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Opening summary
It has gone 10.30am in Kyiv and in Moscow. This is our latest Guardian blog covering all the latest developments over the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The US president, Joe Biden, will sit down for talks with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as they arrive in France for the anniversary of the D-day landings, the White House has confirmed.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said aboard Air Force One on the way to France that Biden will meet Zelenskiy to discuss “how we can continue and deepen our support for Ukraine”.
More on that in a moment, but first, here are the other latest developments:
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France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, will also host Zelenskiy on Friday in Paris. “As Russian strikes intensify on the frontline and against energy infrastructure, the two presidents will discuss the situation on the ground,” the Élysée Palace said. The meeting is set to take place after D-day commemorations. Zelenskiy will also deliver a speech in France’s National Assembly.
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State power operator Ukrenergo on Tuesday introduced forced electricity blackouts in several regions, including the capital, Kyiv, and frontline Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. Russian missile and drone barrages, including a major attack over the weekend, have damaged Ukraine’s energy networks and stretched its air defences.
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Air raid alerts were declared in several regions of Ukraine on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. All of Ukraine was put under an alert after fighter jets took off inside Russia.
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Russian forces are focusing their main firepower on the eastern Donetsk region and not north-eastern Kharkiv where they launched an offensive last month, according to Zelenskiy. The UK Ministry of Defence said the Avdiivka-Pokrovsk sector north and west of Donetsk city “has remained the probable main effort of Russian forces over the last 72 hours”.
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Zelenskiy said he had met with senior commanders in Kyiv on his return to Ukraine from visits to several European capitals as well as Singapore and the Philippines over the last week. The Ukrainian mayor of Kharkiv, the regional capital and second most populous city in the country, said Russia launched 76 aerial attacks on the city in May, almost three times as many as during April.
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Ukrainian officials said eight people were injured in Russian attacks in the central Dnipropetrovsk region and also in the eastern Kharkiv region overnight into Tuesday. The head of the southern Kherson region separately said Russian artillery fire killed an elderly woman in her yard in the village of Veletynske. Shelling injured two people in the Sumy region, the local military administration said.
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Any French military instructors in Ukraine would be a “legitimate target” for Russian armed forces, Sergei Lavrov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, said. Ukraine’s top commander said last week he had signed paperwork allowing French military instructors to access Ukrainian training centres soon. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said last week he would not comment on “rumours or decisions that could be made”. He said he would elaborate on France’s support during the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-day this week.
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A former Ukrainian state official faces trial for allegedly arranging to buy aeroplane parts at a price inflated sevenfold while in charge of arms imports, the country’s anti-corruption agency has said. It concerns the time before Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Key events
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy will visit Qatar on Wednesday, a source with knowledge of the visit told Reuters.
The news agency did not have any further details but we will update if any more information comes in.
The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour has written an analysis piece on why Ukraine is a dividing line in European election that centrists hope to exploit.
You can read Patrick’s full piece here:
A committee tasked with probing Russian and Belarusian influence in Poland started work on Wednesday, prime minister Donald Tusk said, amid growing fears Moscow is trying to destabilise the country, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
EU member Poland is one of staunchest allies of its neighbour Ukraine in its battle against the Russian invasion. According to AFP, it has joined other countries in blaming Russia for a wave of cyber-attacks and attempts to sow division ahead of this weekend’s elections to the European parliament.
On Friday, Warsaw said Russian hackers were likely behind a false story planted on the wire of the state news agency PAP that said Poles would be mobilised to fight in Ukraine.
AFP reports that the panel was set up by government decree last month to investigate Russian and Belarusian attempts to influence political life.
Its task was to shed light on “what the real threats from Russia and Belarus look like today”, said Tusk, a pro-EU majority leader. “We already know exactly that these two countries and their services are the most active in Poland,” he added.
The panel, made up of experts in security, the law and the media, will publish its first findings within two months, he said.
The Ukrainian first deputy foreign minister Andriy Sybiha discussed steps to intensify cooperation with the Chinese vice foreign minister Sun Weidong during a visit to Beijing, the Ukrainian ministry said on Wednesday.
Sybiha also expressed hope for China’s participation in a Ukraine-led peace summit later in June saying it could be “a good opportunity to make a practical contribution to achieving a just and lasting peace”, the ministry added.
Russia will send additional military supplies and instructors to Burkina Faso to help the west African country boost its defence capabilities and fight terrorism, Russian state media quoted foreign minister Sergei Lavrov as saying on Wednesday.
Burkina Faso, under military leadership since a 2022 coup, has played host to contingents of the Wagner mercenary force, whose founder Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash last August.
“From the very first contacts between our countries after President [Ibrahim] Traoré came to power, we have been very closely engaged in all areas of cooperation, including the development of military and military-technical ties”, TASS news agency cited Lavrov as saying during a visit to Burkina Faso.
The Kremlin has described comments by US treasury secretary Janet Yellen that Washington would not tolerate China increasing its exports of “dual-use” goods to Russia, and would respond with sanctions, as “blackmail”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Washington’s tone was completely unacceptable and that Moscow stood in solidarity with Beijing, Reuters reports.
The United States says that by providing dual-use goods – which have both civilian and military applications – China is powering Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.
Russia and China have sharply boosted bilateral trade since the start of the war as Russia’s commerce with the West has been decimated by waves of sanctions.
French president Emmanuel Macron is to host US president Joe Biden, British King Charles and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau on the shores of Normandy, representing the three main countries involved in the landings on 6 June 1944, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and about 200 surviving war veterans are also expected to attend.
No Russian official representing Vladimir Putin’s government has been invited by the Élysée Palace due to the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine, now in its third year. Representatives of the anti-Kremlin opposition and civil society will also not be present, reports AFP.
AFP reports that while some Russian dissidents agreed that Moscow officials should not be present, they said Russians should not be excluded altogether from the hugely symbolic celebrations.
“It is not okay that representatives of Russia, which sacrificed millions in this war, will not be there,” veteran rights campaigner Lev Ponomarev, a co-founder of the Nobel peace prize-winning Memorial group, told AFP.
“I believe that the opposition could and should have been there,” said 82-year-old Ponomarev, who lives in France after fleeing threats of arrest in Russia.
“We are representatives of the Russia that defeated Hitlerism if only because we have stood up to Putin’s fascism,” he told AFP.
Any French military instructors in Ukraine would be a “legitimate target” for Russian armed forces, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said on Tuesday during a tour of Africa, where frustration with the west has swayed several countries toward Moscow.
Lavrov made the remarks at joint news conference with the Republic of Congo’s foreign minister, Jean Claude Gakosso.
“As for the French instructors, I think they are already on the Ukrainian territory,” Lavrov said, referring to the military instructors that France could send to train Ukrainian troops. “Regardless of their status, military officials or mercenaries represent a legitimate target for our armed forces.”
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that “instructors who train the Kyiv regime’s troops don’t have any sort of immunity, and it doesn’t matter whether they are French or not”.
Ukraine’s top commander said last week he had signed paperwork allowing French military instructors to access Ukrainian training centres soon. But France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said last week he would not comment on “rumours or decisions that could be made”. He said he would elaborate on France’s support during the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-day later this week.
Macron’s office said it would not comment on Lavrov and Peskov’s remarks.
You can read the full piece here:
The White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Tuesday that the US is not planning to send US military trainers to Ukraine, reports Reuters.
“For our part, we’re not planning for a training mission in Ukraine,” Sullivan said.
He added: “They need more air defences and we are working on that and they need a continued flow of weaponry which we will supply to them.”
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, revealed the tactics and traits that help him face the daily frustrations of leading a country at war for more than two years.
Within a ceremonial room inside Kyiv’s presidential compound, Zelenskiy spoke for nearly an hour with a Guardian team, including the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.
The interview took place during perhaps the toughest time for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Russia is on the offensive in Kharkiv, an advance that follows months of delay in the US Congress over the passing of a major support package, limiting Ukraine’s battlefield capabilities.
If you missed the interview that was published last week, then you can watch part of it here:
One person killed and five injured by Russian forces in east Ukraine, says official
Russian forces killed one person and injured five more in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which is suffering the most intense assaults from Moscow’s army, regional authorities said on Wednesday according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“One person was killed and five were wounded. These are the consequences of bombardments this morning in the Donetsk region,” its governor Vadym Filashkin said on social media.
According to AFP’s report, Filashkin said one civilian was killed and four others injured near the town of Toretsk and that another person was injured by a separate aerial attack on the frontline town of Selydove.
The Kremlin says its forces only target military infrastructure in Ukraine and AFP was unable to independently confirm details of the attack.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said this week that Russian forces were focusing their main firepower on the Donetsk region and not the north-eastern Kharkiv region where they launched a new offensive last month.
The Kyiv Independent reports that Ukrainian forces downed 22 drones launched by Russia overnight.
Citing the Ukrainian air force’s morning update, the publication writes that the drones were “reportedly launched from Cape Chauda in Russian-occupied Crimea and Russia’s Kursk oblast, located around 95 kilometers (around 60 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border”.
According to the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine’s air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said that “anti-aircraft systems and electronic warfare units, as well as mobile fire groups of the Ukrainian air force had intercepted the drones over Mykolaiv, Kherson, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, and Poltava oblasts”.
Local governor Filip Pronin also reported that a man was injured in Poltava oblast when a Russian drone hit an industrial facility, said the Kyiv Independent.
Kyiv on Wednesday welcomed an announcement from Washington that US vice-president Kamala Harris will attend an upcoming summit on Ukraine, despite earlier urging president Joe Biden’s participation, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Ukraine hopes to win broad international backing at the meeting later this month in Switzerland for its vision of the terms needed to end Russia’s war. Moscow has not been invited to attend the meeting.
“It is important news that US vice-president Kamala Harris has been confirmed to participate in the peace summit to be held on 15-16 June in Switzerland,” the head of the president’s office, Andriy Yermak, said in a statement on social media.
AFP reports that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy had earlier said that if Biden were to snub the summit it would be like “applauding” Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Biden is due to meet with Zelenskiy in France this week and then again at the G7 meeting in Italy to discuss Kyiv’s fight against Russia, the White House has said.
Russia’s supreme court on Wednesday rejected an appeal by sociologist and activist Boris Kagarlitsky against his five-year prison sentence on charges of “justifying terrorism”, Reuters reports citing the Russian state news agency Tass.
Kagarlitsky, 65, is a longtime political dissident and has spoken out repeatedly against the conflict in Ukraine.
A petition calling for Kagarlitsky’s release has been signed by intellectuals and politicians from around the world including Canadian author Naomi Klein, former British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
US president Joe Biden has landed in Paris where he is spending the next five days, and during which he will attend D-day celebrations in Normandy, deliver a high-profile speech and hold a formal state visit with French president Emmanuel Macron.
While in Normandy, Biden will sit down for talks with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy about the war effort to repel Russian invaders, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters aboard the presidential flight to Paris, reports Reuters.
Opening summary
It has gone 10.30am in Kyiv and in Moscow. This is our latest Guardian blog covering all the latest developments over the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The US president, Joe Biden, will sit down for talks with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as they arrive in France for the anniversary of the D-day landings, the White House has confirmed.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said aboard Air Force One on the way to France that Biden will meet Zelenskiy to discuss “how we can continue and deepen our support for Ukraine”.
More on that in a moment, but first, here are the other latest developments:
-
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, will also host Zelenskiy on Friday in Paris. “As Russian strikes intensify on the frontline and against energy infrastructure, the two presidents will discuss the situation on the ground,” the Élysée Palace said. The meeting is set to take place after D-day commemorations. Zelenskiy will also deliver a speech in France’s National Assembly.
-
State power operator Ukrenergo on Tuesday introduced forced electricity blackouts in several regions, including the capital, Kyiv, and frontline Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. Russian missile and drone barrages, including a major attack over the weekend, have damaged Ukraine’s energy networks and stretched its air defences.
-
Air raid alerts were declared in several regions of Ukraine on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. All of Ukraine was put under an alert after fighter jets took off inside Russia.
-
Russian forces are focusing their main firepower on the eastern Donetsk region and not north-eastern Kharkiv where they launched an offensive last month, according to Zelenskiy. The UK Ministry of Defence said the Avdiivka-Pokrovsk sector north and west of Donetsk city “has remained the probable main effort of Russian forces over the last 72 hours”.
-
Zelenskiy said he had met with senior commanders in Kyiv on his return to Ukraine from visits to several European capitals as well as Singapore and the Philippines over the last week. The Ukrainian mayor of Kharkiv, the regional capital and second most populous city in the country, said Russia launched 76 aerial attacks on the city in May, almost three times as many as during April.
-
Ukrainian officials said eight people were injured in Russian attacks in the central Dnipropetrovsk region and also in the eastern Kharkiv region overnight into Tuesday. The head of the southern Kherson region separately said Russian artillery fire killed an elderly woman in her yard in the village of Veletynske. Shelling injured two people in the Sumy region, the local military administration said.
-
Any French military instructors in Ukraine would be a “legitimate target” for Russian armed forces, Sergei Lavrov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, said. Ukraine’s top commander said last week he had signed paperwork allowing French military instructors to access Ukrainian training centres soon. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said last week he would not comment on “rumours or decisions that could be made”. He said he would elaborate on France’s support during the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-day this week.
-
A former Ukrainian state official faces trial for allegedly arranging to buy aeroplane parts at a price inflated sevenfold while in charge of arms imports, the country’s anti-corruption agency has said. It concerns the time before Russia’s 2022 invasion.