Ukraine-Russia news – live: US warns of ‘serious consequences’ if China arms Putin

The war on Ukraine, which marks its one year anniversary this week, has killed at least 461 children and injured 924 others since 24 February, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said yesterday.

The latest shelling attack in Bakhmut on Friday injured a 16-year-old, the officials said.

Officials have added that the actual toll and number of casualties in the war are expected to be higher than the existing data as it does not include the children injured and killed Russian-occupied territories.

The wife of a church pastor in Ukraine whose family split up weeks after Russia’s invasion has said “it’s like being a single mum” almost 12 months after evacuating the country with her daughters.

Luda Sviridok, 48, fled Kharkiv with her two daughters, aged 17 and 10, on a train along with a number of other women and children from the church community - her husband Sergey, 46, and her son, aged 20, stayed in Ukraine.

Twelve months on from Russia’s invasion, she remains in the Czech Republic teaching English as a second language, and has only seen her husband - who continues to take humanitarian aid to villages - twice since leaving Ukraine.

“We were able to meet a couple of times,” Ms Sviridok told the PA news agency.

“The first time my husband was able to come over to the Czech Republic in summer and we did a bit of travelling as a family. And for Christmas this year I had to go to Ukraine with my daughters, of course not home, but to the western part of Ukraine, which is much safer.

“It’s still very difficult for all of us to have split families. It’s really hard. It’s like being a single mum almost. I’m responsible for my girls.

“The first meeting was quite happy. But the Christmas meeting was, I don’t know, for me it was depressing and sad.

“When we left Ukraine, we just thought we were going for a few weeks, or maybe a couple of months. But now we’ve been here for a year, and we don’t know when it’s going to finish.”

Concerns are growing that increasing numbers of Ukrainian refugees in the UK are facing homelessness or destitution, the British government has been warned.

The latest official figures show that 4,295 Ukrainian households have needed assistance from councils in the face of the risk of homelessness.

The data, up to January 27, is from 72% of English local authorities and so gives only a “partial picture of the true scale of homelessness faced by this refugee community”, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Ending Homelessness said.

The cross-party coalition of more than 70 MPs and peers said it welcomed the Government’s response to the conflict in 2022 but called for more action “to ensure that refugees could access a safe and secure home and did not have to face homelessness”.

The Kremlin on Sunday claimed the United States was a “major provocateur” of international tensions for condoning attacks on Crimea, warning that the remarks about the peninsula underscored the depth of disagreement between the two countries.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responding to comments by U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland who said the United States considers that Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, should be demilitarised and that Washington supports Ukrainian attacks on military targets on the peninsula.

“Nuland belongs to a very broad camp of the most aggressive ‘hawks’ in American politics. This is a point of view we know well,” Peskov said in comments published by the TASS news agency.

French president Emmanuel Macron spoke to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday as Western leaders aim to strengthen their support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s latest military attacks.

Mr Macron’s office said in a statement the two leaders had discussed Mr Zelensky’s recent visits to London, Paris and the European Union in Brussels, and that Mr Macron had reaffirmed to Ukraine’s leader NATO backing for more military supplies to Ukraine.

Mr Macron also reaffirmed his support for a 10-point peace proposal laid out by Mr Zelensky, during their phone call.

He had told French paper Le Journal du Dimanche in an interview published on Sunday that while France wanted Russia to be defeated in Ukraine, France did not want to “crush” Russia.

Ukraine‘s military is inflicting “extraordinarily significant” losses on Russian forces near the town of Vuhledar in the eastern Donbas region, president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday.

“The situation is very complicated. And we are fighting. We are breaking down the invaders and inflicting extraordinarily significant losses on Russia,” he said in his nightly video address.

Mr Zelensky referred to several towns in Donbas, where fighting has been focused for months, saying “the more losses Russia suffers there, in Donbas - in Bakhmut, Vuhledar, Marinka, Kreminna - the faster we will be able to end this war with Ukraine‘s victory”.

The Biden administration is planning to impose new export controls and a fresh round of sanctions on Russia, targeting key industries, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The new sanctions will target Russia’s defence and energy sectors, financial institutions and several individuals, the report said, adding that US and allies may also look into preventing the evasion and circumvention of sanctions in order to disrupt the support Russia receives from third countries.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council declined comment when contacted by Reuters.

The European Union’s proposal for new sanctions include Iranian entities seen to be providing Russia with drones and other military supplies, technologies, components, heavy vehicles, electronics and rare-earths, the report said.

Russia said on Sunday that Ukraine was planning to stage a nuclear incident on its territory to pin the blame on Moscow ahead of a United Nations meeting, without providing evidence for the accusation.

Since the start of its invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago, Russia has repeatedly accused Kyiv of planning “false flag” operations with non-conventional weapons, using biological or radioactive materials. No such attack has materialised.

Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement that radioactive substances had been transported to Ukraine from a European country and Kyiv was preparing a large-scale “provocation”.

“The aim of the provocation is to accuse Russia’s army of allegedly carrying out indiscriminate strikes on hazardous radioactive facilities in Ukraine, leading to the leakage of radioactive substances and contamination of the area,” it said.

US politicians broadly support training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets, Republican senator Lindsey Graham has said.

The politician said he believed the Biden administration would soon agree to do so.

Following talks between US and Ukrainian officials at the Munich security conference, Mr Graham said he did not worry that the F-16s would escalate the conflict.

“Don’t worry about provoking Putin, worry about beating him,” he told ABC.

Ukrainian officials have urged members of the US Congress to pressure Joe Biden’s administration to send F-16 jetfighters to Kyiv.

The lobbying came on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in talks between Ukrainian officials, including foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, and US Democrats and Republicans.

Four delegations from the Senate and House combined in what members said was the largest US delegation to attend Europe’s premier security gathering since it started in 1963, demonstrating clear bipartisan support for Ukraine.

“They told us that they want [F-16s] to suppress enemy air defenses so they could get their drones” beyond Russian front lines, senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who flew US Navy fighters in combat, told Reuters on Saturday evening.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Sunday that the United States should focus on providing weapons that can be used immediately on the battlefield, rather than fighter jets which require extensive training.