Closing summary
It is now after 8pm in Kyiv and our live blog is about to close. Here’s a roundup of today’s news about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
A two-year-old girl has been killed in an airstrike that hit a residential district in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro and also left 22 people injured.
The girl’s body was pulled from the wreckage, the regional governor said this morning, after an attack that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy blamed on Russia.
Meanwhile, Russia used artillery to repel a cross-border incursion by Ukrainian saboteurs, after launching a wave of air attacks on Ukraine early this morning. Air defence systems repelled all missiles and drones on their approach to Kyiv, the city’s military officials said. All of Ukraine was under air raid alerts for nearly three hours.
In other news:
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on Sunday that he was willing to meet a pro-Ukraine group of Russian fighters keeping two Russian soldiers captive. The group said earlier it was willing to hand over the soldiers in exchange for a meeting with the governor.
Ukrainian forces have shelled a market area in the town of Shebekino, about 4 miles (7km) from the Ukrainian border, according to Gladkov. He said no one was injured but the attack had caused fires to break out near the market, a private area and a grain depot.
Photograph: Pavlo Pakhomenko/EPA
The Kremlin has said that any supply of long-range missiles to Kyiv by France and Germany would lead to a further round of “spiralling tension” in the Ukraine conflict. Britain last month became the first country to supply Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said that Russia’s war, now in its 16th month, has killed at least 500 Ukrainian children. It is impossible to establish the exact number of children who have become casualties, however, because of the continuing fighting and because some areas are under Russian occupation, he said. “We must hold out and win this war,” he said.
A senior Ukrainian government official expressed “disbelief” on Sunday after learning that nearly half of Kyiv bomb shelters inspected during an initial audit were closed or unfit for use. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, said that out of 1,078 shelters examined on the first day, 359 were unprepared and another 122 locked, while 597 were found to be usable.
Four people have been detained in a criminal investigation into the death of a Kyiv woman outside a locked air-raid shelter, the Kyiv regional prosecutor’s office has said. The office said on Saturday that one person, a security guard who had failed to unlock the doors, remained under arrest, while three others, including a local official, had been put under house arrest, Associated Press reported.
Five drones were shot down and four were jammed and did not hit their targets in Dzhankoi in Crimea, according to a Russian official. There were no casualties but windows were broken in several houses, Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of Crimea’s administration, said.
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Ukraine is ready to launch its long-awaited counteroffensive to recapture Russian-occupied territory, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview published on Saturday. The Ukrainian president said: “We strongly believe that we will succeed. I don’t know how long it will take … but we are going to do it and we are ready.”
That’s it from me, Donna Ferguson, and the Ukraine Live blog. Thanks for following along. If you want to read more news about Ukraine, you can do so here. We will be back tomorrow morning.
The award-winning film 20 Days in Mariupol made its premiere in Ukraine on Saturday.
It was seen for the first time by some of the Ukrainian medics and first responders who were chronicled in the documentary about how Russian forces bombed and blasted their way into the city last year, the Associated Press reports.
Repeated standing ovations in a packed cinema in Kyiv, mixed with tears and hugs, greeted those Ukrainian civil servants who toiled nearly non-stop in and around a Mariupol hospital that was a centrepiece of the film about the south-eastern port city early on in Russia’s invasion in February last year.
For some, the screening served as an unsettling flashback to their own brush with death in the city – a fate inescapable for untold numbers of other victims of Russia’s invasion, including toddlers, infants and expectant mothers whose final moments were caught on video shown in the film.
“It was very hard emotionally because it reminded me of when we were leaving Mariupol, there were still a lot of casualties,” said Serhii Chornobrivets, 25, an ambulance worker who treated countless patients in the city, and is now a military medic. “I could have saved more people but I didn’t.
“Watching that movie brought all those feelings back.”
Many viewers of the documentary, a joint project between the Associated Press and PBS Frontline, expressed their gratitude that the footage eventually got out to the world for history’s sake.
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