Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said the intense battle for Sievierodonetsk is taking a “terrifying” toll on Ukraine. “The human cost of this battle is very high for us. It is simply terrifying. The battle for the Donbas will without doubt be remembered in military history as one of the most violent battles in Europe,” he said in an address to the nation late on Monday.
All three bridges to the embattled eastern city of Sievierodonetsk have been destroyed, according to the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai. In a video update, Haidai said Russia had not “completely captured” the city and “a part of the city” was under Ukrainian control. Russian artillery was hitting an industrial zone where 500 civilians were sheltering in the eastern Ukrainian city, Haidai added. Ukrainian troops in the city must “surrender or die”, a Russian-backed separatist leader in the self-proclaimed republic in Donetsk warned.
Russia’s ministry of defence has again claimed today that surrendering Ukrainian forces in the Donbas have been fired on by their own side, in a move it described as “the Kyiv nationalist regime is trying to stop the retreat and surrender of its units by punitive actions of detachments”. The claims have not been independently verified.
The deputy head of the Russian-imposed military-civilian administration of the occupied Kherson region in Ukraine, Kirill Stremousov, has said it will remain forever Russian.
Ukrainian authorities said they discovered a new mass grave of civilians near Bucha in the Kyiv region. Investigators exhumed seven bodies from makeshift graves in a forest outside the village of Vorzel, less than 10km from Bucha, the scene of previous alleged Russian atrocities. Kyiv region’s police chief, Andriy Nyebytov, said: “This is another sadistic crime of the Russian army.” One man, he said, “has two injuries. He was shot in the knee with a gun. The second shot was into his temple.”
The UK’s ministry of defence has issued its daily assessment of the situation on the ground in Ukraine, suggesting “Russia’s operational main effort remains the assault against the Sievierodonetsk pocket in the Donbas and its Western Group of forces have likely made small advances in the Kharkiv sector for the first time in several weeks.”
The UK’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has refused to be drawn on whether she would negotiate directly with the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic over the situation of Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner. The two British men have been sentenced to death in eastern Ukraine by what Truss called a “sham trial”.
Pope Francis has said Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was “perhaps somehow provoked” as he recalled a conversation in the run-up to the war in which he was warned that Nato was “barking at the gates of Russia”. In an interview with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, conducted last month and published on Tuesday, the pontiff condemned the “ferocity and cruelty of the Russian troops” while warning against what he said was a fairytale perception of the conflict as good versus evil.
Ukraine has called on the west to supply 300 rocket launchers, 500 tanks and 1,000 howitzers before a key meeting on Wednesday. The request was made publicly by Mykhailo Podolyak, a key presidential adviser, amid concern in some quarters it is pushing its demands for Nato-standard weapons to the limit.
Zelenskiy accused the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, of being too concerned about the repercussions his support for Ukraine would have for Berlin’s ties with Moscow. “We need from Chancellor Scholz the certainty that Germany supports Ukraine,” he said in an interview with German public broadcaster ZDF. “He and his government must decide: there can’t be a trade-off between Ukraine and relations with Russia.” Local media reports have speculated that Scholz could on Thursday make his first trip to Kyiv since the start of the war.
The mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, has accused “traitors” of passing on vital information to Russian forces during the bombardment of the southern port city at the beginning of the invasion. Boychenko said the destruction of the city’s critical infrastructure, including power supplies, was well-coordinated because Russia was provided with the coordinates.
About 1,200 bodies, including those found in mass graves, have not yet been identified, according to the head of the national police in Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko. Criminal proceedings had been opened over the deaths of more than 12,000 Ukrainians, Klymenko said. About 75% of the dead were men, 2% children and the rest women, he said.
Russia earned €93bn in revenue from fossil fuel exports in the first 100 days of the war, according to research by Finland’s Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea). With 61% of these exports, worth €56bn (£48bn), going to the member states of the European Union, the bloc of countries remains Russia’s largest export market.
Ukraine has lost a quarter of its arable land since the Russian invasion, notably in the south and east, deputy agriculture minister Taras Vysotskiy said. At a news conference on Monday, Vysotskiy insisted food security for the country’s population was not under immediate threat: “Crop planting this year is more than sufficient [and] the current situation of crop planting areas … does not pose a threat to Ukraine’s food security”.
The UN’s rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, described the “arbitrary arrests” of a “large number” of anti-war protesters in Russia as “worrying”. Speaking at the UN’s human rights council in Geneva, Bachelet also expressed concern about the “increase of censorship and restrictions on independent media” in Russia.
Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, has said he expects the war in Ukraine could last up to two years. Kasyanov, who championed close ties with the west while prime minister, said he felt that Vladimir Putin was already not thinking properly and that he was convinced Russia could return to a democratic path.
More than 15,000 millionaires are expected to flee Russia this year, as wealthy citizens turn their back on Putin’s regime, according to an analysis of migration data by London-based firm Henley & Partners.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, has filed an appeal against a Moscow court decision demanding that it remove information related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The foundation arguing that people have a right to know the facts of the war and that removing information is a violation of human rights.
