Closing summary
We have reached the conclusion of today’s Ukraine blog. Thank you for following along. It is just past 9 p.m. in Kyiv. Here is a summary of today’s events:
The Black Sea grain deal was renewed, according to parties to the agreement. Turkey and the UN announced the initiative was extended, but did not say for how long. A spokeswoman for Russia’s defence ministry said it has notified other parties that the deal was extended for 60 days, while a Ukrainian minister said the deal was extended for 120 days.
Russia launched a series of attacks on Friday, according to the Ukrainian armed forces. Seven homes in the village of Veletenske in the Kherson region were destroyed and a nursery was damaged, but no one was injured, it said. The update, which the Guardian has not verified, also said ten Iranian-made Shahed drones had been shot down, and that Ukrainian forces had “repelled more than 100 enemy attacks”.
Ukraine said some of the overnight drone attacks hit the relatively peaceful western region of Lviv. Dnipro was also targeted, as was Kyiv, where air defences shot down all attacking drones. Ukraine’s air force said 11 out of 16 drones were “destroyed”.
Another 880 Russian soldiers were reportedly killed on Friday, according to unverified totals published by the Ukrainian army. Its general staff said that it meant more than 164,000 Russian service personnel had been killed since the outbreak of war in February last year. In an update posted on Facebook, it said another five tanks, seven armoured combat vehicles and eight artillery systems were disabled by Ukrainian forces.
Russia’s Wagner mercenary group plans to recruit approximately 30,000 new fighters by the middle of May, its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Saturday. In an audio Telegram message, Prigozhin said that Wagner recruitment centres, which he said last week had opened in 42 Russian cities, were hiring on average 500 to 800 people a day.
Russia will probably introduce wider conscription to boost its military requirements, the UK Ministry of Defence said. In its latest intelligence update, the ministry said that Russian Duma deputies introduced a bill to change the conscription age for men from the current 18-27 to 21-30. The law would likely be passed, it said, and come into force in January 2024.
Senior Ukrainian and US security officials met via video link on Saturday, with representatives of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government asking for further assistance, including more equipment, weapons and ammunition. Zelenskiy joined the call at the end of the meeting and discussed his forces’ hopes to retake areas that Russia has captured.
US president Joe Biden said the international criminal court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Russian leader Vladimir Putin was “justified”. “But the question is – it’s not recognised internationally by us either,” Biden said, referring to the US not being a member of the ICC. “But I think it makes a very strong point.”
German chancellor Olaf Scholz has also welcomed the ICC’s decision. “The international criminal court is the right institution to investigate war crimes … The fact is nobody is above the law and that’s what’s becoming clear right now,” Scholz told reporters.
Russian president Vladimir Putin visited the annexed peninsula of Crimea to mark nine years since Russia seized it. Russian state news agency RIA Novosti said Putin visited an art school and a children’s centre. These locations appear to have been chosen in response to the ICC’s arrest warrant, which accuses Putin of being responsible for the abduction of children.
Russia extends grain deal for 60 days, report says
Russia has notified all participants in the Black Sea grain initiative that the deal has been extended for 60 days, Russian media outlet RBC reported on Saturday, citing foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, previously announced the agreement had been extended. The United Nations has also confirmed the extension. Neither specified a time frame.
Ukrainian infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, however, said the grain deal had been extended for 120 days.
Updated
Some more details here from Associated Press on Vladimir Putin’s visit to Crimea on Saturday (see 13:37).
Russian state news agency RIA Novosti said Putin visited an art school and a children’s centre. The locations appear to have been chosen in response to the international criminal court’s arrest warrant being issued on Friday. The warrant accuses him of being responsible for the abduction of children.
Putin took a plane to travel the 1,821 kilometres (1,132 miles) from Moscow to Sevastopol, the region’s largest city, where he took the wheel of the car that transported him around the city, according to its Moscow-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev.
Along with the art school and children’s centre, Putin also visited the archaeological site at the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Chersonesos, according to Russian state media.
The ICC’s arrest warrant was the first issued against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the UN security council. The court, which is based in the Hague, the Netherlands, also issued a warrant for the arrest of Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation.
The move was immediately dismissed by Moscow – and welcomed by Ukraine as a major breakthrough. Its practical implications, however, could be limited as the chances of Putin facing trial at the ICC are highly unlikely because Moscow does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction or extradite its nationals.
Updated
Erdoğan claims Black Sea grain deal has been extended
The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has claimed that the deal allowing grain to be exported by ship through the Black Sea has been extended.
Erdoğan did not say how long the extension had been for. The proposed length has differed between Russia, who called for it to be 60 days and Ukraine who wanted it to be renewed for twice that length.
Ukrainian infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, said the deal had been extended for 120 days.
The current agreement had been due to expire on Saturday. It was agreed in July 2022, as billions of tonnes of grain was building up in Ukraine, once known as the “breadbasket of Europe”, because it could not be exported because of the risks of it being carried by rail, and a Russian blockade in place in the Black Sea.
Eventually a deal was agreed which has been extended since, although Russia briefly suspended its participation in October.
“The deal for the grain corridor was due to expire today. As a result of our talks with the two sides, we have secured an extension to this deal,” Erdoğan said in a speech in the western city of Çanakkale, Reuters reports.
Updated
Putin visits Crimea on anniversary of annexation from Ukraine
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has visited the annexed peninsula of Crimea to mark nine years since Russia seized it.
Russian state TV showed a brief clip of a casually dressed Putin walking with a group of officials, and promised further details shortly, Reuters reports.
Russia seized Crimea in 2014, eight years before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine says it will fight to expel Russia from Crimea and all other territory that Russia has occupied in the year-long war.
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Russia’s Wagner mercenary group plans to recruit approximately 30,000 new fighters by the middle of May, its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Saturday.
He said in an audio message on Telegram that Wagner recruitment centres, which he said last week had opened in 42 Russian cities, were hiring on average 500 to 800 people a day, Reuters reported.
He gave no evidence to support the numbers, which Reuters could not independently verify.
Prigozhin’s men have sustained heavy losses while leading Russian efforts to capture the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has held out since last summer in the longest and bloodiest battle of the year-long war.
In January, the United States assessed that Wagner had about 50,000 fighters in Ukraine, including 40,000 convicts Prigozhin had recruited from Russian prisons with a promise of a free pardon if they survived six months.
Ukrainian officials have claimed that about 30,000 of Wagner’s fighters have deserted or been killed or wounded, a figure that could not be independently verified.
Prigozhin said recruitment was going better than he had expected, and that those volunteering were in better physical shape than the convicts he had taken on before.
“By the middle of May, we plan on increasing the number of fighters in our units by about 30,000,” he said.
Updated
Ukraine has released details of overnight drone attacks by Russia.
Some hit the relatively peaceful region of Lviv in the west of Ukraine. Dnipro was also targeted, as was Kyiv, where air defences shot down all attacking drones.
Russia regularly pounds Ukraine with missiles, artillery and drones, often prompting painful power cuts that have blocked people from warming their homes or getting drinking water.
“[At] around 21:00 on 17 March 2023, the Russian invaders attacked Ukraine with Iranian-made kamikaze attack drones of the Shahed-136/131 type,” Ukraine’s air force said in a statement on Telegram.
It added that 11 out of 16 drones were “destroyed”.
According to the air force, the attack was launched from the Sea of Azov and from Russia’s Bryansk region that borders Ukraine.
“[At] around 1:00am, our region was attacked by kamikaze drones of the Shahed 136 type. According to preliminary information, there were six of them,” Lviv’s regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyi, said.
He added that three were shot down, while three other drones “hit non-residential premises” in the Yavoriv district, causing damage but no victims, according to Agency France Presse.
In the south-eastern Dnipro region, three drones were shot down by air defence, regional council head, Mykola Lukashuk said.
“Two others hit a critical infrastructure facility in Novomoskovsk,” Lukashuk added.
He said the attack caused a fire and “significant” damage.
According to Lukashuk, the fire destroyed four houses and damaged six others. Nobody was injured.
Drones also targeted the capital Kyiv, according to the city’s administration.
“Our air defence forces destroyed all air targets,” it said on social media, adding that there were no victims or damage.
Updated
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has welcomed the international criminal court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Scholz told reporters at a news conference in Tokyo that it showed “nobody is above the law”.
“The international criminal court is the right institution to investigate war crimes … The fact is nobody is above the law and that’s what’s becoming clear right now,” Scholz said at a press conference with the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, Reuters reports.
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Another 880 Russian soldiers were reportedly killed on Friday, according to unverified totals published by the Ukrainian army.
Its general staff said that it meant more than 164,000 Russian service personnel had been killed since the outbreak of war in February last year.
In an update posted on Facebook, it said another five tanks, seven armoured combat vehicles and eight artillery systems were disabled by Ukrainian forces.
Updated
Russia launched a series of attacks on Friday, according to the Ukrainian armed forces.
A morning update by their top official also said there had been a missile strike and another 57 using multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS).
Seven homes in the village of Veletenske in the Kherson region were destroyed and a nursery was damaged, but no one was injured, it said.
The update, which the Guardian has not verified, also said ten Iranian-made Shahed drones had been shot down, and that Ukrainian forces had “repelled more than 100 enemy attacks”.
Updated
Ukrainian and US security officials met via video link on Saturday, with representatives of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government asking for further assistance, including more equipment, weapons and ammunition.
Senior officials included Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin and the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley. The Ukrainian defence minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, was also on the call, along with Roman Mashovets, the deputy head of Zelenskiy’s office.
Zelenskiy joined the call at the end of the meeting, according to his adviser Andriy Yermak’s Telegram account. The Ukrainian president discussed how his forces hope to retake areas that Russia has captured.
“We thanked the US authorities and the American people for the comprehensive and powerful support of our country in the struggle for freedom and the return of peace to Europe,” Yermak said.
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Here are some of the latest images coming through from the frontlines in Ukraine
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Russia likely to widen conscription to boost military, says UK MoD
Russia will probably introduce wider conscription to boost its military requirements, the UK Ministry of Defence says.
In its latest intelligence update, the ministry said that deputies in the Russian Duma on Monday introduced a bill to change the conscription age for men to 21-30, from the current 18-27. The law would likely be passed, it said, and come into force in January 2024.
The ministry said:
Many 18-21-year-old men currently claim exemption from the draft due to being in higher education. The authorities are highly likely changing the age bracket to bolster troop numbers by ensuring that students are eventually forced to serve.
The ministry said Russia continued to officially bar conscripts from operations in Ukraine, although “at least hundreds have probably served through administrative mix-ups or after being coerced to sign contracts”.
Even if Russia continues to refrain from deploying conscripts in the war, extra conscripts will free up a greater proportion of professional soldiers to fight.
Russia runs conscription call-ups twice a year, apart from its “partial mobilisation” last year.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 18 March 2023.
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) March 18, 2023
Find out more about Defence Intelligence's use of language: https://t.co/b1caNLrk5z
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/UEtuzv53WD
Updated
The international criminal court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin obligates the court’s 123 member states to arrest the Russian president and transfer him to The Hague, Netherlands, for trial if he sets foot on their territory.
The court also issued a warrant on Friday for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, on the same charges alleging war crimes.
Agence France-Presse also reported that a US-backed report by Yale University researchers last month said Russia had held at least 6,000 Ukrainian children in at least 43 camps and other facilities as part of a “large-scale systematic network”.
Russia has denied its forces have committed atrocities during the war, while the Kremlin said the arrest warrant against Putin was outrageous and “null and void” for Russia.
ICC sources said they thought it was now “very unlikely” Putin would travel to any country currently supporting Ukraine, and that if he did so he risked arrest.
Biden says Putin arrest warrant 'justified'
Joe Biden has said Vladimir Putin clearly committed war crimes and that the international criminal court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Russian leader makes a “very strong point”.
“Well, I think it’s justified,” the US president said on Friday of the warrant.
But the question is – it’s not recognised internationally by us either. But I think it makes a very strong point.
The US is not a member of the international criminal court (ICC) and the Pentagon has resisted cooperating with it out of fears American soldiers could potentially be pursued by the court.
The ICC decision, over allegations Putin has overseen the abduction of Ukrainian children, marks the first time the court has issued a warrant against one of the five permanent members of the UN security council.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, hailed the court’s move, saying on social media it was “a historic decision from which historic responsibility will begin”.
Updated
Opening summary
Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. This is Adam Fulton bringing you the latest developments.
The US president, Joe Biden, says Vladimir Putin has “clearly committed war crimes” and that the international criminal court is “justified” in issuing an arrest warrant for the Russian president.
The court called on Friday for Putin’s arrest over allegations of overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children and unlawful transfer of people from Ukraine to Russia during the war.
Moscow said the arrest warrant was “meaningless” and legally “void” because it did not recognise the court’s jurisdiction.
More on that story soon.
In other developments as it approaches 9am in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv:
Russia is sustaining up to 1,500 casualties a day in its current offensive, mostly in the eastern city of Bakhmut, according to a senior Nato official. Ukraine was taking “an order of magnitude less” in fighting where “several thousand” shells a day have been fired by both sides, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
China’s President Xi Jinping is to visit Russia next week in an apparent show of support for Vladimir Putin. During the visit, scheduled for 20-22 March, the two leaders would sign “important” bilateral documents and discuss issues of further development of comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction between Moscow and Beijing, the Chinese foreign ministry has said.
The US has deep concerns that China could try to position itself as a peacemaker in the war in Ukraine by promoting a ceasefire, the White House has said. A ceasefire in Ukraine would “in effect recognise Russia’s gains and its attempt to conquer its neighbour’s territory by force, allowing Russian troops to continue to occupy sovereign Ukrainian territory”, said the White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkey would start the process of ratifying Finland’s Nato membership bid in parliament after Helsinki took “authentic and concrete steps” to keep its promises in a trilateral agreement. Erdoğan also said Turkey’s willingness to consider ratifying Sweden’s Nato bid would “depend on the solid steps Sweden will take”.
Sweden remained confident it would join Nato, the foreign minister said. Tobias Billström said separate ratification of Finland and Sweden’s bids by Ankara was “a development that we didn’t want but it’s something that we’re prepared for”.
Slovakia will donate 13 MiG-29 warplanes to Ukraine, its prime minister has said. Eduard Heger told a news conference his government was “on the right side of history” as Slovakia became the second Nato member to announce such a shipment in 24 hours, after a similar move by Poland. The Kremlin said the promised planes were another example of Nato members “raising the level of their direct involvement in the conflict”, adding that “all this equipment will be subject to destruction”.
Talks are in progress on the renewal of an agreement allowing the safe export of grain from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, the UN’s office in Geneva has said. The Black Sea grain initiative, brokered between Russia and Ukraine by the UN and Turkey last July, is due to expire on Saturday. The UN, Ukraine and Turkey have called for a 120-day rollover of the agreement. Russia has said the deal should be renewed for only 60 days.
Kyiv’s wartime curfew will be reduced by an hour to boost business. The head of Kyiv city administration, Serhiy Popko, said the new curfew period – starting at midnight instead of 11pm – would increase the time for public transport and that reducing its duration “should help reduce social tension, increase production, create new jobs”.
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