At least 10 civilians have been killed and 20 wounded as a result of long-range Russian bombardment in several parts of Ukraine on Friday, according to officials. Among them included two people who died in heavy Russian shelling of the town of Bilopillia in Sumy province in northern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office said.
At least five people, including three women, were killed after a Russian missile struck an “invincibility point” set up to offer refuge for Ukrainian civilians in the city of Kostiantynivka in the eastern Donetsk region, according to local officials. The invincibility point was one of many such shelters created by authorities across Ukraine to provide access to electricity, heating, water and other basic services. Prosecutors said the Russians attacked with S-300 anti-aircraft missiles.
The Russian former president Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow was preparing for a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Medvedev, who is deputy chair of Putin’s powerful security council, further warned that Moscow was ready to use “absolutely any weapon” if Ukraine attempted to retake the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
Ukraine has claimed Russian forces were “running out of steam” in Bakhmut and its commanders have started to raise the prospect of an unlikely turnaround in the largely ravaged city. “Very soon, we will take advantage of this opportunity, as we did in the past near Kyiv, Kharkiv, Balakliia and Kupyansk,” Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s land forces, said, referring to previous successful Ukrainian attacks.
About 10,000 civilians, many of them elderly and with disabilities, are living in “very dire conditions” in and around the besieged city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Several thousand civilians are estimated to remain in the city itself, the ICRC’s Umar Khan said. “They are living in very dire conditions, spending almost the entire days in intense shelling in the shelters,” he said.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has said the “friendship” between China and Russia has limits, and that Europe should welcome any attempts by Beijing to distance itself from Moscow’s war in Ukraine. He said China “has not crossed any red lines for us”, adding that Beijing’s proposals to end the war showed it did not want to fully align with Russia. The EU should welcome this, Borrell said, even if western officials have made clear they do not regard Beijing’s initiative as a fully-fledged peace plan.
The bodies of 83 Ukrainian soldiers killed fighting in the war have been returned from the Russian side, according to a Ukrainian official. Separately, Ukraine said it handed over an undisclosed number of seriously wounded Russian soldiers.
Seven Ukrainian children have been reunited with their families after being forcibly taken to Russian-occupied Crimea, according to the Kherson regional military administration. As Ukrainian troops advanced into Kherson last autumn to try and retake the region from Russian control, families were being pressured by local Russian officials to send their children away to Russian-occupied Crimea, where they said they would be safer staying at summer camp.
UN human rights monitors have documented dozens of summary killings of prisoners of war (POWs) carried out by both Russian and Ukrainian forces since Russia invaded Ukraine, according to a new report published today. The report, by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said the findings were based on confirmed cases and the actual number was likely higher, and that they “may constitute war crimes”.
The air forces of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark have agreed on a goal to create a unified Nordic air defence aimed at countering the rising threat from Russia. Air force commanders of the four Nordic nations signed a declaration of intent to operate their fighter jets as one fleet, based on already known ways of operating under Nato, according to statements by the four countries’ armed forces.
The Kremlin has said it is “critically important” to identify an object that was discovered next to one of the Nord Stream pipelines. The Russian-controlled operator of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Nord Stream 2 AG, has accepted an invitation by the Danish Energy Agency to help salvage the unidentified object, discovered during an inspection of the only remaining intact gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
The security situation around the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv will have to improve before its ports can be included in a deal allowing the safe export of Ukrainian grain, a senior Ukrainian official has said. The deal was extended this month, but Kyiv and Moscow differ over how long the extension will last.
A Russian security officer who fled the country because he objected to the invasion of Ukraine has been sentenced to six-and-a-half years in high-security prison, according to a report. Federal protective service Maj Mikhail Zhilin, 36, fled to Kazakhstan last year when Russia announced a conscription campaign, illegally crossing the border through woods while his wife and children drove through a checkpoint. Kazakhstan handed him over to Russia late last year.
The son of a Russian regional governor who was due to be extradited from Italy to the US has disappeared, according to reports. US authorities have accused Artyom Uss, the son of the governor of the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, of illegal oil and weapons trade, money laundering, and sanction violations.
The US treasury has imposed sanctions on three Belarusian state-linked entities and nine individuals in response to an ongoing crackdown on pro-democracy activists after a wave of protests following a presidential election that the west and Belarusian opposition denounced as a sham.
