US calls for Evan Gershkovich's immediate release
The United States is calling for Gershkovich’s immediate release. The White House’s national security spokesman John Kirby has told CNN:
He shouldn’t be detained at all. Journalism is not a crime. He needs to be released immediately. We’re still going to work very, very hard to see if we can get him home with his family where he belongs.
US officials are still pressing for consular access to Gershkovich directly with the Russians, Kirby said.
There is no grounds for denying consular access... We really want to get that consular access going.
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Summary
The training of Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 jets has begun in Poland, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said. It came after the United States gave its green light. He told a meeting of EU defence ministers in Brussels: “I am happy that finally the training of the pilots for the F-16 has started in several countries. It will take time, but the sooner the better... For example, in Poland.”
Moscow claimed to have pushed back the fighters it said launched a cross-border attack from Ukraine to the Belgorod region. Reuters reported that the claim could not immediately be independently verified. Russia subsequently opened a terrorism investigation.
The governor of Belgorod Vyacheslav Gladkov said the measures Russia claimed were in place to stop terrorism after the crossborder attack had finally been lifted. It came only a few hours after Moscow claimed to have pushed the fighters back over the border.
A Moscow court extended the detention of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, detained in Russia on espionage charges at the end of March. During a brief hearing, the court ordered that Gershkovich should remain in jail until 30 August, Russian news agencies reported.
The United States called for Gershkovich’s immediate release. The White House’s national security spokesman John Kirby told CNN: “He shouldn’t be detained at all. Journalism is not a crime. He needs to be released immediately. We’re still going to work very, very hard to see if we can get him home with his family where he belongs.”
Ukrainian forces still controlled the south-western edge of the city of Bakhmut and fighting in the city itself has decreased, deputy Ukrainian defence minister Hanna Maliar claimed on Tuesday. She wrote on the Telegram messaging app that Kyiv’s forces had made some progress “on the flanks to the north and south of Bakhmut” and that Russian forces, which say they have taken the city itself, were continuing to clear areas they control.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited marines on Tuesday on the Vuhledar-Maryinka defence line in the Donetsk region, as part of celebrations for the national day of Ukrainian marines.
The Ukrainian port of Pivdennyi halted operations because Russia was not allowing ships to enter it, a Ukrainian official said. This, in effect, cut it out of a deal allowing safe Black Sea grain exports, they said.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, one of the occupied regions of the Donbas which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed, has reported that the city of Toretsk was struck without casualties.
Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, reports that there has been an interruption in power supplies in Kherson as a result of Russian military action.
Ukraine’s general staff said that on Monday Russia carried out 20 missile strikes against Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kharkiv oblasts, using cruise missiles, Iskander-M ballistic missiles, and S-300 anti-aircraft missiles over the past day. It also claimed that Russia launched 48 airstrikes using Shahed drones, and targeted both civilian and military targets with up to 90 strikes using multiple-launch rocket systems.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has arrived in China, Moscow’s foreign ministry said, for a visit in which he will meet with President Xi Jinping and ink a series of deals on infrastructure and trade
A top Russian official who faces sanctions in the west over Moscow’s war on Ukraine visited Saudi Arabia early Tuesday and held talks with his counterpart in the kingdom. Russian interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev’s visit to Riyadh came days after Zelenskiy addressed an Arab League summit held in Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea port city of Jeddah
Germany is looking into options to support a coalition of countries that plan to train Ukrainian pilots in flying F-16 fighter jets, German defence minister Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday. He added that any potential German contribution could be minor only, as Germany itself does not own any of the US-built jets.
Three villages in Russia’s Kursk region bordering Ukraine are without power after a drone dropped explosives on an electrical substation, the region’s governor says. Roman Starovoit said on Telegram:
Repair crews are currently carrying out restoration work. None of the residents were injured.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, border regions have repeatedly reported drone strikes on their civilian infrastructure. Moscow says Kyiv is directly responsible for attacks inside its territory but Ukraine denies this.
The families of Ukrainian soldiers killed by the Russians are being awarded the “hero’s cross”. This order was awarded to 70 soldiers from the 24th separate mechanised brigade named after King Danylo. The hero’s cross is a posthumous order.
We reported earlier that Russia claims to have pushed back the militants who attacked the border region of Belgorod. Here’s an update on the claims from the Russian defence ministry, which says its forces surrounded the fighters and defeated them with “airstrikes, artillery fire and active action by border units”.
According to Reuters, it claims that – alongside the more than 70 militants who were killed – four armoured vehicles and five pick-up trucks were destroyed.
The remnants of the nationalists were pushed back to Ukrainian territory, where they continued to be hit by gunfire until they were completely eliminated.
The Belgorod regional governor said one civilian had been killed “at the hands of the Ukrainian armed forces”. Reuters has been unable to verify any of the assertions.
One of the two fighting groups – the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) – said on social media: “One day we’ll come to stay.”
Moscow has blamed Kyiv, but – while Ukraine’s government has said it is watching the situation – it insists it has “nothing to do with it”.
European Union countries have provided 220,000 artillery shells to Ukraine under a landmark scheme launched two months ago to ramp up supplies of ammunition to Kyiv to help fight off Russia’s invasion, the EU foreign policy chief says.
According to Josep Borrell, EU states have also given 1,300 missiles under the scheme and are on track to hit a target of supplying 1m pieces of ammunition within a year, even though some EU countries have avoided endorsing that goal as feasible. He has told reporters:
The next days, weeks and months are going to be strategically decisive in the war in Ukraine.
EU governments agreed the ammunition scheme in March after Kyiv warned it was in desperate need of artillery rounds as Russia’s invasion descended into an intense war of attrition, with thousands of shells fired daily.
US calls for Evan Gershkovich's immediate release
The United States is calling for Gershkovich’s immediate release. The White House’s national security spokesman John Kirby has told CNN:
He shouldn’t be detained at all. Journalism is not a crime. He needs to be released immediately. We’re still going to work very, very hard to see if we can get him home with his family where he belongs.
US officials are still pressing for consular access to Gershkovich directly with the Russians, Kirby said.
There is no grounds for denying consular access... We really want to get that consular access going.
Moscow court extends detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich
Shaun Walker
A Moscow court has extended the detention of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, detained in Russia on espionage charges at the end of March.
During a brief hearing on Tuesday, the court ordered that Gershkovich should remain in jail until 30 August, Russian news agencies report. His pre-trial detention was initially set to expire next week. He is being held in the notorious Lefortovo prison in Moscow and could face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
Gershkovich, 31, is the first American journalist to be detained in Russia on spying charges since the end of the cold war. He was detained in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg while there on a reporting trip at the end of March.
Russia’s FSB security service has claimed he was collecting state secrets about Russia’s military industrial complex. Gershkovich and the Wall Street Journal have denied the charges. An open letter to Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, signed by more than 300 foreign correspondents who have worked in Russia, read:
We have no doubt that the only purpose and intention of his work was to inform his readers about the current reality in Russia.
It has been widely speculated that Russia arrested Gershkovich with the hope of trading him for Russian intelligence officers or other persons of interest to Moscow arrested in western countries, but so far there appears to have been little progress in discussions over a possible exchange.
Last month, Joe Biden praised the “absolute courage” of Gershkovich and said he was “working like hell” to secure his release.
'Anti-terrorist' measures imposed on Belgorod region following cross-border attack inside Russia lifted, says governor
The governor of Belgorod says the measures Russia claimed were in place to stop terrorism after the crossborder attack from Ukraine have now been lifted. This comes only a few hours after Moscow claimed to have pushed the fighters back over the border.
According to Reuters, Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on the Telegram messaging app:
A decision has been taken to rescind the judicial anti-terrorist operation regime on the territory of the Belgorod region.
Russia’s embassy in Norway has criticised a planned visit by a US aircraft carrier to Oslo as an “illogical and harmful” show of force, AFP reports.
The 337-metre (1,106-foot) USS Gerald R Ford is scheduled to dock in the Norwegian capital this week. The Russian embassy spokesman Timur Chekanov has told the agency:
There are no issues in the North that require a military solution, nor issues that require outside intervention. Considering that Oslo admits that Russia poses no direct military threat to Norway, such shows of force seem illogical and harmful.
The first-in-class aircraft carrier is a nuclear-powered ship with a displacement of more than 100,000 tonnes.
The US Navy announced in early May that the ship had departed Norfolk on its “first combat deployment”, following a shorter two-month deployment in the autumn of 2022. The Norwegian defence minister Bjorn Arild Gram told the news agency NTB:
The fact that a new aircraft carrier is now making its first visit to Norwegian waters is very positive for our cooperation with the Americans.
Relations between the Nato member Norway and Russia – with which the Scandinavian country shares a border – have deteriorated sharply in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
The Czech state-run Mero energy firm says it has signed a deal to end the country’s dependence on Russian oil, AFP reports, more than a year into Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mero will finance a $73m (£58.74m) expansion of the Transalpine oil pipeline (TAL), which supplies oil from the Italian port of Trieste to central Europe.
The Czech Republic’s TAL capacity will now double to an annual 8m tonnes of oil starting 2025. Mero’s chief executive Jaroslav Pantůček has told reporters:
This deal is our future, it will sever us from Russia after a long 60 years and help us achieve independence, freedom and sovereignty in energy supplies.
The EU member of 10.5 million people already weaned itself off Russian gas earlier this year, AFP reports. The Czech Republic’s two refineries received 7.4m tonnes of oil last year - 56% of it from Russia via the Druzhba pipeline.
The EU banned most oil imports from Russia in May 2022; three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, but the Druzhba pipeline was exempted. The Czech prime minister, Petr Fiala, said that gave Prague time to negotiate the TAL deal.
He hailed the agreement as “a major step, a milestone for our energy independence from Russia”.
EU countries have provided 220,000 artillery shells and 1,300 missiles for Ukraine under a plan agreed by ministers in March, Reuters reports the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the media on Tuesday.
Suspilne, Ukraine’s state broadcaster, reports that a 33-year-old resident of Vovchansk in Kharkiv was injured and hospitalised as a result of shelling by the Russian Federation.
Ukrainian official: Pivdennyi port has halted operations because Russia is not allowing ships to enter
The Ukrainian port of Pivdennyi has halted operations because Russia is not allowing ships to enter it, in effect cutting it out of a deal allowing safe Black Sea grain exports, a Ukrainian official said on Tuesday.
The UN, which together with Turkey, brokered the deal and its extension, had expressed concern on Monday that Pivdennyi – near Odesa on the Black Sea – had not received any ships since 2 May under the deal.
“Formally, the port of Pivdennyi is in the initiative, but in fact it hasn’t been there for a month. It has no incoming fleet,” Ukrainian deputy renovation minister Yuriy Vaskov told Reuters.
“[Russia] has now found an effective way to significantly reduce grain exports by excluding the port of Pivdennyi, which handles large tonnage vessels, from the initiative,” he said in written comments.
Vaskov called the move a “gross violation” of the agreement. He said that Tuesday’s inspections plan showed Russia had included only three of the 13 ships that had been submitted. All ships bound for Pivdenniy had been excluded, he said, as well as some meant to go to Odesa and Chornomorsk.
Russia’s team had inspected only nine ships in all from 19 May to 21 May, Ukrainian officials said.
“The grain initiative has been formally unblocked, but it is not working as it should. Russia continues to slow it down as much as possible,” he said.
Peter Beaumont
Video footage posted online by one of the groups of Russian “partisans” who launched a cross border raid from Ukraine into Russia’s Belgorod region appear to show US manufactured military vehicles were involved in the raid, including Humvees and what appeared to be International Maxxpro 1224 mine resistant vehicles.
The footage, released by the RDK group, apparently prior to their incursion with members of the Freedom of Russia Legion, appeared to show the vehicles in a convoy ahead of the cross border raid, marked with white crosses, the same symbol used by the Ukrainian military as a friendly forces marking.
Some of the members of the group involved in the incursion wore yellow identifying arm bands similar to those used by some Ukrainian units.
While Ukrainian officials have been coy about the raid, suggesting that it involved Russian citizens fighting against Putin, it seems certain to raise questions over where the vehicles involved in the raid came from, and what prior knowledge the US in particular had of the planned incursion which saw continued fighting for a second day in villages close to the border.
Following the first day of fighting, Russia claimed to have captured one of the MaxxPro vehicles, although that could not be independently verified.
Images of the vehicles posted online appeared to have the same distinctive slatted crew windows shaped like a parallelogram.
On Monday, a US state department official reiterated the US policy that it did not support military action by Ukraine beyond Ukraine’s borders.
“We have made very clear to the Ukrainians that we don’t enable or encourage attacks outside Ukraine’s borders, but I do think it’s important to take a step back and remind everyone, and remind the world, that it – of course it is Russia that launched this war,” said Matthew Miller, a state department spokesperson.
“It is Russia that continues to launch attacks on civilians in Ukraine. It is Russia that’s targeted schools and hospitals and civilian infrastructure. So, it is up to Ukraine to decide how they want to conduct their military operations, but it is Russia that has been the aggressor in this war.”
If confirmed that the vehicles were US made MaxxPros, there will be intense interest in how the armed group – some of whom have neo-Nazi and far right links – secured them.
Last October, the US announced it was supplying 200 MaxxPros to Ukraine with vehicles beginning to arrive in Ukraine not long afterwards.
MaxxPros seen by the Guardian in service with the Ukrainian military appeared, however, to be painted a lighter colour than those seen in the footage posted online.
Ukraine’s western allies – the US foremost – have been acutely sensitive about supplying weapons systems that could be used by Ukraine to target Russia, with the US declining to supply Ukraine with longer range rockets to use in the HIMARS rocket artillery system.
The US has also been resisting sending F-16s to Ukraine for the same reason, with the Ukrainian president, Volodmyr Zelenskiy, promising during his visit to the G7 summit in Hiroshima at the weekend that Kyiv would not use the jets to go into Russia.
The US President, Joe Biden, said on Sunday he had received a “flat assurance” from Zelenskiy that he would not use western-provided F-16 fighter jets to go into Russian territory.
Belarus has taken part in the illegal deportation of children from Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, according to a preliminary report compiled by exiled Belarusian opposition leaders.
The National Anti-Crisis Management, a group of political opponents to the government of the president Alexander Lukashenko, said 2,150 Ukrainian children – including orphans aged six to 15 – were taken to so-called recreation camps and sanatoriums on Belarusian territory.
Reuters, which carries the news, says it has not received answers to questions sent to Lukashenko’s office.
Ukraine’s former top prosecutor told the news agency last year there were cases of forced deportations of Ukrainians to Russia and Belarus. Ukrainian prosecutors did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The news agency says that Ukraine alleges roughly 20,000 children have been illegally transferred to Russia since the full-scale invasion started, with some being put up for adoption.
In March, the International criminal court issued arrest warrants for the Russian president Vladimir Putin and his ombudsman for children’s rights Maria Lvova-Belova for two counts of war crimes for moving hundreds of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Yulia Ioffe, an assistant professor at University College London and a specialist in children’s rights law, said that if the allegations against the Belarusian government were substantiated, the country would “highly likely” be violating the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The actions of Belarus may also amount to the crime against humanity of ‘deportation or forcible transfer of population’ under the Rome Statute of the ICC, provided there is sufficient evidence of forcible transfers being widespread or systematic.
Belarus in any case cannot be considered a neutral country to where children could legally be evacuated because there is no indication Ukraine has granted consent.
Hungary’s far-right prime minister, seen as much closer to Moscow than his EU allies, has claimed Ukraine cannot win the war – and that Washington must step in to end the conflict.
According to AFP, Viktor Orbán, who has blocked EU aid for Ukraine in the past, reaffirmed calls for a ceasefire and argued that the United States and its European partners must seal a new security accord with Russia.
The veteran Hungarian leader, who has not condemned Putin, told the Qatar Economic Forum the Russian invasion was the result of a “failure of diplomacy”. He added: “It’s obvious that the battlefield solution does not work,” insisting that Ukraine could not win.
Looking at the reality, looking at the figures, looking at the surroundings, looking at the fact that Nato is not ready to send troops, it’s obvious that there is no victory for poor Ukrainians on the battlefield. That’s my position ... Escalation should be stopped and we should argue in favour of peace and negotiations.
Orbán said that, after a ceasefire, there would have to be a new European security accord with Russia.
As a state, Ukraine is of course very important but in the longer term, strategically thinking, what is at stake is the future security of Europe.
It is obvious that, without the United States, there is no security architecture for Europe. And this war cannot be stopped... unless the Russians can make an agreement with the United States. As a European, I am not happy with that. But it is the only way out.
Peter Beaumont
The events of the past 48 hours appear to confirm assessments in US intelligence documents – leaked by US airman Jack Teixeira to Discord – that Ukraine has trained and armed Russian volunteers with Nato equipment. One document claimed:
Ukraine provides comprehensive support to Russian volunteers ready to liberate Russian territories from President Putin’s tyranny by armed means.
Such detachments are equipped with various qualitative types of Nato weapons; the personnel has passed respective training for usage of such weapons and has successful combat experience from various parts of the frontline in Ukraine.
The reporting speaks of volunteers’ infiltration operations into Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod oblasts being planned for March-April 2023 in order to seize control over territories and declare newly created states. It is also planned to begin formation of a larger military component based on volunteers to create a civil war front in Russia.
Moscow claims to have pushed back fighters it says launched cross-border attack
Moscow claims to have pushed back the fighters it says launched a cross-border attack from Ukraine to the Belgorod region, Reuters reports, noting that the claim could not immediately be independently verified.
There has been little clarity about who ordered the attack. Russia has claimed it was carried out by “Ukrainian militants”, dismissing reports they had self-identified as an ethnic Russian, anti-Kremlin militia. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said there were many ethnic Russians inside Ukraine, but that this did not mean they were not Ukrainian militants.
Kyiv has disavowed any connection to the Russian partisan fighters, saying they act independently and are not subject to military control.
Russia’s defence ministry claims that remnants of the units it blamed for the attack have now been forced back into Ukrainian territory. In its daily briefing, the ministry said more than 70 attackers were killed. Reuters was unable to verify that report.
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