Russia-Ukraine war live: Kyiv vows to defend ‘fortress Bakhmut’ as Russian forces encircle city | Ukraine

The time is just after 3.15pm in Kyiv. Here is a summary of events so far.

• Kyiv said it was holding off attacks from Russian troops still attempting to surround Bakhmut. The Ukrainian general staff said “more than 130 enemy attacks” had been repelled over the past day adding: “The enemy continues its attempts to encircle the town of Bakhmut.”

• The death toll from a Russian missile strike that hit a five-storey apartment block in southern Ukraine on Thursday has risen to 11, Ukraine’s emergency services said on Saturday.

• A woman and two children were killed in Russian mortar shelling of a village in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office said on Sunday.

• Bakhmut’s deputy mayor Oleksandr Marchenko has told CNN evacuations from the frontline have dropped to just five to 10 people each day compared with up to 600 who were leaving the city when evacuations were at their peak.

• Ukraine MP Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday that tens of thousands of Ukrainian children could have disappeared, potentially deported to Russia in what she described as “genocide”.

• Former chief of the general staff Gen Lord Richard Dannatt has said Ukraine could potentially mount a successful counter-offensive in late spring or early summer and that there could be a “decisive outcome” on the battlefield “this year”.

• Western states delivering fighter jets to support Ukraine defending itself against Russia is “only a question of time”, Latvia’s prime minister has said.

• The latest intelligence briefing from the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) says recent evidence suggests an increase in “close combat” in Ukraine, probably due to Russia’s shortage of “munitions”. It also refers to Russian mobilised reservists being ordered to assault a Ukrainian concrete strong point armed with only “firearms and shovels”. These shovels are likely to be the outdated MPL-50 entrenching tools used in hand-to-hand combat.

• Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said on Sunday that Ankara is working hard to extend a UN-backed initiative that has enabled Ukraine to export grain from ports blockaded by Russia following its invasion.

• Two Ukrainian pilots are in Arizona to fly flight simulators and be evaluated by the US military, two US officials say, as Washington remains mute on whether it will send fighter jets or sophisticated remotely piloted drones to Kyiv, Reuters reports.

• Top commanders of what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine have briefed Russia’s defence minister on the current situation and action plans, his ministry said on Sunday.

• The Russian army hit a command centre of the Ukrainian forces’ Azov Regiment in south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday. The Guardian could not independently verify this.

Bakhmut’s deputy mayor has said evacuations from the frontline have dropped to just five to 10 people each day compared with up to 600 who were leaving the city when evacuations were at their peak.

Oleksandr Marchenko told CNN: “The enemy blows everything to the ground, strikes at multi-story buildings, and the residential sector. There are air raids, artillery shelling, mortar shelling. The enemy is striking the city with everything they can.

“There is no way we can get there.”

Approximately 4,000 to 4,500 people are still in Bakhmut and Marchenko said it was difficult to persuade them to leave as most of them “fear having nowhere to go and nothing to go with.”

Four medical workers remain in the city, he said.

A woman and two children were killed in Russian mortar shelling of a village in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office said on Sunday.

“Mortar shelling of Poniativka village in Kherson region. A private house was hit,” Andriy Yermak wrote on the Telegram messaging app, Reuters reports.

“Russian terrorists continue to kill civilians,” he said, providing no additional details of the attack.

Kherson was occupied by Russian troops from the early days of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine until its recapture by Kyiv’s forces in November.

Since its liberation, the city has regularly been shelled from Russian positions across the Dnipro river.

Kyiv said it was holding off attacks from Russian troops still attempting to surround Bakhmut, a now-destroyed eastern Ukrainian city that Moscow has been trying to capture for months.

Ukraine has vowed to defend “fortress Bakhmut” but it has faced Russian troops determined to take the city that has turned into a political prize as the battle drags on.

The Ukrainian general staff said “more than 130 enemy attacks” had been repelled over the past day including in Kupiansk, Lyman, Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

It said on Sunday:

The enemy continues its attempts to encircle the town of Bakhmut.

Bakhmut has been mostly reduced to rubble during the longest and bloodiest battle of the invasion, Agence France-Press reports.

Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukrainian forces, said on Saturday the situation was “difficult but under control” in the city he described as a “priority target for the enemy”.

There is fighting in and around the city, the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said, warning that Ukrainian supply routes were narrowing.

“The Russians may have intended to encircle Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, but the Ukrainian command has signalled that it will likely withdraw rather than risk an encirclement,” ISW said on Saturday.

Ukraine MP Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said tens of thousands of Ukrainian children could have disappeared, potentially deported to Russia in what she described as “genocide”.

She told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday:

We have about 13,000 cases that are confirmed that Ukrainian children have been deported to different parts of the Russian Federation.

However, we also have information about many more of those that are counted in tens of thousands. But we just do not have that the official kind of recording of those … and this is part of the genocide that the Russian Federation is conducting against Ukrainian nation.

Because turning children, abducting them, and turning children into different nationality by spreading them around the Russian Federation and actually giving them to to Russian families, that is just another trace of genocide that is ongoing right now in the centre of Europe.

Klympush-Tsintsadze, the chair of the parliamentary committee on EU integration, said they have been able to return about 100 Ukrainian children to their families with the help of human rights groups and other organisations.

Speaking about how the children had been separated from their families, including instances where some children were even adopted, she explained:

Some of them [the children] have been going through the filtration camps with their parents where they were separated from the parents. Some of them have been taken to so called summer camps or vacation camps for a week from their parents and then never, never returned. And they were even some of them were even given already for adoption to Russian families, as if they didn’t have their own families back in Ukraine.

Klympush-Tsintsadze added that the full picture would not be known until all Ukrainian territories were “liberated”.

I think the the scope of these absolutely tragic activities that are being carried out by the Russian authorities will learn only after we will be able to liberate all the territories of Ukraine.

And that is something that those people who are suggesting peaceful territories do not understand: the suffering, the tragedies, the tortures, the abductions, deportations, you know, all the territories that are right now occupied by the Russian Federation…and we have to ensure that those people are liberated by the Ukrainian armed forces.

On Bakhmut she said the Russian army had suffered “incredible” human losses.

Unfortunately, the Russian Federation did not give up on the plans that they had with regard to Bakhmut. They are still pushing on that particular part of the Ukrainian territory. And I think the approach our military have been using there with holding on to that particular city is trying to deplete the Russian Federation’s army as they are suffering an incredible number of human losses and I assume that Ukrainian military management is also looking into possibility to withdraw the troops should the the losses of our armed forces become unbearable.

Isobel Koshiw

After avoiding criticism of the authorities at the start of the war, Ukrainian journalists have begun reporting allegations of corruption by officials again. But wartime censorship and the army’s role in protecting their country from an existential threat has made reporting on the military a challenge.

Journalist Yuriy Nikolov was leaked evidence that army food procurement contracts had been inflated in January. But conscious of not wanting to harm the war effort, he said in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda that he went to great lengths not to publish them.

But when he approached defence officials with the findings and found their response “was not what it should be”, he said he sensed that the matter was not going to be pursued officially and decided he had to run the story.

In the contracts, several food staples were as much as three times the supermarket price, with a single egg costing the equivalent of 37p. The payment for the contract was due on 1 February. “I knew I had to publish them before the payment was made,” said Nikolov. “For this [much] money, they could buy weapons. If that much was actually stolen, we could lose the war [if it carried on].”

Nikolov said that he and other investigative journalists paused their activities at the beginning of the war and had gradually resumed work in the autumn. “I will say that during the invasion, I have turned down many stories,” he said.

The contracts’ publication in late January by the news site ZN,UA was a tipping point, along with the news on the same day that a deputy infrastructure minister had been arrested for siphoning aid money intended to buy generators.

Sources in the presidential administration said Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was furious, according to Ukrainska Pravda journalists. It prompted the dismissal of 15 senior government and regional officials, including two senior defence officials.

Anti-corruption measures are one of the requirements for Ukraine’s EU membership status and Zelenskiy was responding to disquiet in wider Ukrainian society over corruption at a time when most are regularly donating money to aid the war effort.

For Mykhailo Tkach, a leading investigative journalist who investigated several of the 15 dismissed officials, including the now former member of Zelenskiy’s inner circle, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the action taken by the president was a sign of positive change.

“It is a signal for journalists that they are heard as the ‘fourth power’ [and] a signal for other powerful people that there is no tolerance for corruption,” said Tkach. “In order to defeat the external enemy, it is necessary to simultaneously overcome the internal one – corruption.”

“Regarding [press freedom], as a journalist, I am in such a situation for the first time. I feel doubly responsible for my work and every word I say,” said Tkach.

You can read the full report here.

Sending fighter jets to Ukraine ‘only a question of time’, says Latvian PM

Philip Oltermann

Western states delivering fighter jets to support Ukraine defending itself against Russia is “only a question of time”, Latvia’s prime minister has said.

Speaking to German news magazine Der Spiegel, Krišjānis Kariņš said his own country would not hesitate to send jets to Kyiv “if we had any.”

“The delivery of fighter jets is only a question of time”, said US-born Kariņš, of the centre-right New Unity party. “I don’t see why the west shouldn’t deliver fighter jets. If Ukraine needs fighter jets, it should get them.”

In the wake of Russia’s war of aggression, Latvia has decided to back compulsory military service for men aged 18 to 27 for the first time since 2007.

In the interview Kariņš indicated he would welcome similar moves in other European countries.

He said:

Across the whole of Europe we need a lot more reservists: trained people who can be deployed at the shortest notice.”

A prominent Ukrainian military analyst said late on Saturday that he could not detect any immediate signs that Kyiv was going to order a retreat from the besieged city of Bakhmut.

Oleh Zhdanov said in a YouTube interview:

At the moment the situation is more or less stabilised. In terms of the advancement of Russian troops, we practically stopped [it].

Reuters also reported that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, thanked defenders in Bakhmut in a video message on Saturday but gave no details of the fighting.

Russian artillery have been pounding the last routes out of Bakhmut while trying to complete the encirclement of the besieged city and bring Moscow closer to its first major victory in the Ukraine war in six months.

The Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff said late on Saturday that it had repelled Russian attacks in the villages of Vasyukivka, Orikhovo-Vasylivka, Dubovo-Vasylivka and Hryhorivka, all of which are just north of Bakhmut’s city centre.

Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine – this is Adam Fulton bringing you the latest developments.

The Ukraine military says Russian troops are trying but failing to surround Bakhmut. Troops had repelled numerous attacks in and around the besieged city in eastern Ukraine, the armed forces’ general staff said in a Facebook post late on Saturday.

Bakhmut’s deputy mayor, Oleksandr Marchenko, told BBC radio there was fighting in its streets but Russian forces “still haven’t taken control over the city”.

Russian artillery is reported to be pounding the last routes out of Bakhmut, aiming to block Ukrainian forces’ access and complete an encirclement of the city. The UK Ministry of Defence said Ukrainian resupply routes were becoming “increasingly limited”.

A woman was killed and two men were badly wounded in Bakhmut by shelling while trying to cross a makeshift bridge out of the city on Saturday, according to Ukrainian troops assisting them.

In other developments:

• The death toll has risen to 11 from a Russian missile strike that hit a five-storey apartment block in southern Ukraine on Thursday, Ukraine’s emergency services said on Saturday.

• Ukraine has ordered a mandatory evacuation of families and vulnerable residents from the frontline city of Kupiansk and adjacent north-eastern territories. The evacuation order was due to the “unstable security situation” caused by Russia’s constant shelling of the town and its surroundings, it said. Russian troops retreated from key cities in the north-eastern Kharkiv region, including Kupiansk, and Ukraine recaptured it last September.

• Gen Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato’s former deputy supreme allied commander Europe, has urged speeding up the supply of equipment and support to Ukraine to give the Ukrainians “the tools they need to do the job”,

• The Russian defence minister paid a rare visit to Moscow’s forces in Ukraine. In a statement on Telegram, Russia’s defence ministry said Sergei Shoigu “inspected the forward command post of one of the formations of the eastern military district in the south Donetsk direction”.

• The president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, has called for Ukraine to be allowed to begin EU membership negotiations this year, during a visit to the country on Saturday. She was “hopeful” the talks could starts this year, she said.

• Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s description of the Russian invasion as “the war, which we are trying to stop, and which was launched against us using the Ukrainian people” was met with laughter at an event in New Delhi, India.

• Marjorie Taylor Greene, an influential far-right Republican in Congress, has called for the US to stop aid to Ukraine, saying President Joe Biden was “putting the entire world at risk of world war three”.