Russia-Ukraine war live: highest Russian casualties since first week of invasion, UK says; Poland casts doubt over jets to Kyiv | Ukraine

It is 2pm in Kyiv.

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine:

• Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has cast doubt on whether it would be able to supply Ukraine with fighters jets. Duda said sending F-16 aircraft would be a “very serious decision” that was “not easy to take”.

• The latest defence intelligence update from the UK Ministry of Defence says that over the past two weeks, Russia has likely suffered its highest rate of casualties since the first week of the invasion of Ukraine.

• Russian forces over the weekend continued to shell Ukrainian cities amid a grinding push to seize more land in the east of the country. One person was killed and one more was wounded on Sunday morning by the shelling of Nikopol, a city in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Serhii Lysak reported. The shelling damaged four residential buildings, a vocational school and a water treatment facility.

• Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg will end his term as planned in October, a spokesperson for the alliance said, after a newspaper reported a further extension was in the works.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s Wagner group, has said the mercenary force had taken the village of Krasna Hora, on the northern edge of the embattled city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk region,

• Galina Danilchenko, the Russia-installed mayor of the Ukrainian city Melitopol in south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, said on Saturday one civilian died in overnight shelling of Melitopol by Ukrainian forces. Two people were also injured, she wrote on the Telegram social media app.

• First reports indicate that three Russian S-300 missiles hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday night, regional governor Oleh Sinehubov wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “One infrastructure facility was damaged. Information about the victims and the scale of the destruction is being clarified,” he said.

• Ukraine’s forces are holding defence along the frontline in Donetsk, including in the besieged town of Bakhmut, with the fiercest battles raging for the cities of Vuhledar and Maryinka, Kyiv’s top military commander said on Saturday. Valerii Zaluzhnyi did not specify where the gains were. He added that Ukrainian forices are trying to “stabilise” the frontline around Bakhmut, a city in the eastern Donbas region, which has become the focal point of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and of Moscow’s drive to regain battlefield momentum.

• Russia is ready for negotiations with Ukraine, but without preconditions, state media have reported the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Vershinin, as saying. In an interview with state-run Zvezda television, Vershinin said it was not Ukraine, but the US and the EU that should make the decision on talks with Russia. Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, who headed the country’s negotiating team in the early phases of the conflict, said “talks are out of the question”.

• Zemfira, one of Russia’s most popular singers, has been placed on a list of “foreign agents” on grounds that she supported Ukraine and criticised Russia’s “special military operation” in that country, according to the Russian justice ministry. The ministry has added several other people to its “foreign agents” list, including opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, and activists Aleksandra Kazantseva and Tatyana Nazambaeva for “LGBT propaganda”.

• Immigration authorities in Argentina are cracking down on Russian women who since the invasion of Ukraine have started travelling to Buenos Aires to give birth in order to gain Argentinian citizenship for their children. The director of Argentina’s immigration office, Florencia Carignano, said on Friday that a judicial investigation has been launched into what she described as a lucrative business that promises Argentinian passports for the Russian parents.

The latest defence intelligence update from the UK Ministry of Defence says that over the past two weeks, Russia has likely suffered its highest rate of casualties since the first week of the invasion of Ukraine.

The update, posted to Twitter, continues:

The Ukrainian General Staff release daily statistics on Russian casualties. Although Defence Intelligence cannot verify Ukraine’s methodology, the trends the data illustrate are likely accurate.

The mean average for the last seven days was 824 casualties per day, over four times the rate reported over June-July 2022. Ukraine also continues to suffer a high attrition rate.

The uptick in Russian casualties is likely due to a range of factors including lack of trained personnel, coordination, and resources across the front – this is exemplified in Vuhledar and Bakhmut.

Emily Dugan

My colleague Emily Dugan has this report on a family stuck in Ukraine after their UK host died suddenly.

Nadiia Luba was sheltering in a basement in central Ukraine earlier this month when she learned that her family’s chances of escaping to Britain had been dashed.

After nearly eight months of waiting for visas for her and her two sons, she got a text to say that the British host who had been so ready to welcome them had died suddenly. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “My brain didn’t want to accept it.”

Luba is one of 9,700 Ukrainians still waiting on a visa decision to join a host in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Volunteers helping to match families say they have seen an increase in waits of six months or more, where no news is communicated by the Home Office.

Read the full article here:

Appearing on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has cast doubt on whether it would be able to supply Ukraine with fighters jets.

Duda said sending F-16 aircraft would be a “very serious decision” that was “not easy to take”.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s Wagner group, has said the mercenary force had taken the village of Krasna Hora, on the northern edge of the embattled city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Reuters is reporting.

In an audio message published by his press service on the messaging app Telegram, Prigozhin said: “Today the settlement of Krasna Hora was taken by the assault troops of the Wagner private military company.”

Prigozhin also published a short video, apparently showing Wagner fighters at the entrance sign to Krasna Hora, which had a pre-war population of 600.

The Guardian and Reuters could not independently verify that the village had been taken.

Ukraine’s forces hold defence along the frontline in Donetsk, including of the besieged town of Bakhmut, with the fiercest battles raging for the cities of Vuhledar and Maryinka, Kyiv’s top military commander said on Saturday, Reuters reports.

Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, said Russia carries out some 50 attacks daily in Donetsk, a region in Ukraine’s southeast that Moscow has been trying to occupy fully.

“Fierce fighting continues in the area of Vuhledar and Maryinka,” Zaluzhnyi said in a Telegram message after a call with US General Mark Milley.

“We reliably hold the defence. In some areas of the front we have managed to regain previously lost positions and gained a foothold.”

Zaluzhnyi did not specify where the gains were. He added that Ukraine continues to hold Bakhmut, tying to “stabilise” the frontline around the town.

Hello, I’m Christine Kearney and I’ll be bringing you the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and the surrounding region and the Odesa and Dnipro regions can avoid power cuts on Sunday, leading producer DTEK said, as authorities worked to repair power grids damaged by a major Russian strike.

Russia bombarded Ukraine in a large-scale attack on Friday, hitting several cities including Kyiv. Ukraine’s state-run energy operator Ukrenergo has said the situation in the country’s energy system is challenging but controlled.

Kyiv said Russia struck power facilities in six regions, causing blackouts across most of Ukraine.

The attacks came a day after Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy ended a tour of European allies to lobby leaders for long-range weapons and fighter jets.

In other developments:

• Galina Danilchenko, the Russia-installed mayor of the Ukrainian city Melitopol in south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, said on Saturday one civilian died in overnight shelling of Melitopol by Ukrainian forces. Two people were also injured, she wrote on the Telegram social media app.

• First reports indicate that three Russian S-300 missiles hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday night, regional governor Oleh Sinehubov wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “One infrastructure facility was damaged. Information about the victims and the scale of the destruction is being clarified,” he said.

• Ukraine’s forces are holding defence along the frontline in Donetsk, including in the besieged town of Bakhmut, with the fiercest battles raging for the cities of Vuhledar and Maryinka, Kyiv’s top military commander said on Saturday. Valerii Zaluzhnyi did not specify where the gains were. He added that Ukrainian forices are trying to “stabilise” the frontline around Bakhmut, a city in the eastern Donbas region, which has become the focal point of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and of Moscow’s drive to regain battlefield momentum.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, acknowledged that his forces are facing fierce resistance around Bakhmut from Ukrainian defenders. He said it could take two years for Russia to fully control the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, two regions whose capture Moscow has stated as a key goal of the war. “If we have to get to the Dnipro, then it will take about three years,” Prigozhin added, referring to a larger area that would extend to the vast Dnieper River that runs roughly north to south, bisecting Ukraine. Russian forces must capture the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut to proceed with their campaign.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday issued a decree sacking a senior security figure and said separately that his drive to clean up the government would continue. Authorities have dismissed dozens of officials in recent weeks and opened probes as part of a widespread drive against wrongdoing. The European Union says addressing corruption is a requirement for Ukraine joining the 27-member bloc.

• Russia is ready for negotiations with Ukraine, but without preconditions, state media have reported the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Vershinin, as saying. In an interview with state-run Zvezda television, Vershinin said it was not Ukraine, but the US and the EU that should make the decision on talks with Russia. Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, who headed the country’s negotiating team in the early phases of the conflict, said “talks are out of the question”.

• Russia’s sports minister, Oleg Matytsin, has said Ukraine’s call to ban Russian athletes from the 2024 Paris Olympics was “unacceptable”, state media are reporting. He described the call as “a blatant desire to destroy the unity of international sport and the international Olympic movement”. His remarks came as a group of 35 countries will demand that Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from the 2024 Olympics, according to the Lithuanian sports minister, Jurgita Šiugždinienė.

• A proposed resolution for adoption by the UN’s general assembly has underlined the need for peace ensuring Ukraine’s “sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity”. The draft resolution from supporters of Ukraine, on the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is broader and less detailed than Zelenskiy’s 10-point peace plan he announced in November.

• Zemfira, one of Russia’s most popular singers, has been placed on a list of “foreign agents” on grounds that she supported Ukraine and criticised Russia’s “special military operation” in that country, according to the Russian justice ministry. The ministry has added several other people to its “foreign agents” list, including opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, and activists Aleksandra Kazantseva and Tatyana Nazambaeva for “LGBT propaganda”.

• Immigration authorities in Argentina are cracking down on Russian women who since the invasion of Ukraine have started travelling to Buenos Aires to give birth in order to gain Argentinian citizenship for their children. The director of Argentina’s immigration office, Florencia Carignano, said on Friday that a judicial investigation has been launched into what she described as a lucrative business that promises Argentinian passports for the Russian parents.