Russia-Ukraine war live: Wagner chief calls for action on Russian officials’ ‘crimes’; Moscow claims to have sunk Ukraine warship

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More from Emmanuel Macron’s speech to the security forum in Bratislava in Slovakia, as he called on the west to give Ukraine “tangible and credible” security guarantees.

Stressing that Ukraine “is today protecting Europe”, Macron said it was in the west’s interest that Kyiv have security assurances from Nato, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

“That is why I’m in favour, and this will be the subject of collective talks in the following weeks … to offer tangible and credible security guarantees to Ukraine,” he added.

He said various Nato members could provide these guarantees for the time being as Ukraine waits to join the alliance.

“We have to build something between the security provided to Israel and full-fledged membership,” Macron said.

The French head of state delivered the speech during a visit to Slovakia. At the Globsec event, focused on regional security issues, comes in the long runup to the Nato summit in Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, on 11 and 12 July.

Macron recalled that he once called the western defence alliance “brain dead”, but said Russia’s invasion last year “had jolted Nato awake”.

“We need to help Ukraine today with all means to carry out an effective counter-offensive” against Russian forces, Macron said.

“It’s what we are currently doing. We have to intensify our efforts because what will happen in the next few months offers a chance even for … a lasting peace.”

Macron also called on EU nations to buy European arms and acquire in-depth strike capabilities.

“It is up to us Europeans to in the future have our own ability to defend ourselves,” he said.

“A Europe of defence, a European pillar within Nato, is indispensable. It’s the only way to be credible … in the long-term,” he said.

Macron will next visit Moldova on Thursday where he will meet with fellow European leaders, including from outside the EU.

Ukrainian authorities have claimed that 27,000 Ukrainian civilians are being held on Russian territory.

The Ukrainian parliament commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said during a briefing, reported by the Ukrinform news website: “According to our data, more than 27,000 civilian hostages are being held by the Russian Federation. This is a huge number of our citizens who are actually held captive by the Russians.”

Asked whether there had been any progress on the release of UNIAN news agency journalist Dmytro Khilyuk from Russian captivity, the press conference said that there had been no progress.

“Unfortunately, he has not returned to Ukraine yet. I will not say that we will return him in the near future. I am used to saying real things,” the ombudsman said.

Lubinets said he had repeatedly raised this issue with the Russian side and would continue to raise it.

Russia does not plan to declare martial law after Tuesday’s large-scale drone strike on Moscow, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said.

His comments came after several leading Russian officials and pro-war figures urged the president, Vladimir Putin, to respond to the attacks by declaring a state of total war.

On Tuesday, Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman head of Chechnya whose forces have been fighting in Ukraine, said the Kremlin should declare martial law nationwide and use all its resources in Ukraine “to sweep away that terrorist gang”.

The Wagner mercenary group chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, similarly said Moscow had to “mobilise the whole of society right now”.

Hardline nationalists have for weeks called on the Kremlin to announce a new round of mobilisation, a widely unpopular move that the Kremlin has so far cavoided.

Putin appeared to play down the attack, and Russian state media touted that there was “no panic” in the city after the unprecedented incident.

Tuesday’s raids on Moscow were the latest in a series of drone strikes and sabotage operations behind enemy lines that have intensified in recent weeks before a much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. The attacks pale in comparison with Russia’s deadly assaults on Ukrainian cities that have hit large residential buildings or crowded business centres and killed dozens.

Read more here: Russia not planning to declare martial law after Moscow drone attacks, says Kremlin

Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, has dismissed US statements that it does not want to see the situation in Ukraine escalate, after this week’s drone attack on Moscow. On her Telegram channel, Zakharova said:

That’s funny. They broke the house themselves, doused it with gasoline, set fire to it themselves, planted fireworks and firewood themselves, and now they are declaring an ‘unwillingness to escalate’. The ‘war of the west’ in a hybrid format has been going on for a long time.

Sweden should become a full member of the Nato military alliance as soon as possible and before the Nato Vilnius summit in July, the Norwegian foreign minister, Anniken Huitfeldt, said on Wednesday.

“There is absolutely no reason for holding Sweden back,” Reuters reports she said on the eve of a two-day Nato meeting of foreign ministers in Oslo.

A dispatch from Shaun Walker at the Globsec forum in Bratislava, which the French president has addressed this afternoon.

It’s the third and final day of the Globsec forum and Emmanuel Macron has given a keynote speech on Ukraine and European security.

The speech, as my colleague Patrick Wintour reported this morning, was intended to reassure sceptical central and eastern and European elites that France is not looking to force Ukraine to make concessions at the negotiating table, noting that any peace deal should not involve the acceptance of lost territory.

After speaking in French, Macron answered questions from the audience of politicians and diplomats in English. Asked by the Ukrainian MP Maria Mezentseva how the international community should go about ensuring justice is done for Russian war crimes, up to and including the political elite, Macron first said the international community should support attempts to gather evidence, but injected a note of realism when it came to the international criminal court’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin.

“If in a few months to come we have a window for negotiations … the question will be arbitrage between a trial and a negotiation, and you have to negotiate with the leaders you have de facto, and I think negotiations will be a priority even if you will judge them the next day,” he said.

More details here of Ukraine’s shelling of Russia’s Belgorod border region.

“In Shebekino, fragments of artillery shells damaged one car and a section of the roadway. There are breakages in the power lines. Operational and emergency services are on the scene,” Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Telegram.

No casualties have been reported.

The Kremlin said earlier on Wednesday that it was concerned about reports of shelling in Belgorod, which has repeatedly come under fire from Ukraine’s neighbouring Kharkiv region.

The head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has said he has asked prosecutors to investigate “crimes” committed by senior Russian defence officials before and during the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Prigozhin openly feuded with the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and other top officials for month, accusing them of sabotaging Russia’s military by incompetence.

“Today I have sent letters to the investigative committee and the prosecutor’s office of the Russian Federation with a request to check on the fact of the commission of a crime during the preparation and during the conduct of the SMO [special military operation] by a host of senior functionaries of the defence ministry,” Reuters quoted Prigozhin as saying.

“These letters will not be published due to the fact that the investigative authorities will deal with this.”

The defence ministry did not immediately comment.

The German government is revoking the licenses of four of the five Russian consulates in the country, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry said on Wednesday according to Reuters.

The move comes in response to Moscow’s decision to limit the number of German officials in Russia to 350, the spokesperson said, adding that the withdrawal is to be completed by the end of the year.

German consulates in Kaliningrad, Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk will be closed, leaving only the German embassy in Moscow and the consulate in St Petersburg in operation.

Ukraine has responded in the latest diplomatic war of words with the EU over the trade bloc’s ban on grain exports.

The Ukraine agriculture ministry has said the ban is helping Vladimir Putin.

“Continuation of restrictions means putting additional weapons in Putin’s hands against unity in Europe,” it tweeted. “Current restrictions must be cancelled.”

Several of Ukraine’s neighbours, including its staunch ally Poland, imposed temporary restrictions on Kyiv’s agricultural products last month.

The European agriculture commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, called on Tuesday for restrictions on grain imports imposed by some EU states to be extended at least until the end of October. Hungary has asked them to be extended until 2024.

They are scheduled to end on 5 June.

Russia has claimed it has destroyed the last major warship of the Ukrainian naval forces, which it said was stationed in the southern port of Odesa.

“On 29 May, a high-precision strike by the Russian air force on a ship anchorage site in the port of Odesa destroyed the last warship of the Ukrainian navy, the Yuri Olefirenko,” the Russian army said in its daily briefing.

AFP was not able to independently confirm the claim.

A spokesperson for the Ukrainian navy declined to comment.

The Yuri Olefirenko is a medium-size landing ship for troops and vehicles.

Initially named Kirovograd, the ship was renamed in 2016 in honour of a Ukrainian marine killed near Mariupol in 2015.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, decorated its crew in June 2022.

Russian politicians have drafted a bill to ban legal or surgical sex changes, as Moscow sharpens its conservative turn during the Ukraine offensive.

Russia has for years been an inhospitable environment for anyone whose views differ from the hardline interpretation of “family values” promoted by the Kremlin and the Orthodox church.

Pressure had been building on LGBTQ+ activists in recent years but has intensified as troops fight in Ukraine, AFP reports.

The conflict is increasingly portrayed in Russia as an existential fight against the “decadent” west.

The bill – submitted on Tuesday – would prohibit “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person”, according to the website of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament.

This would include “the formation of a person’s primary and (or) secondary sexual characteristics”.

Russia has said it will evacuate children from villages near its border with Ukraine, after the region has been shelled for several days.

“The situation in (the border village of) Shebekino is worsening,” the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on Telegram, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“We are starting today to evacuate children from the Shebekino and Graivoron districts,” Gladkov said, referring to the most affected border areas.

“Today, the first 300 children will be taken to Voronezh” – a city about 155 miles (250km) further into Russia.

Shelling overnight in Shebekino injured four people, he said.

Russia has already been accused of in effect kidnapping children from the other side of the border, in the east of Ukraine, and rehoming them in Russia. The deportations have been called a war crime by the UN.

Drones attacked two oil refineries just 40-50 miles (65-80km) east of Russia’s biggest oil export terminals on Wednesday, sparking a fire at one and causing no damage to the other, according to Russian officials. At around 2am BST a drone struck the Afipsky oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region, causing a fire that was later extinguished, Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said. Another drone crashed into the Ilsky refinery, about 40 miles east of Novorossiisk.

Five people have been killed and 19 injured in the shelling of a village in Russian-occupied Luhansk region, according to the Telegram channel of Russian-installed officials there.

Serhiy Lysak, the governor of Dnipropetrovsk oblast, has reported on Telegram that an eight-year-old child has been injured in the shelling of the village of Mezhyrich near Pavlohrad in his region.

The governor of Belgorod, a Russian region that borders Ukraine, has claimed that four people were injured in Ukrainian shelling on a town close to the border. Two people were hospitalised as a result of the artillery strike on Shebekino, Vyacheslav Gladkov said, adding that it was the third time in a week the town had been hit.

The Russian security council deputy chair, Dmitry Medvedev, said on Wednesday Britain was Moscow’s “eternal enemy” and that any British officials who facilitated the war in Ukraine could be considered legitimate military targets. Medvedev, the hawkish longtime ally of Vladimir Putin, was responding to the British foreign secretary James Cleverly’s remark that Ukraine had a right to project force beyond its own borders, said Britain’s “goofy officials” should remember that Britain could be “qualified as being at war”.

Emmanuel Macron will make a diplomatic push to reassure central and eastern European countries that France understands that the continent’s security environment has been permanently changed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a speech to a security forum in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava, on Wednesday, Macron will call for a “strategic awakening” and highlight the work France has done to protect Nato’s eastern flank, including posting 1,250 French troops in Romania and 300 in Estonia. He will also stress the French role in unlocking the supply of battle tanks to Ukraine.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, accused Ukraine on Tuesday of seeking to “frighten” Russians after Moscow was targeted with a large-scale drone attack for the first time in the 15-month war.He said that Ukraine had chosen the path of attempting “to intimidate Russia, Russian citizens [with] attacks on residential buildings” and added that the drone attacks were “clearly a sign of terrorist activity”. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine order by Putin in February 2022, the UN reports that almost 24,000 Ukrainian civilians have died.

The Kremlin said on Wednesday President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdo?an would hold a meeting in the foreseeable future, although it was not yet agreed when and where the meeting would take place.

Putin congratulated his “dear friend” Erdo?an after the latter’s victory in Turkey’s presidential election on Sunday.

Reuters notes that Ankara has conducted a diplomatic balancing act since Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February last year, opposing western sanctions on Russia, while retaining close ties with both Moscow and Kyiv, hosting an early attempt at peace talks, and helping to broker the Black Sea grain initiative.

Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, reports:

Ursula von der Leyen, the EU commission president, speaking at a security conference in Bratislava, suggested Nato members could give Ukraine security guarantees on the way to Nato membership through what she described as member states offering Ukraine deterrence by denial.

With a Nato summit in Vilnius in July, debate is intensifying on what form of security guarantees can be provided to Ukraine stopping short of full membership, something that is seen as impossible while Ukraine remains at war with Russia. Ukraine is looking for a clear timetable and milestones but the US is reluctant to make such a commitment.

The EU president, without going into details, said examples from history could be used on Ukraine’s future security status, a possible reference to the position of neutrality adopted by Finland after the second world war up until its accession to the EU.

She said Nato members could provide a collection of guarantees that together represent deterrence by denial “through military equipment that can fortify Ukraine against future Russian attacks”. What was important, she said, was clarity that “Ukraine’s friends would be there for the long term”.

Broadly, deterrence by denial means convincing an adversary that “an attack will not succeed because the defences are strong”, while deterrence by retaliation, Nato’s previous concept,means threatening an adversary to “retaliate for an attack if it is carried out” to force the adversary to refrain from it. The denial strategy was adopted by Nato at its Madrid summit, but the implications for the defence of Ukraine in terms of troop stationing has not been fully spelled out.

She once again ruled out a peace plan with Russia based on a frozen conflict, saying the threat of a repeat of Russia’s invasion would cease only when all Russian military and equipment had left Ukrainian soil.

She added the EU had realised that it was not enough for the EU simply to tell Ukraine that the door was open for Ukraine’s eventual membership of the EU, but active steps have to be taken by the EU to bring itself closer to applicant states.