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Russian commanders ‘increasingly concerned’ by setbacks, says UK MoD
Russian forces are probably trying to attack dams in Ukraine in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points amid Russian concerns about battlefield setbacks, UK intelligence says.
The Ministry of Defence said in its latest daily briefing that the strikes were “unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations due to the distance between the damaged dams and the combat areas”.
It said Russian forces struck the Pechenihy dam on the Siverskyi Donets River with ballistic missiles or similar weapons on Wednesday and Thursday after striking a dam near Krivyy Rih in central Ukraine the previous week.
Ukrainian forces are advancing further downstream along both rivers. As Russian commanders become increasingly concerned about their operational setbacks, they are probably attempting to strike the sluice gates of dams, in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points.
Key events
Queue at Russian border stretches 10km as people flee
Hours after the Kremlin shocked Russia by announcing the first mobilisation of at least 300,000 troops since the second world war has led to a rush among men of military age to leave the country.
The line at the border between Russia and Georgia is approximately 10km long, according to the BBC, where people have reportedly been waiting more than 20 hours to cross.
Options to flee are limited, people fleeing previously told the Guardian. Earlier this week, four of the five EU countries bordering Russia announced they would no longer allow Russians to enter on tourist visas.
“I will be driving across the border tonight,” said a 29-year-old sergeant in the Russian reserves, Oleg, on Thursday. “I have no idea when I’ll step foot in Russia again,” he added, referring to the jail sentence Russian men face for avoiding the draft.
More details of overnight attacks are emerging from Ukraine.
Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said Russian forces had shelled settlements near the Russian border.
In the Kupyan district, five people were injured from shelling, including two children, aged 10 and 17, he said.
Sinegubov warned residents against visiting forests due to a large number of mines and unexploded ammunition. “In the past day, the pyrotechnics of the state emergency service defused 578 explosive objects in the region,” he said via his Telegram channel on Saturday.
A 45-year-old man was injured from a mine while picking mushrooms in the Chuguyiv district, he said. A similar incident happed to a 24-year-old resident of Izium, he added.
Vladimir Putin has taken a more direct position in the strategic planning for the war in Ukraine in recent weeks, according to US officials, reports the New York Times.
The Russian president rejected requests from commanders to retreat from the southern city of Kherson and pull back across the Dnieper River, according to the Times.
While such a withdrawal would preserve Russian equipment and lives, it would be another public humiliation for Putin after Ukraine successfully reclaimed large portions of territory in the Kharkiv region earlier this month.
News of Putin’s more direct strategic involvement comes after the Kremlin began mobilising 300,000 militarily reservists to serve in Ukraine. Kherson is one of four Russian-occupied provinces in Ukraine holding “referendums” on joining the Russian Federation, which began on Friday morning.
Two civilians were killed on Friday in the Donetsk region, and three people were injured, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk oblast.
“Currently, it is impossible to establish the exact number of victims in Mariupol and Volnovas,” he said via his Telegram channel on Saturday.
Russian authorities in the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson have allegedly started handing out draft notices and mobilising men of conscription age who “renounced Ukrainian citizenship and received passports of the Russian federation” according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence.
“Servicemen of the Russian occupation forces continue to commit illegal actions against the civilian population and engage in looting,” the ministry’s statement said on Saturday.
“According to available information, in Melitopol, the so-called ‘kadyrivtsi’ seized a dealer’s warehouse of agricultural machinery and are trying to sell off the property.”
Earlier, we reported on president Volodymyr Zelenskiy telling Ukrainians in occupied territory to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held land.
Here are the latest photos to come out of Ukraine and elsewhere:
Russia strikes Ukraine as “referendums” are under way in occupied areas
Russian forces launched new strikes on Saturday, targeting infrastructure facilities, Zaporizhzhia city’s administrative head, Oleksandr Starukh, said via his Telegram channel.
One missile hit an apartment building causing a fire, killing one person and injuring seven others.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly address on Friday, told Ukrainians in occupied territory – currently Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces – to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held territory.
However, if they end up in the Russian military, Zelenskiy asked people to save their lives and help liberate Ukraine.
But if you get into the Russian army, sabotage any activity of the enemy, hinder any Russian operations, provide us with any important information about the occupiers – their bases, headquarters, warehouses with ammunition. And at the first opportunity, switch to our positions.
The so-called “referendums” under way in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops are a “fraud” and won’t be recognised by anyone in the world, said George Robertson, a former Labour defence secretary who led Nato between 1999 and 2003.
Speaking with Sky News, Robertson said:
It’s a device by Putin to try and pretend that these areas will now be part of the Russian Federation, and that therefore any attack that takes place, aided and abetted by the west, is an attack on Russia as a whole, but that doesn’t work.
When asked if there’s a risk continuing to give Ukraine weapons to defend that land, Robertson added:
Well, everything is risky and we don’t know how President Putin reacts in any given circumstance, but that means that we have got to remain absolutely solid and resolute like the Ukrainian people.
British music stars Harry Styles and Ed Sheeran, US basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and other celebrities will donate personal objects for a campaign launched on Saturday to support healthcare in Ukraine.
Agence France-Presse reports that the WHO Foundation, an independent organisation that works to raise funds to support the UN health agency’s work addressing global health crises, launched the Human Kind e-store, where fans can try to win items donated by celebrities.
The funds raised would go towards supporting the World Health Organisation’s actions in Ukraine and neighbouring countries, the foundation said, adding that it aimed to raise $53.7m.
Russian commanders ‘increasingly concerned’ by setbacks, says UK MoD
Russian forces are probably trying to attack dams in Ukraine in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points amid Russian concerns about battlefield setbacks, UK intelligence says.
The Ministry of Defence said in its latest daily briefing that the strikes were “unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations due to the distance between the damaged dams and the combat areas”.
It said Russian forces struck the Pechenihy dam on the Siverskyi Donets River with ballistic missiles or similar weapons on Wednesday and Thursday after striking a dam near Krivyy Rih in central Ukraine the previous week.
Ukrainian forces are advancing further downstream along both rivers. As Russian commanders become increasingly concerned about their operational setbacks, they are probably attempting to strike the sluice gates of dams, in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has urged the world to condemn the “pseudo-referendums” under way in four provinces of Ukraine.
Agence France-Presse reported the Ukrainian president as saying in his daily address to the nation:
The world will react absolutely justly to pseudo-referendums – they will be unequivocally condemned.
The ballots in the provinces fully or partially controlled by Russian forces have been dismissed as a “sham” by Kyiv and its western allies.
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s three-time former prime minister, has triggered a row after defending the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over the war in Ukraine.
The 85-year-old billionaire, whose party is forecast to return to government after the general election on Sunday, told Italian TV that Putin – an old friend of his – was pushed to invade Ukraine by the Russian people and by ministers who wanted Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration replaced with “decent people”.
Berlusconi, who has condemned the war, told the chatshow Porta a Porta that separatists had gone to Moscow and told the media that Ukraine’s attacks had caused 16,000 deaths and that Putin was doing nothing to defend them.
Berlusconi said:
Putin was pushed by the Russian population, by his party and by his ministers to invent this special operation. The troops were supposed to enter, reach Kyiv within a week, replace Zelenskiy’s government with decent people and then leave. Instead they found resistance, which was then fed by arms of all kinds from the west.
Angela Giuffrida in Rome has the full story:
In the “referendum” in the Donetsk region, the turnout on Friday was 23.6%, Russia’s state news agency Tass cited a local official as saying.
More than 20.5% of voters eligible to vote in the Zaporizhzhia region and 15% of those in the Kherson region voted on Friday, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported, citing local electoral officials.
“In our view, that’s enough for the first day of voting,” the head of Kherson’s Russian-installed election commission, Marina Zakharova, was quoted as saying.
Luhansk town forced to vote, says governor
Serhiy Haidai, Ukraine’s governor of Luhansk, said that in the town of Starobilsk, the population was banned from leaving and people were being forced out of homes to vote in the “referendum”.
In the town of Bilovodsk, a company director told employees voting was compulsory and anyone refusing to take part would be fired and their names given to security services, he said.
Reuters could not immediately verify reports of coercion.
Summary
Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s continuing live coverage of the war in Ukraine. I’m Adam Fulton and here’s a summary of the latest key developments as it approaches 8.40am in Kyiv.
The UN has said its investigators have concluded that Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, including bombings of civilian areas, numerous executions, torture and horrific sexual violence. The team of three independent experts had launched initial investigations looking at the areas of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions, where they were “struck by the large number of executions in the areas that we visited”, and the frequent “visible signs of executions on bodies, such as hands tied behind backs, gunshot wounds to the head and slit throats”.
Long lines of vehicles continued to form at Russia’s border crossings on the second day full day of Vladimir Putin’s military mobilisation. The president’s announcement of the first mobilisation since the second world war has led to a rush among men of military age to leave the country, with some men waiting more than 24 hours or resorting to using bicycles and scooters to skip the miles-long queue of traffic jams. Traffic into Finland across its south-eastern border with Russia continues to be busy, the Finnish border force said.
Finnish ministers on Friday evening announced that the government would prohibit Russian tourists from crossing its borders over the next few days. “The aspiration and purpose is to significantly reduce the number of people coming to Finland from Russia,” president Sauli Niinistö told state broadcaster Yle.
The United States is prepared to impose additional economic costs on Russia in conjunction with American allies if Russia moves forward with Ukraine annexation, the White House said on Friday. Russia has been planning what the US has described as sham referendums in portions of eastern Ukraine in what is seen as a step toward annexing these territories.
So-called referendums are under way in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian troops, with residents told to vote on proposals for the four Ukrainian regions to declare independence and then join Russia. The polls in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces are due to run until Tuesday and appear to be a thin attempt to provide cover for illegal annexation of the regions by Moscow.
Some residents are ignoring the vote, Andriy Yusov, a Ukrainian defence intelligence official, told CNN. Ukraine’s state security service has claimed the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, held by Russian-backed separatists, planned to allow teenagers aged under 18 to cast their votes.
The “referendums” have been widely condemned in the west as illegitimate. Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, described the “sham referenda” as “a media exercise” by Russia, for whom the outcomes have been “almost certainly already decided”. Nato described the “referendums” as Moscow’s “blatant attempts at territorial conquest” and said they have no legitimacy. G7 leaders said they would never recognise the “sham” referendums in a joint statement.
Ukraine said on Friday it had shot down four Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones used by Russia’s armed forces, prompting president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to complain that Tehran was harming Ukrainian citizens. Ukraine and the US have accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia, something Tehran has denied. Zelenskiy had asked his foreign ministry to respond to the use of Iranian equipment, spokesperson Serhii Nykyforov said.
Russia will continue its communication with the United Nations about a deal to export grain from Ukrainian ports but says concrete results are needed, Tass news agency cited a senior official as saying on Friday. It also cited the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Vershinin, as saying Russia had a positive assessment of the UN’s efforts to resume the export of Russian fertilisers.
Ukraine’s armed forces said it has liberated another settlement in the Donetsk region and improved their positions around the eastern town of Bakhmut. The village of Yatskivka in Donetsk region is now in Ukrainian hands, according to Oleksii Hromov, deputy head of the operations directorate of the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces.
China’s foreign minister has told his Ukrainian counterpart that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected”. The meeting between Wang Yi and Dmytro Kuleba took place on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York, and was the first since Russia invaded Ukraine. Kuleba said Wang had “reaffirmed China’s respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
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