The Russian offensive to seize eastern Ukraine and the “battle for Donbas” has begun, Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelenskiy, said. “Now we can already state that the Russian troops have begun the battle for the Donbas, for which they have been preparing for a long time,” he said in a video address, adding that a “significant part of the entire Russian army is now concentrated on this offensive”.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, confirmed Moscow was starting a new stage of what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine. He predicted it would be a significant development.
Russia’s defence ministry said Russian missile and artillery forces struck 1,260 targets in Ukraine overnight, and that anti-aircraft forces downed a Ukrainian MiG-29 jet in the Donetsk region. However, Russia’s new offensive is going “very cautiously” and will fail because Moscow’s forces lack the strength to break through Ukrainian defences, Ukraine’s presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych has said.
Russia has 76 battalion tactical groups in the Donbas region of Ukraine and in the country’s south-east with 11 of those added over the last several days, a senior US defence department official said in a statement on Monday night.
Russian troops have reportedly captured the east Ukraine town of Kreminna while local authorities have urged residents in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to evacuate. “Currently, control over the city of Kreminna is lost; street fights are taking place,” Luhansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday said in a statement on his official Telegram channel on Monday night.
Russia has again called on Ukrainian forces encamped in the Azovstal metallurgical plant in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol to lay down their arms. Ukrainian authorities say no fewer than 1,000 civilians are hiding in the complex along with Ukrainian fighters.
The deputy prime minister of Ukraine Iryna Vereshchuk has said there will be no humanitarian corridors set up again on Tuesday in Ukraine, the third consecutive day without agreed escape routes.
Greece seized a crude oil Russian tanker off the island of Evia as part of European Union sanctions against Russia, a Greek shipping ministry official has said.
The French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said an embargo on Russian oil at an EU level was in the works, adding that France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is keen on such a move.
The UK government’s Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, said he would not comment on national security issues when asked what the UK was doing to bring home Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, British fighters in Ukraine captured by the Russians and paraded on national TV.
The Labour party’s shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, said “it is inappropriate for British people to be involved in the war in Ukraine and they should not be going there”. She said she had been “surprised” the UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, had given out “mixed messages” and had “seemed to almost be endorsing people going out to Ukraine. It simply is wrong.”
