US ‘will stand with Ukraine as long as it takes’, says Treasury secretary on visit to Kyiv – as it happened

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

• The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has met with Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other key Ukrainian government officials in a surprise visit to Ukraine to reaffirm Washington’s support for Kyiv. Yellen said following talks with prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, that the US has provided nearly $50bn in security, economic and humanitarian assistance and announced another multibillion-dollar package to boost the country’s economy.

• Belarusian anti-war partisans claim to have severely damaged a Russian military aircraft in what an opposition leader has called the “most successful diversion” since the beginning of the war. BYPOL, the Belarusian partisan organisation, said it had used drones to strike the Machulishchy airfield 12km from Minsk, severely damaging a Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs).

• Russian forces have escalated shelling and infantry assaults in the Bilohorivka, Svatove-Kupiansk and Kreminna areas of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk province, according to the region’s governor Serhiy Haidai. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a video address early on Friday, said the situation in the east was “very difficult, painful” but that Ukrainian forces were “doing everything to withstand it”.

• Ukraine’s ministry of defence claimed in total to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed, including nine over Kyiv. Air raid alerts sounded across Ukraine’s Kyiv region late on Sunday night as Kyiv’s regional military administration confirmed the country’s air defences were at work. Two emergency service workers were killed and three other people injured during a drone attack on Khmelnytskyi, according to city’s mayor.

• Russia “will likely be concerned that unexplained explosions are occurring” in and around Mariupol, a location “at least 80km away from the frontline … [which] it had probably previously assessed as beyond the range of routine Ukrainian strike capabilities”, the UK’s ministry of defence has claimed in its latest daily intelligence briefing on the war.

• The airline carrier Wizz Air has announced it will suspend flights to Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, from 14 March due to concerns about the safety of its airspace. In a statement, the company said it had taken the “difficult but responsible” decision to suspend flights because of the “high, but not imminent” risk in Moldova’s airspace.

• Russia is paying “a great deal of attention” to China’s peace plan to end Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and its details will need to be analysed in detail, the Kremlin has said. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said any initiatives that might bring peace closer were worthy of attention, but that Russia was continuing to prosecute its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine and that, for now, he didn’t see any signs suggesting a peaceful resolution could be achieved.

• The US is “confident” that China is considering providing lethal equipment to support Russia in Ukraine, according to the CIA director, William Burns. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Burns said he was “confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment” but noted “we also don’t see that a final decision has been made yet, and we don’t see evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment”.

• A Ukrainian court has sentenced two captured Russian soldiers to prison for taking part in the shelling of residential areas in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) said. One of the soldiers received a 10-year sentence and the other has been jailed for nine years, the SBU said in a statement.

• Poland has announced a joint initiative with the European Commission to trace Ukrainian children who have been abducted and taken to Russia during the ongoing war in Ukraine. The aim of the scheme is to track down the missing children and to “ensure those responsible are brought to justice”, Poland’s EU affairs minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk said. “We need to return the abducted children to Ukraine and punish russia for its crimes,” Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said.

• A Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate has called for the swift creation of a special tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his associates for the crime of aggression, Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, told the Guardian that a speedy start to war crimes trials against the Russian president and soldiers it could have “a cooling effect” on atrocities committed by the Kremlin’s invading forces.

• The UN chief, António Guterres, has warned that respect for human rights has gone into reverse, and called for a renewal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 75 years after its signing. Pointing to the war raging in Ukraine, and threats to rights from soaring poverty, hunger and climate disasters, António Guterres said the declaration was “under assault from all sides”. He said the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most massive violations of human rights” being witnessed in the world today.

• Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, is due to visit Beijing on Tuesday for a meeting with Xi Jinping, in a high-profile trip symbolising the widening gulf between the US and China over the war in Ukraine. Xi’s meeting with Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, is seen internationally as a sign of where China’s sympathies lie.

• Gleb Pavlovsky, a Russian political scientist and Vladimir Putin’s former adviser who later became one of his most prominent critics, has died at the age of 71, according to local reports. Pavlovsky had been an influential figure in Russian politics in the first decade of Putin’s rule, serving as the Russian president’s adviser and “political technologist”.

• Vladimir Putin has given an award to actor Steven Seagal for international humanitarian and cultural work, a state decree published on Monday showed. Seagal, a frequent visitor to Russia, backed Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 as “very reasonable”, joined a pro-Kremlin party in 2021, and visited a Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine last summer, where he met with a Russian-backed separatist leader.

That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, and the Russia-Ukraine live blog today. Thank you for following. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Here are some of the latest images we have received from the news wires of the besieged town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.

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Russia’s suspension of participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New Start, has not yet come into force, according to a US official.

The assistant secretary for the US bureau of arms control, verification, and compliance, Mallory Stewart, said she expected treaty notifications will cease once Russia’s suspension is finalised.

Speaking at an event at Brookings Institution, reported by CNN, she said:

The suspension hasn’t been officially affected yet in the sense that we’re still receiving notifications, as recently as today, under the treaty, regular notifications.

But we expect that as soon as that suspension has been formalised, that those will stop.

Vladimir Putin announced Russia will halt its participation in New Start, the last major remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the US, in a speech last week devoted to the one-year anniversary of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian leader claimed the US wanted “to inflict a strategic defeat on us and claim our nuclear facilities”.

However, the Russian foreign ministry later said Moscow intended to continue abiding by the restrictions outlined in the treaty on the number of warheads it can have ready.

The US is “trying to follow up” with the Russians “to truly understand what else could be included in the suspension, and what could be continued”, Stewart said. She added:

Right now we expect it will just be the launch notifications under that 1988 agreement, and that they said they’ll abide by the actual numerical limitations.

Earlier we reported that the European Commission is launching a joint initiative with Poland to trace Ukrainian children who have been abducted and taken to Russia during the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The Commission’s spokesperson, Dana Spinant, has tweeted about the initiative, which she said would be unveiled in the coming days.

Russian forces have sent thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, Spinant said in a news conference. She said:

The abduction of Ukrainian children is a great social problem, a tragedy and a crime.

The aim of the initiative is “to join forces to collect evidence that the abducted children can be found and those responsible for the crime are brought to justice”, she said.

The airline carrier Wizz Air has announced it will suspend flights to Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, from 14 March due to concerns about the safety of its airspace.

In a statement, the company said it had taken the “difficult but responsible” decision to suspend flights because of the “high, but not imminent” risk in Moldova’s airspace.

It said:

Wizz Air has been closely monitoring the security situation in Moldova and has been constantly in contact with various local and international authorities and agencies to ensure the highest level of safety and security of operations.

The safety of passengers and crew remains Wizz Air’s number one priority, and as a result of recent developments in Moldova and the high, but not imminent, risk in the country’s airspace, Wizz Air has taken the difficult but responsible decision to suspend all flights to Chisinau starting on March 14.

It said it would lay on extra flights from the Romanian city of Iasi as replacements.

Earlier this month, Moldova temporarily closed its airspace for several hours to investigate reports of a balloon-like object in the sky, a day after the small east European country accused Russia of plotting to bring down its government.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also posted about his meeting with Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary, in Kyiv today.

Zelenskiy described the meeting as “important,” writing in a Telegram post that the US has been “powerfully supporting” Ukraine since the invasion not just with weapons but with financial aid.

He added:

It is necessary to further strengthen sanctions to deprive Russia of the ability to finance the war.

US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has posted a photo of her meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during her surprise visit to Kyiv.

America will “continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes”, Yellen wrote on Twitter.

In a private meeting with Zelenskiy late in the afternoon, Yellen commended him “for his leadership and resolve in the face of Russia’s illegal and unprovoked war”, the US Treasury said.

The Treasury said she welcomed Zelenskiy’s actions to strengthen governance and address corruption – actions needed to ensure that US economic aid is being spent responsibly.

Here are some images we have received from the news wires of the US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, in Kyiv.

View image in fullscreen

View image in fullscreen

View image in fullscreen

The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has met with Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other key Ukrainian government officials in a surprise visit to Ukraine to reaffirm Washington’s support for Kyiv.

Yellen, flanked by sandbags at the Ukrainian cabinet ministers’ office, told the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal:

America will stand with Ukraine as long as it takes.

In a phone briefing with reporters, she said Russia should bear the costs of damage caused by its invasion of Ukraine, but there are “significant legal obstacles” to fully seizing the $300bn (£249bn) in Russian central bank assets frozen by sanctions.

She said the US and its allies were discussing strategies to ensure that Russia pays for the devastation that its war, with estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars and growing every day.

Yellen also said Washington would study Kyiv’s calls to impose sanctions on Russia’s nuclear energy sector, but needed to be “mindful” of the potential consequences of such an action on western allies. She said:

We want to deprive Russia of revenue. We also need to look at potential consequences of the sanctions for ourselves and our partners.

She also announced the transfer of the first $1.25bn (£1.04bn) from the latest, $9.9bn (£8.23 bn) tranche of economic and budget assistance from Washington.

Shmyhal, speaking through an interpreter, said he and Yellen discussed further US sanctions on Russia aimed at weakening its economy and military and “confiscating frozen Russian assets and putting them to the benefit of the recovery of Ukraine”.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmtryo Kuleba, has accused Russia of the “genocidal crime” of “stealing” Ukrainian children, claiming that it is “probably the largest forced deportation in modern history”.

Kuleba, in a video address at an event on the sidelines of the UN human rights council, said:

The most chilling crime is that Russia steals Ukrainian children.

Kyiv has collated thousands of reports of its children being forcibly deported to Russia and has called for these deportations to be investigated as a war crime.

It’s 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:

• Belarusian anti-war partisans claim to have severely damaged a Russian military aircraft in what an opposition leader has called the “most successful diversion” since the beginning of the war. BYPOL, the Belarusian partisan organisation, said it had used drones to strike the Machulishchy airfield 12km from Minsk, severely damaging a Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs).

• Russian forces have escalated shelling and infantry assaults in the Bilohorivka, Svatove-Kupiansk and Kreminna areas of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk province, according to the region’s governor Serhiy Haidai. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a video address early on Friday, said the situation in the east was “very difficult, painful” but that Ukrainian forces were “doing everything to withstand it”.

• Air raid alerts sounded across Ukraine’s Kyiv region late on Sunday night as Kyiv’s regional military administration confirmed the country’s air defences were at work. The nearby northern city of Chernihiv also reported shooting down Iranian-made Shahed drones, according to its regional governor, Vyacheslav Chaus.

• Ukraine’s ministry of defence claimed in total to have shot down 11 of 14 drones deployed, including nine over Kyiv. Two emergency service workers were killed and three other people injured during a drone attack on Khmelnytskyi, according to city’s mayor.

• Russia “will likely be concerned that unexplained explosions are occurring” in and around Mariupol, a location “at least 80km away from the frontline … [which] it had probably previously assessed as beyond the range of routine Ukrainian strike capabilities”, the UK’s ministry of defence has claimed in its latest daily intelligence briefing on the war.

• Russia is paying “a great deal of attention” to China’s peace plan to end Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and its details will need to be analysed in detail, the Kremlin has said. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said any initiatives that might bring peace closer were worthy of attention, but that Russia was continuing to prosecute its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine and that, for now, he didn’t see any signs suggesting a peaceful resolution could be achieved.

• The US is “confident” that China is considering providing lethal equipment to support Russia in Ukraine, according to the CIA director, William Burns. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Burns said he was “confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment” but noted “we also don’t see that a final decision has been made yet, and we don’t see evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment”.

• A Ukrainian court has sentenced two captured Russian soldiers to prison for taking part in the shelling of residential areas in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) said. One of the soldiers received a 10-year sentence and the other has been jailed for nine years, the SBU said in a statement.

• Poland has announced a joint initiative with the European Commission to trace Ukrainian children who have been abducted and taken to Russia during the ongoing war in Ukraine. The aim of the scheme is to track down the missing children and to “ensure those responsible are brought to justice”, Poland’s EU affairs minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk said. “We need to return the abducted children to Ukraine and punish russia for its crimes,” Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said.

• A Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate has called for the swift creation of a special tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his associates for the crime of aggression, Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, told the Guardian that a speedy start to war crimes trials against the Russian president and soldiers it could have “a cooling effect” on atrocities committed by the Kremlin’s invading forces.

• The UN chief, António Guterres, has warned that respect for human rights has gone into reverse, and called for a renewal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 75 years after its signing. Pointing to the war raging in Ukraine, and threats to rights from soaring poverty, hunger and climate disasters, António Guterres said the declaration was “under assault from all sides”. He said the “Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most massive violations of human rights” being witnessed in the world today.

• Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, is due to visit Beijing on Tuesday for a meeting with Xi Jinping, in a high-profile trip symbolising the widening gulf between the US and China over the war in Ukraine. Xi’s meeting with Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, is seen internationally as a sign of where China’s sympathies lie.

• Gleb Pavlovsky, a Russian political scientist and Vladimir Putin’s former adviser who later became one of his most prominent critics, has died at the age of 71, according to local reports. Pavlovsky had been an influential figure in Russian politics in the first decade of Putin’s rule, serving as the Russian president’s adviser and “political technologist”.

• Vladimir Putin has given an award to actor Steven Seagal for international humanitarian and cultural work, a state decree published on Monday showed. Seagal, a frequent visitor to Russia, backed Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 as “very reasonable”, joined a pro-Kremlin party in 2021, and visited a Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine last summer, where he met with a Russian-backed separatist leader.

Good afternoon from London, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong still here with all the latest from Ukraine. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.

Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and close ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is due to visit Beijing on Tuesday for a meeting with Xi Jinping, in a high-profile trip symbolising the widening gulf between the US and China over the war in Ukraine.

US officials spent the weekend reiterating their concerns that Beijing is considering sending lethal weapons to Russia, amid China’s attempts to position itself as a peacemaker and deny that it would provide arms to Moscow.

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Speaking to ABC News on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser, said the US was “watching closely” for any such shipment, which Beijing “hadn’t taken off the table” as a possibility.

William Burns, the director of the CIA, said in an interview with CBS News on Sunday that the US was “seriously concerned should China provide lethal equipment to Russia”.

“We don’t have evidence of a final decision to do that … all we’re trying to emphasise is the importance of not doing that,” Burns said.

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