Russia-Ukraine war live: Kyiv denies involvement in Nord Stream sabotage as Kremlin calls reports a distraction | Russia

An EU court has struck down the sanctions against the mother of the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, arguing the family connection was not enough to target her.

Violetta Prigozhina had appealed to the Luxembourg general court after she was added to the EU sanctions list in February 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

She won her appeal on Wednesday after judges concluded that the EU council of ministers, the decision-making body, had failed to demonstrate that she owned any companies with links to her son.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest associates, was added to the EU sanctions list in 2020 over his role in financing Russian fighters in Libya who committed human rights abuses.

The EU council added his mother, Violetta, to the sanctions list, naming her as the owner of the Concord Management and Consulting Group, part of the Concord Group, founded and owned by her son until 2019.

She was said to own other companies related to her son, who had benefited from Russian defence ministry contracts following Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the occupation of eastern Ukraine by Russian-backed separatists.

Delivering its ruling on Wednesday, the general court said Prigozhina had not been the owner of Concord Management and Consulting since 2017 and EU authorities had failed to demonstrate that she owned other businesses with links to her son at the time of her addition to the sanctions list.

The family relationship alone, the judgement continued “is not sufficient to justify her inclusion on the contested lists”.

Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the EU has sanctioned 1,473 individuals and 205 organisations, including the Russian president, his inner circle and top military leaders.

Being on the sanctions list means an individual cannot travel to the EU and all their assets held in the bloc are frozen.

• Intelligence reviewed by US officials suggested a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022, the New York Times has reported. There was no evidence President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, or his top lieutenants were involved, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials, said the report, citing US officials.

• Russia said media reports about Nord Stream underscored the need to answer Moscow’s questions about what happened. Foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said those responsible for leaks to the media wanted to divert the public’s attention and avoid a proper investigation.

• It will be an “open road” for Russian troops to capture cities in Ukraine should they seize control of Bakhmut, Zelenskiy has warned in an interview with CNN. “This is tactical for us, we understand that after Bakhmut they could go further,” said Ukraine’s president. The deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk told regional media on Tuesday that fewer than 4,000 civilians, including 38 children, remained in Bakhmut. The city, the focus of fierce fighting in the Donbas region, had an estimated prewar population of about 70,000.

• The press service of Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group which has been leading the Russian assault on Bakhmut, has said that Russian forces now fully control the east of the city. The claims have not been independently verified.

• Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, has said that for the first time since 24 February there were no dead or wounded civilians reported in the region.

• The UN general secretary, António Guterres will visit Kyiv on Wednesday, where he will meet Zelenskiy.

• EU defence ministers on Wednesday discussed plans to rush €1bn worth of ammunition to Ukraine and place joint orders for more to ensure supplies keep flowing. Ministers meeting with their Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksiy Reznikov, in Stockholm were debating a push to meet Kyiv’s immediate needs and bolster Europe’s defence industry for the longer term. “Our priority number one is air defence systems, and also ammunition, ammunition and again ammunition,” Reznikov said as he arrived for the meeting.

• Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian presidency, said 130 prisoners of war had been returned home in an exchange. Russia’s ministry of defence said on Tuesday 90 prisoners of war had been returned by Ukraine.

• The United Nations has said it believes that a viral video showing the apparent execution of a captured Ukrainian soldier by Russian troops may be authentic.

Philip Oltermann

Germany’s defence minister has urged caution around reports that the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged by a pro-Ukrainian group, raising the possibility of a false-flag operation designed to shift blame for the attack to Kyiv.

“It could just as easily been a false [flag] operation, designed to shift the blame to pro-Ukraine groups”, Boris Pistorius told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “The likelihood is equally high.”

In its reporting, the German broadsheet Die Zeit said the passports provided to hire the yacht used by the suspects had been “professionally forged”. While investigators did not rule out the possibility of a false-flag operation, they did consider it unlikely, the newspaper wrote.

The Ukrainian government was not involved in the sabotage last year of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, the country’s defence minister said on Wednesday.

“This is not our activity,” Oleksiy Reznikov said in Stockholm before a meeting with EU defence ministers, Agence France-Presse reports.

A report in the New York Times on Tuesday said US officials had seen new intelligence indicating that a “pro-Ukrainian group” was responsible for the sabotage.

Philip Oltermann

Here is a little more from Philip Oltermann, who is reporting on the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s visit to Erbil, Iraq:

Baerbock was asked about the Nord Stream reports at a press conference this morning.

“Of course we are very intensely following any new reports and any insights obtained by different actors”, she said. “But the strength of a constitutional democracy is that those official bodies in charge of shedding light on something can carry out their investigations in peace, and that the government can reach a verdict on the basis of their work, rather than prematurely drawing conclusions from [media] reports.”

Germany’s general prosecutor has been in charge of investigating the sabotaging of the Nord Stream pipeline since October 2022. Investigators in Denmark and Sweden had recently told the UN security council that their investigations too had not yet reached a conclusion, Baerbock said.

In parallel with a report in the New York Times, several German media outlets including Die Zeit on Tuesday evening reported that official investigators believe a pro-Ukrainian group to be behind the attack. Die Zeit specifically mentioned a yacht on which investigators had found traces of explosives, and which had been hired by a company registered in Poland but was owned by two Ukrainian nationals.

The press service of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group which has been leading the Russian assault on Bakhmut, has said Russian forces now fully control the east of the city. The claims have not been independently verified.

The Russian state-owned news agency Tass reports that Prigozhin said in a Telegram message: “The divisions of the Wagner PMC occupied the entire eastern part of Bakhmut. Everything east of the Bakhmutka river is completely under the control of the Wagner PMC.”

On Tuesday, Prigozhin claimed that between 12,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian troops remained defending the city. The Ukrainian deputy PM Iryna Vereshchuk said fewer than 4,000 civilians remained in Bakhmut, an industrial city that had a prewar population of about 70,000 people.

Philip Oltermann

Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief, reports:

“Of course we are following the reports very intensely,” the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said about the investigations into the Nord Stream blasts during a state visit to Erbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

She said the strength of a constitutional democracy was that it sometimes had to step back and let official bodies carry on with their investigations, “rather than come to premature conclusions based on media reports.”

Baerbock added that Denmark and Sweden had informed her that their investigations were still ongoing.