As the time is approaching 9pm in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, here is a roundup of today’s news.
A Ukrainian military commander has said that Russian forces in Bakhmut had been pushed back by up to 2km in some areas, after counteroffensives. Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, who heads Ukraine’s ground forces, made the comments in a post on Telegram. He said: “In some areas of the front, the enemy could not resist the onslaught of the Ukrainian defenders and retreated to a distance of up to two kilometers.”
Russia’s oil pipeline operator Transneft said that a filling point on the Europe-bound Druzhba pipeline in a border area between Russia and Ukraine had been targeted in a “terrorist” attack, according to the Tass news agency. Transneft said nobody was injured in the incident, which it called a “terrorist attack”, according to Reuters.
It comes as Ukraine’s military said its forces have seriously damaged Russia’s 72nd independent motorised rifle brigade near Bakhmut, made up of thousands of troops. Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for Ukrainian troops in the east, said the situation remained “difficult” in Bakhmut but Moscow was increasingly forced to use regular army units because of heavy losses among the Wagner private army group.
The Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner group is fighting in Bakhmut, said on Tuesday that the brigade had abandoned its positions. Russia has not commented.
Prigozhin has complained that his fighters were still not getting enough shells from the official defence ministry. In an audio statement, he said the defence ministry – which has promised to ensure all combat units have the resources they need – had been holding long meetings on the shell issue but there had been no breakthrough. “We’re not receiving enough shells, we’re only getting 10%,” Prigozhin said, reported Reuters.
The French parliament has called on the EU to formally label the Wagner group terrorists. France’s parliament unanimously passed a non-binding resolution aimed at encouraging the 27 members of the EU to put Wagner on its official list of terrorist organisations.
Britain is also set to formally blacklist Wagner as a terrorist organisation to increase pressure on Russia, the Times reported on Tuesday. After two months of building a legal case, proscription or a formal blacklisting of the group was “imminent” and likely to be enacted within weeks, the newspaper reported, citing a government source.
Russian forces are planning to “evacuate” more than 3,000 workers from the town that serves the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, resulting in a “catastrophic lack” of personnel, Ukraine’s state-owned Energoatom company claimed on Wednesday. Energoatom said it had received information about preparations for the evacuation of about 3,100 people from the southern city of Enerhodar, including 2,700 workers who had signed contracts with the Russian-installed company. Ukraine has repeatedly criticised Russia for forcibly deporting its citizens from occupied Ukrainian regions into Russian Federation territory.
However, Ukraine has said that Russia is now blocking the exit of the thousands it had organised to leave Enerhodar.
Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder has been criticised again for his links to Russia after attending a Victory Day party at the Russian embassy in Berlin. Schröder was seen at the reception on Tuesday marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war, along with senior figures from the far-right Alternative for Germany party and the far-left Linke party.
Russia may formally “denounce” the treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe that it pulled out of in 2015, according to a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. The decree formally appoints the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, to represent Putin during parliamentary proceedings on denouncing the treaty, which aimed to regulate the number of forces deployed by Warsaw Pact and Nato countries. Russia announced in 2015 that it was completely halting its participation in the treaty, having already suspended cooperation in 2007. Russia argues that the treaty, which was intended to balance conventional forces towards the end of the cold war, was de facto in breach because former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Warsaw Pact nations such as Bulgaria, had become members of Nato by the early 2000s.
The governor of Russia’s Voronezh region said on Wednesday that two drones attempted to attack a military facility in his region, but failed.
Tass reports that the Russian Federation security service, the FSB, has claimed to have prevented an assassination attempt on a police chief in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region.
The secretary general of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, has spoken in Brussels at a meeting of Nato’s military committee. He said the alliance needs to “redouble our efforts” in order to provide security to the 1 billion people in Nato countries, citing what he claimed was a range of rising threats.
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More news on the killing of Arman Soldin on Tuesday.
French judges have launched a war crimes investigation into the journalist’s death in Ukraine, anti-terror prosecutors said Wednesday.
Soldin, 32, died when he and his Agence France-Presse colleagues came under fire by Grad rockets on Tuesday while they were with Ukrainian troops near Chasiv Yar, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
The French inquiry will be handled by the OCLCH, an investigating unit specialising in crimes against humanity and hate crimes, and will seek to determine the exact circumstances of Soldin’s death, the prosecutors said, according to AFP.
Soldin’s death brings to at least 11 the number of journalists, fixers or drivers for media teams killed since Russia invaded Ukraine more than a year ago, according to advocacy groups.
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