Ukrainian forces hung on to their positions in the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut early on Thursday under constant attack from Russian troops seeking to claim their first major victory for more than half a year. Russia says seizing Bakhmut would open the way to fully controlling the rest of the strategic Donbas industrial region bordering Russia, one of the main objectives of its invasion a year ago on 24 February. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has nevertheless put up fierce resistance. Not everyone in Ukraine is convinced that defending Bakhmut can go on indefinitely. “I believe that sooner or later, we will probably have to leave Bakhmut. There is no sense in holding it at any cost,” Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Rakhmanin said on NV radio late on Wednesday.
Russia attacked a five-storey apartment block in Zaporizhzhia overnight, killing three people and injuring six others. Rescuers are searching for survivors under the rubble. One of the people evacuated from the building was a pregnant woman. The building was “almost completely destroyed”, the city’s acting mayor Anatoly Kurtev said. The Zaporizhzhia regional military administration said Russia appears to have used a S-300 missile for the strike. A spokesperson for the Russian proxies in the partially occupied region which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed said – without producing any evidence – that the strike was the result of the actions of Ukrainian air defences.
The Kremlin claimed Russia had been attacked by “terrorists” after conflicting reports of firefights emerged from the Bryansk and Kursk regions, which Russian media blamed on Ukrainian “sabotage groups” and Ukrainian sources called a “provocation”. The reports of fighting in Russia near the Ukrainian border began on Thursday morning. The head of the Bryansk region claimed that a “sabotage group opened fire on a moving automobile. As a result, one resident was killed; a 10-year-old child was injured”. The reports of the attack set off a flurry of activity in the Kremlin and at Russia’s security services. Russia’s FSB security service claimed it had launched an operation “to destroy armed Ukrainian nationalists who violated the state border”. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the president, Vladimir Putin, had also cancelled a trip to Stavropol.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday urged China not to send weapons to help Russia’s war in Ukraine, and instead asked Beijing to exert pressure on Moscow to pull back its forces. In a speech to the German parliament, Reuters reports that Scholz said it was disappointing that Beijing had refrained from condemning the Russian invasion, though he welcomed its efforts towards nuclear de-escalation.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, accused Moscow of repressing domestic critics and called on UN-mandated investigators to keep documenting Russia’s alleged abuses in the Ukraine war, in a speech to the Human Rights Council.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi called Thursday for the G20 to bridge differences over Ukraine, telling the opening of a meeting in New Delhi that global governance has “failed”. “The experience of the last few years – financial crisis, climate change, pandemic, terrorism and wars – clearly shows that global governance has failed,” Modi said in a recorded statement opening the meeting of G20 foreign ministers.
Russia’s foreign minister said on Thursday that many leaders from the west had turned the agenda of a G20 meeting in India “into a farce”. Sergei Lavrov told a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi “a number of western delegations has turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian federation”. Blinken, meanwhile, said “Unfortunately, this meeting has again been marred by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine.”
Lavrov accused the west of “shamelessly burying” the Black Sea grain initiative that facilitates the export of Ukraine’s agricultural products from its southern ports. Ukraine has said that it would like to renew the deal for a period of at least a year, to provide certainty to exporters, and to expand it to include the port of Mykolaiv.
Nevertheless, Blinken and Lavrov spoke for ten minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting, according to a US state department official, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion.
Moldova’s parliament adopted a declaration on Thursday condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has contributed to a rise in tensions between Moscow and Chișinău. A narrow majority of 55 lawmakers in the 101-seat assembly voted for the declaration, which stated that Moscow’s invasion began with the seizure of the Crimea peninsula in February 2014 and demanded the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine.
Ukraine’s state broadcaster Suspilne has reported on its Telegram channel that the water supply in Mykolaiv will be off Thursday between 11am and 5pm due to a shutdown at the pumping station.
The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, one of Denmark’s most notable landmarks, has been vandalised with a Russian flag painted across its base. The colours of the red, white and blue ensign were daubed overnight on Thursday on the rock on which the statue of the heroine from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale rests.
Ukrainians survived the past winter thanks to government efforts to ensure energy and heat, but Russia still poses a threat to the generating system, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said. “Winter is over. It was a very difficult one and every Ukrainian, without exaggeration, felt the difficulties,” the Ukrainian president said in a video message delivered after a meeting on energy issues. “But we managed to provide Ukraine with energy and heat. The threat to the energy system remains.”
Evidence collected from Kherson in southern Ukraine shows Russian torture centres were not “random” but instead planned and directly financed by the Russian state, according to a team of Ukrainian and international lawyers headed by a UK barrister.
Russia has lost at least 130 tanks and armoured personnel carriers in a three-week battle at the town of Vuhledar in southern Ukraine, according to Ukrainian officials. They said the “epic” fight on a plain near Vuhledar produced the biggest tank battle of the war so far and a stinging setback for the Russians, the New York Times reported.
The United States is sounding out close allies about the possibility of imposing new sanctions on China if Beijing provides military support to Russia for its war in Ukraine, according to four US officials and other sources. The consultations, which are still at a preliminary stage, are intended to drum up support from a range of countries, especially those in the wealthy G7, to coordinate support for any possible restrictions.
Finland’s parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved joining Nato. Finnish MPs voted 184 in favour of accepting the Nato treaties, with seven against and one abstaining, increasing the chances of it becoming a member of the transatlantic defensive alliance before its neighbour Sweden.
