Russia-Ukraine war live: Russian strikes kill three in Kyiv including child; Ukrainian forces shelled Belgorod, Russian official

Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian presidency, has addressed the plight of children in Ukraine in a message on Telegram. He writes:

At night, Russia again killed a child in Kyiv. Since 2014, the terrorist country has been committing crimes against little Ukrainians.

Since 24 February 2022, no one has any doubts – this is a real genocide. Forced deportation, violence, murders …

This is happening today. And there will be responsibility for this. We won’t let the enemy be silent and hide their crimes. Every case is recorded.

Our task is to return home all kidnapped children, as well as those who were forced to leave the war for other countries.

Our mission is to bring to justice all those who killed, kidnapped and forcibly “adopted” Ukrainian children in the Russian Federation.

Justice will be restored. We protect and fight for our future.

Earlier this year the international criminal court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children. A panel of judges agreed that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the Russian president, and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, bore responsibility for the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children.

Despite limitations on free speech that haven’t ben seen since Soviet times, “there is a realistic possibility that recent vitriolic rhetoric by nationalist figures such as Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin is emboldening opposition figures to challenge taboo topics,” the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update on the conflict.

The MoD pointed to the appearance of opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin on Russian TV this week, in which he called for a new president to be elected in 2024, in order to rebuild normal relations with Europe.

The ministry said:

Nadezhdin has been a vocal critic of the war since the invasion, but this is highly likely the first call for Putin to be replaced on Russian state-approved TV since it began.

Going back to that Institute for the Study of War analysis, it also has some interesting things to say about Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

It suggests that the Kremlin may be attempting to sever Kadyrov’s relationship with Wagner leader Yevgheny Prigozhin and ordering him to deploy his troops in revenge for the attempted blackmail of Russian president Vladimir Putin last month. It says:

The Russian military command has likely ordered Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov’s forces to begin offensive operations in Ukraine following the withdrawal of Wagner Group forces from Bakhmut …

The claimed return of Chechen forces to offensive operations would break Kadyrovites from a nearly yearlong hiatus from participating in high-intensity combat operations …

Chechen units’ limited participation on the frontlines alongside Kadyrov’s heavy emphasis on recruitment may suggest that Kadyrov is hesitant to commit his forces to grinding offensive operations in Ukraine despite his ultranationalist narratives ...

The Kremlin may also be attempting to sever Kadyrov’s relationship with Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and re-emphasize federal authority over Chechen forces ...

Kadyrov participated in Prigozhin’s blackmail attempt in early May aimed at coercing the Russian MoD to allocate additional military supplies to Wagner in Bakhmut. Kadyrov claimed that his forces would relieve Wagner forces on May 6 and even directly asked Putin to authorize the transfer of Chechen forces from other directions to Bakhmut.

Putin may have perceived Kadyrov’s behavior as a threat to his control given that Kadyrov and Prigozhin had conducted a successful joint information campaign in early October 2022 to facilitate military command changes.

Putin or the Russian military command may have ordered Kadyrov to increase the presence of his units on the battlefield in retaliation for Kadyrov’s blackmail attempt.

If you’re just joining us now, here’s a quick rundown of developments:

• Three people, including a child, have been killed after Russia launched a wave of ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv overnight. Another 12 people, including a child were injured, according to city officials. Ukraine’s air force shot down all 10 missiles launched at the city. Those killed and injured were hit by falling debris. Air raid sirens sounded briefly again at around 7.30am.

• Ukrainian forces shelled the Russian border town of Shebekino in Belgorod overnight, according to regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. Five people were injured in the attack, the fourth of its kind this week.

• The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said a negotiated peace in Ukraine may have to be prioritised over putting Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, on trial for war crimes. In a speech in Bratislava, he said: “If in a few months to come, you have a window for negotiation with the existing Russian political power, the question you will have is an arbitrage between a trial and a negotiation. And you will have to negotiate with the leaders you have, de facto, even if the day after you will have to judge them in front of international justice ... Otherwise you can put yourselves just in an impossible situation where you say ‘I want you to go to jail but you are the only ones I can negotiate with’.”

• Macron also urged Nato to offer Ukraine “tangible and credible” security assurances, arguing that it was in the west’s interests to do so as Kyiv “is today protecting Europe”. Leaders will meet in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in July to discuss Nato membership for Ukraine.

• The US has announced a new $300m arms package for Ukraine, including air defence systems and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, but warned Kyiv that US weaponry should not be used for attacks within Russia. “We have been very clear with the Ukrainians privately – we’ve certainly been clear publicly – that we do not support attacks inside Russia,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

• A German government spokesperson has said Ukraine has the right to attack Russian territory as it qualifies as self-defence. In an interview with German news website Deutsche Welle, Steffen Hebestreit said: “International law allows Ukraine to carry out strikes on the territory of Russia for the purpose of self-defence.”

• Russia does not plan to declare martial law after Tuesday’s large-scale drone strike on Moscow, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said. The Kremlin’s comments came after several leading Russian officials and pro-war figures including Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov urged Putin to respond to the drone attacks by declaring a state of total war.

• The UN has proposed that Kyiv, Moscow and Ankara start preparatory work for the transit of Russian ammonia through Ukraine as it tries to salvage a deal allowing safe Black Sea grain exports, a source close to the talks has told Reuters. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address accused Russia of blocking all activity at the port of Pivdennyi, with 1.5 million tonnes of agricultural products unable to move.

• Only 500 people are left in Bakhmut, the city in the east of Ukraine that has been subject to heavy fighting in the last year, according to its mayor. The figure from Oleksii Reva, reported by the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, is a tiny fraction of its prewar population of 70,000.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, has said he has asked prosecutors to investigate “crimes” committed by senior Russian defence officials before and during the invasion of Ukraine.

• An Iraqi citizen fighting with Wagner was killed in Ukraine in early April, the first confirmed case of someone from the Middle East dying in the conflict, Prigozhin told Reuters. Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, the RIA FAN news site also reported.

• Russia claimed it destroyed Ukrainian naval forces’ last major warship, the Yuri Olefirenko, which it said was stationed in the southern port of Odesa. The Russian air force said it attacked the ship on 29 May. Ukraine has not commented.

• Analysis from the Kyiv Post suggests about 90% of the 500 missiles and drones launched by Russia in May in attacks on Ukraine failed, to the cost of $1.7bn. It said 533 of them were destroyed by the Ukrainian air force, including 401 Shahed-136 drones that cost about $20,000 each.

• The Russian security council deputy chair, Dmitry Medvedev, said Britain was Moscow’s “eternal enemy”. Any British officials who facilitated the war in Ukraine could be considered legitimate military targets, he said.

The all-clear has been given once again in Kyiv after air raid sirens sounded for a second time in the early hours of Thursday morning.

It came as Ukraine’s armed forces said the air force had shot down 10 out of the 10 Iskander short-range ballistic missiles that were launched at Kyiv overnight.

In their regular morning update, they also said the air force had launched 15 of its own strikes on Russian troops and military equipment, two of them on anti-aircraft missile systems.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has given another update on the shelling of the Russian border city of Shebekino. He says five people were injured in attacks which took place at midnight, at 3:40 and at 5:15.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine fired at the center and outskirts of the city,” he added.

A private residential building took a direct hit, he said, and several other buildings were damaged.

Today’s raids are the 18th wave of strikes launched by Russia on Kyiv since the beginning of May. Usually they take place at night, but on Monday there was another such daytime attack, as Julian Borger reported.

One person was injured in that attack which began at 11am and which appeared to be part of efforts to exhaust Ukraine’s air defences.

News agencies have sent more photos from the scene of the clinic where three people were killed in the overnight strikes.

Britain’s ambassador appears to have been interrupted in the middle of a boxing session:

Air raid sirens are sounding once again in the Ukrainian capital, where the time is just after 7.30am, in a rare daylight attack by Russia.

Meanwhile, Kyiv’s military administration has just updated its information on the overnight strikes, and now says three people were killed including one child – not two children as it had said earlier.

Another 12 people were injured, including one child, it said in a Telegram post.

Thursday’s first attack began at around 3:00 am, when cruise and ballistic missiles were fired on the city, officials said.

This blog is pausing here for a short while, but we’ll be back to bring you any breaking news.

In the meantime you can find all our coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war here.

Wires are also posting new photos from the Russian city of Shebekino in the Belgorod border region, which Russian officials say was shelled for the fourth time this week by Ukrainian forces.

Some analysis here from the Institute for the Study of War on the recent attacks on Russian territory. The US-based think tank says official responses from Moscow “remain likely insufficient to satisfy the Russian ultranationalist information space’s desire for escalation in the war”.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, who has evacuated children from border areas, has called on Russian forces to capture Kharkiv in order to create a barrier between Belgorod and Ukraine.

But Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on Gladkov’s statements earlier this week and on Wednesday said that Moscow did not plan to declare martial law following Tuesday’s drone attack on Moscow.

The think tank adds:

Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin criticized Peskov, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu for their reluctance to address attacks against Russian territory.

Russian milbloggers have complained about the lack of Russian military escalation to secure border areas in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts since at least September 2022, often criticizing the Kremlin for underreacting to attacks against Russian territory and failing to fully dedicate itself to the war effort.

The evacuations and Peskov’s comments are largely consistent with Putin’s unwillingness and inability to meaningfully escalate the war short of full-scale general and economic mobilization, as ISW has previously assessed.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, says the city of Shebekino has also been shelled overnight.

In a Telegram post, Vyacheslav Gladkov said “shelling by the Armed Forces of Ukraine went on for an hour”. Two people were injured, he said.

He also said the Russian air defences in the region had worked. The Guardian is not able to verify the attack, which would be the fourth time Ukrainian artillery has shelled Shebekino this week.

Another image from the overnight strikes has come through on the wires, courtesy of Kyiv’s military administration, this time of the clinic in Desnyan which officials say was heavily damaged.

The night’s attack was launched by ground-based missile systems, Serhii Popko, the head of Kyiv military administration has said in a Telegram post.

All targets detected were destroyed by Ukraine’s air defences, he said and casualties were caused by falling debris. An update on the type and number of missiles used in the strike would be given later by the Air Force, he said.

In Desnyan district three people including two children were killed and up to 10 others injured when debris fell on a clinic and an adjacent multi-storey residential building, he said.

In Dnipro district a residential building was damaged, parked cars caught fire and debris fell on to a roadway.

The all-clear has been given in Kyiv, about an hour after air raid sirens sounded.

It’s still not clear whether the attack involved drones or missiles. Reuters reports:

Discussions on social media suggested it was a missile attack, given the short time between the declaration of the air raid alert and the impact.

The first images are coming in from the latest Russian strike on Kyiv. This shot from Kyiv’s military administration shows a residential building damaged by falling debris in the city’s Desnyan district, where three people including two children have died.

As we wait for more information from Kyiv to come in, here’s a bit of context. The past week has marked the first time that Moscow has come in for a large-scale drone attack since it launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Nobody was injured in Tuesday’s raid by more than 30 drones but they were part of a series of drone strikes and sabotage operations behind enemy lines that have intensified in recent weeks ahead of a much anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The attack on Moscow came as Russia has launched an increasing number of attacks on Kyiv, including a rare daytime raid on Tuesday, over the past month.

The attacks appear to be an effort to exhaust Ukraine’s air defences.

At least three people have been killed, including two children, after Russia launched another overnight wave of strikes on the Ukrainian capital, city officials have said.

A clinic and an adjacent home were struck by falling debris in Kyiv’s eastern Desnyan district, the city’s military administration said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. Another four people were injured and taken to hospital.

Debris also fell on the nearby district of Dnipro, according to the mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko.

In total 14 people were injured in the attack with nine hospitalised and another five treated at the scenes, he said.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine with me, Helen Livingstone.

Kyiv has once again been hit by Russian strikes overnight, with at least three people killed and another four injured so far, according to the city’s military administration. Falling debris hit a clinic in the city’s Desnyan district as well as an adjacent house. Two of the dead were children, according to the city’s mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko.

Debris also fell on the capital’s Dnipro district, where another person was injured according to Klitschko.

Other key developments:

• The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said a negotiated peace in Ukraine may have to be prioritised over putting Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, on trial for war crimes. In a speech in Bratislava, he said: “If in a few months to come, you have a window for negotiation with the existing Russian political power, the question you will have is an arbitrage between a trial and a negotiation. And you will have to negotiate with the leaders you have, de facto, even if the day after you will have to judge them in front of international justice ... Otherwise you can put yourselves just in an impossible situation where you say ‘I want you to go to jail but you are the only ones I can negotiate with’.”

• Macron also urged Nato to offer Ukraine “tangible and credible” security assurances, arguing that it was in the west’s interests to do so as Kyiv “is today protecting Europe”. Leaders will meet in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in July to discuss Nato membership for Ukraine.

• The US has announced a new $300m arms package for Ukraine, including air defence systems and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, but warned Kyiv that US weaponry should not be used for attacks within Russia. “We have been very clear with the Ukrainians privately – we’ve certainly been clear publicly – that we do not support attacks inside Russia,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

• A German government spokesperson has said Ukraine has the right to attack Russian territory as it qualifies as self-defence. In an interview with German news website Deutsche Welle, Steffen Hebestreit said: “International law allows Ukraine to carry out strikes on the territory of Russia for the purpose of self-defence.”

• Russia does not plan to declare martial law after Tuesday’s large-scale drone strike on Moscow, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said. The Kremlin’s comments came after several leading Russian officials and pro-war figures including Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov urged Putin to respond to the drone attacks by declaring a state of total war.

• Russia said Ukrainian artillery hit the Russian town of Shebekino on the Ukrainian border for a third time this week, injuring four people, while drones attacked two oil refineries 65-80km east of Russia’s biggest oil export terminals. Russian officials did not attribute blame for the drone attacks and said a fire at one of the terminals was put out.

• The UN has proposed that Kyiv, Moscow and Ankara start preparatory work for the transit of Russian ammonia through Ukraine as it tries to salvage a deal allowing safe Black Sea grain exports, a source close to the talks has told Reuters. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address accused Russia of blocking all activity at the port of Pivdennyi, with 1.5 million tonnes of agricultural products unable to move.

• Only 500 people are left in Bakhmut, the city in the east of Ukraine that has been subject to heavy fighting in the last year, according to its mayor. The figure from Oleksii Reva, reported by the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, is a tiny fraction of its prewar population of 70,000.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, has said he has asked prosecutors to investigate “crimes” committed by senior Russian defence officials before and during the invasion of Ukraine.

• An Iraqi citizen fighting with Wagner was killed in Ukraine in early April, the first confirmed case of someone from the Middle East dying in the conflict, Prigozhin told Reuters. Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, the RIA FAN news site also reported.

• Russia claimed it destroyed Ukrainian naval forces’ last major warship, the Yuri Olefirenko, which it said was stationed in the southern port of Odesa. The Russian air force said it attacked the ship on 29 May. Ukraine has not commented.

• Analysis from the Kyiv Post suggests about 90% of the 500 missiles and drones launched by Russia in May in attacks on Ukraine failed, to the cost of $1.7bn. It said 533 of them were destroyed by the Ukrainian air force, including 401 Shahed-136 drones that cost about $20,000 each.

• The Russian security council deputy chair, Dmitry Medvedev, said Britain was Moscow’s “eternal enemy”. Any British officials who facilitated the war in Ukraine could be considered legitimate military targets, he said.