5:22 a.m.: The latest intelligence update from the U.K. defense ministry said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left the Russian elite largely unscathed.

A Feb. 21 photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state of the nation speech shows the front two rows of the audience filled with Russian senior officials. “None of these are known to have children serving in the military,” the update noted.

In many Eastern regions, however, it’s a different story. There, deaths are running at a rate more than 30 times higher than in Moscow. And in some places ethnic minorities make up as much as 75% of the casualties.

4:01 a.m.: The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank, said in its latest Ukraine assessment that Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin said that he would transform the Wagner Group into a hardline ideological elite parallel military organization after the Battle of Bakhmut.

Meanwhile, Russian forces continue to establish fortifications in Zaporizhia Oblast and Russian mobilized soldiers continue to publicize complaints that commanders treat them poorly and used them as expendable manpower.

2:07 a.m.: Ukraine’s foreign minister urged Germany to speed up supplies of ammunition and to start training Ukrainian pilots on Western fighter jets.

Dmytro Kuleba told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper in an interview published on Sunday that ammunition shortages were the “number one” problem in Ukraine’s attempt to repel Russia’s invasion.

He said German weapons manufacturers had told him at the Munich Security Conference last month they were ready to deliver but were waiting for the government to sign contracts.

“So the problem lies with the government,” Kuleba was quoted as saying, according to Reuters.

Kuleba made clear he did not expect Western allies to give Ukraine the fighter jets it has been asking for any time soon.

But he said Ukrainian pilots should be trained anyway, so they would be ready once that decision was taken, the paper wrote.

If Germany were to train Ukrainian pilots, that would be a “clear message of its political engagement,” he said.

1:06 a.m.: The Kyiv Independent reported that two children in Zaporizhzhia Oblast were hurt Saturday when the antitank grenade they were playing with exploded.

The boys, 3 and 11, found the object on the street and brought it home, where it detonated as they played with it.

12:02 a.m.: The first time that Vitaly Votanovsky was contacted to find out the fate of someone fighting in Ukraine for the notorious Wagner mercenary company was in November 2022.

He received a Telegram message from the aunt of 22-year-old Andrei Kargin saying that she hadn’t heard from her nephew for months since he deployed to Ukraine as part of the Russian group, and she was beginning to wonder what fate he had met.

She had filled out all the necessary paperwork to be contacted in the event of his death, but had received no word from Wagner.

Since then, Votanovsky has been contacted by numerous families about the fate of their relatives fighting as mercenaries for Wagner in Ukraine.

Since he began began tracking the graves of those killed in Ukraine, he’s found relatives for families across southern Russia and even as far away as Belarus and Kazakhstan. In most cases, the families had not been informed of the deaths and only discovered that their relatives were no longer alive after someone came across one of Votanovsky’s photos on his Telegram channel.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has his story.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.