The Russian defence ministry said the entire crew of the warship Moskva had been evacuated late on Wednesday night after an ammunition explosion and fire on the ship. However, the governor of the Odesa region, Maksym Marchenko, said the Ukrainians had struck the Moskva with two Neptune missiles. The ship was famously defied by Ukrainian troops on Snake Island at the start of the war, and is the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The defence ministry said it would be towed back to port.
Russia has warned Nato that if Finland and Sweden were to join the military alliance, then it would take measures in the Baltic. Dmitry Medvedev said: “There can be no more talk of any nuclear-free status for the Baltic – the balance must be restored.” Finland and Sweden took a major step towards joining Nato on Wednesday, after their prime ministers said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had changed Europe’s “whole security landscape” and “dramatically shaped mindsets” in the Nordic countries.
Lithuania’s prime minister, Ingrida Šimonytė, has dismissed Medvedev’s words as “nothing new”. Lithuania’s defence minister, Arvydas Anušauskas, said Russia had always kept nuclear weapons in its exclave Kaliningrad anyway.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said it was opening criminal cases into Ukrainian service personnel’s alleged torture of their Russian counterparts.
The governor of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region said four civilians had been killed and 10 wounded during Russian shelling of the city on Thursday.
Ukrainian forces claim they sabotaged a bridge as a Russian military convoy was crossing it towards Izyum in the Kharkiv region, destroying the convoy.
Iryna Vereshchuk, one of Ukraine’s deputy prime ministers, has announced that on Thursday there would be nine humanitarian corridors available. Civilians would need to use private cars to escape from the besieged city of Mariupol. Other evacuation routes are from Berdiansk, Tokmak and Enerhodar, and the ones in the eastern Luhansk region will only operate if occupying Russian forces stop their shelling.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, called for an oil embargo in his nightly address on Wednesday. “First of all, we need an oil embargo. And Europe’s clear readiness to give up all Russian energy. The European Union must stop sponsoring Russia’s military machine.”
Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, who has been part of the negotiating team at the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, has said a stumbling block is that Ukraine wants as many countries as possible to act as security guarantors, but Russia does not want their number to increase.
The US president, Joe Biden, announced an additional $800m (£610m) in military assistance to Ukraine including heavy artillery before a wider Russian assault expected in eastern Ukraine.
The UK’s Ministry of Defence has warned: “The towns of Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka are likely to be Russian targets for similar levels of violence” as the urban shelling seen elsewhere, as Russian military operations focus to the east.
The UK government has announced that about 16,400 people have arrived in the UK from Ukraine under the two visa schemes the Home Office has set up to handle refugees. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, estimates that the number of people who have fled Ukraine since Russia’s latest invasion began on 24 February is 4,697,964.
