A senior US intelligence official said Russian missiles crossed into Nato member Poland, killing two people. Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has convened an urgent meeting of a committee for national security and defence affairs, the government spokesman Piotr Müller said on Twitter.
Russia has launched waves of missile strikes across Ukraine even as G20 leaders – including its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov – met in Bali. Ukraine’s authorities said it was another planned attack aimed at the country’s energy infrastructure facilities. Seven million homes have been left without power.
Ukraine’s public broadcaster reported that the strikes have targeted Kyiv, Kyiv region, Kharkiv city as well as Poltava, Mykolaiv, Dnipro, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi, Lviv, Cherkassy, Odesa, and Chernihiv regions. The strikes follow Russia’s retreat from Kherson and the west bank of the Dnipro River last week.
Russia fired “around 100 missiles” at cities across Ukraine, according to Yurii Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force command.
At least one person has died after three residential buildings in the capital, Kyiv, were hit, according to the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. He said the buildings were in Kyiv’s Pechersk district, a residential area just north of the presidential administration. Klitschko said medics and rescue workers were on their way to the scenes. Widespread power outages are reported across the country as a result of the attack.
The head of Ukraine’s presidential administration, Andriy Yermak, said the attack was a response to president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s address to the G20 on Tuesday. Zelenskiy called on the leaders to support Ukraine to end it on its terms – the primary being that Russian troops leave all of Ukraine, including the areas it occupied in 2014. Zelenskiy is calling for an international conference to “cement key element of the postwar security architecture” and prevent a recurrence of “Russian aggression”.
A senior US intelligence official said Russian missile attacks on Tuesday crossed into Nato member Poland, killing two people. Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has convened an urgent meeting of a committee for national security and defence affairs, the government spokesperson Piotr Müller said.
Moldova’s foreign minister, Nicu Popescu, said parts of the country were also suffering from power outages as a result of today’s Russian strikes on Ukraine. Officials said the strikes earlier today caused the automatic safety shutdown of systems that carry electricity supplies to Moldova.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said that Zelenskiy’s statement that there will be no “Minsk-3” deal to end the fighting in Ukraine confirms that Kyiv is not interested in holding peace talks with Moscow.
In Bali, Lavrov told the media that “all the problems are on the Ukrainian side, which categorically refuses any negotiations and puts forward conditions that are obviously unrealistic and inadequate in this situation”.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskiy, responded to Lavrov’s remarks by blaming the continuation of the war on the Russian minister’s “public manipulation and unwillingness to stop murdering”.
Lavrov also told reporters at the G20 summit in Bali on Tuesday that the United Nations had told him of written US and EU promises to remove obstacles to the export of Russian grain and fertilisers to world markets. Lavrov said he had received undertakings on this from the UN secretary general, António Guterres.
The UN human rights office (OHCHR) said on Tuesday that both Russia and Ukraine have tortured prisoners of war during the nearly-nine-month conflict, citing examples including the use of electric shocks and forced nudity.
Matilda Bogner, head of the monitoring mission, told a Geneva press briefing that the “vast majority” of Ukrainian prisoners they interviewed held by Russian forces reported torture and ill-treatment. She gave examples of dog attacks, electric shocks with Tasers and military phones and sexual violence. On the Ukrainian side, Bogner reported “credible allegations” of summary executions of Russian prisoners among other abuses.
Germany will establish a maintenance hub in Slovakia to service and repair weapons it has delivered to Ukraine, the German defence minister, Christine Lambrecht, said.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has awarded the occupied cities of Melitopol and Mariupol the titles of “cities of military glory”. Both lie in areas of Ukraine that the Russian Federation has claimed to have annexed.
Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, has criticised Ireland for, she claims, moving away from its traditional military neutrality, in actions being “cheered on by its British neighbour”.
The head of football’s world governing body, Fifa, issued a plea on Tuesday for a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine for the duration of the World Cup. Gianni Infantino called for all sides to use the tournament as a “positive trigger” to work towards a resolution.
