Summary
Here’s a roundup of the key developments from the day:
Russia and Ukraine continue to dispute the circumstances surrounding the crash of a Russian military transport plane in the border region of Belgorod on Wednesday. The crash killed all 74 people onboard. Russia claims the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoW who were to be swapped, and that Ukrainian forces shot it down.
The black boxes from the plane have been delivered to a special laboratory in Moscow for analysis, Russian state media said. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called for full clarity over the crash, accusing Moscow of “playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners of war”.
The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has lost an appeal against his arrest, Russian state news agencies report. A court in Moscow extended the pretrial detention until the end of March, meaning the journalist will have spent at least a year behind bars in Russia.
The former Nato security general George Robertson has told Sky News that the Ukrainians are “fighting for us” and “we need to do more”. He said if Russia were to defeat Ukraine, the “rest of us” would then be in danger because Putin would be “fuelled by any success that he has in Ukraine”.
Ukraine has invited Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, to participate in peace talks, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s top adviser has said. Switzerland has agreed to hold the summit, which a number of world leaders will attend, but no venue or date has been set just yet.
In a letter to House Republicans, the speaker, Mike Johnson, warned that an immigration deal under consideration in the Senate may be “dead on arrival” in his chamber. The Republican leader’s statement bodes ill for the bargaining in the Senate, which is seen as crucial to unlocking GOP support for aid to Ukraine, as well as for Israel and Taiwan.
We are closing this liveblog now. Thanks so much for joining us.
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Finland’s leading presidential candidate has said foreign policy and security are “existential” issues for the Nordic country, as it prepares to head to the polls on Sunday for the first time since joining Nato.
Speaking on Friday at a breakfast event in Helsinki at a cafe named after him, Alexander Stubb, who was prime minister from 2014 to 2015, said he had thought he was finished with national politics. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had changed his mind.
Debates between the nine candidates hoping to take over from Finland’s two-term president Sauli Niinistö in March had been “very constructive”, said Stubb, of the centre-right National Coalition party. He said all candidates were qualified for the role.
He remains the frontrunner but polls have recently tightened between the top three candidates. Stubb’s lead over the former foreign minister and Green candidate Pekka Haavisto has slimmed and Jussi Halla-aho, of the far-right Finns party, is catching up in third. The top two candidates are expected to move to a second round.
Stubb, 55, said: “The debates have been very constructive and there’s a reason for that. For Finland, foreign policy, security policy, is existential, so it’s very consensual.” Discussions have centred on foreign policy, the president’s role as commander-in-chief and the candidates’ values. “So you get a lot of questions about Russia, Ukraine, Gaza, US-China, US elections, Finnish Nato membership,” he said.
After eight years in government – as highlighted by his campaign posters, which are emblazoned with the number in a big yellow font – Stubb said his return had been spurred by Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
“Having been in government for eight consecutive years and having held all the key portfolios, I felt in 2016 that I had very much done it for God and country, as they say. My plan was not to return to politics, or certainly not to national politics … but Putin’s attack on Ukraine changed it.”
After Finland joined Nato at record speed last April, he believes the country is entering “a new age in Finnish foreign policy”.
Read more here:
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Ukraine invites Xi Jinping to participate in peace talks
Ukraine has invited Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, to participate in peace talks, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s top adviser has said.
Switzerland has agreed to hold the summit, which a number of world leaders will attend, but no venue or date has been set just yet, Sky News reports.
Zelenskiy’s adviser Igor Zhovkva said:
We are definitely inviting China to participate in the summit, at the highest level, at the level of the president of the People’s Republic of China.
China’s participation will be very important to us. We involve our partners in the world so that they convey to the Chinese side how important it is to participate in such a summit.
Chinese involvement in the talks could be instrumental in ending the war. While Beijing has remained close to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has also previously offered to mediate in the conflict and said sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected.
Xi remains one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies of the major powers, and his views on a potential peace plan could prove key for the future of the conflict in Ukraine.
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Russia said it had recovered Ukrainian identity documents and tattooed body parts from the site where a Russian military plane that Moscow says was carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war crashed two days earlier near the Ukrainian border, Reuters reports.
Moscow has accused Kyiv of downing the Ilyushin Il-76 plane in Russia’s Belgorod region, killing 74 people on board, including 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers en route to be swapped for Russian PoWs.
Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied that its forces downed the plane and said there is no proof of who was on board. It has challenged details of Moscow’s account and called for an international investigation.
Russia’s state investigative committee said body parts were being collected and removed for genetic testing, and some of them bore distinctive tattoos like those worn by captured Ukrainians that Russia had interrogated.
It said the evidence collected also included “documents of Ukrainian servicemen who died in the disaster, confirming their identities, as well as accompanying documents from the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia”.
Russia has sole access to the crash site. Reuters could not independently verify its account of what happened and what evidence had been recovered. On Thursday the investigative committee said preliminary findings showed the plane was struck by a surface-to-air missile fired from Ukraine.
Ukraine has rejected a Russian assertion that it was forewarned that a plane carrying Ukrainian POWs would be flying over Belgorod region at that time.
It has also pointed to discrepancies on a purported list of the names of the 65 Ukrainians that was published by Russian media, saying some of these were soldiers who had already returned in a previous swap.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was not aware any official list had been published. He told reporters he had no information on what would happen to the body remains and whether they would be handed to Ukraine.
Asked if Russia would provide the UN security council and other international organisations with evidence that Ukraine shot down the plane, Peskov said:
I have nothing to add yet. Investigators are working, decisions will be made after the investigators receive all the necessary information.
Russia state media said the black boxes from the plane had been delivered to a special defence ministry laboratory in Moscow and investigators were already working on them.
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Here are some of the latest images to come out of Ukraine on the wires:
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Suspilne reports a policeman was wounded during the morning shelling of Kupiansk. It reported residential houses were damaged in the attack. The policeman has been hospitalised it said, citing regional authorities.
Reuters reports that Russia’s new generation Zircon hypersonic missile will need more testing before it can enter service. The director of NPO Mashinostroyeniya, the rocket design bureau behind the missile, was quoted by Tass as saying: “It was not a quick procedure” and would involve “a certain amount of testing”.
The sea-based missiles have a reported range of 900km and travel several times the speed of sound which would make it hard to defend against them.
China and the US have also been developing the technology, which Russia claims it has tested in the Atlantic Ocean.
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In Russia, Tass reports that Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has claimed that Ukraine’s alleged involvement in the plane crash over the Belgorod region earlier this week was due to Kyiv’s desire to draw the world’s attention back towards the conflict in Ukraine.
She said:
By committing such atrocities, the Kyiv regime hopes to fuel the fading interest of the world community in the Ukrainian crisis, to encourage its sponsors not only to maintain, but also to increase the volume of financial assistance and arms supplies.
Ukrainian officials on Thursday did not explicitly deny shooting down the aircraft but said they could not confirm that Ukrainian soldiers on their way to a prisoner exchange were onboard the plane.
The US is disappointed Hungary’s ratification of Sweden joining Nato is taking so long, Washington’s ambassador has said, warning that Budapest is “really alone” and that the Hungarian government is pursuing a “foreign fantasy” instead of foreign policy.
After months of delays, Turkey’s parliament approved Sweden’s Nato membership this week. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, signed it off on Thursday, leaving Hungary as the only country in the 31-member alliance that has yet to ratify the Swedish bid.
While the Hungarian government formally supports Sweden’s accession, the country’s parliament has avoided voting on the matter, fuelling frustration among Nato allies and raising questions about the motivations of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
The Hungarian leader routinely criticises his western allies and has been nurturing relationships with Moscow and Beijing.
In an interview at the US embassy in Budapest on Thursday afternoon, the US ambassador, David Pressman, said:
An alliance is only as strong as the commitments that we make to each other and the commitments that we keep.
I think that it’s important that the Hungarian government live up to its commitment, and its commitment has been that it will not be the last ally to ratify Sweden’s accession.
Keeping your word is obviously an important element of trust in any relationship.”
Asked whether Hungary had presented any demands, Pressman said:
The United States is unaware of what is causing the delay by the Hungarian government.
And he was blunt about Washington’s position.
We’re disappointed that this has taken so long. And we look forward to Hungary living up to the commitment it’s made to the United States and to its other allies.
The ambassador also underscored Budapest’s deepening diplomatic isolation, beyond the issue of Sweden’s Nato accession.
“Hungary is really alone – and it doesn’t need to be,” he said, citing Hungarian government decisions such as blocking EU financing for Ukraine, holding talks with Vladimir Putin and resisting efforts to diversify away from Russian energy as “worrying signs”.
Read the full story here:
Three lions kept in captivity in Ukraine arrived at a wildlife park in France on Friday, rescued from the war-ravaged country, an AFP reporter said.
Atlas, a male, and lionesses Luladja and Queen – all three around two years old – arrived early in the day at the Auxois park in Burgundy, eastern France after a journey of nearly 90 hours across Europe.
Their rescue is the latest effort by animal protection organisations to save big cats suffering from the upheaval of Russia’s war against Ukraine and from human exploitation.
The Auxois park, which keeps around 500 animals, already has a lioness, said its director, Geoffrey Delahaye.
At first, the new arrivals will be kept in large enclosures in the 40-hectare park area, he said, to give them the chance to discover their new environment gradually.
“We will give them time to find their bearings,” Delahaye said.
Charlotte von Croy, in charge of emergency rescues at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), a US non-profit organisation said there were probably around 10 big cats remaining in Ukraine, where keeping felines in private homes remains legal.
IFAW has rescued 13 big cats from Ukraine so far, taking them to the United States, Poland, Belgium, Spain and France.
Owners are supposed to keep them in large enclosures but that rule is ignored “in 99 percent of cases”, Von Croy said.
“These big cats are not only another victim of the Russian invasion but also suffered from human exploitation,” IFAW’s website quoted Natalia Popova of Wild Animal Rescue as saying after an earlier rescue.
Here are some of the latest images coming out of Ukraine:
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UN nuclear watchdog chief, Rafael Grossi, will visit Ukraine, including its capital and the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), the week after next, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Friday.
“DG (director general) Grossi is expected to visit Ukraine including Kyiv and the ZNPP the week of 5 February,” an IAEA spokesman said in a statement.
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The Kremlin on Friday denied a Bloomberg report that Vladimir Putin was “putting out feelers” to the United States for possible talks on ending the war in Ukraine and might consider dropping key demands on Ukraine’s security status, Reuters reports.
The Bloomberg report said Putin was “testing the waters” on whether Washington was ready to engage in talks, and had reached out to the US via indirect channels.
It cited two people close to the Kremlin as saying Putin “may be willing to consider dropping an insistence on neutral status for Ukraine and even ultimately abandon opposition to eventual Nato membership – the threat of which has been a central Russian justification for the invasion”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked by reporters about the story, and specifically whether Moscow was really ready to give up its demands on neutrality and Nato.
Peskov said:
No, this is a wrong report. It absolutely does not correspond to reality.
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'We need to do more' to support Ukrainian people, says former Nato security general
Former Nato security general Lord Robertson has told Sky News the Ukrainians are “fighting for us” and “we need to do more”.
Robertson said:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has completely tipped up the order that we’ve grown used to. If he gets away with swallowing up a country of 44 million people, right in the very heart of Europe, will he really stop?
He added that the “rest of us” would then be in danger because Putin would be “fuelled by any success that he has in Ukraine”.
He continued:
So they’re fighting for us and that’s why I believe that we need to be ramping up the production of weapons and ammunition in this country in order to make sure that they get the equipment that they require at this time.
They’re fighting for us and that’s why we need to do more.
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Two Russian citizens have been arrested for passing information about the country’s military to Ukraine, Moscow’s FSB security service said.
Russia has arrested several of its own citizens it says have worked with Ukraine or funded the Ukrainian army since Moscow launched its full-scale military offensive in February 2022.
The FSB said on Friday it had arrested two men in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don on treason charges – crimes that carry up to 20 years in prison.
The FSB, using Moscow’s preferred language for its military campaign, said:
According to an investigation, they proactively established contact with a representative of the Ukrainian security services.
In the course of their communications, they agreed to collect and transmit information about units of the Russian armed forces taking part in the special military operation.
It alleged the pair were paid for providing information on the location of military equipment and personnel.
Rostov-on-Don is the command headquarters for Russia’s offensive on Ukraine.
The city is located on the Sea of Azov and is fewer than 100km (60 miles) from the border with Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions – two of the four regions that Moscow claims to have annexed.
The death toll from Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv has risen to 11, officials said on Friday.
In one of the largest waves of aerial bombardments in weeks, more than 100 people were injured and at least 18 killed after Russian missiles struck across Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv and north-eastern Kharkiv, early on Monday.
The Kharkiv prosecutor’s office said on Friday that a 61-year-old woman succumbed to injuries, taking the number killed in just that city to 11, AFP reports.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed a forceful response.
Separately, Ukrainian authorities in the Donetsk region – part of which is under Russia’s control – said a total of six people were injured in Russian strikes during the course of Thursday.
A person was also injured in Kherson by an S-300 missile attack, the southern region’s governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Friday.
He posted photos on social media showing damage to a high-rise residential building and houses in the city, which was under the control of Russian forces for much of 2022 after being captured in the first days of the war.
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Wall Street Journal reporter accused of espionage in Russia loses appeal against arrest
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has lost an appeal against his arrest, Russian state news agencies report.
The 32-year-old United States citizen was arrested on espionage charges in March last year.
A court in Moscow extended the pretrial detention until the end of March, meaning the journalist will spend at least a year behind bars in Russia.
US consul general, Stuart Wilson, attended the hearing at Lefortovo district court, which took place behind closed doors because authorities say details of the criminal case against the American journalist are classified, Associated Press reports.
In video shared by state news agency Ria Novosti, Gershkovich was shown listening to the ruling, standing in a court cage wearing a hooded top and light blue jeans. He was pictured a short time later walking towards a prison van to leave the court.
Gershkovich was detained while on a reporting trip to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, about 2,000km (1,200 miles) east of Moscow.
Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that the reporter, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”
Gershkovich and the Journal deny the allegations, and the US government has declared him to be wrongfully detained. Russian authorities haven’t detailed any evidence to support the espionage charges.
The Russian foreign ministry has said it will consider a swap for Gershkovich only after a verdict in his trial. In Russia, espionage trials can last for more than a year.
Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be charged with espionage in Russia since 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for US News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB. Gershkovich is being held at Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, notorious for its harsh conditions.
Analysts have said that Moscow may be using jailed Americans as bargaining chips after US-Russian tensions soared when Russia sent troops into Ukraine. At least two US citizens arrested in Russia in recent years, including WNBA star Brittney Griner, have been exchanged for Russians jailed in the US.
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The black boxes from a Russian Il-76 military transport plane that crashed near the Ukrainian border on Wednesday have been delivered to a special laboratory in Moscow for analysis, Russian state media said.
Experts have already started work on recovering flight data from the boxes, they said.
Russia has accused Kyiv of downing the large military transport plane which it says was carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war to an exchange on Wednesday. The crash killed all 74 people on board.
Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied that it hit the plane but said Moscow had created a “deliberate threat to the life and safety” of its PoWs by failing to warn Kyiv to deconflict the airspace before the swap.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called for full clarity over the crash, accusing Moscow of “playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners of war”.
Ukraine aid deal in US Senate under threat
Bipartisan US Senate talks on a border security deal that some have set as a condition for further Ukraine aid are under threat.
“We’re at a critical moment, and we’ve got to drive hard to get this done. And if we can’t get there, then we’ll go to plan B,” senator John Thune, the chamber’s No 2 Republican, told reporters on Thursday.
“For now, at least, there are still attempts being made to try and reach a conclusion that would satisfy a lot of Republicans,” Thune added.
Failure to strike a deal would have global implications, with the Pentagon warning that Ukrainian soldiers on the frontlines of its grinding war with Russia risk running out of ammunition. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said the “future of the war in Ukraine” and the “security of our western democracy” depend on Congress reaching an agreement.
Punchbowl News reported that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans in a private meeting that the time and political will to pass a bipartisan border deal were running out, and that Republicans should not undermine Trump’s intention to focus his White House campaign on immigration.
However, McConnell emphasised his commitment to a border deal and Ukraine aid during a Republican lunch on Thursday, according to lawmakers who attended.
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Welcome and summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the war in Ukraine.
A US Senate deal to secure further aid to Ukraine is in danger of collapsing, according to lawmakers.
Funding for Kyiv has been tied to policies to address the flow of migrants across the US-Mexico border. But efforts to deal with the issue has recently encountered growing opposition among Republicans aligned with Donald Trump.
We’ll have more on this shortly, first here’s a round-up of the day’s other key events:
Russia and Ukraine continue to dispute the circumstances surrounding the crash of a Russian military transport plane in the border region of Belgorod on Wednesday. The crash killed all 74 people onboard. Russia claims the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoW who were to be swapped, and that Ukrainian forces shot it down. Ukrainian officials on Thursday did not explicitly deny shooting down the aircraft but said they could not confirm that Ukrainian soldiers on their way to a prisoner exchange were onboard the plane. Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, told Reuters the passenger list shared in Russian media of Ukrainian prisoners of war had discrepancies in it. “We found Ukrainian citizens in the list who have already been previously exchanged,” he said.
Andrey Kartapolov, who heads Russia’s Duma defence committee, told lawmakers on Thursday: “The Ukrainian side was officially warned, and 15 minutes before the plane entered the zone they were given complete information.” Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesperson, Andriy Yusov, insisted that Kyiv had not received either a written or verbal request from Russia to secure airspace around the area of Belgorod, and that two other Russian military transport planes, an An-26 and an An-72, were simultaneously in the airspace.
A Moscow court has jailed Igor Girkin, a prominent ultra-nationalist critic of Vladimir Putin. A former officer for Russia’s FSB security service, Girkin was arrested last summer in his apartment and charged with “calls for extremism” after months of public criticism in which he accused Putin of failing to pursue the war in Ukraine with enough vigour.
Darya Trepova, 26, has been jailed for 27 years for delivering a bomb that exploded in the hands of a pro-war military blogger last year, killing him on the spot. The Russian woman was convicted by a St Petersburg court of charges including terrorism in connection with the death of Vladlen Tatarsky. He was killed by a bomb concealed inside a statuette that Trepova had presented to him as a gift during a talk he was giving in a St Petersburg cafe.
Several major Ukrainian state organisations reported cyber attacks on their systems, in the latest wave that a source close to the government blamed on Russian intelligence. Ukraine’s state-run energy company Naftogaz said one of the data centres had been hit by a “large-scale cyberattack”.
The Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly (Pace) in Strasbourg has unanimously adopted a resolution about the fate of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred and deported by Russia. It calls on national parliaments to adopt resolutions “recognising these crimes as genocide” and asks the international community to collaborate with Ukraine to trace and repatriate missing children. The international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant in March 2023 for Vladimir Putin for overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children.
Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, visited Kyiv, while Vladimir Putin was in Russia’s Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Lithuania. The Kremlin said the visit had not been intended as a message to Nato members.
Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has responded to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán wanting more talks between the two nations over Sweden’s application to join Nato by suggesting the pair meet in Brussels. Orbán had extended an invitation for the discussion to take place in Budapest. The speaker of Hungary’s parliament, László Kövér, has said there is no urgency to resolve the situation, and that attempts by opposition parties to convene an emergency session of parliament to debate it are likely to fail.
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