An airstrike has hit a chemical plant in Sievierodonetsk, a city in east Ukraine, Ukrainian officials wrote on Telegram late on Tuesday. Residents were urged not to come out of hiding due to toxic fumes.
Ukraine welcomed EU sanctions, but criticised the “unacceptable” delay. Speaking alongside Slovakia’s president, Zuzana Čaputová, in Kyiv, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, noted that 50 days have passed between the fifth and sixth sanction packages.
Ukraine is working on an international United Nations-led operation with naval partners to ensure a safe trade route for food exports, according to Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who said Russia is playing “hunger games with the world by blocking Ukrainian food exports”.
Ukraine’s giant seed bank near battlefields is in danger of being destroyed. The genetic code for nearly 2,000 crops rests in underground vaults based in Kharkiv, north-eastern Ukraine, which has come under intense bombing from Russian forces.
The African Union warned EU leaders that Moscow’s blockade of Ukraine’s ports risks “a catastrophic scenario” of food shortages and price rises. Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, who chairs the union, said “the worst is perhaps ahead of us” if current global food supply trends continue.
Ukraine is to prosecute 80 suspected war criminals, said Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova. It was announced on Tuesday as representatives of a group of countries investigating Russian war crimes and international criminal court prosecutor, Karim Khan, met at The Hague.
A senior Russian lawmaker has suggested kidnapping a Nato defence minister. In an interview late on Monday, Oleg Morozov, first elected to the Russian parliament in 1993 and a member of the dominant United Russia party, said on Rossiya-1 state TV he has a “fantastical plot” that a Nato war minister will travel to Kyiv and wake up in Moscow.
Sanctions against Russia are directed at ordinary citizens and motivated by hatred, the former president Dmitry Medvedev has claimed. Medvedev, who advises Vladimir Putin on national security matters, said in a post on Telegram on Tuesday that the “endless tango of economic sanctions” won’t touch the political elite but have incurred losses for big business.
Ukraine is still in control of some parts of Sievierodonetsk city. Its soldiers are fighting slowly advancing Russian troops, but civilian evacuations are not currently possible, the head of the city’s administration has said. Russians now control “around half”, according to reports on national television in Ukraine.
