Closing summary
It’s nearly 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
Military honours, tributes and praise welcomed Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his wife, Olena Zelenska, to Poland on Monday. Zelenskiy and his wife, Olena Zelenska, were welcomed in Warsaw by President Andrzej Duda, who awarded Zelenskiy with Poland’s oldest and highest civilian distinction, The Order of the White Eagle.
Poland would send 14 MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, Duda said at a joint news appearance with Zelenskiy. Zelenskiy thanked the Polish leader, government and people for standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Ukraine and giving fleeing Ukrainians shelter. Poland has led the way in mobilising western military and political support for Kyiv since the start of Russia’s full-fledged invasion 13 months ago.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, met Russian officials in Kaliningrad on Wednesday for talks on the Moscow-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine. Grossi visited the plant last week, where he said the situation had grown worse and military activity around the site had intensified in recent months.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Ukrainian troops face a difficult situation in the eastern city of Bakhmut, but that Kyiv will take the “corresponding” decisions to protect them if they risk being encircled by Russian forces. The Ukrainian president, at a news conference in Poland on Wednesday, said Kyiv’s troops in Bakhmut sometimes advanced a little only to be pushed back by Russian forces, but that they remained inside the city.
The president of Belarus and close ally of Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, arrived in Moscow for a meeting with the Russian leader, Belarusian state-run Belta news agency has reported. Lukashenko and Putin will hold a meeting on Wednesday evening, where the pair will “discuss a broad range of matters concerning Belarusian-Russian relations”, it said.
The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Russia will station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus demonstrated that a Russia-China joint statement amounted to just “empty promises”. The Nato chief noted that Russia was becoming more and more dependent on China, partly as a result of international sanctions imposed on Moscow over its war in Ukraine.
France’s president Emmanuel Macron has warned that anyone helping “aggressor” Russia in the Ukraine conflict would become an “accomplice”. The French leader arrived in Beijing for a three-day state visit during which he hopes to dissuade Xi Jinping from supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while also developing European trade ties with Beijing.
The six Leopard 2A4 tanks Spain has promised to send to Ukraine will leave the country in the second half of April, defence minister Margarita Robles told state broadcaster TVE on Wednesday, pushing back the estimated shipment date. The German-made battle tanks have not been used since the 1990s and had been mothballed in reserve, requiring refitting and battle readiness tests after initial doubts as to whether they could go into combat again.
Updated
It would be “very hard” to lift Russia’s suspension from UEFA until the war in Ukraine ends, the president of the European football governing body has said.
Aleksander Čeferin, at a news conference in Lisbon, said:
My personal opinion is: that, until the war stops, it will be very hard for us to change anything.
Both UEFA and world football’s governing body, FIFA, suspended all Russian international and club teams from their competitions in February 2022.
