Ukraine Russia war latest news: Putin suffering ‘extremely heavy casualties’ in Bakhmut ‘killing zone’

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s request to speak at the Oscars has been rejected for the second year in a row, reported Variety Magazine.

Mr Zelensky has participated virtually in mega-cultural events like the Grammys, Golden Globe Awards, Cannes Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival since the war in Ukraine.

A request was reportedly sent to the Academy to include Mr Zelensky by WME power agent Mike Simpson. However, the request was turned down, it reported.

Last year, Oscars executive producer Will Packer was vary of giving Mr Zelensky airtime because “everyone involved in the conflict is white and previous tragedies involving people of colour did not receive the same level of attention”.

The Oscars that year showed solidarity with Ukraine by observing a moment of silence during the ceremony.

An onslaught of 40 missiles has hit the northeastern city of Kharkiv since the beginning of the year, Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address.

“Ruins, debris, shell holes in the ground are a self-portrait of Russia, which it paints where normal life reigns without Russia,” he said.

He said Russian shelling has killed three Ukrainians in Kherson who simply “went to a store to buy groceries”.

Russia has “become a synonym for terror” and “will be an example of defeat” as well as fair punishment for its acts in Ukraine.

“The punishment that the Kremlin cannot stop,” he said.

More than 500 Russian and Ukrainian troops have been killed over the previous 24 hours as the battle in Bakhmut continued to rage.

Serhiy Cherevatyi, a Ukrainian military spokesperson, said 221 pro-Moscow troops were killed and more than 300 wounded in Bakhmut.

While Moscow did not specify Bakhmut casualties, the defence ministry said up to 210 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the broader Donetsk part of the frontline.

Ukrainian forces are fending off unabating attacks in Bakhmut and a small river that bisects the town now marks a new front line as the Wagner mercenary group made advances in most of the eastern part of the city.

Moscow says capturing Bakhmut would punch a hole in Ukrainian defences and be a step towards seizing all of the Donbas industrial region, a major target. Kyiv says the battle is grinding down Russia’s best units.

Aerial footage reveals the extent of destruction in Lviv Oblast after Russia launched a barrage of missile strikes against Ukraine.

This video, shared by the region’s governor, shows the state civilian houses were left in after the shelling hit the area.

It was the first such missile attack in weeks, with Volodymyr Zelenskiy reporting a total of 81 strikes across the country.

He said it has “been a difficult night” and offered his condolences for the families of the dead and injured.

Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipro, Odesa, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zhytomyr, and Vinnytsia regions were hit.

Georgia’s ruling party has shelved a controversial “foreign agents” law that critics called a Russian-inspired authoritarian move that could have hit hopes of the country joining the European Union.

The bill, which had been given initial parliamentary approval, has sparked several nights of protest, with tens of thousands of on the streets. Demonstrations were dispersed by police using water cannons and tear gas.

Given Georgia’s status as former Soviet state situated at Russia’s south-west border, any suggestions of influence from Moscow will carry significant weight. Vladimir Putin has long seen Georgia as part of Moscow’s sphere of influence. Since his invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president has also upped his rhetoric about Western institutions, such as the EU and the Nato military alliance, seeking to erode Russia’s standing in the world. Georgia is not a member of Nato, but has sought to join.

My colleague Chris Stevenson reports:

A Ukrainian lawyer, who founded the war-torn country’s leading campaign against Russian fossil fuels, has been refused entry to the world’s most prominent energy summit.

Svitlana Romanko travelled from her home in Ivano-Frankivsk, western Ukraine, in late February to Houston, Texas to attend CERAWeek, an annual summit which attracts the heads of major oil and gas companies and industry bodies along with senior government officials.

CERAWeek speakers this year included both John Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate, ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods, and the Cop28 climate summit president, Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Rishi Sunak has said new support measures for Ukraine agreed between the UK and France are designed to put Kyiv in the “strongest possible position” to negotiate a ceasefire.

The Prime Minister and French President Emmanuel Macron used the UK-France summit to sign off on jointly training Ukrainian marines and supplying weapons to the country in its fight against Russia’s invading forces.

During a press conference in Paris, the leaders said the immediate priority was to bolster Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces and allow them to “mount a successful counter-offensive”.

Mr Sunak announced in February, during Mr Zelensky’s visit to Britain, that the UK would start to train Kyiv’s marines as well as pilots.

Friday’s declaration from the summit at the Elysee Palace will see France join Britain in preparing marines for the drive to purge Ukraine of Russian troops.

In the year since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been the figurehead of what he initially termed a “special military operation”. Russia’s president might have prepared the political ground with a show of collective responsibility – few will forget how he solicited the support of key ministers live on TV just hours before ordering the invasion – but he has fronted the invasion ever since, often alone, and it is he who will answer to history.

From the start, Russia’s military action tended to be seen as an old-fashioned war launched by an old-fashioned autocrat. As such, it was as surprising as it was shocking to all those who believed such wars to be over, at least in Europe. The scenes that have dominated our television screens ever since have been tragically reminiscent of black-and-white newsreel showing battles for the very same cities during the Second World War.

But the supposedly old-fashioned autocrat who gave the orders for this war is a more complicated figure than many think.

He sold the invasion as a collective decision with his military chiefs, but it is the president alone who will have to answer to history, writes Mary Dejevsky:

Wildlife groups are calling for Britain to ban the transportation of eels to Russian conservation projects because of fears they are being sold on to China for food.

The alarm was sounded after a consignment of half a million eels were moved to Kaliningrad. Charities have said that the profits Russia has made from these sales could be funding the Ukraine war.

Multi-member organisation Wildlife and Countryside Link (WCL), which represents the RSPCA, CPRE and the Marine Conservation Society, has called for action from Defra (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs).

Conservation has been required with the European eel population falling by 90 per cent in the past four decades despite hundreds of millions of baby, or glass, eels arriving each year.

The capital Kyiv, Kharkiv and the Black Sea port of Odessa were all struck as air raid sirens rang out across the nation while explosions were also reported in the northern city of Chernihiv and the western Lviv region, as well as in Dnipro, Lutsk and Rivne.

Among the projectiles fired were six Kinzhal (Dagger) hypersonic ballistic missiles, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, which are difficult to intercept because they reportedly travel at up to ten times the speed of sound, which is around 8,000mph.

Russia has used hypersonic missiles since the earliest stages of the conflict, claiming to have destroyed a fuel depot in the Black Sea city of Mykolaiv and an underground ammunition store in western Ivano-Frankivsk in the opening skirmishes.

Ukraine has confirmed that those targets were struck but did not specify what weapons were used.