Kyiv said it has held off attacks from Russian troops still attempting to surround Bakhmut. The Ukrainian general staff said “more than 130 enemy attacks” had been repelled over the past day, adding: “The enemy continues its attempts to encircle the town of Bakhmut.”
A woman and two children were killed in Russian mortar shelling of a village in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office said on Sunday.
Bakhmut’s deputy mayor, Oleksandr Marchenko, told CNN that evacuations from the frontline had dropped to just five to 10 people each day compared with up to 600 who were leaving the city when evacuations were at their peak.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children may have been deported to Russia, the Ukrainian MP Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday, in what she described as “genocide”.
Western states delivering fighter jets to support Ukraine defending itself against Russia is “only a question of time”, said Latvia’s prime minister, Krišjānis Kariņš.
The latest intelligence briefing from the UK’s Ministry of Defence said recent evidence suggested an increase in “close combat” in Ukraine, probably due to Russia’s shortage of “munitions”. The MoD also referred to Russian mobilised reservists being ordered to assault a Ukrainian concrete strong point armed with only “firearms and shovels”. These shovels were likely to be the outdated MPL-50 entrenching tools used in hand-to-hand combat, it said.
Former chief of the general staff Gen Lord Richard Dannatt said Ukraine may be able to mount a successful counter-offensive in late spring or early summer and that there could be a “decisive outcome” on the battlefield “this year”.
Ankara is working hard to extend a UN-backed initiative that has enabled Ukraine to export grain from ports blockaded by Russia, the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said on Sunday.
The death toll from a Russian missile strike that hit a five-storey apartment block in southern Ukraine on Thursday has risen to 11, Ukraine’s emergency services said on Saturday.
Two Ukrainian pilots are in Arizona to train in flight simulators and be evaluated by the US military, two US officials said, as Washington remained mute on whether it would send fighter jets or sophisticated remotely piloted drones to Kyiv, Reuters reported.
Top commanders of what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine have briefed Russia’s defence minister on the current situation and action plans, his ministry said on Sunday.
The Russian army hit a command centre of the Ukrainian forces’ Azov regiment in the south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday. The Guardian could not independently verify this.
