(Reuters) – Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the world not to underestimate the elevated risks of nuclear war, and said he viewed NATO as being “in essence” engaged in a proxy war with Russia by supplying Kyiv with weaponry.
DIPLOMACY, SANCTIONS, AID
* The United States will host more than 40 countries on Tuesday for Ukraine-related defence talks in Germany that will focus on arming Ukraine. The United States pledged $713 million in new aid on Monday.FIGHTING
The following reports could not be immediately verified by Reuters:
* Russia’s defence ministry said its high-precision missiles destroyed six facilities powering railways used to deliver foreign weapons to Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region.
* Russia said it had hit 56 Ukrainian military infrastructure facilities overnight.
* Four people were killed and nine were wounded in Russian shelling in the Kharkiv region, Oleh Synegubov, the region’s governor told Ukraine’s public broadcaster.* Two villages in Russia’s Belgorod region came under fire from Ukraine, and at least two people were wounded, the region’s governor said. Officials have in the past few weeks reported cross-border shelling.
* Ukraine’s general staff said Russia was shelling its second biggest city, Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine and towns and villages to the south but that Ukrainian forces had repelled assaults on three settlements.
* Russian forces carried out strikes on Ukrainian positions in the Azovstal steel plant, the main remaining Ukrainian stronghold in Mariupol where more than 1,000 civilians are also sheltering, Ukrainian officials said.
* Britain said Russia had made minor advances since shifting its forces to fully occupying the Donbas but had tied up many units with its focus on Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant.
* Ukrainian human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said the Russian military had destroyed 347 health facilities including all in the Luhansk part of the Donbas, threatening thousands of lives. All of Luhansk province was without electricity on Monday after Russian attacks, the governor said.
WAR CRIMES INVESTIGATION
* The International Criminal Court will take part in a joint team investigating allegations of war crimes in Ukraine, the European Union’s agency for criminal justice cooperation said.
QUOTES
* “NATO, in essence, is engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and is arming that proxy. War means war,” Lavrov said.
* “In terms of Russia’s war aims, Russia has already failed and Ukraine has already succeeded,” Blinken said.
* “What the Americans are doing is pouring oil on the flames,” Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, said of U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
