Closing summary
It has gone 5pm in Kyiv and in Moscow. We will be closing this blog soon, but you can stay up to date on the Guardian’s Russia and Ukraine coverage here.
Here is a recap of today’s latest developments:
At least 14 people were killed and 61 were injured on Wednesday after three Russian missiles slammed into a downtown area of the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, hitting an eight-floor apartment building. Two children were among the 61 people injured, the emergency services said in its latest toll of casualties. “Three people were rescued from the rubble. People are likely still trapped under the rubble of the partially destroyed building,” the statement said.
A 25-year-old policewoman on sick leave was among those killed in Chernihiv after suffering a severe shrapnel injury, the interior minister announced. “Many multi storey buildings were damaged,” the regional governor Vyacheslav Chaus said on state run television. “Civilian infrastructure is damaged. Dozens of vehicles have been destroyed.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy blamed Russia for the attack on Chernihiv but also said the west should do more to help defend Ukraine’s skies. “This would not have happened if Ukraine had received sufficient air defence equipment and if the world’s determination to resist Russian terror had been sufficient,” he said in a social media post on X.
The Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba echoed Zelenskiy’s comments in a separate post on social media and suggested that Ukraine should enjoy the same cover from aerial attacks as Israel. “In the Middle East, we saw what reliable protection of human lives from missiles looks like,” he added, referring to Iran’s drone and missile barrage on Israel that was intercepted by western and Israeli forces.
Kuleba also thanked Germany for agreeing to supply Ukraine with another Patriot air defence system and said he would appeal to other countries at a G7 meeting this week for more weapons.
G7 foreign ministers will discuss support for a Ukrainian air defence system at their meeting in Capri on Wednesday, a German government spokesperson said.
According to the BBC, Russia’s military death toll in Ukraine has now passed 50,000. BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022. More than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of combat, according to the BBC’s findings, which it said Russia declined to comment on.
Kharkiv is at risk of becoming “a second Aleppo” unless US politicians vote for fresh military aid to help Ukraine obtain the air defences needed to prevent long-range Russian attacks, the city’s mayor has warned. Ihor Terekhov said Russia had switched tactics to try to destroy the city’s power supply and terrorise its 1.3 million residents by firing into residential areas, with people experiencing unscheduled power cuts for hours at a time.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Polish president Andrzej Duda on Wednesday in New York. The planned dinner meeting, confirmed by a person familiar with the matter according to the Associated Press, comes as European leaders prepare for the possibility that Trump might win the November election and return to the White House. “Today here is no more important partner for the Republic of Poland in international relations than the US, and this is exactly the context in which this meeting should be seen,” said the adviser, Małgorzata Paprocka.
Poland’s centrist prime minister Donald Tusk, a political opponent of Duda, was critical of the president for his willingness to meet Trump, describing the expected meeting as a form of meddling in the US election campaign. “But if Mr President actually meets with Mr Trump, we would expect him to raise the issue of clearly siding with the western world, democracy and Europe in this Ukrainian-Russian conflict,” Tusk added.
Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, says he has urged Xi Jinping to press Russia to end its “senseless” war in Ukraine and that the Chinese president has agreed to back a peace conference in Switzerland. Scholz said after a meeting with Xi in Beijing on Tuesday that “China’s word carries weight in Russia”.
Zelenskiy responded on X that China could help deliver a “just peace” for his country by playing an “active role” in the international conference. Xi, however, appeared to dismiss the meeting in Switzerland, saying efforts towards a peaceful resolution should be recognised by both sides and include equal participation by all parties. The peace conference in Switzerland is due to take place in June without Russia in attendance and Moscow has dismissed any such meeting as meaningless without its participation.
Russia banned entry to hundreds of Australian citizens, the Russian foreign ministry said on Wednesday. It said Moscow will indefinitely close entry to 235 municipal councillors for what it called an “anti-Russian agenda”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be invited to the 80th anniversary of the 1944 D-day landings in June, the French organisers have said. Some Russian representatives will be welcomed in recognition of the country’s wartime sacrifice, they added. Putin would have been unlikely to attend the Normandy event. He has rarely left Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, in part because of an international criminal court (ICC) warrant for his arrest that Moscow says it does not recognise.
The Ukrainian military says Russia has ramped up its illegal use of riot control agents on the front to try to clear trenches as it begins to make bigger advances in the east. Riot control agents such as teargas are banned on the battlefield by the international Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Russia and Ukraine are signatories.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that a draft law on “foreign agents” currently being debated by lawmakers in Georgia is being used by outside actors to stoke anti-Russian sentiment and should not be called Russian. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the situation was being used to “provoke anti-Russian sentiments” and that “it is unlikely that these impulses are being fed from within Georgia.”“They’re probably coming from the outside,” he told reporters, without elaborating. He said the Kremlin was closely watching developments.
Russia’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday it had expelled one Estonian embassy official working in Moscow in a retaliatory move. The foreign ministry said in a statement that the move was a response to what it called a baseless decision by Estonia to expel a Russian diplomat working in Tallinn.
Ukraine’s need for US aid is now acute, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based thinktank. “Ukraine cannot hold the present lines now without the rapid resumption of US assistance, particularly air defence and artillery that only the US can provide rapidly and at scale,” the ISW said in an assessment late on Tuesday.
Croatian voters are going to the polls on Wednesday in a high-stakes parliamentary election that could significantly change the country’s pro-western stance on issues including European support for Ukraine in its battle against Russia.
Updated
Russia’s military death toll in Ukraine passes 50,000, says the BBC
According to the BBC, Russia’s military death toll in Ukraine has now passed 50,000.
BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022. The BBC say its teams “combed through open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media” and that “new graves in cemeteries helped provide the names of many soldiers”.
More than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of combat, according to the BBC’s findings. It said in its report:
The overall death toll – of more than 50,000 – is eight times higher than the only official public acknowledgment of fatality numbers ever given by Moscow in September 2022.
The actual number of Russian deaths is likely to be much higher.
Our analysis does not include the deaths of militia in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk – in eastern Ukraine. If they were added, the death toll on the Russian side would be even higher.
Russia declined to comment, said the BBC.
