Fighting

• On Monday, a drone believed to be Ukrainian penetrated hundreds of kilometres through Russian airspace, causing a deadly explosion at the main base for Moscow’s strategic bombers in the latest attack to expose gaps in its air defences.
• Russia said it had shot down the drone causing it to crash at the Engels airbase, which houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bomber planes, where three service members were killed.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said power shortages were persisting, with nearly nine million people without electricity.
• Ukraine’s military said dozens of towns in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions had been shelled. In the Kherson region, Russian forces were shelling populated areas along the right bank of the Dnieper river, it said.
• Russia’s FSB security service said that a four-person Ukrainian “sabotage group” had been “liquidated” while trying on Sunday to enter the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, Russian news agencies reported.
• Al Jazeera could not independently verify battlefield reports.

Diplomacy

• Putin said he was open to negotiations and he blamed Ukraine and its Western allies for failing to engage in talks.
• Zelenskyy said he sought India’s help with implementing a “peace formula” in a phone call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India has not explicitly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
• Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said his country was aiming to have a peace summit by the end of February, even suggesting that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres could be the possible mediator for peace talks with Russia.
• Kuleba said, however, that Russia could only be invited if it faced a war crimes tribunal first.
• Ukraine called for Russia to be removed as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and accused it of violating international law.
• Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov gave Ukraine an ultimatum on Monday to fulfil Moscow’s proposals, including surrendering territory Russia controls, or its army would decide the issue.