Ukraine-Russia war live: Russian fuel depots on fire after Ukrainian drone strikes

Vladimir Putin’s troops are using chemical grenades to attack Ukrainian soldiers along the frontline, according to Kyiv military officials.

Ukrainian Tavriisk Group of Forces spokesperson captain Dmytro Lykhovyi claimed Russian forces used at least 60 grenades likely equipped with chloropicrin (PS), which is similar to tear gas, between 4 March and 10 March this year.

Its use would be a potential violation of the chemical weapons convention (CWC), which prohibits the use of PS and other riot control agents (RCAs) in warfare.

Russian fuel facilities in Oryol and Nizhny Novgorod regions were on fire on after Ukrainian drone attacks, local governors and media said, in what appeared to be a coordinated Kyiv air operation that also targeted Moscow and other regions.

Air defence systems downed a total of 25 drones launched by Ukraine over several Russian regions, RIA state news reported, citing Russia’s defence ministry. It was not immediately clear whether all the drones were destroyed.

“In the morning, the Kstovo industrial zone, a fuel and energy complex facility, was attacked by unmanned aerial vehicles,” Gleb Nikitin, governor of Nizhny Novgorod, said on the Telegram messaging app, adding that a fuel processing unit was on fire in result of the attack.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said the situation along the frontlines with Russia was the most favourable it had been in the past three months in his latest update on the war.

Russia’s advance in the east following its capture of Avdiivka city has been halted, Mr Zelensky said, while Ukraine’s overall strategic position has improved despite an ongoing shortage of artillery shells.

“The situation is much better than it has been over the past three months,” Mr Zelensky told France’s BFM television.

“We have had some difficulties because of shortages of artillery shells, an air blockade, Russian long range weapons and the great intensity of Russian drone attacks.

“We have worked in very efficient fashion… against Russian aviation. We have recovered in our situation in the east. The advance of Russian troops has been stopped,” he said.

Russian troops had levelled everything in months of bombardments of Avdiivka, Zelensky said. “We can no longer speak of a city as everything has been destroyed in Avdiivka.”

Russian forces, he said, enjoyed superiority in terms of long range weapons and “an advance of 20km on us”.

Mr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had downed large numbers of Russian aircraft and “continue to act in a strong manner in the Black Sea,” where Russian military targets have come under repeated attack.

And Kyiv’s forces had built up three lines of fortifications over more than 1,000km of territory, he added.

Ukraine will need more than a billion dollars to rebuild scientific infrastructure that was damaged or destroyed during the first two years of Russia’s war, the United Nations’ cultural and scientific agency has said.

Donald Trump will refuse to give funding to Ukraine if he is elected again as US president, according to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban.

Mr Orban met with Mr Trump in Florida at the weekend, and is openly supporting his conservative ally in his bid to return to the White House.

“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end,” Mr Orban said after their meeting.

“It is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet,” he told Hungary’s M1 TV channel late on Sunday.

“If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, then the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone are unable to finance this war. And then the war is over.”

A huge fire has erupted in an oil processing unit in the town of Kstovo in western Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod after a drone attack, the regional governor said.

Gleb Nikitin said a fuel and energy complex facility was attacked by unmanned aerial vehicles. Russia’s Lukoil-Nizhegorodnefteorgsintez refinery is located in the town and is believed to have caught fire.

Work at the refinery was temporarily suspended due to an “incident,” Russia’s RIA state news agency said, citing the oil company.

“In the morning, the Kstovo industrial zone, a fuel and energy complex facility, was attacked by unmanned aerial vehicles,” Mr Nikitin said on the Telegram messaging app.

Russian security services have long had information that Nato advisers are in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed on Monday.

The Kremlin spokesperson was commenting on Polish media reports suggesting that Nato soldiers are in Ukraine.

Russian politicians have submitted a draft bill which would seek to rewrite history by nullifying the Soviet decision in 1954 to transfer Crimea from Russia to Ukraine.

The move appears aimed at establishing a legal basis for Russia to argue that Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which it claims to have annexed from Ukraine in 2014, was never really part of Ukraine to begin with.

The draft, submitted by a politician from each of Russia’s two houses of parliament, describes the 1954 handover as arbitrary and illegal because no referendum was held and Soviet authorities had no right to transfer territory from one constituent republic to another without consent.

There was no announcement of when it would be debated.

Vladimir Putin has previously denounced the 1954 handover of Crimea under then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as a violation of legal norms in place at the time.

Crimea residents voted in favour of independence along with the rest of Ukraine in a referendum when the Soviet Union broke up, and Russia and Ukraine subsequently recognised each other’s borders. But Moscow seized military control of Crimea in 2014 and annexed it after a referendum that Ukraine and Western governments declared illegal.

A South Korean man has been arrested in Russia on suspicion of espionage, Russian state news agency Tass reported.

Law enforcement agencies said the man, identified as Baek Won-soon, had been detained in the far eastern city of Vladivostok before being transferred to Moscow for “investigative actions”.

The state news outlet said it was the first such case against a South Korean national. It did not provide any detail on the nature of the alleged spying.

An official reached at South Korea’s Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.

Russia regards South Korea as an “unfriendly” country because of Seoul’s support for Western sanctions against Moscow over the war in Ukraine while it has forged closer relations with North Korea.

The government should be “ashamed” for making “deeply dishonourable” cuts to defence spending, a Conservative former defence minister has said.

Mark Francois, a member of the cross-party defence committee, told the Commons: “The red book, the Budget bible, shows very clearly in tables 2.1 and 2.2 that the core defence budget next year has been cut by £2.5bn, that is true.

“It ill beholds any government, let alone one which purports to call itself Conservative, to then try and use one-off payments to Ukraine or for overspends in the nuclear budget from the consolidated fund and pretend they’re part of the defence budget, when everyone in this House knows they’re not.

“So I say to the government, if not to the minister who I have great regard for, as the son of a D-Day veteran, more in anger than in sorrow, what the government have done is deeply dishonourable and they should be ashamed of themselves.”

Defence minister James Cartlidge replied: “When we talk about spending on the nuclear deterrent, or spending to support Ukraine which is purchasing weapons, providing ordnance to them to help ultimately defend ourselves, I do think they are legitimately described as defence expenditure.

“After all, how else are we to pay for them, which budget are we supposed to pay from?”