Evening summary
Good evening. It is now approaching 9pm in Kyiv. Here is a roundup of the main stories from today.
US Gen Mark Milley said in the Pentagon briefing that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is far from a failure but the fight ahead will be long. He said: “I think there’s a lot of fighting left to go and I’ll stay with what we said before: This is going to be long. It’s going be hard. It’s going to be bloody.”
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen Mark Milley spoke at a Pentagon briefing in Washington, where they praised Ukrainian people for their courage and reaffirmed their support. Austin said: “We’re following on the heels of a highly successful Nato summit in Vilnius last week, where many of our closest allies announced significant security packages for Ukraine’s defence.”
Ben Wallace, the outgoing UK defence secretary, said the war in Ukraine is “winnable”, arguing the Nato alliance “does function” as a deterrent against Russia at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change conference in London.
Arresting Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, would amount to a declaration of war on Russia, the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, wrote in court papers released on Tuesday as the country wrangles over hosting the Russian leader.
Russia’s parliament has extended the eligibility for military call-up by at least five years – in the case of the highest-ranking officers, up to the age of 70.
The head of USAid, Samantha Power, has accused Vladimir Putin of making a “life and death decision” affecting millions of the world’s poorest people by withdrawing from the year-old UN-brokered deal that let Ukraine export grain through the Black Sea, Jamie Wilson, Nick Hopkins and Shaun Walker report from Odesa for the Guardian.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said on Tuesday it plans to invest £2.5bn ($3.3bn) in army stockpiles and munitions “to improve fighting readiness”, as it “takes learnings from the war in Ukraine”.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, discussed with his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, ways of exporting Russian grain via routes “that would not be susceptible to Kyiv and the west’s sabotage”, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said on Tuesday that every missile fired by Russia at the Ukrainian port of Odesa was also the equivalent of firing a missile at people who are starving in the world.
A summit between European, Latin American and Caribbean leaders on Tuesday highlighted their differences over how to tackle Russia’s war in Ukraine. A handful of Latin American countries – diplomats cited Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela as the most adamant – were opposed to agreeing a text holding Moscow responsible for the conflict.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Tuesday it had carried out overnight strikes on two Ukrainian port cities in what it called “a mass revenge strike” a day after an attack on the Kursk Bridge, which it blamed on Kyiv. The ministry claiming thats it hit “facilities where terrorist acts against the Russian Federation were being prepared using crewless boats, as well as at the place of their manufacture at a shipyard near the city of Odesa”, and fuel depots in Mykolayiv.
Russia pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal on Monday, brokered by the UN and Turkey a year ago to alleviate a global food crisis by allowing Ukrainian grain to be exported safely. Moscow said the decision was final. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said Russia’s decision was “unconscionable”, while the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said he did not accept its explanations for why it had terminated the agreement, including the loss of Russian food markets.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the grain deal must continue and could operate without Russian participation. “Africa has the right to stability. Asia has the right to stability,” he said in his nightly video address.
Continuing to ship grain out of Ukrainian Black Sea ports without security guarantees from Russia would carry risks, because Ukraine uses those waters for military activities, the Kremlin said on Tuesday. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in his regular daily briefing that Moscow rejected US criticism of its withdrawal from the grain deal, and would continue supplying grain to poor countries.
Poland’s agriculture minister, Robert Telus, said Russia is using grain as ammunition.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak commented on Russia’s overnight attacks, saying: “The Russian night attack on Odesa and Mykolaiv with the use of rockets and kamikaze drones is more proof that the terrorist country wants to endanger the lives of 400 million people in various countries that depend on Ukrainian food exports.”
Kyiv reported a “complicated” situation in fighting in eastern Ukraine and success in parts of the south on Tuesday as it pressed on with its counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces. “The situation is complicated but under control [in the east],” Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukrainian ground forces, said on Telegram. He said Russia had concentrated forces in the direction of Kupiansk in the north-eastern region of Kharkiv, but Ukrainian troops were holding them back.
Both sides have achieved “marginal advances” in different areas over the past week, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update on the conflict.
Russian air defences and electronic countermeasure systems downed 28 Ukrainian drones over Crimea in the early hours of Tuesday, the RIA news agency has cited the Russian defence ministry as saying. The drone attacks caused no casualties or damages, the ministry said.
Russian state-owned media is reporting that Russian Federation security services claim to have detained a woman on suspicion of preparing “a terrorist attack” in the Yaroslavl region, to the north of Moscow.
Germany’s military has ordered several hundred thousand artillery shells in a deal with the manufacturer Rheinmetall as it works to replenish stocks dented by the war in Ukraine.
Thank you for following along. Come back tomorrow to read more of our live coverage.
Updated
Ukraine’s counteroffensive is far from a failure but the fight ahead will be long, hard and bloody, US Gen Mark Milley said in the Pentagon briefing.
He told reporters:
It is far from a failure … I think that it’s way too early to make that kind of call.
I think there’s a lot of fighting left to go and I’ll stay with what we said before: This is going to be long. It’s going be hard. It’s going to be bloody.
Updated
