Ukraine live briefing: Bakhmut faces ‘fiercest battles’; Blinken calls for ‘immediate release’ of WSJ reporter
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Key developments
- Russia has still not granted U.S. consular officials access to Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich since he was detained last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday — a situation that Blinken emphasized needed to be rectified immediately. “We continue to call for his immediate release,” Blinken told reporters during a news conference in Hanoi. “We need to consular access now.”
- Jack Teixeira, the suspect in the leaks, faces up to 15 years in prison after the federal government charged him with retention and transmission of national defense information and willful retention of classified documents. The 21-year-old did not enter a plea and is detained pending a hearing Wednesday. The government is seeking continued detention, The Washington Post reported.
- The “fiercest battles” were taking place around Bakhmut, Ukraine’s armed forces said early Saturday. The military update said Russian forces were focusing their offensive operations on the city in the eastern Donetsk region, which has been gripped by fighting for months.
- The leader of Russia’s Wagner Group suggested that Moscow declare it had met the goals of its “special military operation” in Ukraine . Yevgeniy Prigozhin, whose private military forces are fighting alongside Russia in the war, said on Telegram that Russia had succeeded in killing a large number of military-aged Ukrainian men and pushed others to flee the country. Having seized a “fat chunk” of Ukrainian territory, the strategic option for Russia would be to lock down and defend those gains, he wrote in the lengthy post on Friday.
Global impact
- China does not intend to sell weapons to parties involved in the Ukraine conflict, Foreign Minister Qin Gang said at a Friday news conference with his German counterpart. A leaked U.S. intercept showed that Russian intelligence claimed Beijing had agreed to send Moscow weapons, The Post reported earlier. U.S. officials, who have warned China against providing Russia with weapons, say they have not seen evidence Beijing has made a transfer.
- Finland has unveiled the first section of a nearly 125-mile border fence with Russia, which the country started building after Russia launched its war in Ukraine last year, according to AFP. The Nordic nation joined NATO earlier this month, a historic shift for Finland which will double the alliance’s land border with Russia.
From our correspondents
Navalny, jailed Russian opposition figure, is severely ill, aides say: Russian authorities could be slowly poisoning Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison, his lawyers and associates say, after the dissident suffered acute stomach pains and seizures while also losing more than 17 pounds recently, Robyn Dixon reports.
“Regarding the blatant and very strange situation around Navalny’s health, with seizures that have never had any signs, we cannot rule out the possibility that he is simply being ‘slowly poisoned’ so that his health does not deteriorate dramatically, but gradually and steadily,” Navalny’s lawyer posted on Twitter recently.
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