Closing summary
The time in Kyiv is just coming up to 9pm. Here is a roundup of the day’s main news:
António Guterres, the UN’s secretary general, called out Russia on Thursday for killing 136 children in Ukraine in 2022, adding its armed forces to a global list of offenders, according to a report to the UN security council seen by Reuters. Russian armed forces used 91 children as human shields, according to the report.
Ukraine and Moldova have made good progress on their journey to becoming members of the EU, a European commissioner has said. The European Commission reportedly made clear that Ukraine has a way to go to complete the seven steps the EU outlined last year when it granted Kyiv the status of a candidate for membership.
Speaking on the sidelines of a Ukraine reconstruction conference in London on Thursday, Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine’s prime minister, said his country’s counteroffensive would take time but he was optimistic about its success, AFP reported.
Russia fired cruise and ballistic missiles and strike drones at targets in Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday, causing damage in the cities of Odesa and Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian officials said.
Russia is 99.9% certain to quit a UN-brokered deal on the safe wartime passage of Black Sea grain in July as it no longer needs Ukrainian ports to export ammonia, a senior Ukrainian diplomat said.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, reportedly said Ukrainian spies believed Russia was plotting an incident to release radiation from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, an allegation denied by the Kremlin.
Russian-backed officials in southern Ukraine have accused Kyiv of using British-supplied long-range missiles to strike a bridge connecting Kherson province with the Crimean peninsula. A series of photos and videos circulating on Telegram on Thursday showed a large crater on the bridge, and debris littering the roads. There were no casualties reported.
Updated
Ukrainian forces are containing Russian forces on the eastern front and have not allowed “a single metre” of Russian advances, the deputy prime minister Hanna Maliar said on Thursday.
“Our defence forces continue to contain effectively advances by Russian troops,” Maliar wrote on the Telegram app, Reuters reports.
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