Ukraine-Russia war – live: Putin visit dubbed ‘special tour of mass murders’

A senior Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak took to Twitter and mocked Vladimir Putin's trip.

“Putin’s degradation is impressive. The world waited for his statement a year ago. Now they don’t. There’s no such political actor. There’s only a “special tour” of the mass murders author in the occupied and ruined territories to enjoy the crimes of his minions for the last time.

The Russian presidnet had attended a military command meeting in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region and visited a national guard headquarters in eastern Luhansk.

Kherson is partially occupied by Russian forces.

He was briefed by the commanders of the airborne forces and the Dnieper army group as well as other senior officers who briefed him on the situation in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south.

Emmanuel Macron is said to be looking to make arrangements with China that could see talks held between Russia and Ukraine “by the summer”.

William Mata has more:

The British defence ministry has warned against the continuing disinformation campaign from Moscow as it said that the Russian state has systematically used information operations as a major element of its strategy after invading Ukraine.

“It has cultivated multiple channels and proxies to spread disinformation: the intentional creation and sharing of false or manipulated information. One component of Russia’s disinformation is ‘narrative laundering’, whereby Russia promotes information from proxies, or unverified social media sources, which then permeates to more mainstream or state-run media,” the MoD said in its latest intelligence update.

It added: “This aims to cloud the source of the information, making it easier for the Russian state to distance itself from the message. It then promotes misleading fragments of the narrative, while masking its vested interest.

“Russian state actors present manipulated narratives in both orchestrated and opportunistic ways. Their current priorities almost certainly include discrediting the Ukrainian government and reducing international support for Ukraine,” the MoD said.

Ukraine’s air force has said it has shot down 10 out of 12 Iranian-made Shahed drones which targeted Odesa oblast overnight.

Two of the drones Russia launched in the region overnight hit a “public infrastructure facility,” the Odesa oblast military administration said.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said he and US House of Representatives speaker Kevin McCarthy discussed in a phone call Ukraine‘s need for weapons as well as increasing sanctions pressure on Russia.

On Twitter, Mr Zelensky said he thanked Mr McCarthy for bipartisan support in Congress for Ukraine as well as Ukraine’s defence needs. “Outlined the situation at the front and Ukraine‘s urgent defence needs in armoured vehicles, artillery, air defence and aircraft,” Mr Zelensky’s tweet said.

He said they also discussed enhancing sanctions pressure on Russia, including in oil and gas.

A spokesman for Mr McCarthy, the highest-ranking Republican in Washington, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a 31-year-old reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has been arrested and detained in Russia on suspicion of espionage, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The son of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union who grew up speaking Russian at home in Princeton, New Jersey, Gershkovich graduated from the prestigious Bowdoin College in Maine before embarking on a career in the media, firstly at The New York Times, then The Moscow Times and then Agence France-Presse before joining WSJ, where he began covering Russian affairs just a month before the invasion of Ukraine last year.

Joe Sommerlad reports:

A Russia-backed official has said that the Wagner Group’s mercenary forces have captured almost 90 per cent of Bakhmut.

“The Wagner private military company controls about 90% of Artyomovsk [Russian name for Bakhmut] and its advance is inevitable,” said Yan Gagin, an advisor to the Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DPR) leader, reported TASS news agency.

A week back, the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin had said that Russian forces controlled more than 80 per cent of Bakhmut, including all administrative buildings.

He added that Ukrainian troops were “booby-trapping and blowing up major infrastructure facilities before leaving the western outskirts of Bakhmut”.

“The Ukrainian armed forces are okay with using scorched earth tactics. This is what they did in Volnovakha and Mariupol, and now, they are blowing up and booby-trapping major infrastructure facilities in Artyomovsk before retreating from the western outskirts of the city. A local community centre was one of the buildings that they blew up recently,” the Russia-installed leader told TASS news agency.

British cyber defence agency has warned of an emerging threat to Western critical national infrastructure posed by hackers sympathetic to Russia and its war on Ukraine.

Russia-aligned “hacktivists” have carried out largely harmless online campaigns that have defaced prominent public websites or knocked them offline. However, some of those groups have been actively plotting ways to do more real-world damage, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of the GCHQ eavesdropping intelligence agency, said in an alert.

“Some have stated a desire to achieve a more disruptive and destructive impact against Western critical national infrastructure, including in the UK,” the NCSC said.

“We expect these groups to look for opportunities to create such an impact, particularly if systems are poorly protected,” said the alert, which was released to the press at a two-day conference hosted by the NCSC and GCHQ in Belfast.

The alert added that while such groups are ideologically-motivated and align themselves with Russian state interests, they are “not subject to formal state control”.

“This makes them less predictable”, it said.

A successful cyberattack on critical national infrastructure such as an energy grid or water supply could be highly destructive, and do serious real-world damage.

The US government is investigating the role of a multi-platform social media persona known as the “Donbass Devushka,” and the role of a US Navy veteran in operating it, as it pursues the prosecution of a man for allegedly leaking sensitive military documents.

“Donbass Devushka”, which roughly translates to “young Donbass woman,” hosts generally pro-Russia content across a variety of platforms, including a now-private Twitter account, a prolific YouTube platform, and others.

John Bowden has more: