Russia-Ukraine war live: Moscow says it has repelled major offensive as Ukraine military says it has ‘no information’ on claim

Read More

The information war over releasing details of what is taking place in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia is liable to be fraught, and Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-installed leader in the occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast has rebuked those sharing information.

He wrote on Telegram “Friends, I ask you not to rush to publish news about the mass use of Leopard [tanks] on the Zaporizhzhia front. Wait for the official or at least video confirmation of their use by the enemy in our direction. Observe information hygiene!”

Earlier, Alexander Khodakovsky, the head of the pro-Moscow Vostok Battalion in the Donbas had posted to Telegram to say that “the situation on Novodonetsk and to the left towards Velykonovosilkivskyi is difficult” and that “for the first time we saw leopards [tanks] in our tactical area.”

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has reported on Telegram that two vehicles, including an ambulance, were damaged by shrapnel after air defence intercepted a target approaching the city of Belgorod. He stated that there were no casualties.

The claims have not been independently verified.

My colleague Dan Sabbagh, our defence and security editor, offers this analysis of developments in the ground on Ukraine:

Ukraine may not have formally declared its counteroffensive has begun, but the attacks being reported on Russian lines overnight and into Monday morning look like the first steps of what is likely to be a tough military campaign.

Individual reports should be viewed sceptically but taken together they can build up a picture. What is clear is that there is not an all-out assault, but also that the level of forces being committed are non-trivial. These are not exploratory raids, but most likely probing attacks, searching for local Russian weaknesses.

If the Russian Ministry of Defence is correct, and Ukraine has attacked with two brigades, that amounts to a force of several thousand troops.

There is also evidence of Ukraine undertaking attacks elsewhere on the 1,000km front. The leader of the Wagner mercenary forces, Yevgeny Prigozhin, complained that Russian troops had fled from part of Berkhivka, a village north of the recently taken Bakhmut, on the eastern front, suggesting that exploratory attacks may not only be taking place in the south.

It is possible, too, that Ukraine does not even know where it wants to place its key counter-attack forces, until a point of weakness is found. The aim of the initial attacks would be to secure a breakthrough that a subsequent force, held in reserve, can exploit to then surround the defenders.

Read more of Dan Sabbagh’s analysis here: Ukraine counter-attack looks imminent as troops search for Russian weaknesses

A supposed radio address by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, heard on Monday on Russian stations in regions bordering Ukraine was fake and the result of a hack, the Kremlin said.

RIA, the state-owned news agency, said a number of radio stations had carried the hoax address.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, said: “All of these messages are an utter fake,” the RIA reported.

Independent Russian media reported that the announcement had told residents of the Rostov, Belgorod and Voronezh regions, all of which adjoin Ukraine, that Kyiv’s forces had crossed the border with Russia.

They cited the address as saying, wrongly, that martial law had been declared in border regions and a nationwide military mobilisation had begun for Russia’s war with Ukraine, and that residents should evacuate deeper into Russia.

On Sunday, TV broadcasts in Crimea were reportedly hacked with a clip from a short film released by the Ukrainian government showing members of the military putting their fingers to their lips and saying “Shh” followed by the words: “Plans love silence. There will be no announcement about the start.”

Ukraine’s border force said in a Telegram post: “Several cable operators in Crimea are turning off the signal due to the fact that good people hacked TV broadcasts.”

Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence minister, shared the clip on Twitter on Sunday with a quote from the Depeche Mode song Enjoy the Silence.

“Words are very unnecessary / They can only do harm,” he tweeted.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior aide to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has warned against trusting reports from Russia.

On Twitter, he said: “Russian news reports have long since become a separate virtual meta-universe.”

Reuters reports that two Russian strategic bomber planes have carried out routine flights over the Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea off the north coast of Nato member Norway, the defence ministry said on Monday.

Russia regularly flies its Tu-95 long-range bombers, which are capable of carrying nuclear missiles, over international waters.

The flight lasted five hours and was carried out “in strict compliance with international airspace regulations”, the ministry said.

German media has likened the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to an “erupting volcano”, after he broke through his usual reserve and delivered a fiercely passionate defence of sending military aid to Ukraine following heckling at an event in the town of Falkensee outside Berlin on Friday evening.

A few dozen protesters had booed and jeered the chancellor during the “Europe festival” event, chanting “warmongers” and “Create peace without weapons”. Some of the protesters wore T-shirts with anti-vaxxer messages, others waved a blue flag with a white dove, a mainstay of the West Germany anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s.

Scholz eventually talked back at the hecklers. “First of all: warmonger,” he shouted, gripping his microphone with both hands. “Putin is the warmonger. He marched into Ukraine with 200,000 soldiers, he mobilised many more and risked the lives of his own citizens for an imperialist dream. Putin wants to destroy Ukraine.”

Russia’s president had killed many Ukrainians including children and old people, he said. “That is murder,” Scholz said in the impromptu speech, which lasted about four minutes. “Peace and freedom are under attack in this war.”

Scholz, a trained lawyer, is usually known for his clipped and restrained manner of public speaking, though he has dialled up the volume at strategic moments at campaign events or Bundestag debates in the past. “Scholz is like a volcano,” S?ddeutsche wrote on Monday. “He rarely erupts, but when he does sparks start flying.”

Russia’s defence ministry said on Monday that “more than 10” Ukrainian fighters had been killed by air and artillery strikes in Russia’s Belgorod region, repelling a Ukrainian attempt to cross into the region on Sunday, Russian news agencies reported.

These reports have not been independently verified.

The governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov, reported fighting in the town of Novaya Tavolzhanka with what he called “Ukrainian saboteurs”. He said on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had launched 185 shells at the town.

On Sunday, two pro-Ukraine groups of Russian fighters said they had captured several soldiers during a cross-border raid into the region. They said they were willing to hand over the soldiers in exchange for a meeting withGladkov but claim he did not show up. They shared a video clip showing what appeared to be about a dozen Russian soldiers being held captive, with two lying on hospital beds, and said they would be sent to Ukraine.

A two-day event has started in the European parliament that has brought together more than 200 Russian opposition and civil society activists to discuss how the EU can support Russian democratic forces.

Convened by four MEPs, the conference is entitled The Day After, and is meant to discuss strategy for a hypothetical post-Putin Russia.

“I would call this the first gathering of people who believe in the future of a democratic Russia,” said Andrius Kubilius, the Lithuanian MEP behind the forum.

Speaking in the opening session, the exiled opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the richest person in Russia until he was jailed for a decade in 2003, said the only hope for a future Russia that does not cause problems for the rest of the world was fundamental political change.

“This regime should be destroyed, there is no other road to a peaceful normal future for Russia and for Europe and the whole world. The simple change of Putin to another person with a different name but no move to a federalised parliamentary system with free elections will not change anything,” he said.

How to get to that stage is a more difficult question, of course. “The conditions in Russia are certainly not ideal for the rise of democracy,” said Katarina Barley, vice-president of the European parliament, in what is perhaps the understatement of the day.

Ukraine’s military said on Monday it had no information about a major offensive which Russia said Kyiv had launched in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk, Reuters reports.

“We do not have such information and we do not comment on any kind of fake,” a spokesperson for the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff said in response to a question from Reuters.