A summary of today's developments
More than 730 people were detained across Russia at protests against a mobilisation order, a rights group said, three days after their president, Vladimir Putin, ordered the country’s first military draft since the second world war. The independent OVD-Info protest monitoring group said it was aware of detentions in 32 cities, from St Petersburg to Siberia. Unsanctioned rallies are illegal under Russian law, which also forbids any activity considered to defame the armed forces.
A new law signed by Vladimir Putin says Russian troops who refuse to fight, desert, disobey or surrender to the enemy could now face a jail sentence of up to 10 years, according to Russian media reports. The law was approved by the parliament earlier this week.
Russia’s deputy defence minister, Dmitry Bulgakov, who has been in charge of military logistics since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, has been dismissed from his post. He’s been replaced by Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of the National Defence Management Centre, who oversaw Russia’s siege of Mariupol.
China supports all efforts conducive to the peaceful resolution of the “crisis” in Ukraine, its foreign minister Wang Yi told the United Nations general assembly on Saturday. Wang added the pressing priority was to facilitate talks for peace, Reuters reports.
Iran’s ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, “advised” Ukraine to “refrain from being influenced by third parties who seek to destroy relations between the two countries”. The statement came after Ukraine downgraded diplomatic ties with Iran on Friday, and stripped its ambassador of his accreditation over what it called Tehran’s “unfriendly” decision to supply Russian forces with drones.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, urged Europe to show an “openness to those who don’t want to be instrumentalised by the Kremlin”.
The queue at the border between Russia and Georgia is approximately six miles (10km) long, where people have reportedly been waiting more than 20 hours to cross. The number of border crossings from Russia into Finland has doubled in recent days compared with last week.
More details of overnight attacks are emerging from Ukraine. Two civilians were killed on Friday in the Donetsk region, and three people were injured, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk oblast. Russian forces also shelled settlements near the Russian border. In the Kupyan district, five people were injured from shelling, including two children, aged 10 and 17.
Russian authorities in the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have allegedly started handing out draft notices and mobilising men of conscription age who “renounced Ukrainian citizenship and received passports of the Russian federation” according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Ukrainians in occupied territory to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held territory. However, if they end up in the Russian military, Zelenskiy asked people to save their lives and help liberate Ukraine.
Russian forces are probably trying to attack dams in Ukraine in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points amid Russian concerns about battlefield setbacks, UK intelligence said. The Ministry of Defence said in its latest daily briefing that the strikes were “unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations due to the distance between the damaged dams and the combat areas”.
So-called referendums are under way in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, with residents told to vote on proposals for the four Ukrainian regions to declare independence and then join Russia. The polls in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces are due to run until Tuesday and appear to be an attempt to provide cover for illegal annexation of the regions by Moscow.
The UN has said its investigators have concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, including bombings of civilian areas, numerous executions, torture and horrific sexual violence. The team of three independent experts had launched initial investigations looking at the areas of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions, where they were “struck by the large number of executions in the areas that we visited”, and the frequent “visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head and slit throats”.
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Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused the US of “playing with fire” around Taiwan in a speech sharply critical of Washington at the annual gathering at the United Nations.
Lavrov said Washington was trying to turn the entire world into its own backyard through sanctions, Reuters reports.
The US has imposed several rounds of sanctions on Moscow following the invasion of Ukraine.
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It has emerged that the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, may debate bills incorporating Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine into Russia on 29 September, the state-run Tass news agency said on Saturday, citing an unnamed source.
Moscow launched referendums on joining Russia in the four occupied regions of Ukraine on Friday, drawing condemnation from Kyiv and western nations, which dismissed the votes as a sham and pledged not to recognise their results.
Tass cited Denis Pushilin, head of the Russia-backed separatist Donetsk area of Ukraine, as saying his priorities would not change once the region was part of Russia.
Tass quoted an unnamed Duma source as saying the chamber could debate a bill on the incorporation of Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine as soon as Thursday, two days after the end of so-called referendums in the four provinces.
The Interfax agency quoted a source saying the upper house could consider the bill the same day, and RIA Novosti, also citing an unnamed source, said President Vladimir Putin could be preparing to make a formal address to an extraordinary joint session of both houses on Friday.
An official in Luhansk region announced the turnout after two days of voting was 45.9% while in Zaporizhzhia it was 35.5%, Russian agencies said. Voting is due to end on Tuesday.
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In a caricature by the country’s most prominent political cartoonist, Sergey Elkin, Vladimir Putin is standing on top of the Kremlin wall with his arms outstretched.
“So what else do I need to do for you guys to finally start rebelling,” Putin asks, with a look of desperation.
As images showing thousands of Russian men getting into buses bound for training centres have started to appear, many in the west are asking the same question.
Putin’s decision to call the first mobilisation since the second world war has prompted widespread panic among Russia’s population but has not yet led to mass protests as experts predict that the effect of the call-up on public opinion will be gradual.
China supports all efforts conducive to the peaceful resolution of the “crisis” in Ukraine, its foreign minister Wang Yi told the United Nations general assembly on Saturday.
Wang added the pressing priority was to facilitate talks for peace, Reuters reports.
In his address, Wang said the fundamental solution was to address the “legitimate security concerns of all parties”.
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The Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, may debate bills incorporating Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine into Russia on 29 September, the Tass news agency reported, citing an unnamed source.
Moscow launched referendums on joining Russia in the four occupied regions of Ukraine on Friday, drawing condemnation from Kyiv and western nations, who dismissed the votes as a sham and pledged not to recognise their results, Reuters reports.
Voting is due to finish on Tuesday.
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More than 730 Russian protesters detained
More than 730 people were detained across Russia at protests against a mobilisation order, a rights group said, three days after their president, Vladimir Putin, ordered the country’s first military draft since the second world war.
The independent OVD-Info protest monitoring group said it was aware of detentions in 32 cities, from St Petersburg to Siberia.
Unsanctioned rallies are illegal under Russian law, which also forbids any activity considered to defame the armed forces.
“Do you want to be like me?” read a placard held by a woman in a wheelchair at a rally in Moscow.
Footage from the same protest showed Russian officers carrying men and leading women to police vans.
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Russian officials said 300,000 troops were needed, with priority given to people with recent military experience and vital skills.
The Kremlin has denied reports by two Russian news outlets based abroad – Novaya Gazeta Europe and Meduza – that the real target is more than 1 million.
Reports have surfaced across Russia of men with no military experience or past draft age suddenly receiving call-up papers, Reuters reports.
On Saturday, the head of the Kremlin’s human rights council, Valery Fadeyev, publicly announced that he had written to defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, with a request to “urgently resolve” problems of the mobilisation.
His 400-word Telegram posting criticised the way exemptions were applied and listed several cases of inappropriate enlistment including nurses and midwives with no military experience.
“Some [recruiters] hand over the call-up papers at 2am, as if they think we’re all draft dodgers,” he said.
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Russia launched renewed strikes on Ukrainian cities on Saturday, as Moscow’s mobilisation drive to refresh its struggling war effort continued to provide scenes of chaos across Russia.
Ukrainian officials said a Russian missile hit an apartment building in the city of Zaporizhzhia, killing one person and injuring seven others, and said a total of three people were killed and 19 injured in strikes across the south and east of the country.
In Russia, even Kremlin cheerleaders expressed unease at the progress of the mobilisation drive, announced by the president, Vladimir Putin, on Wednesday. Viral videos have shown mobilised men who appear variously to be confused, drunk or angry at receiving the call-up.
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Since Wednesday, people have been prepared to queue for hours to cross into Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Finland or Georgia, scared that Russia might close its borders, although the Kremlin has said reports of an exodus are exaggerated.
The governor of Russia’s Buryatia region, which is located on the Mongolian border and home to an ethnic Mongol minority, acknowledged on Friday that some had received papers in error and said those who had not served in the army or who had medical exemptions would not be called up, Reuters reports.
Tsakhia Elbegdorj, president of Mongolia until 2017 and now head of the World Mongol Federation, promised those fleeing the draft a warm welcome on Saturday.
“The Buryat Mongols, Tuva Mongols, and Kalmyk Mongols have ... been used as nothing more than cannon fodder,” he said in a video message, wearing a ribbon in Ukrainian yellow and blue, and referring to three Mongol ethnic groups in Russia.
“Today you are fleeing brutality, cruelty and likely death. Tomorrow you will start freeing your country from dictatorship.”
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The pro-Kremlin editor of Russia’s state-run RT news channel expressed anger that enlistment officers were sending call-up papers to the wrong men, as frustration at the recent military mobilisation grew across Russia.
Wednesday’s announcement of Russia’s first public mobilisation since the second world war, to shore up its faltering invasion of Ukraine, has triggered a rush for the border by eligible men, the arrests of more than 1,000 protesters, and unease among the wider population, Reuters reports.
“It has been announced that privates can be recruited up to the age of 35. Summonses are going to 40-year-olds,” the RT editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, railed on her Telegram channel.
“They’re infuriating people, as if on purpose, as if out of spite. As if they’d been sent by Kyiv.”
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A Ukrainian aid worker said he does not fear a nuclear attack because it would cause “political destruction” for Russia but said the damage already inflicted by the war was already akin to a nuclear strike.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, accused the west of “nuclear blackmail” on Wednesday and warned “it’s not a bluff” as he vowed to use weapons of mass destruction to protect his country.
Dimko Zhluktenko, an aid worker based in Lviv, western Ukraine, said he did not believe there would be a nuclear strike as such a move would have no strategic advantage for Russian forces.
“Even if it were to happen, it wouldn’t have a massive effect,” the 23-year-old told the PA news agency.
“If they do a tactical nuke strike, that will be pure terrorism and that will lead to the absolute destruction of Russia.
“It wouldn’t grant any strategic advantage to Russian forces because they wouldn’t be able to advance to capture new territories.
“And at the same time, politically they would be destroyed because they would most likely get strikes back and face total isolation from other nations.”
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Here are the latest photos to come out of Ukraine and Russia:
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Summary
It’s 5pm in Kyiv. Here’s where things stand:
A new law signed by Vladimir Putin says Russian troops who refuse to fight, desert, disobey or surrender to the enemy could now face a jail sentence of up to 10 years, according to Russian media reports. The law was approved by the parliament earlier this week.
Russia’s deputy defence minister, Dmitry Bulgakov, who has been in charge of military logistics since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, has been dismissed from his post. He’s been replaced by Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of the National Defence Management Centre, who oversaw Russia’s siege of Mariupol.
Iran’s ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, “advised” Ukraine to “refrain from being influenced by third parties who seek to destroy relations between the two countries”. The statement came after Ukraine downgraded diplomatic ties with Iran on Friday, and stripped its ambassador of his accreditation over what it called Tehran’s “unfriendly” decision to supply Russian forces with drones.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, urged Europe to show an “openness to those who don’t want to be instrumentalised by the Kremlin”.
The queue at the border between Russia and Georgia is approximately 6 miles (10km) long, where people have reportedly been waiting more than 20 hours to cross. The number of border crossers from Russia into Finland has also doubled in recent days compared with last week.
More details of overnight attacks are emerging from Ukraine. Two civilians were killed on Friday in the Donetsk region, and three people were injured, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk oblast. Russian forces also shelled settlements near the Russian border. In the Kupyan district, five people were injured from shelling, including two children, aged 10 and 17.
Russian authorities in the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson have allegedly started handing out draft notices and mobilising men of conscription age who “renounced Ukrainian citizenship and received passports of the Russian federation” according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Ukrainians in occupied territory to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held territory. However, if they end up in the Russian military, Zelenskiy asked people to save their lives and help liberate Ukraine.
Russian forces are probably trying to attack dams in Ukraine in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points amid Russian concerns about battlefield setbacks, UK intelligence said. The Ministry of Defence said in its latest daily briefing that the strikes were “unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations due to the distance between the damaged dams and the combat areas”.
So-called referendums are under way in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, with residents told to vote on proposals for the four Ukrainian regions to declare independence and then join Russia. The polls in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces are due to run until Tuesday and appear to be an attempt to provide cover for illegal annexation of the regions by Moscow.
The UN has said its investigators have concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, including bombings of civilian areas, numerous executions, torture and horrific sexual violence. The team of three independent experts had launched initial investigations looking at the areas of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions, where they were “struck by the large number of executions in the areas that we visited”, and the frequent “visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head and slit throats”.
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Russian troops refusing to fight now face 10 years in prison
A new law signed by Vladimir Putin on Saturday says Russian troops who refuse to fight, desert, disobey or surrender to the enemy could now face a sentence up to 10 years, according to Russian media reports.
The law was approved by the Russian parliament earlier this week.
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Russia has announced the replacement of its highest ranking general in charge of logistics amid a mobilisation drive, AFP reports.
“Army Gen Dmitry Bulgakov has been relieved of the post of deputy minister of defence” and will be replaced by Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, the defence ministry said via Telegram on Saturday.
Mizinstev, 60, was previously made subject to sanctions by Britain over his role in the siege of Mariupol, a Ukrainian port city seized by Russian forces in May.
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As leader after leader discussed the war in Ukraine at the UN’s general assembly (UNGA), some leaders rue other matters pushed aside.
The Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, while quick to address the ongoing conflict in Europe, said the war was making it more difficult to “tackle the perennial issues that feature each year in the deliberations of this assembly”, AP reports.
Among them, he named: inequality, nuclear disarmament, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the more than 1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in limbo in Bangladesh.
Buhari wasn’t the only one raising concerns, according to AP, the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, said a recent trip to Africa left him contemplating how the west treats other conflicts.
He asked the assembly:
Were we equally resolute during the tragedies of Syria, Libya, Yemen? And didn’t the west return to “business as usual” after wars in Congo and the Horn of Africa? While condemning the invasion of Ukraine, do we give equal weight to fighting mercenaries who seek to destabilise the Sahel and threaten many other states in Africa?”
Addressing the criticism raised by other leaders, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, vowed that wasn’t so, AP reports:
Other countries have expressed a concern that as we focus on Ukraine, we are not paying attention to what is happening in other crises around the world.
A former UN official and current secretary general of an international aid group called the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, told AP: “The world manages to focus on one crisis at a time.”
But I cannot, in these many years as a humanitarian worker or a diplomat, remember any time when the focus was so strongly on one conflict only while the world was falling apart elsewhere.
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Here are the latest photos to come out of Ukraine and Russia:
Members of the French National Assembly have asked the president of the lower house of France’s parliament to establish a committee to investigate alleged Russian financing of political parties.
In a letter to Yael Braun-Pivet, MPs said the move was prompted by the recent declassification of US intelligence showing Russia paid hundreds of millions of euros to foreign political parties with the aim of influencing elections, Reuters reports.
The eight MPs, from French president Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party, also noted a loan from Russian banks still being paid off by Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party.
The MPs wrote:
These facts clearly suggest a Russian will to weigh in the French public debate ... they warrant the set-up of an investigation committee to establish if French political parties – and which ones – have benefited from Russian financing.
The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and released earlier this month, cited a new intelligence assessment of Russia’s global covert efforts to support policies and parties sympathetic to Moscow.
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Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine must be taken seriously, the EU’s foreign policy chief has said.
Josep Borrell warned a “dangerous moment” had been reached in the invasion as Russian troops faced several setbacks.
“Certainly it’s a dangerous moment because the Russian army has been pushed into a corner, and Putin’s reaction – threatening to use nuclear arms – it’s very bad,” he told BBC.
A diplomatic solution that “preserves the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Ukraine must be reached, he added.
Russia’s deputy defence minister, Dmitry Bulgakov, who has been in charge of military logistics since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, has been dismissed from his post.
Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of the National Defence Management Centre who oversaw Russia’s siege of Mariupol, has been appointed as his replacement, Russia’s defence ministry said on Telegram.
Bulgakov’s demotion is being widely seen as a punishment for failed military operations across Ukraine.
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Here are the latest photos to come out of Ukraine:
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Iran regrets Ukraine decision to downgrade diplomatic ties over reported supply of drones, says foreign ministry
On Saturday, Iran’s ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, “advised” Ukraine to “refrain from being influenced by third parties who seek to destroy relations between the two countries”, Reuters reports.
The statement comes after Ukraine downgraded diplomatic ties with Iran on Friday, and stripped its ambassador of his accreditation over what it called Tehran’s “unfriendly” decision to supply Russian forces with drones.
Military authorities in southern Ukraine said in a previous statement they had shot down the Shahed-136 unmanned aerial vehicles over the sea near the port of Odesa.
Ukraine and the United States have accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia, something Tehran has denied.
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The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has condemned “sham referendums” in which residents of four regions have been told to vote on proposals to declare independence and join Russia.
“The world will react absolutely justly to pseudo-referendums - they will be definitely condemned,” he said on Friday in his nightly address. Russian news agencies said voting in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia began on Friday morning, with the polls conducted on a door-to-door basis, except on 27 September, when people would be able to vote in person.
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The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said the country would not be granting asylum to Russians fleeing the country.
“Russians should stay and fight. Against Putin,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday.
Lithuania will not be granting asylum to those who are simply running from responsibility. Russians should stay and fight. Against Putin.
— Gabrielius Landsbergis🇱🇹 (@GLandsbergis) September 23, 2022
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Number of people crossing Russia-Finland border doubles, says regional mayor
The number of border crossers from Russia into Finland has doubled in recent days compared to last week, Satu Sikanen, the regional mayor for south Karelia in Finland, told BBC News on Saturday.
Yesterday, Finland’s president and the ministerial committee proposed significant restrictions on issuing visas to Russian citizens and entry to the country, said Sikanen. The number of issued visas has already been decreased, she added.
“This is a serious situation of course for our region, but I want to underline we have strong border guards, we have strong defence forces and Finland is joining Nato so we are safe.
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Europe should open to fleeing Russians, says European Council president
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, has urged Europe to show an “openness to those who don’t want to be instrumentalised by the Kremlin”, according to Politico.
The remarks came following Michel’s address at the United Nations general assembly in New York on Friday, and come ahead of a key meeting of EU ambassadors on Monday within the framework of the EU Integrated Political Crisis Response (IPCR), Politico reports.
In principle I think that … the European Union [should] host those who are in danger because of their political opinions. If in Russia people are in danger because of their political opinions, because they do not follow this crazy Kremlin decision to launch this war in Ukraine, we must take this into consideration.
He added: “I agree on the idea that we should very quickly cooperate and coordinate because this is a new fact — this partial mobilisation.”
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A campaign to repatriate the body of British aid worker Paul Urey has raised more than £8,000 on GoFundMe.
Urey, from Warrington, Cheshire, died after being captured by pro-Russia separatists in April along with another Briton, Dylan Healey. Urey’s daughter, 20-year-old Chelsea Coman, created the campaign and said the return of her father’s body would bring the family closure.
The two men were later charged with “mercenary activities” by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), but in July the Russian proxy authorities announced that Urey had died as a result of “illness and stress”. Healy was one of five Britons released from Russia and reunited with their families this week.
The body was handed to Ukraine in September with “possible signs of unspeakable torture”, according to the country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba.
“As me and my sister is only 20 and 17 years of age and still in college, we have no source of income that could pay near enough that amount,” the campaign says.
Coman and her sister, Courtney, 17, were told by the Foreign Office they would need to pay nearly £10,000 in repatriation costs.
Coman, who found about her father’s death over the news, said:
He doesn’t deserve to be out there at the minute. It would set our mind at ease to be able to lay him to rest and know that he’s not in a different country still suffering even though he’s died. We would get closure.
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Queue at Russian border stretches 10km as people flee
Hours after the Kremlin shocked Russia by announcing the first mobilisation of at least 300,000 troops since the second world war has led to a rush among men of military age to leave the country.
The line at the border between Russia and Georgia is approximately 10km long, according to the BBC, where people have reportedly been waiting more than 20 hours to cross.
Options to flee are limited, people fleeing previously told the Guardian. Earlier this week, four of the five EU countries bordering Russia announced they would no longer allow Russians to enter on tourist visas.
“I will be driving across the border tonight,” said a 29-year-old sergeant in the Russian reserves, Oleg, on Thursday. “I have no idea when I’ll step foot in Russia again,” he added, referring to the jail sentence Russian men face for avoiding the draft.
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More details of overnight attacks are emerging from Ukraine.
Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said Russian forces had shelled settlements near the Russian border.
In the Kupyan district, five people were injured from shelling, including two children, aged 10 and 17, he said.
Sinegubov warned residents against visiting forests due to a large number of mines and unexploded ammunition. “In the past day, the pyrotechnics of the state emergency service defused 578 explosive objects in the region,” he said via his Telegram channel on Saturday.
A 45-year-old man was injured from a mine while picking mushrooms in the Chuguyiv district, he said. A similar incident happed to a 24-year-old resident of Izium, he added.
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Vladimir Putin has taken a more direct position in the strategic planning for the war in Ukraine in recent weeks, according to US officials, reports the New York Times.
The Russian president rejected requests from commanders to retreat from the southern city of Kherson and pull back across the Dnieper River, according to the Times.
While such a withdrawal would preserve Russian equipment and lives, it would be another public humiliation for Putin after Ukraine successfully reclaimed large portions of territory in the Kharkiv region earlier this month.
News of Putin’s more direct strategic involvement comes after the Kremlin began mobilising 300,000 militarily reservists to serve in Ukraine. Kherson is one of four Russian-occupied provinces in Ukraine holding “referendums” on joining the Russian Federation, which began on Friday morning.
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Two civilians were killed on Friday in the Donetsk region, and three people were injured, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk oblast.
“Currently, it is impossible to establish the exact number of victims in Mariupol and Volnovas,” he said via his Telegram channel on Saturday.
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Russian authorities in the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson have allegedly started handing out draft notices and mobilising men of conscription age who “renounced Ukrainian citizenship and received passports of the Russian federation” according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence.
“Servicemen of the Russian occupation forces continue to commit illegal actions against the civilian population and engage in looting,” the ministry’s statement said on Saturday.
“According to available information, in Melitopol, the so-called ‘kadyrivtsi’ seized a dealer’s warehouse of agricultural machinery and are trying to sell off the property.”
Earlier, we reported on president Volodymyr Zelenskiy telling Ukrainians in occupied territory to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held land.
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Here are the latest photos to come out of Ukraine and elsewhere:
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Russia strikes Ukraine as “referendums” are under way in occupied areas
Russian forces launched new strikes on Saturday, targeting infrastructure facilities, Zaporizhzhia city’s administrative head, Oleksandr Starukh, said via his Telegram channel.
One missile hit an apartment building causing a fire, killing one person and injuring seven others.
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly address on Friday, told Ukrainians in occupied territory – currently Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces – to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held territory.
However, if they end up in the Russian military, Zelenskiy asked people to save their lives and help liberate Ukraine.
But if you get into the Russian army, sabotage any activity of the enemy, hinder any Russian operations, provide us with any important information about the occupiers – their bases, headquarters, warehouses with ammunition. And at the first opportunity, switch to our positions.
The so-called “referendums” under way in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops are a “fraud” and won’t be recognised by anyone in the world, said George Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary who led Nato between 1999 and 2003.
Speaking with Sky News, Robertson said:
It’s a device by Putin to try and pretend that these areas will now be part of the Russian Federation, and that therefore any attack that takes place, aided and abetted by the west, is an attack on Russia as a whole, but that doesn’t work.
When asked if there’s a risk continuing to give Ukraine weapons to defend that land, Robertson added:
Well, everything is risky and we don’t know how President Putin reacts in any given circumstance, but that means that we have got to remain absolutely solid and resolute like the Ukrainian people.
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British music stars Harry Styles and Ed Sheeran, US basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and other celebrities will donate personal objects for a campaign launched on Saturday to support healthcare in Ukraine.
Agence France-Presse reports that the WHO Foundation, an independent organisation that works to raise funds to support the UN health agency’s work addressing global health crises, launched the Human Kind e-store, where fans can try to win items donated by celebrities.
The funds raised would go towards supporting the World Health Organisation’s actions in Ukraine and neighbouring countries, the foundation said, adding that it aimed to raise $53.7m.
Russian commanders 'increasingly concerned' by setbacks, says UK MoD
Russian forces are probably trying to attack dams in Ukraine in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points amid Russian concerns about battlefield setbacks, UK intelligence says.
The Ministry of Defence said in its latest daily briefing that the strikes were “unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations due to the distance between the damaged dams and the combat areas”.
It said Russian forces struck the Pechenihy dam on the Siverskyi Donets River with ballistic missiles or similar weapons on Wednesday and Thursday after striking a dam near Krivyy Rih in central Ukraine the previous week.
Ukrainian forces are advancing further downstream along both rivers. As Russian commanders become increasingly concerned about their operational setbacks, they are probably attempting to strike the sluice gates of dams, in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 24 September 2022
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) September 24, 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/di4bgNrfIF
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/co6ys1K5zT
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy has urged the world to condemn the “pseudo-referendums” under way in four provinces of Ukraine.
Agence France-Presse reported the Ukrainian president as saying in his daily address to the nation:
The world will react absolutely justly to pseudo-referendums – they will be unequivocally condemned.
The ballots in the provinces fully or partially controlled by Russian forces have been dismissed as a “sham” by Kyiv and its western allies.
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Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s three-time former prime minister, has triggered a row after defending the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over the war in Ukraine.
The 85-year-old billionaire, whose party is forecast to return to government after the general election on Sunday, told Italian TV that Putin – an old friend of his – was pushed to invade Ukraine by the Russian people and by ministers who wanted Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration replaced with “decent people”.
Berlusconi, who has condemned the war, told the chatshow Porta a Porta that separatists had gone to Moscow and told the media that Ukraine’s attacks had caused 16,000 deaths and that Putin was doing nothing to defend them.
Berlusconi said:
Putin was pushed by the Russian population, by his party and by his ministers to invent this special operation. The troops were supposed to enter, reach Kyiv within a week, replace Zelenskiy’s government with decent people and then leave. Instead they found resistance, which was then fed by arms of all kinds from the west.
Angela Giuffrida in Rome has the full story:
In the “referendum” in the Donetsk region, the turnout on Friday was 23.6%, Russia’s state news agency Tass cited a local official as saying.
More than 20.5% of voters eligible to vote in the Zaporizhzhia region and 15% of those in the Kherson region voted on Friday, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported, citing local electoral officials.
“In our view, that’s enough for the first day of voting,” the head of Kherson’s Russian-installed election commission, Marina Zakharova, was quoted as saying.
Luhansk town forced to vote, says governor
Serhiy Haidai, Ukraine’s governor of Luhansk, said that in the town of Starobilsk, the population was banned from leaving and people were being forced out of homes to vote in the “referendum”.
In the town of Bilovodsk, a company director told employees voting was compulsory and anyone refusing to take part would be fired and their names given to security services, he said.
Reuters could not immediately verify reports of coercion.
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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 summary of the latest key developments as it approaches 8.40am in Kyiv.
The UN has said its investigators have concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, including bombings of civilian areas, numerous executions, torture and horrific sexual violence. The team of three independent experts had launched initial investigations looking at the areas of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions, where they were “struck by the large number of executions in the areas that we visited”, and the frequent “visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head and slit throats”.
Long lines of vehicles continued to form at Russia’s border crossings on the second day full day of Vladimir Putin’s military mobilisation. The president’s announcement of the first mobilisation since the second world war has led to a rush among men of military age to leave the country, with some men waiting more than 24 hours or resorting to using bicycles and scooters to skip the miles-long queue of traffic jams. Traffic into Finland across its south-eastern border with Russia continues to be busy, the Finnish border force said.
Finnish ministers on Friday evening announced that the government would prohibit Russian tourists from crossing its borders over the next few days. “The aspiration and purpose is to significantly reduce the number of people coming to Finland from Russia,” president Sauli Niinistö told state broadcaster Yle.
The United States is prepared to impose additional economic costs on Russia in conjunction with American allies if Russia moves forward with Ukraine annexation, the White House said on Friday. Russia has been planning what the US has described as sham referendums in portions of eastern Ukraine in what is seen as a step toward annexing these territories.
So-called referendums are under way in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, with residents told to vote on proposals for the four Ukrainian regions to declare independence and then join Russia. The polls in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces are due to run until Tuesday and appear to be a thin attempt to provide cover for illegal annexation of the regions by Moscow.
Some residents are ignoring the vote, Andriy Yusov, a Ukrainian defence intelligence official, told CNN. Ukraine’s state security service has claimed the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, held by Russian-backed separatists, planned to allow teenagers aged under 18 to cast their votes.
The “referendums” have been widely condemned in the west as illegitimate. Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, described the “sham referenda” as “a media exercise” by Russia, for whom the outcomes have been “almost certainly already decided”. Nato described the “referendums” as Moscow’s “blatant attempts at territorial conquest” and said they have no legitimacy. G7 leaders said they would never recognise the “sham” referendums in a joint statement.
Ukraine said on Friday it had shot down four Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones used by Russia’s armed forces, prompting president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to complain that Tehran was harming Ukrainian citizens. Ukraine and the US have accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia, something Tehran has denied. Zelenskiy had asked his foreign ministry to respond to the use of Iranian equipment, spokesperson Serhii Nykyforov said.
Russia will continue its communication with the United Nations about a deal to export grain from Ukrainian ports but says concrete results are needed, Tass news agency cited a senior official as saying on Friday. It also cited the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Vershinin, as saying Russia had a positive assessment of the UN’s efforts to resume the export of Russian fertilisers.
Ukraine’s armed forces said it has liberated another settlement in the Donetsk region and improved their positions around the eastern town of Bakhmut. The village of Yatskivka in Donetsk region is now in Ukrainian hands, according to Oleksii Hromov, deputy head of the operations directorate of the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces.
China’s foreign minister has told his Ukrainian counterpart that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected”. The meeting between Wang Yi and Dmytro Kuleba took place on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York, and was the first since Russia invaded Ukraine. Kuleba said Wang had “reaffirmed China’s respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
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