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Lifting sanctions is part of peace negotiations, Russia claims
Lifting sanctions imposed on Russia is part of peace negotiations between Moscow and Ukraine, which are “not going well” but continue via videoconferencing on a daily basis, Lavrov said.
Kyiv warned on Friday that talks on ending Russia’s invasion, now in its third month, were in danger of collapse. In comments to China’s Xinhua news agency, Lavrov said:
At present, the Russian and Ukrainian delegations are actually discussing a draft of a possible treaty via videoconferencing on a daily basis.
This document should fix such elements of the post-conflict state of affairs as permanent neutrality, non-nuclear, non-bloc and demilitarised status of Ukraine, as well as guarantees of its security.
The agenda of the talks also includes issues of denazification, recognition of new geopolitical realities, the lifting of sanctions, the status of the Russian language, and others.
The settlement of the situation in Ukraine will make it possible to make a significant contribution to the de-escalation of military-political tension in Europe, and in the world as a whole.
As one of the possible options, the creation of an institution of guarantor states is envisaged, among which, first of all, are the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including Russia and China.”
“We are in favour of continuing the negotiations, although they are not going well,” Lavrov added.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has insisted that western sanctions on Russia needed to be strengthened and could not be part of negotiations.
Summary
If you have just joined us, here is comprehensive re-cap of where things stand:
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Any foreign weapons shipment to Ukraine is a “legitimate target” for Russia, its foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Al Arabiya television channel, as cited by RIA Novosti. “Because those weapons are to be handed to the regime that is waging a war against its own population, against civilians in the country’s east,” Lavrov said.
- The sooner the west comes to terms with “new geopolitical realities” the better it will be for itself and the international community, Lavrov warned. “Our special military operation in Ukraine also contributes to the process of freeing the world from the neo-colonial oppression of the west, heavily mixed with racism and an exclusiveness complex,” he said.
- Russia claims Nato is trying to interfere with reaching political settlement to end the crisis in Ukraine. “By publicly expressing support for the Kyiv regime, Nato countries are doing everything to prevent the completion of the operation by reaching political agreements,” Lavrov said in a rare interview with China’s official Xinhua news agency. “If the US and Nato are really interested in resolving the Ukrainian crisis, then, firstly, they should change their minds and stop supplying arms and ammunition to Kyiv.”
- Ukraine has claimed “colossal” Russian losses have taken place in the effort to fully capture the eastern Donbas region. While acknowledging its own heavy losses from Russia’s attacks in the east, Kyiv said casualties in the invading army were worse. “We have serious losses, but the Russians’ losses are much much bigger … They have colossal losses,” said a Ukrainian presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych.
- The Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, has spoken of Vladimir Putin’s “cruelty and depravity” in Ukraine, calling his actions “unconscionable” and his justifications for the invasion “BS”. “It’s hard to square his … BS that this is about nazism in Ukraine, and it’s about protecting Russians in Ukraine, and it’s about defending Russian national interests, when none of them, none of them were threatened by Ukraine,” Kirby said. “It’s brutality of the coldest and the most depraved sort.”
- European Union countries are likely to approve a phased embargo on Russian oil as early as next week, according to EU officials. European ambassadors are reportedly expected to agree to a finalised proposal by the end of next week after meeting on Wednesday, according to several EU officials and diplomats involved in the process.
- The US did not believe the threat of Russia using nuclear weapons despite a recent escalation in Moscow’s rhetoric, a senior US defence official said. Russia was days behind its schedule on its military operations in Ukraine’s Donbas region, a US defence official said, and Russia’s fighting with Ukraine in the Donbas region would be a potential “knife fight”.
- Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy described a Russian airstrike on Kyiv during a visit by the UN secretary general, António Guterres as a “deliberate and brutal humiliation” that was “left without a powerful response”.
- The situation inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol was “beyond a humanitarian catastrophe”, a Ukrainian commander inside the facility said. Serhiy Volyna, from the 36th separate marine brigade, said there were hundreds of people in the steelworks, including 60 young people, the youngest of them four months old. Ukraine hoped to evacuate civilians holed up in the steel plant with the last fighters defending the southern city, Zelenskiy’s office said. The president described the besieged city as a “Russian concentration camp in the middle of ruins”.
- Two British aid workers who were reportedly captured by Russian forces in Ukraine have been named. Presidium Network, a UK-based company that says it carries out evacuations of families and individuals from war zones, identified Paul Urey and Dylan Healy as the captured men. The UK Foreign Office said it was seeking further information about the claims of their capture.
- A former US marine has been killed fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, the first US citizen known to have died in combat in the war with Russia. Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, was killed on Monday while working for a military contracting company that sent him to Ukraine, his mother told CNN. The US defence department warned US citizens that they should not go to Ukraine to fight.
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More than 1 million people have been “evacuated from Ukraine” into Russia since 24 February, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed in remarks published by the ministry early on Saturday. Ukraine has said that Moscow has forcefully deported thousands of people to Russia with humanitarian corridors repeatedly breaking down.
- The US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said it would vote to pass Joe Biden’s $33bn request for aid for Ukraine “as soon as possible”. Speaking at her weekly press briefing on Friday morning, the House speaker framed the administration’s request as one of a number of “emergencies” Congress needed to address urgently.
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Shipments of new US military aid are en route to Ukraine with 155mm shells, fuses and helmets bound for Ukraine loaded on aircraft pallets on a C-17 cargo aircraft on Friday at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
- Britain will send investigators to Ukraine to help gather evidence of war crimes, including sexual violence, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said. Ukrainian prosecutors and the international criminal court have been investigating potential war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s 24 February invasion.
- The US has begun training Ukrainian armed forces at sites located outside Ukraine. A Pentagon spokesperson said it was happening at three sites outside the US, including one in Germany.
- Putin could announce the mass mobilisation of Russians on 9 May, Ben Wallace, the UK defence secretary, has said. Wallace said that Putin could declare that “we are now at war with the world’s nazis and we need to mass mobilise the Russian people”.
- Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that since Russia’s withdrawal from Kyiv, 900 bodies had been uncovered in mass graves. The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo confirmed with the deputy head prosecutor of Kyiv’s region that 900 bodies had been found so far, buried in several mass graves around the region.
- In his latest address, Zelenskiy thanked the US for its support via a revived second world war-era lend-lease programme. He also thanked countries that have resumed diplomatic operations in Kyiv, saying: “Such gestures, together with strong defensive, financial and political support from the free world, mean that the need to end the war is becoming more and more obvious to Russia.”
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The United States has rejected the possibility of “business as usual” with Russian President Vladimir Putin after after Indonesia invited him to the upcoming Group of 20 summit in November.
Updated
Russia’ foreign minister also thanked Beijing for their “balanced position” on Ukraine.
We are grateful to Beijing, as well as to other BRICS partners, for their balanced position on the Ukrainian issue,” Lavrov said.
The sooner the west comes to terms with 'new geopolitical realities', the better it will be, Lavrov says
Russia’s foreign minister doubled down on his assertions against the west, claiming “the sooner” the west comes to terms with “new geopolitical realities” the better it will be for itself and the international community.
Today we are not talking about a new ‘cold war’, but, as I have already noted, about the persistent desire of Washington and its satellites, who imagine themselves to be ‘arbiters of the fate of mankind’, to impose an American-centric model of the world order.
It has gotten to the point that the western minority is trying to replace the UN-centric architecture and international law formed after the Second World War with their own ‘rule-based order’. These rules are written by Washington and its allies themselves and then imposed on the international community as binding.
Lavrov continued to argue that those “who pursue an independent course in domestic and foreign policy” are suppressed by the west “by the most brutal methods”.
Obviously, the attempts of the ‘collective west’ to impede the natural course of history, to solve their problems at the expense of others, are doomed. Today’s world has several decision-making centres, it is multipolar. We see how the states of Asia, Africa and Latin America are developing dynamically. Everyone has a real freedom of choice, including ways of development and participation in integration projects.
Our special military operation in Ukraine also contributes to the process of freeing the world from the neo-colonial oppression of the west, heavily mixed with racism and an exclusiveness complex.”
The sooner the West comes to terms with the new geopolitical realities, the better it will be for itself and for the entire international community.”
Updated
More than 1 million people have been “evacuated from Ukraine” into Russia since 24 February, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed in remarks published by the ministry early on Saturday.
Lavrov claimed the hotline of Russia’s interdepartmental coordination headquarters for humanitarian response received requests for assistance in evacuating 2.8 million people to Russia, of which 16,000 were foreign citizens and employees of UN and OSCE international missions.
“In total, 1.02 million people were evacuated from Ukraine, the DPR and the LPR, of which over 120 thousand citizens of third countries,” the foreign minister said in comments made to China’s Xinhua news agency.
Ukraine has said that Moscow has forcefully deported thousands of people to Russia with humanitarian corridors repeatedly breaking down.
According to data from the United Nations, more than 5.4 million people have fled Ukraine since the start of the invasion.
Nato countries are 'doing everything to prevent' negotiated cease fire, Lavrov says
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has had some stern words to say about the west’s involvement in Ukraine in a rare interview with China’s official Xinhua news agency.
The transcript from the interview was published on the Russian foreign ministry’s website early Saturday morning.
Among a string of assertions, the foreign minister accused the United States and Nato countries of using Ukraine as “one of the tools to contain Russia” while maintaining that prior to Russia’s invasion on 24 February they were “forcing Kyiv to make an artificial, false choice: either with the West or with Moscow.”
Over the past years, the United States and its allies have done nothing to stop the intra-Ukrainian conflict ... they ‘pumped up’ the Kyiv regime with weapons, trained and armed the Ukrainian army and nationalist battalions, and generally carried out the military-political development of the territory of Ukraine. They encouraged the aggressive anti-Russian course pursued by the Kyiv authorities.”
It was these conditions that gave Russia “no other choice” but to recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and launch a “special military operation” to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, Lavrov continued.
In fact, Nato countries are “doing everything to prevent” a negotiated cease fire with Ukraine, Lavrov maintained.
By publicly expressing support for the Kyiv regime, Nato countries are doing everything to prevent the completion of the operation by reaching political agreements.
Various weapons are sent to Ukraine through Poland and other Nato countries in an endless stream.
All this is done under the pretext of ‘fighting the invasion’, but, in fact, the US and the EU intend to fight Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’, and they are absolutely indifferent to the fate of Ukraine as an independent subject of international relations.”
If the US and Nato are really interested in resolving the Ukrainian crisis, then, firstly, they should change their minds and stop supplying arms and ammunition to Kyiv, Lavrov said, adding that Russia is “in favour” of continuing the negotiations, although “they are not going well”.
These are militant rhetoric and inflammatory actions of Kyiv’s Western backers. They actually encourage him to ‘fight to the last Ukrainian’, pumping up the country with weapons and sending mercenaries there. I note that the Ukrainian special services, with the help of Westerners, staged a crude bloody provocation in Bucha, including to complicate the negotiation process.”
Lavrov said it would only be possible to reach agreements when Kyiv begins to be guided by the interests of the Ukrainian people, and not “advisers from afar”.
The “special military operation” launched on 24 February is “developing strictly according to plan” and all its goals “will be surely achieved, despite the opposition of our opponents,” the foreign minister concluded.
Updated
The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) will support Ukrainian athletes seeking to resettle in Australia on humanitarian grounds amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, outgoing AOC President John Coates said on Saturday.
Coates told the AOC’s annual general meeting in Sydney that it was “sad” young Ukrainian athletes were swapping sports equipment to take up arms against Russia’s forces, Reuters reports the president as saying.
“Today I announced that the AOC executive has by circular resolution last week, determined that the AOC will support humanitarian visa applications by Ukrainian athletes and will seek the assistance of you, our member sports, in their settlement requirements,” said Coates, who is also a vice president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Coates added that the AOC would contribute $100,000 to the IOC’s “Solidarity Fund” for the Ukrainian Olympic community.
As Ukrainians are forced to defend their families and homes, Ukrainian athletes are amongst them.
Many have returned home for this purpose, and how sad it is that young men and women just swapped their rackets and running spikes for rifles and flak jackets.”
“They have lost their right to membership of the international Olympic community. There are no stadiums for their colours, no poles for their flags, no music for their songs and no dais for their athletes,” Coates added.
Any weapons shipment to Ukraine is ‘legitimate target’ for Russia, Lavrov says
Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine will be finished as soon as its objectives are achieved, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said in an interview with Al Arabiya television channel, as cited by RIA Novosti.
“It will be completed as soon as the goals, which I have already described, are accomplished and achieved,” he said.
In Lavrov’s view, any weapons shipment to Ukraine is a legitimate target, RIA reported.
Because those weapons are to be handed to the regime that is waging a war against its own population, against civilians in the country’s east,” he said.
The minister emphasised that the special operation was a response to what Nato was doing in Ukraine to prepare it for an aggressive stand against Russia.
They were provided with offensive weapons, including the weapons capable of reaching Russian territory. Military bases were built, including at the Sea of Azov. Dozens of military exercises were conducted, and many of them on Ukrainian soil with Nato assistance. And most of those drills were aimed against Russia’s interests. Therefore, the goal of this operation is to make sure that those plans do not materialise,” the Russian foreign minister said.
“It has become evident that the goals of the military operation, which I have described, must be accomplished. I can assure you that during this military operation the Kiev regime’s escapades have been taken care of,” the foreign minister added.
Shipments of new US military aid are en route to Ukraine after President Joe Biden asked Congress on Thursday for $33bn to bolster Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
In the images below, airmen and women with the 436th Aerial Port Squadron place 155mm shells, fused and helmets on aircraft pallets ultimately bound for Ukraine on a C-17 cargo aircraft on Friday at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said there is a big risk that peace talks with Moscow would end and blamed public anger over what he said were atrocities by Russian troops.
“People [Ukrainians] want to kill them. When that kind of attitude exists, it’s hard to talk about things,” Interfax news agency quoted the president as telling Polish journalists.
Russia's Kyiv attack 'deliberate and brutal humiliation' of UN without powerful response, Zelenskiy says
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has described Russian missile attacks on Kyiv during UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ visit as a “deliberate and brutal humiliation” that was “left without a powerful response”.
The dismantlement of debris in Kyiv, where Russian missiles hit on Thursday continues, he said in his latest national address late on Friday.
Unfortunately, such a deliberate and brutal humiliation of the United Nations by Russia was left without a powerful response.”
Zelenskiy continued to provide an operational update as to Russia’s advances, describing the city of Mariupol as a “Russian concentration camp in the middle of ruins”.
The city, which was one of the most developed in the region, is simply a Russian concentration camp in the middle of ruins. And the order of the occupiers in that part of Mariupol which they unfortunately still control differs insignificantly from what the Nazis did in the occupied territory of Eastern Europe.
But the Russian troops manage to be even more cynical than the Nazis 80 years ago. At that time, the invaders did not say that it was the Mariupol residents and the defenders of the city who shelled and killed themselves.”
The situation in the Kharkiv region is tough. But our military, our intelligence, have important tactical success.
In Donbas, the occupiers are doing everything to destroy any life in this area. Constant brutal bombings, constant Russian strikes at infrastructure and residential areas show that Russia wants to make this area uninhabited. “
Describing the situation in the temporarily occupied areas of the Kherson region, Zelenskiy said Russian forces are allegedly preparing for the transition to the “ruble zone”.
“Any attempt to transfer our territory to Russia’s administrative, monetary, or any other system will mean only one thing: Russia itself will suffer from that,” he said. “Our responses, sanctions and other reactions of the free world to Russia’s aggressive actions will not be delayed.”
Updated
US rejects ‘business as usual’ with Putin after G20 invitation
The United States said that the world cannot deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin as before after Indonesia invited him to the upcoming Group of 20 summit in November.
President Joe Biden “has expressed publicly his opposition to President Putin attending the G20. We have welcomed the Ukrainians attending,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.
We have conveyed our view that we don’t think they should be a part of it publicly and privately.”
Psaki indicated that the United States was in touch with the Indonesians and that the invitation to Russia came before its invasion of Ukraine.
State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter said separately that the United States did not believe it could be “business as usual” with Russia on the international stage, AFP reported.
She did not comment on whether the United States would still attend the summit in Bali.
US lashes out at Putin's 'cruelty and depravity'
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby called Putin’s justifications for the invasion - that he is protecting Russians and that Ukraine was a font of Nazism - “BS”, during an emotional press briefing.
It’s hard to square that rhetoric by what he’s actually doing inside Ukraine to innocent people, shot in the back of the head, hands tied behind their backs, pregnant women being killed, hospitals being bombed,” Kirby said.
I mean, it’s just unconscionable and I don’t have the mental capacity to understand how you connect those two things.”
Before the war, Kirby said, “I don’t think we fully appreciated the degree to which (Putin) would visit that kind of violence and cruelty and depravity on innocent people, on non-combatants, on civilians, with such utter disregard for the lives he was taking.”
He then apologised for the rare show of emotion.
“I don’t want to make this about me. But I’ve been around the military a long, long time, and I’ve known friends who didn’t make it back. It’s just hard,” Kirby said.
Kirby lashed out at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “depravity” in Ukraine, questioning how any moral person could defend bombing hospitals and summary executions of innocent people.
It’s hard to look at what he’s doing in Ukraine, what his forces are doing in Ukraine, and think that any ethical, moral individual could justify that.
I can’t talk to his psychology. But I think we can all speak to his depravity.”
Kirby also hit back at Putin’s justifications for war.
It’s hard to square his ... BS that this is about Nazism in Ukraine, and it’s about protecting Russians in Ukraine, and it’s about defending Russian national interests, when none of them, none of them were threatened by Ukraine.
It’s brutality of the coldest and the most depraved sort.”
Updated
Catch up
- Ukraine acknowledged heavy losses from Russia’s attack in the east as Moscow’s forces, having failed to seize the capital, redoubled their efforts to fully capture the eastern Donbas region. But Ukraine said casualties in the invading army were even worse. “We have serious losses, but the Russians’ losses are much much bigger … They have colossal losses,” a Ukrainian presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, said.
- European Union countries are likely to approve a phased embargo on Russian oil as early as next week, according to EU officials. European ambassadors are reportedly expected to give their approval of a finalised proposal by the end of next week after meeting on Wednesday, according to several EU officials and diplomats involved in the process.
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The US does not believe the threat of Russia using nuclear weapons despite a recent escalation in Moscow’s rhetoric, a senior US defence official said. Russia is days behind its schedule on its military operations in Ukraine’s Donbas region, a US defence official said, adding that the US believes that Russia’s fighting with Ukraine in the Donbas region will be a potential “knife fight”.
- Moscow has confirmed it carried out an airstrike on Kyiv during a visit by the UN secretary general, António Guterres. The defence ministry said two “high-precision, long-range air-based weapons” had destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in the Ukrainian capital on Thursday night.
- The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, however, said a 25-storey residential building in the capital’s Shevchenkivskyi district was hit in the strike. Klitschko said one body had been recovered. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said one of its staff, the journalist and producer Vera Gyrych, had died “as a result of a Russian missile hitting the house where she lived” during Guterres’ visit.
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The situation inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol is “beyond a humanitarian catastrophe”, a Ukrainian commander inside the facility has said. Serhiy Volyna, from the 36th separate marine brigade, said there were hundreds of people in the steelworks, including 60 young people, the youngest of whom is four months old. Ukraine hopes to evacuate civilians who are holed up in the steel plant with the last fighters defending the southern city, Zelenskiy’s office said.
- Two British aid workers who have reportedly been captured by Russian forces in Ukraine have been named. Presidium Network, a UK-based company that says it carries out evacuations of families and individuals from war zones, identified Paul Urey and Dylan Healy as the captured men. The Foreign Office said it was seeking further information about claims the two men who went to Ukraine to provide humanitarian aid have been captured.
- A former US Marine has been killed fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, the first US citizen known to have died in combat in the war with Russia. Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, was killed on Monday while working for a military contracting company that sent him to Ukraine, his mother told CNN. The US defence department warned US citizens that they should not go to Ukraine to fight.
- The US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, says the House will vote to pass Joe Biden’s $33bn request for aid for Ukraine “as soon as possible”. Speaking at her weekly press briefing on Friday morning, the House speaker framed the administration’s request as one of a number of “emergencies” Congress needed to address urgently.
- Britain will send investigators to Ukraine to help gather evidence of war crimes, including sexual violence, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said. Ukrainian prosecutors and the international criminal court (ICC) have been investigating potential war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s 24 February invasion.
- The US has begun training Ukrainian armed forces at US sites located outside of Ukraine. A Pentagon spokesperson said that there are three sites outside of the US where Ukrainians are receiving training, including one in Germany.
- Vladimir Putin could announce the mass mobilisation of Russians on 9 May, Ben Wallace, the UK defence secretary, has said. Wallace said that Putin could declare that “we are now at war with the world’s Nazis and we need to mass mobilise the Russian people”.
- In an interview with Polish journalists, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that since Russia’s withdrawal from Kyiv, 900 bodies have been uncovered in mass graves. The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo confirmed with the deputy head prosecutor of Kyiv’s region that 900 bodies have been found so far, buried in several mass graves around the region.
- In his latest address, Zelenskiy thanked the US for its support via a revived second-world-war-era lend-lease program. He also thanked countries that have resumed diplomatic operations in Kyiv, saying: “Such gestures, together with strong defensive, financial and political support from the free world, mean that the need to end the war is becoming more and more obvious to Russia.”
– Léonie Chao-Fong, Gloria Oladipo, Maanvi Singh
Updated
Despite saying it would only repay loans in roubles, Russia made overdue interest payments in dollars, Reuters reports:
Russia made what appeared to be a late U-turn to avoid a default on Friday, as it made a number of overdue interest payments in dollars on its overseas bonds, despite previously vowing to pay only in roubles as long as its reserves remained frozen.
Russia’s $40b of international bonds have become the focus of a game of financial chicken amid sweeping Western sanctions - and speculation about a default is likely to revive in less than four weeks, when a U.S. license allowing Moscow to make payments is due to expire.
Russia’s finance ministry said it had managed to pay $564.8m in interest on a 2022 Eurobond and $84.4m on another 2042 bond in dollars - the currency specified on the bonds.
A senior US official confirmed Moscow had made the payment without using reserves frozen in the United States, adding that the exact origin of the funds was unclear.
Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told Reuters that the payments siphoned funds away from Russia’s Ukraine war effort and were a “sign of success” for US sanctions policy.
He declined to comment on the future of a Treasury general license due to expire on May 25 that allows banks to process Russian debt payments.
“Our overarching goal is to try to starve Russia of the resources that they’re using to both prop up their economy and finance their war effort, and to stop their invasion of Ukraine. So we’re going to keep making policy decisions with that in mind,” Adeyemo said.
Russia said it had channelled the required funds to the London branch of Citibank, one of the “paying agents” whose job it is to disburse them to the bondholders.
Citibank declined to comment.
Updated
In his latest address, Volodomyr Zelenskiy thanked the US for its support via a revived second-world-war-era lend-lease program:
United States, President Biden and Congress for an analogue of the famous Lend-Lease program, which will be very helpful in the fight against Russia, against the Russian invaders. Which helped a lot in the fight against the Nazis during World War II.
I am sure that now the Lend-Lease will help Ukraine and the whole free world beat the ideological successors of the Nazis, who started a war against us on our land. Lend-Lease and other programs in support of Ukraine are concrete proof that freedom is still able to defend itself against tyranny.
He also thanked countries that have resumed diplomatic operations in Kyiv:
Ambassador of the United Kingdom to Ukraine Melinda Simmons returned to Kyiv today.
Currently, 27 foreign diplomatic missions operate in the capital of our country. And this is an extremely important gesture of support for Ukraine, for which we are grateful to all of them.
Such gestures, together with strong defensive, financial and political support from the free world, mean that the need to end the war is becoming more and more obvious to Russia. The defeat of the occupiers is unalterable.
Updated
Catch up on this week’s must-read news and analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war
War threatens to enter dangerous new phase
Analysis by Julian Borger explained how a series of mysterious explosions in Moldova has raised the threat of Russia’s war in Ukraine spilling over into new territory, with unpredictable consequences.
Russia turns off the gas
Dan Boffey in Brussels, Philip Olterman in Berlin and Rob Davies in London wrote about the consequences for Europe after Russia halted gas supplies to two EU countries and threatened others, in a move condemned by European leaders as blackmail.
On the ground in ‘Fortress Zaporizhzhia’
Isobel Koshiw visited Zaporizhzhia, the only large city in south-east Ukraine under Ukrainian control. It has become a destination for the hundreds of thousands of people who fled Russian occupation, but with 70% of the wider region under Russian military control, there are fears that Moscow’s forces will attempt to take it.
Metal darts out to kill
Fléchettes are rarely used in modern warfare. Small, metal and sharp like a dart, thousands can be stored inside each shell. Lorenzo Tondo reported on the discovery of the tiny metal arrows in bodies of men and women in mass graves, allegedly killed during the Russian occupation of Bucha, Ukraine.
In an interview with Polish journalists, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that since Russia’s withdrawal from Kyiv, 900 bodies have been uncovered in mass graves.
The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo confirmed with the deputy head prosecutor of Kyiv’s region that 900 bodies have been found so far, buried in several mass graves around the region.
Zelenskiy previously misspoke, implying that a new mass grave of 900 was found. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, was visiting the site of some of these mass graves yesterday.
Updated
Here’s more information on what it looks like for residents in Ukraine’s besieged Mariupol, from AFP.
Charred buildings, sunken ships and scattered shrapnel in the port of Mariupol remain a stark reminder of a siege endured by the Ukrainian city recently captured by Moscow during a military campaign in its pro-Western neighbour.
After nearly two months, the fighting in the battered city and its strategic port has mostly stopped, but the sound of explosions still echoes from the Azovstal steel plant: the last stronghold of Ukrainian forces in the city.
President Vladimir Putin last week ordered a blockage of the steelworks, where several hundred Ukrainian solider and civilians remain sheltered in a maze of Soviet-era underground tunnels, including those requiring medical attention.
From Mariupol’s port, AFP heard heavy shelling coming from Azovstal on Friday morning and mid-afternoon, during a media trip organised by the Russian army.
In the early afternoon, explosions were only a few seconds apart - some more powerful than others - and grey smoke occasionally rose into the sky above the huge industrial zone.
- De-mining -
Life appears to have come to a halt in Mariupol’s once bustling port, which bears the scars of some of the heaviest fighting seen in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s military operation on February 24.
In the port area on the shores of the Sea of Azov, the majority of administrative buildings have been severely damaged, their walls charred and crumbling.
Rolls of copper that according to their export labels were bound for Israel, lie abandoned. A few steps away, shipping containers lie ripped open - their cargo spilling out onto the ground.
But the danger is far from over for the city that was once home to around half a million people, as de-mining operations are underway in the port, with missile fragments scattered on the ground.
“The waters of the port and the port itself have been mined. We are carrying out de-mining operations to secure them,” said Sergei Neka, a senior official with the Emergency Situations Ministry of the pro-Russian separatist authorities.
At the end of the dock, two men in heavy suits work to disarm underwater mines and rockets brought up by divers. Once they are neutralised, they are taken away by a military truck.
A little further on, a few men with shovels walk alongside an excavator towards one of the many destroyed buildings.
Several ships have sunk and remain stranded in the port, including a cargo boat and a Ukrainian military command ship, destroyed in the siege.
Following up on earlier reports of air raid alerts in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, those alerts have reportedly ended.
From Iuliia Mendel:
Ok, in some regions the alert is over. Including Kyiv and Lviv. Waiting if our air defence coped with all the threats
— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) April 29, 2022
Vladimir Putin could announce the mass mobilization of Russians on 9 May, Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has said.
Mr Wallace said that Putin could declare that “we are now at war with the world’s Nazis and we need to mass mobilize the Russian people”.
He told LBC that the Russian leader had “failed” in “nearly all [of his] objectives”.
He added: “We have to help Ukrainians effectively get the limpet off the rock and keep the momentum pushing them back”.
Meanwhile, the British ambassador to Ukraine has announced the reopening of the embassy in the capital of Kyiv after it was temporarily relocated days before the Russian invasion began.
Updated
Russia’s defense ministry released a video today showing an injured British man being interrogated by Russian forces in Ukraine, reported Reuters.
The man, who identified himself as Andrew Hill, spoke with a British accent and had a bandaged left arm in the video. The man’s head was also wrapped in bandages and blood was on his right arm.
“I don’t have a rank ... I just know the foreign legion said I could help,” said the man in the video when questioned about his rank.
The Russian defense ministry said the man surrendered to Russian forces in the Mykolaiv region of southwestern Ukraine.
Read the full article here (paywall).
Updated
A pro-Russia cybercrime group hacked several Romanian government websites because of the country’s support for Ukraine, reported AFP citing Romania’s cybersecurity agency.
A series of attacks hit “public institutions and private entities”, Romania’s National Cybersecurity Agency said in a statement.
The so-called Ddos attacks, where multiple requests are sent to a website to overload its servers, knocked several websites offline for a few minutes, including the defence ministry, border police and railways.
The cybersecurity agency said a group called “Killnet” posted a message on Telegram saying they had carried out the attacks because of “Romania’s support for Ukraine in the military conflict with Russia”.
Romania’s intelligence service (SRI) said the cybercriminals had “exploited vulnerabilities” in the websites by “taking control of equipment operating outside Romania”.
It added that Killnet had recently targeted official websites of the United States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Nato.
The United States and its major partners in the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance last week said they had information warning of massive Russian cyberattacks being prepared against Ukraine’s allies.
Updated
US president Joe Biden commented today on the death of Willy Joseph Cancel, an American who died in combat in Ukraine, calling the former marine’s death “very sad”.
Biden commented to pool on the American killed in Ukraine: “It’s very sad. He left a little baby behind.”
— Morgan Chalfant (@mchalfant16) April 29, 2022
Cancel was killed on Monday while fighting alongside Ukrainian armed forces and is the first known American to die during combat in the war with Russia.
Updated
Air raid alerts are reportedly going off in Kyiv, according to social media posts.
From Iuliia Mendel, ex-spokesperson of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy:
Air raid alert in Kyiv
— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) April 29, 2022
US defense secretary Llyod Austin tweeted support for the Ukraine military today amid ongoing atrocities committed by Russia.
Austin said via Twitter:
Ukraine’s hospitals have been bombed. Their citizens have been executed. Their children have been traumatized. And yet, despite all that, they have done a magnificent job defending their sovereignty. Ukraine’s valor and skill will go down in military history.
Austin’s tweet follows condemnation of Russia from US Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby today, who called actions by Russian military forces “the most depraved sort”.
Updated
Here’s an interview with TV pundit and author Malcolm Nance who recently left the US to go to Ukraine and fight in the war, with writer Michael Harriot for the Guardian.
As a personal and professional acquaintance of Nance, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when the literary agent to whom I had introduced him a few months ago, interrogated me about whether I knew that Nance had joined the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine in March.
“I had no idea,” I replied, extremely unshocked. “But it sounds exactly like something Nance would do. It’s the most Malcolm thing ever.”
Whether jousting with his conservative critics on social media or battling the trend toward authoritarianism that has invaded American politics, Nance has spent most of his life defending the values he endorses. He participated in US combat operations, taught Survival, Evasion, Resistance (Sere) and created advanced programs for the US military. His 20 years of experience in intelligence, counter-terrorism and cryptology as a chief petty officer in the United States navy made him one of the most sought-after intelligence experts in the media. Although his books Defeating Isis and The Plot to Hack America presaged Putin’s invasion of American elections and Ukraine, Nance is not a war correspondent or a pundit.
When I interviewed him about his recent decision to take up arms in Ukraine, the telephone conversation was typical of our many conversations.
First, let me ask you, as a journalist, not as a friend: what the hell, Malcolm?
Well, what made me decide to do this was a couple of things. But the precipitating event of course, was the invasion of Ukraine. I spent a month in Ukraine, driving around, mapping out the Russian order of battle, driving up and down the highways and analyzing where the invasion routes would come and go. So I knew the country backward and forwards by the time of the invasion. In fact, on the day of the invasion, just by happenstance, I got on the last Lufthansa flight out of the country. A couple of hours later they had leveled the airport.
Read the full interview here.
Updated
Russia does not consider itself to be at war with NATO, blaming Ukraine for stalled peace talks, reports Reuters.
Russia does not consider itself to be at war with NATO over Ukraine since such a development would increase the risks of a nuclear war, RIA news agency cited Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying on Friday.
RIA also said Lavrov told the Dubai-based Al Arabiya channel that Ukraine was at fault for stalled peace talks with Russia, blaming what he said was Kyiv’s changing negotiating positions.
In new comments today, a US Pentagon spokesperson accused Putin of depravity and brutality during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s brutality of the coldest and the most depraved sort,” said US Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby.
“I don’t think we fully appreciated the degree to which he would visit that kind of violence and cruelty and as I said depravity, on innocent people, on non-combatants, on civilians, with such utter disregard for the lives he was taking,” Kirby added.
Here’s video of additional comments made by Kirby from CSPAN:
.@PentagonPresSec John Kirby gets emotional talking about Putin: "It's difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious mature leader would do that. I can't talk to his psychology, but I think we can all speak to his depravity." pic.twitter.com/awH6dKyoPW
— CSPAN (@cspan) April 29, 2022
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said today that there was a big risk that peace talks with Russia would end, blaming public anger over what he said were atrocities by Russian troops, reports Reuters, citing Interfax news agency.
“People [Ukrainians] want to kill them. When that kind of attitude exists, it’s hard to talk about things,” said Zelenskiy according to Interfax.
Updated
US officials are also saying that it is unclear if Russian president Vladimir Putin is receiving accurate information on the war in Ukraine from his advisors.
From Foreign Policy’s Jack Detsch:
U.S. believe it's NOT clear that Putin is getting accurate information on the war in Ukraine from advisors in the Kremlin: Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby
— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) April 29, 2022
"He's messaging that he is going to achieve military outcomes in the Donbas and the south," Kirby said.
It has been previously reported that Putin was not receiving accurate information on the war in Ukraine from his advisors, specifically about military miscalculations being made by Russian military forces.
The US has begun training Ukrainian armed forces at US sites located outside of Ukraine, including one in Germany, announced a US Pentagon spokesperson.
While giving a briefing on the Ukraine war, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said:
Today I can announce that the United States has commenced training with Ukrainian armed forces on key systems at U.S. military installations in Germany.
.@PentagonPresSec John Kirby: "Today I can announce that the United States has commenced training with Ukrainian armed forces on key systems at U.S. military installations in Germany." pic.twitter.com/7kiPolbePc
— CSPAN (@cspan) April 29, 2022
Providing additional context on the training, Kirby said that there are three sites outside of the US where Ukrainians are receiving training, including one in Germany.
Kirby clarified further that he could not disclose where the additional sites are located.
.@PentagonPresSec John Kirby on training: "We're talking about roughly three locations outside of Ukraine and in this case we definitely can identify Germany as a site. There are other sites outside Ukraine and we're just not at liberty to disclose where they are." pic.twitter.com/QRUDL855Qq
— CSPAN (@cspan) April 29, 2022
Kirby added: “Those sites could change over time...but training has already occurred outside Ukraine, particularly on the Howitzers,” referring to long-range weapons that Ukrainians were recently given by the US.
Summary
It is 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
- Ukraine acknowledged heavy losses from Russia’s attack in the east as Moscow’s forces, having failed to seize the capital, redoubled their efforts to fully capture the eastern Donbas region. But Ukraine said casualties in the invading army were even worse. “We have serious losses, but the Russians’ losses are much much bigger … They have colossal losses,” a Ukrainian presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, said.
- European Union countries are likely to approve a phased embargo on Russian oil as early as next week, according to EU officials. European ambassadors are reportedly expected to give their approval of a finalised proposal by the end of next week after meeting on Wednesday, according to several EU officials and diplomats involved in the process.
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The US does not believe the threat of Russia using nuclear weapons despite a recent escalation in Moscow’s rhetoric, a senior US defence official said. Russia is days behind its schedule on its military operations in Ukraine’s Donbas region, a US defence official said, adding that the US believes that Russia’s fighting with Ukraine in the Donbas region will be a potential “knife fight”.
- Moscow has confirmed it carried out an airstrike on Kyiv during a visit by the UN secretary general, António Guterres. The defence ministry said two “high-precision, long-range air-based weapons” had destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in the Ukrainian capital on Thursday night.
- The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, however, said a 25-storey residential building in the capital’s Shevchenkivskyi district was hit in the strike. Klitschko said one body had been recovered. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said one of its staff, the journalist and producer Vera Gyrych, had died “as a result of a Russian missile hitting the house where she lived” during Guterres’ visit.
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The situation inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol is “beyond a humanitarian catastrophe”, a Ukrainian commander inside the facility has said. Serhiy Volyna, from the 36th separate marine brigade, said there were hundreds of people in the steelworks, including 60 young people, the youngest of whom is four months old. Ukraine hopes to evacuate civilians who are holed up in the steel plant with the last fighters defending the southern city, Zelenskiy’s office said.
- Two British aid workers who have reportedly been captured by Russian forces in Ukraine have been named. Presidium Network, a UK-based company that says it carries out evacuations of families and individuals from war zones, identified Paul Urey and Dylan Healy as the captured men. The Foreign Office said it was seeking further information about claims the two men who went to Ukraine to provide humanitarian aid have been captured.
- A former US Marine has been killed fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, the first US citizen known to have died in combat in the war with Russia. Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, was killed on Monday while working for a military contracting company that sent him to Ukraine, his mother told CNN. The US defence department warned US citizens that they should not go to Ukraine to fight.
- The US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, says the House will vote to pass Joe Biden’s $33bn request for aid for Ukraine “as soon as possible”. Speaking at her weekly press briefing on Friday morning, the House speaker framed the administration’s request as one of a number of “emergencies” Congress needed to address urgently.
-
Britain will send investigators to Ukraine to help gather evidence of war crimes, including sexual violence, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said. Ukrainian prosecutors and the international criminal court (ICC) have been investigating potential war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s 24 February invasion.
That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, as I hand the blog over to my US colleague, Gloria Oladipo. I’ll be back next week. Thank you for reading.
Updated
The US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, says the House will vote to pass Joe Biden’s $33bn request for aid for Ukraine “as soon as possible”.
Speaking at her weekly press briefing on Friday morning, the House speaker framed the administration’s request as one of a number of “emergencies” Congress needed to address urgently.
“We have emergencies here. We need to have the Covid money, and time is of the essence because we need the Ukraine money... so I would hope that we can do that [soon]”, Pelosi said, according to Reuters.
The speaker, however, was unable to give any indication as to when any vote might be, saying only: “We hope to as soon as possible pass that legislation”.
Biden announced on Thursday plans to more than double US spending on military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as the country fights the two-month-old Russian invasion.
Updated
Updated
Facebook moderators have called on the company to let them take action against users who praise or support the Russian military’s atrocities in Bucha and across Ukraine.
Almost a month after evidence of widespread murder and mass graves was uncovered by Ukrainian forces taking the suburb of Kyiv, the social network still has not flagged the atrocity as an “internally designated” incident, the moderators say.
That ties their hands in how they can treat content related to the killings, they say, and forces them to leave up some content they believe ought to be removed.
“It’s been a month since the massacre and mass graves in Bucha, but this event hasn’t been even designated a ‘violating event’, let alone a hate crime,” said one moderator, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. “On that same day there was a shooting in the US, with one fatality and two casualties, and this was declared a violating event within three hours.”
Under Facebook’s public moderation guidelines, users are barred from posting content that makes violent threats through “references to historical or fictional incidents of violence”. But in private documents issued to moderators, who work for third-party contracting firms such as Accenture or Bertelsmann, they are told to wait for regional input from Facebook itself before determining whether a “documented violent incident” counts.
In the absence of that input, content that praises events in Bucha is tough to remove if it’s even slightly coy about whether it’s celebrating the murder of people. One post, for instance, showed a T-shirt featuring a butcher carving up a pig, with Russian text on it reading “РеZня в Буче Можем поVторить” – “Slaughter in Bucha, we can repeat”.
“My suspicion is that this is just not as close, not as important to American audiences or the American public, so it just doesn’t get the attention,” the Facebook moderator said. “After two weeks I realised that they probably aren’t going to do anything about it.
“I was quite happy with the initial reaction of Facebook to the war,” they added. “I was quite happy with the exceptions that were made that allowed dehumanising speech against soldiers. Those changes brought some balance into the policies: victims and oppressors were not treated the same and were not given the same rights. But now, it has become clear that what counts for Facebook is American public opinion. They only care if they look good in the US media.”
Russia taking ‘colossal’ losses in eastern battle, says Ukraine
A Ukrainian presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, has acknowledged that its army has taken heavy losses as Moscow’s forces, having failed to seize the capital, redoubled their efforts to fully capture the eastern Donbas region.
But Arestovych said casualties in the invading army were even worse. Speaking earlier today, he said:
We have serious losses, but the Russians’ losses are much much bigger … They have colossal losses.
Western officials said today that Russia had been suffering fewer casualties after narrowing the scale of its invasion but numbers were still “quite high”.
Updated
European Union countries are likely to approve a phased embargo on Russian oil as early as next week, according to EU officials.
The New York Times reports that European ambassadors are expected to give their approval of a finalised proposal by the end of next week after meeting on Wednesday, citing several EU officials and diplomats involved in the process.
The oil embargo will be the biggest and most important step in the EU’s sixth package of sanctions since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.
The package would also include sanctions against Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, as well as additional measures against high-profile Russians, officials said.
Updated
Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, has arrived in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
Last week, the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced Britain would reopen its Kyiv embassy more than two months after moving it out of the capital before the Russian invasion.
It was a long drive but worth going the distance. So good to be in #Kyiv again. pic.twitter.com/FsQe0xnEIz
— Melinda Simmons (@MelSimmonsFCDO) April 29, 2022
Earlier today, the Dutch foreign affairs ministry said the Netherlands will reopen its Kyiv embassy today.
Updated
Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of seizing “over 2,000 artworks” from museums in the occupied city of Mariupol and moving the pieces to the Russian-controlled Donbas region.
“The occupiers ‘liberated’ Mariupol from its historical and cultural heritage. They stole and moved more than 2,000 unique exhibits from museums in Mariupol to Donetsk,” the Mariupol city council said in a statement posted on its Telegram channel on Thursday.
They said the haul includes several original works by the 19th-century Mariupol native Arkhip Kuindzhi and the famed Russian romantic painter Ivan Aivazovsky as well as a unique handwritten Torah scroll, and the Gospel of 1811, made by a Venetian printing house for the Greeks of Mariupol.
“Mariupol city council is preparing materials for law enforcement agencies to initiate criminal proceedings and make an appeal to Interpol,” the council added.
In a separate statement, Petro Andriushchenko, a member of the city council, said Russia seized three original paintings by Kuindzhi, who gained international fame for his portraits of the Russian landscape.
According to the Mariupol city council, the works came from three local museums, including the Kuindzhi Art Museum, which was heavily damaged during a Russian airstrike on 21 March 2022.
Natalia Kapustnikova, director of the Mariupol Local History Museum, told the pro-Kremlin outlet Izvestiya that she handed over the works of Aivazovsky and Kuindzhi to the Russian forces “following the end of the hostilities”.
“The head of the Kuindzhi art museum hid the paintings when the war started. I knew where they were … They were then moved to safety,” she said.
Updated
US does not believe Russia will use nuclear weapons, says official
The US does not believe the threat of Russia using nuclear weapons despite a recent escalation in Moscow’s rhetoric, a senior US defence official said.
The official said:
We do not assess that there is a threat of the use of nuclear weapons and no threat to Nato territory.
Russia is days behind its schedule on its military operations in Ukraine’s Donbas region, a US defence official said.
The official said the US believes that Russia’s fighting with Ukraine in the Donbas region will be a potential “knife fight”.
Fighting in the Donbas could become prolonged by toe-to-toe ground combat and the use of long-range fires, the official said.
From Foreign Policy’s Jack Detsch:
NEW: Ukraine continues to resist Russia's advance in the Donbas, putting 🇷🇺 days behind schedule in their invasion: senior US defense official
— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) April 29, 2022
But 🇷🇺 boasts superior numbers & shorter lines of comms in the Donbas. "The fighting there could become prolonged," official said.
Meanwhile, western officials said Russia suffered fewer casualties in Ukraine after focusing on the Donbas region, but the numbers were still quite high.
Asked about Ukrainian casualties, one official said there had been Ukrainian losses in the Donbas:
They are taking some losses [but] certainly not at the sort of scale that Russian forces are taking.
Those losses on Russian forces, we assessed to be having a significant impact on the will to fight of wider Russian forces, but the Ukrainian losses are not affecting the morale of the Ukrainian forces.
Updated
Updated
Today so far …
If you have just joined us, here’s a roundup of what’s been happening so far:
- Moscow has confirmed it carried out an airstrike on Kyiv during a visit by the UN secretary general, António Guterres. The defence ministry said two “high-precision, long-range air-based weapons” had destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in the Ukrainian capital on Thursday night.
- The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, however, said a 25-storey residential building in the capital’s Shevchenkivskyi district was hit in the strike. Klitschko said one body had been recovered. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said one of its staff, the journalist and producer Vera Gyrych, had died “as a result of a Russian missile hitting the house where she lived” during Guterres’ visit.
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Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in an overnight address that the Kyiv attack was aimed at “humiliating” the UN, adding: “It says a lot about Russia’s true attitude to global institutions, about the efforts of the Russian leadership to humiliate the UN and everything that the organisation represents. It requires a strong response.”
- Ukraine acknowledged heavy losses from Russia’s attack in the east as Moscow’s forces, having failed to seize the capital, redoubled their efforts to fully capture the eastern Donbas region. But Ukraine said casualties in the invading army were even worse. “We have serious losses, but the Russians’ losses are much much bigger … They have colossal losses,” a Ukrainian presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, said.
-
The situation inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol is “beyond a humanitarian catastrophe”, a Ukrainian commander inside the facility has said. Serhiy Volyna, from the 36th separate marine brigade, said there were hundreds of people in the steelworks, including 60 young people, the youngest of whom is four months old. Ukraine hopes to evacuate civilians who are holed up in the steel plant with the last fighters defending the southern city, Zelenskiy’s office said.
- Two British aid workers who have reportedly been captured by Russian forces in Ukraine have been named. Presidium Network, a UK-based company that says it carries out evacuations of families and individuals from war zones, identified Paul Urey and Dylan Healy as the captured men. The Foreign Office said it was seeking further information about claims the two men who went to Ukraine to provide humanitarian aid have been captured.
- A former US Marine has been killed fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, the first US citizen known to have died in combat in the war with Russia. Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, was killed on Monday while working for a military contracting company that sent him to Ukraine, his mother told CNN. The US defence department warned US citizens that they should not go to Ukraine to fight.
-
Britain will send investigators to Ukraine to help gather evidence of war crimes, including sexual violence, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said. Ukrainian prosecutors and the international criminal court (ICC) have been investigating potential war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s 24 February invasion.
Good afternoon from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, in London. Feel free to drop me a message if you have anything to flag, you can reach me on Twitter or via email.
Updated
Two British aid workers who have reportedly been captured by Russian forces in Ukraine have been named.
Presidium Network, a UK-based company that says it carries out evacuations of families and individuals from war zones, identified Paul Urey and Dylan Healy as the captured men.
The Foreign Office (FCDO) said earlier on Friday it was seeking further information about claims the two men who went to Ukraine to provide humanitarian aid had been captured.
A statement from Urey’s mother, Linda, released by Presidium said: “My family and I are extremely worried. We know my son Paul and his friend who was a humanitarian aid volunteer in Ukraine has been captured by the Russians.
“He was out there on his own accord. We want everyone’s support to bring my son home and pray he is safe. My son Paul is also type 1 diabetic and needs his insulin. We have asked the Presidium Network to help us and also the FCDO to help as well. We pray for him and hope he is safe.”
The organisation said it had been intending to work with the men, who were missing south of Zaporizhzhia, and provided details of messages in which they had reported their location. Both appeared to be members of the public with little or no experience of military or humanitarian work.
There was no immediate comment from the FCDO.
• This article was amended on 3 May 2022. Presidium Network is a community interest company, not a non-governmental organisation as stated in an earlier version.
Updated
UN 'will redouble its efforts to save lives' in Ukraine, says secretary general
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said he was “moved” by the “resilience and bravery” of the people of Ukraine, after his visit to Kyiv yesterday.
Guterres tweeted:
My message to them is simple: We will not give up.
I was moved by the resilience and bravery of the people of Ukraine. My message to them is simple: We will not give up.
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) April 29, 2022
The @UN will redouble its efforts to save lives and reduce human suffering. In this war, as in all wars, the civilians always pay the highest price. pic.twitter.com/dd1OsyzAOb
Updated
A former US Marine has been killed fighting alongside Ukrainian forces – the first US citizen known to have died in combat in the war with Russia.
Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, was killed on Monday while working for a military contracting company that sent him to Ukraine, his mother, Rebecca Cabrera, told CNN.
Cabrera said her son was working as a corrections officer in Tennessee and had signed up to work with the private military contractor shortly before fighting began in late February. She told CNN he agreed to go to Ukraine.
“He wanted to go over because he believed in what Ukraine was fighting for, and he wanted to be a part of it to contain it there so it didn’t come here, and that maybe our American soldiers wouldn’t have to be involved in it,” she said.
Cabrera said her son’s body had not been found.
“They haven’t found his body,” she said. “They are trying, the men that were with him, but it was either grab his body or get killed. We would love for him to come back to us.”
The US has not confirmed the reports. On Friday, the state department said it was aware of the reports and was “closely monitoring the situation. Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment. We once again reiterate US citizens should not travel to Ukraine due to the active armed conflict and the singling out of US citizens in Ukraine by Russian government security officials, and that US citizens in Ukraine should depart immediately if it is safe to do so using any commercial or other privately available ground transportation options.”
Cancel’s widow, Brittany Cancel, told Fox News he had a young son who saw her husband as a hero.
“My husband did die in Ukraine,” Cancel said. “He went there wanting to help people, he had always felt that that was his main mission in life.”
Updated
The US defense department has again warned US citizens that they should not go to Ukraine to fight. Agence France-Presse reports Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told CNN “We continue to urge Americans not to go to Ukraine... this is an active war zone, this is not the place to be traveling to.”
The comments came after the death of 22-year-old Willy Joseph Cancel on Monday.
Kirby offered condolences for Cancel’s family, and said he understood his “altruistic motives,” while underscoring that there are ways to support Ukraine “in a safe, effective way.”
The President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, has just tweeted a picture of his meeting with Bulgaria’s prime minister, Kiril Petkov. In the message he says they discussed ways to deepen cooperation and promote their interests within the European Union and Nato.
Iohannis also rather pointedly, given recent events in the breakaway Transnistria region that borders Ukraine, specifically said the two men spoke about their support of Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.
Welcomed 🇧🇬 PM @KirilPetkov to #CotroceniPalace. We discussed ways to deepen bilateral cooperation and continue our coordination to promote joint interests in EU & NATO. Focus on energy security, increasing interconnectivity between🇧🇬-🇷🇴, support to Ukraine & Republic of Moldova. pic.twitter.com/y5QcX3bEQa
— Klaus Iohannis (@KlausIohannis) April 29, 2022
Updated
Authorities in Ukraine are trying to encourage civilians not to visit cemeteries and graves post-Easter, a time when families traditionally go and visit the last resting places of their loved ones. The Luhansk governor, Serhiy Haidai, has just issued another message to that effect on Telegram, saying:
In the territory of Luhansk region it is forbidden to visit cemeteries and burial places on traditional post-Easter memorial days in 2022.
This is stated in the order of the head of the Luhansk regional state administration, the head of the regional military administration Serhiy Haidai No 160 dated 28 April, 2022.
The ban was introduced to save the lives and health of citizens in conditions of active hostilities.
- This is Martin Belam in London, back on the blog for the next hour or so. You can reach me at martin.belam@theguardian.com
Updated
Almost 80 Holocaust survivors have been evacuated from Ukraine in a complex operation to rescue the most elderly and fragile out of the war, the New York Times reports.
Two Jewish groups have organised a rescue mission to evacuate Ukraine’s Holocaust survivors, of whom there are about 10,000, to Germany.
Galina Ploschenko, 90, embarked on a three-day journey from Dnipro, her hometown in central Ukraine, to Hanover, in north-western Germany.
She said she was trapped in her bed at a retirement centre in Dnipro, as nurses fled to the basement while artillery strikes thundered and air raid sirens blared.
Ploschenko said:
That first time, I was a child, with my mother as my protector. Now, I’ve felt so alone. It is a terrible experience, a painful one.
The groups said convincing these elderly Holocaust survivors to leave Ukraine and go to Germany was not an easy one. Rüdiger Mahlo, of the Claims Conference, who works with German officials in Berlin to organise the rescues, said:
One of them told us: I won’t be evacuated to Germany. I do want to be evacuated — but not to Germany.
Ploschenko told the NYT the decision to leave was not made without trepidation:
They told me Germany was my best option. I told them, ‘I hope you’re right.’
She said she now had “nothing but love” for Germany, though she remembered “everything” about the last war she survived. From the senior care centre in Hanover where she now resides, she practises the German phrases she has carefully recorded on a notepad: “danke schön” (many thanks) and “alles liebe” (much love).
Updated
Situation inside Mariupol’s Azovstal ‘beyond a humanitarian catastrophe’, says commander
The situation inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol is “beyond a humanitarian catastrophe”, a Ukrainian commander inside the facility has said.
Serhiy Volyna, from the 36th separate marine brigade, said there were hundreds of people in the steel works, including 60 young people, the youngest of whom is four months old.
In an interview with CNN, he said because of a recent Russian strike against the plant’s field hospital, there was no vital medical equipment and people “have very little water, very little food left”.
Volyna said:
The operating theatre was hit directly. And all the operating equipment, everything that is necessary to perform surgery has been destroyed so right now, we cannot treat our wounded, especially those with shrapnel wounds and with bullet wounds.
He added:
We are looking after the wounded right now with whatever tools we have. We have our army medics and they’re using every skill they have to look after the wounded. And right now, we don’t have any surgical tools but we have some basics. But also, we are in dire need of medication. We have almost no medication left.
When asked about a possible evacuation plan from the Azovstal plant, announced by the Ukrainian president’s office today, Volyna said he did not “know the details”.
Updated
Norway will close its borders and ports to Russian trucks and ships, joining sanctions imposed by the EU over the war in Ukraine, the Norwegian foreign ministry has said.
Russian fishing vessels, which often land their catch at ports in northern Norway, will receive exemptions from sanctions, Reuters reports.
Norway’s Arctic Svalbard archipelago, which operates under a 1920s treaty allowing expanded foreign access, will also be exempted, the ministry says.
Updated
Warning lights are flashing in the eurozone economy, with first-quarter growth in France stalling and shrinking in Italy, as Russia’s war in Ukraine drives up energy costs across the continent.
Figures from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics body, showed growth in GDP across the single-currency area slipped to 0.2% in the first three months of 2022, down from 0.3% in the final quarter of 2021, when the Omicron Covid variant weighed on activity.
City economists had forecast a growth rate of 0.3% for the 19 euro-area countries, highlighting the economic risks from the war amid soaring wholesale oil and gas prices exacerbated by the conflict.
Raising the spectre of stagflation as living costs soar while growth in GDP falters, France’s economy unexpectedly ground to a halt in the first three months of the year, recording zero growth as supply chain disruption and higher energy costs held back activity.
Italy’s economy shrank, Spain lost momentum, while Germany rebounded from a contraction in the fourth quarter when Omicron and supply chain problems had weighed heavily on the euro area’s largest economy.
Suggesting a weaker period ahead as the conflict continues to push up the price of energy, hitting net importers of gas across the continent, separate figures for April showed eurozone inflation hit a record high of 7.5%.
Prices jumped by 0.6% in April alone. Energy was the biggest single factor, driving up costs with a 38% year-on-year increase as wholesale prices for oil and gas soared, amid fears over disruption to supplies across the continent as the war continues.
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Zelenskiy: Russia trying to ‘humiliate’ UN with Kyiv attack
In a video address late last night, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, condemned yesterday’s Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, which took place while the UN secretary general was visiting the capital.
Zelenskiy said the strikes happened immediately after his talks with António Guterres, “and this says a lot about Russia’s true attitude to global institutions”. He accused Russia’s leadership of trying to “humiliate the UN and everything that the organisation represents”.
He said:
Today, immediately after the end of our talks [with Guterres] in Kyiv, Russian missiles flew into the city. Five missiles.
This says a lot about Russia’s true attitude to global institutions, about the Russian leadership’s efforts to humiliate the UN and everything that the organisation represents.
And therefore requires an appropriate, powerful response.
Russian attacks in other cities across the country, including Fastiv and Odesa “once again prove that we cannot let our guard down”, he said.
We cannot think that the war is over. We still have to fight. We still have to drive the occupiers out.
The Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said Russia’s “defiant behaviour” was an “attack on world security”.
During the meeting with @antonioguterres in #Kyiv, we heard explosions, russia launched a missile strike on the capital. I am sure that such defiant behavior of the occupier will be assessed properly by the @UN Secretary-General. War in #Ukraine is an attack on world security!
— Denys Shmyhal (@Denys_Shmyhal) April 28, 2022
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The Kremlin has said Russia is preparing for this year’s G20 summit in Indonesia but remains undecided over whether President Vladimir Putin will attend in person or virtually.
Indonesia, which is chairing the G20, has invited Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to a leaders summit in November, despite pressure from some western countries to exclude the former.
Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, said he had turned down a request for arms from Ukraine’s leader and urged him and Putin to end the war in Ukraine, Reuters reports.
In an online statement, the Indonesian leader said he had declined Zelenskiy’s request for weapons because of his country’s foreign policy, which tries to steer a path of strategic neutrality. He said Indonesia was ready to send humanitarian aid.
He said he had spoken to both leaders by phone this week, adding:
I expressed my hope that the war can soon be ended, and peaceful solutions can be forged through negotiations.
The Ukrainian president’s attendance at the G20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali would “depend mainly on the situation in the battlefield”, Vysotskyi Taras, a senior Ukrainian government official, said on Thursday.
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Two British volunteers captured by Russian forces, says NGO
Two British volunteers providing humanitarian assistance in Ukraine have been captured by Russian forces, an aid organisation has said.
The men were detained at a checkpoint near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday, according to the UK-based non-profit Presidium Network.
They were said to be trying to rescue a Ukrainian family from a village south of the city at the time of their capture.
They are believed to have been working independently but were in touch with Presidium Network.
The organisation’s founder, Dominik Byrne, told the BBC it had taken the men six hours of negotiation to get through the last Ukrainian checkpoint and into Russian territory, where they were detained.
He told the BBC:
They got through a Ukraine checkpoint to go south through a Russian-controlled area when we lost contact on Monday morning.
He said the civilians waiting to be evacuated began to receive strange tests and two hours later Russian soldiers stormed their house, asking how they knew the men and that they believed they were “British spies”.
He said he was making an appeal on behalf of the captured men “to get the support we need from the UK government and from the international community, as well as on the ground”.
He said he also wanted “to get clarification about how they are and how safe they are” and to know whether they were being “treated properly”.
The Foreign Office has said it is urgently seeking more information.
Hello everyone. It’s Léonie Chao-Fong here again, taking over the live blog from Martin Belam to bring you all the latest developments on the war in Ukraine. As always, feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.
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Today so far …
- Russia attacked western Kyiv with two cruise missiles late yesterday, as the UN secretary general, António Guterres, visited the Ukrainian capital. Two loud explosions rocked Kyiv on Thursday evening, after Guterres visited the site of massacres and mass graves on the city’s outskirts, and met Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The UN chief admitted: “Let me be very clear. The security council failed to do everything in its power to prevent and end this war.”
- Russia’s defence ministry said its forces destroyed the production facilities of a space-rocket plant in Kyiv with high-precision long-range missiles. It is being reported that the journalist Vera Girich was killed in the missile strikes on the city.
- Russia’s ministry of defence posted a video claiming to show cruise missiles being launched into Ukraine from a submarine of the Black Sea fleet.
- Ukraine hopes to evacuate civilians who are holed up in the Azovstal steel plant with the last fighters defending the southern city of Mariupol. “An operation is planned today to get civilians out of the plant,” Zelenskiy’s office said without giving details.
- A checkpoint at the Russian village of Krupets in the Kursk region came under fire, according to Kursk’s governor, Roman Starovoyt.
- Russian gains in Donbas have come at a “significant cost” to its forces, the UK Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence report.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency says it is investigating a report that a missile had flown directly over a nuclear power station, adding it would be “extremely serious” if true.
- The US president, Joe Biden, called for a $33bn package of military and economic aid to Ukraine, more than doubling the level of US assistance to date.
- Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament who is often seen to be voicing the Kremlin’s views, accused the US of seeking to profit from the war while indebting future generations of Ukrainians.
- A British citizen has been killed in Ukraine and a second is missing, the Foreign Office has confirmed, amid reports that both were volunteer fighters. The Briton who died was understood to be Scott Sibley, a former British soldier who had served in Iraq.
- The UK will send 8,000 soldiers to eastern Europe on expanded exercises to combat Russian aggression in one of the largest deployments since the cold war.
- The UK is also sending experts to help Ukraine with gathering evidence and prosecuting war crimes, with a team due to arrive in Poland in early May.
Léonie Chao-Fong will be along shortly to take over the blog for the next few hours. I will be back later.
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Here are some of the latest images to be sent to us from Kyiv, which show the aftermath of the Russian missile strike in the Shevchenkivskyi district.
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It is being reported that the journalist Vera Girich was killed in the missile strike on Kyiv yesterday. Radio Svoboda writes:
Radio Liberty journalist and producer Vera Girich died as a result of a Russian missile hitting the house where she lived in Kyiv. The shelling took place on 28 April. The body of the deceased was found under the wreckage on the morning of 29 April.
Vira Gyrych started working in the Kyiv bureau of Radio Svoboda on 1 February 2018. Prior to that, she worked on leading Ukrainian TV channels.
Earlier, Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko posted to Telegram to say that a body had been recovered from rubble in the Shevchenkivskyi district, one of the sites of the strikes.
Продюсерка Радіо Свобода Віра Гирич загинула внаслідок влучання російської ракети в будинок, у якому вона жила в Києві. Обстріл стався 28 квітня. Тіло загиблої виявили під уламками вранці 29 квітня.https://t.co/H8sIUrfwWs pic.twitter.com/24Iu8kB1Um
— Радіо Свобода (@radiosvoboda) April 29, 2022
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Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament who is often seen to be voicing the Kremlin’s views, has today accused the US of seeking to profit from the war while indebting future generations of Ukrainians.
“Lend-Lease is a commodity loan, and not cheap: many future generations of Ukrainian citizens will pay for all the ammunition, equipment and food that the United States will supply,” Volodin said.
“Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is driving the country into a debt pit,” Reuters reports he added.
US president Joe Biden yesterday asked Congress for $33bn to provide ammunition, equipment and food for Ukraine.
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Russia’s ministry of defence has posted to its social media channels video of what it claims is the launch of cruise missiles towards Ukraine from a submarine of the Black Sea fleet.
The post on Telegram says the missiles were targeting military infrastructure.
Updated
Britain is sending experts to help Ukraine with gathering evidence and prosecuting war crimes, with a team due to arrive in Poland in early May.
“Russia has brought barbarity to Ukraine and committed vile atrocities, including against women. British expertise will help uncover the truth and hold Putin’s regime to account for its actions,” Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said.
The announcement comes as Truss travels to The Hague to meet with international criminal court president, Judge Piotr Hofmanski, and her Dutch counterpart Wopke Hoekstra.
“The specialist team will assist the Ukrainian government as they gather evidence and prosecute war crimes and will include experts in conflict-related sexual violence,” said a Foreign Office statement.
Reuters report Ukraine says it is investigating 7,600 potential war crimes and at least 500 suspects following Russia’s invasion of its neighbour on 24 February.
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Ukraine says 'operation is planned today to get civilians out of' Azovstal plant
Ukraine hopes on Friday to evacuate civilians who are holed up in a vast steel works with the last fighters defending the southern city of Mariupol.
“An operation is planned today to get civilians out of the plant,” president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office said without giving details.
There have been regular announcements from both Ukraine and Russia that humanitarian corridors would be set up, but as yet none have succeeded. Russia did not immediately comment on the Ukrainian presidency’s remarks.
“We are depending on the goodwill of all parties and we are in this together,” United Nations crisis coordinator Amin Awad told Reuters this morning.
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Russia’s defence ministry has said its forces have destroyed the production facilities of a space-rocket plant in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv with high-precision long-range missiles, Reuters reports. There has been no independent verification of the claim.
Updated
Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, has posted to Telegram to say that a body has been recovered in the aftermath of yesterday’s Russian missile strike on Ukraine’s capital. He posted:
Friends! Rescuers who are continuing to inspect and dismantle the rubble of a residential building in the Shevchenkivskyi district, where a rocket hit yesterday, have just found the body of the deceased.
China’s ministry of foreign affairs has accused Nato of messing up Europe and stirring up conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region, after the UK’s foreign secretary told China it should “play by the rules”.
In a speech at Mansion House in London on Wednesday, Liz Truss renewed calls to boost Nato in the wake of the Ukraine war. Truss also delivered a direct warning to China. “Countries must play by the rules. And that includes China,” she said.
On Thursday, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s ministry of foreign affairs, dismissed Truss’s comments and accused Nato of demanding other countries abide by basic norms while it has “wantonly waged wars and dropped bombs in sovereign states, killing and displacing innocent civilians”.
“Nato, a military organisation in the North Atlantic, has in recent years come to the Asia-Pacific region to throw its weight around and stir up conflicts,” Wang said.
“Nato has messed up Europe. Is it now trying to mess up the Asia-Pacific and even the world?”
Read more here: China says Nato has ‘messed up Europe’ and warns over role in Asia-Pacific
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Maksym Kozytskyy, governor of Lviv, has given his daily operational briefing via Telegram. He reported that the area had spent two-and-a-half hours last night with air raid warnings in place, but there were no strikes. He said the region is now sheltering 335,000 internally displaced citizens, and also stated that 26,000 Ukrainians crossed the western border to return to the country.
He signed off with an optimistic message: “Have a nice day everyone! Everything will be fine.”
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Lord Malloch Brown, former UN deputy secretary general, has been speaking to Sky News this morning. Of the missile strikes on Kyiv while UN secretary general António Guterres was visiting, he said:
It is humiliating in a way. I think the international community, not just Europe, but countries everywhere, will recognise they cannot have their UN secretary general sort of treated in this disrespectful, casual and frankly, dangerous way, by Putin and the Russian regime.
Malloch Brown did not see much prospect for peace in the near future, telling viewers:
This is not a conflict tragically, which is ready for peacemaking by anybody, let alone the United Nations. Neither side is ready to make the concessions that would require.
He felt that Guterres had attempted to make humanitarian gains his focus, but there was little evidence of success. Malloch Brown said:
[Guterres] very much focused his non-public efforts on securing humanitarian corridors, particularly trying to find a way to get the civilians trapped under the plant in Mariupol a safe passage out. In theory, Putin agreed to that, but there’s been no sign on the ground that even that very limited humanitarian goal has been advanced. So this remains a situation where the Russian word is not to be trusted.
On the long-term implications for the UN, he said:
A lot of ambassadors, a lot of UN staff, describe this as the UN’s League of Nations moment. The moment just before the second world war, when that international mechanism for peacekeeping – the UN’s predecessor – was basically broken.
There are many that worry that the UN faces a similar moment of crisis of legitimacy and confidence. One of the original guarantors of the UN, the former Soviet Union, now Russia, has become a rogue state, an enemy of the international law and order system. The UN has to rise to the occasion of dealing with that.
Ukraine’s foreign minister has tweeted this morning asking for security guarantees and criticising Nato for not opening the door to Ukraine’s membership. Dmytro Kuleba said:
Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons for the sake of world peace. We have then been knocking on Nato’s door, but it never opened. Security vacuum led to Russian aggression. The world owes Ukraine security and we ask states to decide which security guarantees they are ready to provide.
Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons for the sake of world peace. We have then been knocking on NATO’s door, but it never opened. Security vacuum led to Russian aggression. The world owes Ukraine security and we ask states to decide which security guarantees they are ready to provide.
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) April 29, 2022
- This is Martin Belam on the live blog from London for the next few hours. You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com
A checkpoint at the Russian village of Krupets in the Kursk region came under fire, according to Kursk’s governor Roman Starovoyt. The RIA news agency reports he said there were no casualties, and fire was returned. Krupets is close to the Ukrainian border, near the Sumy region in the north-east of the country.
The UK’s international trade minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan has been interviewed on Sky News in the UK. She stressed again that the UK government did not support British people going over to Ukraine to fight.
A British citizen has been killed in Ukraine, and a second is missing, the Foreign Office has confirmed, amid reports both were volunteers who had gone to fight in the country. Trevelyan said:
The Foreign Office is working very closely with those in Ukraine, both to make sure that, you know, the identification is correct. And indeed to work with local authorities and to support families here. As we’ve set out right from the beginning, we don’t want British nationals to go and fight.
But there are many, many ways in which so many people, and I think the heartfelt, genuinely heartfelt, anxiety and appalment that Putin has illegally invaded and is now continuing to bombard those areas where he had stepped away from, is something that quite rightly horrifies the British public.
And there are many ways that we can all support, through humanitarian, through in our homes, through financial, but we don’t want people to go and fight. Obviously, the advice was to not go to Ukraine, that remains the travel advice, for obvious reasons, because it’s a war zone.
And we want to make sure that people can show their support, their solidarity for Ukrainians, and for the battle that those extraordinary people are doing to fight for the freedom of their country through all those other ways. And it is extraordinary how generous the British people are being both with their own homes, with their money, with their time, to support the Ukrainian families.
In case you missed our earlier report, the world’s largest security body has said it is officially winding up its observer mission in Ukraine after eight years, after Russia vetoed its extension.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said it would “take immediate steps” to close the mission after members failed to find a way around Russia’s objections during a meeting last month, AFP reports.
Poland’s foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, whose country holds the rotating OSCE chairmanship, said the organisation had tried all options but “the position of the Russian Federation left us with no choice”.
The Vienna-based OSCE’s mission to Ukraine began in 2014 after Russia-backed separatists launched an insurgency in the east. The organisation was the only international body monitoring the conflict on the ground, according to AFP.
OSCE monitors were largely withdrawn from the country following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. But administrative staff were left behind, and four of them have since been detained.
The OSCE secretary general, Helga Maria Schmid, said the organisation would continue to push for an “end to the detentions, intimidation, and disinformation that are so dangerous for our national mission members”.
Updated
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says it is investigating a report that a missile had flown directly over a nuclear power station, adding it would be “extremely serious” if true.
IAEA director general Rafael Grossi said Kyiv had formally told the agency on Thursday the missile flew over the south Ukraine plant on 16 April. The facility is near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk, 350km (220 miles) south of Kyiv.
Grossi said in a statement:
Ukraine’s regulator formally informed the IAEA that on 16 April 2022 on-site video surveillance recorded the flight of a missile flying directly over the South Ukraine NPP.
The IAEA is looking into this matter, which, if confirmed, would be extremely serious.
Had such a missile gone astray, it could have had a severe impact on the physical integrity of the NPP potentially leading to a nuclear accident.”
Grossi did not say who had fired the missile but Kyiv had earlier accused Moscow of sending rockets directly over nuclear plants.
#Ukraine’s regulator formally informed IAEA today that on 16 April on-site video surveillance recorded the flight of a missile flying directly over the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant. "If confirmed, this event is extremely serious," @RafaelMGrossi said. https://t.co/2zMPRqWDWf pic.twitter.com/4MbJZpmi3T
— IAEA - International Atomic Energy Agency (@iaeaorg) April 28, 2022
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Here are some of the latest images to come out of Ukraine today.
UN chief admits Security Council failed to prevent and end war
The UN secretary general has criticised his own organisation’s security council while on visit to Kyiv.
During a press conference with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Antonio Guterres said the council had failed to prevent or end the war in Ukraine.
Let me be very clear. The security council failed to do everything in its power to prevent and end this war.
This is a source of great disappointment, frustration and anger.”
Guterres pledged that he would “boost our efforts across the board” and expand the council’s cash assistance – distributing $100m per month, reaching 1.3 million people by May and covering 2 million by August.
The 15-member UN security council is specifically tasked with ensuring global peace and security and has faced criticism for failing to act since Russia’s invasion began in February.
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Nato warns of possibility war may drag on 'for months and years'
Nato is prepared for a possibility that the war in Ukraine will drag on and last for months and years.
However, the alliance said it was ready to maintain its support for Ukraine in the war against Russia for years, including help for Kyiv to shift from Soviet-era weapons to modern western arms and systems.
Secretary general Jens Stoltenberg made the remarks during a youth summit in Brussels later on Thursday.
We need to be prepared for the long term.
There is absolutely the possibility that this war will drag on and last for months and years.”
The Nato chief said the west would continue to put maximum pressure on Russian president Vladimir Putin to end the invasion of Ukraine through sanctions and economic as well as military aid to Kyiv.
“Nato allies are preparing to provide support over a long period of time and also help Ukraine to transit, move from old Soviet-era equipment to more modern Nato-standard weapons and systems that will also require more training,” Stoltenberg said.
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Kyiv reeling after being hit by Russian cruise missiles
Russia attacked western Kyiv with two cruise missiles, as the UN secretary general António Guterres visited the Ukrainian capital.
Two loud explosions rocked Kyiv on Thursday evening, after Guterres visited the site of massacres and mass graves on the city’s outskirts, and met Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Ukrainian officials were quick to underline the extraordinary timing of the attack, one day after Guterres met Vladimir Putin (across the very long table the Russian leader uses for many meetings).
The strikes prompted a furious response from Ukraine’s government, with foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba denouncing it as a “heinous act of barbarism” that demonstrated Russia’s “attitude towards Ukraine, Europe and the world”.
Zelenskiy added: “This says a lot about Russia’s true attitude to global institutions. About the efforts of the Russian leadership to humiliate the UN and everything that the organisation represents. Therefore, it requires a strong response.”
Missile strikes in the downtown of Kyiv during the official visit of @antonioguterres. The day before he was sitting at a long table in the Kremlin, and today explosions are above his head. Postcard from Moscow? Recall why 🇷🇺 still takes a seat on the UN Security Council?
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) April 28, 2022
One missile reportedly struck the lower floors of a 25-storey residential building, injuring at least 10 people, Ukrainian officials said.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said the blasts hit the central Shevchenkivskyi district and three people have so far been hospitalised.
The state emergency service said one blast – believed to have occurred around 8.13pm – partially destroyed a 25-storey residential building in the Shevchenkivskyi district of the capital.
Russia stroke Kyiv with cruise missiles right when UN Secretary General @antonioguterres and Bulgarian PM @KirilPetkov visit our capital. By this heinous act of barbarism Russia demonstrates once again its attitude towards Ukraine, Europe and the world.
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) April 28, 2022
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Russian gains in Donbas come at ‘significant cost’, says UK
Russian gains in Donbas have come at a “significant cost” to its forces, the UK ministry of defence has said in its latest intelligence report.
Released just after 6am GMT, the report reads:
The Battle of Donbas remains Russia’s main strategic focus, in order to achieve its stated aim of securing control over the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
In these oblasts fighting has been particularly heavy around Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, with an attempted advance south from Izium towards Slovyansk.
Due to strong Ukrainian resistance, Russian territorial gains have been limited and achieved at significant cost to Russian forces.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 29 April 2022
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) April 29, 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/94lb8T09GX
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/Shgw19Ejz0
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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 until my colleague Martin Belam takes the reins a little later in the day.
It is just past 7am in Ukraine and its capital, Kyiv, is still reeling from a missile attack launched the night before. The blasts came soon after the UN secretary general, António Guterres, met with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, admitting the UN had failed to prevent or end the war.
Meanwhile, Nato has warned that the west needs to be prepared for the long haul and the possibility that the war will “drag on and last for months and years”.
Here’s everything you might have missed:
- Russia attacked Kyiv with two cruise missiles on Thursday evening, injuring at least 10 people and partially destroying a 25-storey residential building in the central Shevchenkivskyi district.
- The blasts came “immediately after” Guterres met with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in the capital.
- The UN chief admitted: “Let me be very clear. The security council failed to do everything in its power to prevent and end this war.”
- Joe Biden has called for a $33bn package of military and economic aid to Ukraine, more than doubling the level of US assistance to date. The package would include over $20bn in military aid, including heavy artillery and armoured vehicles, greater intelligence sharing, cyberwarfare tools and many more anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. “We’re not attacking Russia. We’re helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression,” Biden said.
- The US House has given final passage to legislation that would streamline a second world war-style lend-lease program to more quickly provide Ukraine with military aid. The measure would update the 1941 legislation Franklin Roosevelt signed into law to help allies fight Nazi Germany.
- The UK will send 8,000 soldiers to eastern Europe on expanded exercises to combat Russian aggression in one of the largest deployments since the cold war. Dozens of tanks will be deployed to countries ranging from Finland to North Macedonia between April and June.
- A British citizen has been killed in Ukraine and a second is missing, the Foreign Office has confirmed, amid reports that both were volunteer fighters. The Briton who died was understood to be Scott Sibley, a former British soldier who had served in Iraq.
-
A 22-year-old former US marine and American citizen, Willy Joseph Cancel, was also reportedly killed while fighting alongside Ukrainian forcesin Ukraine, members of his family have told CNN.
- Russian forces have been hitting the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol with the heaviest strikes yet while preventing wounded Ukrainian fighters from being evacuated, a local official said. “They [want to] use the opportunity to capture the defenders of Mariupol, one of the main [elements] of whom are the... Azov regiment. Therefore the Russian side is not agreeing to any evacuation measures regarding wounded [Ukrainian] troops,” Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said, according to Reuters.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was probing a report that a missile had flown directly over a nuclear power station, adding it would be “extremely serious” if true. The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said Kyiv had formally told the agency the missile flew over the plant in southern Ukraine on 16 April. The facility is near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk, 350km (220 miles) south of Kyiv.
- The UN general assembly will vote on 11 May to replace Russia on its 47-member human rights council after Russia was suspended. Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said the Czech Republic was the only candidate for the seat.
- Ukraine’s prosecutor general has named 10 Russian soldiers allegedly involved in human rights abuses during the month-long occupation of Bucha. There were 8,653 alleged war crimes under investigation, according to the prosecutor’s office.
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Moldova’s deputy prime minister, Nicu Popescu, said the country was facing “a very dangerous new moment” as unnamed forces were seeking to stoke tensions after a series of explosions in the breakaway region of Transnistria this week. Popescu said his government had seen “a dangerous deterioration of the situation” in recent days amid attacks in the region.
- The European Union will consider it as a violation of sanctions if European energy companies comply with Moscow’s requirement to open a payment account in roubles with Gazprombank, EU officials warned. The EU “cannot accept” that payments in euros for Russian gas are considered completed by Moscow only after they are converted into roubles, an official said.
- Nato said it was ready to maintain its support for Ukraine in the war against Russia for years, including help for Kyiv to shift from Soviet-era weapons to modern western arms and systems. “We need to be prepared for the long term,” Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, told a summit in Brussels. “There is absolutely the possibility that this war will drag on and last for months and years.”
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The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said Finland and Sweden would be “warmly welcomed” should they decide to join the 30-nation military organisation and any membership process could “go quickly”.
As usual, please feel free to reach out to me by email or Twitter for any tips or feedback.
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