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.
