Russia-Ukraine war: Russia accused of demolishing Mariupol theatre ‘to hide war crimes’ – as it happened

Here’s more from Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was speaking earlier at a conference of Ukrainian ambassadors in Kyiv.

Zelenskiy described his visit to the US as “a very important benchmark, as a set bar” at the meeting, adding:

I do not have the opportunity to make foreign visits – I simply do not have it, because there’s no time.

Ukraine plans to open new embassies in 10 African countries, its president has announced, with the aim of increasing Kyiv’s presence in Africa and strengthening trade ties.

Speaking at a conference of Ukrainian ambassadors, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said:

We are already rebooting relations with dozens of African countries. Next year, we have to strengthen them. Ten countries have already been designated in Africa where new embassies of Ukraine will be opened.

There are also plans to develop a “Ukraine-Africa trade house” with offices in the capitals of “the most promising countries” on the African continent, he added.

Zelenskiy continued:

In addition to the existing representation of Ukraine in 10 African countries, together with new embassies and trading houses, we should achieve representation in 30 countries of the African continent.

Like many Ukrainian refugees, Yuliia Kashperenko will spend Christmas away from home this year.

She feels upset at the thought of being away from her family and friends in Ukraine, but comforted to know she will spend the holiday with her host and their children in south London.

Kashperenko, 25, arrived the UK in October, leaving her parents behind in the Kyiv region. “With this family, I feel like I’m with my family,” she says.

I realise it’s better to stay here. I’m in a safe place with good people.

The Ukrainian government advised refugees not to go home over Christmas, because of fears the country’s energy infrastructure would not be able to deal with the demand, meaning many will spend the holiday apart from loved ones.

Ukrainians traditionally celebrate Christmas on 7 January, according to the Julian calendar, but after Russia’s invasion the country’s Orthodox church is allowing its congregations to observe the 25 December date instead, in a move toward the west.

Kashperenko, who worked in the media and as a copywriter in Ukraine, arrived in London after applying to the Homes for Ukraine scheme. She fled because she was worried about attacks on the capital and being forced to survive the winter without power. “I understood that Russia was going to destroy cities and energy systems,” she says.

Read the full story here:

Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has called for Iran, North Korea and Belarus to be held accountable for their alleged involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Podolyak’s tweet came a day after the White House accused North Korea of supplying arms to the private Russian mercenary firm the Wagner Group to help bolster Moscow’s troops in Ukraine.

Kyiv has accused Tehran of supplying thousands of its drones to Moscow, which used them in deadly attacks on cities such as Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia.

After initially denying the presence of Iranian drones in Ukraine, the Tehran government has admitted that it had supplied a “small number” of the unmanned aircraft to Russia months before Vladimir Putin launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine in February.

The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has previously allowed the Kremlin to use his country as a platform to send tens of thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine, while Russian war jets have taken off from Belarusian bases. But Lukashenko has not joined the war directly or sent his own troops into the fight.

The Canadian government has condemned reports that North Korea has supplied battlefield missiles and rockets to the Wagner Group, a private Russian mercenary company, for use in Ukraine.

The White House yesterday said the Wagner Group took delivery of an arms shipment from North Korea to help bolster Russian forces in Ukraine, a sign of the group’s expanding role in the war.

Pyongyang’s transaction with the Wagner Group “clearly violates international law and UN security council resolutions”, Canada’s foreign ministry said.

Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, said in a statement:

We will continue to work with international partners to address these developments and respond to further arms deliveries should they take place.

The Wagner group’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, denied the White House’s accusation as “gossip and speculation”. North Korea’s foreign ministry also denied it had supplied munitions to Russia but did not make any mention of Wagner.

If one battle more than any other has defined the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine, it is the three-month siege of Mariupol’s steelworks this spring, and the harrowing experience of its last defenders.

Holed up in Azovstal, one of Europe’s largest metal-producing plants, hundreds of outnumbered, outgunned, wounded and emaciated Ukrainian soldiers, and more than 1,000 civilians, resisted one of Moscow’s fiercest military attacks for more than 80 days.

“No one came out of there unchanged,” says Oksana, an Azovstal employee who asked not to give her full name.

They were one person when they went in, and another person when they came out.

Soon after the Russian invasion in late February, Mariupol was one of the first major cities to be encircled. Viewed as a key Kremlin objective, the city was the scene of a siege that the Red Cross has defined as “apocalyptic”. The outskirts of the city became the site of a mass grave, and the bodies of many more men, women and children were either dumped in the streets or remain buried beneath the rubble.

Ukrainian authorities estimate that 22,000 people died during the fighting. Some survivors took refuge in the Azovstal steelworks, an industrial site covering an area of about four square miles, including a network of underground tunnels.

With the civilians were about 3,000 soldiers, many of whom were members of the notorious Azov brigade, which, at its inception in 2014, included far-right volunteers, some with neo-Nazi affiliations. In recent years the brigade has been fully integrated into the Ukrainian military, but for President Vladimir Putin it was the perfect propaganda opportunity to convince the public that his narrative about the “nazification” of Ukraine was true, and that his army would hunt them down like rats. Never would Putin have imagined that the last defenders of Mariupol would defy his plan for so long.

Cut off from the world and low on food, the defenders of Azovstal were holed up in the tunnels of the steelworks for over two months while the Russians launched rockets and incendiary bombs at the site.

Read the full story by my colleague Lorenzo Tondo here:

A woman stands outside her building, damaged by a Russian military strike, in Kramatorsk.

Canada condemned what it said were North Korean arms deliveries to Russia, saying Pyongyang’s transaction with the private military company the Wagner Group “clearly violates international law and UN security council resolutions”.

“We will continue to work with international partners to address these developments and respond to further arms deliveries should they take place,” the Canadian foreign affairs minister, Mélanie Joly, said in a statement.

North Korea’s foreign ministry, in a statement, has denied that it has supplied munitions to Russia but did not make any mention of Wagner, Reuters reported.

A Russian opposition politician has filed a legal challenge over President Vladimir Putin’s use of the word “war” to describe the conflict in Ukraine.

Putin yesterday publicly acknowledged the situation as a “war” for the first time since he ordered his troops to invade Ukraine in February, after 10 months of calling his campaign a “special military operation”.

In March, Putin formally signed a law that would impose harsh jail terms for people who intentionally spread “fake” information about Russia’s armed forces, including calling the war by its name.

But the Russian leader said at a news conference on Thursday:

Our goal is not to spin this flywheel of a military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war. This is what we are striving for.

Nikita Yuferev, an opposition councillor in St Petersburg, has asked prosecutors to investigate Putin for using the word “war”, and accused the president of breaking his own law.

In an open letter, he asked the prosecutor general and interior minister to “hold (Putin) responsible under the law for spreading fake news about the actions of the Russian army”.

He told Reuters that he knew his legal challenge would go nowhere, but he had filed it to expose the “mendacity” of the system.

Yuferev said:

It’s important for me to do this to draw attention to the contradiction and the injustice of these laws that he (Putin) adopts and signs but which he himself doesn’t observe.

I think the more we talk about this, the more people will doubt his honesty, his infallibility, and the less support he will have.

Two people were injured after a car bomb exploded in the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol in south-eastern Ukraine, according to a local pro-Moscow official.

Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-appointed official in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia province, told the state-owned Tass news agency:

The blast occurred in front of the entrance to Gorky Park. A car exploded. The causes and circumstances are being investigated.

He described the incident as a “terrorist attack” carried out by “militants of the Kyiv regime” to the Russian state-owned news agency Ria Novosti.

Ivan Fedorov, the exiled mayor of Melitopol, wrote on Telegram that eyewitnesses reported a car was “blown up”.

It has not been possible to independently verify these claims.

Russian forces shelled the recently liberated Kherson region more than 60 times on Thursday, killing one person and injuring two others, according to the head of the region’s military administration, Yaroslav Yanushevych.

Moscow’s troops “shelled the territory of Kherson region 61 times. The invaders attacked peaceful settlements of the region with artillery, MLRS, mortars and tanks”, Yanushevych wrote in an update on Facebook.

About half the strikes hit Kherson city, striking residential blocks, educational institutions and private houses, he said. A kindergarten was also impacted, he added.

The Netherlands will provide Ukraine with up to €2.5bn (£2.2bn) in aid in 2023, the Dutch government has announced.

The money is earmarked for military assistance, work to recover critical infrastructure and to help investigations into possible war crimes, it said.

The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, vowed that his country would provide assistance “as long as Russia continues its war against Ukraine”.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, confirmed he had spoken with Rutte and thanked him for the €2.5bn aid.

Here are some of the latest images we have received from Ukraine.

Russia’s ambassador to the United States said on Friday that the risk of a clash between the US and Russia was “high”, Russian state-owned news agency TASS reported.

TASS cited Anatoly Antonov as saying that it was hard to say when talks on strategic dialogue between the two sides could resume, but that talks on prisoner swaps had been “effective” and would continue.

The top Russian-installed official in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region said on Friday that shelling of the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, had “almost stopped”.

Speaking on Russian state television, governor Yevgeny Balitsky said Russian troops would not leave the nuclear plant, and that it would never return to Ukrainian control.

A destroyed building in Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine.

In early 2022, the Ukrainian photojournalist Evgeny Maloletka was covering violence in Kazakhstan when his attention turned back home: there were several reports signalling that Russia was preparing an invasion.

He didn’t have to think twice: he knew he had to be back in his home country. By mid-January, he was already working on assignment for the Associated Press in the city of Kharkiv and the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine, where there was a growing tension among Russian proxies.

Maloletka was based in Kharkiv, 25 miles from some of the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed at the border, as diplomatic efforts to find a solution continued.

When Maloletka and the AP team estimated that the invasion was imminent, they moved to the city of Mariupol, in south-east Ukraine. They thought that if war broke out, Mariupol would be key because it was a strategic seaport. They were not wrong.

South Korea’s foreign ministry said on Friday it condemns North Korea’s arms shipment to a private Russian military company, the Wagner Group, adding it supports the United States’ push to raise the issue at the UN security council.

The White House said on Thursday North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to the Wagner Group to help bolster Russian forces in Ukraine.

A senior Russian diplomat has said that talks on security guarantees for Russia cannot take place while Nato instructors and “mercenaries” remain in Ukraine, and while western arms supplies to the country continue.

In an interview with the Russian state-owned news agency Tass, Alexander Darchiev, head of the Russian foreign ministry’s North America department, said talks would be premature “until the flood of weapons and financing for the [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelenskiy regime stops, American and Nato servicemen/mercenaries/instructors are withdrawn”.

Russia typically refers to foreign volunteers fighting with the Ukrainian army as “mercenaries”, and has convicted captured foreign fighters of acting as such, Reuters reports.

Australia’s financial intelligence agency has warned Russian paramilitary groups are soliciting cryptocurrency donations to buy weapons and that Australians have donated to terrorist organisations overseas.

Senior executives at Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac) also said cryptocurrency has become a “standard part of the money-laundering tool kit” for organised crime groups in Australia.

The agency’s deputy chief executive and head of intelligence, John Moss, said crypto was no longer considered a “niche option” for criminal activity and had become more mainstream.

“We are now seeing more traditional money laundering being displaced into cryptocurrency, particularly to send money offshore,” he said.

Moss said Russian groups have been soliciting digital currency donations on social media to buy weapons, drones and armour for the conflict in Ukraine:

Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s surprise visit to Washington – the Ukrainian president’s first overseas trip since the Russian invasion 300 days ago – started with a secretive train ride to Poland late on Tuesday.

The next morning he arrived in the southern Polish city of Przemysl, where he was spotted at the train station, according to footage from private broadcaster TVN, along with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Bridget Brink, who accompanied him.

Zelenskiy’s visit had been planned for days and organised in secret because of concerns about his safety, but details were tweeted on Tuesday by a reporter from US-based newsletter Punchbowl News.

In Poland, Zelenskiy boarded a US government plane which landed at about noon EST on Wednesday at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland near Washington.

He traveled by motorcade to Blair House, the presidential guest house along Pennsylvania Avenue, and after freshening up from his trip went to the nearby White House, where he was greeted by President Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden.

Back to North Korea: According to the White House, Wagner took delivery of infantry rockets and missiles from North Korea, though Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin denied the assertion as “gossip and speculation”, Reuters reports.

“The DPRK remains unchanged in its principled stand on the issue of ‘arms transaction’ between the DPRK and Russia which has never happened,” the North Korean spokesperson said, adding it is the US that’s “bringing bloodshed and destruction to Ukraine by providing it with various kinds of lethal weapons”.

DPRK are the initials of the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.