Closing summary
It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
Vladimir Putin has no immediate plans for peace in Ukraine, so the west needs to brace itself to supply lethal aid to Kyiv for a long time to come, Nato’s secretary general has warned in an interview with the Guardian. The fierce fighting, currently centred around Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, demonstrated Russia was willing “to just throw in thousands and thousands more troops, to take many casualties for minimal gains”, the head of Nato said.
Russia has stepped up its missile and drone attacks against Ukraine. At least one person has been killed and 33 wounded by a twin Russian missile strike on two residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia, according to officials. Footage from a security camera captured the moment the strike hit, causing an explosion and a large plume of smoke to rise from two nine-storey buildings. Residential areas “where ordinary people and children live are being fired at”, said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Russia’s missile attack on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia “certainly could” have been targeted at civilians, the White House has said. A senior Ukrainian official called it “a specific, deliberate strike at a residential building”. “It’s obviously right out of the Russian playbook to target civilian infrastructure and to show no regard for avoiding the targeting of civilians,” said the White House’s national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, adding that the US did not yet have “tactile information specifically about that strike”.
Russian forces launched exploding drones before dawn, killing at least six people in or near a student dormitory in Rzhyshchiv, near Kyiv, officials said. The body of a 40-year-old man was pulled from the rubble on one floor, according to its regional police chief, adding that more than 20 people were taken to hospital. One of the people who died as a result of the strike was “an ambulance driver who came to the call”, according to a report.
Russia’s foreign ministry has warned that Moscow will not leave “unanswered” a UK plan to supply Ukraine with tank shells made with depleted uranium. “This decision will not remain without serious consequences both for Russian-British bilateral relations and at the international level,” it said on Wednesday. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Britain’s decision took the situation to new and dangerous levels.
The UK foreign secretary has said there is no “nuclear escalation” in the country’s decision to supply Ukraine with tanks shells made with depleted uranium. “They are not nuclear munitions. They are purely conventional munitions,” James Cleverly said, a day after Vladimir Putin warned the move would prompt a Russian response, as he accused the west of “beginning to use weapons with a nuclear component”.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, has said the risk of a nuclear conflict is at its highest level in decades. Russia was committed to keeping the world “safe and free” from the threat of nuclear war, he said, but added later that business could not continue as usual, given that Moscow was now “in a de facto state of open conflict” with Washington.
Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia was a “journey of friendship, cooperation and peace”, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson has said, as China’s president ended his three-day visit to Moscow. Wang Wenbin reiterated Beijing’s claims that it remained neutral in the Ukraine conflict and said China would “continue to play a constructive role in promoting a political settlement of the Ukrainian issue”, in an apparent reference to a 12-point “peace” proposal put forward by Beijing.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has said China is watching “very carefully” to see how Washington and the world respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If Russia was allowed to attack Ukraine with impunity, it would “open a Pandora’s box” for would-be aggressors and lead to a “world of conflict”, he told lawmakers at a US Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.
The International Monetary Fund, the global lender of last resort, has agreed a package of support for Ukraine of $15.6bn (£12.8bn). The loan, the first the Washington-based lender will make to a country at war, could represent one of the biggest tranches of financial support for Ukraine so far. It still needs to be signed off by the IMF’s executive board, a process that should conclude within weeks.
Zelenskiy made a surprise visit on Wednesday to Ukrainian troops near the frontline city of Bakhmut. During his visit, the president heard “reports on the operational situation and the course of hostilities on the frontline”, a statement from his office said. Zelenskiy, dressed in a dark sweatshirt and military khaki trousers, was seen handing out medals to soldiers he said were heroically defending their country’s sovereignty.
There is a possibility that the Russian assault on the town of Bakhmut is losing the limited momentum it had obtained, the UK’s Ministry of Defence said in its latest intelligence update. This could be happening because “some Russian MoD units have been reallocated to other sectors”, it said.
The Prince of Wales has travelled to Warsaw as part of a surprise two-day trip to Poland to thank British and Polish troops for their efforts supporting Ukraine, as well as to learn more about how the country has cared for displaced Ukrainian refugees. Prince William became the first member of the royal family to meet troops in Poland during a visit that was kept secret until after his arrival. He will also meet the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, while in the country.
Sweden’s parliament has formally approved a bill to allow the country to join Nato. Sweden and its neighbour Finland applied to join Nato in May 2022, abandoning decades of non-alignment after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The process has been held up by Turkey, which along with Hungary has yet to ratify the memberships. Membership in Nato “is the best way to safeguard Sweden’s security”, the Swedish foreign minister, Tobias Billström, said during the nearly seven-hour debate on Wednesday.
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Estonia’s prime minister, Kaja Kallas, has said Nato countries should be “prepared for a long confrontation” in Ukraine.
Writing on Twitter, she urged Nato countries to increase defence spending beyond the 2% threshold, arguing that 2% “must be the floor, not the ceiling”.
Russia has prepared for a long confrontation and so must we. #Estonia has increased its defence budget significantly, it will reach 3% of GDP by 2024.
— Kaja Kallas (@kajakallas) March 22, 2023
2% of GDP on defence spending must be the floor, not the ceiling. https://t.co/tx1fFZMo37
Her tweet came after the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said yesterday that only seven of the alliance’s 30 member countries met the current goal of spending 2% of GDP on defence in 2022.
Stoltenberg’s report for the year showed that Greece, the US, Lithuania, Poland, Britain, Estonia and Latvia met that target.
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