Ukraine says it will not rest until every last Russian soldier is ejected from Ukraine, including from Crimea which Russia annexed in 2014.

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Putin’s existential framing of the war allows the 70-year-old Kremlin chief to gird the Russian people for a much deeper conflict while it also allows him much greater freedom in the types of weapons he could one day use.

Putin has signalled he is ready to rip up the architecture of nuclear arms control - including the big powers’ moratorium on nuclear testing - unless the West backs off in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, he sought to underscore Russian resolve in Ukraine by suspending a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing new strategic systems had been put on combat duty and warning that Moscow could resume nuclear tests.

Putin said Russia would only resume discussion once French and British nuclear weapons were also taken into account.

Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons, has the world’s biggest store of nuclear warheads. It has more warheads that the United States, France and Britain combined, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

“In today’s conditions, when all the leading NATO countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin said.

Putin said the biggest result of the past year was the unity of the Russian people.

On Sunday, a Russian A-50 surveillance military aircraft was damaged in a drone attack at an airfield near the Belarus capital of Minsk, according to Belarus partisans and members of the exiled opposition.

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“Those were drones. The participants of the operation are Belarusian,” Aliaksandr Azarov, leader of Belarusian anti-government organisation BYPOL reportedly said.

Franak Viacorka, an adviser to Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said in a post on Twitter it was the most successful act of sabotage this year.

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago, there have been several acts of sabotage in Belarus and in Russian regions bordering Ukraine, especially on the railway system.
President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus has not taken a direct part in Russia’s war on Ukraine, but he allowed its forces access to use territory as a staging post at the beginning of the invasion a year ago.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday fired a senior military commander helping lead the fight against Russian troops in the country’s embattled east but gave no reason for the move. In a one-line decree, Zelensky announced the dismissal of Eduard Moskalyov as commander of the joint forces of Ukraine, which are engaged in battles in the Donbas region.