Russia-Ukraine war live: Kremlin has ‘Belarus as nuclear hostage’ with plans to station tactical nuclear weapons, says Kyiv

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Former Russian state TV editor Marina Ovsyannikova, who in 2022 interrupted a live news broadcast denouncing the Ukraine war, has said her son called her a “traitor” for her actions, adding that she may never be able to return to Russia.

Ukrainian-born Ovsyannikova, who was an editor at Channel One, burst on to the set of the nightly news in March 2022 shouting: “Stop the war. No to war.”

She also held a sign saying: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” It was signed in English: “Russians against the war.”

At the time, she was fined 30,000 roubles (?460) for ignoring protest laws. She continued protesting against the war after quitting her job at Channel One.

Last August, she was charged with spreading false information about the Russian army for holding up a poster that read “Putin is a murderer, his soldiers are fascists” during a solo protest on the Moskva River embankment opposite the Kremlin.

She was subsequently forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and placed under house arrest in Moscow, where she was to await trial. She faced up to 10 years in prison if found guilty. However, she escaped her pre-trial house arrest and fled to Europe. She now lives in Paris, France, with her daughter.

Shortly after she left Russia, she said her son had told her that her decision to protest had ruined the family’s life.

She told BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg:

My son still called me a traitor, that I betrayed our family. I betrayed our country. I can say that for millions of families [this] is the same situation – war ruins a lot of families. And this is a real catastrophe because Russians have been destroyed by Putin, not only physically by him sending them to war but also on a psychological level.

Russia is now deep in depression, there is an apathy everywhere and millions of people just don’t know what the future holds.

When asked if she thought it would ever be safe for her to return to Russia, she said:

I can’t go back now. But I do see my future with Russia. My son is there, my family is there, my mum, and they don’t want to leave the country. For me, I am not indifferent to the future of this country and I will fight for the future even being outside of Russia.

Ovsyannikova said she was “ashamed” of Russia for invading Ukraine and recalling how she had “mixed emotions” before she made the 2022 protest, she explained:

A lot of factors came together. Over a long time I realised that the Russian TV became like a gigantic brainwashing machine. Secondly, I have Ukrainian roots – my father is from Ukraine. It was like this huge emotional outburst. But I didn’t really care what would happen to me later.”

Ovsyannikova had worked at the channel for nearly 20 years and admitted she had in the past “shut my eyes to it [the propaganda]”, but the war became “a point of no return”.

She said:

This propaganda is made on a very high level …These people who are working in the main media channels, they don’t really believe it. They have similar views to me, and also, you can say that people who are pro-Putin, who are convinced in him, as no more than 10 or 20%.

The arrest warrant handed to President Putin by the international criminal court could herald change, she added:

I think this is the first signal that the Russian elite should take notice of, and perhaps some kind of resistance will start within the Russian elite and they might plot against him.

At least this is some kind of hope for me.

Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak has accused Vladimir Putin of violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and resorting to “scare” tactics.

On Saturday, Putin announced Russia would station tactical nuclear weapons in neighbour and ally Belarus “without violating our international agreements on nuclear non-proliferation”, Agence France-Presse reports.

But Podolyak said on Twitter:

Making a statement about tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, he admits that he is afraid of losing and all he can do is scare with tactics …

Second. He once again states his involvement in the crime. Violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty …

Ukrainian refugees are increasingly being targeted for sexual exploitation with an increase in interest in pornography claiming to feature refugees from the war-torn country, according to research.

Thomson Reuters has conducted the research, which has found that Ukrainian refugees may be victims of both traffickers on the ground and cyber-voyeurs.

Researchers identified an increased interest in Ukrainian pornography since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 by analysing global internet search engine traffic. They believe the increased interest online may be encouraging traffickers to act more often and with greater impunity.

The organisation has called for urgent action to strengthen protections to help keep Ukrainian women and children who are at risk from sexual exploitation safe.

The analysis of internet search trends has found views of pornographic videos claiming to show Ukrainian refugees have exploded in the past six months. A snapshot of 13 pornographic videos claiming to feature Ukrainian refugees shows they were viewed 275,000 times in January.

While there was evidence of sexual exploitation and trafficking of some Ukrainians before the war started, the latest data shows a significant increase since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Worldwide search traffic for exploitative terms such as “Ukrainian porn” have been consistently at higher levels since the February 2022 invasion.

Thomson Reuters is working with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to raise awareness about this sexual exploitation. They have partnered to launch the “Be Safe” campaign to encourage the global community to provide Ukrainians with safety information and to help them to spot the warning signs of traffickers.

Valiant Richey, the OSCE special representative and coordinator for combating trafficking in human beings, said: “This analysis shows just how crucial it is to keep women and children fleeing the war safe. The high demand from men for sexual access to Ukrainian women and girls creates an enormous incentive for traffickers to recruit vulnerable people in order to meet that demand and profit from it.

“We already found direct evidence of recruitment attempts on chats used by Ukrainians and an increase in the advertisement of Ukrainians online.”

The new data is based on “interest scores”, which relate directly to search traffic and compare a term’s popularity over a specific period.

Earlier analysis in 2022 found that global internet searches for sexually exploitative terms specifically relating to Ukrainian refugees surged following the outbreak of the war. In March 2022, research found a 300% global increase in these terms.

You can read the full report here.

Here are some images coming to us over the wires.

Here’s some more on football.

Later on Sunday, Ukraine take on England at the UK’s Wembley Stadium in a qualifying match for the men’s Euro 2024 football competition.

UK ministers offered 1,000 free tickets to Ukrainians and their sponsors to attend the match at Wembley.

Denys Dreyzer, 18, from Kherson, fled Ukraine in May 2022 and came to the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

He and his family have since moved out from their hosts’ home.

Dreyzer, who works as caretaker for the Ukrainian Community Centre and is studying at the University of Bolton, will attend the game with his mother and sister, who he lives with in Bradford. His father is in Kyiv.

Discussing the match, he told PA News:

I hope it will be amazing, because it’s like new fresh air to our community to watch our guys fighting to get to the Euros.

We hope this game our guys will show what we can do. And also it will be good present for our military, because they are every day fighting for our freedom.

I hope they will watch this game and this game will will make them happy.

The Azadi Stadium in Tehran can hold up to 78,000 at capacity. As Anton Miranchuk of Lokomotiv Moscow kicked off under a giant portrait of the former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini on Thursday night, let’s generously say it wasn’t quite full. Still, what crowd there was made a pretty decent noise.

There were even a few hundred travelling fans, who were rewarded when Miranchuk scored for Russia from the penalty spot. Early in the second half the Porto striker Mehdi Taremi equalised for Iran, and although the later stages disintegrated into a procession of substitutions, the visitors were ultimately a little fortunate to escape with a 1-1 draw.

Honours even on the pitch, then, which felt like a diplomatically fitting result. Over the past year, as the west has begun to close ranks, these two pariah states have found themselves locked in a pragmatic but increasingly enthusiastic embrace.

Russian money has been pouring into Iranian mining and infrastructure projects, to the point where it is now Iran’s largest source of foreign investment. Iran has invited Russian businesspeople to Tehran to share advice on circumventing western sanctions. The two countries have linked their banking systems and embarked on joint naval drills. And last month the Russian and Iranian sports ministers signed a “memorandum of mutual understanding”, vowing to strengthen their sporting ties.

On Sunday evening, Ukraine’s footballers will step out at Wembley Stadium to a vivid fanfare: a sea of flags and bold gestures, an outpouring of affection and solidarity that has greeted them pretty much everywhere they have travelled in the last year. At exactly the same time, in St Petersburg’s Krestovsky Stadium, Russia will play Iraq in their first national team game on home soil since the start of last year’s war.

Good luck finding the game on television or tracking down a match report on the Fifa website. But seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, Russia has returned to the international football treadmill, and nobody seems overly perturbed by it.

Even Ukraine, who called for Iran to be thrown out of last year’s World Cup for its role in supplying drones to the Russian war effort, has in this instance opted for apathy over outrage. “Those countries who play Russia, an aggressor, support Russian aggression and what Russia is doing to Ukraine,” said Ukraine’s caretaker manager, Ruslan Rotan, last week. “We don’t have to think about those countries, we don’t have to pay attention to them. They are not worthy. The bottom line is, forget Russia.”

Read the full report here.

Russia and China are not creating a military alliance, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said in a televised interview broadcast on Sunday, stating that the two countries’ military cooperation was transparent, news agencies reported.

Putin also said western powers were building a new “axis”, bearing some resemblance to Germany and Japan’s second world war alliance.

Interfax quoted Putin as saying:

We are not creating any military alliance with China.

Yes, we have cooperation in the sphere of military-technical interaction. We are not hiding this.

Everything is transparent, there is nothing secret.

Kyiv on Sunday said Russia was holding Minsk as a “nuclear hostage” after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to ally Belarus, Agence France-Presse reports.

“The Kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danilov, wrote on Twitter, adding that the move was “a step towards the internal destabilisation of the country”.

The UK Ministry of Defence says that since the start of March 2023 Russia is likely to have launched at least 71 Iranian-designed Shahed series one-way attack uncrewed aerial vehicle (OWA-UAVS) against targets across Ukraine.

It says Russia is likely launching Shaheds from two axes: from Russia’s Krasnodar Krai in the east and from Bryansk Oblast in the north-east.

Ukraine will no longer resort to “dangerous” monetary financing to fund the war against Russia, its central bank governor, Andriy Pyshnyi, told the Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday.

The head of the National Bank of Ukraine said that it had “created huge risks for macro-financial stability” when the bank was last year forced to print billions of hryvnia to plug a budget shortfall, adding that an “open conflict” with the government over the issue had been resolved.

“It was a quick remedy, but very dangerous,” Pyshnyi told the newspaper.

Reactions continue on Vladimir Putin’s announcement Russia will station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“It’s a very significant move,” Nikolai Sokov, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, told Reuters.

“Russia had always been very proud that it had no nuclear weapons outside its territory. So, now, yes, they are changing that and it’s a big change.”

Putin did not specify when the weapons would be transferred to Belarus, which has borders with three Nato members – Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. He said Russia would complete the construction of a storage facility there by 1 July.

“This is part of Putin’s game to try to intimidate Nato … because there is no military utility from doing this in Belarus as Russia has so many of these weapons and forces inside Russia,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons called Putin’s announcement on an extremely dangerous escalation.

“In the context of the war in Ukraine, the likelihood of miscalculation or misinterpretation is extremely high. Sharing nuclear weapons makes the situation much worse and risks catastrophic humanitarian consequences,” it said on Twitter.

Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. This is Christine Kearney to bring you up to speed with the latest developments.

The US – the world’s other nuclear superpower – has reacted cautiously to Russia’s deal to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

A senior US administration official says there are no signs Moscow plans to use its nuclear weapons.

Putin likened his plans to the US stationing its weapons in Europe and said that Russia would not be transferring control to Belarus. But this could be the first time since the mid-1990s that Russia were to base such weapons outside the country.

Hawkish Russian politicians and commentators have long-speculated about nuclear strikes, saying Russia has the right to defend itself with nuclear weapons if it is pushed beyond its limits.

“Tactical” nuclear weapons refer to those used for specific gains on a battlefield rather than those with the capacity to wipe out cities. It is unclear how many such weapons Russia has, given it is an area still shrouded in cold war secrecy.

Experts say the development is significant, since Russia had until now been proud that unlike the US, it did not deploy nuclear weapons outside its borders.

The senior US administration official noted that Russia and Belarus had been speaking about the transfer of nuclear weapons for some time.

“We have seen reports of Russia’s announcement and will continue to monitor this situation,” the US defence department’s press office said in a written statement.

“We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture nor any indications Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon. We remain committed to the collective defence of the Nato alliance.”

In other key developments shortly after 9am in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv:

Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence Hanna Maliar went on Facebook to urge Ukrainians to not openly discuss details about the country’s upcoming offensive. “On live broadcasts, don’t ask experts questions [in the vein of] ‘how is the counter-offensive going?’, don’t write blogs or posts on this topic, and don’t discuss military plans of our army publicly at all. We have one strategic plan – to liberate all our territories. And as for the details – that’s simply a military secret,” Maliar wrote.

The head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant next week to assess the serious security situation there, the IAEA said. Rafael Grossi said in a statement that the nuclear safety and security dangers at the Russian-held plant were “all too obvious”.

Russia fired on a humanitarian aid delivery point in the city of Kherson on Saturday, injuring two civilians, according to the Ukrainian military. Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional military administration, said: “Russian occupiers continue shelling the places where civilians are provided with aid.”

The top commander of Ukraine’s military has said that his forces are pushing back against Russian troops in the long and grinding battle for the town of Bakhmut. Separately, Britain’s defence ministry said the months-long Russian assault on the city had stalled, mainly as a result of heavy troop losses. British military intelligence also said Russia appeared to be moving to a defensive strategy in eastern Ukraine, Associated Press reported.

Russian oil company Gazprom reduced gas exports to the EU through Ukraine by 15%, the Kyiv Independent reports. On 24 March, Gazprom recorded a gas transit flow of 42.5m cubic metres. A day later, the volume decreased to 36.2m cubic metres.

The US president, Joe Biden, and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, have displayed a united front against authoritarian regimes as Biden visited the Canadian capital days after the leaders of China and Russia held a Moscow summit. Reuters reported that images of Biden and Trudeau standing side by side in Ottawa on Friday announcing agreements including on semiconductors and migration represented a counterpoint to the scene in Moscow days ago.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, spoke by phone with Putin and thanked him for his “positive attitude” in extending the Black Sea grain deal, the Turkish presidency said on Saturday. It said the two leaders discussed steps to improve Turkish-Russian relations, and developments regarding the war in Ukraine, and that Erdo?an expressed the importance of ending the conflict through negotiations as soon as possible, Reuters reported.

More than 5,000 former criminals have been pardoned after finishing their contracts to fight in Russia’s Wagner mercenary group against Ukraine, the founder of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Saturday. The Wagner group, originally staffed by battle-hardened veterans of the Russian armed forces, took on a much more prominent role in the Ukraine war after the Russian army suffered a series of humiliating defeats last year, Reuters reported.

The United Nations has said it is “deeply concerned” by what it said were summary executions of prisoners of war by both Russian and Ukrainian forces on the battlefield. A report from the UN’s office of the high commissioner for human rights said its monitors had documented dozens of the executions by both sides, that the actual number was likely higher and that they “may constitute war crimes”.

Police in Russia have placed a former speechwriter for Vladimir Putin on a wanted list of suspects, the latest step in a sweeping crackdown on dissent. The Associated Press reports that Abbas Gallyamov wrote speeches for Putin during the Russian leader’s 2008-12 stint as prime minister. Gallyamov later became an outspoken political consultant and analyst who was frequently quoted by Russian and foreign media. He has lived abroad in recent years.

Russia’s parliament speaker has proposed banning the activities of the international criminal court (ICC) after the court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, accusing him of war crimes. Vyacheslav Volodin, an ally of Putin’s, said on Saturday that Russian legislation should be amended to prohibit any activity of the ICC in Russia and to punish any who gave “assistance and support” to the court.