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Good morning. Ben Wallace, the defense secretary, has been giving interviews this morning and he has been fleshing out the latest assessment of the state of the war in Ukraine from his department, the Ministry of Defense.

Ministry of Defense 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ)

Latest Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/CeKxZDHRDk

March 2, 2022

This is what he told Sky News this morning when asked why the enormous Russian convoy heading for Kyiv seems to have stalled. Asked if this was because of logistical problems, or if this was a tactical decision, he replied:

Well, I think it’s a combination … What we have seen is that the tactics weren’t correct, they were rather confident they would take many of these cities in a few hours rather than six days or longer. And when any army on the move takes longer to do things, your logistical supply chain is stretched. If you’re given enough rations for two days, and it takes you six, you’ve suddenly got a problem. And I think what we’ve seen is a lot of those issues are coming to bear.

They’ve also been surprised by the Ukrainian strength of the resistance. And the Ukrainians have also been carrying out a very clever plan. We’ve seen footage of Ukrainians using UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] to attack petrol train convoys, to go off logistical lines. We’ve seen railway lines blown up. All the things that you and I think about when you come to resistance, so I think that is effectively coming home to roost.

But it is also a switch in Russian tactics. The Russians have realised that the Ukrainians, by fighting, are costing them lots of consequences, and the Russians have taken significant consequences, far more than they would have planned.

What they are therefore doing is trying to switch tactics. What you’re seeing now is those heavy bombardments at night. They won’t come into the cities as much. They will, by the looks of thing, carpet bomb cities, indiscriminately in some cases. They will fly their air at night rather than daytime, because they get shot down in the daytime. And they slowly but surely try and surround the cities and then either bypass them or bombard them.

That is the brutality that we are witnessing and it’s going to get worse.

I will post more from his interviews soon.

Mostly I will be focusing on the UK response to the war today, but there will be some non-Ukraine politics here too. For more Ukraine coverage, do read our global live blog.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Sir Tom Winsor, chief inspector for fire, gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee on the state of fire services.

10.15am: Prof Graham Medley, chair of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modeling (SPI-M), gives evidence to the Commons science committee.

12pm: Boris Johnson faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

12pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, is questioned by the Scottish parliament’s convenors’ group (Holyrood’s version of the Commons liaison committee).

2.30pm: Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, gives evidence to the Commons women and equalities committee.

5pm: Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, bishop for Ukrainian, Belarusian and Slovak Eastern Catholics in GB, and Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute, hold a press conference.

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Alternatively, you can email me at [email protected].

Ben Wallace on Sky News this morning. Photograph: Sky News
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