Closing summary
It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has met with Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other key Ukrainian government officials in a surprise visit to Ukraine to reaffirm Washington’s support for Kyiv. Yellen said following talks with prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, that the US has provided nearly $50bn in security, economic and humanitarian assistance and announced another multibillion-dollar package to boost the country’s economy.
Belarusian anti-war partisans claim to have severely damaged a Russian military aircraft in what an opposition leader has called the “most successful diversion” since the beginning of the war. BYPOL, the Belarusian partisan organisation, said it had used drones to strike the Machulishchy airfield 12km from Minsk, severely damaging a Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs).
Russian forces have escalated shelling and infantry assaults in the Bilohorivka, Svatove-Kupiansk and Kreminna areas of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk province, according to the region’s governor Serhiy Haidai. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a video address early on Friday, said the situation in the east was “very difficult, painful” but that Ukrainian forces were “doing everything to withstand it”.
Ukraine’s ministry of defence claimed in total to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed, including nine over Kyiv. Air raid alerts sounded across Ukraine’s Kyiv region late on Sunday night as Kyiv’s regional military administration confirmed the country’s air defences were at work. Two emergency service workers were killed and three other people injured during a drone attack on Khmelnytskyi, according to city’s mayor.
Russia “will likely be concerned that unexplained explosions are occurring” in and around Mariupol, a location “at least 80km away from the frontline … [which] it had probably previously assessed as beyond the range of routine Ukrainian strike capabilities”, the UK’s ministry of defence has claimed in its latest daily intelligence briefing on the war.
The airline carrier Wizz Air has announced it will suspend flights to Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, from 14 March due to concerns about the safety of its airspace. In a statement, the company said it had taken the “difficult but responsible” decision to suspend flights because of the “high, but not imminent” risk in Moldova’s airspace.
Russia is paying “a great deal of attention” to China’s peace plan to end Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and its details will need to be analysed in detail, the Kremlin has said. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said any initiatives that might bring peace closer were worthy of attention, but that Russia was continuing to prosecute its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine and that, for now, he didn’t see any signs suggesting a peaceful resolution could be achieved.
The US is “confident” that China is considering providing lethal equipment to support Russia in Ukraine, according to the CIA director, William Burns. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Burns said he was “confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment” but noted “we also don’t see that a final decision has been made yet, and we don’t see evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment”.
A Ukrainian court has sentenced two captured Russian soldiers to prison for taking part in the shelling of residential areas in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) said. One of the soldiers received a 10-year sentence and the other has been jailed for nine years, the SBU said in a statement.
Poland has announced a joint initiative with the European Commission to trace Ukrainian children who have been abducted and taken to Russia during the ongoing war in Ukraine. The aim of the scheme is to track down the missing children and to “ensure those responsible are brought to justice”, Poland’s EU affairs minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk said. “We need to return the abducted children to Ukraine and punish russia for its crimes,” Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said.
A Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate has called for the swift creation of a special tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his associates for the crime of aggression, Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, told the Guardian that a speedy start to war crimes trials against the Russian president and soldiers it could have “a cooling effect” on atrocities committed by the Kremlin’s invading forces.
The UN chief, António Guterres, has warned that respect for human rights has gone into reverse, and called for a renewal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 75 years after its signing. Pointing to the war raging in Ukraine, and threats to rights from soaring poverty, hunger and climate disasters, António Guterres said the declaration was “under assault from all sides”. He said the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most massive violations of human rights” being witnessed in the world today.
Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, is due to visit Beijing on Tuesday for a meeting with Xi Jinping, in a high-profile trip symbolising the widening gulf between the US and China over the war in Ukraine. Xi’s meeting with Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, is seen internationally as a sign of where China’s sympathies lie.
Gleb Pavlovsky, a Russian political scientist and Vladimir Putin’s former adviser who later became one of his most prominent critics, has died at the age of 71, according to local reports. Pavlovsky had been an influential figure in Russian politics in the first decade of Putin’s rule, serving as the Russian president’s adviser and “political technologist”.
Vladimir Putin has given an award to actor Steven Seagal for international humanitarian and cultural work, a state decree published on Monday showed. Seagal, a frequent visitor to Russia, backed Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 as “very reasonable”, joined a pro-Kremlin party in 2021, and visited a Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine last summer, where he met with a Russian-backed separatist leader.
That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, and the Russia-Ukraine live blog today. Thank you for following. I’ll be back tomorrow.
Here are some of the latest images we have received from the news wires of the besieged town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
