We will be pausing our live coverage of the war in Ukraine and returning in a few hours to bring you all the latest developments.
In the meantime, here is a comprehensive rundown of where things stand as the time approaches 3am in Kyiv.
- A court in Kyiv will hear the first war crime trial since the invasion began when a Russian soldier accused of murdering a 62-year-old civilian appears in the dock on Friday. Vadim Shysimarin, a 21-year-old commander of the Kantemirovskaya tank division, is accused of shooting dead an unarmed man who was on a bicycle and talking on his phone in the village of Chupakhivka, Sumy, after being ordered “to kill a civilian so he would not report them to Ukrainian defenders”, according to prosecutors.
- The Russian foreign ministry in Moscow said it would have to take “military-technical” steps if Helsinki applied for Nato accession, after Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, and prime minister, Sanna Marin, said the country must apply to join the military alliance “without delay”. Neighbouring Sweden is expected to follow suit in the coming days.
- Republican senator Rand Paul has blocked the passage of a $40bn aid bill to Ukraine in the US Senate. Paul demanded changes to the legislation that would include implementing a special inspector general to oversee how the aid is spent.
- Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), said that “at least several thousand Ukrainians” have been sent to so-called “filtration centres” in Russia where they are subject to “brutal interrogations”. Tens of thousands more had been evacuated to Russia or Russia-controlled territory. Carpenter said that one survivor said “everyone was afraid to be taken to Donetsk”, where they could be the victim of “further investigation or murder”.
- Urgent measures to break the Russian blockade of grain exports from Ukraine’s ports, including by trying to open routes through Romanian and Baltic ports, are being discussed at a three-day meeting of G7 foreign and agriculture ministers in Germany. Before the war, most of the food produced by Ukraine – enough to feed 400 million people – was exported through the country’s seven Black Sea ports.
- Ukraine said it had damaged and set on fire a Russian navy logistics ship in the Black Sea. The Vsevolod Bobrov vessel was near Snake Island, said Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odesa regional military administration in southern Ukraine. The Guardian could not independently verify the details. Russia’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said “very difficult negotiations” were ongoing to evacuate 38 seriously wounded fighters from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, in exchange for Russian prisoners of war. “We work step by step,’” he said. “We will exchange 38, then we will move on.”
- The number of people who have fled Ukraine to escape Russia’s invasion has exceeded 6 million, the UN’s refugee agency said. A further 8 million people have been forced to flee their homes and are displaced inside Ukraine, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
- Nearly 100 children were killed in Ukraine during the month of April alone, but actual figures could be significantly higher, the United Nations children’s fund said. Unicef’s deputy executive director, Omar Abdi, demanded an end to the bombing of Ukrainian schools, adding that one in six Unicef-supported schools in eastern Ukraine had been “damaged or destroyed” as of last week.
- European Union leaders plan to assess Ukraine’s membership next month, according to the French foreign ministry. Ukraine’s application to become an EU member was being examined by the European Commission and would be “discussed at heads of state and government level at the European Council in the month of June”, a spokesperson for the ministry said.
- Russia could cut its gas supplies to Finland tomorrow, a day after Finnish leaders said they would apply to join Nato, according to reports. Key Finnish politicians have been warned that Russia could halt its gas supplies on Friday, the local newspaper Iltalehti cited unnamed sources as saying.
- The UN’s human rights council has passed a resolution to investigate alleged abuses by Russian troops in parts of Ukraine formerly under their control, with a view to holding those responsible to account. The resolution passed by a strong majority, with 33 members voting in favour and two – China and Eritrea – against. There were 12 abstentions.
- The UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, said 1,000 bodies had been recovered in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in recent weeks. Many of the violations it is verifying since the Russian invasion may amount to war crimes, she said.
The UK government has declined a Commons instruction to release information about the decision to make Evgeny Lebedev a peer, saying this would undermine the confidentiality of those nominated and could degenerate into “political point-scoring”, the Guardian’s political correspondent Peter Walker reports.
Labour called the decision “a cover-up” and promised more action over what it called a contempt of parliament.
The announcement said information had instead been provided to parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC). This prompted an immediate rebuff from the ISC, which said its request for details about Lebedev was separate and should have remained classified.
In March a humble address motion tabled by Labour was passed by the Commons amid a threatened Tory rebellion, directing ministers to release information about the elevation of the Russian-born businessman and son of a former KGB officer.
The vote, in which Tory MPs were instructed to abstain given the extent of backbench Conservative disquiet on the issue, followed revelations that the intelligence services had concerns about a peerage for Lebedev awarded by Boris Johnson, a close friend.
But a Cabinet Office document released on Thursday, running to nine pages, contained no new information beyond a handful of redacted emails, including one in which Lebedev confirmed he had completed a form, and another in which an unidentified official congratulated him on the peerage.
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