Poland open to sending fighter jets to Kyiv, says PM, if part of Nato decision – as it happened

It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:

• The EU has pledged to double a military aid programme for Ukraine by training an extra 15,000 soldiers as part of a blizzard of announcements aimed at showing that it will “stand by Ukraine for the long-haul”. Speaking at the start of a two-day trip to Kyiv, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, reiterated that the EU aimed to have a tenth package of sanctions against Russia in place by 24 February.

• Von der Leyen also reiterated that the EU would cap the price of Russian petroleum products, as part of a broader G7 plan to restrict oil revenues available to the Kremlin’s war machine. The G7 and the EU have already agreed a price cap on crude oil that came into force last December and according to Von der Leyen, costs Russia €160m (£142m) a day. The EU’s 27 member states are yet to agree on the latest oil price cap.

• The EU also intends to work with Ukrainian prosecutors to set up an international centre for the prosecution of the crime of aggression in Ukraine to be located in The Hague, Von der Leyen said. The purpose of this centre is to collect and store evidence, for any future trial, whether that takes place via a special tribunal or some other way.

• Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has urged the EU to impose more sanctions on Russia, and said he had discussed a new sanctions package with Von der Leyen. Ukraine’s president said the speed of the EU sanctions campaign against Russia had “slightly slowed down” while Russia had been “increasing its pace of adapting to sanctions”.

• Russia is planning a major offensive to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine on 24 February, according to the country’s defence minister. Speaking to French media, Oleksii Reznikov warned Russia would call on a large contingent of mobilised troops. Referring to the general mobilisation of 300,000 conscripted soldiers in September, he claimed that numbers at the border suggest the true size could be closer to 500,000.

• Russia has warned it has “the potential” to respond to western arms deliveries to Ukraine that will not just be about “using armoured vehicles”. In a speech marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory against Nazi Germany in the Battle of Stalingrad, Vladimir Putin appeared to allude to Russia’s enormous nuclear weapons arsenal, warning “those who expect to win on the battlefield apparently do not understand that a modern war with Russia will be utterly different for them”.

• Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev has said Russia’s arms suppliers will “significantly” increase their deliveries of military hardware during 2023. Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of the powerful Security Council and oversees a government commission on arms production, said new supplies would help Russia inflict a “crushing defeat” over Ukraine on the battlefield.

• Two Russian missiles struck Kramatorsk on Thursday, after an apartment block in the eastern Ukrainian city was hit Wednesday night, killing three people. The latest strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, said the head of the regional military administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, but it is not clear how many. Two people were killed by Russian shelling in the southern Kherson region.

• Those attacks came after a Russian missile strike on a residential building in Kramatorsk on Wednesday night killed at least three people and injured 20 others. The police force said an Iskander-K tactical missile had struck at 9.45pm local time.

• At least eight people have died after a fire at a dormitory for construction workers in the Crimean city of Sevastopol, Russian officials said. The fire broke out in temporary accommodation for workers building the Tavrida highway, a road linking the cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol, according to the Russia-installed governor of Sevastopol.

• Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said everybody wanted the conflict in Ukraine to end, but that the west’s support for Kyiv was playing an important role in how Moscow approached the campaign. In an interview on Russia’s state TV, Lavrov also said Moscow had plans to overshadow pro-Ukrainian events arranged by western and allied countries around the world to mark the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.

• A senior Russian lieutenant who fled after serving in Ukraine has described how his country’s troops tortured prisoners of war and threatened some with rape. “I have personally seen our troops torture Ukrainian soldiers,” Konstantin Yefremov, who is the most senior soldier to speak out against the war, told the Guardian in a phone call. “I feel relieved that I can finally speak out about the things I have seen.”

• A state-of-the-art missile defence system provided by Italy and France should be up and running in Ukraine within the next two months, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, has said. France and Italy agreed to supply their SAMP/T air defence system to Ukraine, on Kyiv’s request, to help protect the country’s critical infrastructure and cities from the regular barrage of Russian missiles hitting Ukraine.

• Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has said he is open to supplying Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets if the decision were taken together with Nato allies. In an interview with Bild, he stressed that his assessment was “based on what Nato countries decide together” and that the decision required the “strategic consideration of the whole” alliance.

• Britain’s defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said Russia is using tactics similar to those used in the first world war and suffering heavy casualties as a result. Asked about the possibility of supplying British fighter jets to be used by Ukrainian forces, Wallace did not rule out the possibility but said there was “no magic wand” that could help Kyiv in its fight against Moscow.

• The European parliament has voted in support of a roadmap for Ukraine’s accession to the EU. The Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, has said he wanted Ukraine to join the EU in two years but in reality, it was likely to take much longer.

• Norway will increase the spending from its sovereign wealth fund in the coming years to fund military and civilian aid to Ukraine, the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, told parliament on Thursday. He did not specify how much money Norway would spend on Ukraine aid, but said it would be a multi-year commitment. The announcement comes after Norwegian academics, rights campaigners, bestselling authors and a former minister urged Oslo to do more to help after earning billions in extra oil and gas revenue from Russia’s war.

2 Feb 202313.40 EST

Former Russian soldier reveals he saw Ukrainian prisoners of war tortured

Pjotr Sauer

A senior Russian lieutenant who fled after serving in Ukraine has described how his country’s troops tortured prisoners of war and threatened some with rape.

Konstantin Yefremov left Russia in December after spending three months in the parts of the southern Zaporizhzhia oblast that were occupied in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I have personally seen our troops torture Ukrainian soldiers,” Yefremov, who is the most senior soldier to speak out against the war, told the Guardian in a phone call from Mexico, where he currently is. “I feel relieved that I can finally speak out about the things I have seen.”

Yefremov is one of a growing body of soldiers who have fled Russia and spoken out against the war. The Guardian earlier interviewed Pavel Filatyev and Nikita Chibrin, two Russian contract soldiers who have similarly denounced the war.

Yefremov was previously based in Chechnya in the Russian army’s 42nd Motorised Rifle Division, where he was involved in mine clearance. At the beginning of February last year, two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, he said he was sent with his unit to Crimea to take part in what he was told were military exercises.

He said he tried to flee as soon as he realised he would be sent to fight in Ukraine.

I left my gun, found the first taxi and drove off. I wanted to return to my base in Chechnya and hand in my resignation papers because I was against this horrible war.

But, according to Yefremov, he was threatened with 10 years in jail for desertion by his superiors and he decided to return to his unit. “It was a mistake, I should have tried harder to leave,” he said.

Read the full story here:

Ukraine has signed an agreement with the EU on its participation in the single market programme, its prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, has said.

The agreement will provide Ukraine with support to businesses, facilitating access to markets, a favourable business environment, sustainable growth and internationalisation, according to the European Commission.

At least three people were killed after a Russian missile strike struck the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Wednesday night, destroying an apartment building and damaging nine others.

Police said the apartments were hit by an Iskander-K tactical missile at 9.45pm local time, after earlier reports had described a rocket attack.

The dead include a husband and wife and a 61-year-old pensioner, whose daughter was still believed to be missing. Eighteen people were also wounded.

Hours later, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said two more strikes had also targeted the city centre, leaving at least five people wounded and more than a dozen buildings damaged.

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Russia has warned it has “the potential” to respond to western arms deliveries to Ukraine that will not just be about “using armoured vehicles”.

In a speech marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory against Nazi Germany in the Battle of Stalingrad, Vladimir Putin appeared to allude to Russia’s enormous nuclear weapons arsenal while referring to the military aid promised to Ukraine by its European and American allies.

Putin said:

Those who expect to win on the battlefield apparently do not understand that a modern war with Russia will be utterly different for them. We are not the ones sending our tanks to their borders.

He added:

But we have a way to respond, and it will not just end with the use of armoured vehicles. Everyone should understand this.

The Financial Times’ Max Seddon has the clip:

Asked to comment on the Russian leader’s remarks, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said:

This means that Russia has the potential and as long as new weapons supplied by the collective West appear, Russia will use more fully its available potential to respond.

The former Chelsea and Ukraine footballer Andriy Shevchenko has urged the International Olympics Committee (IOC) to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing at the 2024 Olympics.

In a post on Facebook, Shevchenko called on the IOC to “strongly condemn” Russia’s war of “aggression” and not allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete “until the war in Ukraine is over”.

“There is no politics in sport. But this war is more than just politics,” he said.

If athletes from Russia or Belarus enter the arena, with or without flags, it reflects this statement from the Olympics Committee to the whole world — the war is over, you can forgive everyone and forget everything.

But the war is not over. Every day war destroys our cities, ruins the childhood of our kids and threatens our existence.

Sports ministers representing Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland issued a statement earlier today calling on international sports bodies to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing in the Olympics and other events while the war in Ukraine continues.

The statement reads:

Efforts to return Russian and Belarusian athletes to international sports competitions under the veil of neutrality legitimise political decisions and widespread propaganda of these countries.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that allowing Russia to compete at the 2024 Games would be tantamount to showing that “terror is somehow acceptable”, while his adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has accused the IOC of “promoting violence, mass murders, destruction”.

The IOC has said it “rejects in the strongest possible terms this and other defamatory statements. They cannot serve as a basis for any constructive discussion”.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said the future of the EU “is being written, right now, in Ukraine” after meeting with EU leaders, including European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, in Kyiv today.

Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, has said Russia’s arms suppliers will “significantly” increase their deliveries of military hardware during 2023.

Posting to social media, Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of the powerful Security Council and oversees a government commission on arms production, wrote:

Our armed forces regularly receive full supplies of various types of missiles. The delivery of all kinds of military hardware will increase significantly in 2023.

New supplies would help Russia inflict a “crushing defeat” over Ukraine on the battlefield, he said.

Britain’s defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said Russia is using tactics similar to those used in the first world war and suffering heavy casualties as a result.

Taking questions at a press briefing in Portsmouth alongside Australian ministerial counterparts, Wallace was asked about the possibility of supplying British fighter jets to be used by Ukrainian forces. He replied there was “no magic wand” that could help Kyiv in its fight against Moscow.

He said:

On the question of jets, one thing I’ve learned over the last year is don’t rule anything in, don’t rule anything out. That is the simple reality. We respond to the needs of the Ukrainians at the time, based on what the Ukrainians tell us, what we see in intelligence, in our knowledge of the Russians on the battlefield.

He did not rule out the possibility of sending jets but said fighter aircraft were not what Ukraine needed right now and that there were practical issues to consider, such as the many months it would take to train Ukrainian forces to use them.

Instead, he said what Ukraine currently needed was for ground forces to be strengthened, He said:

What the Ukrainians need is the ability to form military formations on the ground in order to use combined arms manoeuvre to push back Russian forces. That is how you defeat the human wave attacks that the Russians are currently having to resort to ... they’re resorting to First World War-level type of attacks, with subsequent casualties to match.

2 Feb 202311.36 EST

EU pledges to double military aid programme for Ukraine

Jennifer Rankin

Speaking at the start of a two-day trip to Kyiv, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, reiterated that the EU aimed to have a tenth package of sanctions against Russia in place by 24 February, the first anniversary of the invasion ordered by Vladimir Putin.

“We are making Putin pay for his atrocious war,” she told reporters, on a visit accompanied by 15 EU commissioners, the first time so many EU officials have visited a war zone.

Today Russia is paying a heavy price as our sanctions are eroding its economy, throwing it back by a generation.

With a promise to “keep on turning up the pressure”, Von der Leyen also reiterated that the EU would cap the price of Russian petroleum products, as part of a broader G7 plan to restrict oil revenues available to the Kremlin’s war machine. The G7 and the EU have already agreed a price cap on crude oil that came into force last December and according to Von der Leyen, costs Russia €160m (£142m) a day.

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The EU’s 27 member states are yet to agree on the latest oil price cap. Discussions continue on a proposal to set the cap at $100 a barrel for premium petroleum products and $45 a barrel for discount ones. One diplomatic source said they were confident of an agreement by 5 February, the agreed deadline.

Von der Leyen and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, arrived in Kyiv under tight security on Thursday to meet Ukraine’s government, with 14 other EU commissioners.

The heavily symbolic visit was intended not only as a show of support, but encouragement as Ukraine bids to join the EU at unprecedented speed. Ukraine’s government has expressed hope of joining the EU within two years, but most member states think the process will take many years, if not decades.

Von der Leyen will remain in Kyiv on Friday for an EU-Ukraine summit, the first since the Russian invasion.

Among a blizzard of announcements, Von der Leyen said the EU would be supplying Ukraine with 35m LED lightbulbs, 2,400 generators on top of 3,000 already delivered and promised funding for solar panels to power the country’s public buildings. According to Brussels officials, the EU institutions and its 27 member states have given Ukraine support worth €50bn, plus €10bn for 8 million refugees who have fled to Europe.

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A state-of-the-art missile defence system provided by Italy and France should be up and running in Ukraine within the next two months, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, has said.

France and Italy agreed to supply their SAMP/T air defence system to Ukraine, on Kyiv’s request, to help protect the country’s critical infrastructure and cities from the regular barrage of Russian missiles hitting Ukraine.

The SAMP/T, known as Mamba, can track dozens of targets and intercept 10 at once. It is the only European-made system that can intercept ballistic missiles.

Tajani, who is also deputy prime minister, said today:

I believe it will be operational within seven to eight weeks.

Italy is expected to provide the missile launchers, while France will supply the rockets.