Closing summary
It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
The US is expected to announce an additional military aid package for Ukraine of about $3bn (£2.5bn), according to reports. The new package will be announced on Wednesday, the day the war in Ukraine hits the six-month mark, US officials were cited as saying. It would be the largest such assistance package that the US has provided for Ukraine since the start of the war.
Many civilians are attempting to leave Kyiv amid fears of a Russian attack on the country’s independence day, according to an adviser to Ukraine’s president. Alex Rodnyansky said people were worried and that there was “certainly some concern” that an attack may strike the centres of decision-making in the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday.
The US has issued a security alert warning that Russia is stepping up efforts to launch strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and government facilities in the coming days. The warning is the first specific security alert the US embassy in Kyiv has issued in recent months and comes after a ban by the Ukrainian government on celebrations in the capital to mark Wednesday’s anniversary of independence from Soviet rule because of fears of attack.
The head of Ukraine’s security and defence council, Oleksiy Danilov, said he expects Russia’s security services to stage a series of terrorist attacks in Russian cities, resulting in large numbers of civilian casualties. Danilov said that the murder on Saturday of Darya Dugina, the daughter of Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin, was the first in what he expects to be a number of attacks.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has vowed a “powerful response” in the event of a Russian attack on Kyiv on or around independence day on Wednesday. There was a daily threat of Russian attacks and Ukrainian intelligence was working with foreign intelligence, Zelenskiy said in a joint news conference with the visiting Polish president, Andrzej Duda.
Ukraine’s president said the country will not agree to any proposal to freeze the current frontlines in its conflict with Russia in order to “calm” Moscow, which now controls about 22% of Ukraine including Crimea. Speaking at a news conference in Kyiv today, Zelenskiy urged the world not to show fatigue with the war, saying this would pose a big threat to the whole world.
Zelenskiy also promised to bring “freedom to Ukraine and citizens in Crimea” and vowed that the Ukrainian flag will fly “where it’s supposed to be” in all occupied parts of Ukraine. The Ukrainian president said Kyiv would restore Ukrainian rule over the Russia-annexed region. “It started in Crimea and it will end in Crimea,” he told an international conference on Crimea.
Boris Johnson has urged world leaders not to allow Vladimir Putin to repeat the annexation of Crimea in other parts of Ukraine. Britain will continue to support Ukraine with military, humanitarian, economic and diplomatic support until Russia “ends this hideous war and withdraws its forces from the entirety of Ukraine”, Johnson said in a remote address to the international Crimea Platform summit.
Hundreds of people gathered in Moscow for the funeral of Darya Dugina, the daughter of one of Russia’s most prominent nationalist ideologues. Dugina, daughter of ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin, was murdered on Saturday in a car bomb attack outside Moscow. Russia’s FSB security service has accused Ukrainian intelligence agencies of ordering her killing, which Kyiv denies.
Russian tourists may be banned from entering Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland if the EU does not enact a bloc-wide ban, according to Lithuania’s foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis. Russians should not be allowed to enter the EU while their country “is undertaking genocide”, Landsbergis told reporters in Vilnius. It comes after the US rebuffed Ukraine’s demand for a blanket visa ban on Russians.
The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has demanded a halt to “nuclear sabre-rattling”, saying the world is at a “maximum moment of danger” and all countries with nuclear weapons must make a commitment to “no first-use”. The UN chief described the situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, as critical. Shelling and fighting in the area continues.
The war in Ukraine has pushed people to “a critical breaking point” with “devastating” knock-on effects that will only grow as the conflict drags on, the Red Cross has warned. Soaring inflation and shortages of essential products like fuel and food in Ukraine and neighbouring countries have left people struggling to afford basic supplies, with the situation becoming more desperate as the weather chills in the weeks ahead.
Kyiv has accused Moscow of having organised illegal mass adoptions of Ukrainian children after transferring them from occupied territories to Russia. “More than 1,000 children from Mariupol,” were “illegally transferred to outsiders in Tyumen, Irkutsk, Kemerovo and Altai Krai” in Siberia, a statement by Ukraine’s foreign ministry read.
The UN has said it is “very concerned” about plans by Russian-backed authorities to hold trials for captured Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol. Pro-Russian officials appear to be installing metal cages in a hall in Mariupol as part of plans to establish what they were calling an “international tribunal”, a UN rights office spokesperson said, adding that such a process could itself amount to a war crime.
That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, and the Russia-Ukraine war blog today. Thanks for reading.
Here’s some more detail on the US military aid package for Ukraine of about $3bn, which would be the single largest assistance package that the US has provided for Ukraine since the start of the war.
The package will use funds from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, appropriated by the US congress, to allow the Biden administration to procure weapons from industry rather than taking weapons from existing US weapons stocks, Reuters reports.
The new weapons do not appear to include types of arms that had not been provided previously to the Ukrainian military, according to a US official.
The amount and mix of weapons could change before the formal announcement, expected to take place tomorrow, the official added.
