Russia will only agree to a ceasefire if Ukraine lays down its weapons and meets Moscow’s demands, Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday, according to Reuters and the Associated Press. During a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Putin said that the conflict will end only when Kyiv “stops military operations and carries out well-known Russian demands,” the Kremlin said in a readout of the call. Putin’s publicly stated aims for the conflict are to “demilitarize and denazify” the country.

Peace talks? A third round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine were slated to take place today, but there has been no confirmation over the past 24 hours that they will go ahead.

ON THE GROUND-

• Efforts to evacuate 200k people from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol failed for the second day, as Russian shelling continued, the newswires said,
• Some 1.5 mn people have now fled to neighboring countries as a result of the conflict, the UN Refugee Agency said yesterday.
• A total of 364 civilians have been killed, including 25 children, since the fighting began 11 days ago, according to the UN.

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EGYPTIANS IN UKRAINE- More Egyptians coming home: A flight from Slovakia carrying Egyptian expats who escaped Ukraine will be flying to Cairo “in the coming days,” the Egyptian Embassy in Kyiv said yesterday. Some 6k Egyptians had been living in Ukraine before the war broke out, including almost 4k students whose evacuation is being prioritized.

Around 70% of Egyptian expats have been evacuated from Ukraine to neighboring countries so far, Ali Farouk, head of the Egyptian community in Ukraine, told Al Hayah Al Youm last night (watch, runtime 9:07). “We have to choose between evacuation or death,” he said, adding that two buses transporting Egyptians were due to move shortly from Ukrainian cities towards the Slovakian and Romanian borders.

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IRON FIREWALL- Russia and western nations are censoring and shutting down each other's media outlets in a bid to control the online infowar. A new law that criminalizes “fake news” in Russia led the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and others to shutter their operations in the country while US social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter are now blocked. In the West, Russian state media RT and Sputnik have been censored by social media firms and banned by the EU.

US and European companies are continuing to abandon Russia as western governments pile on the economic pressure. The latest:

• American Express announced the suspension of all operations in Russia, following similar decisions by Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.
• UPS and FedEx have stopped deliveries to Russia and Ukraine.
• Netflix has suspended operations in Russia.
• TikTok is no longer allowing Russian users to live stream or upload new content.
• Accounting giants PwC and KPMG are shuttering their businesses in Russia.
• Russia's second-largest financial institution VTB Bank is reportedly preparing to pull out of Europe after being hit hard by Western sanctions. The move follows a similar decision by Russia’s biggest lender Sberbank, which announced last week it plans to sell off or wind down all its EU operations.

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SHADES OF 1998- Russia is edging closer to defaulting on its debts as western sanctions hammer its economy and the country’s central bank bans payments to foreign bondholders to shore up its currency. A decree signed by Putin yesterday allows the government and companies to skirt capital controls by using RUB to pay off foreign-currency debts though the jury is out on whether this is going to help matters. Apart from the fact that both of Europe’s central securities depositories have banned the use of the RUB for settlement, we’ll hand out Enterprise mugs to anyone who can find us an investor who’d want to be paid in RUB right now.

There’s confusion over whether the government has defaulted already after it kind of paid but sort of not paid foreign bondholders by last week’s due date. We’ll let you parse through the details on Bloomberg here and here.

Either way, Russia’s credit rating is only heading in one direction: Moody’s has cut Russia’s rating deeper into junk territory, downgrading it to Ca from B3 with a negative outlook, less than a week after the ratings agency took away Russia’s investment-grade rating. The downgrade was “driven by severe concerns around Russia’s willingness and ability to pay its debt obligations,” Moody’s said in a statement.