Closing summary
It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner group, has published a video that he said shows his fighters in the key eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In a post on Telegram, uniformed men are seen lifting a Wagner banner on top of a heavily damaged building. The video has been geolocated to the east of Bakhmut, about 1.2 miles from the city centre, where Wagner fighters have been for a while.
A meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised and developing nations in New Delhi has ended with no consensus on the war in Ukraine. Most G20 members strongly condemned the Ukraine war, with Russia and China disagreeing, said the G20 president, India, after the meeting. India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said there were “divergences” on the issue of the war in Ukraine “which we could not reconcile as various parties held differing views”.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke for less than 10 minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting in New Delhi today, according to a US state department official. Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine’s defence for as long as it took, the official said, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Blinken said he told Lavrov that Washington would push for the war in Ukraine to end through diplomatic terms that Kyiv agreed to. Blinken said he had also urged Moscow to reconsider its “irresponsible decision” and return to participation in the New Start nuclear treaty, and that he had also urged Russia to release the detained US citizen Paul Whelan.
Ukrainian forces are hanging on to their positions in the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut under constant attack from Russian troops. 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 the invasion it launched on 24 February 2022. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has put up fierce resistance. “I believe that, sooner or later, we will probably have to leave Bakhmut. There is no sense in holding it at any cost,” the Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Rakhmanin said on NV radio late on Wednesday.
Russia attacked a five-storey residential block in Zaporizhzhia overnight, killing four people and injuring eight others. The Zaporizhzhia regional military administration said Russia appeared to have used a S-300 missile for the strike. A spokesperson for 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”. 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.”
In Ukraine, the reports were quickly interpreted as a “false flag” attack launched by Russia to discredit the Ukrainian armed forces. “The story about [the Ukrainian] sabotage group in [Russia] is a classic deliberate provocation,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser. There was no immediate video or photo of the fighting to confirm the reports of deaths.
Vladimir Putin planned to hold a meeting of the security council, Russia’s main military decision-making body, on Friday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. Peskov said he had also cancelled a trip to Stavropol.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has 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, Scholz said it was disappointing that Beijing had refrained from condemning the Russian invasion, though he welcomed its efforts towards nuclear de-escalation.
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. The lawyers, called the Mobile Justice Team, said on Thursday they had investigated 20 torture chambers in Kherson and concluded they were part of a “calculated plan to terrorise, subjugate and eliminate Ukrainian resistance and destroy Ukrainian identity”.
A new team of nuclear experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have taken up their post at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in southern Ukraine after a delay of almost a month, the IAEA chief, Rafael Grossi, has said. In a statement, Grossi said the presence of IAEA monitors at the station was “indispensable to help reduce the risk of a nuclear accident”.
A Russian regional politician is to appear in court to face accusations that he discredited the armed forces by posting a video of himself listening to a speech by Vladimir Putin with spaghetti draped over his ear.
Mikhail Abdalkin, a Communist party lawmaker in the Samara regional parliament, said his case would appear before the Novokuybyshev city court next week.
Abdalkin posted his video on “V Kontakte”, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, shortly after Putin’s state of the nation speech on 21 February.
Accompanying the video was a caption saying he had been asked to watch the speech by the deputy chair of the Samara parliament.
The video referred to the Russian saying that when noodles have been hung on someone’s ear, that person has been strung along or deceived.
“We will fight to prove our non-involvement and innocence,” Abdalkin said.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner group, has published a video that he said shows his fighters in the key eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
In a post on Telegram, uniformed men are seen lifting a Wagner banner on top of a heavily damaged building. One of the men is shown dancing and holding a guitar, a reference to Wagner’s informal nickname of “the musicians”.
Prigozhin was quoted by his press service as saying:
The lads are mucking about, shooting home video. They brought this from Bakhmut this morning, practically the centre of the city.
The video has been geolocated to the east of Bakhmut, about 1.2 miles from the city centre, where Wagner fighters have been for a while.
Ukrainian forces were reported to be hanging on to their positions in Bakhmut earlier today, but to be under relentless attacks from Russian forces.
Updated
Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, has said his country faces “some difficult choices” as he reconsiders its relationship with its traditional Slavic ally, Russia.
In an interview with Politico, Vučić indicated that he believed the time had come to rethink Serbia’s refusal to join western sanctions against Russia. He said:
You’re going to get one sentence from me: Serbia will remain on its EU path. Okay, draw your own conclusions. But I think you understand me.
He added:
We’ll have some difficult choices in the future, no doubt. That’s all I can say.
Vučić reiterated that Russia should halt its efforts to recruit Serbs to fight alongside its Wagner paramilitary group in Ukraine.
The Serbian legislature bans the participation of its citizens in conflicts abroad and several people have been sentenced for doing so.
Serbs who have been recruited to fight in Ukraine “are going to be arrested when they come back to Serbia and [are] within reach of our institutions. You don’t recruit like that in a friendly country,” Vučić added.
Serbia is a candidate to join the EU, its main trade partner and investor, but it also maintains trade and military cooperation with Russia, a traditional Slavic and Orthodox Christian ally.
Although it repeatedly condemned Russia’s invasion against Ukraine at the UN and several other international forums, Belgrade has also refused to impose sanctions against Moscow.
Updated
A new team of nuclear experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have taken up their post at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in southern Ukraine after a delay of almost a month, the IAEA chief, Rafael Grossi, has said.
The “long-delayed” rotation of IAEA allows the three experts who had been at the site since early January to finally begin their journey back to IAEA headquarters.
In a statement, Grossi said the presence of IAEA monitors at the station was “indispensable to help reduce the risk of a nuclear accident”.
He added:
Our courageous experts – working closely with the plant’s operating staff – are providing technical advice and monitoring the situation in extremely difficult and challenging circumstances.
Grossi reiterated his “determination to help protect the plant by agreeing and implementing a nuclear safety and security protection zone there”.
Updated
Air raid alerts have been reported across Ukraine, including the capital, Kyiv.
Euan MacDonald of the New Voice of Ukraine has posted a map showing which regions of Ukraine are covered by the air raid alerts, adding that a MiG-31K fighter jet has taken off in Belarus.
Air raid alert in Kyiv, and countrywide. MiG-31K has taken off in Belarus. This aircraft can carry a missile with a range that can reach every part of Ukraine, so the whole country goes on alert when one takes off. pic.twitter.com/e9VQZWvRaO
— Euan MacDonald (@Euan_MacDonald) March 2, 2023
Updated
Blinken says he told Lavrov to 'engage in meaningful diplomacy'
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said he told Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that Washington would continue to support Ukraine for as long as it took when the pair met briefly on the sidelines of the G20 meeting of foreign ministers in New Delhi.
Blinken said he had told Lavrov that Washington would push for the war in Ukraine to end through diplomatic terms that Kyiv agreed to.
“End this war of aggression, engage in meaningful diplomacy that can produce a just and durable peace,” Blinken said he had told the Russian foreign minister. He added:
President Putin has demonstrated zero interest in engaging, saying there’s nothing to even talk about unless and until Ukraine accepts and I quote ‘the new territorial reality’.
Blinken said he had also urged Moscow to reconsider its “irresponsible decision” and return to participation in the New Start nuclear treaty, and that he had told Lavrov that “mutual compliance is in the interest of both our countries”.
He added:
No matter what else is happening in the world, in our relationship, the United States is always ready to engage and act on strategic arms control, just as the United States and the Soviet Union did even at the height of the cold war.
He said he had also urged Russia to release the detained US citizen Paul Whelan, and Washington had “put forward a serious proposal. Russia should take it.”
Updated
Summary of the day so far
It’s 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
A meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised and developing nations in New Delhi has ended with no consensus on the war in Ukraine. Most G20 members strongly condemned the Ukraine war, with Russia and China disagreeing, said the G20 president, India, after the meeting. India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said there were “divergences” on the issue of the war in Ukraine “which we could not reconcile as various parties held differing views”.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke for less than 10 minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting in New Delhi today, according to a US state department official. Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine’s defence for as long as it took, the official said, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukrainian forces are hanging on to their positions in the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut under constant attack from Russian troops. 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 the invasion it launched on 24 February 2022. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has put up fierce resistance. “I believe that, sooner or later, we will probably have to leave Bakhmut. There is no sense in holding it at any cost,” the Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Rakhmanin said on NV radio late on Wednesday.
Russia attacked a five-storey residential block in Zaporizhzhia overnight, killing four people and injuring eight others. The Zaporizhzhia regional military administration said Russia appeared to have used a S-300 missile for the strike. A spokesperson for 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”. 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.”
In Ukraine, the reports were quickly interpreted as a “false flag” attack launched by Russia to discredit the Ukrainian armed forces. “The story about [the Ukrainian] sabotage group in [Russia] is a classic deliberate provocation,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser. There was no immediate video or photo of the fighting to confirm the reports of deaths.
Vladimir Putin planned to hold a meeting of the security council, Russia’s main military decision-making body, on Friday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. Peskov said he had also cancelled a trip to Stavropol.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has 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, Scholz said it was disappointing that Beijing had refrained from condemning the Russian invasion, though he welcomed its efforts towards nuclear de-escalation.
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. The lawyers, called the Mobile Justice Team, said on Thursday they had investigated 20 torture chambers in Kherson and concluded they were part of a “calculated plan to terrorise, subjugate and eliminate Ukrainian resistance and destroy Ukrainian identity”.
The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, one of Denmark’s most notable landmarks, has been vandalised, with a Russian flag painted across its base. Copenhagen police said they had attended the scene and recorded “a case of vandalism” and that they were trying to find “traces” in the area. An investigation has been opened into the act, seen as a sign of support for Moscow in the war in Ukraine.
Good afternoon from London, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong still here with all the latest from the Russia-Ukraine war. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.
Updated
In the besieged city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, the volunteers collecting the civilian dead risk becoming casualties themselves.
“Where? Where?” demands Daniel Wilk, a Canadian driver, in shaky video footage shot recently inside the city and seen by the Guardian.
Wilk proceeds quickly, the anxiety of the situation visible in his movements as he is directed to a fence, cutting an uncertain path across the snow as another voice cries “no, no” repeatedly.
The bodies, when Wilk gets to them, have been cut in half by the force of the explosion that took their lives, and still lie where they fell three days before. Quickly they are bundled up in a sheet to be removed.
People who have managed to reach Bakhmut in the past week use the same word to describe what they have experienced: hell.
As flames and smoke ring into the sky from blazing buildings, the city, almost totally encircled by Russian forces, has been raked by constant gunfire and explosions in recent days. With roads leading to the city under constant fire from two sides, and with snipers in the streets, accessing the city has become ever more perilous for rescue teams, as speculation has mounted that Ukrainian forces will have to withdraw.
“We haven’t been able to reach the downtown area in recent days,” said Olha Danilova, who like Wilk works for a Ukrainian NGO, Dobryi Rukh, which has been working in Bakhmut for all of the seven months of the Russian assault.
The closest we could get was 500 metres from the city centre. It’s very loud. Everything is being shelled with mortars. It’s inaccessible. We were trying evacuate civilian from down by the river last time. We couldn’t even get close.
The main road we used to use is being shelled constantly. The 27th [of February] was the worst. That was the hell day. It was the hardest day we’ve had since we’ve been working here. It was a wall of fire. Two walls of fire. It was coming from all sides, and aviation was attacking.
Poland and Ukraine have called for international sanctions against Russia’s nuclear energy sector, after the EU adopted its latest package of sanctions that did not include Moscow’s nuclear energy sector because of opposition from some EU member states.
“If we want to develop nuclear … we need to suspend Russia in International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),” Poland’s climate and environment minister, Anna Moskwa, said at an energy conference in the Croatian capital of Zagreb.
We need to end any nuclear cooperation with Russia … and I believe Europe will manage to do so. Nuclear sanctions next package – this is our future challenge we need to face no matter how difficult it is.
She said Russia’s occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power in southern Ukraine was a “very huge danger to our economies, to our society, to our security”.
“We should get rid of Russians in the nuclear sector, in a civilised world they cannot be present as a partner of business,” Ukraine’s energy minister, German Galushchenko, said at the same conference. He added:
They destroy everything, they destroy all seven pillars of nuclear safety and security.
Updated
Reuters has a quick snap from the sidelines of the G20 meeting that US secretary of state Antony Blinken claims to have told Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov that whatever else was happening in the world, the US was always ready to engage with Russia on the issue of strategic arms control.
Blinken and Lavrov met briefly in New Delhi, according to US officials, in what would have been their first face-to-face meeting since Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine commenced in February 2022. Last Tuesday, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said his country would halt its participation in the New Start nuclear arms treaty.
Updated
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.
Reuters reports the declaration said Russia was waging an illegal, unprovoked and unfounded war of aggression in Ukraine that violated the principles of international law, and echoed calls by Kyiv for an international tribunal to prosecute war crimes.
Tensions between Russia and Moldova, the small former Soviet republic which borders Ukraine, have grown sharply since the war began.
Moldova has protested to Moscow that Russian missiles aimed at Ukraine have entered its airspace and that missile debris has landed inside its borders, and it has accused Moscow of plotting to topple the pro-European government in Chișinău.
Russia has denied the allegation and accused Ukraine and other countries of stoking instability in Moldova’s breakaway Transdniestria region, where about 1,500 Russian troops are based. Chișinău and Kyiv have dismissed the accusation.
Updated
The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont reports seeing an increase in the number of people claiming that images from Ukraine are fake.
He writes that it is his fifth trip to Ukraine and his sense of outrage is only getting stronger. “Listen to the people who are here,” he adds.
I've been seeing an increasing amount of crap from western pro-Putin keyboard warriors about how images from Ukraine are somehow fake. This is my fifth trip and the horror of what I'm seeing and my sense of outrage is only getting stronger. Listen to the people who are here.
— petersbeaumont (@petersbeaumont1) March 2, 2023
In Ukraine, the reports of firefights emerged from the Bryansk and Kursk regions were quickly interpreted as a “false flag” attack launched by Russia to discredit the Ukrainian armed forces.
“The story about [the Ukrainian] sabotage group in [Russia] is a classic deliberate provocation,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser.
[Russia] wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country and the growing poverty after the year of war. The partisan movement in [Russia] is getting stronger and more aggressive. Fear your partisans …
The story about 🇺🇦sabotage group in RF is a classic deliberate provocation. RF wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country & the growing poverty after the year of war. The partisan movement in RF is getting stronger & more aggressive. Fear your partisans...
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) March 2, 2023
Russia blames Ukrainian ‘terrorists’ after reports of fighting near Ukraine border
The Kremlin claimed Russia had been attacked by “terrorists” after conflicting reports of fighting 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.”
Other reports of hostages being taken or school buses being fired upon have been discredited, even by local Russian officials. In an online statement later corroborated by the independent Russian news site iStories, a group called the Russian Volunteer Corps claimed its fighters had crossed the border into Russia on Thursday but denied reports of civilian casualties.
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, would plan to hold a meeting of the security council, Russia’s main military decision-making body, on Friday. Peskov said he had also cancelled a trip to Stavropol.
He said:
We are talking about a terrorist attack. Measures are being taken to eliminate them.
Asked whether Russia could change the status of its “special military operation” after the reported attacks, Peskov said:
I don’t know. I can’t say for now.
Updated
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has been pictured in New Delhi where he is attending a meeting of top diplomats from the G20 countries.
Updated
G20 talks fail to reach consensus on Ukraine war
A meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised and developing nations in New Delhi has ended with no consensus on the war in Ukraine.
Most G20 members strongly condemned the Ukraine war, with Russia and China disagreeing, said the G20 president, India, after the meeting.
India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said there were “divergences” on the issue of the war in Ukraine “which we could not reconcile as various parties held differing views”.
He said:
If we had a perfect meeting of minds on all issues, it would have been a collective statement.
Much of the talks were dominated by discussions of the war and China’s widening global influence, he said, adding that members agreed on most issues involving the concerns of less-developed nations, “like strengthening multilateralism, promoting food and energy security, climate change, gender issues and counter-terrorism”.
Updated
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 white, blue and red ensign were on Thursday found daubed on the rock on which the statue of the heroine from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale rests.
Copenhagen police said they had attended the scene and recorded “a case of vandalism” and that they were trying to find “traces” in the area.
An investigation has been opened into the act, seen as a sign of support for Moscow in the war in Ukraine.
Updated
Blinken and Lavrov meet for the first time since Russia's invasion
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke for less than 10 minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting in New Delhi today, according to a US state department official.
Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine’s defence for as long as it takes, the official said, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Blinken also called for Moscow to reverse its decision to suspend participation in the New Start nuclear treaty and to release detained US citizen, Paul Whelan.
The official said:
The secretary saw the purpose of this was to deliver these three direct messages, which we see as advancing our interests.
We always remain hopeful that the Russians will reverse their decision and be prepared to engage in a diplomatic process that can lead to a just and durable peace, but I wouldn’t say that coming out of this encounter there was any expectation that things will change in the near term.
Lavrov did not mention the meeting during a news conference he gave after Thursday’s G20 foreign ministers’ meeting.
Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, confirmed the meeting took place, telling CNN:
Blinken asked for contact with Lavrov. On the go, as part of the second session of the [G20], Sergey Viktorovich [Lavrov] talked. There were no negotiations, meetings, etc.
Updated
Boris Johnson is delivering the keynote address at London’s soft power summit, where he says democracy matters because Vladimir Putin would never have made “the catastrophic mistake of invading Ukraine”.
Putin would “never have been so deluded about the true nature” of Ukraine if Russians lived in a free society with free media.
[Putin] would have known that the Ukrainians are a great patriotic people and that they would fight for every inch of their land.
Updated
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has been speaking at a soft power summit in London, where he was asked by the journalist Mishal Husain about the “striking difference” in polls that showed support for Ukraine between western countries and countries such as India and Turkey.
Kuleba said there was a broad notion that the countries in the Global South was against Ukraine, but the reality was far more nuanced.
He said there were three rules that he used in communicating with countries: First, he had “to speak with them. The more you speak, the more familiar they get with the issue.”
The second was that he had to address them “with a lot of respect. Most of these countries are traumatised with their own history.”
Finally, what really worked was “putting them in our shoes”, he said.
What really works is just to say, are you ready to concede a square kilometre of your own country to your neighbour, simply because your neighbour decided to take the square kilometre away from you?
The answer is always no.
Updated
Here are some of the latest images from the scene of a Russian missile strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia in south-east Ukraine.
At least four people have been killed and eight wounded in the attack, Ukrainian officials said.
Updated
Russia has violated the world’s very principle of soft power, Olena Zelenska has said, and the world must decide “whether the language of aggression is acceptable to them”.
Russia attacked not only Ukraine but all world principles of peaceful coexistence, human rights and the progress we have made. Why negotiate when you can launch missiles?
Updated
Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, is delivering a video address at a soft power summit in London.
The country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, and the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson are also expected to speak.
You can watch live here:
Updated
Summary of the day so far …
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 the invasion it launched on 24 February 2022. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has 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,” the Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Rakhmanin said on NV radio late on Wednesday.
Russia attacked a five-storey residential 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 appeared to have used a S-300 missile for the strike. A spokesperson for 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 Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has cancelled a planned trip to Stavropol amid reports of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Bryansk region. Russian media has reported that two villages near the border with Ukraine have been attacked, with at least one person killed. Details remain unclear, but the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, described the incident as a “terrorist” attack.
The 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.
The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, called on 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.
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.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will be back later. Léonie Chao-Fong will be here shortly to take you through the next few hours of our live coverage.
Updated
Putin cancels trip to Stavropol over reports of Ukrainian incursion into Russia's Bryansk region
Russian media outlets have been carrying reports claiming that Ukrainian forces entered Russian territory in Bryansk region, which borders northern Ukraine. Tass reports that head of the region, Alexander Bogomaz, gave the news, and that “according to the latest information, they entered two villages, there is a battle going on”.
Details remain unclear, but Tass also reports: “The security forces confirmed that an operation is being carried out in the border area to destroy violators of the state border.”
The state-owned RIA Novosti news agency reported on its Telegram channel that the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, in his daily media breifing, said that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, cancelled a planned trip to Stavropol “due to the situation in the Bryansk region”.
In his media briefing, Peskov said the incident had been an attack by “terrorists”.
Tass suggests that “saboteurs attacked both Lyubechan and Sushany”, and that “Ukrainian forces fired at a vehicle, killing one person and injuring another, a 10-year-old child”.
It reports: “The FSB confirmed to TASS that in the border area of the Bryansk region ‘measures are being taken to destroy the armed Ukrainian nationalists who have violated the state border.’”
The claims have not been independently verified.
Updated
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 on Thursday.
Blinken described Russia’s civil society crackdown as a “systematic muzzling” and said UN investigators should continue documenting Russia’s Ukraine abuses to provide “an impartial record of what’s occurring, and a foundation for national and international efforts to hold perpetrators accountable”.
Reuters reports his video address comes ahead of an expected speech by a senior Russian official, Sergei Ryabkov, who is due to appear before the same Geneva-based body for the first time since Moscow invaded Ukraine more than a year ago.
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Kateryna Mishchenko is a Ukrainian author, and this morning we have an adapted text of her closing address at Debates on Europe 2023 in which she asks: does Europe want Ukrainians as living partners or dead heroes?
Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion, I often heard people refer to Ukraine as Europe’s back yard. Now it resembles a graveyard, the war itself a gravedigger – missiles and shells form huge pits, digging graves for Ukrainians themselves. This cemetery is planted with beautiful flowers – notions of unbreakability, courage and resilience, which should give hope, the promise of rebuilding and that life is possible after all the horror.
A few weeks ago, I crossed the border between Ukraine and the European Union. Today there are no fast connections to or from Ukraine. The long journey has its own logic: the mental transformation takes time. In order to move from peace to war or from war to peace, one has to travel through a process, out of accelerated time – where the countdown applies not to seconds, but to human lives – into a time where there is room for reflection and discussion (sometimes just the wasting of words) and, most importantly, where there is time for choice. This mental metamorphosis creates anxiety, fear, disrupts sleep and deprives you of the most basic confidence in the ground under your feet, even when this ground is no longer dug up by shells and grave shovels. The borderline is felt as a kind of mental disorder.
Perhaps the current Nato strategy of supporting Ukraine in doses can be viewed through the prism of the fatal political logic of the borderline. The repressed can wait. But for how long?
Read more here: Kateryna Mishchenko – Does Europe want Ukrainians as living partners or dead heroes?
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Guardian journalist Peter Beaumont is driving from Kharkiv to Kramatorsk to cover the situation around Bakhmut. He has this to say about the car journey.
We’ve been in Kupiansk for the last two days which has seen increasing shell fire from Russian artillery. We saw a lot of damage there, but coming south past Izium there are villages and towns that have been smashed to pieces. Extraordinary damage. We stopped in one place, where every building was damaged, some reduced to rubble, including what appeared to be a monastery or church.
All along this section of the road there are mine warning signs. At one point we were surprised by an explosion ahead of us, a puff of grey smoke above the road. We could see soldiers who seemed unconcerned, so came closer and could see they were blowing up unexploded ordinance right by the road.
South of Izyum. Whole towns and villages smashed to bits pic.twitter.com/F0EPKkACsX
— petersbeaumont (@petersbeaumont1) March 2, 2023
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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”, the Tass news agency reported.
“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,” Sergei Lavrov told a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi.
Meanwhile, US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said the G20 meeting has been marred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Unfortunately, this meeting has again been marred by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine,” Reuters report Blinken said, adding that G20 countries must continue to call on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine.
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Ukraine’s state broadcaster Suspilne has reported on its Telegram channel that the water supply in Mykolaiv will be off today between 11am and 5pm due to a shutdown at the pumping station.
Scholz cautions China against sending weapons to Russia
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.
“My message to Beijing is clear: use your influence in Moscow to urge the withdrawal of Russian troops,” he said. “And don’t deliver any weapons to the aggressor Russia.”
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Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday accused the west of “shamelessly burying” the Black Sea grain initiative that facilitates the export of Ukraine’s agricultural products from its southern ports, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Reuters notes that while remaining in the agreement, Russia has repeatedly complained about the west’s approach to the deal, struck last July, saying countries that have imposed sanctions on Moscow were not doing enough to ease restrictions on Russia’s own exports, in particular of fertilisers.
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.
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German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, met with her Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, before the G20 meeting in India, the German foreign ministry said on Twitter on Thursday.
“In the face of Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine and the UN Charter, neutrality rewards the aggressor,” Reuters reports the ministry added in the tweet.
The G20 meeting has been accompanied by an awkward set of bilateral meetings overshadowed by disagreements over the war in Ukraine, with some of the attenders pointedly not expected to meet face-to-face on the sidelines as might usually be expected.
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Suspilne, Ukraine’s national brodcaster, has raised the death toll from the strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia to three. It reports on Telegram:
Three people were killed as a result of a Russian missile attack on a five-story building in Zaporizhzhia at night, the national police reported. Six injured were hospitalised, rescuers continue to work on the spot.
Ukraine’s emergency services have released images from the scene of a missile strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s state broadcaster has reported that two people were killed, and that people were believed to be trapped under the rubble.
In quotes being carried by Russian state-owned media, Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-proxy who is chair of the We Are Together with Russia organisation that operates within the occupied Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, has claimed on Telegram, without providing evidence, that the blast was a result of Ukrainian air defence fire. He is quoted as saying:
The work of the Ukrainian military over my native Zaporizhzhia led to the destruction of an apartment building and casualties among peaceful, innocent people. Today, at about 2.45am, two explosions sounded in the regional centre, temporarily occupied by the regime of Zelenskiy.
According to Tass, Rogov went on to say that the armed forces of Ukraine are constantly firing anti-aircraft missiles over residential areas, not taking into account the security of the civilian population.
Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and Zaporizhzhia is one of the partially occupied areas of the country which the Russian Federation claimed to annex late last year.
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Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, has tweeted about the overnight attack on Zaporizhzhia, writing:
Zaporizhzhia bravely resists the Russian aggressor. In retaliation, it attacks civilians. A high-rise building was deliberately hit last night. Three floors are completely destroyed. People died. We continue to search under the rubble. My condolences to the victims. We will not forgive this.
Zaporizhzhia bravely resists ru-aggressor. In retaliation, it attacks civilians. A high-rise building was deliberately hit last night. 3 floors are completely destroyed, people died. We continue to search under the rubble. My condolences to the victims. We will not forgive this. pic.twitter.com/b0t2WCKuLG
— Олена Зеленська (@ZelenskaUA) March 2, 2023
Europe’s chief prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi has told Agence France-Presse she wants to go after people undermining sanctions against Russia.
The European public prosecutor’s office is charged with probing any offence deemed to have cost the EU money, which often means tracking international crime gangs and sophisticated cross-border VAT fraud operations.
The EU has imposed a series of ten packages of economic sanctions on Moscow as punishment for its year-old invasion of Ukraine, and the 49-year-old anti-graft champion wants to go after the gangs circumventing the measures to supply Russia’s war machine.
“This is something that we already have been asked by the Commission – if we can deal with it. And our answer was: ‘Yes, we can do it. We are ready to do it’,” she said.
“We have specialised prosecutors. We have offices in 22 member states … We are the only available tool in this moment at the European level that can fight with this kind of criminality.”
Any decision to add sanctions-busters to the EPPO’s targets would be a political one, taken by the leaders of the EU member states. Not all have been supportive of her role – Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Poland and Ireland have assigned no prosecutors to the EPPO.
This is Martin Belam taking over the live blog in London. You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com.
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for now. My colleague Martin will take you through the rest of the day’s news.
The UK Ministry of Defence has published a wartime weather forecast in its update today, predicting that “warmer than average conditions for the remainder of winter and spring”. While this is good news for people trying to stay warm, it will pose a challenge to Ukraine’s armed forces as the ground thaws, creating mud.
Poor cross-country movement (CCM) caused by mud does “provide some advantage to defending forces”, the ministry said – presumably by slowing the attackers down.
(3/5) Daytime soil temperatures have risen and are now largely above freezing. As experienced since mid-February 2023, overnight freeze and daytime thaw remains likely until next week.
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) March 2, 2023
It added that, “It is almost certain that by late March, CCM will be at its worst after the final thaw. This will add further friction to ground operations and hamper the off-road movement of heavier armoured vehicles, especially over churned-up ground in the Bakhmut sector.”
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The G20 will see US secretary of state Antony Blinken and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the same room for the first time since July, but the two men are unlikely to hold talks, AFP reports.
Western delegates fear China is considering supplying arms to its Russian ally and they will use the foreign ministers’ summit to discourage Beijing from intervening in the conflict.
India’s longstanding security ties with Russia have put the host of Thursday’s meeting in an awkward diplomatic position after refusing to condemn the invasion over the past year.
But EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he was confident India would use the meeting to “make Russia understand that this war has to finish”.
“Certainly the success of the meeting today will be measured in respect to what we will be able to do on that,” he told reporters Wednesday.
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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.
“We are meeting at a time of deep global divisions … We all have our positions and our perspectives on how these tensions [can] be resolved. However, as the leading economies of the world, we also have a responsibility for those who are not in this room,” Modi said.
India had wanted its G20 presidency this year to focus on issues such as alleviating poverty and climate finance, but the Ukraine war has so far crowded out other agenda items.
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Bakhmut can’t be held ‘at any cost’, says Ukrainian MP
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.
“But for the moment, Bakhmut will be defended with several aims - firstly, to inflict as many Russian losses as possible and make Russia use its ammunition and resources.”
No lines of defence should be allowed to collapse, Rakhmanin said.
“There are two ways to approach this - an organised retreat or simple flight. And we cannot allow flight to take place under any circumstances,” he said.
Among the people evacuated from the apartment block was a pregnant woman, photographs show.
A Reuters photographer captured this photo of a Zaporizhzhia resident named Yurji holding the hand of his relative, Anna, who was in the apartment block when it was hit by a Russian missile.
Two dead in attack on Zaporizhzhia apartment block
Russia attacked a five-storey apartment block in Zaporizhzhia overnight, killing two people, the city’s acting mayor, Anatoly Kurtev, said. Rescuers are searching for survivors under the rubble.
The building was “almost completely destroyed”, Kurtev said.
The Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration said Russia appears to have used a S-300 missile.
Welcome and summary
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next while.
Russia attacked a five-storey apartment block in Zaporizhzhia overnight, killing two people, the city’s acting mayor, Anatoly Kurtev, said. Rescuers are searching for survivors under the rubble.
And 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.
“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.
“But for the moment, Bakhmut will be defended with several aims – firstly, to inflict as many Russian losses as possible and make Russia use its ammunition and resources.”
We’ll have more on these stories shortly. First, here are the other key recent developments:
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.”
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.
The Ukrainian military may decide to withdraw its forces from Bakhmut, an economic adviser to Zelenskiy has said. “Our military is obviously going to weigh all of the options. So far, they’ve held the city, but if need be, they will strategically pull back,” said Alexander Rodnyansky on CNN. “We’re not going to sacrifice all of our people just for nothing.”
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force, said Ukrainian forces were putting up “furious resistance” against Moscow’s attempt to seize Bakhmut. Prigozhin said he so far had seen no signs of a Ukrainian withdrawal. The battle for Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance as defenders hold out against relentless shelling and repel waves of Russian troops who have been carrying out a months-long campaign to capture it.
Russia’s defence ministry has said its forces repelled what it described as a major Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014. “Six Ukrainian attack drones were shot down by air defence systems. Another four Ukrainian drones were disabled by electronic warfare,” the ministry said.
Vladimir Putin has said he is preparing for a visit to Moscow by China’s president, Xi Jinping, Russian state media reported. The Russian leader said he planned to show the Chinese delegation the Moscow metro’s Bolshaya Koltsevaya line (Big Circle line) during their visit to the Russian capital.
The leaders of China and Belarus – Xi Jinping and Alexander Lukashenko – have issued a joint statement calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine and negotiations to bring about a political settlement. The joint call amounted to an endorsement of Beijing’s peace plan issued last week that called for respect of national sovereignty and “territorial integrity”.
Finland’s parliament has 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.
Hungary’s president, Katalin Novák, urged lawmakers on Wednesday to ratify Finland and Sweden’s Nato entry “as soon as possible”. “It is a complex decision, with serious consequences, so careful consideration is necessary,” Novák said on Facebook.
Germany will ramp up ammunition production as well as ensure it has enough replacement parts and repairs capacity in its defence industry to better support Ukraine, the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has said.
Russia would only agree to extend the Black Sea grain deal if the interests of its agricultural producers were taken into account, Russia’s foreign ministry has said. The deal, brokered by the UN and Turkey, allows safe exports from Ukrainian ports and is up for renewal this month.
Russia brought new legal amendments to parliament on Wednesday that further strengthen the country’s censorship laws, envisaging up to 15 years in jail for discrediting the armed forces or voluntary military organisations such as the Wagner group.
