Russia-Ukraine war live: Belarusian leader Lukashenko says ‘situation is now seriously stalemate’ | Ukraine
Belarus leader says ‘situation is now seriously stalemate’
Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, the authoritarian leader of Belarus has said.
Alexander Lukashenko, who is an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, described the current state of the conflict as “head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying”.
“There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position,” he said.
In other news:
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A third round of Ukrainian-backed peace talks opened in Malta, but without Moscow, which condemned it. In a statement afterwards, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said 66 countries had taken part, proof that his plan “has gradually become global”. It follows similar meetings in Jeddah and Copenhagen, with the Ukrainians hoping to eventually hold a summit at the level of heads of state.
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Russia’s forces around the Donetsk oblast town of Avdiivka have “likely suffered” some of its highest casualty rates of 2023 so far, according to the UK Ministry of Defence’s intelligence update.
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The report follows the Ukrainian president’s claims on Friday that Russian forces lost at least a brigade’s worth of troops attempting to advance on Avdiivka.
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The head of the office of the president of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, has praised Qatar’s role in facilitating the return of four Ukrainian children from Russian captivity earlier this month.
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Ukraine and the Netherlands began talks on a bilateral agreement on security guarantees in Malta, Andriy Yermak also announced. It is the sixth country to start bilateral negotiations with Ukraine on security guarantees.
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Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Mykola Tochytskyi, has pointedly accused Russia of having a history of “provoking” and “stoking” hybrid conflicts across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
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“We warned that turning a blind eye to [Russian] violation of international peace and security would fuel conflicts in the world,” Tochytskyi said, amid the Israel-Hamas war. Volodymyr Zelenskiy has previously expressed fears that the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel could threaten military support for Ukraine.
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Russia’s foreign ministry claimed a Ukrainian drone crashed into a nuclear waste storage facility at the Kursk nuclear power plant in western Russia, damaging its walls.
Key events
The UK ministry of defence has cited unspecified reports that the Russian government is attempting to suppress discussion of “negative political, economic and social trends” at universities.
Volunteer Ukrainian soldiers have been pictured undergoing intensive military training outside of Kyiv ahead of their deployment.
Summary
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Russia would confiscate assets belonging to EU states it deems unfriendly if the bloc “steals” frozen Russian funds in a drive to fund Ukraine, a top ally of president Vladimir Putin said. It comes after Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said that the EU executive was working on a proposal to pool some of the profits derived from frozen Russian state assets to help Ukraine and its post-war reconstruction.
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Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, the Belarus leader said. Alexander Lukashenko, a key Putin ally, described the current state of the conflict as “head-to-head, to the death, entrenched … Seriously stalemate.”
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A third round of Ukrainian-backed peace talks opened in Malta, but without Moscow. In a statement, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said 66 countries had taken part, proof that his plan “has gradually become global”.
Crimean schoolchildren are being trained as part of a military-patriotic programme called the “School of Future Commanders”.
In Sevastopol yesterday the training was conducted under the guidance of military personnel and included multi-sport racing, emergency medicine, and weapons handling.
Russian air defence systems shot down over 30 Ukrainian drones over the Black Sea and the Crimean peninsula overnight, the defence ministry has said.
“The air defence systems in place destroyed 36 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over the Black Sea and the northwestern part of the Crimean peninsula,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
Local authorities in the southern Krasnodar region bordering the Black Sea said that a fire broke out at an oil refinery in the early hours of Sunday, but did not specify the cause, AP reports. “The reasons for the incident are being established,” a statement from local authorities said, amid claims in local media outlets that the fire had been caused by a drone strike or debris from a downed drone.
Drone strikes and shelling on the Russian border regions and Moscow-annexed Crimea are a regular occurrence.
In Ukraine, the country’s air force said today that it had shot down five Iranian-made Shahed exploding drones launched by Russia overnight.
Close to the front line in the country’s east, where Ukrainian and Russian forces are locked in a grinding battle for control, four police officers were wounded when a shell fired by Russian troops exploded by their police car in the city of Siversk, located in the partly occupied Donetsk province.
Russians commemorated the victims of Stalinist terror today, more than 20 months into Moscow’s Ukraine offensive that has been accompanied at home by a crackdown on dissent.
The Kremlin has doubled down on its version of history, which often glosses over Stalinist crimes – with public commemoration of Soviet-era repression seen as unpatriotic, AFP reports.
The “Returning of the Names” event was organised by Nobel Prize winning Memorial – a rights and historical memory group shut down weeks before Moscow launched its 2022 military campaign. Every year, the event sees people taking turns to read out the names of people executed during Stalin’s Terror between 1936 and 1938.
In Moscow, it is traditionally held at the Solovetsky Stone memorial to victims, sited opposite the Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB, now occupied by its modern successor FSB. AFP reporters said the square was encircled by metal barriers with a heavy police presence.
Oleg Orlov, the Memorial’s co-chair who was recently fined for denouncing the Ukraine campaign, attended the ceremony.
Several Western ambassadors, including the US envoy, laid flowers there. Memorial staged a live feed of the reading of the names from Moscow and other Russian cities such as Volgograd and Siberia’s Novosibirsk as well as from abroad.
Once a week, Ukrainian parents bring their children to a community centre in Kyiv for canine therapy.
Beijing Xiangshan Forum, China’s biggest annual show of military diplomacy, started on Sunday, but the name of Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu, initially listed in the forum’s agenda as the first guest speaker at tomorrow’s opening ceremony, was not on the agenda.
His slated appearance was originally thought to suggest China intends to give Russia, which invaded in Ukraine in 2022, centre stage at the forum. But as of today, his name was not on the agenda, Reuters reported.
China hopes to use the forum to promote president Xi Jinping’s vision for a safer world and draw developing countries closer, as it faces increased coordination between the US and its allies to curtail its military ambitions. The US defence department has sent a delegation led by Xanthi Carras, China country director in the office of the undersecretary of defence.
This year’s forum takes place at an awkward time for China, when it is without a defence minister, whose main role is to engage with foreign militaries. On Tuesday, Beijing sacked defence minister Li Shangfu but did not name a replacement. Reuters reported last month that Li, who has been missing for two months, was being investigated for corruption.
Some European countries, including France, plan to send a small delegation from their defence ministries, according to sources familiar with the matter. Nato’s delegation will be led by Wendin Smith, its security policy director, a Nato official said.
Cash Boyle
Russian forces are believed to have suffered some of the country’s biggest casualty rates so far this year as a result of continued “heavy but inconclusive” fighting around the Donetsk oblast town of Avdiivka.
According to the UK Ministry of Defence’s intelligence update on Saturday morning, Russia has probably committed elements of up to eight brigades to the sector where it initiated a “major offensive effort” in mid-October.
Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Saturday that Russia had lost 298,420 troops since the beginning of its full-scale invasion last year, including 740 casualties in the last day. These figures have not been independently verified.
The intelligence update states that the nature of the operation in Avdiivka indicates that Russia’s “core military-political challenge remains the same as it has throughout most of the war … Political leaders demand more territory to be seized but the military cannot generate the effective operational level offensive action.”
Lisa O’Carroll
Canada is to take the lead in facilitating a global network of countries working to free kidnapped Ukrainian children from Russia or territories it occupies, the Guardian has been told.
Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska said last month that an estimated 19,000 children were forcibly removed from their homes since the war started. It is one of the topics under discussion at a two way meeting of national security advisers in Malta to progress a peace plan amid fears military and political energies will be diverted to the Middle East.
More than 60 countries, including the US, the UK and the EU are meeting at the third round of Ukrainian-backed peace talks underway this weekend in Malta following similar gatherings in Saudi Arabia in August and Denmark in June. China, which attended the meeting in Jeddah, is not participating. Notable additions this time include the Holy See, Armenia and Mexico.
They are working to develop operational details of Zelenskiy’s 10 point peace formula which seeks to end the war but also provide a framework for food and energy security, safety around the Zaparazhay nuclear plant and humanitarian needs.
The EU is discussing new routes to facilitate transit of Ukraine’s agricultural goods while the humanitarian working group, which enjoys the widest participation including from Qatar and Turkey, is discussing kidnapped children.
Pjotr Sauer
Armed with a brush and a bucket of grey paint, the Russian anti-war activist Ilya Zernov walked through Belgrade until he reached a large mural that said “Death to Ukraine” on the side of an apartment block.
As Zernov, 19, started painting over the mural, he said he was cornered by three Serbian men who ordered him to stop. “One of them pulled out a knife … He then punched me in the right ear,” Zernov, who fled his hometown of Kazan shortly after Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine, told the Observer.
The attack left him with a perforated eardrum, but Zernov said he was glad he managed to at least partly cover the mural. “As a Russian, I felt it was my responsibility to do something. The graffiti glorified violence.”
Zernov is one of the estimated 200,000 Russians to have left for Serbia since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, making the Balkan country one of the main exile destinations for those fleeing the consequences of the Kremlin’s war.
A fire broke out in early hours today at the Afipsky oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region, local emergency authorities said, after social media reports of powerful blasts.
Baza and Shot, two Russian news outlets with good security sources, said that the fire at the refinery, which lies 50 miles (80km) east of the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, one of Russia’s most important oil export gateways, was caused by a drone attack.
Earlier, Russia’s defence ministry, without providing much detail, said its air defence systems destroyed 36 Ukraine-launched drones over the Black Sea and the north-western part of the Crimean Peninsula. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
The Krasnodar region is connected to Crimea – which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014 – via the illegal, Russian-built Kerch bridge. The bridge has been closed by Ukrainian attacks several times.
Schooling will move to online starting from tomorrow in Ukraine’s central city of Vinnytsia after a Hepatitis A outbreak sent scores of children and adults to the hospital, the country’s chief sanitary official said .
“The main thing now is to establish the centre of the outbreak and the causes in order to stop the spread of the viral Hepatitis A among the population as soon as possible,” chief sanitary doctor of Ukraine Ihor Kuzin wrote on Facebook on Saturday, Reuters reports.
Kuzin, who also serves as Ukraine’s deputy health minister, said 141 people in the city and the region were in a hospital. Vinnytsia, which had a pre-war population of around 370,000, is the administrative centre of the Vinnytsia region in central Ukraine.
“So far, there is no single cause of the outbreak,” Kuzin said. “We are analysing the centers of spread and are working with the population, in particular to establish a circle of contact persons.”
Russia would confiscate European assets if frozen funds ‘stolen’ by EU
Russia would confiscate assets belonging to EU states it deems unfriendly if the bloc “steals” frozen Russian funds in a drive to fund Ukraine, a top ally of President Vladimir Putin said today.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said on Friday that the EU executive was working on a proposal to pool some of the profits derived from frozen Russian state assets to help Ukraine and its post-war reconstruction.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, the Russian lower house of parliament, said Moscow would retaliate in a way that would be more costly to the bloc if the EU moved against Russian assets, many of which are held in Belgium, Reuters reported.
“A number of European politicians, led by the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, have once again started talking about stealing our country’s frozen funds in order to continue the militarisation of Kyiv,” the close Putin ally said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.
“Such a decision would require a symmetrical response from the Russian Federation. In that case, far more assets belonging to unfriendly countries will be confiscated than our frozen funds in Europe.”
He claimed that EU politicians were considering the move “in an effort to hold on to their jobs and because of the poor financial situation to which they had led their countries.”
Von der Leyen said on Friday that the value of frozen Russian sovereign assets was €211 billion and said that the bloc had decided that Russia must pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction. The EU clearing house in Brussels, Euroclear, has reportedly earned more than €3bn this year from frozen Russian assets which it is holding due to EU sanctions.
More on that news that Putin ally and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is calling for Ukraine and Russia to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict.
Lukashenko, who provided his country’s territory as a launch pad for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said that Ukraine’s demands for Russia to quit its territory needs to be resolved at the negotiating table “so nobody dies”.
“We need to sit down at the negotiating table and come to an agreement,” Lukashenko said in a question and answer video posted on the website of the Belarusian state news agency BelTA. “As I once said: no preconditions are needed. The main thing is that the ‘stop’ command is given.”
Russian forces have kept pushing this week near the ruined Donetsk city of Avdiivka suffering heavy losses, the US White House has said, but the vast frontline in Ukraine has moved little in the past year despite Kyiv’s gruelling months-long offensive.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy reiterated yesterday at a gathering of over 60 national security advisers that his 10-point peace plan, which includes calls for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, is the only way to end the war.
Belarus leader says ‘situation is now seriously stalemate’
Russia and Ukraine are locked in a stalemate on the frontlines of their war and the two sides need to sit down and negotiate an end to the conflict, the authoritarian leader of Belarus has said.
Alexander Lukashenko, who is an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, described the current state of the conflict as “head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying”.
“There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position,” he said.
In other news:
-
A third round of Ukrainian-backed peace talks opened in Malta, but without Moscow, which condemned it. In a statement afterwards, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said 66 countries had taken part, proof that his plan “has gradually become global”. It follows similar meetings in Jeddah and Copenhagen, with the Ukrainians hoping to eventually hold a summit at the level of heads of state.
-
Russia’s forces around the Donetsk oblast town of Avdiivka have “likely suffered” some of its highest casualty rates of 2023 so far, according to the UK Ministry of Defence’s intelligence update.
-
The report follows the Ukrainian president’s claims on Friday that Russian forces lost at least a brigade’s worth of troops attempting to advance on Avdiivka.
-
The head of the office of the president of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, has praised Qatar’s role in facilitating the return of four Ukrainian children from Russian captivity earlier this month.
-
Ukraine and the Netherlands began talks on a bilateral agreement on security guarantees in Malta, Andriy Yermak also announced. It is the sixth country to start bilateral negotiations with Ukraine on security guarantees.
-
Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Mykola Tochytskyi, has pointedly accused Russia of having a history of “provoking” and “stoking” hybrid conflicts across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
-
“We warned that turning a blind eye to [Russian] violation of international peace and security would fuel conflicts in the world,” Tochytskyi said, amid the Israel-Hamas war. Volodymyr Zelenskiy has previously expressed fears that the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel could threaten military support for Ukraine.
-
Russia’s foreign ministry claimed a Ukrainian drone crashed into a nuclear waste storage facility at the Kursk nuclear power plant in western Russia, damaging its walls.
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