Closing summary
Ukraine has withdrawn from the villages of Severne and Stepove near the eastern town of Avdiika, recently captured by Russian forces, military spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy said.
Two police officers were killed and four were injured by Russian shelling in the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, Ukraine’s interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said. Klymenko wrote on Telegram that an investigative team was deliberately fired upon while documenting damage caused by an earlier Russian strike.
Several European countries have said they are not considering sending ground troops to Ukraine after France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said on Monday he refused to rule out sending soldiers to the country. Britain, Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy and Hungary all ruled out the move on Tuesday, as did Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, who said that the military alliance has no plans to send combat troops into Ukraine. Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, did however, say that European leaders now appeared willing to procure weapons from third countries outside Europe as a way of speeding up military aid to Ukraine.
France’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, said nothing was off the table in western efforts to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine. “No dynamic can be ruled out. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” he said, noting that there was “no consensus” on any “official” deployment of ground troops.
The Kremlin has suggested that conflict between Russia and the US-led Nato military alliance would become inevitable if European members of Nato sent troops to fight in Ukraine. “The very fact of discussing the possibility of sending certain contingents to Ukraine from Nato countries is a very important new element,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about Macron’s remarks. Asked by reporters what the risks of a direct Russia-Nato conflict would be if Nato members sent their troops to fight in Ukraine, Peskov said: “In that case, we would need to talk not about the probability, but about the inevitability (of a direct conflict).”
Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian Su-34 fighter jet on the eastern front, air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said.
One of Russia’s longest-serving and most respected human rights campaigners, Oleg Orlov, has been sentenced to two and a half years in jail for denouncing the war in Ukraine.
North Korea has shipped about 6,700 containers carrying millions of munitions to Russia since July to support Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, South Korean media reported on Tuesday. South Korea’s defence minister, Shin Won-sik, said the containers might carry more than 3 million 152mm artillery shells, or 500,000 122mm rounds.
US treasury secretary Janet Yellen said it was urgent for G7 countries to jointly seize profits from frozen Russian assets and redirect them to Ukraine, AFP reports.
Calls have been mounting in the US and Europe to set up a fund for Ukraine using billions of dollars in bank accounts, investments and other assets frozen by the west over Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
“It is necessary and urgent for our coalition to find a way to unlock the value of these immobilised assets to support Ukraine’s continued resistance and long-term reconstruction,” Yellen told journalists in São Paulo, Brazil, where she will attend a meeting of G20 finance ministers on Wednesday and Thursday.
Yellen continued:
There is a strong international law, economic, and moral case for moving forward. This would be a decisive response to Russia’s unprecedented threat to global stability.
It would make clear that Russia cannot win by prolonging the war and would incentivise it to come to the table to negotiate a just peace with Ukraine.
