Good evening, we are now closing this blog but you can read all our Ukraine coverage here.
A summary of today's developments
President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia had no choice but to take into account the nuclear capabilities of Nato as the US-led military alliance was seeking the defeat of Russia. “In today’s conditions, when all the leading Nato countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television, according to Tass.
The west, Putin claimed, wants to liquidate Russia. “They have one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part – the Russian Federation,” Putin said, according to Tass. The west, he said, was an indirect accomplice to the “crimes” committed by Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military said that Russia conducted unsuccessful offensives near Yahidne over the past day, after Russia’s Wagner mercenary group claimed to have captured the village in eastern Ukraine near the focus on intense fighting. The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said in a morning update that Russia keeps concentrating its offensive efforts along the entire Bakhmut frontline, were Yahidne is located.
Two Russian rockets hit a house on the outskirts of Kramatorsk, one of the main towns in the Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk region, on Saturday afternoon. The rockets appear to have missed their target, falling on the side of a GP surgery, devastating the house next door as well as damaging houses around it. A Guardian team on the scene said the rockets shells were likely to have come from a Russian Smerch rocket launcher.
US president Joe Biden has said the prospect of China negotiating peace between Ukraine and Russia is “just not rational”. Speaking on ABC News about China’s peace plan, he said: “I’ve seen nothing [that] would indicate there’s something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia. The idea that China is gonna be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational.”
China has not moved towards providing lethal aid that would help Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, and the US has made clear behind closed doors that such a move would have serious consequences, White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday. “Beijing will have to make its own decisions about how it proceeds, whether it provides military assistance, but if it goes down that road, it will come at real costs to China,” Sullivan said in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union programme.
Russian online bank Tinkoff, run by TCS Group Holding, said it would suspend trading in euros from Monday after the imposition of a further set of EU sanctions. The EU agreed a 10th round of punitive measures on Friday to punish Russia for invading Ukraine. The package includes cutting off more banks, among them Tinkoff and the private Alfa-Bank, from the Swift global payments system, Reuters reports.
The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said it was up to Kyiv to decide when, and under what conditions, to enter talks with Moscow. He suggested the same was true for any decision on recapturing the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and a close ally of the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, will visit Beijing this week, China’s foreign ministry confirmed. Spokesperson Hua Chunying said Lukashenko was due to visit between Tuesday and Thursday, but gave no details about his agenda, the Associated Press reported.
Algeria will reopen its embassy in Kyiv one year after it was closed over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Algerian state television said on Sunday, citing a foreign ministry statement. “This decision falls within the framework of preserving the interests of the Algerian state and the interests of the national community in this country,” state TV quoted the foreign ministry statement as saying.
More than a third of British adults have donated to help the humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine, according to polling that reveals the vast majority of the public remain concerned about the conflict a year on. With charitable drives for those plunged into dire need by the war continuing, a poll commissioned by Christian Aid revealed that 37% of the adult population in the UK had made some kind of donation, while 81% said they remain concerned about the impact of the conflict.
Finance chiefs of the world’s largest economies have strongly condemned Moscow for its war on Ukraine, with only China and Russia itself declining to sign a joint statement on Saturday. India, which as chair of the G20 group of economies was hosting a meeting in the city of Bengaluru, was reluctant to raise the issue of the war, but western nations said they could not back any outcome that did not include a condemnation, Reuters reported.
Ukraine’s energy minister says the country has been able to amass some power reserves and that there will be no more outages to ration electricity if there are no new Russian strikes, after months of power cuts.
Updated
