Russia-Ukraine war live: war crimes dominate agenda at UN in Geneva; US warns China against arming Russia | Ukraine

Belarus’s exiled opposition has claimed partisans destroyed a Russian A-50 surveillance military aircraft in a drone attack at an airstrip near the capital Minsk on Sunday.

Franak Viacorka, a close adviser of opposition figurehead Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, tweeted:

Partisans … confirmed a successful special operation to blow up a rare Russian plane at the airfield in Machulishchy near Minsk.

This is the most successful diversion since the beginning of 2022.”

The two Belarusians who carried out the operation had used drones, he said, adding that they had already left the country and were safe.

Reuters reported Aliaksandr Azarov, leader of Belarusian anti-government organisation BYPOL, as saying on the organisation’s Telegram messaging app and on the Poland-based Belsat news channel:

Those were drones. The participants of the operation are Belarusian … They are now safe, outside the country.”

The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the reports.

Front and central parts of the aircraft as well as the radar antenna were damaged as a result of two explosions in the attack at the Machulishchy air base near Minsk, BYPOL reported.

The Beriev A-50 aircraft, which has the Nato reporting name of Mainstay, is a Russian airborne early warning aircraft, with airborne command and control capabilities, and the ability to track up to 60 targets at a time, according to Reuters.

The UN human rights council is set to meet today in a united call to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and extend its investigation into war crimes in the conflict.

Days after the United Nations general assembly in New York voted overwhelmingly to demand Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine, the war is expected to dominate the opening of the top UN rights body’s main annual session in Geneva.

We’re looking for this session to show, as the UN general assembly showed … that the world stands side-by-side with Ukraine,” British ambassador Simon Manley said at an event Friday marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The meeting, which is due to last a record six weeks, will be the first presided over by new UN rights chief Volker Turk, who kicks the session off early Monday.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, will also address the council on the first day, while nearly 150 ministers and heads of state and government will speak, virtually or in person, during the four-day high-level segment.

Among them will be the top diplomats of the US, China, Ukraine and Iran.

Moscow will send deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov to address the council in person on Thursday.

One key resolution will be on extending a high-level investigation into crimes committed in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The so-called Commission of Inquiry, which has already determined that Russia is committing war crimes on a “massive scale” in Ukraine, is due to present a comprehensive report to the council in late March.

The commission must “continue its important work, which is of paramount importance for the principles of accountability and justice”, Yevheniia Filipenko, permanent representative of Ukraine to the United Nations office in Geneva, told reporters on Friday.

Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine. I’m Samantha Lock and I’ll be bringing you all the latest developments as they unfold.

The UN human rights council is set to meet today in Geneva in a united call to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and extend a probe into war crimes in the conflict.

Days after the United Nations general assembly in New York voted overwhelmingly to demand Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine, the war is expected to dominate the opening of the top UN rights body’s main annual session.

US officials have also warned China against providing lethal aid to support Russia’s war on Ukraine. CIA director William Burns said he is “confident” that Beijing is considering providing the equipment to Moscow’s forces but a final decision has not been made yet and there has been no evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment.

It’s 7.30am in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:

• The US is “confident” that China is considering providing lethal equipment to support Russia in Ukraine, according to the CIA director, William Burns. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Burns said he was “confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment” but noted “we also don’t see that a final decision has been made yet, and we don’t see evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment”. The US has made clear behind closed doors that such a move would have serious consequences. The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union programme: “Beijing will have to make its own decisions about how it proceeds, whether it provides military assistance, but if it goes down that road, it will come at real costs to China.”

• Vladimir Putin has accused the west of seeking to “dismember” Russia and to turn the vast country into a series of weak mini-states. In an interview with the state TV channel Rossiya on Sunday, the Russian president claimed the US and its Nato allies wanted to “inflict a strategic defeat on us”. The aim, he said, was to “make our people suffer”.

• Putin has claimed Russia had no choice but to take into account the nuclear capabilities of Nato as the US-led military alliance was seeking the defeat of Russia. “In today’s conditions, when all the leading Nato countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin told Rossiya 1 state television, according to Tass. “They tried to reshape the world exclusively on their terms. We had no choice but to react,” he said, adding that the west was complicit in Ukraine’s “crimes”.

• Ukraine’s military has dismissed claims by Russia’s Wagner mercenary group that it had captured Yahidne, a village on Bakhmut’s northern outskirts. It said intense fighting was going on across the whole frontline. On Saturday the founder of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said his forces had taken Yahidne and the nearby village of Berkhivka. The latest Ukrainian update cited “unsuccessful” Russian offensives in the two settlements and four others. All were subject to heavy shelling, it said.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy fired a senior military commander in charge of fighting Russian troops in Ukraine’s east. The Ukrainian president dismissed Eduard Moskalyov as commander of the joint forces of Ukraine, which are engaged in battles in the Donbas region, but gave no reason for the move on Sunday.

• Belarus’s exiled opposition has claimed partisans destroyed a Russian plane at an airstrip near the capital Minsk on Sunday. “Partisans … confirmed a successful special operation to blow up a rare Russian plane at the airfield in Machulishchy near Minsk,” tweeted Franak Viacorka, a close adviser of opposition figurehead Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. “This is the most successful diversion since the beginning of 2022.” The two Belarusians who carried out the operation had used drones, he said, adding that they had already left the country and were safe. The Guardian has not been able to independently verify the reports.

• Joe Biden has said the prospect of China negotiating peace between Ukraine and Russia is “just not rational”. Speaking on ABC News about China’s peace plan, the US president said: “I’ve seen nothing [that] would indicate there’s something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia. The idea that China is gonna be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational.”

• The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said he expected the contracts for the backfilling of howitzers that Berlin rushed to Ukraine last year to be signed by the end of March – months earlier than originally planned – “if everything works out”. Talking to German public broadcaster ARD on Sunday, he did not specify the number of weapons to be reordered. Pistorius also said it was up to Kyiv to decide when, and under what conditions, to enter talks with Moscow. He suggested the same was true for any decision on recapturing the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

• Washington is reportedly in talks with Berlin and Warsaw to hold joint military manoeuvres in Poland in response to Russia’s threat to the eastern border of the Nato alliance. Exercises were being “considered”, Pistorius told Germany’s ARD, without confirming or adding any details “for now”. He said military manoeuvres in a country bordering Ukraine – invaded one year ago by Russia – would send a “very clear” signal to Nato allies “but also to Putin”.