The Russian defence ministry said it would open a humanitarian corridor earlier on Monday for all civilians to leave the Azovstal steel plant in the besieged port city of Mariupol. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said Kyiv had not reached an agreement with Moscow on creating a humanitarian corridor and said the UN should act as the “initiator and guarantor” of any agreement with Russia on evacuating civilians from the plant.
Five railway stations in central and western Ukraine were hit by Russian airstrikes in the space of one hour on Monday. Oleksander Kamyshin, the head of Ukrainian Railways, said five train stations came under fire causing an unspecified number of casualties, as most of Ukraine was placed under an unusually long air raid warning for two hours on Monday morning.
Large fires broke out early on Monday at two oil depots in the Russian city of Bryansk, less than 100 miles from the border with Ukraine, in a potential act of sabotage by Kyiv. Russian state media said the first fire occurred at a civilian facility in Bryansk holding 10,000 tons of fuel, followed by a second fire at a military fuel depot holding 5,000 tons.
Forensic doctors carrying out postmortem examinations on bodies in mass graves north of Kyiv say they have found evidence some women were raped before being killed by Russian forces. One doctor who has been carrying out autopsies on residents from Bucha, Irpin and Borodianka, said he had seen “a few cases which suggest that these women had been raped before being shot to death”.
Russia should be “weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine”, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said after he and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, visited Kyiv and pledged a further $713m to help Ukraine in its war effort. Blinken said “Russia is failing” in its war aims, while Ukraine is succeeding. He added that the US had put in place a strategy of “massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia” across Nato members.
Russia has warned the US against sending more arms to Ukraine, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, told Russian state television. Antonov said Russia had “stressed the unacceptability of this situation when the United States of America pours weapons into Ukraine”.
Sweden and Finland have agreed to submit applications to join Nato at the same time, a Swedish newspaper has reported. Both countries have agreed to announce their applications in the week of 16 to 22 May, during Finland’s president Sauli Niinistö’s visit to Stockholm, according to reports.
Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said the FSB spy agency had foiled what he cast as a western plan to kill a prominent Russian journalist. Without providing evidence to support his claim, Putin accused the west of having “turned to attempts to kill Russian journalists”.
