We are now closing the blog. Here’s a summary of today’s events:
Three people were killed by shelling near the southern Ukrainian city of Berislav on Sunday morning, according to local officials. The regional military administration said Russian forces struck the village of Burgunka with “massive artillery fire” and that one of the shells hit the yard of a family home.
Ukrainian troops preparing for a Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region if the town of Bakhmut falls have described being outgunned and their fears of being “semi-encircled”.
The state body that manages Ukraine’s nuclear power plants has said two missiles fired from the Black Sea on Saturday came “dangerously close” to hitting a plant in the Mykolaiv region.
The US has said it believes China could be preparing to provide military aid to Russia, possibly including guns and other weapons.
Russia has sustained almost 143,000 casualties since the beginning of the war, according to the latest figures from the Ukrainian military.
The EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, has said the war could be over “in weeks” if the EU cannot increase its supply of ammunition to Ukraine. “We are in urgent war mode,” he said. “This shortage of ammunition has to be solved quickly.”
France has said it would deliver the AMX-10 light armoured vehicles it has promised to Ukraine “by the end of next week”.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, also said in an interview that he wants Russia to lose the war but he does not want to see it “crushed”.
The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, will travel to Kyiv on Monday to meet with President Zelenskiy, according to reports.
The amount of grain leaving Ukraine under a deal to keep food flowing to developing nations has dropped significantly in recent months, the body set up to monitor the shipments has said.
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, rejected calls to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs, telling German media the military alliance “has neither recommended nor supplied these kinds of weapons.”
The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said on Sunday he and President Joe Biden will discuss the possibility of increasing US troop presence in Poland and making it more permanent.
The Biden administration is planning to impose new export controls and a fresh round of sanctions on Russia, targeting its defence and energy sectors, financial institutions and several individuals, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday.
The Ukraine war will have cost the German economy around €160bn (£142bn), or about 4% of its gross domestic output, in lost value creation by the end of the year, the head of the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) said.
Russia said on Sunday that Ukraine was planning to stage a nuclear incident on its territory to pin the blame on Moscow before a United Nations meeting, without providing evidence for the accusation.
Suggestions by senior Ukrainian government ministers that the country’s military should be provided with cluster munitions received a cool reception among western allies at the Munich security conference.
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, rejected calls to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs, telling German media the military alliance “has neither recommended nor supplied these kinds of weapons”.
Cluster munitions are a type of weapon that split open mid-air to release smaller explosives over a wide area. They can cause indiscriminate harm to civilians and have been banned under an international convention signed by more than 100 countries.
On the sidelines of the conference, which concluded this afternoon, Ukraine’s calls for cluster munitions were widely discussed among attendees. For EU officials, however, the demand is particularly difficult since most European countries are parties to the convention.
Asked at the conference about the calls for cluster munitions, Germany’s foreign affairs minister, Annalena Baerbock, said the country’s military support for Ukraine would be guided by the treaty. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that within the German government “it is considered impossible that chancellor Olaf Scholz could allow something like this”.
The reaction follows comments made by Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Olexander Kubrakov, who suggested Ukraine should be allowed to use cluster munitions on its territory.
When asked about this on Saturday, the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, told reporters: “We understand that cluster ammunition is a debatable issue in world affairs. We are not party to the convention on the prohibition of cluster munitions. So legally there are no obstacles for that.”
“If we receive one, we will be using it exclusively against military forces of the Russian Federation,” he added.
Ukraine, like Russia and the US, has not joined the international convention on cluster munitions, which came into effect in 2010. The UN treaty prohibits under any circumstance the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of the weapons.
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