Closing summary
It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
Finland will become the 31st member of the world’s biggest military alliance on Tuesday, the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said. Stoltenberg said Turkey, the last country to ratify Finland’s membership, would hand its official texts to the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, on Tuesday. Stoltenberg said he would then invite Finland to do the same.
Stoltenberg’s announcement prompted a warning from Russia that it would bolster its defences near their joint border if Nato deployed any troops inside the country. “We will strengthen our military potential in the west and in the north-west,” Grushko said in remarks carried by the RIA Novosti state news agency.
Ukraine’s western allies have sent the country €65bn (£57bn) in military aid to help in its fight against Russia’s full-scale invasion, Stoltenberg said. He was speaking as Nato foreign ministers prepare to meet in Brussels on Tuesday to “discuss how we can step up our support, including by continuing to strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces”.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has paid tribute to the courage of nearly 400 villagers in north Ukraine who were held in a school basement under Russian occupation for 27 days before they were set free a year ago. The Ukrainian leader travelled to Yahidne on Monday, where he gave an emotive speech recalling how villagers were kept captive in a space of less than 200 sq metres during the first month of Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, will visit the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on Wednesday, an IAEA spokesperson said.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy is scheduled to visit Poland on Wednesday for talks with his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda. Zelenskiy will be accompanied by his wife, Olena Zelenska, during his first official visit to Warsaw since Russia’s invasion 13 months ago. Zelenskiy is also expected to hold talks with Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.
Poland has already delivered the first batch of Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, according to the Polish presidential office’s head of international policy, Marcin Przydacz. He did not specify how many jets had been transferred. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, last month said Warsaw would hand over the first four MiG-29 to Ukraine.
Ukraine has said Russian forces are “very far” from capturing the eastern town of Bakhmut and that fighting raged around the city administration building where the Wagner mercenary group claims to have raised the Russian flag. “Bakhmut is Ukrainian, and they have not captured anything and are very far from doing that to put it mildly,” Serhiy Cherevatiy, a spokesperson for the eastern military command said.
President Zelenskiy has said overnight the fighting in Bakhmut is “especially hot”. His comments came as the Wagner founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said his troops had raised a Russian flag on the city’s administrative building. However, there was no indication from Ukrainian officials that Bakhmut had fallen into Russian hands and Prigozhin has previously made premature claims about Wagner’s military progress in the city.
Russian police have arrested a woman suspected of delivering a bomb that killed a prominent pro-war Russian military blogger in a blast in a cafe in central St Petersburg on Sunday. Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was killed by a bomb blast as he hosted a discussion with other pro-war commentators at a cafe on the banks of the Neva River in the historic heart of the city. Police said they had identified a woman called Darya Trepova as the suspect and that she was arrested in a flat in St Petersburg after a search on Monday morning.
Evan Gershkovich, the US journalist arrested on espionage charges in Russia last week, has appealed against his detention through his lawyers, according to a report. The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said Gershkovich’s arrest was “of concern” and called for his “immediate release”. The US government is “pushing hard” for the release of Evan Gershkovich, the White House said on Monday.
Updated
Many people could have wanted to kill Vladlen Tatarsky, the pro-war Russian blogger who died in a bomb blast in a St Petersburg cafe on Sunday.
Tatarsky, whose real name is Maxim Fomin, was notorious for his vehement support for the invasion of Ukraine, where he regularly called for Russia to commit to a total war and advocated for extreme violence that included war crimes. “We’ll defeat everyone, we’ll kill everyone, we’ll loot whoever we need to, and everything will be just as we like it,” he said last year on camera after a Kremlin ceremony confirming the “annexation” of four Ukrainian regions.
A former coalminer from east Ukraine, Fomin was convicted of bank robbery and was serving a prison sentence in east Ukraine when Russian proxy forces launched their war against the government. Fomin claimed he then fled custody and joined the Russian-backed forces. Later, he became a blogger and moved to Moscow several years before Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in 2022. After the war began, he claimed to have joined a volunteer battalion and fought in Mariupol.
At the beginning of the war he became a member of a small but influential group of military bloggers who have been vocally supportive of the conflict, regularly posting updates citing troops on the frontlines or dangling scoops about potential offensives or big political decisions such as mobilisations.
At the same time, they have also been some of the most virulent critics of Russia’s military effort, condemning the army’s top brass as ineffective and lazy, and uncaring for the lives of Russian troops sent into battle.
