Putin’s nuclear war threats ‘unacceptable’ say quad ministers
Foreign ministers of the so-called Quad group denounced Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war as unacceptable, according to a statement issued after a meeting on Friday.
The ministers also said they opposed any unilateral actions to increase tensions in the South China Sea, and expressed concerns about the “militarisation” of disputed territories, in a thinly veiled reference to China.
The Quad groups India, Australia, Japan and the United States.
Key events
Reuters reports that Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary force, said in a video published on Friday that the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut was “practically surrounded” by Russian forces and that Kyiv’s forces had access to only one road out.
Prigozhin in the video called on Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy to withdraw his forces from the city which Russia has been trying to capture without success for months.
Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, offers this summary of news from the past 24 hours on its official Telegram channel:
In Zaporizhzhia, the rubble of a five-story building, which was hit by a Russian rocket the previous night, continues to be dismantled. The number of dead has increased to five, 10 people are considered missing.
In the last day, Russian troops fired more than 360 projectiles in the Kherson region: residential buildings were damaged, one person died, 17 were injured.
In Donbas, the Russian army continues to fire on populated areas along the entire frontline. On 2 March, as a result of shelling in the Donetsk region, two people were killed and five were injured.
The claims have not been independently verified.
Switzerland’s defence ministry on Friday said it had received a request from its German counterparts to allow Rheinmetall AG to acquire some of Switzerland’s mothballed Leopard 2 tanks.
The request said the tanks would not be sent to Ukraine, but would be used to backfill gaps created by the handover of Leopard 2s by Germany and Nato and EU allies, a ministry spokesperson told Reuters.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that Russia “will not let the west blow up gas pipelines again” and said that Moscow would no longer rely on the west as an energy partner.
Reuters reports Lavrov was speaking at an event in India a day after attending a meeting of G20 foreign ministers.
Russia has claimed that western forces were behind the undersea explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipes last September, and has repeatedly insisted it should be included in any investigations of the incident.
The Russian state-owned RIA Novosti news agency reports on its Telegram channel that Mikhail Abdalkin, a member of the Samara regional Duma, has been charged with “discrediting the Russian armed forces” and will go on trial on 7 March.
Abdalkin posted a photograph of himself on Telegram on 21 February listening to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state address with what appeared to be noodles draped over his ears. He has already been publicly censured by the regional Duma.
In the last few minutes air alerts have been declared again across much of Ukraine.
Peter Beaumont
Iryna Viktorivna is serving up free hot food to her neighbours from a trestle table set up in a snowy street in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk, ladling porridge and meatballs and cabbage salad.
The sound of artillery bounces across the shallow bowl in which the city stands, four or five shells a minute – sometimes more – fired by both Ukrainian and Russian gun crews.
Mostly the shells land far away, but sometimes they fall on the city. A little earlier, one killed a 63-year-old man and damaged a nursery and fire station.
In the queue waiting to be served is 60-year-old Natalia Ivanivna, wrapped up in a winter coat and scarf and carrying a stick.
Ivanivna says she could have been relocated earlier that day but has chosen to stay because she worries about her house being looted. She tells of her concern about the cities further to the south along the eastern front, Bakhmut and Vuhledar and others, that have already been reduced to rubble over months of fighting. “It could happen here,” she says.
Viktorivna interrupts to chide her: “Don’t be pessimistic!”
As both women know, the tides of war have twice washed over Kupiansk already. Now it is threatened by a third inundation:
The Group of 20 is no longer an economic forum and has become a platform to discuss geopolitical issues, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said on Friday, according to Reuters.
His comments were prompted by the Russia-Ukraine war dominating two recent meetings of G20 foreign and finance ministers in India, the current president of the bloc.
Neither Washington nor Berlin says they have seen evidence of Beijing’s providing weapons to Moscow, but US officials say they are monitoring the situation closely.
Germany, which has typically taken a much less hawkish stance on China, its top trading partner, than the United States, has suggested China could play a role in bringing about peace – a prospect many China observers view with skepticism.
A second senior US official downplayed suggestions of big strains between Washington and Berlin.
“The relationship is in a rock-solid place,” the official said. “Tomorrow’s meeting will largely focus on what we are doing together next to support Ukraine – a sign of the good footing the relationship continues to be on.”
A major topic of today’s meeting between Scholz and Biden will be the push to deliver fresh western support to Ukrainian forces, which are bracing for new Russian offensive in coming weeks, officials said. Washington is due to announce a new $400m military aid package for the Kyiv government on the day of Scholz’s visit, officials said.
His first trip to Washington since just before the invasion comes days after Biden’s security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told ABC that Biden overrode his military’s advice and agreed to send Abrams tanks to Ukraine because Scholz made it a pre-condition for sending German Leopards. Berlin says Biden came to see it was necessary and the decision was consensual.
The German leader arrives as United States is sounding out close allies about the possibility of imposing sanctions on China if Beijing provides military support to Russia for its war in Ukraine, according to four US officials and other sources.
Biden and Scholz to meet at White House
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will hold confidential talks on Friday in Washington with the US president, Joe Biden, about the war in Ukraine amid growing concerns that China may provide weapons to Russia.
Scholz set off on the one-day trip, which unusually will not include a press delegation, late on Thursday.
Biden and Scholz will meet for an hour at the White House, including a significant “one-on-one component,” a senior US official said, giving the two men a chance to “exchange notes” on their respective recent meetings with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the state of the war.
“Both of the leaders wanted this to be a working-level meeting, wanted it to be very much a get down into the weeds, focused on the issues of Ukraine,” the official said.
Putin’s nuclear war threats ‘unacceptable’ say quad ministers
Foreign ministers of the so-called Quad group denounced Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war as unacceptable, according to a statement issued after a meeting on Friday.
The ministers also said they opposed any unilateral actions to increase tensions in the South China Sea, and expressed concerns about the “militarisation” of disputed territories, in a thinly veiled reference to China.
The Quad groups India, Australia, Japan and the United States.
Welcome and summary
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next few hours.
Our top stories this morning: foreign ministers of the so-called Quad group denounced Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war as unacceptable, according to a statement issued after a meeting on Friday.
And German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will hold confidential talks on Friday in Washington with US President Joe Biden about the war in Ukraine amid growing concerns that China may provide weapons to Russia as its invasion of Ukraine grinds into a second year.
More on these stories soon. Here are the other key recent developments:
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Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner group, has published a video that he said showed his fighters in the key eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In a post on Telegram, uniformed men are seen lifting a Wagner banner on top of a heavily damaged building. The video has been geolocated to the east of Bakhmut, about 1.2 miles from the city centre, where Wagner fighters have been for a while.
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Joe Biden, the US president, and Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, will focus their discussions on Friday on war aid for Ukraine and may also touch on concerns that China may provide lethal aid to Russia, a senior US administration official has said.
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Scholz has 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.
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The US will announce a new military aid package for Ukraine on Friday, worth roughly $400m and comprised mainly of ammunition, two officials and a person familiar with the package have told Reuters.
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The US is hosting war planning exercises in Germany for Ukrainian military officers to help them think through battlefield decisions in the next phase of the conflict, officials have said.
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A meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations in New Delhi has ended with no consensus on the war in Ukraine. Most G20 members strongly condemned the Ukraine war, with Russia and China disagreeing, said the G20 president, India.
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The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke for less than 10 minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting in New Delhi, according to a US state department official. Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine’s defence for as long as it took, the official said, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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Blinken said he told Lavrov that Washington would push for the war in Ukraine to end through diplomatic terms that Kyiv agreed to. Blinken said he had also urged Moscow to reconsider its “irresponsible decision” and return to participation in the New Start nuclear treaty, and that he had also urged Russia to release the detained US citizen Paul Whelan.
