Russia-Ukraine war live: Lavrov heads to China; EU and western Balkan leaders to meet in Albania – latest updates

Reuters reports that Turkey is set to delay ratifying Sweden’s Nato bid until after October.

The Russian deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, said on Monday that Russia was expecting a visit from the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro.

A source familiar with the plans told Reuters that the visit would take place by the end of the year.

Russian foreign minister to visit North Korea this week

Reuters reports that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow’s planned withdrawal of its ratification of the global treaty banning nuclear tests does not mean that Russia intends to conduct such a test, Tass news agency reported on Monday.

Russia’s lower house of parliament, or State Duma, is set to vote on Tuesday on a bill to de-ratify the treaty.

Russia launched five missiles and 12 drones into Ukraine overnight, air force says

Three Ukrainian children who had been taken to Russia are to be released to Qatari diplomats in Moscow this week under a mechanism Qatar has set up with the goal of returning many more children from Russia to Ukraine, a Qatari official briefed on the plans told Reuters on Monday.

Qatar on Friday facilitated the return of another Ukrainian child, aged seven, who was reunited with his grandmother and is en route to Ukraine via Estonia, the official said. The three other children are a boy aged two, a nine-year-old boy, and a girl aged 17.

Kyiv has identified 20,000 children as taken to Russia or Russian-held territory without the consent of family or guardians.

A Russian governor was accused by critics on Sunday of discrediting Russia’s armed forces after telling residents in her region that the country had “no need” for its war in Ukraine.

Natalya Komarova, the governor of the Khanty-Mansiysk region and a member of President Vladimir Putin’s governing United Russia party, made the remarks during a meeting with residents in the Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk on Saturday.

Critics have called for authorities to launch an investigation into her remarks, but Komarova has not been detained or faced any charges so far.

A video of the event posted on social media showed the politician being confronted by the wife of a Russian soldier who said mobilised men had been poorly equipped for the frontline.

Komarova told residents that Russia had not been prepared for the invasion of Ukraine.

“Are you asking me (why your husband does not have equipment), knowing that I’m the governor and not the minister of defence?”, the 67-year-old said.

“As a whole, we did not prepare for this war. We don’t need it. We were building a completely different world, so in this regard, there will certainly be some inconsistencies and unresolved issues,” she added.

Komarova’s comments spread quickly online, reportedly prompting pro-war activists to denounce the politician to authorities for “discrediting Russia’s armed forces”.

The news outlet Sibir.Realii reported that its journalists had seen a letter from the Yuri Ryabtsev, the director of a Siberian non-profit organisation, to Russia’s minister of internal affairs, calling for a further investigation of Komarova’s comments.

Days after Putin sent troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Russia’s Kremlin-controlled parliament approved legislation that outlawed disparaging the military and the spread of “false information” about Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russian courts have used the legislation to hand out fines and prison terms to opposition critics, including those who describe Moscow’s full-invasion of Ukraine as a war, instead of using the Kremlin’s preferred euphemism of “special military operation”.

Hello and welcome to our ongoing live coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov has arrived in Beijing, Moscow’s foreign ministry said on Monday, ahead of an expected visit by President Vladimir Putin.

The foreign ministry said on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that Lavrov was in the Chinese capital as part of a Russian delegation.

Beijing is hosting representatives of 130 countries on Tuesday and Wednesday to mark a decade of its belt and road initiative (BRI) – a key geopolitical project of President Xi to extend China’s global reach.

But all eyes will be on Putin, who last month in St Petersbury told Beijing’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, he had “gladly accepted” President Xi Jinping’s invitation to visit China.

The Russian leader’s strategic dependence on China has grown since his invasion of neighbouring Ukraine thrust his country into international isolation.

Putin has hardly ventured beyond his country’s borders since the war, with this week’s trip the first to a major global power.

Meanwhile, leaders from the EU and the western Balkans will hold a summit in Albania’s capital on Monday to discuss the path to membership in the bloc for the six countries of the region.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has put integration of the western Balkans into the EU at the top of the 27-nation bloc’s agenda.

The main topics at the annual talks – called the Berlin Process – are integrating the western Balkans into a single market and supporting their green and digital transformation. The nations in the region are Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.

The senior EU officials attending the summit in Tirana are the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Council president, Charles Michel. They will be joined by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

Here are the other major developments:

• A top Ukrainian commander has said Russia’s biggest offensive in months on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka is failing, adding that Kyiv’s own attempts to advance in the south were proving “difficult”. Russia has continued to deploy new forces in an attempt to surround the city, according to Vitaliy Barabash, the head of its military administration. Both Moscow and Washington have described the surge in violence around Avdiivka as a new Russian offensive.

• At least six people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past 24 hours, local officials reported on Sunday. Two people were killed and three more injured in the Kherson area after more than 100 shells bombarded the region over the weekend, the local governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, wrote on social media, according to AP.

• The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that a new weapons package for Israel and Ukraine would be significantly more than $2bn. In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sullivan said Joe Biden would have extensive talks with the US Congress this week on the need for the package to be approved.

• Russian forces had improved their positions along almost the entire line of contact in Ukraine, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday. Reuters reported that in a video posted to social media by the Kremlin journalist Pavel Zarubin, Putin said: “What is happening now along the entire length of the [line of] contact is called an active defence.”

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked troops in areas where fighting was “particularly hot”. In his regular address, he said: “I thank everyone who is holding their positions and destroying Russian troops”, citing Avdiivka, Maryinka and other key locations in the Donetsk region.

• Ukraine was working to evacuate nearly 260 of its citizens from Gaza and to fly other Ukrainians out of Israel, Zelenskiy said on Sunday. Ukraine’s embassy in Israel said on social media on Saturday that 207 Ukrainian citizens, including 63 children, were evacuated from Tel Aviv to Romania on Saturday and that another flight would take 155 people to Romania on Sunday.