Russia has likely lost almost half of its best tanks during its invasion of Ukraine, with Vladimir Putin’s troops stepping up attacks in the country’s eastern regions including Donetsk and Luhansk.

Moscow’s pre-invasion fleet of modern T-72B3 and T-72B3M main battle tanks has been hit particularly hard, with a loss rate of up to 50 per cent, an assessment from military think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) suggests.

The director general of the IISS, John Chipman, said that Moscow has been forced “to rely on its older stored weapons” thanks to production of the newer models being “slow”. That means falling back on its Soviet-era tanks.

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Ukraine has informed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that it won’t attend the next meeting of its parliamentary assembly if sanctioned Russian lawmakers are allowed to participate.

The meeting is scheduled to take place in Vienna on February 23-24, during the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday, the head of the Ukrainian delegation to the the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, Mykyta Poturaiev, wrote, “We do not find ourselves in a position to attend the winter meeting in case of Russia’s participation.”

The letter, which was dated February 10 and addressed to Parliamentary Assembly President Margareta Cederfelt, noted that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine was widely supported by Russian politicians, including members of the Russian delegation to the OSCE.

“We have no doubts that the Russian delegation will use the OSCE … for justification of the aggression against my country as well as for whitewashing numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Ukrainian people,” Poturaiev wrote.

He suggested the meeting’s postponement “to preserve the integrity of the assembly,” which is a separate body consisting of 323 parliamentarians from the OSCE’s 57 member states,

Defence secretary Ben Wallace has said it could be years before the UK gives any fighter jets to Ukraine as he joined a Nato security conference.

The cabinet minister suggested it was likely that president Volodymyr Zelensky may even have to wait until the war with Russia was over before British aircraft was supplied.

“I don’t think it’s going to be in the next few months or even years,” he told the BBC. “These are aircraft that come with not only huge sort of capability challenges. You just can’t learn to fly in a week or two, it will take a long time.”

Saying a fleet of a fighter jets would involve “hundreds of engineers and pilots”, he added: “We’re not going to deploy, you know, 200 RAF personnel into Ukraine in the time of a war.”

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Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Russia is losing many people from its forces and will not be able to find a “marine” throughout the country.

“The enemy is already losing so many of its people, so many of its forces, that it will soon be difficult to find, for example, a ‘marine’ throughout Russia,” he said in his nightly address.

He added that Ukraine’s task is to “make sure that there is less and less desire there to keep Ukrainian territories under occupation”.

“The liberation of our land is the goal we are working on every day,” Mr Zelensky said.

“We have to ensure that this spring it is truly felt that Ukraine is moving towards victory. This applies to the training of our defence forces, the supply of weapons for our country and our strategic initiative in the war,” the Ukrainian president said.

He added that any attempts by Russia to “retake the initiative must be thwarted” and that he is “confident that we will do so.”

Russia has held at least 6,000 Ukrainian children – likely many more – in “re-education” camps, according to a US-backed report.

Yale University researchers said they had identified at least 43 camps and other facilities where Ukrainian children have been held that were part of a “large-scale systematic network” operated by Moscow since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The children included those with parents or clear familial guardianship, those Russia deemed orphans, others who were in the care of Ukrainian state institutions before the invasion and those whose custody was unclear or uncertain due to the war, it said.

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A fight broke out between Russian and Ukrainian footballers after the teams were checked into the same hotel in Turkey.

Footage shows a brawl between Russian Shinnik Yaroslavl FC players and Ukrainian FC Minaj at the Royal Seginus hotel in Antalya.

In a statement, FC Minaj said the fight occurred out due to “the disgraceful behavior of the football players of the Russian team towards the hotel employees.”

The Ukrainian side said allegations in Russian media that Minaj players forced Shinnik players to sing the Ukraine national anthem and “beat the players in the lift” was a “delusion.”

The Russian defence ministry has claimed that its soldiers have broken through two fortified defensive lines in Ukraine’s east.

“During the offensive… the Ukrainian troops randomly retreated to a distance of up to 3 km (2 miles) from the previously occupied lines,” the ministry said on Telegram.

It added: “Even the more fortified second line of defence of the enemy could not hold the breakthrough of the Russian military.”

The ministry did not give any details on the battlefield gains.

Luhansk and Donetsk regions make up the Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland, now partially occupied by Russia which wants full control.

The Russian embassy to the US has said that officials in Washington should try to prove that it was not behind the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Moscow to western Europe, reported TASS news agency today.

Moscow considers the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines last September “an act of international terrorism” and will not allow it to be swept under the rug, the embassy said in a statement.

Russia on Wednesday gave Cuba an “emergency” donation of 25,000 tons of wheat to combat shortages on the island, a sign of deepening ties between the two long-time allies.

The Russian ambassador in Havana, Andrei Guskov, said in a brief dockside ceremony in the Cuban capital that Moscow “accompanies Cuba’s efforts in its development in areas such as industry, machinery, transportation and energy.”

The substantial donation of wheat – used to make the bread that is a basic, government-subsidised staple in Cuba – marks the latest overture between the communist-run island and Russia.

Russia, hit by Western sanctions over the conflict in Ukraine, is looking to strengthen political and economic ties with other countries opposed to what it calls U.S. hegemony. Cuba has been under a U.S. economic embargo since 1962 after the Communist revolution led by Castro.

Ana Teresita Gonzalez, Cuban deputy minister of foreign trade, told Reuters on the sidelines of the ceremony that the Russians had provided Cuba with food and medicine recently, part of an “enduring relationship” between the two countries.

“The Russian government and people have been by our side in difficult times since the pandemic,” she said in a brief interview.

Russia’s mercenary group fighting in eastern Ukraine has lost up to 80 per cent of the troops in some of its units, Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar said last night.

The Wagner group, which has recruited many convicted prisoners to fight in Ukraine, is seeing limited evacuation of the dead and wounded by the wider Russian forces – or not at all.

“As a result, among the personnel of the Russian occupying forces in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine, there is a significant decrease in the level of trust in the decisions of the command regarding the conduct of hostilities,” the deputy defence minister said on Telegram yesterday.

She added that more and more Russian troops are learning how the commanders are “inadequately assessing the situation on the battlefield, as evidenced by the intensive use of so-called ‘death squads’ – units staffed by insufficiently trained mobilised personnel, which daily suffer heavy combat and sanitary losses.

“In particular, only one initial centre in the territory of the Rostov region sends about 500 hastily trained mobilised workers every week, most of whom undergo an accelerated training course from 14 to 21 days,” she said.

When these mobilised troops get to the units, such servicemen, “not wanting to play the role of ‘suicide squads’ resort to deliberate damage to military equipment, mainly engines, which, without firing a single shot, are sent to repair bases with full ammunition,” she said.