Ukraine forced to cut back ammo use on frontline as Putin threatens Nato – live

Russia summoned Finland’s ambassador on Tuesday to express its concerns about a new defence agreement between Helsinki and Washington, the Russian foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

Russian officials informed the ambassador that Moscow would “take the necessary measures to counter the aggressive decisions of Finland and its NATO allies”, notably the growing NATO military presence near its border, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.

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Russian air defences downed a hostile drone near Moscow on Tuesday, city mayor Sergei Sobyanin said, with no casualties reported.

Two Moscow airports, Vnukovo and Domodedovo, had restricted flights, a measure often taken during drone attacks.

Vnukovo airport in Moscow said on Tuesday it was temporarily restricting flights for reasons beyond its control, a measure often taken in recent months when there have been suspected Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian capital.

One of Ukraine‘s top generals has warned that its military is already being forced to downsize some operations due to delays in Western support.

Oleksandr Tarnavskyi said troops faced ammunition shortages along the “entire frontline“, creating a “big problem” for Kyiv. Ukraine’s military has consistently asked for more weapons, including ammunition, to fight off Russia’s invasion, but political wrangling within both the US and EU has delayed tens of billions of pounds of military aid. That is now having an impact on the battlefield.

Britain and France have pledged to support Ukraine for as long as it takes during a meeting of their foreign ministers in Paris.

Lord David Cameron and Catherine Colonna said they would continue to be staunch supporters of Kyiv. What would otherwise be a common statement of support has taken on renewed importance after rebels in both the US and the European Union blocked significant military and financial packages to Kyiv last week.

The Russian prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, has touched down in China to meet with his counterpart, as well as the Chinese president Xi Jinping tomorrow.

Their talks, taking place over two days, will focus on the further expansion of trade and economic cooperation. While China has not explicitly backed Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, it is seen as one of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest allies.

United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk has said there has been an extensive failure by Russia to take adequate measures to protect civilians in Ukraine and that there were indications that Russian forces had committed war crimes.

“There has been extensive failure by the Russian Federation to take adequate measures to protect civilians and protect civilian objects against the effects of their attacks,” Mr Turk said at the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

He added that his office’s monitoring indicated “gross violations of international human rights law, serious violations of international humanitarian law, and war crimes, primarily by the forces of the Russian Federation”.

More than 140 Ukrainian settlements have been shelled in the past 24 hours, according to the latest update from the Ukrainian military, with at least one person confirmed dead. Oleksander Prokudin, the governor of Kherson Oblast, southern Ukraine, confirmed that the region’s namesake city had been hit roughly two dozen times, killing one civilian.

Along the combat line, Russian forces have made only marginal gains along the southern outskirts of a small Ukrainian town called Novomykhailivka, in eastern Ukraine. The rest of the frontline remained largely static.

Analysis of confirmed vehicle and equipment losses in the last four days suggests that Russian forces are losing equipment at twice the rate of Ukraine. At least 86 percent of successful hits from both sides came from attack drones, which is increasingly understood as the defining offensive weapon of this war.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian military chief Valery Zaluzhny has appeared to backtrack on comments last month that the war had reached a stalemate. Asked on Monday whether he considered the battlefield situation a stalemate, Mr Zaluzhny replied “No”, Ukraine’s RBC media reported.

Olha Konoplenko’s eastern Ukrainian city is occupied by Russian forces, but that hasn’t stopped her from trying to uphold the law remotely as a judge.

Residents who fled Bakhmut, captured last May after months of fierce fighting, still rely on her and other exiled colleagues for key rulings.

“There’s no city, but there are still its people,” said Konoplenko, whose Artemivsk City District court now operates in a town farther from the front line of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

She requested its exact location not be disclosed for security reasons.

Working in the war-torn east, parts of which have been occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014, was never easy for local judges. Moscow’s February 2022 invasion raised the stakes further.

Konoplenko, 39, and other colleagues in the Donbas region preside under the regular threat of air strikes. Their hearings, to which defendants and plaintiffs dial in remotely, are often cut short by power outages.

At Konoplenko’s court, clerks were sitting in front of dark screens, leafing through documents as they waited for electricity to return.

The next day, a hearing was punctuated by the sound of explosions from a Russian strike.

Vladimir Putin is preparing for the possibility of “large-scale conventional war” with Nato, according to a major think tank, after moving troops towards Russia’s northwestern border and issuing a veiled threat to new alliance member Finland.

Russia has confirmed it is strenthening its military units in the northwest, where it shares borders with Finland, Estonia and Latvia, and has formed a new military zone – the Leningrad Military District (LMD) – in the wake of Finland’s decision to join Nato in April.