Putin orders forces not to storm last stronghold in Mariupol as west warns of Russian cyber-attacks
* Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates
Vladimir Putin has ordered his forces not to storm the last remaining Ukrainian stronghold in the besieged city of Mariupol, after his defence minister admitted the Russian army was still fighting thousands of Ukrainian troops there.
Putin described a plan to storm the Azovstal steelworks as “impractical” and called instead for Russian troops to blockade the area “so that a fly can’t get through”.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, has appealed for a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians and wounded soldiers to be evacuated from Azovstal.
Russian missiles and artillery struck 1,001 military targets in Ukraine overnight, including 162 firing positions, the country’s ministry of defence claimed.
The mayor of Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, has said it is under intense bombardment. Oleg Synegubov, the head of the regional state administration, said Russian forces shelled areas of Kharkiv with multiple systems. He claimed there were about 15 attacks and five civilians were injured.
Russian forces are advancing towards Kramatorsk, while Putin is likely to want to demonstrate “significant successes” before Victory Day celebrations, British intelligence has suggested.
A court in Moscow has fined Google 11m roubles (£105,000) over what it says is inaccurate data about Russian troop losses and civilian casualties in Ukraine, as well as the distribution of video clips on YouTube produced by Ukrainian groups such as the nationalist Azov battalion.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, are both expected to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Kyiv today.
The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, has arrived in India on a diplomatic mission to convince his reluctant counterpart, Narendra Modi, to back western action against Russia, along with agreeing to a variety of other strategic trade and defence partnerships.
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, said his government supports talks to resolve international disputes but reiterated China’s opposition to unilateral sanctions. China has repeatedly criticised western sanctions, including those against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, but has also been careful not to provide assistance to Moscow that could lead to sanctions being imposed on Beijing.
The “five eyes” allied countries, including the UK and US, have warned that “evolving intelligence” indicates Russia is poised to launch cyber-attacks against rivals supporting Ukraine.
Vanda Semyonovna Obiedkova, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor, has been killed in the siege of Mariupol. She died sheltering in a freezing basement without water, in a grim echo of how she had hidden in a basement from the Nazis when she was 10 years old.
Posts casting doubt on evidence of alleged war crimes in Bucha have been shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook, analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has found. Continue reading...
