Vladimir Putin Russia-Ukraine war

Kyiv has been unable to export grain supplies due to Russia's invasion, which has sent global food prices soaring.

As Ukraine’s Western backers were considering whether to send more arms supplies to Kyiv, Putin also told Macron and Scholz the continuing arms supplies were “dangerous”, warning “of the risks of further destabilisation of the situation and aggravation of the humanitarian crisis,” the Kremlin said. “Putin said that Russia is willing to allow the passage of those ships, roughly around 300 of them, from the main port in Odesa in Ukraine. That is something up for discussion, but of course, that is something that has to be done through the Russian military,” Jabbari said. “Russia is ready to help find options for the unhindered export of grain, including the export of Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea ports,” Putin told Macron and Scholz, the Kremlin said.

France and Germany's leaders have urged Vladimir Putin to hold direct and serious negotiations with Ukraine's president.

There are multiple, credible reports of war crimes carried out by occupying Russian forces. It all comes as Moscow claims to have captured the crucial crossroads city of Lyman - and continues its assault of Severodonesk. The industrial city has been encircled for days - with reports that Ukraine may order a strategic withdrawal of its forces. It is a stark contrast not just with the readout from the EU allies - who said the focus was on the welfare of the 2500 prisoners of war who surrendered - but with the evidence of all independent observers. To read the Kremlin's report of the call between Presidents Putin and Macron and Chancellor Scholz, Russia is engaged in a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. Its actions in the southern port of Mariupol - a city that has been reduced to rubble - are all about "establishing peaceful life" and "liberation". Elsewhere in the call, the French and German leaders asked Putin to lift Russia's blockade of the Ukrainian port of Odesa, to allow for grain exports. Russia has previously said more than 900 of the fighters were moved to a reopened prison colony in Olenivka, a village in Russian-occupied Donetsk. A smaller number with serious wounds were taken to a hospital in the town of Novoazovsk, also in Donetsk.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he will not tolerate criticism of his assault on Ukraine. Russians who describe his “special military ...

Putin pledged to Scholz and Macron that if Ukraine demines areas of the sea around ports, Russia would not use the opportunity to take “offensive actions,” the German statement said. Putin said Moscow was ready to continue peace talks with Kyiv, Russia’s Tass news agency reported, citing the Kremlin press service. Scholz and Macron called on Putin to negotiate directly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to end the three-month conflict. Meanwhile, Ukraine has continued to seek military support from Western allies to enable it to resist Russian military pressure in the east of the country. Russia has been trying to encircle Severodonetsk, the easternmost city still under Ukraine’s control. Something must be done for the world to get better.” Haidai said Severodonetsk remains under Ukrainian control — echoing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — as Russian forces try to encircle the city. In interviews with The Washington Post, foreign fighters from the United States and elsewhere described glaring disparities between what they expected the war to be like and what they experienced. Russian forces are making gains in eastern Ukraine, with more than 95 percent of the Luhansk region under their control, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. Severodonetsk, one of the largest Ukrainian-controlled cities in Luhansk, is now facing a direct Russian assault. The Russian state-owned news agency Tass appeared to confirm Denisova’s account. Moscow has tried to downplay these losses, but the battlefield setbacks have raised questions. Russia is also trying to encircle the eastern city of Severodonetsk, but the regional governor said Saturday that the city has not been cut off.

The Kremlin chief warned French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saying they could further destabilise the situation in the ...

"The president of the Republic and the German chancellor asked for the release of some 2,500 defenders of Azovstal made prisoners of war by the Russian forces," the French presidency said. Macron and Scholz for their part urged Russia to lift the blockade of the Ukrainian port of Odessa to allow the export of grain, the French presidency said. "Russia is ready to help find options for the unhindered export of grain, including the export of Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea ports," Putin told Macron and Scholz, the Kremlin said.

Ukraine pleads for heavy weapons as Russia advances in the east, claiming to have captured strategically important Lyman.

Two rounds landed in courtyards of high-rise buildings, and one shell fell close to a kindergarten, CNN reported. Russia’s defence ministry claims to have captured the strategically important city of Lyman and several other smaller towns and encircled Sievierodonetsk, which Ukraine denies. Ukrainian officials say they urgently need advanced US-made mobile multiple launch rocket systems, which are capable of striking targets up to 300km away, to halt Russian advances in Luhansk and Donetsk.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Lyman, the second small city to fall this week, had been “completely liberated” by a joint force of Russian soldiers and ...

Meanwhile, some 50 homes in the village of Demydiv remain partially submerged months after a dam was destroyed and the area flooded to stop Russian troops from advancing on Ukraine capital Kyiv, regional governor Oleksiy Kuleba said. The Ukrainian military blew up a dam on the river Irpin in February, sending water surging into the village and thousands of acres around it, flooding houses and fields, but preventing Russian tanks from reaching the capital city. The Russian Defense Ministry said Lyman, the second small city to fall this week, had been “completely liberated” by a joint force of Russian soldiers and Kremlin-backed separatists, who have waged war for eight years in the industrial Donbas region bordering Russia. Ukraine’s train system has ferried arms and evacuated citizens through Lyman, a key railway hub in the east.

As Russia seeks to capture the last Ukrainian controlled city in the eastern Luhansk region, Ukraine announced a counteroffensive around a southern port ...

Thermobaric weapons are not banned, and they are not addressed in the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements that govern warfare. Such explosives, also called fuel-air bombs or vacuum bombs, scatter a flammable mist or powder that is then ignited and burns in the air. The Russian weapon carries a box of rockets atop a tanklike tracked vehicle. Better use of artillery and a deliberately slower tempo of operations has helped Russia advance in the region, according to analysts. Russian and Ukrainian forces have been locked in increasingly heavy street fighting in the area of Sievierodonetsk, a major railway hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. And Ukraine’s Army said on April 5 that it had fired Heatwave thermobaric rockets from a captured system back at Russian troops, intending to burn them with their own weapon, in fighting near Izium. He said that the shells landed in a residential area near a kindergarten. According to Ukrainian and British officials, Russia has been using one of its most fearsome conventional weapons, a rocket artillery system nicknamed the Heatwave, in a systematic fashion. Russian forces have been active in the region since 2014 in support of separatists. The Ukrainian military said on Sunday that hospitals in Crimea had been ordered by Moscow to stop treating civilians to attend to the needs of wounded soldiers. Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 and has been a key staging ground for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine had been asking for the systems, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain agreeing on Friday that they should be supplied.

Vladimir Kara-Murza's wife Evgenia says Russian president will fall over war in Ukraine.

And I brought him back to the US. He recovered and then he went back to Russia. Everything – speaking and being on stage, speaking to journalists – is very new to me. Kara-Murza said that since the war started Russia had switched from being an authoritarian regime to a totalitarian one. “Thanks to an amazing independent investigation by Bellingcat and Insider, we now know the names and the faces of those people from the FSB, who had followed him before the poisoning. “He was targeted by an FSB team that tried to kill him twice in 2015 and 2017. On the basis of the charges laid so far Vladimir is now facing up to 10 years.”

Evgenia Kara-Murza, whose husband Vladimir was arrested in Moscow in April, said he may have reason to fear for his life.

"And there are no more media outlets in Russia that can talk about it." "That is important to say it out loud... She could not immediately be reached for further comment.

The battle for control of the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas raged on Sunday as Russian forces tightened their grip around the key cities of ...

"Evacuation is very unsafe, it's isolated cases when we manage to get people out. He also called for the lifting of sanctions to allow "an increase in the supply of Russian fertilisers and agricultural products" to the global market. But on Saturday, he told Macron and Scholz that Russia was "ready" to look for ways to allow more wheat onto the global market. Lyman lies on the road to Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk, which is "now surrounded," according to a police official in Lugansk province cited by Russian state media. Meanwhile, on the eastern bank of the Donets river, Russian forces "carried out assault operations in the area of the city of Severodonetsk," according to the Ukrainian general staff. The two European leaders also "insisted on an immediate ceasefire and a withdrawal of Russian troops" in an 80-minute phone call with the Russian leader on Saturday, the German chancellor's office said.