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Blinken and Lavrov meet for the first time since Russia’s invasion
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke for less than 10 minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting in New Delhi today, according to a US state department official.
Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine’s defence for as long as it takes, the official said, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Blinken also called for Moscow to reverse its decision to suspend participation in the New Start nuclear treaty and to release detained US citizen, Paul Whelan.
The official said:
The secretary saw the purpose of this was to deliver these three direct messages, which we see as advancing our interests.
We always remain hopeful that the Russians will reverse their decision and be prepared to engage in a diplomatic process that can lead to a just and durable peace, but I wouldn’t say that coming out of this encounter there was any expectation that things will change in the near term.
Lavrov did not mention the meeting during a news conference he gave after Thursday’s G20 foreign ministers’ meeting.
Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, confirmed the meeting took place, telling CNN:
Blinken asked for contact with Lavrov. On the go, as part of the second session of the [G20], Sergey Viktorovich [Lavrov] talked. There were no negotiations, meetings, etc.
Key events
Moldova’s parliament adopted a declaration on Thursday condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine which has contributed to a rise in tensions between Moscow and Chișinău.
A narrow majority of 55 lawmakers in the 101-seat assembly voted for the declaration, which stated that Moscow’s invasion began with the seizure of the Crimea peninsula in February 2014 and demanded the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine.
Reuters reports the declaration said Russia was waging an illegal, unprovoked and unfounded war of aggression in Ukraine that violated the principles of international law, and echoed calls by Kyiv for an international tribunal to prosecute war crimes.
Tensions between Russia and Moldova, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, have grown sharply since the war began.
The tiny former Soviet republic has protested to Moscow that Russian missiles aimed at Ukraine have entered Moldovan airspace, and that missile debris has landed inside Moldova, and has accused Moscow of plotting to topple the pro-European government in Chisinau.
Russia has denied the allegation and accused Ukraine and other countries of stoking instability in Moldova’s breakaway Transdniestria region, where about 1,500 Russian troops are based. Chișinău and Kyiv have dismissed the accusation.
The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont reports seeing an increase in the number of people claiming that images from Ukraine are fake.
He writes that it is his fifth trip to Ukraine and his sense of outrage is only getting stronger. “Listen to the people who are here,” he adds.
I’ve been seeing an increasing amount of crap from western pro-Putin keyboard warriors about how images from Ukraine are somehow fake. This is my fifth trip and the horror of what I’m seeing and my sense of outrage is only getting stronger. Listen to the people who are here.
— petersbeaumont (@petersbeaumont1) March 2, 2023
Andrew Roth
In Ukraine, the reports of firefights emerged from the Bryansk and Kursk regions were quickly interpreted as a “false flag” attack launched by Russia to discredit the Ukrainian armed forces.
“The story about [the Ukrainian] sabotage group in [Russia] is a classic deliberate provocation,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser.
[Russia] wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country and the growing poverty after the year of war. The partisan movement in [Russia] is getting stronger and more aggressive. Fear your partisans …
The story about 🇺🇦sabotage group in RF is a classic deliberate provocation. RF wants to scare its people to justify the attack on another country & the growing poverty after the year of war. The partisan movement in RF is getting stronger & more aggressive. Fear your partisans…
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) March 2, 2023
Russia blames Ukrainian ‘terrorists’ after reports of fighting near Ukraine border
Andrew Roth
The Kremlin claimed Russia had been attacked by “terrorists” after conflicting reports of fighting emerged from the Bryansk and Kursk regions, which Russian media blamed on Ukrainian “sabotage groups” and Ukrainian sources called a “provocation”.
The reports of fighting in Russia near the Ukrainian border began on Thursday morning. The head of the Bryansk region claimed that a “sabotage group opened fire on a moving automobile. As a result, one resident was killed; a 10-year-old child was injured.”
Other reports of hostages being taken or school buses being fired upon have been discredited, even by local Russian officials. In an online statement later corroborated by the independent Russian news site iStories, a group called the Russian Volunteer Corps claimed its fighters had crossed the border into Russia on Thursday but denied reports of civilian casualties.
The reports of the attack set off a flurry of activity in the Kremlin and at Russia’s security services. Russia’s FSB security service claimed it had launched an operation “to destroy armed Ukrainian nationalists who violated the state border”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the president, Vladimir Putin, would plan to hold a meeting of the security council, Russia’s main military decision-making body, on Friday. Peskov said he had also cancelled a trip to Stavropol.
He said:
We are talking about a terrorist attack. Measures are being taken to eliminate them.
Asked whether Russia could change the status of its “special military operation” after the reported attacks, Peskov said:
I don’t know. I can’t say for now.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has been pictured in New Delhi where he is attending a meeting of top diplomats from the G20 countries.
G20 talks fail to reach consensus on Ukraine war
A meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised and developing nations in New Delhi has ended with no consensus on the war in Ukraine.
Most G20 members strongly condemned the Ukraine war, with Russia and China disagreeing, said the G20 president, India, after the meeting.
India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said there were “divergences” on the issue of the war in Ukraine “which we could not reconcile as various parties held differing views”.
He said:
If we had a perfect meeting of minds on all issues, it would have been a collective statement.
Much of the talks were dominated by discussions of the war and China’s widening global influence, he said, adding that members agreed on most issues involving the concerns of less-developed nations, “like strengthening multilateralism, promoting food and energy security, climate change, gender issues and counter-terrorism”.
The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, one of Denmark’s most notable landmarks, has been vandalised with a Russian flag painted across its base.
The colours of the white, blue and red ensign were on Thursday found daubed on the rock on which the statue of the heroine from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale rests.
Copenhagen police said they had attended the scene and recorded “a case of vandalism” and that they were trying to find “traces” in the area.
An investigation has been opened into the act, seen as a sign of support for Moscow in the war in Ukraine.
Read the full story here:
Blinken and Lavrov meet for the first time since Russia’s invasion
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke for less than 10 minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting in New Delhi today, according to a US state department official.
Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine’s defence for as long as it takes, the official said, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Blinken also called for Moscow to reverse its decision to suspend participation in the New Start nuclear treaty and to release detained US citizen, Paul Whelan.
The official said:
The secretary saw the purpose of this was to deliver these three direct messages, which we see as advancing our interests.
We always remain hopeful that the Russians will reverse their decision and be prepared to engage in a diplomatic process that can lead to a just and durable peace, but I wouldn’t say that coming out of this encounter there was any expectation that things will change in the near term.
Lavrov did not mention the meeting during a news conference he gave after Thursday’s G20 foreign ministers’ meeting.
Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, confirmed the meeting took place, telling CNN:
Blinken asked for contact with Lavrov. On the go, as part of the second session of the [G20], Sergey Viktorovich [Lavrov] talked. There were no negotiations, meetings, etc.
Boris Johnson is delivering the keynote address at London’s soft power summit, where he says democracy matters because Vladimir Putin would never have made “the catastrophic mistake of invading Ukraine”.
Putin would “never have been so deluded about the true nature” of Ukraine if Russians lived in a free society with free media.
[Putin] would have known that the Ukrainians are a great patriotic people and that they would fight for every inch of their land.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has been speaking at a soft power summit in London, where he was asked by the journalist Mishal Husain about the “striking difference” in polls that showed support for Ukraine between western countries and countries such as India and Turkey.
Kuleba said there was a broad notion that the countries in the Global South was against Ukraine, but the reality was far more nuanced.
He said there were three rules that he used in communicating with countries: First, he had “to speak with them. The more you speak, the more familiar they get with the issue.”
The second was that he had to address them “with a lot of respect. Most of these countries are traumatised with their own history.”
Finally, what really worked was “putting them in our shoes”, he said.
What really works is just to say, are you ready to concede a square kilometre of your own country to your neighbour, simply because your neighbour decided to take the square kilometre away from you?
The answer is always no.
Here are some of the latest images from the scene of a Russian missile strike on a residential building in Zaporizhzhia in south-east Ukraine.
At least four people have been killed and eight wounded in the attack, Ukrainian officials said.
Russia has violated the world’s very principle of soft power, Olena Zelenska has said, and the world must decide “whether the language of aggression is acceptable to them”.
Russia attacked not only Ukraine but all world principles of peaceful coexistence, human rights and the progress we have made. Why negotiate when you can launch missiles?
Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, is delivering a video address at a soft power summit in London.
The country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, and the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson are also expected to speak.
You can watch live here:
Summary of the day so far …
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Ukrainian forces hung on to their positions in the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut early on Thursday under constant attack from Russian troops seeking to claim their first major victory for more than half a year. Russia says seizing Bakhmut would open the way to fully controlling the rest of the strategic Donbas industrial region bordering Russia, one of the main objectives of the invasion it launched on 24 February 2022. Ukraine says Bakhmut has limited strategic value but has put up fierce resistance. Not everyone in Ukraine is convinced that defending Bakhmut can go on indefinitely. “I believe that sooner or later, we will probably have to leave Bakhmut. There is no sense in holding it at any cost,” the Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Rakhmanin said on NV radio late on Wednesday.
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Russia attacked a five-storey residential block in Zaporizhzhia overnight, killing three people and injuring six others. Rescuers are searching for survivors under the rubble. One of the people evacuated from the building was a pregnant woman. The building was “almost completely destroyed”, the city’s acting mayor, Anatoly Kurtev, said. The Zaporizhzhia regional military administration said Russia appeared to have used a S-300 missile for the strike. A spokesperson for Russian proxies in the partially occupied region which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed said – without producing any evidence – that the strike was the result of the actions of Ukrainian air defences.
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The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has cancelled a planned trip to Stavropol amid reports of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Bryansk region. Russian media has reported that two villages near the border with Ukraine have been attacked, with at least one person killed. Details remain unclear, but the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, described the incident as a “terrorist” attack.
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The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, on Thursday urged China not to send weapons to help Russia’s war in Ukraine, and instead asked Beijing to exert pressure on Moscow to pull back its forces. In a speech to the German parliament, Reuters reports that Scholz said it was disappointing that Beijing had refrained from condemning the Russian invasion, though he welcomed its efforts towards nuclear de-escalation.
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The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, accused Moscow of repressing domestic critics and called on UN-mandated investigators to keep documenting Russia’s alleged abuses in the Ukraine war, in a speech to the Human Rights Council.
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The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, called on Thursday for the G20 to bridge differences over Ukraine, telling the opening of a meeting in New Delhi that global governance has “failed”. “The experience of the last few years – financial crisis, climate change, pandemic, terrorism and wars – clearly shows that global governance has failed,” Modi said in a recorded statement, opening the meeting of G20 foreign ministers.
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Russia’s foreign minister said on Thursday that many leaders from the west had turned the agenda of a G20 meeting in India “into a farce”. Sergei Lavrov told a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in New Delhi “a number of western delegations has turned the work on the G20 agenda into a farce, wanting to shift the responsibility for their failures in the economy to the Russian federation”. Blinken, meanwhile, said: “Unfortunately, this meeting has again been marred by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine.”
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Lavrov accused the west of “shamelessly burying” the Black Sea grain initiative that facilitates the export of Ukraine’s agricultural products from its southern ports. Ukraine has said that it would like to renew the deal for a period of at least a year to provide certainty to exporters, and to expand it to include the port of Mykolaiv.
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Ukraine’s state broadcaster, Suspilne, has reported on its Telegram channel that the water supply in Mykolaiv will be off Thursday between 11am and 5pm due to a shutdown at the pumping station.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, for now. I will be back later. Léonie Chao-Fong will be here shortly to take you through the next few hours of our live coverage.
Putin cancels trip to Stavropol over reports of Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Bryansk region
Russian media outlets have been carrying reports claiming that Ukrainian forces entered Russian territory in Bryansk region, which borders northern Ukraine. Tass reports that head of the region, Alexander Bogomaz, gave the news, and that “according to the latest information, they entered two villages, there is a battle going on”.
Details remain unclear, but Tass also reports: “The security forces confirmed that an operation is being carried out in the border area to destroy violators of the state border.”
The state-owned RIA Novosti news agency reported on its Telegram channel that the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, in his daily media breifing, said that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, cancelled a planned trip to Stavropol “due to the situation in the Bryansk region”.
In his media briefing, Peskov said the incident had been an attack by “terrorists”.
Tass suggests that “saboteurs attacked both Lyubechan and Sushany”, and that “Ukrainian forces fired at a vehicle, killing one person and injuring another, a 10-year-old child”.
It reports: “The FSB confirmed to TASS that in the border area of the Bryansk region ‘measures are being taken to destroy the armed Ukrainian nationalists who have violated the state border.’”
The claims have not been independently verified.
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