Ukraine war news latest: Kyiv pleads for weapons as Putin warn of ‘catastrophic’ energy price hike after G20

To escape the worst hit areas of the war, the most vulnerable Ukrainians are reliant on volunteers using buses to ferry people to safety. Bel Trew joined one such convoy in Donbas.

UK military intelligence says Russia is moving its reserve forces and positioning them near the Ukrainian border for “for future offensive operations”.

Its latest assessment on the situation adds: “Many of its reinforcements are ad hoc groupings, deploying with obsolete or inappropriate equipment.”

A new UN report has found that Ukrainian forces took up positions inside the nursing home a few days before the Russian forces assaulted a nursing home in March, an attack that killed almost 50 civilians.

The positioning of the troops in the health care facility in Stara Krasnyanka with vulnerable civilians effectively made it a target of Russian forces.

The report said Ukraine’s armed forces “a large, and perhaps equal,” share of blame for the attack.

The report does not conclude that Ukrainian soldiers or Moscow-backed separatist fighters committed a war crime.

But it said the battle at the Stara Krasnyanka nursing home is emblematic of the human rights office’s concerns over the potential use of “human shields” to prevent military operations in certain areas.

The first cohort of Ukrainian soldiers arrived in the UK to receive training by British forces to help them in their fight against Russia.

Up to 10,000 Ukrainians will be trained in the coming months in the UK-led military programme.

The troops met defence secretary Ben Wallace, who said: “This ambitious new training programme is the next phase in the UK’s support to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in their fight against Russian aggression.

“Using the world-class expertise of the British Army we will help Ukraine to rebuild its forces and scale-up its resistance as they defend their country’s sovereignty and their right to choose their own future.”

Around 1,050 personnel of the British forces have been deployed to run the programme which will take place in MoD sites across the North West, South West and South East of the UK.

The training will be provided to volunteer recruits with little to no military experience and the skills to be effective in frontline combat.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said if western powers continued to impose further sanctions would mean risk causing “catastrophic consequences” for world energy markets.

“All this reveals, once again, that sanctions on Russia end up causing much more harm to those countries that impose them,” he told in a televised address on Friday.

He admitted that sanctions were hurting Russia’s economy but said western powers would inflict more harm.

“The further use of sanctions could lead to even more severe consequences, even, without exaggeration, catastrophic consequences on the global energy market,” he said.

Ukraine urged its allies yesterday to send more weapons as the Ukrainian chief negotiator said a turning point in war was starting to take shape as Moscow’s forces took an “operational pause due to losses and to resupply”.

“It is clear that they have to redeploy things, bring forward new troops and weaponry, and this is very good. A certain turning point is beginning to take shape because we are proving we are going to attack storage facilities and command centres,” Mykhailo Podolyak told Ukraine‘s 24 Channel television.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went on a visit to areas at and near the front, and said he spent the day visiting a hospital in Dnipro treating wounded soldiers and touring areas in the forward lines of defence in Dnipropetrovsk and Kriviy Rih regions.

The decreasing global production of chickpeas due to the Ukraine war and the changing climate is threatening the supply of hummus, according to industry experts.

The global supply of chickpeas could fall as much as 20 per cent this year, according to the Global Pulse Confederation.

Farmers in the United States – the fourth largest chickpea exporter – planted nearly five per cent fewer acres of chickpeas this year due to bad weather, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported.

Maryam Zakir-Hussain reports.

We have begun to show that, when provoked, Europe can respond powerfully, writes Josep Borrell Fontelles.