A summary of today's developments
More than 730 people were detained across Russia at protests against a mobilisation order, a rights group said, three days after their president, Vladimir Putin, ordered the country’s first military draft since the second world war. The independent OVD-Info protest monitoring group said it was aware of detentions in 32 cities, from St Petersburg to Siberia. Unsanctioned rallies are illegal under Russian law, which also forbids any activity considered to defame the armed forces.
A new law signed by Vladimir Putin says Russian troops who refuse to fight, desert, disobey or surrender to the enemy could now face a jail sentence of up to 10 years, according to Russian media reports. The law was approved by the parliament earlier this week.
Russia’s deputy defence minister, Dmitry Bulgakov, who has been in charge of military logistics since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, has been dismissed from his post. He’s been replaced by Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of the National Defence Management Centre, who oversaw Russia’s siege of Mariupol.
China supports all efforts conducive to the peaceful resolution of the “crisis” in Ukraine, its foreign minister Wang Yi told the United Nations general assembly on Saturday. Wang added the pressing priority was to facilitate talks for peace, Reuters reports.
Iran’s ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, “advised” Ukraine to “refrain from being influenced by third parties who seek to destroy relations between the two countries”. The statement came after Ukraine downgraded diplomatic ties with Iran on Friday, and stripped its ambassador of his accreditation over what it called Tehran’s “unfriendly” decision to supply Russian forces with drones.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, urged Europe to show an “openness to those who don’t want to be instrumentalised by the Kremlin”.
The queue at the border between Russia and Georgia is approximately six miles (10km) long, where people have reportedly been waiting more than 20 hours to cross. The number of border crossings from Russia into Finland has doubled in recent days compared with last week.
More details of overnight attacks are emerging from Ukraine. Two civilians were killed on Friday in the Donetsk region, and three people were injured, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk oblast. Russian forces also shelled settlements near the Russian border. In the Kupyan district, five people were injured from shelling, including two children, aged 10 and 17.
Russian authorities in the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have allegedly started handing out draft notices and mobilising men of conscription age who “renounced Ukrainian citizenship and received passports of the Russian federation” according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Ukrainians in occupied territory to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held territory. However, if they end up in the Russian military, Zelenskiy asked people to save their lives and help liberate Ukraine.
Russian forces are probably trying to attack dams in Ukraine in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points amid Russian concerns about battlefield setbacks, UK intelligence said. The Ministry of Defence said in its latest daily briefing that the strikes were “unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations due to the distance between the damaged dams and the combat areas”.
So-called referendums are under way in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, with residents told to vote on proposals for the four Ukrainian regions to declare independence and then join Russia. The polls in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces are due to run until Tuesday and appear to be an attempt to provide cover for illegal annexation of the regions by Moscow.
The UN has said its investigators have concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, including bombings of civilian areas, numerous executions, torture and horrific sexual violence. The team of three independent experts had launched initial investigations looking at the areas of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions, where they were “struck by the large number of executions in the areas that we visited”, and the frequent “visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head and slit throats”.
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Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the US of “playing with fire” around Taiwan in a speech sharply critical of Washington at the annual gathering at the United Nations.
Lavrov said Washington was trying to turn the entire world into its own backyard through sanctions, Reuters reports.
The US has imposed several rounds of sanctions on Moscow following the invasion of Ukraine.
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