We Are Preparing New Formats to Support Brigades and Man Our Units, I Have Given Instructions to Present the Details to the Public Next Week – Address by the President

31 January 2025 – 21:01

Dear Ukrainians!

Currently, in the south of our country – in Odesa – rescue efforts continue following the Russian missile strikes. Preliminary, it was ballistics. The strikes directly targeted the city, ordinary civilian buildings. Again and again: air defense remains our top priority, we are working with all our partners to provide more protection for our state.

Today, I held a meeting of the Staff. There were many reports. On supplies to our troops – it’s our weapons, all procurements, contracts. All these are in place. Supplies are in place. We need faster delivery speeds, and we need much more such systems, such weapons that will help us save more lives of our warriors, our people. More orders for drones. More investment in the development of robotic systems. And more basic weapons supplies. All the necessary orders are in place. Our industry has the potential. Countries, particularly in Europe, are ready to collaborate with Ukraine and invest in our arms production. And our diplomats have clear tasks. We need to increase our partners’ funding for Ukraine’s defense. And in particular, these should become the KPIs – key performance indicators – of Ukrainian diplomacy.

Today we received a report from the military: the frontline, the situation with brigades – manning. We are preparing new formats to support brigades and man our units. I have given instructions to present the details to the public next week.

Today, I also had the honor of recognizing our warriors with state awards – specifically, our fighters: the Stars of the Heroes of Ukraine and the Crosses of Military Merit. Thirty of our warriors. I thank all of them. I thank each one.

Today, I held a meeting with international experts – our team of the Government and the Office. We are preparing important talks with the Europeans and, of course, with the team of the United States. We all need meetings, we all need a shared vision, we all need strong decisions to secure a lasting peace. We need them badly!

I thank everyone who is helping us!

Glory to Ukraine!

Latvia and Norway:

On request from Latvian authorities, Norwegian Police and Coast Guard has brought in the Norwegian flagged, and owned, merchant ship Silver Dania to Tromsø, on suspicion of damaging a fiber cable in the Baltic.

The entire crew are Russian citizens.

www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnm…

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— Thord Are Iversen (@thelookout.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 5:03 AM

Another ship, the Silver Dania, Norwegian-owned with a Russian crew on board has been detained in Norway on suspicion of damaging a cable in the Baltic Sea.

The ship was brought into Tromsø Port in Breivika today at 6:40 a.m.

borsen.dagbladet.no/nyheter/poli…

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— 🦋Special Kherson Cat🐈🇺🇦 (@specialkhersoncat.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 5:52 AM

Spain:

⚡️Explosion at Rheinmetall plant in Spain leaves 6 injured.

The explosion occurred at 4:20 p.m. local time on Jan. 30, starting a large fire that spread to about 2,000 square meters. The cause of the incident is currently under investigation, Spanish authorities said.

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— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) January 31, 2025 at 3:19 AM

From The Kyiv Independent:

Six people were injured in an explosion at a warehouse of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall plant in Murcia, Spain, the Spanish news agency EFE reported on Jan. 30, citing local emergency services.

The explosion occurred at 4:20 p.m. local time on Jan. 30, starting a large fire that spread to about 2,000 square meters but was subsequently extinguished. Six people were injured, one of whom is in serious condition, according to officials.

The cause of the blast is currently under investigation, Spanish authorities said.

The incident was not the first to result in casualties at the Spanish plant. Two workers suffered severe burns due to a solvent fire a year ago, according to EFE.

Rheinmetall is one of the largest arms manufacturers in Europe. The company provides weapons, ammunition, and equipment to Ukraine under contracts with the German government, such as 155 mm artillery rounds, Leopard 1 tanks, mortar shells, and drone surveillance systems, among other weapons.

Rheinmetall also opened a military vehicle repair facility in Ukraine in June 2024, the first of four plants it plans to open in the country.

Georgia:

Various marches have been launched and have united at several locations in Tbilisi, demanding the release of those illegally detained as well as the re-holding of the elections.

#GeorgiaProtests
Day 65

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 12:11 PM

A protest and solidarity march were held in Batumi in support of people unjustly arrested, fined, and imprisoned for participating in pro-European rallies.

#GeorgiaProtests
Day 65

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 7:58 AM

Day 65 continuous, large-scale; day 95 overall. Protesters demand the release of the unlawfully imprisoned and chant “no justice, no peace.” #GeorgiaProtests #terrorinGeorgia #NewElectionsforGeorgia

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— Marika Mikiashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 (@marikamikiashvili.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 12:24 PM

“At 3 o’clock, occupy the axis line for 3 minutes” – A women’s protest in support of Mzia Amaglobeli and political prisoners is taking place in Tbilisi and the regions today.

#GeorgiaProtests
#TerrorinGeorgia

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 6:19 AM

Lawyer Maia Mtsariashvili says that they have only one blood test for imprisoned journalist Mzia Amaglobeli, despite the fact that Mzia has been on a hunger strike for 20 days.

#TerrorinGeorgia

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— Publika.ge (@publikage.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 6:56 AM

Lasha Chkhvimiani who a few began a protest hunger strike in front of the Dmanisi City Hall in his car says that he did so not in hopes of the regime empathy but to urge people to act – everyone is unhappy about the electoral fraud, yet not everyone protests. #GeorgiaProtests

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— Marika Mikiashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 (@marikamikiashvili.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 12:01 PM

Back to Ukraine:

In 24 days, Russia’s splendid little “special military operation” to occupy Ukraine within 10 days will enter its 4th year.

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— Illia Ponomarenko (@ioponomarenko.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 8:38 AM

The Ukrainian Command of the Unmanned Systems Forces confirms the use of long-range UAVs capable of carrying FAB-250 bombs and flying up to 2,000 km.

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 12:13 PM

A map of every russian oil refinery hit by Ukrainian drones.

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— SAINT JAVELIN (@saintjavelin.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 4:41 AM

Against all odds, soldiers of Ukraine’s 106th Battalion, 63rd Brigade “Steel Lions,” pulled off a daring operation near the front line. Under shelling and drone attacks, they recovered a Russian BMP-2 submerged for two years—right under the enemy’s nose. A month and a half of planning paid off!

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 8:57 AM

This distressing report by Sarah Rainsford gives a rare insight into the treatment of Ukrainian civilians living under occupation www.bbc.co.uk/news/article…

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— sianushka.bsky.social (@sianushka.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 1:54 AM

From the BBC:

The Russians came for Tetiana and Oleh Plachkov while they were sleeping, bursting into their home late at night.

It was 25 September 2023 in Melitopol, south-eastern Ukraine, where the couple had grown up, fallen in love and married. Now their city was occupied by Russian forces.

The men were armed and dressed in black. As some began searching the house, seizing devices and documents, others led Tetiana and Oleh away in handcuffs.

The couple then vanished without trace.

Ukraine has listed more than 61,000 people as missing since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, both soldiers and civilians.

When troops go missing in action there is a chance they might eventually be included in a prisoner-of-war exchange. But civilians are returned very rarely: the Russians don’t usually admit to holding them.

Four months after she was detained, Tetiana was abandoned at a hospital in Melitopol in a coma. She had no clothes or medical papers and the soldiers who brought her left no explanation. She died without ever regaining consciousness.

Oleh has never been found.

“It’s so hard for me to think about what they did to her, and why. My mum was 51. She loved life. She was such a radiant person, then everything was cut short,” the couple’s only daughter, Lyudmila, cries quietly.

“If, God forbid, something has happened to my father it will kill me.”

Lyudmila’s phone is full of happy memories of her parents. She showed them to me on a recent visit to Ukraine, where she’d travelled to wind up the family restaurant business and give a DNA sample that might identify her father if a body is ever found.

It’s not something Lyudmila wants to contemplate.

The family were extremely close. Every day under Russian occupation, her parents would send reassuring video messages. “Morning, daughter! Just checking in,” Tetiana announces in one video, then swings the camera round to her husband who waves and grins in his dressing gown.

There are pictures from life before the war, too: laughing on a beach, dancing at a disco. The couple are full of energy and life.

When Russian tanks rolled into their city in early 2022, the Plachkovs decided to stay. The entire country was under attack in an invasion that Vladimir Putin had threatened, but most could not imagine until the first explosions.

In those first weeks, Lyudmila joined the crowds waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags and shouting at the soldiers to leave. Then the round-up began.

In Putin’s Russia, fear is a way of rule: dissent is crushed and critics imprisoned. The aim is to punish the few and scare the rest into compliance.

Now the same principle was being imported to the swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine illegally claimed by Russia, with soldiers patrolling the streets.

There, those considered loyal to Kyiv were seen as traitors.

After a few months in that climate, Lyudmila fled abroad as a refugee. But her mother didn’t want to leave her city, her own parents or the business she and Oleh had built up. She also had faith in the Ukrainian military.

In late 2023, all the talk was of a counteroffensive in the southeast to take territory back from Russia and Tetiana believed Melitopol would be liberated.

“She was a strong optimist,” Lyudmila smiles. “I’d say, ‘mum, maybe you should leave.’ And she’d say, ‘Just a little more time. Our guys will push harder.'”

Earlier that year, Tetiana’s name had appeared online on a pro-Russian forum. It identified her as a ‘waiter’, a slur for those seen to be ‘waiting’ for liberation. Melitopol was full of informers.

“She definitely donated money and helped [Ukraine] however she could,” her daughter tells me. “Some people die on the battlefield and others die in occupation, helping Ukraine in other ways. To me, she’s a warrior. She knew the risks. But she had to help.”

By then, Ukrainians in occupied areas were being forced to take Russian passports. Russian citizens were brought in to staff schools, as well as police and prosecutors.

Eventually Tetiana and Oleh agreed to leave Melitopol if the Ukrainian army hadn’t pushed through by November. But in September, they were arrested.

Lyudmila was frantic. Unable to return to an occupied town, she wrote to every official body she could find, demanding answers as her grandmother began searching local police stations and prisons.

Then, in February 2024, came a call: Tetiana was critically ill, and Lyudmila’s gran could visit her in hospital – once she’d been questioned by the FSB security service. That’s how the family learned Tetiana was being investigated for espionage.

But by that point she was unconscious. A nurse later told Lyudmila her mother had arrived in hospital with severe bedsores, suggesting she had been immobile for some time. So where had she been and what happened to her?

Through sheer persistence, Lyudmila has gathered a thick file of documents on her parents’ disappearance but she says that none of the printed words make sense. They claim Tetiana had been passing information about Russian military personnel to Ukrainian intelligence, but the criminal case was only opened after she was brought to hospital.

Before that, the papers record that “unknown persons in military uniform” had taken her and Oleh in an “unknown direction” in September 2023.

Their whereabouts from then on is officially a mystery. But in Russia it is the FSB that handles espionage cases, including detention and interrogation, and it was Russian FSB officers who searched Tetiana and Oleh’s home.

“I’d like to believe her health deteriorated because of the poor conditions and lack of proper care, but deep down I understand that they tortured her,” Lyudmila believes.

Her view is formed from first-hand accounts of brutality in occupied territory, including from a restaurant singer charged in the same espionage case as Tetiana.

“They were probably extracting information,” Lyudmila says. “I know they like to use electric shock.”

The autopsy and a hospital report she obtained show that Tetiana died of pneumonia after a prolonged time on a ventilator. But why she was intubated initially isn’t recorded. Neither is what happened to Lyudmila’s father, Oleh.

“He is not on the lists of those detained, there is no criminal case against him,” a letter from the Russian Interior Ministry reads. Police have opened a criminal case for abduction but there are no suspects and no clues.

Lyudmila’s suffering is shared by many thousands of Ukrainian families. At a hotline in Kyiv run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), most of the calls are from people searching for relatives lost in this war.

The phone operators gather detailed information, often in long and emotional calls, which they then send to a tracing database in Geneva.

Lyudmila has logged her own details here and elsewhere, but so far there have been no answers.

“There are always limits to what we’re able to do, and we have to be very realistic with families to manage their expectations. There’s a lot of pain and frustration,” ICRC spokesman Patrick Griffiths explains.

He is also countering criticism in Ukraine that the organisation doesn’t push Russia hard enough.

International humanitarian law obliges all states to report every detainee during an armed conflict, and provide access, but Russia simply ignores that. It’s partly because it sees all civilians in occupied areas as Russian and nobody else’s business. It’s also a display of contempt for the rest of the world’s rules.

The ICRC does have staff in Moscow and parts of occupied Ukraine, but whilst handing out aid is allowed, occasionally, touring Melitopol to search for secret prisons is not.

“There are a lot of families who… may never receive the answer they’re looking for,” Mr Griffiths cautions, adding that the ICRC can’t “force its way in” anywhere. “But the process of dialogue with the authorities, trying to improve our access, never stops.”

Ukraine’s own national search squad has even less access. The Office for Missing Persons in Special Circumstances amounts to just three police officers, based at the end of an Interior Ministry corridor in Kyiv. But their powerful facial recognition software can scan websites and media, hunting for an ever-growing list of the missing.

Russian bloggers sometimes post videos of detainees, or the dead. But a search for Lyudmila’s father draws a blank.

“Either he’s being held hostage and can’t contact relatives,” commissioner Artur Dobroserdov explains before voicing the other alternative. “Sometimes, the bodies of civilians are returned to us along with our deceased soldiers. They are mostly in a very poor condition, so visual recognition is impossible.”

That’s why Lyudmila gave a DNA sample.

Much, much more at the link!

The Kursk cross border offensive:

Ukrainians are among the world’s greatest warriors, that’s what it is.

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— Illia Ponomarenko (@ioponomarenko.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 5:20 AM

Kharkiv:

Russian drones attack the Kharkiv region right now. Some are in the city too‼️

— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Days filled with anxiety and danger have turned into a three-year-long nightmare. This city survives on the sheer willpower of those who love it. Our determination to resist and save our home keeps us going. And I am proud to be one of its citizens.

Hello from Kharkiv!

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 9:12 AM

Volgograd Russia:

A drone attack and the subsequent “falling debris” sparked a fire at an oil refinery in the Volgograd region last night. Processing 14 million tonnes of oil annually, it is one of the largest refineries in the country. This is the third incident in which the refinery has been attacked by “debris.”

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 5:51 AM

That’s enough for tonight.

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