupied southeastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, Moscow’s Defense Ministry said on its official Telegram channel Monday.

Shoigu also toured a medical center, a new residential district constructed by the military, and was briefed on the construction of a pipeline that will “supply water to many settlements in the region,” the post said.

The ministry did not confirm when Shoigu’s visit took place, or if he was still in the city. 

On Saturday, the ministry released a video of Shoigu meeting with Russian troops serving in occupied Ukraine. It was unclear where the video was shot, and CNN was not able to geolocate it. 

The ministry said Shoigu “inspected the forward command post of one of the formations of the Vostok [Eastern] forces in the South Donetsk direction.”

Fall of the city: Mariupol, located on the Sea of Azov in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, was captured by Russian forces last year after months of intense bombardment and thousands of reported deaths.

It was the scene of some of the most intense fighting since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine; it was there that Russia carried out deadly strikes on a maternity ward and the bombing of a theater where hundreds of civilians had sought refuge.

Mariupol also became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance in the weeks leading up to its fall, with the city’s last defenders holding out inside a steel plant alongside as many as 1,000 civilians taking shelter as stocks of food and water dwindled.

For the first time in eight months, the Russians are on the cusp of taking a Ukrainian city, albeit a small one already abandoned by more than 90% of its prewar population.

Ukrainian defenses in and around the eastern city of Bakhmut are being squeezed by a combination of intense artillery, mortar fire, and airstrikes and a substantial commitment of ground forces, both Russian regulars and fighters of the Wagner private military company.

If and when Bakhmut falls, it may be tempting to ask whether Russian forces are improving, learning from the catalog of mistakes they have made so far in this conflict and finally exploiting their superiority in numbers and firepower.

The answer: probably not.

But a Ukrainian withdrawal does not equal disaster if carried out in an orderly way. “It should be treated as a routine tactic rather than a harbinger of disaster,” Ryan says.

The Ukrainians have used Bakhmut to inflict massive losses on the attacking force: by some estimates at a ratio of 7:1. There comes a moment when it is smarter to withdraw than suffer growing losses and the damaging blow to morale of seeing the surrender of hundreds and maybe thousands of surrounded Ukrainian soldiers.

For the Ukrainians judging that moment is critical.

But for the Russians, taking Bakhmut would not alter the fundamental shortcomings in their campaign.

Read the full analysis here.