Russia-Ukraine war live: Russian assault on towns near Donetsk becoming more concerted, says UK

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said it rejects “defamatory statements” by Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, who accused the committee of being a “promoter of war, murder and destruction” after the committee said it would consider ways for Russian athletes to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics.

The IOC was offering Russia “a platform to promote genocide & encourages their further killings”, Podolyak posted to Twitter on Monday.

His remarks came after the IOC said it was continuing to work on a pathway which would enable Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals, a move that has been criticised by the British government.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said allowing Russia to compete at the 2024 Paris Games was tantamount to showing that “terror is somehow acceptable”, adding:

As if you could shut your eyes to what Russia is doing in Kherson, Kharkiv, Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

Responding to Podolyak’s tweet, an IOC spokesperson said:

The IOC rejects in the strongest possible terms this and other defamatory statements. They cannot serve as a basis for any constructive discussion.

The Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg and Japanese premier Fumio Kishida pledged on Tuesday to strengthen ties, saying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its growing military cooperation with China had created the most tense security environment since the second world war.

The comments came in a statement issued during Stoltenberg’s trip to Japan after a visit to South Korea on which he urged Seoul to increase military support to Ukraine and gave similar warnings about rising tension with China.

“The world is at a historical inflection point in the most severe and complex security environment since the end of the second world war,” the two leaders said in the statement.

It also raised concerns about Russia’s nuclear threats, joint military drills between Russia and China near Japan, and North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons.

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Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg (centre L) meets Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida (centre R). Photograph: Takashi Aoyama/Getty Images

Stoltenberg told reporters a Russian victory in Ukraine would embolden China at a time when it was building up its military, “bullying its neighbours and threatening Taiwan”.

Reuters reports he added: “This war is not just a European crisis, but the challenge to the world order.”

Russian forces are preparing for a renewed attack on Ukraine imminently, with the most likely course of action being an offensive in the coming months, according to analysts.

Citing western, Ukrainian and Russian sources, the US thinktank the Institute for the Study of War writes that Moscow is “preparing for an imminent offensive”.

In its latest update posted last night, it points to remarks by the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, who said there were “no signs” that Vladimir Putin was “preparing for peace”.

Speaking in South Korea on Monday, Stoltenberg said:

We see the opposite. We see that [the Russians] are preparing for more war, that they are mobilising more soldiers, more than 200,000, and potentially even more than that. That they are actively acquiring new weapons, more ammunition, ramping up their own production, but also acquiring more weapons from other authoritarian states like Iran and North Korea.

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The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in Seoul on Monday. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

The ISW also notes that a Ukrainian military chief, Ivan Tymochko, stated that Russian forces were strengthening their grouping in Donbas as part of an anticipated offensive. It also cited him as saying that Russian forces would need to launch an offensive due to increasing domestic pressure for victory.

The update continues:

Stoltenberg’s and Tymochko’s statements support ISW’s previous forecast that Russian forces are setting conditions to launch an offensive effort, likely in Luhansk oblast, in the coming months.

Hello everyone. It’s Léonie Chao-Fong here again, taking over the live blog from Martin Belam to bring you the latest from the Russia-Ukraine war. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.

• The United States would not provide the F-16 fighter jets that Ukraine was seeking in its fight against Russia, President Joe Biden said on Monday, as Russian forces claimed a series of incremental gains in the country’s east.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s most senior adviser has suggested Poland is willing to supply Ukraine with the F-16 fighters. Andriy Yermak said Ukraine had received “positive signals” from Warsaw in a Telegram posting, although Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was careful to stress his own country would only act in consultation with Nato allies.

• Russian forces continued attacks on positions across the frontline near the eastern cities of Bakhmut and Donetsk. Moscow’s troops have been pounding Bakhmut in the Donbas for several months, but in recent days the invaders appeared to have opened up a new effort to gain ground around the village of Vuhledar, 30 miles south-west of Donetsk city.

• The situation in Bakhmut and Vuhledar was “very tough”, with both areas and other parts of the Donetsk region “under constant Russian attacks”, Zelenskiy said.

• Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg and Japan’s premier Fumio Kishida pledged on Tuesday to strengthen ties, saying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its growing military cooperation with China had created the most tense security environment since the second world war.

• A Russian court has fined the streaming service Twitch 4m roubles (£46,200/$57,000) for failing to remove what it said were “fakes” about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin and deputy chair of the security council of Russia, has boasted that sanctions are having little effect on the Russian economy.

• Ukraine’s foreign ministry criticised the president of Croatia, Zoran Milanović, for saying Crimea would never return to Ukrainian control, describing his comment as “unacceptable”. On Monday, in remarks detailing his objection to Zagreb providing military aid to Kyiv, Milanović said it was “clear that Crimea will never again be part of Ukraine”.

• Russia and Belarus have started a week-long session of staff training for the joint command of their regional grouping of forces, the Belarusian defence ministry has said.

That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will be back with you later. Léonie Chao-Fong will be here with you shortly to continue our live coverage.

Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin and deputy chair of the security council of Russia, has boasted that sanctions are having little effect on the Russian economy. On Telegram he wrote:

Enemy countries do not have the courage to admit that their “hellish” sanctions have failed miserably. Do not work. The vast majority of industrial products and consumer goods were replaced by our own, Russian, and the missing ones – by Asian brands. Parallel imports also work, from which we get the same western brands, and their owners get nothing. So everything is as always: the Americans make money on a humiliated Europe. Crushed Europe endures and loses money. At the same time, even the IMF predicts economic growth in Russia this year.

Medvedev went on to say that Russia would continue to use western intellectual property “without any licences and payment of royalties … for everything from movies to industrial software”.

He then offered praise to those who have pirated software, writing “thanks to those who have developed various programs for the unlicensed use of their expensive intellectual products” and deployed an animated laughing troll emoji as part of the message.

Medvedev has previously been both president and prime minister of Russia.

Here are some of the latest images to have been sent to us over the news wires from Ukraine.

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A fire is seen on the skyline of Bakhmut, where fierce fighting has been raging for weeks. Photograph: Reuters

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Valentyna, 75, who lives nearby, drinks tea as she comes at a humanitarian centre where she goes every day in Bakhmut. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images

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A woman plays with her dog in a snow covered field in Odesa. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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City workers repair damaged electrical wires amid the snowfall in Odesa. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, reports on Telegram that its correspondents in Kherson have again heard explosions.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has published its daily intelligence briefing on the situation in Ukraine. It says:

In the last three days, Russia has likely developed its probing attacks around the towns of Pavlivka and Vuhledar into a more concerted assault. Russian commanders are likely aiming to develop a new axis of advance into Ukrainian-held Donetsk Oblast, and to divert Ukrainian forces from the heavily contested Bakhmut sector. There is a realistic possibility that Russia will continue to make local gains in the sector. However, it is unlikely that Russia has sufficient uncommitted troops in the area to achieve an operationally significant breakthrough.

The two settlements are situated 50km to the south-west of Donetsk city.

A Russian court has fined the streaming service Twitch 4m roubles (£46,200/$57,000) for failing to remove what it said were “fakes” about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reports.

Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment.

Moscow has long objected to foreign tech platforms’ distribution of content that it deems to fall foul of its restrictions, with Russian courts regularly imposing penalties.

Russia’s foreign ministry has said that President Vladimir Putin spoke with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a telephone call.

In a readout of the call, the foreign ministry stated: “Further development of bilateral cooperation in the political, trade, economic and energy sectors, as well as cooperation within the Opec Plus group to provide the stability of global oil market were discussed.”

Ukraine’s foreign ministry criticised the Croatian president, Zoran Milanović, on Tuesday for saying Crimea would never return to Ukrainian control, describing his comment as “unacceptable”.

In remarks last night detailing his objection to Zagreb providing military aid to Kyiv, Milanović said it was “clear that Crimea will never again be part of Ukraine”. [See 7.20 GMT]

“We consider as unacceptable the statements of the president of Croatia, who effectively cast doubt on the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Reuters reports Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko wrote on Facebook.

Reuters has a quick snap that Germany’s energy regulator has said the country has sufficient gas supplies for this winter, but must start preparing for the winter of 2023-24.

The leader of the We Are Together with Russia group in Ukraine’s occupied Zaporizhzhia region, Vladimir Rogov, has posted to Telegram to claim that last night pro-Russian forces repulsed an attempt by Ukrainian forces to break through in the region. He wrote:

Zaporizhzhia front: a night attempt to break through the special group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Our scouts, using a Mavic quadcopter with a thermal imager, detected the movement of Ukrainian special forces on the front line at night.

The enemy group was promptly hit by artillery. Only one enemy saboteur got up and fled after being covered by an automatic grenade launcher.

The claims have not been independently verified.

Ukraine’s state broadcaster Suspilne offers this summary of events of the last 24 hours in its Telegram bulletin today. It writes:

At night, Russian troops shelled the Nikopol district of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Three private houses, farm buildings and a power line were damaged. There are no injured.

Over the past day, three people were injured in Donetsk region due to Russian shelling. In the Zaporizhzhia region, 14 settlements were shelled during the day, seven in the Kherson region.

During the day, the defence forces carried out several strikes on areas where the Russian army is concentrated, hitting three control points and two ammunition depots. Over the past day, the Russian Federation lost approximately 850 of its soldiers in the war against Ukraine, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported.

Nato-member Croatia’s president last night criticised western nations for supplying Ukraine with heavy tanks and other weapons in its campaign against invading Russian forces, saying those arms deliveries will only prolong the war.

Associated Press report that Zoran Milanović told reporters in the Croatian capital that it was “mad” to believe that Russia could be defeated in a conventional war.

“I am against sending any lethal arms there,” Milanović said. “It prolongs the war.”

“What is the goal? Disintegration of Russia, change of the government? There is also talk of tearing Russia apart. This is mad,” he added.

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Croatia’s president, Zoran Milanović, at a Nato summit in Madrid last year. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters

Milanović has openly opposed the admission of Finland and Sweden into Nato as well as the training of Ukrainian troops in Croatia as part of EU aid to the embattled country.

Yesterday he said he believed that Crimea would never again be part of Ukraine. The Black Sea peninsula was annexed by Russia in 2014 in a move that is not widely recognised internationally.

More now on Europe’s shifting energy demands: Russia’s Gazprom’s gas exports to the EU via Ukraine reached a record low of 951.4m cubic metres in the first 30 days of January, Russian business newspaper Vedomosti is reporting, citing Gazprom figures.

Vedomosti reported that Gazprom had shipped 41-43m cubic metres via Ukraine daily during the second half of 2022. However, from 5 January, daily volumes began to fall sharply, with only 24.4m cubic metres shipped daily by 19 January.

Vedomosti reported that the decline is primarily the result of reduced demand for Russian gas in Europe, amid an unusually warm and windy winter.

Ukraine’s state broadcaster Suspilne reports that according to the regional authority, the night passed in the Sumy region with no shelling.

• This is Martin Belam taking over the blog in London from my colleague Helen Sullivan.

Mild weather, government aid, gas storage facilities at full capacity and energy imports from other regions have helped Europe limit the economic damage caused by the war, AFP reports.

Germany, which relied heavily on Russian gas imports before the war, provided massive aid to consumers, scrambled to fill up its storage facilities and found new sources of energy as Moscow turned off the taps.

The government said last week it expects Europe’s biggest economy to avoid recession this year, though data on Monday showed a contraction in the last three months of 2022.

To beef up winter supplies, Germany and its EU neighbours bought LNG from Qatar and the United States, which is more expensive than Russian gas that was brought in via pipelines.

LNG imports in Europe jumped by 60% in 2022 compared to the previous year, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

As a result “the worst case scenarios for 2022/2023 winter did not happen,” said Fabian Skarboe Ronningen, senior analyst for power markets research at Rystad Energy.

European gas stocks are currently at 72% of capacity – double this time last year.

With temperatures so far this winter more clement than usual, European consumers turned the heating on later, keeping bill rises in check, ensuring reserves stay high.

Russia and Belarus have started a week-long session of staff training for the joint command of their regional grouping of forces, the Belarusian defence ministry said on Tuesday.

The training is part of preparation for joint drills the two countries will hold in Russia in September, the ministry added in its statement.

Ukraine’s defence minister is expected in Paris on Tuesday to meet President Emmanuel Macron amid a debate among Kyiv’s allies over whether to provide fighter jets for its war against Russia, after US President Joe Biden ruled out giving F-16s.

In remarks carried on French television before Biden spoke in Washington, Macron stressed any such move would depend on several factors including the need to avoid escalation and assurances that the aircraft would not “touch Russian soil.” He said Reznikov would also meet his French counterpart Sebastien Lecornu in Paris on Tuesday.

The United States will not provide the F-16 fighter jets that Ukraine has sought in its fight against Russia, President Joe Biden said on Monday.

Ukraine planned to push for western fourth-generation fighter jets such as the F-16 after securing supplies of main battle tanks last week, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister said on Friday. A Ukrainian air force spokesperson said it would take its pilots about half a year to train on such fighter jets.

Asked if the United States would provide the jets, Biden told reporters at the White House, “No.”

The brief exchange came shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that Russia had begun exacting its revenge for Ukraine’s resistance to its invasion with relentless attacks in the east.

Zelenskiy has warned for weeks that Moscow aims to step up its assault on Ukraine after about two months of virtual stalemate along the front line that stretches across the south and east.

Ukraine won a huge boost last week when Germany and the United States announced plans to provide heavy tanks, ending weeks of diplomatic deadlock on the issue.

“The next big hurdle will now be the fighter jets,” Yuriy Sak, who advises Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters on Friday.

Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next while.

Our top story this morning: the United States will not provide the F-16 fighter jets that Ukraine has sought in its fight against Russia, President Joe Biden said on Monday, as Russian forces claimed a series of incremental gains in the country’s east.

We’ll have more on this shortly. In the meantime, here are the other key recent developments:

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s most senior adviser, Andriy Yermak, has suggested Poland is willing to supply Ukraine with the F-16 fighters. Yermak said Ukraine had had “positive signals” from Warsaw in a Telegram posting, although Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was careful to stress his own country would only act in consultation with Nato allies, as Ukraine’s lobbying for the combat jets steps up only a few days after Germany and the US agreed to send over tanks.

• Zelenskiy has called for western weapons to be supplied more quickly. Speaking in his nightly address, the Ukrainian president said Russia was hoping to drag out the war, and exhaust his country’s ability to resist the invaders. “So we have to make time our weapon. We must speed up the events, speed up the supply and opening of new necessary weaponry options for Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said.

• The Kremlin warned the west’s supplying of further weapons to Ukraine would only lead to “significant escalation” of the conflict. Kyiv “demands more and more weapons” while Nato countries were “more and more becoming directly involved in the conflict”, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, after Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Andriy Melnyk, called on Germany to send his country a submarine.

• Russian forces continued attacks on positions across the frontline near the eastern cities of Bakhmut and Donetsk. Moscow’s troops have been pounding Bakhmut in the Donbas for several months, but in recent days the invaders appeared to have opened up a new effort to gain ground around the village of Vuhledar, 30 miles south-west of Donetsk city.

• Ukraine’s military and Russia’s Wagner private military group are both claiming to have control in the area of Blahodatne, eastern Donetsk region. “Units of Ukraine’s defence forces repelled the attacks of the occupiers in the areas of … Blahodatne … in the Donetsk region,” Ukraine’s military reported, adding its forces also repelled attacks in 13 other settlements in the Donetsk region. Wagner, designated by the US as a transnational criminal organisation, said on the Telegram messaging app on Saturday that its units had taken control of Blahodatne.

• The Russian government on Monday banned domestic oil exporters and customs bodies from adhering to western-imposed price caps on Russian crude. The measure was issued to help enforce President Vladimir Putin’s decree of 27 December that prohibited the supply of crude oil and oil products from 1 February for five months, to nations that abide by the caps. The new Russian act bans corporates and individuals from including oil price cap mechanisms in their contracts.

• Ukraine’s state-run energy operator Ukrenergo has said there is a “significant” deficit in the country’s energy system due to damage caused by Russian missile attacks. Ukraine’s energy system had “survived” 13 rocket attacks and 15 drone strikes from Russian forces, which had “caused significant damage to high-voltage facilities and power plants”, it added.

• Ukraine’s military will spend nearly $550m (£444m / €505m) on drones (UAVs) in 2023, and 16 supply deals have already been signed with Ukrainian manufacturers, defence minister Oleksii Reznikov has said. Ukraine has received significant supplies of UAVs from its partners but Kyiv is now seeking to boost domestic production to build what officials cast as an “army of drones”.