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UN seeks to broker civilian evacuation from ruins of Mariupol, while Russia continues offensive...

Live Updates: Russia’s Eastern Offensive Appears to Falter

Russian forces in eastern Ukraine face logistical and morale problems like those seen earlier in the war, analysts say. The E.U. is poised to approve a ban on Russian oil.

 

Victoria Kim and Lauren McCarthy

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/30/world/ukraine-russia-war-news

 

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

• Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine appears to be faltering, as its troops suffer battlefield losses and logistical and morale problems similar to those they faced in the war’s first phase, Western officials and analysts say.
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• As Russian efforts to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east by attacking from three sides seemed to stall in recent days, Ukrainians managed to retake a small town near the northern city of Kharkiv. Russia was relying on artillery to pound Ukrainian forces along the 300-mile-long eastern front, but it only managed to make incremental gains, a senior Pentagon official said.
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• In a sign of Moscow’s troubles, some of the troops who had been trying to stamp out the last pockets of resistance in the southern port city of Mariupol were redirected to the eastern front in the Donbas region, according to the Pentagon official. Yet Russian forces continued to rain destruction on civilians trapped in Mariupol, some of whom were sheltering at the Azovstal steel plant. The city’s mayor warned that people at the plant would be without water and medicine in “a matter of hours.”
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• In a significant new move to support Ukraine, the European Union is expected to ban Russian oil next week, an embargo that would be phased in over a period of months. The ban is expected to be approved at a meeting of ambassadors, allowing the bloc to avoid the time-consuming process of gathering heads of state together.

 

In other developments:

 

• Family members of a United States citizen confirmed on Friday that he had died fighting alongside Ukrainians. He is believed to be the first American killed in action in the war. Britain’s Foreign Office also confirmed the death of a British national, said to be a former soldier who had been fighting as a volunteer.
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• President Biden wants Congress to expedite visas for Russian scientists eager to leave their country by temporarily suspending the requirement of a sponsoring employer. That would eliminate one of the biggest obstacles for many scientists seeking to come to the U.S. and accelerate a brain drain already underway in Russia.
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• Russian troops occupying Mariupol have plundered more than 2,000 items from its museums and taken them to the city of Donetsk, the capital of an eastern region controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, according to the Mariupol City Council.
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• Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, accused the United States and the European Union of using the war to battle Russia without regard to the cost in civilian lives, according to RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency. Western allies are supplying Ukraine with arms not to support the country’s sovereignty, but to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” he said.

First published in Le Temps, Switzerland, April 26, 2022 | By Chappatte

 

 

12m ago

07.15

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/apr/30/ukraine-latest-news-us-damns-putins-cruelty-and-depravity-zelenskiy-questions-lack-of-powerful-response-to-humiliation-of-un-in-kyiv-live

 

Summary and welcome

Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.

 

I’m Samantha Lock and I’ll be bringing you all the latest developments until my colleague in London takes the reins a little later in the day.

 

It is nearing 9am in Ukraine. Here’s everything you might have missed:

 

• Lifting sanctions imposed on Russia is part of peace negotiations between Moscow and Ukraine, which are “not going well” but continue via videoconferencing on a daily basis, Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov Lavrov said in an interview with China’s official Xinhua news agency. “The agenda of the talks also includes issues of denazification, recognition of new geopolitical realities, the lifting of sanctions, the status of the Russian language, and others,” he said. “We are in favour of continuing the negotiations, although they are not going well,” Lavrov added.
• Any foreign weapons shipment to Ukraine is a “legitimate target” for Russia, its foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in an interview with Al Arabiya television channel, as cited by RIA Novosti. “Because those weapons are to be handed to the regime that is waging a war against its own population, against civilians in the country’s east,” Lavrov said.
• The sooner the west comes to terms with “new geopolitical realities” the better it will be for itself and the international community, Lavrov warned. “Our special military operation in Ukraine also contributes to the process of freeing the world from the neo-colonial oppression of the west, heavily mixed with racism and an exclusiveness complex,” he said.
• Russia has claimed Nato is trying to interfere with reaching political settlement to end the crisis in Ukraine. “By publicly expressing support for the Kyiv regime, Nato countries are doing everything to prevent the completion of the operation by reaching political agreements,” Lavrov told Xinhua news agency. “If the US and Nato are really interested in resolving the Ukrainian crisis, then, firstly, they should change their minds and stop supplying arms and ammunition to Kyiv.”
• Ukraine has claimed “colossal” Russian losses have taken place in the effort to fully capture the eastern Donbas region. While acknowledging its own heavy losses from Russia’s attacks in the east, Kyiv said casualties in the invading army were worse. “We have serious losses, but the Russians’ losses are much much bigger … They have colossal losses,” said a Ukrainian presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych.
• The Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, has spoken of Vladimir Putin’s “cruelty and depravity” in Ukraine, calling his actions “unconscionable” and his justifications for the invasion “BS”. “It’s hard to square his … BS that this is about nazism in Ukraine, and it’s about protecting Russians in Ukraine, and it’s about defending Russian national interests, when none of them, none of them were threatened by Ukraine,” Kirby said. “It’s brutality of the coldest and the most depraved sort.”
• European Union countries are likely to approve a phased embargo on Russian oil as early as next week, according to EU officials. European ambassadors are reportedly expected to agree to a finalised proposal by the end of next week after meeting on Wednesday, according to several EU officials and diplomats involved in the process.
• The US did not believe the threat of Russia using nuclear weapons despite a recent escalation in Moscow’s rhetoric, a senior US defence official said. Russia was days behind its schedule on its military operations in Ukraine’s Donbas region, a US defence official said, and Russia’s fighting with Ukraine in the Donbas region would be a potential “knife fight”.
• Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, described a Russian airstrike on Kyiv during a visit by the UN secretary general, António Guterres as a “deliberate and brutal humiliation” that was “left without a powerful response”.
• The situation inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol was “beyond a humanitarian catastrophe”, a Ukrainian commander inside the facility said. Serhiy Volyna, from the 36th separate marine brigade, said there were hundreds of people in the steelworks, including 60 young people, the youngest of them four months old. Ukraine hoped to evacuate civilians holed up in the steel plant with the last fighters defending the southern city, Zelenskiy’s office said. The president described the besieged city as a “Russian concentration camp in the middle of ruins”.
• Two British aid workers who were reportedly captured by Russian forces in Ukraine have been named. Presidium Network, a UK-based NGO that says it carries out evacuations of families and individuals from war zones, identified Paul Urey and Dylan Healy as the captured men. The UK Foreign Office said it was seeking further information about the claims of their capture.
• A former US marine has been killed fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, the first US citizen known to have died in combat in the war with Russia. Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, was killed on Monday while working for a military contracting company that sent him to Ukraine, his mother told CNN. The US defence department warned US citizens that they should not go to Ukraine to fight.
• More than 1 million people have been “evacuated from Ukraine” into Russia since 24 February, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed in remarks published by the ministry early on Saturday. Ukraine has said that Moscow has forcefully deported thousands of people to Russia with humanitarian corridors repeatedly breaking down.
• The US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said it would vote to pass Joe Biden’s $33bn request for aid for Ukraine “as soon as possible”. Speaking at her weekly press briefing on Friday morning, the House speaker framed the administration’s request as one of a number of “emergencies” Congress needed to address urgently.
• Shipments of new US military aid are en route to Ukraine with 155mm shells, fuses and helmets bound for Ukraine loaded on aircraft pallets on a C-17 cargo aircraft on Friday at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
• Britain will send investigators to Ukraine to help gather evidence of war crimes, including sexual violence, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has said. Ukrainian prosecutors and the international criminal court have been investigating potential war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s 24 February invasion.
• The US has begun training Ukrainian armed forces at sites located outside Ukraine. A Pentagon spokesperson said it was happening at three sites outside the US, including one in Germany.
• Putin could announce the mass mobilisation of Russians on 9 May, Ben Wallace, the UK defence secretary, has said. Wallace said that Putin could declare that “we are now at war with the world’s nazis and we need to mass mobilise the Russian people”.
• Zelenskiy has said that since Russia’s withdrawal from Kyiv, 900 bodies had been uncovered in mass graves. The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo confirmed with the deputy head prosecutor of Kyiv’s region that 900 bodies had been found so far, buried in several mass graves around the region.
• In his latest address, Zelenskiy thanked the US for its support via a revived second world war-era lend-lease programme. He also thanked countries that have resumed diplomatic operations in Kyiv, saying: “Such gestures, together with strong defensive, financial and political support from the free world, mean that the need to end the war is becoming more and more obvious to Russia.”
• The United States has rejected the possibility of “business as usual” with Putin, after after Indonesia invited him to the upcoming Group of 20 summit in November.

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