Russian troops launched multiple attacks to the west of just-captured Avdiivka in a bid for more gains, a Ukrainian army spokesperson said on Sunday. Kyiv also announced it had opened a war crimes investigation after two separate reports of Russian troops shooting captured Ukrainian soldiers emerged. Russia has said some Ukrainian troops remain at the Avdiivka coking coal plant.
Facing manpower and ammunition shortages, Ukraine was forced to withdraw from Avdiivka in the eastern Donetsk region, handing Moscow its first major territorial gain since May last year. “The enemy is trying to actively develop its offensive,” said Dmytro Lykhoviy, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian army commander leading Kyiv’s troops in the area. Ukraine’s general staff reported 14 failed Russian attacks on the village of Lastochkyne, around 2km (one mile) to the west of Avdiivka’s northern edge. “But our considerable forces are entrenched there,” Lykhoviy said.
Lykhoviy also reported failed Russian attacks near the villages of Robotyne and Verbove in the southern Zaporizhzhia region – one of the areas where Ukraine managed to regain ground during last year’s counteroffensive. He said it would be “very difficult” for Russia to break through there, given heavy Ukrainian defensive lines and natural conditions of the terrain. “The situation in the Zaporizhzhia sector is stable … No positions have been lost. The enemy was kicked in the teeth and retreated.”
Denmark has decided to donate all its artillery to Ukraine, the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, told the 60th Munich Security Conference on Saturday, pointing out that other European countries are also holding munitions they do not immediately need. “If you ask Ukrainians, they are asking us for ammunition now, artillery now,” he said. “From the Danish side, we decided to donate our entire artillery.”
Frederiksen continued: “There is still ammunition in European stocks. This is not a question of only production because we have the weapons, we have ammunition, we have air defence that we don’t have to use ourselves at the moment that we should deliver to Ukraine … Russia does not want peace with us. They are destabilising the western world from many different angles – in the Arctic region, the Balkans and Africa – with disinformation, cyber-attacks, hybrid war, and obviously in Ukraine.”
“Please, do not ask Ukraine when the war will end. Ask yourself: why is Putin still able to continue it?” Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said as he addressed delegates at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. Zelenskiy shared a video of the speech online and also wrote: “We can get our land back. And Putin can lose.”
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, has told his Ukrainian counterpart that Beijing does not sell lethal weapons to Russia for its war against Ukraine, a Chinese foreign ministry statement said on Sunday. China says it is a neutral party in the Ukraine conflict but has been criticised for refusing to condemn Moscow for its offensive.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said he had discussed the prospects for peace in Kyiv’s war against Russia with his Chinese counterpart. Kuleba said he had discussed Ukraine’s plans to hold a global peace summit, which Switzerland has agreed to help stage. The two men, he said, “agreed on the need to maintain Ukraine-China contacts at all levels and continue our dialogue”.
The UK’s shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said he would support further sanctions against Russia and added he would “plug the gaps” of existing measures. In seperate comments made at the Munich conference on Sunday, Lammy said: “Russia will continue to be a threat for Europe for months, years, perhaps a generation more.”
Events on the battlefield in Ukraine are a matter of “life and death” for Russia that could determine its fate, Vladimir Putin said in remarks aired on Sunday. The Russian president has repeatedly framed the almost two-year conflict as a battle for Russia’s survival in a bid to rally patriotic sentiment.
More than 100 Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by the Washington Post reportedly show that Russia ran a disinformation campaign to undermine Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The US publication said Kremlin instructions had “resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles” that “tried to exploit what were then rumoured tensions” between Zelenskiy and his top army commander, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
German politician Ricarda Lang pushed back at the idea of a deal with Russia, in response to US Republican senator JD Vance’s comments, that included his belief that Putin is not “an existential threat to Europe”, on a panel at the Munich Security Conference on Sunday. Lang said: “Putin has shown over and over again – and he just showed this with the murder of Navalny on Friday – that he has no interest in peace at the moment.”
Poland’s Radek Sikorski stressed Poland’s support for Ukraine at the third day of the Munich conference, but acknowledged that Warsaw and Kyiv had two problems linked to grain and trucking. Responding to Sikorski on stage, Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said: “We have to solve it. There are legitimate messages on both sides. I think that the major contribution in resolving these issues has been done by Ukraine, because we secured the Black Sea.”
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said that “the most important security commitment for Ukraine was membership” of the EU, in comments made at the Munich conference on Sunday.
The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, dismissed a warrant issued by Russia for her arrest, saying it was just an attempt to intimidate her amid speculation she could get a top EU post. “It’s Russia’s playbook. It’s nothing surprising and we are not afraid,” she told Reuters on Sunday on the sidelines of the Munich conference. When asked by Reuters whether she was interested in any future European role, she said: “We are not there yet.”
Ukrainians who sought sanctuary in the UK after the Russian invasion will be permitted to extend their visas for an extra 18 months, the Home Office has announced.
