Russia-Ukraine war latest: Putin defends ‘noble’ invasion; alleged Mariupol chemical attack investigated – live | Ukraine

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, urged European leaders to impose sanctions on all Russian banks and oil, warning them: “We cannot wait.”

In a video address to the Lithuanian parliament today, Zelenskiy said:

We need powerful decisions, and the EU must take them now. They must sanction oil and all Russian banks…

Each EU state must set terms for when they will refuse or limit (Russian) energy sources such as gas.

Only then will the Russian government understand they need to seek peace, that the war is turning into a catastrophe for them.

Zelenskiy told Lithuanian lawmakers that Russian soldiers had behaved the same everywhere they had stayed as they did in the town of Bucha, 18.5 miles (30km) north-west of Kyiv.

The Ukrainian president also accused Russia of deporting hundreds of thousands of people from occupied Ukrainian regions into “filtration camps”. The Kremlin has denied targeting and abusing civilians in the conflict.

A chemical weapons expert is urging caution over claims that chemical weapons may have been used during an attack on the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, noting that there remains “a paucity of information” about what happened.

Dan Kaszeta, from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said it is “legitimately difficult” to assess these situations remotely, particularly when relying on mainly second-hand or third-hand reports instead of evidence from the scene.

The symptoms that the Ukrainian soldiers are reportedly showing, such as difficulty breathing, “does not tell us much”, he said.

What we really have is people being dizzy. What we don’t have is signs and symptoms (and any kind of medical diagnostics) that narrow the investigative focus to chemicals, let alone a specific chemical warfare agent.

“The fog of war is real,” Kaszeta said.

And this is a swamped yet fragile information space. It’s a front in an information war.

A Russian citizen in Poland has been arrested and charged with espionage, a spokesperson for the Polish minister coordinator of special services said.

The man had been living in Poland for 18 years and carrying out business activity, Reuters reports.

He was detained on 6 April and will be held in custody for three months, the spokesperson said in a statement, adding:

The evidence gathered by the Military Counterintelligence Service indicates that the man, instructed by the Russian special services, collected information concerning the military readiness of the Polish Armed Forces and of Nato troops.

A British man fighting in Ukraine has said his unit has no choice but to surrender to Russian forces in the besieged city of Mariupol, his family and friends told the BBC.

Aiden Aslin, from Newark, Nottinghamshire, is a marine in the Ukrainian military after moving to Ukraine in 2018. Over the past few weeks, his unit has been defending the southern port city of Mariupol, which has come under heavy bombardment by Russian forces.

His mother, Ang Wood, told the BBC:

He called me and said they have no weapons left to fight. I love my son. He is my hero. They put up one hell of a fight.

But he sounded OK. Boris [Johnson] needs to take Putin down.

A friend of Aslin also said he had spoken to him by phone and was told the unit had no food, ammunition or supplies, leaving them no option but to surrender.

He said:

They can’t get out. They can’t fight back. So they had no choice. I’m sure sure if they had a bullet left, they would have shot it.

From British journalist Jake Hanrahan:

Russia has previously threatened to bring criminal prosecution against any foreigners who travel to Ukraine to fight.

A Russian defence ministry spokesperson, Igor Konashenkov, said “none of the mercenaries the west is sending to Ukraine to fight” would be considered “combatants in accordance with international humanitarian law or enjoy the status of prisoners of war”.

However, Aslin is a member of the Ukrainian marines and not a foreign mercenary. According to reports, he was in his fourth year with the Ukrainian armed forces.

Hello, I’m Léonie Chao-Fong and I’ll be bringing you all the latest developments from the war in Ukraine. Feel free to drop me a message if you have anything to flag, you can reach me on Twitter or via email.

• Russian president Vladimir Putin has justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying he had taken “the right decision”. Visiting Vostochny Cosmodrome, he said: “On the one hand, we are helping and saving people, and on the other, we are simply taking measures to ensure the security of Russia itself. It’s clear that we didn’t have a choice. It was the right decision.”
• Ukraine is checking unverified information that Russia may have used chemical weapons while besieging the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, has said. The local council in Mariupol has written on the Telegram messaging service that it was not yet possible to examine the area where the unknown substance had allegedly been used because of enemy fire.
• Russia’s defence ministry has not made any comment on the allegations. The pro-Russian separatist forces of the self-proclaimed republic of Donetsk have issued a denial that they have used any chemical agents.
• Russia’s defence ministry says it has destroyed Ukrainian ammunition depots in the Khmelnytskyi and Kyiv regions.
• Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said nine humanitarian corridors had been agreed to evacuate civilians today. That included from the besieged city of Mariupol – although civilians will have to use private cars.
• More than 10,000 civilians have died in Mariupol, the city’s mayor has said. Vadym Boychenko said the death toll could surpass 20,000, as weeks of attacks and privation leave bodies “carpeted through the streets”.
• Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, partly blamed the Ukrainian loss of life on western nations that had not sent weapons to bolster the war effort. “Unfortunately, we are not getting as much as we need to end this war sooner,” he said. “Time is being lost. The lives of Ukrainians are being lost … And this is also the responsibility of those who still keep the weapons Ukraine needs in their armoury.”
• More than 6,000 alleged war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine are under investigation, Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office has said.
• Nearly two-thirds of all Ukrainian children have fled their homes in the six weeks since Russia’s invasion
• Telecoms equipment maker Nokia is pulling out of the Russian market. The decision will affect about 2,000 workers.

That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will hand you over to Léonie Chao-Fong for the next few hours.

Russia has used cluster munitions in Ukraine that litter civilian areas with bombs over an area of up to 350 metres, according to a report by the explosive weapons watchdog, Airwars.

Investigators at Airwars has released a report that analysed a strike on a hospital and blood donation centre in Kharkiv that reportedly killed at least one person. It documented a total of 26 impact sites spanning 350 metres in the February attack.

Airwars said several munitions experts it consulted believed the wide distribution of damage at Kharkiv could suggest Russia is detonating cluster munitions at a higher altitude than normal, making them even more indiscriminate.

More than 100 countries have signed a UN convention banning their use, though Russia, Ukraine and the US are not signatories.

“It has long been known that cluster munitions are indiscriminate, but this investigation highlights the sheer scale of suffering a single strike can cause,” Emily Tripp, Airwars’ director, said.

“While more than 100 countries have banned their use, many of the world’s largest militaries still refuse to do so – despite the inevitable risk to civilians.”

Vladimir Putin has justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying he had taken “the right decision”. The Russian president is visiting Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur Oblast in Russia’s far east. Reuters quotes Putin saying about the country’s military operation in Ukraine:

Its goals are absolutely clear and noble. On the one hand, we are helping and saving people, and on the other, we are simply taking measures to ensure the security of Russia itself. It’s clear that we didn’t have a choice. It was the right decision.

The details of allegations that a chemical weapon was used in Mariupol are still sketchy and unclear. Reuters reports that the local council in Mariupol has written on the Telegram messaging service that it was not yet possible to examine the area where the unknown substance had allegedly been used because of enemy fire.

It added that the city’s civilian population had minimal contact with the unspecified substance, but that Ukrainian soldiers had come into closer contact with it and were now being observed for possible symptoms.

There is a video being shared on social media from the Azov fighters in the besieged eastern Ukrainian city, which purports to feature witnesses of a chemical attack. However, the video and the claims within it have not been independently verified.

Russia’s defence ministry has not responded to a request for comment on the issue. The pro-Russian separatist forces of the self-proclaimed republic of Donetsk have issued a denial that they have used any chemical agents.

2h ago05:33

Philip Oltermann

The three parties that make up Germany’s coalition government increasingly look at odds over the speed and concrete implications of the country’s historic U-turn on exporting lethal weapons.

The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, on Monday said Ukraine needed “heavy weapons” while seemingly indirectly criticising the Social Democratic party (SPD) of chancellor Olaf Scholz, saying now was “not the time for excuses but for creativity and pragmatism”.

Defence minister Christiane Lambrecht, of the SPD, said over the weekend that German capacities for supplying Ukraine with arms from its own arsenal without endangering its own security position had “reached a limit”.

The head of the German parliament’s defence committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann of the Free Democratic party (FDP), urged the government to show more leadership on the issue and financially support the transfer of weapons from eastern European arsenals to Ukraine.

Foreign policy spokesperson Norbert Röttgen, of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), accused Scholz of “pursuing a failed policy” towards Russia by stalling on arms deliveries to Ukraine.

On 27 February, chancellor Scholz had announced a historic U-turn on exporting lethal weapons into conflict zones, as well as a plan to set up a €100bn fund to modernise its military and increase defence spending to meet the Nato goal of 2% of GDP.

2h ago05:22

Philip Oltermann

Austria’s chancellor said a meeting with Vladimir Putin has left him “not optimistic” that a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine was in sight, as the Russian president was trapped in his own logic about the nature of the conflict.

Karl Nehammer, of the conservative Austrian People’s party, met with Putin for about 75 minutes in Novo-Ogaryovo on Monday, making him the first European Union leader to meet the Russian president since the start of the war.

In a conversation Nehammer described as “direct, open and tough”, Nehammer said he had told Putin the EU would increase sanctions as long as there were further casualties in the war, and had raised his impressions from Bucha, which he had visited ahead of the trip to Russia.

Putin outright rejected the Bucha allegations, Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper reported, claiming they were “false flag” attacks staged by the Ukrainian side.

“Putin has massively arrived in a mindset whose logic is determined by war, and is acting accordingly”, Nehammer told Austrian media. Nonetheless the Russian president continued to reject the term “war”.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine would undoubtedly achieve what he said were its “noble” objectives.

Speaking at an awards ceremony at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the far east of Russia, where he is also expected to meet the Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko, Putin was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies that Moscow had no other choice but to launch a military operation to protect Russia, and that a clash with Ukraine’s anti-Russian forces had been inevitable and just a question of time.

Reuters adds that Putin said his country does not plan to isolate itself from the rest of the world, and that Russian forces carrying out Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine were acting bravely and efficiently. He said Russia could no longer tolerate the genocide being carried out on the Russian-speaking people in the Donbas region.

Here are some of the latest images that have been sent to us of the war on Ukraine over the newswires.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is visiting Russia’s far-east Amur region today, where he is expected to meet the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

Reuters reports the two leaders are due to head to the Vostochny Cosmodrome to mark Russia’s annual Cosmonautics Day, commemorating the first manned space flight made in 1961 by the Soviet Union cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

They are expected to inspect the spaceport and meet staff, and to give a joint news conference.

Ukraine is checking unverified information that Russia may have used chemical weapons while besieging the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, has said.

“There is a theory that these could be phosphorus munitions,” Malyar said in televised comments, adding: “Official information will come later.”

Reuters reports that Russia’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Interfax news agency is reporting that the pro-Russian separatist forces in the self-proclaimed republic of Donetsk have denied using chemical weapons in Mariupol.