Scholz cautions China against sending weapons to Russia
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday urged China not to send weapons to help Russia’s war in Ukraine, and instead asked Beijing to exert pressure on Moscow to pull back its forces.
In a speech to the German parliament, Reuters reports that Scholz said it was disappointing that Beijing had refrained from condemning the Russian invasion, though he welcomed its efforts towards nuclear de-escalation.
“My message to Beijing is clear: use your influence in Moscow to urge the withdrawal of Russian troops,” he said. “And don’t deliver any weapons to the aggressor Russia.”
Key events
Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, is current delivering a video address at a soft power summit in London.
The country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, and the former UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, are also expected to speak.
You can watch live here:
Summary of the day so far …
-
Ukrainian forces hung on to their positions in the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut early on Thursday under constant attack from Russian troops seeking to claim their first major victory for more than half a year. Russia says seizing Bakhmut would open the way to fully controlling the rest of the strategic Donbas industrial region bordering Russia, one of the main objectives of the invasion it launched on 24 February 2022. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has put up fierce resistance. Not everyone in Ukraine is convinced that defending Bakhmut can go on indefinitely. “I believe that sooner or later, we will probably have to leave Bakhmut. There is no sense in holding it at any cost,” the Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Rakhmanin said on NV radio late on Wednesday.
-
Russia attacked a five-storey residential block in Zaporizhzhia overnight, killing three people and injuring six others. Rescuers are searching for survivors under the rubble. One of the people evacuated from the building was a pregnant woman. The building was “almost completely destroyed”, the city’s acting mayor, Anatoly Kurtev, said. The Zaporizhzhia regional military administration said Russia appeared to have used a S-300 missile for the strike. A spokesperson for Russian proxies in the partially occupied region which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed said – without producing any evidence – that the strike was the result of the actions of Ukrainian air defences.
-
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has cancelled a planned trip to Stavropol amid reports of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Bryansk region. Russian media has reported that two villages near the border with Ukraine have been attacked, with at least one person killed. Details remain unclear, but the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, described the incident as a “terrorist” attack.
-
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, on Thursday urged China not to send weapons to help Russia’s war in Ukraine, and instead asked Beijing to exert pressure on Moscow to pull back its forces. In a speech to the German parliament, Reuters reports that Scholz said it was disappointing that Beijing had refrained from condemning the Russian invasion, though he welcomed its efforts towards nuclear de-escalation.
-
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, accused Moscow of repressing domestic critics and called on UN-mandated investigators to keep documenting Russia’s alleged abuses in the Ukraine war, in a speech to the Human Rights Council.
-
The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, called on Thursday for the G20 to bridge differences over Ukraine, telling the opening of a meeting in New Delhi that global governance has “failed”. “The experience of the last few years – financial crisis, climate change, pandemic, terrorism and wars – clearly shows that global governance has failed,” Modi said in a recorded statement opening the meeting of G20 foreign ministers.
-
Russia’s foreign minister said on Thursday that many leaders from the west had turned the agenda of a G20 meeting in India “into a farce”. Sergei Lavrov told a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi “a number of western delegations has turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian federation”. Blinken, meanwhile, said “Unfortunately, this meeting has again been marred by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine.”
-
Lavrov accused the west of “shamelessly burying” the Black Sea grain initiative that facilitates the export of Ukraine’s agricultural products from its southern ports. Ukraine has said that it would like to renew the deal for a period of at least a year, to provide certainty to exporters, and to expand it to include the port of Mykolaiv.
-
Ukraine’s state broadcaster Suspilne has reported on its Telegram channel that the water supply in Mykolaiv will be off Thursday between 11am and 5pm due to a shutdown at the pumping station.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will be back later. Léonie Chao-Fong will be here shortly to take you through the next few hours of our live coverage.
Putin cancels trip to Stavropol over reports of Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Bryansk region
Russian media outlets have been carrying reports claiming that Ukrainian forces entered Russian territory in Bryansk region, which borders northern Ukraine. Tass reports that head of the region, Alexander Bogomaz, gave the news, and that “according to the latest information, they entered two villages, there is a battle going on”.
Details remain unclear, but Tass also reports: “The security forces confirmed that an operation is being carried out in the border area to destroy violators of the state border.”
The state-owned RIA Novosti news agency reported on its Telegram channel that the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, in his daily media breifing, said that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, cancelled a planned trip to Stavropol “due to the situation in the Bryansk region”.
In his media briefing, Peskov said the incident had been an attack by “terrorists”.
Tass suggests that “saboteurs attacked both Lyubechan and Sushany”, and that “Ukrainian forces fired at a vehicle, killing one person and injuring another, a 10-year-old child”.
It reports: “The FSB confirmed to TASS that in the border area of the Bryansk region ‘measures are being taken to destroy the armed Ukrainian nationalists who have violated the state border.’”
The claims have not been independently verified.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, accused Moscow of repressing domestic critics and called on UN-mandated investigators to keep documenting Russia’s alleged abuses in the Ukraine war, in a speech to the Human Rights Council on Thursday.
Blinken described Russia’s civil society crackdown as a “systematic muzzling” and said UN investigators should continue documenting Russia’s Ukraine abuses to provide “an impartial record of what’s occurring, and a foundation for national and international efforts to hold perpetrators accountable”.
Reuters reports his video address comes ahead of an expected speech by a senior Russian official, Sergei Ryabkov, who is due to appear before the same Geneva-based body for the first time since Moscow invaded Ukraine more than a year ago.
Kateryna Mishchenko is a Ukrainian author, and this morning we have an adapted text of her closing address at Debates on Europe 2023 in which she asks: does Europe want Ukrainians as living partners or dead heroes?
Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion, I often heard people refer to Ukraine as Europe’s back yard. Now it resembles a graveyard, the war itself a gravedigger – missiles and shells form huge pits, digging graves for Ukrainians themselves. This cemetery is planted with beautiful flowers – notions of unbreakability, courage and resilience, which should give hope, the promise of rebuilding and that life is possible after all the horror.
A few weeks ago, I crossed the border between Ukraine and the European Union. Today there are no fast connections to or from Ukraine. The long journey has its own logic: the mental transformation takes time. In order to move from peace to war or from war to peace, one has to travel through a process, out of accelerated time – where the countdown applies not to seconds, but to human lives – into a time where there is room for reflection and discussion (sometimes just the wasting of words) and, most importantly, where there is time for choice. This mental metamorphosis creates anxiety, fear, disrupts sleep and deprives you of the most basic confidence in the ground under your feet, even when this ground is no longer dug up by shells and grave shovels. The borderline is felt as a kind of mental disorder.
Perhaps the current Nato strategy of supporting Ukraine in doses can be viewed through the prism of the fatal political logic of the borderline. The repressed can wait. But for how long?
Read more here: Kateryna Mishchenko – Does Europe want Ukrainians as living partners or dead heroes?
Guardian journalist Peter Beaumont is driving from Kharkiv to Kramatorsk to cover the situation around Bakhmut. He has this to say about the car journey.
We’ve been in Kupiansk for the last two days which has seen increasing shell fire from Russian artillery. We saw a lot of damage there, but coming south past Izium there are villages and towns that have been smashed to pieces. Extraordinary damage. We stopped in one place, where every building was damaged, some reduced to rubble, including what appeared to be a monastery or church.
All along this section of the road there are mine warning signs. At one point we were surprised by an explosion ahead of us, a puff of grey smoke above the road. We could see soldiers who seemed unconcerned, so came closer and could see they were blowing up unexploded ordinance right by the road.
Russia’s foreign minister said on Thursday that many leaders from the west had turned the agenda of a G20 meeting in India “into a farce”, the Tass news agency reported.
“A number of western delegations has turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian federation,” Sergei Lavrov told a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi.
Meanwhile, US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said the G20 meeting has been marred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Unfortunately, this meeting has again been marred by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine,” Reuters report Blinken said, adding that G20 countries must continue to call on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine.
Ukraine’s state broadcaster Suspilne has reported on its Telegram channel that the water supply in Mykolaiv will be off today between 11am and 5pm due to a shutdown at the pumping station.
Scholz cautions China against sending weapons to Russia
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday urged China not to send weapons to help Russia’s war in Ukraine, and instead asked Beijing to exert pressure on Moscow to pull back its forces.
In a speech to the German parliament, Reuters reports that Scholz said it was disappointing that Beijing had refrained from condemning the Russian invasion, though he welcomed its efforts towards nuclear de-escalation.
“My message to Beijing is clear: use your influence in Moscow to urge the withdrawal of Russian troops,” he said. “And don’t deliver any weapons to the aggressor Russia.”
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday accused the west of “shamelessly burying” the Black Sea grain initiative that facilitates the export of Ukraine’s agricultural products from its southern ports, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Reuters notes that while remaining in the agreement, Russia has repeatedly complained about the west’s approach to the deal, struck last July, saying countries that have imposed sanctions on Moscow were not doing enough to ease restrictions on Russia’s own exports, in particular of fertilisers.
Ukraine has said that it would like to renew the deal for a period of at least a year, to provide certainty to exporters, and to expand it to include the port of Mykolaiv.
German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, met with her Chinese counterpart, Qin Gang, before the G20 meeting in India, the German foreign ministry said on Twitter on Thursday.
“In the face of Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine and the UN Charter, neutrality rewards the aggressor,” Reuters reports the ministry added in the tweet.
The G20 meeting has been accompanied by an awkward set of bilateral meetings overshadowed by disagreements over the war in Ukraine, with some of the attenders pointedly not expected to meet face-to-face on the sidelines as might usually be expected.
Suspilne, Ukraine’s national brodcaster, has raised the death toll from the strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia to three. It reports on Telegram:
Three people were killed as a result of a Russian missile attack on a five-story building in Zaporizhzhia at night, the national police reported. Six injured were hospitalised, rescuers continue to work on the spot.
Ukraine’s emergency services have released images from the scene of a missile strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s state broadcaster has reported that two people were killed, and that people were believed to be trapped under the rubble.
In quotes being carried by Russian state-owned media, Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-proxy who is chair of the We Are Together with Russia organisation that operates within the occupied Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, has claimed on Telegram, without providing evidence, that the blast was a result of Ukrainian air defence fire. He is quoted as saying:
The work of the Ukrainian military over my native Zaporizhzhia led to the destruction of an apartment building and casualties among peaceful, innocent people. Today, at about 2.45am, two explosions sounded in the regional centre, temporarily occupied by the regime of Zelenskiy.
According to Tass, Rogov went on to say that the armed forces of Ukraine are constantly firing anti-aircraft missiles over residential areas, not taking into account the security of the civilian population.
Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and Zaporizhzhia is one of the partially occupied areas of the country which the Russian Federation claimed to annex late last year.
