23:56
Hello, it’s Rebecca Ratcliffe with you as we continue our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. Here are some of the major developments of the past hour so you can get up to speed:
- Ukrainian troops have taken over the entire Kyiv region, but they have uncovered extensive evidence of what the Kyiv government calls war crimes committed by Russian forces. This includes bodies found on the streets, evidence of civilian murders, mass graves and murdered children.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a number of other authorities accused Russian troops of leaving mines behind and other explosives in their retreat from the Kyiv region. At Irpin, crews found 643 explosive objects.
- Russia has been specifically accused by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General of using children as “human shields” when regrouping its forces, as the first evidence of the newly liberated town of Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, emerges.
- Zelenskiy repeated his warning that Russian troops want to capture Donbass and southern Ukraine. In his nightly video address, Ukraine’s president said ‘we are aware that the enemy has reservations to increase pressure in the east’ but complained that Western allies had not sent enough anti-missile systems .
- The Polish Deputy Prime Minister accused France and Germany of being too close to Russia. In an interview with a German newspaper on Sunday, Jaroslaw Kaczynski said “the German government didn’t want to see what Russia was doing under Putin and we see the result today.”
- Ukrainian peace negotiator reportedly says Russia ‘verbally accepts’ Kyiv’s stance on peace talks, reported AFP, with the exception of the issue of Crimea. Moscow had also agreed that a referendum on Ukraine’s neutral status “will be the only way out of this situation”.
- Turkey is the most likely venue for peace talks between Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putinreported Interfax Ukraine.
- A Red Cross convoy heading for Mariupol will again attempt to evacuate civilians from the besieged port as Russian forces appeared to regroup for further attacks in the southeast.
- Maksim Levin, a Ukrainian photographer, was also found dead near kyiv. The Ministry of Defense said Levin, whose work has appeared in BBC and Reuters reports, was shot twice by Russian soldiers.
- The UK said authorities were working to collect evidence of Russian war crimes. Liz TrussBritish Foreign Secretary, tweeted that she was reviewing new information from the Kyiv region.
- The Baltic countries have stopped everything Russian oil importsand encourage the rest of the European Union follow the movement.
- British military intelligence says Russia has still not been able to destroy Ukraine’s air force and air defences. This failure “seriously hampered their efforts to gain broad air control, which significantly affected their ability to support the advance of their ground forces on a number of fronts”.
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