Both sides claim hundreds of enemy troops killed in past 24 hours. Follow all the latest developments
Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. This is Christine Kearney bringing you up to date.
The Ukrainian military is preparing for an upcoming counteroffensive, with a top commander saying his forces’ ongoing defence of Bakhmut in the face of fierce and sustained Russian attacks is necessary to “buy time” for that push.
Three civilians were killed in Russian shelling of Kherson in southern Ukraine on Saturday, and another died in Donetsk, regional officials said. Reuters reported the governor of Kherson oblast, Oleksandr Prokudin, as saying three people, including an elderly woman, had also been wounded. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the three people killed in Kherson had gone to a store to buy groceries. “I would like to support all our cities and communities that are subjected to brutal terrorist attacks,” he said in a regular evening video address.
Russia has bombarded Ukraine more than 40,500 times since its invasion in February 2022, according to the Ukrainian interior minister, Ihor Klymenko. The shelling had destroyed more than 152,000 residential buildings since the war began, Euromaidan reported Klymenko as saying.
Russian missile strikes targeted “critical infrastructure” in Zaporizhzhia, the Kyiv Independent reported. The strikes launched on Saturday were likely to have come from S-300 air defence missiles, the outlet reported the Zaporizhzhia oblast military administration as saying.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, dismissed reports that a “pro-Ukrainian group” carried out a high-profile attack on the Nord Stream pipelines late last year. Speaking to former Portuguese minister Bruno Macaes in an interview with the New Statesman, Kuleba said: “It is the first time that I’m hearing a story of a secret pro-Ukrainian or Ukrainian group that is able to conduct operations of that scale and sophistication.”
Canada has announced a ban on imports of Russian aluminium and steel products, with the aim of denying Moscow revenues to fund its war in Ukraine. The imports were worth almost C$250m (US$180m/£150m) in 2021, according to the latest government data.
Ukraine’s foreign minister urged Germany in an interview published on Sunday to speed up supplies of ammunition and to start training Ukrainian pilots on western fighter jets. Dmytro Kuleba told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that ammunition shortages were the “number one” problem in Ukraine’s attempt to repel Russia’s invasion.
Most of Kyiv’s power supply was restored, Ukrainian officials said, after a Russian missile and drone barrage targeting critical infrastructure on Thursday. Power supplies were fully restored in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, private provider DTEK said, while about 60% of households in Kharkiv city that were knocked off the grid were back online, Associated Press quoted authorities as saying. Significant damage remained in the Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions in Ukraine’s north-west and north-east.
Iran has reached a deal to buy advanced Su-35 fighter planes from Russia, Iranian state media said on Saturday, expanding a relationship that has seen Iranian-built drones used in Russia’s war on Ukraine. “The Sukhoi-35 fighter planes are technically acceptable to Iran and Iran has finalised a contract for their purchase,” the broadcaster IRIB quoted Iran’s mission to the United Nations as saying in New York.
