Russia-Ukraine war live news: Russian forces targeting Donetsk cities next, Luhansk governor warns

Russian forces will target the eastern Donetsk cities of Sloviansk and Bakhmut next, the governor of the neighbouring province of Luhansk has warned.

President Vladimir Putin claimed victory in the heavily fought-over region of Luhansk on Monday after Ukraine’s military command confirmed that its troops had been forced to pull back from the city of Lysychansk.

Luhansk governor, Serhiy Haidai, says he now expects the cities to come under heavy attack as Russia attempts to take full control of Donbas. Haidai told Reuters:

The loss of the Luhansk region is painful because it is the territory of Ukraine.

For me personally, this is special. This is the homeland where I was born and I am also the head of the region.

[Russian forces] will not transfer 100% of their troops to some front because they need to hold the line. If they leave their positions then ours can carry out some kind of counteroffensive.

Still, for them goal number one is the Donetsk region. Sloviansk and Bakhmut will come under attack – Bakhmut has already started being shelled very hard.”

On Monday, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin that “the operation” in Luhansk was complete. The Russian president said the military units “that took part in active hostilities and achieved success, victory” in Luhansk “should rest, increase their combat capabilities”.

The capture of the city of Lysychansk on Sunday completed the Russian conquest of Luhansk, one of two regions in Donbas, the industrialised eastern region of Ukraine that has become the site of the biggest battle in Europe in generations.

Bakhmut, Sloviansk and nearby Kramatorsk lie south-west of Lysychansk and are the main urban areas holding out against Russian forces in Donetsk.

The latest intelligence briefing from the UK’s Ministry of Defence said Russian forces would “almost certainly” switch to trying to capture Donetsk. The briefing said the conflict in Donbas had been “grinding and attritional” and this was unlikely to change in the coming weeks.

Hello it’s Samantha Lock back with you as we unpack all the latest news from Ukraine this morning.

Leaders from dozens of countries, international organisations and the private sector have gathered in Switzerland to draw up plans to rebuild war-ravaged Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia has said it is in control of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region after taking over Lysychansk, the last Ukrainian-controlled city in the region.

Here are all the latest lines as of 8am in Kyiv.

• Russia has declared victory in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, a day after Ukrainian forces withdrew from their last remaining stronghold in the province. On Monday, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told Putin that “the operation” in Luhansk was complete. The Russian president said the military units “that took part in active hostilities and achieved success, victory” in Luhansk “should rest, increase their combat capabilities”. Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk, said he expected the Donetsk cities of Sloviansk and Bakhmut to come under heavy attack as Russia attempts to take full control of Donbas.

• Ukraine has laid out a $750bn (£620bn) “recovery plan” for its postwar future during the Ukraine Recovery Conference hosted by Switzerland on Monday. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the common task of the entire democratic world was to map out a physical future for Ukraine in the event it survives as a western-facing nation after the Russian invasion.

• Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said a key source of funding for the recovery plan should be assets confiscated from Russian oligarchs. Ukraine’s recovery plan so far has three phases: a first focused on fixing things that matter for people’s daily lives, such as water supply, which is ongoing; a second “fast recovery” component that will be launched as soon as fighting ends, including temporary housing, hospital and school projects; and a third that aims to transform the country over the longer term.

• Ukrainian forces are set to raise the country’s flag on Snake Island, a strategic and symbolic outpost in the Black Sea that Russian troops retreated from last week after months of heavy bombardment. Ukraine’s military earlier stated that the national flag had been returned to the island shortly before 11pm on Monday. However, Natalia Humeniuk, spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern military command, later confirmed in an interview with CNN: “The flag was delivered to the island by helicopter. It will wait for the arrival of the troops, then it will wave.”

• A British citizen who has been sentenced to death by a Russian proxy court in eastern Ukraine has launched an appeal against the verdict. Aiden Aslin, 28, a British-Ukrainian former care worker from Nottinghamshire who was a Ukrainian marine, was captured by Russian forces in the besieged city of Mariupol in April.

• The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, has said alternative routes to retrieve grain stuck in Ukraine would need to be looked at, including through Europe’s Danube River, if it cannot be moved via the Bosphorus strait in Turkey. “The Turks are absolutely indispensable to solving this. They’re doing their very best … We will increasingly have to look at alternative means of moving that grain from Ukraine if we cannot use the sea route, if you can’t use the Bosphorus,” he told parliament on Monday.

• Turkey has halted a Russian-flagged cargo ship off its Black Sea coast and is investigating a Ukrainian claim that it was carrying stolen grain, a senior Turkish official said on Monday.

• Ukraine is holding talks with Turkey and the United Nations to secure guarantees for grain exports from Ukrainian ports, Zelenskiy said. “Talks are in fact going on now with Turkey and the UN [and] our representatives who are responsible for the security of the grain that leaves our ports,” Ukraine’s president told a news conference alongside the Swedish prime minister, Magdalena Andersson.

• Ukraine has renewed its invitation for Pope Francis to visit the country and urged the pontiff to continue praying for the Ukrainian people, a foreign ministry spokesperson said.

• Western envoys in China have criticised Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, with the US ambassador saying China should not spread Russian “propaganda”, during an unusual public forum in a country that has declined to condemn Moscow’s attack.

• Russian missiles hit a secondary school in the Kharkiv district at 4am on Monday, according to a report from Oleh Synyehubov, governor of the region.

• The self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic has claimed that in the last 24 hours Ukrainian forces have shelled 15 of the 240 settlements they say they control. They claim that “five people were killed and another 20 civilians were injured”.

• Britain is proposing a new law that will require social media companies to proactively tackle disinformation posted by foreign states such as Russia. The law would tackle fake accounts on platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Twitter that were set up on behalf of foreign states to influence elections or court proceedings, the government said in an announcement on Monday.