Russia-Ukraine war live: Russia launches wave of attacks across Ukraine
A Ukrainian soldier in the snow-covered Serebryan Forest in Kreminna, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. Follow live updates.
LIVE – Updated at 12:45
Kyiv said Russia fired Kinzhal missiles, which move at several times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to shoot down.
12:45
France’s new foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, is visiting Kyiv in his first official trip abroad in a show of support for Ukraine as it approaches its second year since Russia’s invasion.
“Stephane Sejourne arrived in Kiev for his first trip on the ground, to continue France’s diplomatic efforts there and to reiterate France’s commitment to its allies and to the civilian population,” France’s foreign ministry wrote on X.
“Despite the multiplying crisis, Ukraine is and will remain France’s priority,” AFP quotes Séjourné as saying. “We will not falter … our determination remains intact, and so does our admiration for the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people.”
The visit comes at a tense time for Ukraine, which fears support may be waning, with its allies in Brussels and Washington struggling to secure funding for its defence.
An EU aid package worth €50bn has flagged in Brussels, while the US Congress is divided on sending further aid to Ukraine.
France’s military support to Ukraine stands at €3.2bn, according to a parliamentary report from November.
Newly committed aid to Ukraine between August and October 2023 fell by close to 90% compared with the same period in 2022, to hit its lowest point since Russia’s invasion, according to a Kiel Institute survey from December.
France and Ukraine to ‘scale up’ their defence cooperation, Ukrainian foreign minister says
12:45
France and Ukraine have agreed to “scale up” their defence cooperation, Ukraine’s foreign minister has said after a meeting with his counterpart.
Dmytro Kuleba and Stéphane Séjourné discussed topics including Ukraine’s EU and Nato integration and tightening sanctions against Russia, the Ukrainian foreign minister said.
“Russia hopes Ukraine and its supporters will get tired before them. We will not grow weaker,” Séjourné said during a press conference in Kyiv, Reuters reports.
Séjourné added that he would work to fix EU and bilateral legal issues to help French companies set up more military production facilities in Ukraine. He did not say what these legal issues were.
He also encouraged French companies, such as transport, energy, telecoms and water, to invest in Ukraine.
The French foreign minister said he was personally convinced that more military assistance was needed and that talks between the two governments would continue in the coming weeks.
11:51
About 3,000 trucks are queuing at Ukraine’s borders, according to Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform, with more than 2,000 at the border of Ukraine and Poland, and about 1,000 at other parts.
Polish drivers have been blocking several crossings with Ukraine since 6 November, demanding the EU restore a system whereby Ukrainian companies need permits and the same for European truckers to enter Ukraine.
From 6 January, the movement of trucks at Medyka-Shegyny (a border crossing at Poland’s south-east and Ukraine’s west) resumed, but queues remain, with Ukrinform citing the State Border Service as stating that there were 1,200 trucks in the line this morning.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said in December that the government would try to put a quick stop to the truck drivers’ protest.
The protesters had promised not to block vehicles carrying essential aid and fuel to Ukraine, but drivers say that in practice, some of these lorries are stuck. Reuters has also previously reported that the blockade has affected critical supplies of weapons to Ukraine’s army. (It’s worth reading Luke Harding’s report here from early December speaking to drivers at the Medyka-Shegyny crossing.)
Why is this happening? The Polish drivers want the EU to reinstate a transport permit scheme that limited the number of Ukrainian drivers able to operate in Poland to 200,000 entries a year. They say that the lifting of restrictions following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has hit their earnings due to cheaper competition.
The protests come against a background of Ukraine one day becoming a member of the EU. EU leaders agreed to start accession talks with Ukraine in December.
Russia says it has hit ‘Ukrainian military-industrial complex’ facilities
11:03
Russia’s defence ministry has said it destroyed its targets in a series of strikes on facilities producing ammunition and drones in Ukraine.
“This morning the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out a group strike … against facilities of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex,” the defence ministry said in a daily briefing, AFP reports.
Russia said it had targeted facilities producing shells, gunpowder and unmanned aerial vehicles, saying “all designated facilities were hit”.
Ukraine earlier said that it had recorded 40 missiles and drones launched from Russia, with eight missiles destroyed and “more than 20 devices” failing to reach their targets. The proportion of missiles that were downed is understood to be lower than usual.
No fatalities have been reported so far, but Ukrainian authorities said a civilian was wounded in the northeastern Sumy region.
11:00
After Russia’s ministry of justice designated one of the country’s most popular fiction writers a “foreign agent” due to his opposition to its war in Ukraine, the author has hit back on social media.
The ministry designated Georgian-born Grigori Chkhartishvili, who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin, a “foreign agent” late on Friday, citing his opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine. It also accused him of distributing false and negative information about Russia and of helping raise money for the Ukrainian army. The 67-year-old author lives in the UK.
Other writers and cultural figures who have spoken out against the Ukraine war have received the same label, and books by Chkhartishvili had already been removed from sale in Russia after the authorities added him to a ‘terrorist’ list in December.
Chkhartishvili, whose books used to be bestsellers in Russia and is open about his opposition to the Ukraine war, joked about his foreign agent designation online.
“They are writing that I have been declared a foreign agent today. Me, a terrorist and extremist?! I feel like Bin Laden who has been given a ticket for parking illegally,” he wrote.
10:53
A bit more on the “foreign agent” designation, a phrase which in Russia has strong associations to cold war era espionage. Once a person is registered as one, they’re subject to extra audits and must mark their social media and other publication with a disclaimer that they are being distributed by a “foreign agent”.
The “foreign agent” designation list that Grigori Chkhartishvili has been placed on includes journalists, opposition politicians, figures who worked on Alexei Navalny’s campaign and in his non-profit, cultural figures including actors and musicians and human rights campaigners.
10:00
More detail has come through on the missile attacks that Russia launched across Ukraine overnight.
Reuters cites Ukraine’s air force as saying it recorded a total of 40 attacks, of which 37 were missiles and three were drones. Ukraine said it destroyed eight missiles.
The attack included weapons including cruise, ballistic, anti-aircraft missiles as well as drones.
The force said that “more than 20” devices failed to reach their targets, with spokesperson Yuri Ignat saying that “either they fell in the fields, they were detonated in the air, or they were affected by means of radio-electronic warfare of our defence forces”.
As a neighbouring country, Poland briefly activated its air defence systems due to the increased level of threat.
Saturday morning’s attacks come after the air force’s spokesperson said earlier this week that Ukraine was running low on air defence missiles. It downed a lower proportion of missiles in the mass attacks than usual – but it is not yet clear whether this or any other factor was the reason for the low hit rate.
Russia launches attacks across Ukrainian regions in early hours of Saturday
09:55
Russia launched attacks against regions across Ukraine on Saturday morning using weapons including hypersonic missiles, according to the local authorities and the Ukrainian air force.
The air force warned that Russia had fired Kinzhal missiles, which move at several times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to shoot down.
Here are the regions that have been affected, courtesy of the Kyiv Independent:
In the Chernihiv region in northern Ukraine, the governor said that the attack had caused damage in an unspecified location but there were no casualties.
In central Ukraine, a missile was shot down over Kremenchuk in the Poltava region. A building was damaged but no casualties were reported.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region in south-east Ukraine, two cruise missiles were downed over the district of Kryvyi Rih.
Explosions were also heard in the city of Kropyvnytskyi in the Kirovohrad region in central Ukraine, with no casualties reported.
In the Khmelnytskyi region in the west of Ukraine, with local authorities reporting that no “critical infrastructure” or civilians affected.
Air defence forces were also operating in the Rivne region in western Ukraine, with no casualties or damage reported.
In Lviv, western Ukraine, there was an air raid alert from around 6.30 am to 8.25am – but the governor said air defence forces meant “rockets did not manage to enter the airspace” of the Lviv region.
It comes after Russian shelling on Friday killed two people in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.
09:35
Here are some images of people taking sheltering in Kyiv’s metro during the air raid alert on Saturday.
09:11
More detail about the damage caused by the attacks, from the former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine:
09:07
Photos from Russian online retailer Wildberries’ warehouse fire have started coming through – here are a couple showing the huge blaze in a suburb of St Petersburg.
I previously reported the fire as covering 50,000 metres – latest figures from Reuters are now giving it as 70,000 metres.
08:40
A warehouse in St Petersburg owned by one of Russia’s biggest online retailers has gone up in flames, Reuters reports Russia’s ministry of emergency situations as saying, as firefighters battled a huge blaze on Saturday.
The owner, Wildberries, stated that all its staff had been evacuated. Nobody was reported to have been hurt.
It is not yet known how the fire, which covered 50,000 sq metres and was rated as category five, the most severe, had began.
Nearly 300 firefighters, dozens of fire engines, and also helicopters, were battling to put out the fire, officials said.
Opening summary
08:21
Good morning, we are restarting the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has praised a security deal signed with Britain during a visit by prime minister Rishi Sunak as a history-making “model for our time”.
The deal, which guarantees that the UK will give “swift and sustained” help should Russia attack Ukraine again “gives us confidence now, while we defend ourselves from Russian aggression, and establishes our strong security positions throughout the period until Ukraine joins Nato”, Zelenskiy said in his nightly address.
During his visit to Kyiv on Friday, Sunak made a £2.5bn commitment to Ukraine’s defence, and pledged that the UK would not falter at a time when military aid from the US has stalled.
More on that soon. In other developments:
The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said he would visit Kyiv in the next few days. Warsaw is one of Ukraine’s key allies in its war against Russia but relations between the two countries became tense last year, under the rule of Tusk’s predecessor, Mateusz Morawiecki.
Zelenskiy said he was more positive now than he was last month that his country would secure new financial aid from the US. But there was no indication in Washington that congressional approval for an aid package proposed by the White House would be forthcoming anytime soon. “I am viewing this with more positivity than in December, I think we will [get it],” Zelenskiy told a news conference in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s military spy chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said Kyiv’s attacks in Russian-annexed Crimea were set to intensify, adding that Moscow’s economy was proving surprisingly resilient despite sanctions. “In 2023, the first Ukrainian incursions took place in temporarily occupied Crimea,” Budanov, 38, said in an interview with French daily Le Monde published on Friday. “And this is just the beginning.”
Ukraine’s ground forces commander told Reuters that Kyiv needed more military aircraft for its war effort, such as US A-10 attack jets to support infantry as well as planes that could fire long-range cruise missiles. “I would talk about A-10s as an option if they’ll be given to us … this is not a new machine, but a reliable one that has proven itself in many wars, and which has a wide array of weapons for destroying land targets to help the infantry,” Col-Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi said.
Russian shelling on Friday killed two people in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, while a drone attack by Kyiv in the Moscow-controlled east killed another two, officials said. The head of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said the Russian army used artillery, striking a street. A Ukrainian drone, meanwhile, killed two people and wounded six during an evacuation of injured people near the Russian-controlled city of Gorlivka, the Russian-backed mayor, Ivan Prikhodko, said.
Russia labelled the exiled writer Boris Akunin, who has spoken out against Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, as a foreign agent. The Kremlin has intensified its crackdown on dissent since launching its offensive in Ukraine in February 2022 and targeted the arts, with books by authors critical of Moscow disappearing from bookshops. Akunin is the pen name of Georgian-born writer Grigory Chkhartishvili.
Moldova’s pro-Russian separatist Transniestria region accused central authorities in the ex-Soviet state of training Ukrainian soldiers to launch attacks on the rebel area’s institutions and leaders. Moldova’s pro-European government, which denounces Russia’s war in Ukraine, immediately denied the allegation.
The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, made a £2.5bn commitment to Ukraine’s defence on Friday during a visit to Kyiv, and pledged that the UK would not falter at a time when military aid from the US has stalled. Sunak met the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, embracing him warmly and addressed Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. The two leaders held talks and signed a new UK-Ukrainian security treaty. It guarantees that the UK will give “swift and sustained” help should Russia attack Ukraine again.