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Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, April 21st,

and this is your FT News Briefing.

We've got an update on the war in Ukraine, we'll find out about Algeria's struggle to

supply more energy to Europe, and Mexico's populist president failed to get state control over

the electricity industry, so we went for another resource. Plus,

there were celebrations in US airplanes after a judge struck down the government's mask mandate

for transport. We'll look at the fallout. I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to

start your day. Ukraine has access to 20 more war planes, thanks to a transfer of spare parts

facilitated by the US. This will boost Kiev's firepower against Russia, and it comes as Moscow

has launched a renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine. Here's our defense in security correspondent John

Paul Rathbone. We haven't seen Russia yet unleash the full forces of its army, and there are

several reasons for that. But some of the shelling has been really intense, both of the Ukrainian armed

forces positions, and also in the west around Liviv, and other areas where Russia is trying to stop

the supply of western arms getting through to the Ukrainian army. So, John, in the first stage of

this war, Russian forces were, as you put it, they were malt. There was a low morale among troops,

and Moscow was going to reboot its forces. What's happening with that now?

Well, there are a lot of questions here about whether Russia can unleash the full force,

and the idea was, or one theory, was that the Russian forces, which are now unified under a single

commander, they'd get their forces together, they'd move them south to the Donbass, and launch this

full-scale offensive. Instead, what seems to be happening is the Russian forces are being filtered

...