Ukraine Russia war – latest news: Cruise missile shipment destroyed in Crimea, says Kyiv

An explosion in Russia-occupied Crimea has destroyed a shipment of Russian cruise missiles, officials from Ukraine’s defence ministry said yesterday.

“An explosion in the city of Dzhankoy in the north of the temporarily occupied Crimea destroyed the Russian Kalibr NK cruise missiles during their transportation by rail,” the ministry said, though it did not claim responsibility for the attack on Russia’s stockpile.

It said that the cruise missiles destroyed in the explosion would have been used to supply ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

“The range of such a weapon is more than 2,500 kilometres against land targets and 375 kilometres against sea targets,” it said.

Ukraine’s justice officials and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court appealed Monday to countries around the world to boost funding and support for the global court’s investigations into alleged war crimes in Ukraine to ensure Russia is held accountable.

Justice ministers from over 40 countries travelled to London for the war crimes conference, jointly hosted by Britain and the Netherlands, aimed at rallying extra support for the International Criminal Court’s probes into atrocities allegedly committed by Russian forces in Ukraine.

The conference came days after the global court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of personal responsibility in the abduction of children from Ukraine. Friday’s move was the first time the court has issued a warrant against a leader of one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

“We share the belief that President Putin and the wider leadership must be held to account,” Britain’s Justice Secretary Dominic Raab said as he opened the meeting. “Let’s make sure that we back up our words with deeds, that we back up our moral support with practical means to effectively investigate these awful crimes.”

Britain pledged an additional 395,000 pounds ($484,000) in support for the ICC, bringing its funding for the court to 1 million pounds. The U.K. government said other countries were also expected to pledge funding for the court’s investigations.

Every day that goes by gets worse for Russia, with little or no route to victory in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, writes Timothy Ash.

Russia and China are now aligned, but no deal is possible without the agreement of Ukraine; and Ukraine still feels it can win this war. But China’s 12-point peace plan did include some elements that Kyiv appreciated, including talk of “territorial integrity”.

A sticking point could well be Ukraine giving up on ambitions for Nato membership, but that might well be assuaged by US-Israel style security guarantees from senior Nato states. The problem here is that Putin invaded Ukraine not because of its Nato aspirations, but simply because he wants Ukraine.

Agreement over Nato member security guarantees for Ukraine would mean, in effect, Russia has lost Ukraine forever. Is Putin so desperate to save his own skin as to accept that? We might soon find out.

Read the full story here:

Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida said he raised the issue of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine during his meeting with Indian counterpart Narendra Modi – who stopped short of mentioning the war in his own remarks.

Mr Kishida, who began a two-day visit to India on Monday, has an expansive new plan set out for an open and free Indo-Pacific region. This includes cooperation between the two Quad partners as witnessed in Tokyo’s efforts to forge stronger partnerships with south Asian countries to counter China’s growing assertiveness.

The Japanese leader was expected to convince Delhi to forge a broader and stronger coalition to call out Russia for its invasion of Ukraine during his meeting with Mr Modi and referred to his Indian counterpart’s earlier rebuke of Mr Putin.

“I reiterate that Japan strongly condemns Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and will never recognise it,” Mr Kishida said while delivering the 41st Sapru House lecture. “Prime minister Modi too expressed to president Putin that today is not the era of war. Japan opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo by force anywhere in the world.”

He delivered the lecture in the presence of a gathering of top diplomats, envoys and experts hours after he held bilateral talks with Mr Modi for the strengthening of India and Japan’s “Special Strategic and Global Partnership”.

Russia is looking to hold an informal meeting of the UN Security Council in early April on what it calls “the real situation” of Ukrainian children taken to Russia, officials said.

This comes in the wake of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin for war crimes related to the abduction of children.

Russia’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia claimed in a news conference that Moscow planned the council meeting long before Friday’s announcement by the ICC.

From April, Russia also holds the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council.

The arrest warrant for Mr Putin has been issued as he “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of (children) and that of unlawful transfer of (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation,” the ICC said.

Ukrainian forces are fast burning through their ammunition piles to retain Bakhmut and are firing thousands of artillery shells in a day across the 600-mile frontline in their bid to stop Russia from snatching the mining city, two US officials have said.

The Pentagon raised concerns about this with Kyiv recently as the forces in the embattled city saw several days of nonstop artillery firing, the officials said, according to a report by The New York Times.

The US has warned Ukraine against wasting ammunition at a key time as the war-hit nation looks at a decisive spring offensive.

Officials from the Pentagon have highlighted the tension between Ukraine’s move to protect Bakhmut from Russia at all costs and its hopes for taking back some more territory in the spring, where the sludgy swathes of land from receding winter will make way for a dry battlefield.

The speed at which Ukraine is burning through its munition stockpiles is unsustainable and could imperil its springtime campaign, American and European officials have warned.

Japan prime minister Fumio Kishida has left for Ukraine today where he will meet Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, reported Japanese broadcaster NHK News.

The Japanese leader has already departed from India where he met his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi in New Delhi and is directly reaching Ukraine, the report said citing unnamed sources.

European Union countries have endorsed a fast-track procedure aimed at providing Ukraine with sorely needed artillery shells to repel Russia’s invasion forces, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Monday, as Moscow maintains its focus on attacking the industrial east of the war-ravaged country.

As he chaired a meeting of EU foreign and defence ministers in Brussels, Borrell took to Twitter to hail what he described as “a historic decision” for the 27-nation bloc and Norway to send Ukraine 1 million 155-millimetre artillery shells within 12 months.

“We are taking a key step towards delivering on our promises to provide Ukraine with more artillery ammunition,” he said, and noted that 18 countries had signed up to a European Defense Agency, or EDA, project to place joint orders for ammunition with the defence industry.

Borrell said that he had won approval for his proposal to provide 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to encourage member nations to provide artillery shells from their stocks and any orders for new rounds that they might have placed with industry.

A further 1 billion euros would also be used to fast-track new orders and encourage countries to work together on those purchases through the EDA or in groups of at least three nations. Germany has already called for countries to join its own effort, which Berlin believes will go faster.

The UK will “consider” backing a special tribunal to look into potential war crimes in Ukraine, after the country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky urged nations to support the idea.

It comes after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arrest, accusing him of bearing personal responsibility for the abduction of children from Ukraine.

Speaking during a conference at Lancaster House in central London, where justice ministers from around the world were gathered, Karim Khan KC demanded Russia “return” children to Ukraine as alleged war crimes were detailed.

Concluding the meeting, Mr Zelensky, appearing in a pre-recorded message, urged delegates to back a tribunal to look into Russian “aggression”.

When secretary of state Antony Blinken made a personal appeal to Volodymyr Zelensky, hoping to convince him that a Russian invasion was imminent, Ukraine’s president didn’t believe him.

The warning lacked specificity, Zelensky recalled in an interview after the invasion. Moreover, if the Americans truly believed the situation was as dire as Blinken intimated, why hadn’t they begun to send more powerful weapons months sooner?

This discreet meeting, occurring on the sidelines of a climate summit in Glasgow in November 2021, revealed the limitations of Blinken’s influence over the Ukrainian leader and Zelensky’s innate scepticism of US intelligence. But in the time since, Blinken’s rapport with Zelensky and his top aides has evolved substantially, and the top US diplomat has become one of Kyiv’s most trusted champions and interlocutors.

The diplomat is ‘completely synchronised with us in terms of vision’, say Zelensky’s advisers, while detractors say he must be bolder in brokering negotiations. John Hudson profiles one of Joe Biden’s most influential allies: