Key events
Opening summary
Welcome back to our live coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This is Adam Fulton and here’s a roundup of the latest developments.
Air raid alerts were in effect throughout Ukraine early on Friday, the military said, while warnings of Russian missile and drone attacks were issued over wide areas.
Telegram channels reported explosions in several regions, from Lviv in the west, far from the frontlines, to Kherson in the south, Reuters reports. There no immediate reports of strikes or casualties.
Meanwhile, Russia launched air attacks on the Viysk airfield near the Khmelnitskyi region overnight, said the acting governor, Serhiy Tyurin.
More on that story shortly. In other news:
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The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, has called out Russia for killing 136 children in Ukraine in 2022 and added its armed forces to a global list of offenders, according to a report to the UN security council. The UN also verified that Russian armed forces and affiliated groups injured 518 children and carried out 480 attacks on schools and hospitals. The forces used 91 children as human shields, according to the report. Guterres was “particularly shocked” by the high number of child casualties, he said in the report, while also saying he was disturbed by the high number of offences against children by Ukrainian forces.
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Russia has formed special groups to collect and hide bodies of people killed in the aftermath of Kakhovka dam breach in southern Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. The Ukrainian president said in a video address on Thursday that the situation in Russian-occupied parts of the region was “catastrophic to put it mildly”.
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Ukraine’s prime minister has said its counteroffensive will take time but he is optimistic about its success. Denys Shmyhal’s comments, on the sidelines of a Ukraine reconstruction conference in London on Thursday, came after Zelenskiy said the counteroffensive might be going “slower than desired” but he would not needlessly risk soldiers’ lives to meet international expectations. Moscow had suggested there appeared to have been a break in the counteroffensive’s intensity.
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Foreign donors pledged €60bn of new financial support for Ukraine, the UK said, as the international conference in London aimed at funding the country’s reconstruction closed. The commitments from governments and international organisations targeted supporting Ukraine in the short- and medium-term, the British foreign minister, James Cleverly, said on Thursday.
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Russia fired cruise and ballistic missiles and strike drones at targets in Ukraine early on Thursday, causing damage in the cities of Odesa and Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian officials said.
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Russian-backed officials in southern Ukraine have accused Kyiv of using British-supplied long-range missiles to strike a bridge connecting Kherson province with the Crimean peninsula. A series of photos and videos circulating on Telegram on Thursday showed a large crater on the bridge, and debris littering the roads. There were no casualties reported.
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Ukraine and Moldova have made good progress on their journey to becoming members of the EU, a European commissioner has said. The EC reportedly made clear that Ukraine had a way to go to complete the seven steps the EU outlined last year when it granted Kyiv the status of a candidate for membership.
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Russia is 99.9% certain to quit a UN-brokered deal on the safe wartime passage of Black Sea grain in July as it no longer needs Ukrainian ports to export ammonia, a senior Ukrainian diplomat has said.
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy reportedly said Ukrainian spies believed Russia was plotting an incident to release radiation from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, an allegation denied by the Kremlin.
