Ukrainian president brings home commanders from Turkey; US president to begin three-country tour dominated by Nato and US decision to permit cluster munitions
Five former commanders of the garrison in Mariupol have returned to Ukraine from Turkey, being welcomed home at a ceremony in the western city of Lviv.
Denys Prokopenko, Svyatoslav Palamar, Serhyi Volynsky, Denys Shleha and Oleh Khomenko returned from Istanbul by plane with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Eight people were killed and 13 injured on Saturday in Lyman in eastern Ukraine after the town came under Russian rocket fire, Ukraine’s interior ministry said. “So far we know about eight dead … The number of injured has increased to 13 people,” the ministry said on social media. The strikes hit around 10am local time at two intersections that were busy with pedestrians. A residential building, an annex to a printing house and three cars were set on fire in the attack, the ministry said.
The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has reiterated that the UK is signatory to a convention that prohibits cluster munitions, after the US agreed to supply Ukraine with the controversial weapons. “We will continue to do our part to support Ukraine against Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion, but we’ve done that by providing heavy battle tanks and, most recently, long-range weapons,” Sunak said. The US president, Joe Biden, has been condemned by human rights groups for agreeing to send the weapons, with one fellow Democrat labelling the decision “unnecessary and a terrible mistake”.
Mercenary fighters of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group are preparing to move to Belarus under the terms of a deal that defused their mutiny against Russia’s military leadership, a senior commander of the group was quoted as saying. Since the June mutiny, when Wagner fighters briefly seized a southern Russian city and marched towards Moscow, the exact whereabouts of Prigozhin and his mercenaries have been unclear.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has visited Snake Island, which became a symbol of his country’s defiance early in the war after Ukrainian soldiers there refused to surrender to Russian forces, to mark 500 days since the invasion. In an undated clip released on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelenskiy was shown arriving by boat and laying flowers to honour those who defended the island.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog chief said it was “making progress” on inspecting several areas of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, after Ukraine claimed that “external objects similar to explosive devices” had been placed on rooftops at the site. UN officials said they had “not seen any indications of explosives or mines” while touring the cooling ponds and other areas, but have yet to visit the facility’s rooftops.
