Summary
The time in Kyiv is now 9pm. Here is a round-up of the day’s top headlines:
- Russia has “definitively” lost the initiative in the battle for the Donbas in Ukraine, according to western officials. Moscow will not take the eastern industrial heartland in the “immediate future”, one official said, but “they are not just going to give up and go home”.
- Ukraine’s navy confirmed on Wednesday that work had started at three Ukrainian Black Sea ports aimed at preparing for the resumption of grain exports. “In connection with the signing of the agreement on the unblocking of Ukrainian ports for the export of grain, work has been resumed in the ports of Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdeny,” the navy said on Facebook.
- Russia cannot be trusted to honour an agreement to allow the export of Ukrainian grain from Odesa, the Polish prime minister said on Wednesday, after Moscow launched a missile strike on the Black Sea port. “The day after the signing [of the agreement], the Russian armed forces ... attacked Odesa,” Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference.
- Ukrainian parliament approved the appointment of lawmaker Andriy Kostin as the country’s prosecutor general on Wednesday, the prosecutor general’s office said. Some 299 deputies in the 450-seat parliament endorsed Kostin’s appointment, it said on the Telegram messaging app.
- A key Russian-held bridge into the occupied southern city of Kherson has been hit with a barrage of rocket fire by Ukrainian forces, who appeared to be stepping up operations to isolate the city. Video and witness accounts showed up to 18 detonations on the Antonivskiy Bridge over the Dnieper river, one of the main Russian resupply routes into Kherson, with Russian anti-missile air defences apparently failing to intercept the strikes. There were also reports that a railway bridge was targeted.
- Germany has accused Moscow of engaging in “power play” over energy exports, as Russian state-run Gazprom further throttled gas supplies into Europe. As announced two days earlier, the energy giant on Wednesday reduced the gas flow through Nord Stream 1 to 33m cubic metres a day – about 20% of the pipeline’s total capacity and half the amount it has been delivering since resuming service last week after 10 days of maintenance work.
- Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign affairs minister, was in Uganda on Tuesday for bilateral talks with President Yoweri Museveni, on his third stop of an African tour that ends in Ethiopia today. The trip comes against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is having devastating consequences on food supply across Africa. The war has fuelled food shortages in east Africa, which was already hard-hit by climate change and disruptions to the food supply due to Covid-19.
- One person has been killed and four wounded in a Russian attack on a hotel in Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, according to local emergency services and the regional governor.
- A bipartisan group of three US senators urged Meta’s Facebook, Twitter and Telegram to do a better job of stopping Russian efforts to spread Spanish-language disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine. Senators Bob Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent the letters, dated Wednesday, along with Senators Tim Kaine, also a Democrat, and Bill Cassidy, a Republican.
- A tongue-in-cheek petition to give the outgoing British prime minister, Boris Johnson, Ukrainian citizenship and make him the country’s prime minister has garnered over 2,500 signatures hours after being put up on Ukraine’s official petitions site on Tuesday.
- The European Union had understood how “essential” to Russia the issue of goods transit to the country’s Kaliningrad exclave is, according to Moscow. Reuters reported that the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said developments around the exclave were “positive”, after a deal with the EU to unblock transit to Kaliningrad.
That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, and indeed the Ukraine live blog for tonight. Thanks for following along. The latest news from Russia’s war on Ukraine can be found here.
A bipartisan group of three US senators urged Meta’s Facebook, Twitter and Telegram to do a better job of stopping Russian efforts to spread Spanish-language disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine.
Senators Bob Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent the letters, dated Wednesday, along with Senators Tim Kaine, also a Democrat, and Bill Cassidy, a Republican.
In particular, the lawmakers asked the companies to better moderate Russia’s RT en Espanol and Sputnik Mundo, Reuters reported.
“We ... know that disinformation campaigns by Russian state media’s Spanish-language outlets targeted at Latin American and Caribbean audiences regularly reach Spanish-speaking communities in the United States, directly harming our national interests,” they said in the three letters.
The letters were sent to Telegram Chief Executive Pavel Durov, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO. Representatives of Facebook and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment while Telegram could not be reached.
A group of 21 US lawmakers sent a similar letter to Facebook in April.
