🔴World leaders believe time is running out to avert a full-scale invasion by Russia of Ukraine
🇷🇺Moscow has sent tens of thousands of troops to its border with Ukraine and western leaders are convinced an invasion is imminent.
So we have broken down how the crisis reached this point and what could be next 👇
❓What’s happening?
As many as 190,000 Russian troops are currently "in and around Ukraine", according to Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the OSCE
Russia has also put forward a list of security demands including a guarantee that Ukraine will never be allowed to join Nato and that alliance forces pull back in Eastern European countries that joined after 1997 (MAP)
❓What’s behind the crisis?
There has been tension between Moscow and Kyiv since Ukraine declared itself independent of the Soviet Union in 1991
The situation escalated in 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in southern Ukraine and sent troops to support a separatist uprising in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine
A peace agreement signed in Minsk in 2015 stopped the worst of the fighting but has failed to deliver a settlement of the conflict because of disagreements between Kyiv and Moscow over how it should be implemented
❓What does Putin want with Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin maintains that Ukraine is fundamentally part of Russian civilisation, both culturally and historically, and has questioned whether it is even a real country
🔴Vladimir Putin also sees Russian dominance of Ukraine as fundamental to Russian security
❓How big is the risk of invasion?
Russia said on February 16 that military drills in Moscow-annexed Crimea had ended and that soldiers were returning to their garrisons, a day after it announced a first troop pullback from Ukraine's borders
But Britain has thus far not seen any evidence that Russia is withdrawing troops from positions near the Ukrainian border, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said
Russia has denied that it has any plans to invade Ukraine - but tensions are extremely high
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.