The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said a negotiated peace in Ukraine may have to be be prioritised over putting Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, on trial for war crimes. In a speech in Bratislava, he said: “If in a few months to come, you have a window for negotiation with the existing Russian political power, the question you will have is an arbitrage between a trial and a negotiation. And you will have to negotiate with the leaders you have, de facto, even if the day after you will have to judge them in front of international justice … Otherwise you can put yourselves just in an impossible situation where you say ‘I want you to go to jail but you are the only ones I can negotiate with’.”
Macron also urged Nato to offer Ukraine “tangible and credible” security assurances, arguing that it was in the west’s interests to do so as Kyiv “is today protecting Europe”. Leaders will meet in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in July to discuss Nato membership for Ukraine.
The US has announced a new $300m arms package for Ukraine, including air defence systems and tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, but warned Kyiv that US weaponry should not be used for attacks within Russia. “We have been very clear with the Ukrainians privately – we’ve certainly been clear publicly – that we do not support attacks inside Russia,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.
A German government spokesperson has said Ukraine has the right to attack Russian territory as it qualifies as self-defence. In an interview with German news website Deutsche Welle, Steffen Hebestreit said: “International law allows Ukraine to carry out strikes on the territory of Russia for the purpose of self-defence.”
Russia does not plan to declare martial law after Tuesday’s large-scale drone strike on Moscow, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has said. The Kremlin’s comments came after several leading Russian officials and pro-war figures including Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov urged Putin to respond to the drone attacks by declaring a state of total war.
Russia said Ukrainian artillery hit the Russian town of Shebekino on the Ukrainian border for a third time this week, injuring four people, while drones attacked two oil refineries 65-80km east of Russia’s biggest oil export terminals. Russian officials did not attribute blame for the drone attacks and said a fire at one of the terminals was put out.
The UN has proposed that Kyiv, Moscow and Ankara start preparatory work for the transit of Russian ammonia through Ukraine as it tries to salvage a deal allowing safe Black Sea grain exports, a source close to the talks has told Reuters. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address accused Russia of blocking all activity at the port of Pivdennyi, with 1.5 million tonnes of agricultural products unable to move.
Only 500 people are left in Bakhmut, the city in the east of Ukraine that has been subject to heavy fighting in the last year, according to its mayor. The figure from Oleksii Reva, reported by the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, is a tiny fraction of its prewar population of 70,000.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, has said he has asked prosecutors to investigate “crimes” committed by senior Russian defence officials before and during the invasion of Ukraine.
An Iraqi citizen fighting with Wagner was killed in Ukraine in early April, the first confirmed case of someone from the Middle East dying in the conflict, Prigozhin told Reuters. Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, the RIA FAN news site also reported.
Russia claimed it destroyed Ukrainian naval forces’ last major warship, the Yuri Olefirenko, which it said was stationed in the southern port of Odesa. The Russian air force said it attacked the ship on 29 May. Ukraine has not commented.
Analysis from the Kyiv Post suggests about 90% of the 500 missiles and drones launched by Russia in May in attacks on Ukraine failed, to the cost of $1.7bn. It said 533 of them were destroyed by the Ukrainian air force, including 401 Shahed-136 drones that cost about $20,000 each.
The Russian security council deputy chair, Dmitry Medvedev, said Britain was Moscow’s “eternal enemy”. Any British officials who facilitated the war in Ukraine could be considered legitimate military targets, he said.
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