Category Archives: Ukraine

Charity that supported St Petersburg ballet and opera closes its doors

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Prince Charles was a patron of trust set up by friend of Putin to back the Russian Mariinsky theatre

A UK charity set up to support one of Russia’s oldest theatres has closed. The Anglo-Russian Opera and Ballet Trust, founded in 1992, raised millions for Russian arts organisations and boasted the Prince of Wales as its patron.

The charity was set up by conductor Valery Gergiev, a high-profile friend of Vladimir Putin, with the main goal of supporting St Petersburg’s Mariinsky theatre – one of the best-known cultural institutions in Russia – and promoting its work in the UK.

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Stranded and desperate, Ukrainian refugees wait for the Home Office reply. But it never comes

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Evacuees queue for hours but still can’t get past bureaucratic chaos – and flights to Britain leave with empty seats

Inside the cavernous confines of the airport in Iași, Romania, volunteers were offering food, drink and translation services to the continuous influx of Ukrainians fleeing war.

Those arriving knew that bagging a place on a flight required patience, tenacity and no little luck. Routes to Italy, Austria, Poland and Ireland were all fully booked. Yet one destination stood out.

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Scotland and Wales want to act as Ukrainian refugee ‘super sponsors’

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Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford tell UK government they want to ‘maximise’ their contributions

Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford have said Scotland and Wales are willing to become “super sponsors” for Ukrainian refugees.

The UK government is to launch a scheme where individuals and organisations can sponsor refugees to come into the country, but the Scottish and Welsh first ministers told Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, they wanted to “maximise” their contribution and act as “super sponsors”.

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UK visa red tape distracting fighters on frontline, says Ukraine’s former PM

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Volodymyr Groysman suggests worry over safety of families who have fled could disrupt those left behind to fight

Red tape holding up refugees from reaching the UK could be distracting husbands and fathers left behind to fight Russian forces as they worry about the safety of their families who have fled, a former prime minister of Ukraine has said.

Volodymyr Groysman was Ukraine’s premier between 2016 and 2019, and has been warning about the threat from the Kremlin for many years.

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Boris Johnson to host Nordic and Baltic leaders for talks on Ukraine invasion

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Prime minister to host summit of Joint Expeditionary Force as he seeks to bolster European resilience

Boris Johnson is preparing to embark on a series of meetings with Nordic and Baltic leaders as he seeks to bolster European resilience after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The prime minister will host a summit of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) in London, where he will urge leaders to work together to ensure no further nations fall victim to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s aggression, No 10 said.

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Russia-Ukraine war latest news: Russia will only take Kyiv if city is ‘razed to the ground’, Zelenskiy says, as Moscow threatens western shipments – live

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Ukraine’s president says the capital will only fall to Russian troops if it is completely destroyed, while Moscow warns western shipments of arms to Ukraine could be attacked

In an early morning update on Telegram, Ukraine’s State Emergency Services (SES) said rescuers in Kharkiv had recovered the bodies of five people including two children, who were killed when Russian bombs hit a residential building in the village of Slobozhanske, outside the city.

It also said workers had visited 40 separate addresses to dispose of unexploded ordnance.

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Why has Abramovich’s billionaire friend been left off the UK sanctions list?

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Eugene Shvidler has stepped down as a director of Ervaz, the steel company accused of possibly supplying steel for tanks

In March 2000, five of Russia’s richest oligarchs met in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London to discuss a multibillion-pound merger involving some of the biggest assets in the world aluminium industry.

The tycoons - one of whom arrived from a legal hearing in the House of Lords - discussed Russian politics, the aluminium wars in their country in the 1990s and the creation of the industrial giant Rusal.

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Putin did not show willingness to end Ukraine war during call, French official says

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German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron called for an immediate ceasefire on call

Vladimir Putin did not show a willingness to end the war with Ukraine during a call on Saturday with French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz, a French presidency official said.

Scholz and Macron called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine during the 75-minute phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin, a German government spokesman added.

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How Ukraine has become the crucible of the new world order

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From Russia’s threat of nuclear weapons to the patriotic courage of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, an A to Z of how the world has changed

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been described by politicians and commentators as a watershed moment in modern history, a turning point comparable in importance to the 9/11 attacks in the US in 2001, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and even the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963.

Whether this portentous view of the war turns out to be justified, only time – and future historians – will tell. But there’s no doubt that in the violent, tumultuous days after 24 February, the established international order has been shaken and, in some respects, upended in extraordinary, unexpected and often unwelcome ways.

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Putin propagandist news host has British home and citizenship

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Labour MP Stephen Kinnock calls for Sergei Brilev of state-controlled Rossiya 1 to be banned from UK and have assets frozen

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest news

One of Russia’s most popular television news presenters, who has been accused of being a propagandist for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has British citizenship and a family flat in west London.

Sergei Brilev has been reporting on the war in Ukraine on the state-controlled Rossiya 1, which tightly follows the Kremlin’s messaging. The channel describes the war as a “special military operation” launched to protect Ukrainian citizens from “abuse and genocide”.

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US and allies set to revoke normal trade relations with Russia over Ukraine war, says Biden – as it happened

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Bates only took one question before he was interrupted by the pilot asking passengers to take their seats. Shortly thereafter the feed your live-blogger was using to follow the mid-flight briefing cut out.

Asked to elaborate on what consequences Russia could face if it used chemical weapons against Ukraine, Bates deferred to the president’s remarks and said the “meaning was unmistakable”.

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Russia makes claims of US-backed biological weapon plot at UN

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Fears claims of plot to use birds to spread disease could be pretext for biological attack by Russia itself

Russia has accused Ukraine and the US at the UN security council of a plot to use migratory birds and bats to spread pathogens, raising alarm among other council members that the accusations could be intended to provide cover for future Russian use of biological weapons.

The Russian permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, delivered a lengthy account of the alleged biological weapons plot, and said the birds, bats and insects supposedly intended to spread disease would cross Ukraine’s western border.

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EU leaders announce intention to collectively rearm in face of Putin threat

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Versailles declaration says Russia’s war in Ukraine has heralded ‘tectonic shift in European history’

EU leaders have announced their intention to collectively rearm and become autonomous in food, energy and military hardware in a Versailles declaration that described Russia’s war as “a tectonic shift in European history”.

At a summit in the former royal palace, the 27 heads of state and government said on Friday that the invasion of Ukraine had shown the urgent need for the EU to take responsibility for its own security and to rid itself of dependencies on others.

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Ukraine woman who escaped Mariupol maternity ward gives birth

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Mariana Vishegirskaya, wearing same dotted pyjamas, is photographed holding newborn daughter

One of the pregnant women pictured escaping the ruins of the Mariupol maternity ward bombed by Russia has given birth to a daughter.

Mariana Vishegirskaya, wearing the same dotted pyjamas she was pictured in as she struggled down the stairs of the devastated hospital, was photographed on Friday by the Associated Press lying in a hospital bed holding her newborn daughter, Veronika.

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Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in book

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Marie Yovanovitch, who was fired by Trump in 2019, reveals details of then president’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian counterpart

At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.

Describing the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”

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Iran nuclear talks on hold over last-minute Russian demands

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Moscow is insisting that Washington pledge not to sanction trade between it and Tehran over Ukraine

Talks on the revival of the Iran nuclear deal have become a casualty of the war in Ukraine after an indefinite pause was announced over last-minute Russian demands.

An agreement on the nuclear deal to bring the US and Iran back into compliance would have led to a swathe of US sanctions on Iran being lifted, including Iranian crude oil exports and petrochemicals, in return for limits on Tehran’s nuclear activity.

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Russia-Ukraine war latest news: Russia may be planning to use biological weapons, US says, as Russia warns of ‘uncontrolled spread of bio agents’

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The US tells the UN that Russia has a well-documented history of using chemical and biological weapons, after Russia warned about the potential for the ‘uncontrolled spread of bio agents’

Guardian reporter Peter Beaumont brings us this morning run-down from Lviv.

Russian jets bombed cities in the west of Ukraine in the early hours of Friday morning hitting Lviv, Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk, as the Kremlin’s war continued to creep further into Ukraine.

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‘We must welcome them’: how Europe is helping Ukrainian refugees

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Unlike the UK, EU countries have offered open sanctuary to the millions fleeing Russia’s attack in biggest refugee crisis since second world war

Over the past few days, images of desperate Ukrainian families being turned away by officials have thrown the UK’s response to what has been termed the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war into stark contrast with its European neighbours.

So far the UK has refused to match the EU’s decision to offer Ukrainians open sanctuary, instead operating a limited family reunification and humanitarian sponsorship system.

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Ukraine’s Zelenskiy calls Russia ‘terrorist state’ over aid shelling as forces close in on Kyiv

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Ukraine president accuses Moscow of deliberate attack on humanitarian corridor in Mariupol as Russian forces fan out around capital and Biden prepares further trade restrictions

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has accused Russia of being a “terrorist state” after its tanks prevented a delivery of food, water and medicine to the besieged city of Mariupol, and said Moscow was capable of chemical weapon attacks.

As Russian forces appeared to be regrouping in order to encircle Kyiv and the US planned to ratchet up the economic pressure on Vladimir Putin, Zelenskiy tried to rally Ukrainians with another video address late on Thursday condemning Moscow’s relentless assault on cities.

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