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Unprecedented Western sanctions imposed on Russia have frozen much of the country's central bank's $640 billion in assets; barred several banks from global payments system SWIFT; and sent the rouble into free-fall, erasing a third of its value this week.

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The US government is planning to use $7bn (£5.16bn) in frozen Afghan assets to compensate victims of the 9/11 attacks and for relief efforts.

Washington froze the money after the Taliban took power last year but has been under pressure to find a way to use it without aiding the militants.

A Taliban spokesman condemned the move, calling it "theft" and a sign of "moral decay".

The move came in an executive order declaring a national emergency.

As for the funds, President Biden's order formally blocks them, and says US financial institutions should transfer them to a consolidated account at the Federal Reserve.

The money, along with another $2bn held in Europe, the UAE and elsewhere, is primarily the proceeds of international assistance given to Afghanistan over the last two decades.

On Friday, a senior administration official said that a third-party $3.5bn trust fund would be set up to ensure that the money addresses the immediate humanitarian needs of the Afghan people, while at the same time "ensuring no benefit goes directly to the Taliban".

"We've not made specific decisions about how the funds will be used," the official said, adding that it would be months before the money was available, pending a judicial decision.

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Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine’s security council, said eight Russian commanders have been fired since the start of the conflict amid heavy losses on the battlefield.

Putin is also said to be enraged with leaders of the FSB security service for handing him intelligence suggesting that Ukraine was weak, riddled with neo-Nazi groups, and would give up easily if attacked.

Philip Ingram, a former senior British intelligence officer, told The Times that Putin is obviously ‘very angry’ and is blaming his intelligence agencies.

‘He blames them for seeding him the advice that led to the poor decision-making in Ukraine,’ he said.

Andrei Soldatov, who has monitored the Russian secret service for two decades, told The Times that one possibility is that the organisation is simply not fit for purpose.

Most FSB agents are brought into the service as legacy hires based on their parents or grandparents being agents and are removed from mainstream schools to be educated in-house.

This is unlike western security services, which tend to recruit from elite universities so they get ‘the cream of the crop’.

Another theory is that the organisation did gather good intelligence – but was simply too afraid to tell Putin the truth, instead doctoring their reports to appease him.

‘The problem is that it is too risky for superiors to tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear, so they tailor their information,’ he said.

‘The tailoring probably takes place somewhere between the rank of colonel and general in the FSB.’

It comes after it was claimed Kremlin officials are ‘privately denouncing’ Putin’s ‘clusterf**k’ invasion.

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The Unian:
The bodies of Russian invaders are burned by their command in pits - eyewitnesses

The Russian command begins to burn the bodies of the killed invaders in Ukraine in ordinary pits.

According to eyewitnesses, in Chaplynka, on the administrative border with Crimea, on March 9, the bodies of about 50 Russian soldiers killed in the Kherson and Nikolaev regions were thrown into a pit in an embankment and burned in the morning, adviser to the Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko reports.

"Local residents asked why this was done with the bodies of the dead, they were told that there was a ban on sending the bodies to the Russian Federation," Gerashchenko wrote in his Telegram channel.

Earlier it became known that the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation ordered to destroy the bodies of its soldiers who died in Ukraine. The corresponding document dated February 26, signed by the Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Alexei Krivoruchko, was published by the Sever Operational Command.

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