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.
Russia’s suspension of participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New Start, has not yet come into force, according to a US official.
The assistant secretary for the US bureau of arms control, verification, and compliance, Mallory Stewart, said she expected treaty notifications will cease once Russia’s suspension is finalised.
Speaking at an event at Brookings Institution, reported by CNN, she said:
The suspension hasn’t been officially affected yet in the sense that we’re still receiving notifications, as recently as today, under the treaty, regular notifications.
But we expect that as soon as that suspension has been formalised, that those will stop.
Vladimir Putin announced Russia will halt its participation in New Start, the last major remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the US, in a speech last week devoted to the one-year anniversary of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian leader claimed the US wanted “to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities”.
However, the Russian foreign ministry later said Moscow intended to continue abiding by the restrictions outlined in the treaty on the number of warheads it can have ready.
The US is “trying to follow up” with the Russians “to truly understand what else could be included in the suspension, and what could be continued”, Stewart said. She added:
Right now we expect it will just be the launch notifications under that 1988 agreement, and that they said they’ll abide by the actual numerical limitations.
Updated
Earlier we reported that the European Commission is launching a joint initiative with Poland to trace Ukrainian children who have been abducted and taken to Russia during the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The Commission’s spokesperson, Dana Spinant, has tweeted about the initiative, which she said would be unveiled in the coming days.
Russian forces have sent thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, Spinant said in a news conference. She said:
The abduction of Ukrainian children is a great social problem, a tragedy and a crime.
The aim of the initiative is “to join forces to collect evidence that the abducted children can be found and those responsible for the crime are brought to justice”, she said.
Russian forces have abducted and sent thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia. It is a tragedy and a crime.
— Dana Spinant (@DanaSpinant) February 27, 2023
The Commission is launching an initiative with Poland, under the leadership of President @vonderleyen and PM @MorawieckiM,
to collect evidences and find the children⤵️ pic.twitter.com/bZHW6hHhys
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.
It said:
Wizz Air has been closely monitoring the security situation in Moldova and has been constantly in contact with various local and international authorities and agencies to ensure the highest level of safety and security of operations.
The safety of passengers and crew remains Wizz Air’s number one priority, and as a result of recent developments in Moldova and the high, but not imminent, risk in the country’s airspace, Wizz Air has taken the difficult but responsible decision to suspend all flights to Chisinau starting on March 14.
It said it would lay on extra flights from the Romanian city of Iasi as replacements.
Earlier this month, Moldova temporarily closed its airspace for several hours to investigate reports of a balloon-like object in the sky, a day after the small east European country accused Russia of plotting to bring down its government.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also posted about his meeting with Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary, in Kyiv today.
Zelenskiy described the meeting as “important,” writing in a Telegram post that the US has been “powerfully supporting” Ukraine since the invasion not just with weapons but with financial aid.
He added:
It is necessary to further strengthen sanctions to deprive Russia of the ability to finance the war.
US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has posted a photo of her meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during her surprise visit to Kyiv.
America will “continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes”, Yellen wrote on Twitter.
The U.S. will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes. I commend @ZelenskyyUa for his leadership, and thank him for our discussion on support from the U.S. and allies – including the announcement today of the transfer of the first $1.25B in U.S. support this year. pic.twitter.com/kHafuGjinR
— Secretary Janet Yellen (@SecYellen) February 27, 2023
In a private meeting with Zelenskiy late in the afternoon, Yellen commended him “for his leadership and resolve in the face of Russia’s illegal and unprovoked war”, the US Treasury said.
The Treasury said she welcomed Zelenskiy’s actions to strengthen governance and address corruption – actions needed to ensure that US economic aid is being spent responsibly.
Updated
Here are some images we have received from the news wires of the US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, in Kyiv.
US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen makes surprise visit to Ukraine
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, flanked by sandbags at the Ukrainian cabinet ministers’ office, told the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal:
America will stand with Ukraine as long as it takes.
Following @POTUS’s visit to Ukraine, I'm in Kyiv to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to Ukraine, discuss ways we can continue our support – including through economic assistance – and pay tribute to the bravery of the Ukrainian people a year after Russia's unprovoked invasion. pic.twitter.com/avJaabavX7
— Secretary Janet Yellen (@SecYellen) February 27, 2023
In a phone briefing with reporters, she said Russia should bear the costs of damage caused by its invasion of Ukraine, but there are “significant legal obstacles” to fully seizing the $300bn (£249bn) in Russian central bank assets frozen by sanctions.
She said the US and its allies were discussing strategies to ensure that Russia pays for the devastation that its war, with estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars and growing every day.
Yellen also said Washington would study Kyiv’s calls to impose sanctions on Russia’s nuclear energy sector, but needed to be “mindful” of the potential consequences of such an action on western allies. She said:
We want to deprive Russia of revenue. We also need to look at potential consequences of the sanctions for ourselves and our partners.
She also announced the transfer of the first $1.25bn (£1.04bn) from the latest, $9.9bn (£8.23 bn) tranche of economic and budget assistance from Washington.
Shmyhal, speaking through an interpreter, said he and Yellen discussed further US sanctions on Russia aimed at weakening its economy and military and “confiscating frozen Russian assets and putting them to the benefit of the recovery of Ukraine”.
🇺🇸 is among the leaders in providing financial support to 🇺🇦. We spoke with @Secylllen today about supporting 🇺🇦's rapid recovery, military risks, sanctions pressure, and the seizure of frozen russian assets. We appreciate the solidarity of the US government and 🇺🇸 people with 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/yrXetu6Iaw
— Denys Shmyhal (@Denys_Shmyhal) February 27, 2023
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmtryo Kuleba, has accused Russia of the “genocidal crime” of “stealing” Ukrainian children, claiming that it is “probably the largest forced deportation in modern history”.
Kuleba, in a video address at an event on the sidelines of the UN human rights council, said:
The most chilling crime is that Russia steals Ukrainian children.
Kyiv has collated thousands of reports of its children being forcibly deported to Russia and has called for these deportations to be investigated as a war crime.
Summary of the day so far
It’s 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
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”.
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. The nearby northern city of Chernihiv also reported shooting down Iranian-made Shahed drones, according to its regional governor, Vyacheslav Chaus.
Ukraine’s ministry of defence claimed in total to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed, including nine over Kyiv. 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.
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.
Good afternoon from London, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong still here with all the latest from Ukraine. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.
Updated
Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and close ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, 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.
US officials spent the weekend reiterating their concerns that Beijing is considering sending lethal weapons to Russia, amid China’s attempts to position itself as a peacemaker and deny that it would provide arms to Moscow.
Speaking to ABC News on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser, said the US was “watching closely” for any such shipment, which Beijing “hadn’t taken off the table” as a possibility.
William Burns, the director of the CIA, said in an interview with CBS News on Sunday that the US was “seriously concerned should China provide lethal equipment to Russia”.
“We don’t have evidence of a final decision to do that … all we’re trying to emphasise is the importance of not doing that,” Burns said.
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.
Szynkowski vel Sęk told reporters at a Saturday press conference:
The whereabouts of many of these children are unknown. Estimates vary widely, but even the most restrained ones speak of at least six thousand cases of documented child theft.
The scheme will involve “investigative activities to collect specific evidence” of abductions and “establish a mechanism allowing the problem to be dealt with”, he said.
Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said Kyiv was grateful to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki. Posting to Twitter today, Shmyhal said:
We need to return the abducted children to Ukraine and punish russia for its crimes.
.@EU_Commission and Poland launch an initiative to find children illegally abducted from #Ukraine by russia. We are grateful to @vonderleyen and @MorawieckiM. We need to return the abducted children to Ukraine and punish russia for its crimes.
— Denys Shmyhal (@Denys_Shmyhal) February 27, 2023
A US-backed report published earlier this month said Russia has held at least 6,000 Ukrainian children – likely many more – in sites in Russian-held Crimea and Russia whose primary purpose appears to be political re-education.
Updated
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has given an award to actor Steven Seagal for international humanitarian and cultural work, a state decree published on Monday showed.
Reuters reports the decree said the 70-year-old actor had been given Russia’s Order of Friendship. There was no immediate reaction from Seagal.
The decree mentioned Seagal’s work as a special representative of Russia’s foreign ministry for humanitarian ties with the United States and Japan.
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.
Ukraine in 2017 banned Seagal from entering for five years on national security grounds. Putin presented him with a Russian passport in Moscow in 2016.
Updated
Russian state-owned news agency Tass reports that in Sevastopol in Crimea, Russian security services claim to have detained two suspects accused of being recruited by Ukrainian secret services to “transfer information for a monetary reward about the location of objects of the ministry of defence of the Russian Federation, the leakage of which abroad could damage the country’s defense capability”.
Tass reports that the two have been charged with treason, and could face up to 20 years in prison. They have initially been detained for two months.
Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014, in a move not widely internationally recognised.
Updated
A planned concert by the subversive Slovenian industrial rock band Laibach in Ukraine has been cancelled after the group angered Ukrainians by remarks interpreted to suggest that Kyiv was a client state fighting a war for its western masters, AP reports.
The group was scheduled to play Bel Etage Music Hall on 31 March, and claimed they were to be the first foreign group to perform a full concert in Kyiv since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
They said the concert aimed to show support for the Ukrainian people during the war, but organisers said its remarks caused “controversy” and discord, forcing the cancellation.
In remarks to the Guardian published last week, the group lamented the conflict in Ukraine as “a cynical proxy war for the geostrategic interests of the superpowers and financial capital (of the military industry, etc)”.
The group’s statement was compared by many Ukrainians with Russian state propaganda that portrays the invasion as a conflict with Nato and reduces Ukraine to a puppet state of the west, according to Slovenia’s STA news agency.
In a Facebook post late on Sunday, the Bel Etage Music Hall said:
While the team showed support for Ukraine and Ukrainians and condemned the Russian regime, a large part of the audience came out categorically against Laibach’s visit.
It added:
In order to prevent the unnecessary division of Ukrainians into different camps and to eliminate the cause of discord, we have decided to cancel the Laibach concert at Bel Etage.
Laibach told STA they were “categorically asked to declare that all Russians are bad and that all Russian art is worthless, which of course they did not agree to do”.
In a statement on Facebook, the group said “to all those who doubt our views, let us therefore once again make it very clear that Russia is the main aggressor in this clash of destructive political and geostrategic interests”.
Updated
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.
The men were not named in the statement, but it said both “took an active part in the storming of Ukrainian cities on the Eastern Front” and were captured last year.
It said one of the soldiers had started fighting for Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and fought for the Russian army in the Bakhmut area of eastern Ukraine last year.
The other was in charge of Russian troops that shelled the eastern cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine, and was captured along with a number of his subordinates, it said.
The statement said:
As a result of investigative actions, indisputable evidence on the guilt of two more militants who joined the ranks of the occupation groups of the aggressor country at the beginning of the full-scale invasion was collected.
The SBU said both soldiers were found guilty under laws on the encroachment on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine, and on participation in paramilitary or armed formations not provided for by law.
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.
He died after a “serious illness”, Simon Kordonsky, a professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, told the Vedomosti business daily on Monday.
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”, the Moscow Times reports.
Political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky has died.
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) February 27, 2023
Gleb Pavlovsky was the founder and head of the Effective Policy Fund, which developed Vladimir #Putin's 2000 presidential campaign. Later he became a critic of the #Russian government. pic.twitter.com/8f5lQlX5Xv
He founded the Effective Policy Foundation, a political strategy firm that worked on the presidential campaigns of Boris Yeltsin, Putin and Viktor Yanukovych, among others.
He was instrumental in the development of Russia’s “managed democracy” that saw Putin’s rivals marginalised, exiled or jailed. He also played the role of a spin doctor, hosting a weekly political segment on Russian state television in the mid-2000s.
He was sacked from the presidential administration in 2011, reportedly for backing the then president Dmitry Medvedev’s re-election over Putin’s return to the presidency.
After leaving the Kremlin, he became an outspoken critic of Russia’s top leadership. In an interview with the Financial Times published last February, said:
Putin’s used to being lucky. That’s very dangerous for a gambler, because he starts believing fate is on his side. When you play Russian roulette, you feel that God is on your side until the shot rings out.
Updated
Russia escalating shelling and infantry assaults in Luhansk, says governor
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.
Haidai, in remarks to Ukrainian state television and quoted by Reuters, said:
There is no fleeing, our units do not leave territory. Moreover, there is success in certain sectors. They are advancing, they can deoccupy areas. Of course, everything can change at any moment.
He added:
On the other hand, western offensive heavy equipment is on the way and therefore in any week the military command can conduct an operation following the same plan as they did in the Kharkiv region.
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”.
Updated
Here are some images that have been sent to us from the news wires of Lyman, a key eastern city that was recaptured by Ukrainian troops in October.
Russia paying 'a great deal of attention' to China’s peace plan, says Kremlin
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.
Beijing has called for peace talks while urging all parties to avoid nuclear escalation and end attacks on civilians, in a 12-point position paper on Ukraine that was released on Friday, on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said any initiatives that might bring peace closer were worthy of attention.
He told reporters during a regular briefing:
We are paying a great deal of attention to the plan of our Chinese friends. Of course, the details need to be painstakingly analysed taking into account the interests of all the different sides. This is a very long and intense process.
He added 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.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has cautiously welcomed Beijing’s peace plan but said it would be acceptable only if it led to Vladimir Putin pulling his troops out from all occupied Ukrainian territory.
Western leaders are sceptical about the proposal, and argue that Beijing does not have the international credibility to act as a mediator.
Hello everyone, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong taking over the Russia-Ukraine live blog from Martin Belam. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.
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).
“One of the nine Awacs of the Russian aerospace forces worth $330m (was destroyed),” said a statement attributed to BYPOL.
“These were drones. The participants of the operation are Belarusians. (They have attained) ‘Victory’ and are now safely outside the country. Everyone has escaped,” said one statement attributed to Aliaksandr Azarau.
The plane “definitely won’t fly anywhere”, the group added.
According to some reports, the aircraft was hit by munitions dropped by two drones. A second munition reportedly hit close to the cockpit. “The front and middle section of the aircraft were damaged, as well as avionics and a radar antenna,” said a report attributed to BYPOL.
The damage to the aircraft has not been independently confirmed, although both Russian and Belarusian military bloggers have reported explosions on Sunday at the airfield. One also confirmed “damage to a Russian military transport plane”.
China has derided US sanctions on Chinese companies, as part of its targeting of the Russian private mercenary Wagner group and its affiliates, describing them as “illegal” and accusing the US of “outright bullying and double standards”.
The sanctions “have no basis in international law or authorisation from the Security Council, and are typical illegal unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction”, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing.
The measures were “seriously harming China’s interests” and China “strongly rejects and deplores that and has lodged solemn complaints with the US side”, Mao said. She added:
While the US has intensified its efforts to send weapons to one of the parties to the conflict, resulting in an endless war, it has frequently spread false information about China’s supply of weapons to Russia, taking the opportunity to sanction Chinese companies for no reason.
This is outright bullying and double standards.
The US has sanctioned the Chinese company Changsha Tianyi Space Science and Technology Research Institute, also known as Spacety China, for providing satellite imagery of Ukraine to support the Wagner group’s combat operations for Russia. A Luxembourg-based subsidiary of Spacety China was also targeted.
Updated
Summary of the day so far …
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. The nearby northern city of Chernihiv also reported shooting down Iranian-made Shahed drones, according to its regional governor, Vyacheslav Chaus.
Ukraine’s ministry of defence claimed in total to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed, including nine over Kyiv. Two emergency service workers were killed and three other people injured during a drone attack on Khmelnytskyi, according to city’s mayor.
Belarus’s exiled opposition has claimed partisans destroyed a Russian plane at an airstrip near the capital, Minsk, on Sunday. “Partisans … confirmed a successful special operation to blow up a rare Russian plane at the airfield in Machulishchy near Minsk,” tweeted Franak Viacorka, a close adviser of opposition figurehead Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. “This is the most successful diversion since the beginning of 2022.” The two Belarusians who carried out the operation had used drones, he said, adding that they had already left the country and were safe.
Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Monday that talks with Sweden and Finland regarding their Nato membership bids would resume on 9 March, after a delay in January in the wake of a Qur’an-burning protest. The meeting will take place in Brussels and will include discussion on the implementation of the memorandum signed between the countries. It later emerged that the Qur’an-burning incident in Stockholm was funded by a far-right journalist with links to Kremlin-backed media.
Respect for human rights has gone into reverse, the United Nations chief warned Monday, calling 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. “It has unleashed widespread death, destruction and displacement,” he said.
The UK’s ministry of defence has claimed that “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 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”.
China has always maintained communication with all sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including Kyiv, a foreign ministry spokesperson told a regular news briefing on Monday.
Russia’s former president said in remarks published on Monday that the continued arms supply to Kyiv risks a global nuclear catastrophe, reiterating his threat of nuclear war over Ukraine. Dmitry Medvedev’s apocalyptic rhetoric has been seen as an attempt to deter the US-led Nato military alliance and Kyiv’s western allies from getting even more involved in the war.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will be back later. Léonie Chao-Fong will be with you for the next few hours.
Updated
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, arguing that it could have “a cooling effect” on atrocities committed by the Kremlin’s invading forces.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, also said a speedy start to war crimes trials against the Russian president and soldiers could save people’s lives by deterring Russian forces from committing further crimes.
Starting legal proceedings could have “a cooling effect” on the brutality of human rights violations that Russian troops were committing daily in Ukraine, she told the Guardian in an interview.
Some troops, perhaps not all, would realise that Putin’s authoritarian regime had an end date, Matviichuk said, if they knew they would be held to account. The possibility of justice would help them realise “I will not be able to hide under abstract Putin and maybe I will have to be responsible for every thing which I commit by my own hands,” she said.
Read more of Jennifer Rankin’s interview and report here: Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate calls for special tribunal to try Putin
Here is a recent view of the military cemetery in Dnipro that has just been sent to us over the news wires.
The Kremlin said on Monday it was worried about the state of affairs in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region, where it said Ukraine and other European countries were stirring up the situation.
Moscow last week told the west that it would view any actions that threatened Russian peacekeepers in Transnistria as an attack on Russia itself, a warning that came amid increased concerns in Moldova, a small ex-Soviet republic located between Romania and Ukraine, of a possible Russian threat.
Moldova’s pro-European president, Maia Sandu, this month accused Moscow of plotting a coup, something Russia denied.
“Naturally, the situation in Transnistria is the subject of our closest attention and a reason for our concern,” Reuters reports Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the media. “The situation is unsettled, it is being provoked, provoked from outside.
“But we know that our opponents in the Ukrainian regime, the Kyiv regime, as well as those in European countries, are capable of various types of provocation.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed Moscow’s assertion that Ukraine wants to take over the region, while Moldova said there was no truth to the allegations.
Vadim Krasnoselsky, the self-styled president of Transnistria, had earlier described the situation in the region as tense, but urged people to remain calm and said that citizens would be informed immediately should any threat of danger arise.
Updated
Respect for human rights has gone into reverse, the United Nations chief warned on Monday, calling 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, AFP reports António Guterres as saying the declaration was “under assault from all sides.”
“Some governments chip away at it. Others use a wrecking ball,” he told the opening of the UN Human Rights Council’s main annual session, describing the disregard and disdain seen for human rights around the world as “a wake-up call”.
He said the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most massive violations of human rights” being witnessed in the world today.
“It has unleashed widespread death, destruction and displacement,” he said.
Updated
AFP reports that a second person has died as a result of Russian drone attacks overnight.
It quotes Oleksandr Symchyshyn, mayor of Khmelnytskyi, saying “Unfortunately, we have another hospital death. Doctors failed to save the life of another hero, a rescuer”. Earlier, the mayor and Ukraine’s ministry of defence reported that someone from the emergency services had been killed. Ukraine claims to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed by Russian forces.
Nine were downed over the capital, Kyiv, the head of the city’s military administration said, and there were no reported casualties or damage to infrastructure.
The official, Sergiy Popko, said Russian forces were trying “to exhaust our air defences”, and said the attack had come in two separate waves.
Updated
Here are some of the latest images sent to us over the news wires from Ukraine.
Ramon Antonio Vargas has spoken to Randi Thompson, president of Los Angeles-based nonprofit Kidsave, who is calling on Americans to aid efforts to place Ukrainian children orphaned by the Russian invasion in new families within their country.
Read more here: Ukrainian children orphaned by war ‘need a tremendous amount of help’
Just to add to that report from the Ukraine ministry of defence that an emergency service worker was killed in Khmelnytskyi overnight, AFP is reporting that the mayor of Khmelnytskyi, Oleksandr Symchyshyn, has said: “For now, we know of one dead and four injured” after the drone attack on the city.
Updated
Ukraine’s ministry of defence has claimed that overnight its forces shot down 11 Iranian-made Shahed drones. It also confirmed that an officer of Ukraine’s emergency services was killed in Khmelnytskyi.
Last night, enemy attacked Ukraine with Iran-made Shahed drones.
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) February 27, 2023
11 of them were shot down.
A @SESU_UA officer was killed in Khmelnytskyi; he was on duty at that time.
The claims have not been independently verified.
China has always maintained communication with all sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including Kyiv, a foreign ministry spokesperson told a regular news briefing on Monday.
Reuters reports Mao Ning was answering a question on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy saying he would welcome talks with China.
In another question on Zelenskiy saying that he planned to speak to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, Mao said: “China’s position on the Ukraine crisis is consistent and very clear.”
“The core is to call for peace and promote dialogue and promote a political solution to the crisis. We have always maintained communication with the sides involved including Ukraine,” Mao said.
Updated
Turkey's talks with Sweden and Finland over Nato bid to resume 9 March
Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Monday that talks with Sweden and Finland regarding their Nato membership bids would resume on 9 March, after a delay in January in the wake of a Qur’an-burning protest.
Reuters reports that speaking in Ankara, Çavuşoğlu said the meeting would take place in Brussels and would include discussion on the implementation of the memorandum signed between the countries.
It later emerged that the Qur’an-burning incident in Stockholm was funded by a far-right journalist with links to Kremlin-backed media.
Updated
In its latest daily intelligence briefing on the war, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has raised the issue of explosions in occupied Mariupol. It writes:
Since 21 February 2023, pro-Russian officials have reported at least 14 explosions around the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol. Sites of the incidents have included an ammo cache at the airport, two fuel depots, and a steel works that Russia uses as a military base. Mariupol lies at least 80km away from the frontline.
Russia will likely be concerned that unexplained explosions are occurring in a zone it had probably previously assessed as beyond the range of routine Ukrainian strike capabilities. Although widely devasted earlier in the war, Mariupol is important to Russia because it is the largest city Russia captured in 2022 that it still controls, and sits on a key logistics route.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 27 February 2023
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) February 27, 2023
Find out more about Defence Intelligence: https://t.co/Cg1AlRQ2SI
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/0cX28D5RdE
The claims have not been independently verified.
Updated
Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, has reported on the Telegram app that trams and trolleybuses in the port city of Odesa have stopped this morning because of a shortage of electricity.
This is Martin Belam taking over the live blog in London. You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com
Russia’s former president said in remarks published on Monday that the continued arms supply to Kyiv risks a global nuclear catastrophe, reiterating his threat of nuclear war over Ukraine.
Dmitry Medvedev’s apocalyptic rhetoric has been seen as an attempt to deter the US-led Nato military alliance and Kyiv’s western allies from getting even more involved in the war.
The latest comments by Medvedev, an ally of President Vladimir Putin who serves as deputy chairman of Putin’s security council, follow Putin’s nuclear warning last week and his Sunday remarks casting Moscow’s confrontation with the west as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people.
Of course, the pumping in of weapons can continue .... and prevent any possibility of reviving negotiations,” Medvedev said in remarks published in the daily Izvestia.
Our enemies are doing just that, not wanting to understand that their goals will certainly lead to a total fiasco. Loss for everyone. A collapse. Apocalypse. Where you forget for centuries about your former life, until the rubble ceases to emit radiation.”
Partisans destroy Russian plane in Belarus, officials claim
Belarus’s exiled opposition has claimed partisans destroyed a Russian A-50 surveillance military aircraft in a drone attack at an airstrip near the capital Minsk on Sunday.
Franak Viacorka, a close adviser of opposition figurehead Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, tweeted:
Partisans … confirmed a successful special operation to blow up a rare Russian plane at the airfield in Machulishchy near Minsk.
This is the most successful diversion since the beginning of 2022.”
The two Belarusians who carried out the operation had used drones, he said, adding that they had already left the country and were safe.
Reuters reported Aliaksandr Azarov, leader of Belarusian anti-government organisation BYPOL, as saying on the organisation’s Telegram messaging app and on the Poland-based Belsat news channel:
Those were drones. The participants of the operation are Belarusian … They are now safe, outside the country.”
The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the reports.
⚡️Opposition group: Explosion at Belarusian military airfield damaged Russian aircraft in reported partisan attack. pic.twitter.com/rUofwbEUCX
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) February 26, 2023
Front and central parts of the aircraft as well as the radar antenna were damaged as a result of two explosions in the attack at the Machulishchy air base near Minsk, BYPOL reported.
The Beriev A-50 aircraft, which has the Nato reporting name of Mainstay, is a Russian airborne early warning aircraft, with airborne command and control capabilities, and the ability to track up to 60 targets at a time, according to Reuters.
As battles continue to rage across Ukraine’s eastern front here are some of the latest images to come through our newswires.
Updated
UN human rights council to meet, will extend war crimes investigation
The UN human rights council is set to meet today in a united call to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and extend its investigation into war crimes in the conflict.
Days after the United Nations general assembly in New York voted overwhelmingly to demand Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine, the war is expected to dominate the opening of the top UN rights body’s main annual session in Geneva.
We’re looking for this session to show, as the UN general assembly showed … that the world stands side-by-side with Ukraine,” British ambassador Simon Manley said at an event Friday marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The meeting, which is due to last a record six weeks, will be the first presided over by new UN rights chief Volker Turk, who kicks the session off early Monday.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, will also address the council on the first day, while nearly 150 ministers and heads of state and government will speak, virtually or in person, during the four-day high-level segment.
Among them will be the top diplomats of the US, China, Ukraine and Iran.
Moscow will send deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov to address the council in person on Thursday.
One key resolution will be on extending a high-level investigation into crimes committed in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The so-called Commission of Inquiry, which has already determined that Russia is committing war crimes on a “massive scale” in Ukraine, is due to present a comprehensive report to the council in late March.
The commission must “continue its important work, which is of paramount importance for the principles of accountability and justice”, Yevheniia Filipenko, permanent representative of Ukraine to the United Nations office in Geneva, told reporters on Friday.
Updated
Summary and welcome
Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine. I’m Samantha Lock and I’ll be bringing you all the latest developments as they unfold.
The UN human rights council is set to meet today in Geneva in a united call to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and extend a probe into war crimes in the conflict.
Days after the United Nations general assembly in New York voted overwhelmingly to demand Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine, the war is expected to dominate the opening of the top UN rights body’s main annual session.
US officials have also warned China against providing lethal aid to support Russia’s war on Ukraine. CIA director William Burns said he is “confident” that Beijing is considering providing the equipment to Moscow’s forces but a final decision has not been made yet and there has been no evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment.
It’s 7.30am in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
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”. The US has made clear behind closed doors that such a move would have serious consequences. The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union programme: “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.”
Vladimir Putin has accused the west of seeking to “dismember” Russia and to turn the vast country into a series of weak mini-states. In an interview with the state TV channel Rossiya on Sunday, the Russian president claimed the US and its Nato allies wanted to “inflict a strategic defeat on us”. The aim, he said, was to “make our people suffer”.
Putin has claimed 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. “They tried to reshape the world exclusively on their terms. We had no choice but to react,” he said, adding that the west was complicit in Ukraine’s “crimes”.
Ukraine’s military has dismissed claims by Russia’s Wagner mercenary group that it had captured Yahidne, a village on Bakhmut’s northern outskirts. It said intense fighting was going on across the whole frontline. On Saturday the founder of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said his forces had taken Yahidne and the nearby village of Berkhivka. The latest Ukrainian update cited “unsuccessful” Russian offensives in the two settlements and four others. All were subject to heavy shelling, it said.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy fired a senior military commander in charge of fighting Russian troops in Ukraine’s east. The Ukrainian president dismissed Eduard Moskalyov as commander of the joint forces of Ukraine, which are engaged in battles in the Donbas region, but gave no reason for the move on Sunday.
Belarus’s exiled opposition has claimed partisans destroyed a Russian plane at an airstrip near the capital Minsk on Sunday. “Partisans … confirmed a successful special operation to blow up a rare Russian plane at the airfield in Machulishchy near Minsk,” tweeted Franak Viacorka, a close adviser of opposition figurehead Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. “This is the most successful diversion since the beginning of 2022.” The two Belarusians who carried out the operation had used drones, he said, adding that they had already left the country and were safe. The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the reports.
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, the US president 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.”
The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said he expected the contracts for the backfilling of howitzers that Berlin rushed to Ukraine last year to be signed by the end of March – months earlier than originally planned – “if everything works out”. Talking to German public broadcaster ARD on Sunday, he did not specify the number of weapons to be reordered. Pistorius also 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, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Washington is reportedly in talks with Berlin and Warsaw to hold joint military manoeuvres in Poland in response to Russia’s threat to the eastern border of the Nato alliance. Exercises were being “considered”, Pistorius told Germany’s ARD, without confirming or adding any details “for now”. He said military manoeuvres in a country bordering Ukraine – invaded one year ago by Russia – would send a “very clear” signal to Nato allies “but also to Putin”.
