Closing summary
It’s coming up to 6pm in London – 8pm in Kyiv. We’re now closing this blog. Here’s a summary of the day’s events.
A Russian strike killed three people in a residential district of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka on Saturday, the regional governor said. Fourteen other people were wounded in the attack, which also damaged four apartment buildings and a hotel, Reuters reported.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said ahead of an EU-Ukraine summit next week that Ukraine had unconditional support from the bloc and needed to prevail against Russian attacks to defend European values. “We stand by Ukraine‘s side without any ifs and buts. Ukraine is fighting for our shared values, it is fighting for the respect of international law and for the principles of democracy and that is why Ukraine has to win this war,” she was quoted as saying.
A new barrage of Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the Ukrainian president’s office has said. Towns and villages in the east and in the south that were within reach of the Russian artillery suffered most, regional officials said. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson and two in the Kharkiv region, Associated Press quoted the officials as saying on Friday.
A day earlier, Russian-fired missiles and self-propelled drones were reported to have hit deeper into Ukrainian territory, killing at least 11 people.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has described the situation on the frontline as “extremely acute”, particularly in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia is stepping up its offensive. “The occupiers are not just storming our positions – they are deliberately and methodically destroying these towns and villages around them,” the Ukrainian president said, reporting major battles for Vuhledar and Bakhmut. Local Ukrainian officials reported heavy shelling in the north, north-east and east.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, will hold a meeting with Lynne Tracy, the new US ambassador to Moscow, early next week, the RIA news agency reported today.
Ukrainian troops were locked in “fierce” fighting with Russian forces for control of Vuhledar, a town south-west of Donetsk, on Friday. Both sides claimed success in the small administrative centre, a short distance from the strategic prize of the village of Pavlivka, Agence France-Presse reported. The Donetsk region’s Moscow-appointed leader, Denis Pushilin, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying Vuhledar may soon become a “very important success for us”, while Kyiv said the town remained contested.
Ukraine’s army claims to have killed 109 Russian soldiers and wounded another 188 in one day during fighting around Vuhledar. Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson in the Ukrainian armed forces, said the death toll was recorded on Thursday, adding that “fierce fighting is ongoing”.
Poland will send an additional 60 tanks to Ukraine on top of the 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks it has already pledged, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has told CTV News.
A total of 321 heavy tanks have been promised to Ukraine by several countries, Ukraine’s ambassador to France said on Friday. Vadym Omelchenko told French TV station BFM that “delivery terms vary for each case and we need this help as soon as possible”, while not specifying the number of tanks per country.
Belgium announced an additional €94m ($102m/£82.5m) package in military aid for Ukraine in what the Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, said was – including previous spending – the largest of its kind Belgium had ever given another country.
Ukraine said it is setting up drone assault companies within its armed forces that will be equipped with Starlink satellite communications, as it presses ahead with an idea to build up an “army of drones”, Reuters reported. The army’s commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, signed off on the creation of the units in a project that would involve several ministries and agencies, the general staff said.
Ten regions of Ukraine are instituting emergency power outages due to a power shortage in the network after Thursday’s Russian attacks, Ukraine’s state broadcaster has reported. Repairs to damaged facilities are continuing.
The European Union wants swift accountability for “horrific” crimes in Ukraine, EU justice ministers have said while meeting in Stockholm. But the member states differ over how to bring prosecutions, seek evidence or fund war damage repairs.
The German arms-maker Rheinmetall is ready to greatly boost the output of tank and artillery munitions to satisfy strong demand in Ukraine and the West, Reuters reports.
And the news agency quoted the firm’s chief executive, Armin Papperger, as saying it may start producing Himars multiple rocket launchers in Germany.
He spoke days before Germany’s defence industry bosses are due to meet new defence minister Boris Pistorius for the first time, though the exact date has yet to be announced.
With the meeting, Pistorius aims to kick off talks on how to speed up weapons procurement and boost ammunitions supplies in the long term after almost a year of arms donations to Ukraine has depleted the German military’s stocks.
Rheinmetall makes a range of defence products but is probably most famous for manufacturing the 120mm gun of the Leopard 2 tank. Papperger said in an interview with Reuters:
We can produce 240,000 rounds of tank ammunition (120mm) per year, which is more than the entire world needs.
The capacity for the production of 155mm artillery rounds can be ramped up to 450,000 to 500,000 per year, he added, which would make Rheinmetall the biggest producer for both kinds of ammunition.
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Kyiv and its western allies are engaged in “fast-track” talks on the possibility of equipping the invaded country with long-range missiles and military aircraft, the Associated Press quotes a top aide to Ukraine’s president as saying.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Ukraine’s supporters in the west “understand how the war is developing” and the need to supply planes capable of providing cover for the armoured fighting vehicles that the US and Germany pledged at the beginning of the month.
However, in remarks to online video channel Freedom, Podolyak said some of Ukraine’s western partners maintain a “conservative” attitude to arms deliveries.
Updated
Ukraine struggling to hold Bakhmut, military sources say
On Saturday, Ukraine’s armed forces reported that Russia had turned its artillery fire on 40 settlements close to Bakhmut, the city in the eastern Donetsk region that has been at the heart of some of the most intense fighting in recent months.
Military sources said Ukrainian forces were now struggling to hold the city, after the Ukrainian army’s withdrawal from the nearby city of Soledar last week.
“The Russians are destroying anything that can be used for cover,” said one source. “The Ukrainian forces don’t have enough artillery.”
The risk of Bakhmut being encircled was said to be growing, with Ukraine’s army facing shortages of artillery that could hold back the advancing Russian forces.
Elsewhere in Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the regional administration, said three civilians were killed, and at least two injured in a morning missile strike on the city of Kostyantynivka.
Meanwhile, a senior Ukrainian official, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defence council, said Russia was preparing a new wave of offensives to mark the anniversary of the 24 February invasion.
He claimed Russian troops had been “given the task” of going “beyond the borders of” the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Updated
Russia’s defence ministry has Ukrainian forces of striking a hospital in the eastern Lugansk region, leaving 14 dead and injuring 24 others.
On Saturday morning in the town of Novoaidar, “the Ukrainian armed forces deliberately attacked the building of a district hospital” with a US-made HIMARS multiple-launch rocket system, the ministry said in a statement.
The ministry added that 14 were killed and 24 wounded among the “hospital patients and medical staff”, AFP reports.
The ministry added:
A deliberate missile strike on a known active civilian medical facility is, without doubt, a grave war crime by the Kyiv regime.
Russian strike kills three people in Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka
A Russian strike killed three people in a residential district of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka on Saturday, the regional governor said.
Fourteen other people were wounded in the attack, which also damaged four apartment buildings and a hotel, Reuters reported.
Donetsk’s governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Telegram:
Rescuers and law enforcement officials are working at the scene of the tragedy to help people and carefully document yet another crime by the Russian occupiers on our land.
Factory worker Iryna Maltseva, 42, said she was watching television when the explosion violently rattled her living room.
I opened my eyes and everything was blown out. I was covered in blood. Mom was sitting in the bedroom, also covered in blood.
Earlier today, Kyrylenko said at least four people had been killed and seven wounded throughout the region from Russian strikes over the past 24 hours.
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Natalia Samsonova says she imagines the muffled screams of those trapped under the rubble, the fire and smell of smoke, the grief of the mother who lost her husband and infant child beneath the ruins of the building in Dnipro bombed by Russia. She imagines being unable to breathe.
That is why she is here, at a statue to the Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, a largely unknown monument tucked away among Moscow’s brutalist apartment blocks that has hosted a furtive anti-war memorial at a time when few in Russia dare protest against the conflict.
“I don’t know what else I can do … I wanted to show that not everyone is indifferent [to the war] and that some people still have a conscience,” she says, her eyes filling with tears.
It is the second time she has returned to place flowers at a makeshift memorial to victims of the strike on 14 January that killed 46 people and wounded more than 80. She passes it when she comes to visit her mother, who lives nearby.
Read more: ‘Ukraine is not our enemy’: Russians risk arrest to honour victims of war
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has tweeted his support for Israel after seven people were killed leaving a synagogue in East Jerusalem on Friday evening.
He said:
Sincere condolences to the victims’ families.
The crimes were cynically committed on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Terror must have no place in today’s world. Neither in Israel or Ukraine.
We share 🇮🇱 pain after the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Among the victims is a 🇺🇦 woman. Sincere condolences to the victims' families. The crimes were cynically committed on the Intl Holocaust Remembrance Day. Terror must have no place in today's world. Neither in 🇮🇱 nor in 🇺🇦
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) January 28, 2023
More than 6,500 Russian military personnel have sought to surrender through a special “I want to live” hotline, Ukraine’s government has claimed, with the call centre said to have been recently moved to a secret location to avoid Moscow interference.
Vitaly Matvienko, a spokesperson at the department for prisoners of war, said those who had made contact through the service had been verified as serving in the Russian forces using their personal data and service number.
Between 15 September – when the hotline launched – and 20 January, it is claimed that 6,543 Russian personnel contacted the Ukrainian government to surrender into its custody, often from the frontline. The claims could not be independently verified.
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These are some of the latest images to be sent to us over the newswires from Ukraine.
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Ukraine is fighting for our shared values, says EU Commission president
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said ahead of an EU-Ukraine summit next week that Ukraine had unconditional support from the bloc and needed to prevail against Russian attacks to defend European values.
Reuters reported Von der Leyen said in a speech on Saturday at an event of her party, the Christian Democrat CDU, in Duesseldorf, Germany:
We stand by Ukraine‘s side without any ifs and buts. Ukraine is fighting for our shared values, it is fighting for the respect of international law and for the principles of democracy and that is why Ukraine has to win this war.
Von der Leyen and her fellow EU commissioners plan an EU-Ukraine summit on 3 February.
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Battlefield tanks are only half the battle. Beyond military might on the ground in Ukraine, the other critical confrontation in which the Kremlin has a superiority that must be challenged. The information war.
Russia’s media space has reverted to a grotesque parody of the Soviet-era model. (In fact, it’s far worse, as in the latter Soviet years at least when most people knew they were being fed lies.) Television and the domestic press is utterly captured. Millions are fed a daily diet of Ukrainian “fascists”, western pederasts, and nuclear revenge on Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
It’s working. A broad consensus inside Russia still supports Putin and his wretched campaign in Ukraine. The Kremlin may be making a hash of the war on the ground, but it is winning the propaganda battle.
Read more: To defeat Putin, we must support the brave Russian journalists telling the truth
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Summary
Hello, I’m Joe Middleton and here’s a rundown on the latest developments just after 1pm in Kyiv.
A new barrage of Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the Ukrainian president’s office has said. Towns and villages in the east and in the south that were within reach of the Russian artillery suffered most, regional officials said. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson and two in the Kharkiv region, Associated Press quoted the officials as saying on Friday.
A day earlier, Russian-fired missiles and self-propelled drones were reported to have hit deeper into Ukrainian territory, killing at least 11 people.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has described the situation on the frontline as “extremely acute”, particularly in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia is stepping up its offensive. “The occupiers are not just storming our positions – they are deliberately and methodically destroying these towns and villages around them,” the Ukrainian president said, reporting major battles for Vuhledar and Bakhmut. Local Ukrainian officials reported heavy shelling in the north, north-east and east.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, will hold a meeting with Lynne Tracy, the new US ambassador to Moscow, early next week, the RIA news agency reported today.
Ukrainian troops were locked in “fierce” fighting with Russian forces for control of Vuhledar, a town south-west of Donetsk, on Friday. Both sides claimed success in the small administrative centre, a short distance from the strategic prize of the village of Pavlivka, Agence France-Presse reported. The Donetsk region’s Moscow-appointed leader, Denis Pushilin, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying Vuhledar may soon become a “very important success for us”, while Kyiv said the town remained contested.
Ukraine’s army claims to have killed 109 Russian soldiers and wounded another 188 in one day during fighting around Vuhledar. Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson in the Ukrainian armed forces, said the death toll was recorded on Thursday, adding that “fierce fighting is ongoing”.
Poland will send an additional 60 tanks to Ukraine on top of the 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks it has already pledged, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has told CTV News.
A total of 321 heavy tanks have been promised to Ukraine by several countries, Ukraine’s ambassador to France said on Friday. Vadym Omelchenko told French TV station BFM that “delivery terms vary for each case and we need this help as soon as possible”, while not specifying the number of tanks per country.
Belgium announced an additional €94m ($102m/£82.5m) package in military aid for Ukraine in what the Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, said was – including previous spending – the largest of its kind Belgium had ever given another country.
Ukraine said it is setting up drone assault companies within its armed forces that will be equipped with Starlink satellite communications, as it presses ahead with an idea to build up an “army of drones”, Reuters reported. The army’s commander-in-chief, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, signed off on the creation of the units in a project that would involve several ministries and agencies, the general staff said.
Ten regions of Ukraine are instituting emergency power outages due to a power shortage in the network after Thursday’s Russian attacks, Ukraine’s state broadcaster has reported. Repairs to damaged facilities are continuing.
The European Union wants swift accountability for “horrific” crimes in Ukraine, EU justice ministers have said while meeting in Stockholm. But the member states differ over how to bring prosecutions, seek evidence or fund war damage repairs.
Updated
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, will hold a meeting with Lynne Tracy, the new US ambassador to Moscow, early next week, the RIA news agency reported today.
Tracy arrived in Moscow earlier this week. Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said on Friday that the US ambassador would not improve ties between the two countries because of what she called Washington’s ongoing “hybrid war” against Russia.
Reuters reports that Ryabkov said:
It will take place literally at the beginning of the week. It is expected that the transfer of copies of credentials by ambassador Tracy will be made to me.
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A senior Ukrainian presidential aide criticised the International Olympic Committee today for siding with Russia days after it said the Olympic Council of Asia had offered Russian and Belarusian athletes a chance to qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter:
#IOC proposes to the world promotion of violence, mass murders, destruction. That’s why it insists Russian athletes should participate in contests as real ‘ambassadors of death’,”
Sport doesn’t exist outside politics – sport promotes it. Thus, the IOC promotes the Russian anti-human policy.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday Ukraine would launch an international campaign to prevent Russian athletes from being allowed to compete in the 2024 games, Reuters reported.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said on Friday that any attempt to squeeze Moscow out of international sport was “doomed to fail”.
#IOC proposes to the world promotion of violence, mass murders, destruction. That's why it insists 🇷🇺 athletes should participate in contests as real "ambassadors of death"… Sport doesn't exist outside politics – sport promotes it. Thus, the IOC promotes the 🇷🇺 anti-human policy
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) January 28, 2023
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Reuters reports that three people were killed and at least two others wounded after Russian forces struck a residential neighbourhood in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostiantynivka, the regional governor said.
Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote on the Telegram messaging app that four apartment buildings and a hotel had been damaged and that rescuers and police officials were at the site to “carefully document yet another crime by the Russian occupiers”.
Earlier today, Kyrylenko said four people had been killed and at least seven wounded from Russian strikes over the past 24 hours.
Updated
In the clear sky over the winter-yellowed marsh grasses on the outskirts of the town of Huliaipole, the bang and crump of artillery picked up pace like the thunderclaps of a distant but approaching storm.
The Russian armed forces declared on Sunday that they had launched a new offensive in Zaporizhzhia region, but the Ukrainian soldiers seemed unperturbed.
The frontline here has not moved for 10 months, and the Russians are hunkered in their trenches, which run across the rolling hills of black-soil farmland. They are not going anywhere soon, the soldiers said.
Read more: ‘The big battle is coming’: Ukrainian forces prepare for the war’s most intense phase
Makiivka attack death toll far higher than Moscow acknowledged, says UK
A missile strike on Russian forces at Makiivka that Moscow claimed had killed 89 people was “highly likely” to have in fact had more than 300 casualties, the UK Ministry of Defence has said.
The case highlighted “the pervasive presence of disinformation in Russian public announcements”, the ministry said in its latest intelligence update.
This typically comes about through a combination of deliberate lying authorised by senior leaders, and the communication of inaccurate reports by more junior officials, keen to downplay their failings in Russia’s ‘blame and sack’ culture.
The ministry said that after the strike on Russian troop accommodation near Donetsk city on 1 January, Russia’s defence ministry took the “rare step” of publicly acknowledging it had suffered casualties, claiming 89 had been killed.
“Russian officials likely assessed that it was not viable to avoid comment in the face of widespread criticism of Russian commanders over the incident,” the UK ministry said.
Of the casualties, the ministry said it believed the majority were likely killed or missing, rather than wounded.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 28 January 2023
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) January 28, 2023
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/rQI3IVrDMH
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/QA2OBo1rpk
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Japan has tightened sanctions against Russia following its latest missile attacks in Ukraine, adding goods to an export ban list and freezing the assets of Russian officials and entities.
Moscow said Tokyo’s sanctions were nothing to worry about and that it was adapting to life under such restrictions, Reuters reported.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday by urging the world to unite against “indifference” and “hatred”.
The Ukrainian president said:
Today, as always, Ukraine honours the memory of millions of victims of the Holocaust. We know and remember that indifference kills along with hatred.
Agence France-Presse also reported that Vladimir Putin used the remembrance day to lash out at Ukraine, calling those in the country “neo-Nazis” to justify his 11-month-old invasion.
The Russian president said:
Forgetting the lessons of history leads to the repetition of terrible tragedies. It is against that evil that our soldiers are bravely fighting.
But in Poland, where about 3 million Jews were slaughtered during the second world war, officials pointed their fingers at Russia as perpetuating Nazi thinking.
The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said on Facebook:
On the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, let us remember that to the east Putin is building new camps
Solidarity and consistent support for Ukraine are effective ways to ensure that history does not come full circle.
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Summary
Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s continuing live coverage of the war in Ukraine. I’m Adam Fulton and here’s a rundown on the latest developments at it approaches 9am in Kyiv.
A new barrage of Russian shelling killed at least 10 Ukrainian civilians and wounded 20 others in a day, the Ukrainian president’s office has said. Towns and villages in the east and in the south that were within reach of the Russian artillery suffered most, regional officials said. Six people died in the Donetsk region, two in Kherson and two in the Kharkiv region, Associated Press quoted the officials as saying on Friday.
A day earlier, Russian-fired missiles and self-propelled drones were reported to have hit deeper into Ukrainian territory, killing at least 11 people.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has described the situation on the frontline as “extremely acute”, particularly in the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia is stepping up its offensive. “The occupiers are not just storming our positions – they are deliberately and methodically destroying these towns and villages around them,” the Ukrainian president said, reporting major battles for Vuhledar and Bakhmut. Local Ukrainian officials reported heavy shelling in the north, north-east and east.
Ukrainian troops were locked in “fierce” fighting with Russian forces for control of Vuhledar, a town south-west of Donetsk, on Friday. Both sides claimed success in the small administrative centre, a short distance from the strategic prize of the village of Pavlivka, Agence France-Presse reported. The Donetsk region’s Moscow-appointed leader, Denis Pushilin, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying Vuhledar may soon become a “very important success for us”, while Kyiv said the town remained contested.
Ukraine’s army claims to have killed 109 Russian soldiers and wounded another 188 in one day during fighting around Vuhledar. Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson in the Ukrainian armed forces, said the death toll was recorded on Thursday, adding that “fierce fighting is ongoing”.
Poland will send an additional 60 tanks to Ukraine on top of the 14 German-made Leopard 2 tanks it has already pledged, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has told CTV News.
A total of 321 heavy tanks have been promised to Ukraine by several countries, Ukraine’s ambassador to France said on Friday. Vadym Omelchenko told French TV station BFM that “delivery terms vary for each case and we need this help as soon as possible”, while not specifying the number of tanks per country.
Belgium announced an additional €94m ($102m/£82.5m) package in military aid for Ukraine in what the Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, said was – including previous spending – the largest of its kind Belgium had ever given another country.
Ukraine says it is setting up drone assault companies within its armed forces that will be equipped with Starlink satellite communications, as it presses ahead with an idea to build up an “army of drones”, Reuters reported. Commander-in-chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi signed off on the creation of the units in a project that would involve several ministries and agencies, the general staff said.
Ten regions of Ukraine are instituting emergency power outages due to a power shortage in the network after Thursday’s Russian attacks, Ukraine’s state broadcaster has reported. Repairs to damaged facilities are continuing.
The European Union wants swift accountability for “horrific” crimes in Ukraine, EU justice ministers have said while meeting in Stockholm. But the member states differ over how to bring prosecutions, seek evidence or fund war damage repairs.
Updated
