Pope Francis says Moscow's invasion of Ukraine was 'perhaps somehow provoked'
Angela Giuffrida
Pope Francis has said Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was “perhaps somehow provoked” as he recalled a conversation in the run-up to the war in which he was warned that Nato was “barking at the gates of Russia”.
In an interview with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, conducted last month and published on Tuesday, the pontiff condemned the “ferocity and cruelty of the Russian troops” while warning against what he said was a fairytale perception of the conflict as good versus evil.
He said:
We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.
Ukraine needs more long-range weapons, Zelenskiy says
Ukraine’s military has enough ammunition and weapons, but needs more long-range weapons, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told Danish journalists during a press briefing.
Zelenskiy said:
We have enough weapons. What we don’t have enough of are the weapons that really hits the range that we need to reduce the advantage of the Russian Federation’s equipment.
Meanwhile, Germany’s defence minister has said that the training of Ukrainian troops on German howitzers would soon be completed, paving the way for the use of the weapons in the war in Ukraine.
Western countries have promised Ukraine Nato-standard weapons but deploying them is taking time.
Germany is sending Ukraine the Panzerhaubitze 2000, which is one of the most powerful artillery weapons in Bundeswehr inventories and can hit targets at a distance of 40 km (25 miles).
Germany pledged in May to supply Kyiv with seven self-propelled howitzers, adding to five such artillery systems the Netherlands have promised.
Defence minister Christine Lambrecht gave no details on when the howitzers would be sent to Ukraine.
Kyiv needs 1,000 howitzers, 500 tanks and 1,000 drones among other heavy weapons, Presidential Adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said on Monday.
The Guardian’s Russia affairs correspondent, Pjotr Sauer, has spoken to the Russians who are fighting for Ukraine, including those who have joined a special military unit in the Ukrainian armed forces that is made up entirely of Russian nationals.
One fighter said of his decision:
I made compromises with myself for a long time … But on the 24 February [the day Russia launched its invasion], any talk of compromise became impossible. I could not be part of this crime.
The Kremlin is “sure” that pro-Russian separatist leaders in the Donbas would be willing to listen to an appeal from the UK over the fate of two Britons sentenced to death for fighting for Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a conference call that London had not contacted Moscow about the issue.
A court in the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in eastern Ukraine last week sentenced Britons Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner and Moroccan Brahim Saadoun to death, saying they were guilty of “mercenary activities”.
Their families deny the trio, who were contracted by the Ukrainian armed forces, were mercenaries. Russia alone recognises the independence of the DPR.
Peskov also restated one of Moscow’s justifications for sending troops into Ukraine: that it had to protect the mostly Russian speaking people of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, collectively known as the Donbas.
Kyiv rejects the accusation of oppression of Russian-speakers as a baseless pretext for a land grab.
Rachel Hall here taking over the blog for the rest of the day - please do send over anything we’ve missed to rachel.hall@theguardian.com.
The intense battle for Sievierodonetsk will be remembered as one of the “most brutal” Europe has ever seen and is taking a “terrifying” toll on Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday evening, as Russian forces move closer to capturing the strategic eastern city.
Russian forces have cut off all last routes out of Sievierodonetsk by destroying all three bridges to the embattled eastern city, according to the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai. In a video update, Haidai said Russia had not “completely captured” the city and “a part of the city” was under Ukrainian control.
Russian artillery was hitting an industrial zone where 500 civilians were sheltering in the eastern Ukrainian city, Haidai added. Ukrainian troops in the city must “surrender or die”, a Russian-backed separatist leader in the self-proclaimed republic in Donetsk warned.
Russia’s ministry of defence has again claimed today that surrendering Ukrainian forces in the Donbas have been fired on by their own side, in a move it described as “the Kyiv nationalist regime trying to stop the retreat and surrender of its units by punitive actions of detachments”. The claims have not been independently verified.
The deputy head of the Russian-imposed military-civilian administration of the occupied Kherson region in Ukraine, Kirill Stremousov, has said it will remain forever Russian.
Ukrainian authorities said they discovered a new mass grave of civilians near Bucha in the Kyiv region. Investigators exhumed seven bodies from makeshift graves in a forest outside the village of Vorzel, less than 10km from Bucha, the scene of previous alleged Russian atrocities. Kyiv region’s police chief, Andriy Nyebytov, said: “This is another sadistic crime of the Russian army.” One man, he said, “has two injuries. He was shot in the knee with a gun. The second shot was into his temple.”
The UK’s ministry of defence has issued its daily assessment of the situation on the ground in Ukraine, suggesting “Russia’s operational main effort remains the assault against the Sievierodonetsk pocket in the Donbas and its Western Group of forces have likely made small advances in the Kharkiv sector for the first time in several weeks.”
The UK’s foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has refused to be drawn on whether she would negotiate directly with the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic over the situation of Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner. The two British men have been sentenced to death in eastern Ukraine by what Truss called a “sham trial”.
Zelenskiy accused the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, of being too concerned about the repercussions his support for Ukraine would have for Berlin’s ties with Moscow. “We need from Chancellor Scholz the certainty that Germany supports Ukraine,” he said in an interview with German public broadcaster ZDF. “He and his government must decide: there can’t be a trade-off between Ukraine and relations with Russia.”
The mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, has accused “traitors” of passing on vital information to Russian forces during the bombardment of the southern port city at the beginning of the invasion.Boychenko said the destruction of the city’s critical infrastructure, including power supplies, was well-coordinated because Russia was provided with the coordinates.
About 1,200 bodies, including those found in mass graves, have not yet been identified, according to the head of the national police in Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko.Criminal proceedings had been opened over the deaths of more than 12,000 Ukrainians, Klymenko said. About 75% of the dead were men, 2% children and the rest women, he said.
Russia earned €93bn in revenue from fossil fuel exports in the first 100 days of the war, according to research by Finland’s Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea).With 61% of these exports, worth €56bn (£48bn), going to the member states of the European Union, the bloc of countries remains Russia’s largest export market.
Ukraine has lost a quarter of its arable land since the Russian invasion, notably in the south and east, deputy agriculture minister Taras Vysotskiy said.At a news conference on Monday, Vysotskiy insisted food security for the country’s population was not under immediate threat: “Crop planting this year is more than sufficient [and] the current situation of crop planting areas … does not pose a threat to Ukraine’s food security”.
Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, has said he expects the war in Ukraine could last up to two years. Kasyanov, who championed close ties with the west while prime minister, said he felt that Vladimir Putin was already not thinking properly and that he was convinced Russia could return to a democratic path.
That is it, from Martin Belam, for now. I will be back later. Rachel Hall will be with you shortly to continue our live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Here are some of the most recent images from Ukraine that have been sent to us over the newswires.
A view yesterday of the completely destroyed and burnt-out local bazaar buildings in Kharkiv. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
A picture taken during a visit to Mariupol organized by the Russian military shows a Russian serviceman on guard in front of a school. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA
A still from a video showing a police officer evacuating people at a location given as Pryvillia town, Luhansk. Photograph: National Police Of Ukraine/Reuters
Smoke rises after shelling in Donetsk on 13 June. Photograph: Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images
Yesterday evening Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskiy claimed that the intense battle for Sievierodonetsk will be remembered as one of the “most brutal” Europe has ever seen. Peter Beaumont puts that claim into context here:
The claims by Zeleinskiy that the battles in the Donbas are among the most brutal and violent ever seen in Europe is best described as somewhat hyperbolic with considerable competition for that distinction.
It comes nowhere close to the attrition of some of the battles of the first world war - not least the Somme, where the British suffered almost 58,000 casualties on the first day alone of the battle including 19,240 killed.
In the battle for the Selow Heights outside Berlin in April 1945, the Soviets saw 30,000 killed, most in the space of less than a week. All of which was dwarfed by the losses on both sides at Stalingrad – seen as a key turning point in the war in Europe - which saw some 2 million casualties suffered by both sides during the course of the battle, including 40,000 Soviet civilian deaths.
Russia’s ministry of defence has issued its daily operations briefing for today. In it, they claim:
High-precision long-range Kaliber missiles destroyed an arsenal of artillery weapons and ammunition of the armed forces of Ukraine in Chernihiv region
Operational-tactical and army aviation hit 101 areas of concentration of manpower and military equipment, leading to the loss of 350 lives, three command posts, 13 tanks and other combat armoured vehicles
Russian air defence systems shot down a MiG-29 aircraft and a Mi-24 helicopter
The claims have not been independently verified.
In addition to the regular update, today’s operational briefing also carries an additional message, in which the Russian ministry of defence claim that 30 Ukrainians who were in the process of surrendering in the occupied self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic were shot in the back by other Ukrainian forces. The claim has not been independently verified, but the message reads:
This incident, like many others like it, clearly shows that against the backdrop of growing military failures and the demoralisation of Ukrainian troops, the Kyiv nationalist regime is trying to stop the retreat and surrender of its units by punitive actions of detachments.
The lives of Ukrainian servicemen and mobilised fighters of territorial defence units mean nothing to the current leadership of Ukraine.
The deputy head of the Russian-imposed military-civilian administration of the occupied Kherson region in Ukraine has said it will remain forever Russian.
The Russian RIA Novosti news agency reports Kirill Stremousov saying:
We are already irrevocably the Russian Federation. We need to remember this, rebuild, get passports of citizens of the Russian Federation and remember that we will really feel at home there and feel good.
Serhai Haidai, Ukraine’s governor of Luhansk, has confirmed that as usual there will be a free evacuation train for civilians from Pokrovsk to Lviv at 4.30pm local time today.
