Russia-Ukraine war live: intense artillery bombardment forcing ‘orderly withdrawals’ by Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut, says UK | Ukraine

China’s foreign minister on Friday said the country would not sell weapons to parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine and would regulate the export of items with dual civilian and military use.

Qin Gang was responding to concerns from the US and others that China was considering providing military assistance to Russia, which Beijing has backed politically and rhetorically in the conflict while formally saying it remains neutral.

Speaking at a news conference with his visiting German counterpart Annalena Baerbock, Qin reiterated China’s willingness to help facilitate negotiations to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict and said all parties should remain “objective and calm.”

“Regarding the export of military items, China adopts a prudent and responsible attitude,” Associated Press reports Qin said.

“China will not provide weapons to relevant parties of the conflict, and manage and control the exports of dual-use items in accordance with laws and regulations,” he added.

In her remarks, Baerbock said that as a permanent member of the UN security council, China bore a special responsibility for helping end the conflict.

While Germany has strongly backed Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, Beijing has blamed the US and Nato for provoking the conflict, refused to criticise Moscow’s actions and criticised economic sanctions against President Vladimir Putin’s government.

“Territory is indivisible, and security is equally indivisible,” Qin said. “Without recognition of the security interests of a particular party, crises and conflicts are inevitable.”

“China is willing to continue to work for peace, and hopes that all parties involved in the crisis will remain objective and calm, and make constructive efforts to resolve the crisis through negotiations,” he added.

Ukraine has banned its national sports teams from competing in Olympic, non-Olympic and Paralympic events that include competitors from Russia and Belarus, the sports ministry said in a decree published on Friday.

Reuters reports the decision, which has been criticised by some Ukrainian athletes, comes after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) angered Kyiv by paving the way for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, initially using its ally Belarus as a staging ground for troops driving towards Kyiv in what Russia called a “special military operation”.

Ukraine had previously warned its sports federations that it would strip them of their status as governing bodies if their athletes competed on the international stage with Russians and Belarusians.

The decree published on the sports ministry’s website overnight was signed by deputy sports minister Matviy Bidnyi.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has claimed in its daily intelligence briefing that Ukrainian troops have been forced to make ‘orderly withdrawals’ from positions they previously held in the highly contested town of Bakhmut, and that the last two days have seen an intense artillery bombardment from Russian forces.

Writing on Twitter, the ministry posted:

Russia has re-energised its assault on the Donetsk oblast town of Bakhmut as forces of the Russian ministry and Wagner group have improved cooperation.

The Ukrainian defence still holds the western districts of the town but has been subjected to particularly intense Russian artillery fire over the previous 48 hours.

Wagner assault groups continue to conduct the main advance through the centre of town, while Russian airborne forces have relieved some Wagner units securing the northern and southern flanks of the operation.

Ukrainian forces face significant resupply issues but have made orderly withdrawals from the positions they have been forced to concede.

The claims have not been independently verified.

The small agricultural town of Dighton, Massachusetts, seems an unlikely place to have any impact on Ukrainian battlefield tactics or spread diplomatic fallout halfway around the globe.

But it was from here, an hour south of Boston, that 21-year-old air national guardsman Jack Teixeira is suspected of posting intelligence documents meant for the highest levels of the Pentagon to a Discord gamers chatgroup called Thug Shaker Central.

“It’s like God’s country out here,” said farmer Cam Levesque, 26, standing beside a pickup truck at the gas station. “We shoot guns, ride dirt bikes. Nobody says anything so long as you’re respectful about it. Everyone does what they want to do.”

Late Thursday, roads to the home Teixeira shared with his mother, Dawn, a floral business owner, were still blocked off. Neighbors said that Teixeira, who was arrested on a spring day and led away in handcuffs wearing red shorts and a green T-shirt, appeared to them quiet and polite.

On Friday, Teixeira will appear in a US federal court in Boston. The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said Teixeira would be charged with the unauthorized removal of classified national defense information.

“Nice people – this is a shame,” said neighbor Mario Correia, adding that if convicted he might now face time in “Leavenworth”, America’s most famous military prison in Kansas:

The European Union on Thursday added Russia’s Wagner mercenary group to its sanctions list for “actively participating in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine”.

Wagner, which is leading Russian battles to try to capture the Ukrainian towns of Bakhmut and Soledar, had already been placed in February on another EU sanctions list for violating human rights and “destabilising” countries in Africa.

The European Council, representing the 27 EU member states, said the new sanctions listing “completes” the previous one.

Wagner, it said, was added anew to the list “for actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine”.

That Wagner is twice-listed “underscores the international dimension and gravity of the group’s activities, as well as its destabilising impact on the countries where it is active,” the council said in a statement.

The US Department of Justice arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, a suspect in the recent leaks of Pentagon intelligence online, US attorney general Merrick Garland announced on Thursday. The arrest was made “in connection with an investigation into an alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information,” said Garland.

Teixeira will appear in court in Massachusetts on Friday after being detained at his home in the town of North Dighton, Massachusetts, by FBI agents. Helicopter news footage showed a young man with shorn dark hair, an olive green T-shirt and red shorts being made to walk backwards towards a team of agents, who were pointing their rifles at him.

Pentagon spokesperson Patrick Ryder said the leak of classified information was a “deliberate, criminal act.” He added that the Pentagon had taken measures to review distribution lists and make sure that individuals who receive information had a need to know.

The leak is believed to have started on a site called Discord, a social media platform popular with people playing online games and where Teixeira is believed to have posted for years about guns, games and racist memes.

The investigative website Bellingcat and The New York Times first publicly identified Teixeira, minutes before federal officials confirmed he was a subject of interest in the investigation. They reported tracking profiles on other more obscure sites linked to Teixeira.

Teixeira was a “cyber transport systems specialist”, essentially an IT specialist responsible for military communications networks, including their cabling and hubs. A defence official has told the Associated Press that in that role Teixeira would have had a higher level of security clearance – because he would have also been tasked with ensuring protection for the networks.

Welcome back to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest.

Our top stories this morning:

The European Union has added Russia’s Wagner group to its sanctions list for “actively participating in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine”. The mercenary group had already been placed on another EU sanctions list in February for violating human rights and “destabilising” countries in Africa.

And the 21-year-old air national guardsman arrested by the FBI in Massachusetts suspected of being responsible for the leak of US classified defence documents will appear in court on Friday.

More shortly. In the meantime here are the other key recent developments:

• UN nuclear chief Rafael Grossi warned on Thursday that “we are living on borrowed time” after two recent landmine explosions near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly expressed fears over the safety of the plant, which is Europe’s largest atomic power station.

• Ukraine’s armed forces have said Russian troops are attempting to surround the embattled city of Bakhmut from the north and the south. “Every day in Bakhmut area, the enemy makes 40 to 50 offensive and assault attempts, launches more than 500 strikes using the entire range of available weapons,” said Brig Gen Oleksiy Hromov, deputy chief of the Ukrainian armed forces general staff’s main operational department.

• Russia’s defence ministry claimed its troops had already surrounded Bakhmut, but Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, said it was “too early” to say. Prigozhin, whose forces have spearheaded much of the fighting for the embattled city, was responding to a statement by the Russian defence ministry that said Moscow’s forces were “blocking” Ukrainian forces from getting in or out of Bakhmut.

• Fragmentation of the global economy into rival trading blocs runs the risk of prompting a new cold war, the head of the International Monetary Fund has said. Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s managing director, said a combination of the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and shortcomings with globalisation had led to a potentially dangerous splintering.

• Serbia never sold weapons or ammunition to Ukraine or Russia, president Aleksandar Vučić has insisted, following a leaked secret Pentagon report that said Serbia had pledged to send arms to Kyiv or had sent them already. Vučić said he was “quite certain” that Serbian ammunition would appear “on one side or the other in the battlefield” in Ukraine, after having been exported to Turkey, Spain or the Czech Republic.

• Russia’s prosecutor general said it had opened an investigation into a video showing Russian soldiers apparently beheading a Ukrainian prisoner of war lying on the ground. It comes a day after president Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged international leaders to act, saying the world could not ignore the “evil” footage, which circulated on Telegram, Twitter and other social media channels, causing revulsion among Ukrainians.

• Norway will expel 15 Russian embassy officials who it said were intelligence officers operating under the cover of diplomatic positions.

• Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, is grappling with a mystery ailment in jail that could be some sort of slow-acting poison, and has lost 8kg in weight in just over two weeks, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh has said. “We do not exclude that at this very time Alexei Navalny is being slowly poisoned, being killed slowly so that it attracts less attention,” Yarmysh said in a post on Twitter. “He is being held in a punishment cell with acute pain without medical help,” she said.

• Ukraine’s state-owned gas company Naftogaz on Thursday said Russia has been ordered by an arbitration court in The Hague to pay $5bn (£4bn / €4.5bn) in compensation for unlawfully expropriating its assets in Crimea, which the Russian Federation claimed to annex in 2014.

• All Ukrainian cities and Crimea must be part of Ukraine again and a real peace will come by restoring the country’s borders, foreign minister Dmitro Kuleba has said on Thursday. “There is no difference between…any Ukrainian city, they all must and will be Ukraine again,” he said, speaking via a video link at a Black Sea security conference in Bucharest.

• The UK’s Ministry of Defence has awarded £650m to manufacturers working on its Tempest fighter jet, in the latest sign that the UK is pushing forward with the aim of producing the aircraft by 2035. The Tempest programme is seen as a key part of the UK’s plans for defence spending and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put pressure on the government to increaseits investment.

• ExxonMobil handed its chief executive a 52% pay increase to $35.9m (£28.7m) for 2022 after the oil company reported its highest ever profits amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Darren Woods’ salary rose by 10% to $1.9m last year while his bonus and share awards surged by 80% compared with the year before.