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Ukrainian soldiers repair damaged roads and dig new trenches amid intense shelling of last routes out of besieged city
Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. Our top story this morning:
There have been reports of intense Russian shelling of routes leading west out of Bakhmut, in an apparent attempt to block Ukrainian forces’ access in and out of the besieged city.
Ukraine has ordered a mandatory evacuation of families and vulnerable residents from the frontline city of Kupiansk and adjacent north-eastern territories. The evacuation order was due to the “unstable security situation” caused by Russia’s constant shelling of the town and its surroundings, it said. Russian troops retreated from key cities in the north-eastern Kharkiv region, including Kupiansk, and Ukraine recaptured it last September.
The US president, Joe Biden, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, met at the White House on Friday, where both leaders praised each other’s country’s support towards Ukraine. “As Nato allies, we’re making the alliance stronger and more capable,” Biden said. Scholz told Biden that it was important that the US and Germany organised in “lockstep” since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February.
The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, made an unannounced trip to Ukraine on Friday, according to Department of Justice officials. Garland had traveled to the western city of Lviv on an invitation from the Ukrainian prosecutor general, USA Today reported officials saying.
Serbia has denied that it has supplied weapons to Ukraine, its foreign minister said. Following Moscow’s demand on Thursday to know whether Serbia provided thousands of rockets to Ukraine in its fight against Russia, Ivica Dačić said that zero weapons have been exported from the country to any parties involved in the “conflict”.
The US has announced a new military aid package of ammunition and other support for Ukraine worth $400m. The package will be funded using presidential drawdown authority, which authorises the president to transfer articles and services from US stocks without congressional approval during an emergency, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said.
Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, has said he is confident that western countries will supply fighter jets to Kyiv, and that he is optimistic that the war will end this year. In an interview with the German newspaper Bild, Reznikov said Ukraine expects to receive “two to three different types” of fighter jets and that he believed it would be “done through a kind of coalition again”, referring to the “tank coalition” of Leopard 2 tanks from western allies.
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