Summary
Thank you for joining us for today’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
It is currently 3am in the capital Kyiv. We will be pausing this live blog overnight and returning in the morning.
In the meantime, you can read our comprehensive summary of the days’ events in our summary below.
- Ukraine has ignored a Russian ultimatum to surrender Sievierodonetsk, with Moscow controlling 80% of the embattled eastern city that has become a focal point of Russia’s advances in the east of the country. Russia ordered Ukrainian forces to stop their “senseless resistance and lay down arms” from Wednesday morning and accused Kyiv of disrupting plans to open a humanitarian corridor for civilians to leave the area.
- Thousands of civilians, including women, children and elderly people, are trapped in Sievierodonetsk with a diminishing supply of food, clean water, sanitation and electricity. An urgent situation is developing in the bunkers beneath the Azot chemical plant in the city, a UN spokesperson said. About 500 civilians believed to be trapped alongside soldiers inside Azot were preparing to flee the city through a possible humanitarian corridor.
- The United States will provide an additional $1bn in security assistance to Ukraine for its efforts in the eastern Donbas, US president Joe Biden confirmed. The support package includes 18 additional howitzers with tactical vehicles to tow them, 36,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition for the howitzers and two Harpoon coastal defence systems, the defence department said.
- President Zelenskiy urged the EU to tighten sanctions on Russia and warned Moscow’s forces could attack other countries after invading his own. In an address to the Czech parliament, Zelenskiy said Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine “is the first step that the Russian leadership needs to open the way to other countries, to the conquest of other peoples”.
- Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said allies would continue to supply Ukraine with heavy weapons and long-range systems, with an agreement on a new package of assistance to Kyiv expected at the summit in Madrid later this month. The agreement will help Ukraine move from old Soviet-era weaponry to “more modern Nato standard” gear, he said. Stoltenberg was speaking before a meeting in Brussels of defence ministers from Nato and other countries to discuss and coordinate help for Ukraine.
- At the meeting in Brussels, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said Ukraine was facing a “pivotal moment on the battlefield” in Sievierodonetsk, with Russian forces using long-range weapons to try to overwhelm Ukrainian positions. Austin urged America and its allies not to “let up and lose steam” and to “intensify our shared commitment to Ukraine’s self-defence”.
- China’s Xi Jinping has assured Vladimir Putin of China’s support on Russian “sovereignty and security” prompting Washington to warn Beijing it risked ending up “on the wrong side of history”. China is “willing to continue to offer mutual support [to Russia] on issues concerning core interests and major concerns such as sovereignty and security,” state broadcaster CCTV reported Xi as saying during a call with Putin. US State Department spokesperson responded: “China claims to be neutral, but its behaviour makes clear that it is still investing in close ties to Russia.”
- Turkey has said it is ready to host a four-way meeting with the United Nations, Russia and Ukraine to organise the export of grain through the Black Sea, saying safe routes could be formed without needing to clear mines around Ukrainian ports. Foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said it would “take some time” to de-mine Ukraine’s ports and that a safe sea corridor could meanwhile be established in areas without mines. “Since the location of the mines is known, certain safe lines would be established at three ports,” he said. “Ships, with the guidance of Ukraine’s research and rescue vessels as envisaged in the plan, could thus come and go safely to ports without a need to clear the mines.”
- Poland’s agriculture minister, Henryk Kowalczyk, said building grain silos at the Polish-Ukrainian border to help channel the crop from Ukraine to global markets would take three to four months. Kowalczyk’s remarks came after President Joe Biden, proposed that temporary silos would be built along the border with Ukraine in a bid to help export more grain and address a growing global food crisis.
- Two US veterans from Alabama who were in Ukraine assisting in the war against Russia haven’t been heard from in days and are missing, members of the state’s congressional delegation said. John Kirby, a national security spokesman at the White House, said that the administration wasn’t able to confirm the reports about missing Americans. “We’ll do the best we can to monitor this and see what we can learn about it,” he said.
- Europe’s unity over the war in Ukraine is at risk as public attention increasingly shifts from the battlefield to cost of living concerns, polling across 10 European countries suggests. The survey found support for Ukraine remained high, but that preoccupations have shifted to the conflict’s wider impacts, with the divide deepening between voters who want a swift end to the conflict and those who want Russia punished.
Russian people and companies are using entities in Georgia to bypass western sanctions, a group of Ukrainian lawmakers say.
Speaking in Washington, David Arakhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator with Russia, said the Ukrainian delegation was set to have meetings at the US Congress, State Department and the Treasury to raise awareness of the issue, among other topics.
Speaking to reporters at a German Marshall Fund event, he said:
They (Russians) use heavily right now ... Georgian banks, Georgian financial system, Georgian companies and so on.
If you are a sanctioned Russian person, you go to the Internet, you open up a Georgian company, open up remotely the bank account and start processing.”
He did not provide further details or specific examples.
