MOSCOW SAYS NO PLAN TO OVERTHROW ZELENSKY GOVT, BUT ‘US MUST EXPLAIN BIO-WEAPON’

Russia's foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova on Wednesday said Moscow is not working to topple the Ukrainian government as some progress has been made in the three rounds of the talks held between Russia and Ukraine. In her weekly briefing, Zakharova said Moscow has documental evidence that bioweapons are being developed in Ukraine by the United States.

Referring to the statement of US Under Secretary of state for political affairs Victoria Nuland, Maria Zakharova said that in response to a question, Nuland has confirmed the existence of laboratories for biological research.

"We are not talking here about peaceful uses or scientific goals," Zakharova said. "What were you up to there?" "These (programmes) were financed by the US Department of Defence."

“The US Defence Department and the presidential administration of the United States are obliged to officially explain to the global community, officially, not through talking heads, about the programmes in Ukraine,” Maria Zakharova said.

"We demand details," she said. “We demand and the world awaits,” Zakharova said.

Both Pentagon and Ukraine have already denied the allegations of bio-weapons.

The spokesperson said they are not targeting civilians and even the Russian army's aim is not to occupy Ukraine, or destruction of the statehood, but to "de-Nazify" the country.

Zakharova said Kyiv authorities are blocking evacuation efforts. "Information about humanitarian corridors is deliberately not communicated to the population," she said, adding, "Persons wishing to leave for Russia are forced to evacuate in the Western direction."

AIRSTRIKE HITS UKRAINE MATERNITY HOSPITAL, 17 REPORTED HURT

A Russian airstrike devastated a maternity hospital Wednesday in the besieged port city of Mariupol amid growing warnings from the West that Moscow’s invasion is about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn. Ukrainian officials said the attack wounded at least 17 people.

The ground shook more than a mile away when the Mariupol complex was hit by a series of blasts that blew out windows and ripped away much of the front of one building. Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying out a heavily pregnant and bleeding woman on a stretcher as light snow drifted down on burning and mangled cars and trees shattered by the blast.

Another woman wailed as she clutched her child. In the courtyard, a blast crater extended at least two stories deep.

“Today Russia committed a huge crime,” said Volodymir Nikulin, a top regional police official, standing in the ruins. “It is a war crime without any justification.”

In Zhytomyr, a city of 260,000 to the west of Kyiv, bombs fell on two hospitals, one of them a children’s hospital, Mayor Serhii Sukhomlyn said on Facebook. He said the number of casualties was still being determined.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Mariupol strike trapped children and others under the rubble.

“A children’s hospital. A maternity hospital. How did they threaten the Russian Federation?” Zelenskyy asked in his nightly video address, switching to Russian to express his horror at the airstrike. “What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?”

He urged the West to impose even tougher sanctions, so Russia “no longer has any possibility to continue this genocide.”

The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on health facilities and ambulances since the fighting began.

UKRAINIAN AND RUSSIAN PEACE NEGOTIATORS ARRIVE IN TURKEY

Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba has arrived in Turkey for peace negotiations with Russia.

The talks will be held on Thursday in the city of Antalya at the invitation of Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

Earlier on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was also seen arriving in Turkey.

The three-way talks will be the first between the nation's top diplomats since the Russian invasion two weeks ago.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT: FURTHER UPDATES

- Around 35,000 people were evacuated through humanitarian corridors from three cities on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. Local officials said civilians had left Sumy in the east and Enerhodar in the south.

- About 1,200 people have died in the nine-day siege of the city, Zelenskyy’s office said.

- Two million people — half of them children — have fled Ukraine in less than two weeks since Russia invaded the country, officials said on Tuesday, as Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II grows by the day.

- The humanitarian situation in the country's besieged cities grew direr, including in Mariupol, where bodies lay uncollected in the streets and hopes for a mass evacuation of civilians were dashed again.

- Britain said Wednesday it was preparing to send more portable missile systems to help Ukrainian forces destroy Russian tanks and aircraft, but denied it was escalating the conflict. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the UK had so far delivered 3,615 Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapons (NLAWs) "and continue(s) to deliver more".

 - Some 80,035 Ukrainian refugees have been registered in Germany as of Wednesday, a German interior ministry spokesperson said.

- Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold a meeting with members of his government on Thursday and the main topic will be measures to minimise the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy, the Kremlin said in a statement, reported news agency Reuters.

- The foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine have landed in Turkey to hold peace talks in the city of Antalya on Thursday

- US Vice-President Kamala Harris is in Poland one day after the US rejected the country's plan to transfer its jet fleet to the US, rather than directly to Ukraine

- White House officials have warned that Russia is growing increasingly desperate, and could resort to chemical weapons attacks against civilians in the coming days

- US officials estimate that between 5,000 to 6,000 Russian troops have died so far in Ukraine

- More private companies are pledging to end business in Russia, as the country's economic isolation continues.

CHERNOBYL SITE KNOCKED OFF POWER GRID

Ukrainian authorities say the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant, site of the world's worst nuclear disaster, has been knocked off the power grid. Emergency generators are now supplying backup power.

The state communications agency says the outage could put systems for cooling nuclear material at risk.

The cause of the damage to the power line serving Chernobyl was not immediately clear, but it comes amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The site has been under control of Russian troops since last week.

Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenerho said that according to the national nuclear regulator, all Chernobyl facilities are without power and the diesel generators have fuel for 48 hours. Without power the “parameters of nuclear and radiation safety” cannot be controlled, it said.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the grid supplying electricity was damaged and called for a ceasefire to allow for repairs.

U.S. TURNS DOWN POLAND’S OFFER TO SEND MIG-29S TO UKRAINE

The Pentagon has said a Polish plan to transfer MiG-29 jets to the U.S. airbase in Rammstein, Germany, for deployment in Ukraine is “non-tenable”. Warsaw had offered on Tuesday to make all its MiG-29 aircraft available through the U.S. airbase to be used by Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pressing the administration to make the Russian-made aircraft available to it.

“The prospect of fighter jets ‘at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America’ departing from a U.S./NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that there is no substantive role for these aircraft.

Mr. Kirby said the U.S. would continue to consult with Poland and other allies but believed that the proposal was not “tenable”.

The Biden administration seems to have been taken by surprise by Warsaw’s offer. U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, said she had seen the Polish announcement as she was “literally driving here today” and to her knowledge, there were no prior consultations on this proposal.

The U.S. has, however, in general, been holding consultations to support Mr. Zelenksy’s request — such as by giving aircraft to Poland if Warsaw were to donate its own aircraft to Ukraine.

CONSCRIPTS TAKING PART IN UKRAINE OPS, ADMITS RUSSIA

Russia’s defence ministry acknowledged on Wednesday that some conscripts were taking part in the conflict with Ukraine after President Putin denied this on various occasions, saying only professional soldiers and officers had been sent in. The ministry said that some of them, serving in supply units, had been taken prisoner by the Ukrainian army since the fighting began on February 24.

Citing Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the RIA news agency said Putin had ordered military prosecutors to investigate and punish the officials responsible for disobeying his instructions to exclude conscripts from the operation.

Some associations of soldiers’ mothers in Russia had raised concerns about a number of conscripts going incommunicado at the start of what Kremlin calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine, suggesting they could have been sent to fight despite a lack of adequate training. The Kremlin and military authorities had denied it until now. “Unfortunately, we have discovered several facts of the presence of conscripts taking part in the special military operation in Ukraine. Practically all such soldiers have been withdrawn to Russia,” the defence ministry said, promising to prevent such situations in the future. But, some conscripts have been taken prisoner, it said.

EU TIGHTENS SANCTIONS ON RUSSIA, BLACKLISTS LAWMAKERS

The EU agreed on Wednesday to add 160 Russian business people and lawmakers to its sanctions blacklist, target crypto-assets and hit the maritime sector over Moscow’s war in Ukraine, officials said.

The 27-nation bloc also gave the go-ahead to cut three Belarusian banks from the global SWIFT messaging system over Minsk’s support for the Kremlin’s attack.

The EU is looking to close off loopholes in the unprecedented barrage of sanctions it unleashed along with Western allies after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion.

“We are further tightening the net of sanctions responding to Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen tweeted.

A statement said 146 members of Russia’s Upper House of Parliament and 14 Kremlin-linked business people and their relatives would be added to the assets freeze and visa ban blacklist.

KREMLIN SAYS UNITED STATES HAS DECLARED ECONOMIC WAR ON RUSSIA

The Kremlin said on Wednesday that the United States had declared economic war on Russia and that Moscow would think seriously about what to do.

President Joe Biden imposed a ban on Russian oil and other energy imports.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had been, is and would be a reliable energy supplier and pointed out that energy flows continued.

"But you see the bacchanalia, the hostile bacchanalia, which the West has sown - and that of course makes the situation very difficult and forces us to think seriously," Peskov said.

"The United States definitely has declared economic war against Russia and is waging this war," he said.

UKRAINE WAR: IMF APPROVES $1.4 BILLION IN EMERGENCY FUNDING FOR UKRAINE

The International Monetary Fund said its executive board on Wednesday approved $1.4 billion in emergency financing for Ukraine to help meet urgent spending needs and mitigate the economic impact of Russia's military invasion.

SOUTH KOREA: CONSERVATIVE CANDIDATE YOON SUK-YEOL ELECTED PRESIDENT

Yoon Suk Yeol, a conservative former top prosecutor, has been elected South Korea’s new president, defeating his chief liberal rival in one of the country’s most closely fought presidential elections.

With more than 98 percent of the ballots counted, Yoon had 48.6 percent of the votes against his rival Lee Jae-myung’s 47.8 percent.

Yoon said on Thursday that he would honour the constitution and the parliament and work with opposition parties when he takes office as the country’s next leader, calling the election result a “victory of the great people”.

“Our competition is over for now,” he said in an acceptance speech, thanking and consoling Lee and other rivals.

“We have to join hands and unite into one for the people and the country.”

At a separate ceremony with supporters, Yoon said he would put top priority on “national unity,” adding all people should be treated equally regardless of their regional, political and socioeconomic differences.

“I would pay attention to people’s livelihoods, provide warm welfare services to the needy, and make utmost efforts so that our country serves as a proud, responsible member of the international community and the free world,” he said.

Yoon is to take office in May and serve a single five-year term as leader of the world’s 10th-largest economy.

INDIAN AIRLINES HIJACKER SHOT DEAD IN KARACHI

Unidentified gunmen have shot dead a "businessman" in Karachi, who Indian intelligence officials said was Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Mistry Zahoor Ibrahim, involved in the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines plane IC-814 and fatal stabbing of passenger Rupin Katyal.

According to digital news agency 'Chippa', "one person died in firing near a shop at Akthar Colony.” The same agency, had identified the "victim" as Zahid, 44, and later quoted Senior Superintendent of Police (Karachi east) as saying that initial investigation indicated it to be a case of personal rivalry. However, officials in India said the businessman killed was Ibrahim who was living under a false identity of Zahid Akhund for many years.

‘PAK. MOSQUE BOMBER WAS AN AFGHAN’

An Islamic State (IS) suicide bomber who killed 64 people at a Shiite mosque in northwest Pakistan last week was an Afghan exile who returned home to train for the attack, police said. There have been warnings Afghanistan could become a recruiting ground for militants since the Taliban returned to power following the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces.

1ST MAN TO GET PIG HEART TRANSPLANT DIES

Baltimore: The first person to receive a heart transplant from a pig has died, two months after the groundbreaking experiment, the Maryland hospital that performed the surgery announced on Wednesday. David Bennett, 57, died on Tuesday at the University of Maryland Medical Center.