US defence secretary ‘very encouraged’ by Ukrainian capture of Lyman
The US defence secretary has welcomed the capture by Ukrainian forces of Lyman, a key Russian stronghold in eastern Ukraine.
Lloyd Austin told a news conference on Saturday:
We’re very encouraged by what we’re seeing right now.
Reuters reports Austin noted that Lyman was positioned across supply lines that Russia has used to push its troops and material down to the south and to the west.
Without those routes, it will be more difficult. So it presents a sort of a dilemma for the Russians going forward
Austin did not say whether he thought Ukraine’s capture of Lyman – in the Donetsk region – might prompt Russian escalation, although US officials have widely denounced Russia’s nuclear rhetoric in recent days and President Joe Biden has publicly urged Putin not to use nuclear weapons.
Key events
From an elegant mansion in Kyiv’s government quarter, Tamila Tasheva is planning what the Ukrainian takeover of Crimea might look like.
Tasheva, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s top representative for Crimea, and her team spend their days discussing issues such as how many Ukrainian teachers or police should be sent to the peninsula if Kyiv regains control, and what else would be required to help reverse eight years of Russian rule.
No serious military analyst is suggesting that Ukraine is close to being in a position to regain Crimea, but the idea feels much less fanciful than it did a year ago.
Shaun Walker in Kyiv has the full story:
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has pledged that within a week more areas will follow the capture of Lyman by Ukrainian forces.
Agence France-Presse reports that the retaking of Lyman, which Moscow’s forces had pummelled for weeks to control, would mark the first Ukrainian military victory in territory that the Kremlin has claimed as its own and has vowed to defend by all possible means.
Ukraine’s defence ministry announced its forces were “entering” Lyman in the eastern Donetsk region after the army said it had “encircled” several thousand Russian troops near the town. The ministry posted a video of soldiers holding up a Ukrainian flag near a sign with the town’s name.
Zelenskiy said in his evening video address:
Throughout this week, more Ukrainian flags have been raised in the Donbas. There will be even more in a week.
Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of killing 24 civilians, including 13 children, in an attack on a road convoy near a recently recaptured town in Kharkiv.
Ukrainian troops on Friday had shown Agence France-Presse reporters a group of vehicles riddled with bullet holes and several corpses in civilian clothes, a short distance east of the recently recaptured town of Kupiansk.
A Ukrainian official said on Sunday that the death toll of a Russian attack on a separate civilian convoy near the city of Zaporizhzhia on Friday had risen to 30 civilians and one police officer killed, the news agency reported.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based thinktank, has said the Russian military in its current state was almost certainly unable to operate on a nuclear battlefield, even though it has historically trained its units to do so.
“The chaotic agglomeration of exhausted contract soldiers, hastily mobilised reservists, conscripts and mercenaries that currently comprise the Russian ground forces could not function in a nuclear environment,” Reuters reported ISW analysts as saying.
Any areas affected by Russian tactical nuclear weapons would thus be impassable for the Russians, likely precluding Russian advances.
Ukraine’s battlefield successes have infuriated Putin allies such as Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Russia’s southern Chechnya region, who said he believed “more drastic measures” should be taken by Moscow, including “the use of low-yield nuclear weapons”.
Other top officials, including former president Dmitry Medvedev, have suggested Russia may need to resort to nuclear weapons, but Kadyrov’s call was the most explicit.
US defence secretary ‘very encouraged’ by Ukrainian capture of Lyman
The US defence secretary has welcomed the capture by Ukrainian forces of Lyman, a key Russian stronghold in eastern Ukraine.
Lloyd Austin told a news conference on Saturday:
We’re very encouraged by what we’re seeing right now.
Reuters reports Austin noted that Lyman was positioned across supply lines that Russia has used to push its troops and material down to the south and to the west.
Without those routes, it will be more difficult. So it presents a sort of a dilemma for the Russians going forward
Austin did not say whether he thought Ukraine’s capture of Lyman – in the Donetsk region – might prompt Russian escalation, although US officials have widely denounced Russia’s nuclear rhetoric in recent days and President Joe Biden has publicly urged Putin not to use nuclear weapons.
Summary
Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s continuing coverage of the war in Ukraine. As it approaches 9.15am in Kyiv, here’s a rundown on the latest news and overnight developments.
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Russia suffered a humiliating military defeat on Saturday when Ukrainian troops liberated the key eastern city of Lyman, with videos showing them raising a national flag and performing a victory dance. Russia’s ministry of defence admitted its soldiers had retreated. They had been “withdrawn to more advantageous lines”, the ministry said, after their encirclement by Ukrainian forces. The defeat is an embarrassment for Vladimir Putin, who declared on Friday that the city – in the Donetsk region – was Russia’s “for ever”.
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Germany’s defence minister, Christine Lambrecht, made a surprise visit to Ukraine – her first since Russia’s invasion in February – as Kyiv urged Berlin to send it battle tanks. Lambrecht visited the southern port city of Odesa on Saturday and met her Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksii Reznikov, the German defence ministry said.
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The Nord Stream 2 pipeline is no longer leaking under the Baltic Sea because an equilibrium has been reached between the gas and water pressure, pipeline spokesman Ulrich Lissek told AFP. The British prime minster, Liz Truss, has said the series of explosions that severely damaged Russia’s gas pipelines were an act of sabotage.
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Belarus is preparing to receive Russian soldiers and equipment, the Kyiv Independent reports. There are about 1,000 Russian soldiers in the country.
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Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada said her country held Russia to account for violating Ukraine’s sovereign airspace by bombing airports, which goes against the 1944 agreement setting out core principles for global aviation. Yuliya Kovaliv told Reuters it was important that all members of the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) addressed “such a drastic breach of the Chicago convention”.
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Russia failed to win enough votes for re-election to the ICAO’s governing council. The French representative told the assembly after Saturday’s ballot: “When we have votes in our countries, if we don’t like the result, we don’t ask for another vote.” Russia had a place on the UN aviation agency’s 36-member council as one of the “states of chief importance in air transport”.
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The head of Russia’s region of Chechnya said Moscow should consider using a low-yield nuclear weapon in Ukraine after its battlefield defeat in Lyman. Ramzan Kadyrov said in a message on Telegram addressing Russia’s loss of its stronghold: “In my personal opinion, more drastic measures should be taken, right up to the declaration of martial law in the border areas and the use of low-yield nuclear weapons.”
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A superyacht built for an oligarch under sanctions is being discreetly offered for sale for £26m ($29m), with buyers advised that any viewings will be in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Brokers are being warned that the sale of MySky, built for Igor Kesaev – sanctioned over the supply of weapons to the Russian army – should not be advertised online.
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Russia has accused the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, of violating the game’s principles by suggesting that Russian athletes might be allowed to return to competition provided they did not support the invasion of Ukraine. Bach told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera: “This war has not been started by the Russian athletes.”
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Russian authorities informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that the head of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was “temporarily detained” for questioning. Ihor Murashov was detained on his way from the Russian-occupied plant – Europe’s largest – to the town of Enerhodar at about 4pm on Friday. Russia is trying to transfer the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Russian energy firm Rosatom, the head of Ukraine’s atomic energy company, Petro Kotin, has told the BBC.
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Kharkiv oblast’s governor said Ukrainian authorities found the bodies of at least 20 people in a civilian convoy near the city of Kupiansk. Oleh Syniehubov believed they were killed while they attempted to flee Russian soldiers, according to the Kyiv Independent.
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Turkey, which has been at the centre of mediation between the west and Russia, rejected Russia’s annexations in Ukraine, calling the Kremlin’s move on four regions a “grave violation” of international law.