🔺Invaders occupy fifth of our land, admits Ukraine’s President Zelensky

President Zelensky conceded yesterday that Vladimir Putin’s forces control 20 per cent of his country as the Russian army moved to grab a key city in the eastern Donbas region.

“We have to defend ourselves against almost the entire Russian army,” the Ukrainian leader told Luxembourg’s parliament in a video address.

“All combat-ready Russian military formations are involved in this aggression,” he said, adding that the battle was now stretched along a front line of more than 620 miles (1,000km), and 100 people were dying per day. Today marks the 100th day of the war.

Andriy Yermak, one of Zelensky’s chiefs of staff, said Ukraine was fighting “to liberate territory that Russia has temporarily occupied”. “We are not fighting on Russian territory,” he added.

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🔺Russia will strike West if US rockets hit us, says Putin ally

One of President Putin’s closest allies has warned that Moscow could target western cities if Ukraine uses rocket systems supplied by the United States to carry out strikes on Russian territory.

Washington said this week that it was sending M142 high-mobility artillery rocket systems to Ukraine, which will more than double its army’s artillery range and allow it to strike targets 50 miles away.

“If, God forbid, these weapons are used against Russian territory then our armed forces will have no other choice but to strike decision-making centres,” said Dmitry Medvedev, a former prime minister under Putin who is deputy chairman of Russia’s national security council.

“Of course, it needs to be understood that the final decision-making centres in this case, unfortunately, are not located on the territory of Kyiv,” he said in an interview with Al Jazeera.

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🔺Morale suffers as Ukraine army’s losses grow

Ever since Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine in February, the world has been mesmerised by the spectacle of a superpower’s army being outmanoeuvred and humiliated by a smaller, better-motivated force. But now Ukraine’s army, too, is reported to be struggling with heavy losses in an increasingly bloody struggle to hold the invaders at bay.

News from the eastern Donbas region is grim: the Ukrainian military is losing ground and between 60 to 100 soldiers a day, as well as 3,500 a week injured, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, suggesting that overall Ukrainian losses, which in April he put at less than 3,000 soldiers killed, are now far higher.

Ukraine’s huge and easy victories around Kyiv and Kharkiv may soon seem a lifetime ago: one-fifth of Ukraine is now under some form of Russian occupation.

So is President Vladimir Putin in the process of salvaging a tactical victory from his extraordinary strategic folly?

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🔺Britain will send Ukraine longer-range rockets

Britain is sending cutting-edge rocket systems to Ukraine that can strike targets 50 miles away as part of efforts to help the country defend itself against a new onslaught from Russia.

The multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) come with precision-guided rockets. The rockets are deployed with pinpoint accuracy and the steel blast-fragmentation cases are designed for low collateral damage.

Britain is sending them after a request from Ukraine for longer-range weapons to counter Russian heavy artillery, which has been used to devastating effect in the eastern Donbas region. Ben Wallace, defence secretary, said Britain’s continued support would help Ukraine win the war, despite the Russian onslaught in the east and the first assault on Kyiv for weeks.

The decision was co-ordinated with the US following its decision to supply Ukraine with high-mobility artillery rocket systems last week, which more than doubled its artillery range.

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🔺Street fighting intensifies in eastern Ukraine after Zelensky visit

The battle for the eastern city of Severodonetsk has descended into “intense street fighting”, according to the region’s governor, who was speaking hours after President Zelensky visited soldiers on the front line.

Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk, said the position of Ukrainian forces fighting in the city at the centre of the Russian offensive had “worsened a little” after they reclaimed a chunk of territory previously lost, although he added that forces were still holding positions in its industrial zone.

“Our defenders managed to undertake a counterattack for a certain time; they liberated almost half of the city. But now the situation has worsened a little for us again,” Gaidai told national television today.

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🔺President Zelensky plea for anti-ship weapons in face of famine in Ukraine

President Zelensky has warned that 75 million tonnes of grain could be stuck in Ukraine by the autumn unless anti-ship missiles are provided to break Russia’s Black Sea naval blockade.

The Ukrainian leader said there were already up to 25 million tonnes of grain in Ukrainian silos, which exporters are unable to move because of fighting around the country’s ports.

President Putin has dangled the prospect of allowing a Black Sea corridor to be opened for ships carrying grain, but only in return for an easing of western sanctions, which has been rejected by Kyiv’s allies.

The British Ministry of Defence warned yesterday that since the sinking of the Moskva battle cruiser in April, Russia has moved multiple air-defence assets to Snake Island in the western Black Sea. “Russia’s activity on Snake Island contributes to its blockade of the Ukrainian coast and hinders the resumption of maritime trade, including exports of Ukrainian grain,” it said.

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🔺Airspace ban forces Sergey Lavrov to cancel Serbia trip

The Russian foreign minister has been forced to cancel a visit to Serbia after neighbouring countries closed their airspace to his plane, prompting threats from Moscow.

Sergey Lavrov’s two-day visit to Belgrade for talks with President Vucic, who has good relations with the Kremlin, was due to start today. A flight ban imposed by Bulgaria, a member of the European Union, as well as by Montenegro and North Macedonia meant that there was no way for him to make the trip.

“Our diplomacy has yet to master teleportation,” a foreign ministry source told Russia’s Interfax news agency.

Britain and EU member states closed their airspace to Russian aircraft after President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine started in February. Lavrov’s visit was announced after Vucic said that Serbia had struck a “extremely favourable” gas deal with Russia.

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🔺Recruits are signing up for glory but dying in droves

A shortage of western kit is costing Ukrainian lives, a British volunteer tells Alistair Dawber

A third of the men Matthew Robinson meets have only a few weeks left to live.

The former member of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers has been in Ukraine since the start of the war. Attached to the Georgian Legion of foreign volunteers, his job has been raising money, begging for arms and training potential fighters, mostly raw but enthusiastic Ukrainians who have heard their country’s call to arms.

As many as 1,000 of them have died at the front. In many cases though, Robinson’s brave but ragtag army have lost their lives not because they are out-fought by the Russians but because of what he describes as a lamentable lack of equipment, a situation he fears the West is not taking seriously enough.

“This has become a TikTok war,” he says, referring to the video-sharing website.

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🔺Ukrainian grain is Russia’s new stealth missile, UN warned

Russia has been accused of weaponising Ukrainian grain exports and fuelling a global food crisis in a cynical attempt to force the West to lift sanctions.

During heated exchanges at the UN security council, Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, addressed Moscow’s envoy directly: “Mr Ambassador of the Russian Federation, let’s be honest, the Kremlin is using food supplies as a stealth missile against developing countries.

“The dramatic consequences of Russia’s war are spilling over across the globe, and this is driving up food prices, pushing people into poverty, and destabilising entire regions. Russia is solely responsible for this food crisis.”

Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador, accused Michel of spreading lies and left the meeting.

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🔺Ukraine compiles ‘book of executioners’

Ukraine is to launch a “book of executioners” to help prosecute Russian soldiers accused of torturing and killing civilians, President Zelensky has said.

Three Russian soldiers have been convicted of war crimes in Ukraine since the start of the invasion on February 24. Ukraine is carrying out at least 15,000 investigations, Irina Venediktova, its top prosecutor, has said.

Zelensky said the database would collate “specific facts about specific people guilty of specific brutal crimes”. He said that Ukraine would seek to prosecute rank-and-file soldiers and their superiors. The Kremlin has denied allegations of war crimes, dismissing the testimonies of witnesses, as well as video and satellite imagery, as “fake” and orchestrated by the West.

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🔺President Putin creates police department to impose martial law

President Putin has ordered the creation of a new interior ministry department that will enforce martial law, despite the Kremlin previously denying rumours that it is to be imposed.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said the law enforcement department was being established due to the “requirements of the times”, but gave no further details.

Tens of thousands of people fled Russia in early March amid rumours that Putin was about to officially put the country on a war footing, speculation that Peskov described at the time as a “hoax”.

The Kremlin refers to its invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation”.

The imposition of martial law could mean border closures, the mass mobilisation of military reserves and the creation of internment camps for citizens of “enemy” countries.

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🔺British pair Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner sentenced to death in Ukraine

Two British men captured by Russian forces while fighting in Ukraine have been sentenced to death by firing squad.

Aiden Aslin, 28, and Shaun Pinner, 48, are to be executed after they were convicted on charges of terrorism in a court in Donetsk, a pro-Kremlin region of the country. They were convicted alongside Brahim Saadoun, a Moroccan, after a “show trial” in Russian-occupied territory.

Aslin, a former care worker from Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, has dual British and Ukrainian citizenship, and his fiancée is Ukrainian. Pinner, a former British Army soldier from Bedfordshire, moved to Ukraine four years ago and his wife is Ukrainian.

They were detained in Mariupol in April. Both were members of Ukrainian army units but were accused by Russia of being mercenaries, meaning they would not be entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention.

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🔺It’s a doll’s life: Putin effigies nailed to sacred trees in Japan

Across the world, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked anger, denunciation and sanctions. In Japan, though, the Russian leader faces punishment of an unusual kind — supernatural appeals for his death in the form of effigies nailed to sacred trees.

Police in Chiba prefecture, east of Tokyo, have launched an investigation after identical straw dolls, bearing photographs of Putin’s face, were found in Shinto shrines close to the town of Matsudo. Support for Ukraine and indignation about the invasion are widespread in Japan, but local people are indignant about the damage caused by the nails driven into the sacred trees.

Since last month, dolls have been found in the grounds of at least ten shrines, apparently the work of the same person. One found at Mikazuki Shrine in Matsudo was nailed to a castanopsis tree. With it was piece of paper with the words, “Vladimir Putin, born 7 October 1952. Pray for his extermination.”

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🔺Husband fears for celebrated medic Taira captured by Russian soldiers

Only a few days before the Russian invasion, Yuliia Paievska, a medic, called her husband to say she was urgently needed in the south where her volunteer rescue team was located on the outskirts of Mariupol.

“She told me something was about to happen and she needed to be with them. I was abroad so I flew back on the Monday. On Wednesday morning she set off towards Mariupol,” said her husband, Vadym Puzanov.

That was the last time he saw his wife. On March 16 she was captured by Russian soldiers and Puzanov has had no communication with her since the day before, he said in a phone call from the couple’s home in Kyiv.

The celebrated medic, 53, whose call sign is Taira, became well known through her work as a volunteer during the bloody 2013 Euromaidan protests.

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🔺‘Corpse lords’ search for Russian bodies with which to buy back Ukraine’s dead

They find him by the smell. In a green field in Vilkhivka, a small village east of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, a breeze carries a sickly sweet, sour stench over to the two Ukrainian soldiers scouring the land.

It is the unmistakable aroma of death, and it leads them to a thicket of trees. There, the body of a Russian soldier lies in the wrecked remains of an abandoned camp. Cat food and clothes are strewn around him; a burnt-out tank on the edge of the field is a clue to how he met his death.

The man is clad in three jackets, worn during the cold winter months when the Russian army occupied Vilkhivka, before Ukrainian forces liberated the village as part of a wider counterattack at the end of March. It has been at least two months since he died, possibly longer, and the body of someone’s son, husband, brother or father is mottled and swollen, its blackened features largely unidentifiable.

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🔺Horsemen of the Apocalypse are on their way, Dmitry Medvedev warns

When Dmitry Medvedev was elected president of Russia in 2008, the country’s liberals dared to dream.

“Freedom is better than non- freedom,” Medvedev, a lawyer with a passion for western rock groups, said. Although his appointment was a political sleight of hand that allowed President Putin to sidestep term limits and return to the Kremlin in 2012, Medvedev’s one-term tenure ushered in a short-lived political thaw in Russia.

He rejected Putin’s notion of “sovereign” democracy, the byword for strict Kremlin control over the electoral process. “It would be better to talk of genuine democracy,” he said.

Crucially, Medvedev was the first Russian leader whose political views had not been forged in service of the Soviet system. He oversaw a brief “reset” in ties between Moscow and Washington in 2009 and visited Silicon Valley to seek inspiration for his plans to establish a high-tech hub in Russia.

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🔺Russia makes billions selling oil and gas to Germany

Germany paid Russia more than €12 billion for fossil fuels and remained Moscow’s largest client for natural gas over the first hundred days of the war in Ukraine, an analysis has found.

Over the same period the European Union bought more than 60 per cent of Russia’s hydrocarbon exports, which in turn typically make up almost 50 per cent of the Kremlin’s state revenues.

While the EU has imposed a gradual embargo on most Russian oil imports and is trying to scale back its reliance on gas from Russia, high international energy prices and greater demand from China and India mean Moscow’s revenue is predicted to increase as much as €14 billion this year. In total they have amounted to about €93 billion since February 24.

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🔺Call for arms as Zelensky fears key Donbas city could fall in days

Russian forces using punishing firepower pushed Ukrainian troops back from the centre of Severodonetsk yesterday with the two sides fighting for “literally every metre” as Kyiv’s foothold in the crucial strategic city crumbles.

Amid warnings that the city could fall to Moscow within days, President Zelensky begged western leaders for missile defence systems, saying his country had been struck by about 2,600 Russian cruise missiles since the start of the war.

He has called the battle for Severodonetsk decisive for the fate of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russia has a “ten fold” artillery advantage, according to his military chief.

Zelensky accused Moscow of sending waves of poorly trained conscripts to their deaths in an effort to overwhelm his forces. “Russian generals see their people simply as the cannon fodder they need to gain an advantage in numbers,” he said in his nightly video address.

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🔺Russian war in Ukraine ‘possibly provoked’ by Nato, says Pope

The Pope has said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was partly “provoked” by Nato but denied that he is backing President Putin as he denounced the “cruelty” of Russian soldiers.

In an interview with Catholic publications the Pope doubled down on claims he made in April that Nato expansion in eastern Europe “facilitated” Russian wrath.

Francis said that a “very wise” head of state had visited him a few months before the war and told him he was “very worried about how Nato was operating”. He added that the leader told him: “They are barking at the doors of Russia. And they don’t understand that the Russians are imperial and won’t let any foreign power come near them.”

He said: “That head of state knew how to read the signs of what was happening.”

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🔺Russia to spend 20% more on defence budget in 2022

Russia’s defence spending is expected to increase by 20 per cent, according to the Military-Industrial Commission that reports directly to President Putin.

The increase would see Russia’s budget soar by up to 700 billion roubles (£9.9 billion) this year compared with 2021.

The Ministry of Defence in London cited remarks by the commission’s first deputy chairman, Andrey Elchaninov, who made the prediction last week.

The MoD said: “Russian government funding is allowing the country’s defence industrial base to be slowly mobilised to meet demands placed on it by the war in Ukraine. However, the industry could struggle to meet many of these requirements, partially due to the effects of sanctions and lack of expertise.”

It said Russia’s production of high-quality optics and advanced electronics “likely remain troubled and could undermine its efforts to replace equipment lost in Ukraine”.

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