International human rights body calls for immediate and urgent action to halt movement of children from Ukraine by Russia. This live blog is closed

• Russia-Ukraine war at a glance

Reuters has taken a hard look at satellite imagery of Russia’s “vast network of fortifications, sweeping down from western Russia through eastern Ukraine and on to Crimea” and built in readiness for Ukraine’s expected counteroffensive.

The news agency says it has examined thousands of defensive positions, both inside Russia and along Ukrainian front lines, and concluded Russia is most heavily defended in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and the gateway to the Crimean Peninsula.

It’s not the numbers for the Ukrainians. It’s can they do this kind of warfare, combined arms operations? The Russians have shown they can’t do it and they’ve gone back to their old Soviet method of attrition.

We’ve cleaned out most of the stocks in the West. It’s going to take some years to rebuild. I think this is Ukraine’s big opportunity to press on.

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Here are the images shared by the German air force of the Russian aircraft intercepted over the Baltic Sea.

They are reported to be two SU-27 flankers and one IL-20 aircraft.

Everybody fears that they won’t allow Belarusians to keep watching the war from a distance for too long.

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Russia’s foreign ministry has summoned the Moldovan ambassador in Moscow over the expulsion last week of a Russian diplomat in Moldova, state-owned news agency RIA reported.

Last week, Moldovan government press secretary Daniel Voda told reporters the decision to expel a Russian diplomat was connected to the actions of embassy staff towards Moldovan border guards at Chisinau airport.

Kupyansk, city centre, local history museum. The terrorist country is doing everything to destroy us completely. Our history, our culture, our people. Killing Ukrainians with absolutely barbaric methods. We have no right to forget about it for a single second. We must and will respond!

So far, it is known about a dead employee of the museum, and 10 wounded. There are still people under the rubble. Elimination of the consequences of shelling continues. All necessary services are involved.

Nikolai Peskov, 33, says he sought father’s help to serve anonymously in mercenary group for six months

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

The son of the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has claimed he served as an artilleryman with the Wagner mercenary group in Ukraine for nearly six months.

In an interview with the pro-Kremlin daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, Nikolai Peskov, 33, said: “It was my duty … I couldn’t sit to one side watching as friends and others went off there.”

Apparent move in occupied areas comes as Ukrainian military sets up positions on eastern side of Dnipro River

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

Ukrainian authorities say Russian forces are “forcibly evacuating” civilians in the area of the Kherson region that they still occupy, a day after it was claimed Ukrainian forces had established a bridgehead on the east bank of the Dnipro River.

“I have information that the evacuation starts today [Sunday] with an excuse of protecting civilians from the consequences of heavy fighting in the area,” Oleksandr Samoylenko, the Ukrainian head of Kherson’s regional council, said. Russian troops were “trying to steal as much as they can” as they withdrew, he added.

Head of intelligence in Ukraine says Bakhmut is the only frontline area in which Russian troops are making any attempt to advance. This live blog is closed

• Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 425 of the invasion

Recent remarks by China’s ambassador to France questioning the sovereignty of former Soviet states such as Ukraine are totally unacceptable, the Czech Republic’s foreign minister Jan Lipavský said before a meeting with EU colleagues in Luxembourg on Monday.

“It is totally unacceptable”, Lipavský said. “I hope bosses of this ambassador will make these things straight.”

Ukraine says Russia is taking up defensive positions in most combat areas apart from Bakhmut

Thinktank says infiltration into area east of Dnipro River could be first step toward trying to dislodge Russian forces

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

Ukraine’s military has set up positions on the eastern side of the Dnipro River near Kherson city, the Institute for the Study of War cites Russian military bloggers as saying.

Infiltrating the area could be a first step towards trying to dislodge Russian forces from positions they are using to shell and shoot at Kherson. The constant attacks have made it impossible for residents to return to normal life months after Ukrainian troops liberated the city from occupation.

Ukraine military sets up positions on east bank of Dnipro river; France and Baltic states dismayed at Chinese ambassador comments

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At least five Russian missiles hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and surrounding districts late on Saturday night, damaging civilian buildings, local officials said. One missile hit a house in the village of Kotliary, just to the south of Kharkiv, while another caused a fire in the city itself, said the regional governor, Oleh Sinegubov.

Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had captured another three districts in the western part of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. Troops who have continued into the heavily contested city are thought to be part of the Wagner group of mercenaries.

Russia confirmed it would expel 20 German diplomats in retaliation for its own diplomats being sent home from Berlin, the Tass news agency said, citing Russia’s foreign ministry.

Seventeen apartment buildings were evacuated in the Russian city of Belgorod after an explosive device was found at the site blown up by a bomb accidentally dropped by a Russian warplane, authorities said. The explosion on Thursday injured three people in the city near the Ukrainian border. The province’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on Saturday that sappers examining the blast site found and detonated an “explosive object” that was “in the immediate vicinity of residential buildings”. The precautionary evacuations ended later in the day, said Belgorod’s mayor, Valentin Demidov.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has again refused to take sides in the war in Ukraine, calling for a “negotiated political solution” between Kyiv and Moscow. “We urgently need a group of countries to sit round a table with both Ukraine and Russia,” he said after a meeting with the Portuguese president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in Lisbon.

Units from Belarus returned home from Russia on Saturday after training on how to use the Iskander tactical missile system to launch nuclear weapons, the Belarusian defence ministry said. It made the announcement exactly four weeks after Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said Russia would station tactical nuclear weapons in neighbouring Belarus.

Ukraine plans to deploy software from the US data analytics provider Palantir Technologies to help it prosecute alleged war crimes committed by Russia, the company has said.

Ukraine’s operational command has reported that 11 Russian warships are in combat readiness in the Black Sea, including two submarines armed with Kalibr cruise missiles. The press service of Ukraine’s Operational Command South reported this on Facebook, according to Ukrinform.

Cyprus has cracked down on those named by the US and Britain for allegedly helping Russian oligarchs bypass sanctions on Moscow because of the Ukraine war, an official said. The financial commissioner, Pavlos Ioannou, told state broadcaster CyBC on Saturday that assets of the individuals and entities concerned had been frozen.

Jack Teixeira, the US air national guardsman accused of leaking classified defence documents to a small group of gamers, posted sensitive information months earlier than previously known and to a much larger chat group, according to the New York Times.

The UK Ministry of Defence has said Russia is struggling to maintain consistency in a core narrative used to justify the Ukraine war: that the invasion is akin to the Soviet experience during the second world war.

A Ukrainian soldier who lost his leg and has been fighting on the frontline wearing a prosthesis will run the London Marathon to raise money and share a message of unity against Russian aggression. Roman Kashpur, from Khmelnyk in Vinnytska, stood on a landmine in 2019. He fought on the frontline in Ukraine wearing a prosthesis for six weeks after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

The top Russian official in occupied Crimea said its air defence systems had been activated but there were no reports of damage or casualties. “Air defence forces worked in the sky over Crimea. No damage or casualties,” the official, Sergei Aksyonov, said on Telegram. “I ask everyone to remain calm and trust only trusted sources of information.”

Russian defence ministry says it has made progress in heavily contested region. This blog is now closed

A guided bomb hit the village of Orlykivka in Chernihiv in the early hours of Saturday.

No casualties were reported by Ukraine’s operational command northern region on Saturday, after the bomb was dropped from a Russian SU-35 jet.

Nato chief ‘confident’ Ukraine is ready to retake more territory; suspect in Pentagon leaks posted information earlier than previously thought – report

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The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said he is “confident” that Ukraine is prepared to retake more territory as Kyiv readies for a new offensive against invading Russian forces. Stoltenberg told journalists in Germany when asked if Ukraine has what it needs to successfully execute the offensive: “I’m confident that they will now be in a position to be able to liberate even more land.” He also invited the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to the Nato summit in July and emphasised the need to support Ukraine’s battlefield logistics.

Jack Teixeira, the US air national guardsman accused of leaking classified defence documents to a small group of gamers, posted sensitive information months earlier than previously known and to a much larger chat group, the New York Times has reported. In February 2022, soon after the invasion of Ukraine, a user profile matching that of Teixeira began posting secret intelligence on the Russian war effort on a previously undisclosed chat group of about 600 members on the social platform Discord. The Pentagon has declined to comment on the new report.

A Moscow court has ordered the arrest in absentia of Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, adding him to its list of “foreign agents”, state-owned news agency RIA has reported. Grozev is the lead Russia journalist for the Bellingcat news outlet, and played a key role in its investigation into the poisoning of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Germany, Poland and Ukraine signed an agreement on Friday for a hub to repair Leopard tanks used in Ukraine to fight Russian forces, Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said at a meeting of allies at the Ramstein airbase. He sounded a note of caution about any early invitation for Ukraine to join Nato. All parties agreed on how to finance such a hub, which will cost €150m-€200m a year and could begin operations at the end of May.

International backing for Ukraine holds “strong and true”, said the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, as he opened a meeting in Germany with allies to discuss further support for Kyiv. Austin confirmed the US is helping to train nine Ukrainian “storm” brigades for the counteroffensive and stressed the need to make Ukraine’s air defence system “robust” and “rigorous”. Austin said: “Our support for the forces of freedom in Ukraine holds strong and true. At today’s contact group meeting, we’ll focus on three key issues: air defence, ammunition and enablers.”

Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, has tweeted about the meeting of the Ukraine defence contact group in Ramstein, Germany, saying that Ukraine is “de facto already a part of the alliance’s security space” having reached “unprecedented levels of interoperability”.

A Moscow court has issued a warrant for the arrest of the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, accusing the spy chief of organising “terrorist attacks” inside Russia, state-owned news agency RIA reported. RIA cited the court as saying that Budanov was accused of offences related to terrorism and arms smuggling. The move against him was announced “in absentia”, in an apparent acknowledgment that Budanov cannot be immediately detained.

The Canadian government announced C$39m (£23.26m) in new military assistance for Ukraine including 40 sniper rifles, 16 radio sets and a donation to a Nato fund to help in the war. The latest round of Canadian aid, which also includes ammunition for the rifles, was announced by Canada’s defence minister, Anita Anand, at the Ramstein airbase in Germany where Nato defence officials met to discuss further military supplies for Ukraine.

The UK has imposed sanctions on five people linked to the arrest of the Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was jailed this week for 25 years. Elena Lenskaya, a judge who approved Kara-Murza’s arrest, along with Denis Kolesnikov and Andrei Zadachin, investigators involved in the arrest of Kara-Murza, will all be hit with sanctions. FSB agents Alexander Samofal and Konstantin Kudryavtsev, who followed Kara-Murza on multiple trips before he was poisoned in 2015, will be sanctioned as well.