Ukrainian officials have denounced a call by the Russian embassy in Britain for fighters from the Azov Regiment to face a “humiliating” execution, Agence France-Presse has reported. Twitter said the embassy had violated its rules on “hateful conduct,” but put a warning on the tweet instead of banning the post about Azov, a Ukrainian battalion that retains some far-right affiliations. Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, responded on Telegram on Saturday: “Russia is a terrorist state. In the 21st century, only savages and terrorists can speak diplomatically about the fact that people deserve be executed by hanging. Russia is a state sponsor of terrorism. What more evidence is needed?”
New Russian strikes on Ukraine’s frontline have left one person dead in the country’s south and also hit a school in Kharkiv, officials said. The mayor of the southern city of Mykolaiv said one person was killed when rockets hit two residential neighborhoods overnight, AFP reported. In Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, rockets from an S-300 surface-to-air system destroyed part of an educational center, local authorities said.
Russia announced it was banning 32 New Zealand officials and journalists from entering its territory, in response to similar measures taken by Wellington against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, AFP reported. Among those subject to sanctions are the Mayor of Wellington, Andrew Foster; Auckland Mayor Philip Goff; New Zealand Navy Commander Commodore Garin Golding; and journalists Kate Green and Josie Pagani, the Russian Foreign Ministry in a statement.
The Ukrainian military said it had killed dozens of Russian soldiers and destroyed two ammunition dumps in fighting in the Kherson region, the focus of Kyiv’s counteroffensive in the south and a key link in Moscow’s supply lines. Reuters reported that the army’s Southern Command said rail traffic to Kherson across the Dnipro River had been cut, potentially further isolating Russian forces west of the river from supplies in occupied Crimea and the ‘East.
Gazprom has suspended gas supplies to Latvia following tensions between Moscow and the West over the conflict in Ukraine and broad sanctions against Russia, AFP reports. The company sharply reduced gas deliveries to Europe via the Nord Stream pipeline on Wednesday to about 20% of capacity. European Union states have accused Russia of squeezing supplies in retaliation for Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The US ambassador to the United Nations said on Friday that there would no longer be any doubt that Russia intended to dismantle Ukraine, Reuters reported. Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the UN Security Council that the United States was seeing growing signs of Russia laying the groundwork to try to annex all of Ukraine’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Russia is “getting carried away” in its war against Ukraine, the head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, Richard Moore, said in a brief comment on Twitter on Saturday. Moore made the comment on top of an earlier Defense Ministry tweet that said the Kremlin was “growing desperate.”
Russia and Ukraine have launched criminal investigations into attacks that reportedly killed at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were being held at a pre-trial detention center in the village of Olenivka, after both countries blamed the other for the attack The UN is ready to send a team of experts to Olenivka to investigate the incident, if it gets the consent of both sides.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has accused Russia of a “petrifying war crime” over the killings and called on world leaders to “recognize Russia as a terrorist state.”
Ukraine has said it is ready for grain exports to leave its ports again, but is waiting for UN approval.