Latest news on Russia and the war in Ukraine

Angela Merkel defended her approach to Ukraine and Russia during her 16 years as Germany’s leader, saying that a much criticized 2015 peace deal for eastern Ukraine bought Kyiv precious time and she won’t apologize for her diplomatic efforts.

In her first substantial comments since leaving office six months ago, Merkel said there was “no excuse” for Russia’s “brutal” attack on Ukraine and it was “a big mistake on Russia’s part.”

Merkel, who dealt with Russian President Vladimir Putin throughout her chancellorship, rejected a suggestion that she and others engaged in appeasement that ultimately enabled the invasion.

“I tried to work toward calamity being averted, and diplomacy was not wrong if it doesn’t succeed,” she said in an on-stage interview at a Berlin theater that was televised live. “I don’t see that I should say now that it was wrong, and so I won’t apologize.”

“It is a matter of great sorrow that it didn’t succeed, but I don’t blame myself now for trying,” Merkel said.

— Associated Press

Radiation detectors in the Exclusion Zone around Ukraine’s defunct Chornobyl nuclear power plant are back online for the first time since Russia seized the area on Feb. 24, and radiation levels are normal, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said.

“Most of the 39 detectors sending data from the Exclusion Zone … are now visible on the IRMIS (International Radiation Monitoring Information System) map,” the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement. “The measurements received so far indicated radiation levels in line with those measured before the conflict.”

— Reuters

The U.S. military has begun training Ukrainian forces on the sophisticated rocket systems that the Biden administration agreed last week to provide, but that Russia has said could trigger wider airstrikes in Ukraine.

Marine Lt. Col. Anton Semelroth, Pentagon spokesman, said Ukrainian troops are training on the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, at Grafenwoehr training base in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

The U.S. agreed to send four of the medium-range, precision rocket systems to Ukraine as part of a $700 million package approved last week, and officials said it would take about three weeks of training before they could go to the battlefront.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Sunday that any Western deliveries of longer-range rocket systems would prompt Moscow to hit “objects that we haven’t yet struck.”

— Associated Press