Russia-Ukraine war: Belgorod governor says shelling continues after two killed; missiles and drones shot down over Kyiv – as it happened

It is approaching 9pm in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and here is a roundup of today’s developments.

• Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, has ordered shelters to be operational in the capital on a 24-hour basis, after allegations that yesterday three people who were killed by falling debris from a Russian missile attack were stuck outside a “locked” air raid shelter. Three people including a child were killed and at least 11 people were injured in Thursday’s early morning missile attack. Residents of Kyiv have been leaving flowers, toys and sweets at a makeshift memorial at the location where Olha Ivashko, 33, and her daughter Vika, nine, were killed.

• The US’s top military officer says training for Ukrainian forces on advanced US Abrams tanks has started, but those weapons crucial over the long term in trying to expel Russia from occupied territory will not be ready in time for Kyiv’s imminent counteroffensive.

• The Belarusian tennis star Aryna Sabalenka skipped her post-match press conference at the French Open tennis tournament on Friday, citing mental health reasons, two days after she was asked to comment on the war in Ukraine after her second-round win.

• Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, released excerpts of his correspondence with prison administrators on Friday, detailing his sarcastic demands for things like a bottle of moonshine, a balalaika and even a kangaroo. His requests were denied.

• Ukraine would be ready to continue exporting grain across the Black Sea as part of a “plan B” without Russian backing if Moscow pulls the plug on the current grain export deal and it collapses, Ukraine’s farm minister said on Friday.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he had received ‘powerful support’ from allies attending a summit in Moldova on 1 June as it emerged F-16 fighter jets could be made available to Ukraine within six months. Several countries, including the UK, Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium, have said they want to help procure F-16s for Ukraine.

• A Russian-installed official in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region said on Friday that Ukrainian forces shelled the Russian-controlled port city of Berdiansk, on the Sea of Azov. Footage shows a large cloud of grey smoke rising from near the port area.

• The former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev has reacted to the imposition of sanctions on him by Ukraine, and has defended his investments in occupied Crimea, Luke Harding reported.

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy has accused Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, and other city leaders of negligence after witness reports emerged that civilians had died earlier this week because a bomb shelter had not been opened in time, the Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh reported from Kyiv.

• Denis Pushilin, the Russian-imposed leader of the occupied Donetsk region, has claimed three people have been killed and four injured, including a three-year-old girl, by fire from Ukrainian armed forces.

• Ruslan Stefanchuk, chair of Ukraine’s parliament, has posted to social media about meeting Lithuania’s president, saying “We are grateful for the support of Lithuania, the EU, and the Euro-Atlantic future of Ukraine.”

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he understood Ukraine would not join Nato while the war with Russia was ongoing

• Britain supports Ukraine joining Nato, the defence minister, Ben Wallace, said on the sidelines of the Shangri-La dialogue security meetings in Singapore, saying the path is open to them, although political realities may slow the process as it is not possible to add members in the middle of a war.

• The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said the US “calls the tunes” for Nato, which Ukraine wants to join. Asked at a news briefing about Ukraine’s push to join the western military alliance, Peskov said Kyiv’s Nato ambitions underscored its unwillingness to resolve problems at the negotiating table.

• Russia again attacked Kyiv overnight, with Ukrainian forces claiming air defence shot down all 15 cruise missiles and 21 attack drones. Overnight the governor of Dnipropetrovsk region, Serhiy Lysak, said the city of Nikopol had been struck by shelling.

• The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said on Friday that two people had been killed and two others injured when Ukrainian forces shelled a road in the town of Maslova Pristan near the Ukrainian border. “Fragments of the shells hit passing cars. Two women were travelling in one of them. They died from their injuries on the spot,” governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.

• The governor of Russia’s Bryansk region said on Friday that four houses were damaged after Ukrainian forces shelled a town near the border. There have also been reports of explosions in occupied Berdiansk, in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, one of the areas of the country the Russian Federation has claimed to annex.

• Two long-range drones attacked fuel and energy infrastructure in Russia’s western Smolensk region overnight on Friday, but no injuries or fires were reported, the region’s acting governor said.

• Mariupol’s mayoral aide Petro Andryushchenko has claimed that three people have been killed by the detonation of a landmine on the Mariupol-Donetsk H20 highway. He said the incident happened near Olenivka, the location of a prison massacre earlier in the war.

• China’s special envoy for Eurasian affairs, Li Hui, said on Friday that the Russian side appreciated China’s desire and efforts to resolve the Ukraine crisis. “The risk of escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war is still high,” Li said at a news briefing about his visit to Europe. “All sides must ensure the safety of nuclear facilities and take concrete measures to cool down the temperature,” he said.

• The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Friday the US was working with Ukraine and other allies to build consensus around the core elements of a “just and lasting peace” to end the war with Russia. Washington would also encourage initiatives by other countries to bring about an end to the conflict, as long as they uphold the UN charter and Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.

• Two close allies of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, on Thursday publicly criticised Russia’s most prominent mercenary, casting Yevgeny Prigozhin as a blogger who “screams” all the time about his problems.

That’s all for today. Thanks for following along.

The US’s top military officer says training for Ukrainian forces on advanced US Abrams tanks has started, but those weapons crucial over the long term in trying to expel Russia from occupied territory will not be ready in time for Kyiv’s imminent counteroffensive.

The tank training got under way as the US and its allies began to work out agreements to train Ukrainians on F-16 fighter jets, another long-sought advanced system that would be part of a security plan to deter future attacks, US army general Mark Milley said on Thursday as he arrived in France, AP reports.

Milley said:

Everyone recognises Ukraine needs a modernised air force. It’s going to take a considerable amount of time.

Milley said detailed planning on the size of F-16 training classes, the types of flying tactics and locations for training was being worked out among the US and allies such as the Netherlands and Britain that have pledged to provide the US-made F-16s. The United States has not said whether it will directly provide jets, but President Joe Biden has said the US will support F-16 training as part of the coalition.

About 200 Ukrainian soldiers began an approximately 12-week training course in Germany over the past weekend where they are learning how to manoeuvre, fire and conduct combined arms operations with the advanced armoured system. An additional 200 troops are receiving training on tank fuelling and fuel truck maintenance.

Milley is in France to mark the 79th anniversary of D-day, where he said:

You can look back to the second world war and some of the biggest armoured battles that were ever fought in history were fought, basically, in parts of Ukraine.

So tanks are very important, both to the defence and the offence, and upgraded modern tanks, the training that goes with it, the ability to use them, will be fundamental to Ukrainian success.

The Belarusian tennis star Aryna Sabalenka skipped her post-match press conference at the French Open tennis tournament on Friday, citing mental health reasons, two days after she was asked to comment on the war in Ukraine after her second-round win.

Sabalenka was reportedly asked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and her country’s role as a staging ground for Moscow’s troops and weapons.

The tournament organisers instead released an interview with the world number two conducted by a hand-picked group of reporters in which she said she had not felt safe at her previous press conference, Reuters reports.

Sabalenka beat Russian tennis player Rakhimova 6-2, 6-2 today. Read more of our French Open coverage here.

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The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy welcomed the president of Estonia Alar Karis to Kyiv today in a tweet.

Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, released excerpts of his correspondence with prison administrators on Friday, detailing his sarcastic demands for things like a bottle of moonshine, a balalaika and even a kangaroo. His requests were denied.

Responses from prison officials, posted on his social media account apparently by his team, came after he has spent almost 180 days in solitary confinement since last summer at Penal Colony No 6 in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow.

Navalny, 46, is serving a nine-year sentence after being convicted of fraud and contempt of court – charges he says were trumped up for his efforts to expose official corruption and organising anti-Kremlin protests. He was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve-agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.

“When you are sitting in a punishment isolation cell and have little entertainment, you can have fun with correspondence with the administration,” wrote Navalny.

Among his denied requests: a megaphone to be given to the prisoner in a nearby cell “so he can yell even louder,” and to award another inmate who “killed a man with his bare hands” with the highest rank in karate.

He also was turned down for his requests of moonshine, tobacco for rolling cigarettes and a balalaika. But Navalny expressed particular mock outrage at the administrators’ refusal to allow him to keep a kangaroo in his cell. The politician said inmates could have a pet if the prison administration allowed it.

“I will continue to fight for my inalienable right to own a kangaroo,” Navalny wrote in his social media post.

A Moscow court has set a 6 June date for a hearing for a new trial for Navalny on a charge of extremism, which could keep him in prison for 30 years.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said that two people had been killed and four others injured on Friday after Ukraine shelled a town near the border, while officials in nearby regions reported overnight drone attacks.

Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on Telegram that shelling had struck a section of road in the town of Maslova Pristan, about 9 miles (15km) from Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region, and that shell fragments had struck passing cars.
“Two women were travelling in one of them. They died from their injuries on the spot,” he said.

In another message posted later on Friday, Gladkov said two more people had been injured and an industrial facility had caught fire after shelling in the town of Shebekino.

Gladkov said more than 2,500 people were being evacuated from the Shebekino area.
The governor of the Bryansk region, north of Belgorod, said four homes had been damaged by shelling, while the head of neighbouring Kursk region said some buildings had been damaged in an overnight drone attack.

These reports have not been independently verified.

The Ukrainian president has ordered an audit of all Ukrainian air raid shelters on Friday as a rift widened with Kyiv’s mayor after the deaths of three people locked out on the street during a Russian attack.

A nine-year-old girl, her mother and another woman were killed by falling debris after rushing to a Kyiv shelter on Thursday morning and finding it was shut.

The deaths caused a public outcry and a promise of a harsh response from the Ukrainian president, which appears aimed at Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, a former world champion boxer who has previously clashed with the president.

Zelenskiy said he had ordered Ukraine’s strategic industries minister and his interior minister to conduct a full audit of bomb shelters after saying on Thursday that shelters must be kept accessible and that this was the responsibility of local authorities.

Klitschko acknowledged at a local committee meeting on Friday that he bore some responsibility but said others were to blame, particularly allies of the president.

He said spending on shelters in Kyiv districts, most of which were led by members of Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People party, had been “extremely unsatisfactory” and underlined that the city’s military administration was led by a presidential appointee.

In a spat in November, Zelenskiy accused Klitschko of doing a poor job setting up emergency shelters to help people without power and heat.

Ukraine would be ready to continue exporting grain across the Black Sea as part of a “plan B” without Russian backing if Moscow pulls the plug on the current grain export deal and it collapses, Ukraine’s farm minister said on Friday.

The UN and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative between Moscow and Kyiv last July to help tackle a global food crisis aggravated by Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a leading global grain exporter.

The Ukrainian agriculture minister, Mykola Solskyi, told Reuters that Russia had already blocked the use of Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Pivdennyi despite the deal and was allowing only one ship a day to deliver Ukrainian food to certain countries.

Russia has said it will allow more ships through if all parties to the grain deal agree to unblock the transit of Russian ammonia via a pipeline through Ukrainian territory to Pivdennyi for export.

Solskyi said:

The latest actions that are taking place there during yesterday, the day before yesterday, today, it says more about the fact that in fact only legally it looks like this corridor works, but in reality nothing much is happening there.

He said in an interview in Kyiv:

That’s not how it works and then we will be ready for a plan B, which depends on us, depends on the U.N. I don’t think we will stand by if it continues like this in the near future.

Plan B … excludes the fourth party [Russia] in this relationship.

He proposed his government could offer insurance guarantees for companies to continue shipping without Russia’s involvement in a new deal.

Solsky said the government had already created a special insurance fund of about $547m (£440m) for companies whose ships would come to Ukrainian Black Sea ports under a new arrangement.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he had received ‘powerful support’ from allies attending a summit in Moldova on 1 June as it emerged F-16 fighter jets could be made available to Ukraine within six months.

Several countries, including the UK, Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium, have said they want to help procure F-16s for Ukraine. The US has also endorsed training programmes for Ukrainian pilots on F-16s

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In a tweet, the US embassy in Kyiv said “only Russia can end this war”.

The US does not believe it needs to increase the size of its own nuclear arsenal in order to deter the combined forces of Russia, China and other rivals, the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Friday.

He also said the US would abide by the nuclear weapons limits set in the New Start treaty until its 2026 expiration if Russia does the same, in a speech in which he sought to coax Moscow and Beijing into arms control talks, Reuters reports.

French authorities have put up for sale a luxurious multimillion-euro chateau seized from the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died in 2013 and was a sworn opponent of President Vladimir Putin, the agency handling confiscated assets said on Friday.

Berezovsky acquired Château de la Garoupe on the Côte d’Azur in the 1990s while post-Soviet Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, was in power and the tycoon was considered one of the most powerful people in the country.

But it was confiscated by French authorities in 2015, two years after Berezovsky was found dead in exile at his home in England in circumstances that have never been fully explained. He had by then become a bitter opponent of Putin.

The property was built on the prestigious Cap d’Antibes by the British industrialist and MP Charles McLaren, and its rich history has seen it associated with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter and Ernest Hemingway.

The Côte d’Azur has been popular with rich Russians going back to visits from the imperial family at the turn of the century. After the collapse of the USSR, it became a favourite playground for the country’s oligarchs.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and sanctions from the west have made owning property and even entering France increasingly problematic for many Russians.

A Russian-installed official in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region said on Friday that Ukrainian forces shelled the Russian-controlled port city of Berdiansk, on the Sea of Azov.

Footage shows a large cloud of grey smoke rising from near the port area. Zaporizhzhia is one of five Ukrainian regions, including the Crimea peninsula, that Russia claims to have annexed.

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