Closing summary
This blog is now closing. Below is a roundup of today’s events:
A Russian military transport plane has crashed in the border region of Belgorod, according to Russia’s defence ministry, killing all 74 people on board. The ministry said the aircraft was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoW who were to be swapped. The ministry added that onboard the Ilyushin Il-76 were also six crew and three Russian servicemen. The Russian military said all 74 people onboard had died.
Ukraine did not confirm or deny the downing of the Il-76 but the military released a statement which accused the Russian army of using military transport aircraft to deliver missiles to the Belgorod region. The statement followed a now retracted Ukrainskaya Pravda report, which claimed that the military had shot down an Il-76 jet which it believed to be carrying a shipment of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles en route to Belgorod this morning.
In Kyiv, there is skepticism about Russia’s claim that the plane was carrying 65 PoW. Anton Gerashchenko, a popular blogger and adviser to the internal affairs ministry, said that Russia’s version of events was unconvincing.
The UK defence secretary Grant Shapps said its allies need to “step up” the amount of military aid given to Ukraine. Writing in Politico, Shapps said: “Ukraine has done an unbelievable job of repelling its invader. It has retaken 50 per cent of the territory stolen by Russia, and opened up a maritime passage in the Black Sea. But Kyiv needs more support – and not just from the UK. Our fellow allies must step up too.”
At least 18 people were killed and more than 130 wounded in massive Russian airstrikes on Ukraine on Tuesday, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. The air raids mostly targeted the two largest cities: the capital, Kyiv, and Kharkiv in the east. Ukraine’s president said more than 200 sites were struck, including 139 dwellings.
Russia’s military is carrying out probing attacks with barrages of missiles and drones in an attempt to find weaknesses in Ukraine’s defences as US funding for security assistance is tied up in Congress, Celeste Wallander, a Pentagon assistant secretary of defence, has said.
The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said he had invited Sweden’s prime minister to visit and negotiate his country joining the Nato military alliance, a process that Hungary and Turkey have delayed. Turkey’s parliament, though, voted on Tuesday to accept Sweden as a Nato member.
Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, has made his first appearance since being hospitalised for cancer treatment – a stay he concealed from both the White House and Congress for several days. Austin spoke via video link at the opening of a meeting on military aid for Ukraine. “The security of the entire international community is on the line in Ukraine’s fight. I am more determined than ever to work with our allies and partners to support Ukraine and to get the job done,” Austin said.
Western allies aren’t supplying Ukraine with enough ammunition and air defence missiles, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has said in an interview with German media. Russian attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv on Tuesday “clearly show the need to provide more anti air defence systems, as well as more surface-to-air missiles”. As for the ground war, “insufficient quantities of artillery munitions has been a problem from the start”, he said.
Kuleba said he was still in talks with the German government about receiving Taurus cruise missiles, even after the lower house of the German parliament voted a week ago against delivering them. “We’ll never give up,” Kuleba said.
The finance minister of Germany has said it can’t keep up Ukraine’s defence capabilities on its own in the long term and that others will need to increase bilateral contributions.
20 Days in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov’s chronicle of the besieged Ukrainian city and the international journalists who remained there after Russia invaded, has been nominated for best documentary at the Oscars.
Poland and the Baltic states were calling for import bans on Russian aluminium and liquefied natural gas (LNG) for the European Union’s 13th package of sanctions against Moscow over its Ukraine invasion, a Polish official said.
Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, insisted life in the Ukrainian capital was “absolutely normal”, just hours after Russian missiles fell on Kyiv and a day before his first meeting with the Ukrainian prime minister.
Ukrainian military does not confirm or deny Il-76 downing but accuses Russian army of using military transport aircraft to deliver missiles
Ukraine’s military has released a statement in which it accused the Russian army of using military transport aircraft to deliver missiles to the Belgorod region in order to perform cross-border attacks in recent weeks.
The statement did not confirm or deny the downing of the Il-76 on Wednesday. But it followed the (now retracted) Ukrainskaya Pravda report, which claimed that the military had shot down an Il-76 jet which it believed to be carrying a shipment of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles en route to Belgorod this morning.
In the official statement, Ukraine’s military said that Russian forces had fired 19 missiles across the border from Belgorod into the Kharkiv region in the last week, including S-300 missiles (which are designed to be used against aircraft and are notoriously inaccurate against ground targets) and Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles.
The Ukrainian military also said that it had recorded an increase in military transport flights to Belgorod region at the same time as the intensity of the missile strikes against Kharkiv had risen.
“In order to reduce the missile threat, the Armed Forces of Ukraine not only control the airspace, but also closely monitor missile launch sites and logistics of their supplies, especially using military transport aircraft,” the military said. “With this in mind, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will continue to take measures to destroy delivery vehicles and control airspace to eliminate the terrorist threat, including in the Belgorod-Kharkiv direction.”
