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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
World
Samantha Lock

Russia-Ukraine war: what we know on day 49 of the invasion

Man clears garden of debris
A local man clears a garden of debris next to a destroyed Russian tank in the yard of a house in Bohdanivka village, northeast of Kyiv. Photograph: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty
  • More than 1,000 Ukrainian marines defending the besieged port city of Mariupol have surrendered, Moscow has claimed. In one of the most critical battles of the war, Russia’s defence ministry said on Wednesday 1,026 soldiers from Ukraine’s 36th marine brigade, including 162 officers, had “voluntarily laid down their arms” near the city’s Ilyich iron and steel works. There was no independent confirmation of the claim.

  • The presidents of four countries bordering Russia – Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia – have travelled to Kyiv in a show of support for their Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and his embattled troops. It follows Kyiv’s reported refusal to meet the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who visited Poland on Tuesday and said he had planned to go on to Ukraine but “was not wanted”. Steinmeier, who was formerly Germany’s foreign minister, is facing heavy criticism for his past policy of rapprochement with Moscow.

  • ​Zelenskiy told Estonian MPs, without providing evidence, that Russia was using phosphorus bombs in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces in Mariupol said a drone had dropped a poisonous substance on the city, but there has been no independent confirmation that Russia used banned chemical weapons.

  • Zelenskiy warned that the war will become an “endless bloodbath, spreading misery, suffering, and destruction” without additional weaponry. Speaking in English in a video published on Twitter, Zelenskiy said: “Freedom must be armed better than tyranny. Western countries have everything to make it happen.”

  • The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has declined to repeat Joe Biden’s accusation that Russia was carrying out “genocide” against Ukrainians, warning that verbal escalations would not help end the war. The US president said on Tuesday it had “become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian”. In response, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described Biden’s comments as “unacceptable”.

  • The UK government has imposed sanctions on another 206 individuals in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, including 178 people it said were involved in propping up the self-proclaimed republics in Luhansk and Donetsk. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, said the latest sanctions were imposed in a direct response to the “horrific rocket attacks” on a train station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, that killed dozens of civilians.

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