World

SHANGHAI, China — China reported 13,000 COVID cases on Sunday, the most since the peak of the first pandemic wave over two years ago, as health officials said they have found a suspected new subtype of the Omicron variant in the Shanghai area.

China's "zero-COVID" strategy is under extreme pressure as the virus whips across the country. 

Until March, China had successfully kept the daily caseload down to double or triple digits, with hard, localised lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions.

But cases have surged over recent weeks to thousands each day, especially in the outbreak epicentre of Shanghai, where streets were eerily empty on Sunday as 25 million people stayed in under lockdown orders.

Officials in Suzhou, a city 30 minutes west of Shanghai, have detected a mutation of the Omicron variant not found in local or international databases, state media reported on Sunday.

"This means a new variant of Omicron has been discovered locally," Xinhua said, citing health official Zhang Jun, deputy director of the Suzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The current outbreak is also testing the patience of the Chinese towards tough restrictions, at a time when much of the world has reopened.

On Sunday, the 1.5 million residents of Baicheng in northeast China joined the ranks of tens of millions of other Chinese who have endured some form of lockdown over the last month, disrupting work and damaging the economy. 

China recorded 13,146 cases on Sunday, the National Health Commission said in a statement, with "no new deaths" reported.

It is the country's highest daily infection tally since mid-February 2020.

Nearly 70 per cent of the national caseload was found in Shanghai, the commission said, after mass testing the metropolis' 25 million residents.

City authorities have conceded they are struggling to contain the outbreak, with thousands now in state quarantine and reports circulating of health workers being stretched. 

Vice Premier Sun Chunlan urged “resolute and swift moves” to snuff out the outbreak after a visit to Shanghai, Xinhua reported Sunday. 

Anger is rising among residents over lockdowns that were initially planned to last just for four days, but now appear likely to drag on for several more as fresh rounds of mass testing are carried out.

Parents have expressed fears of separation from their children in the event of a positive test, while residents have griped about a lack of fresh food and the ability to walk dogs outside.

China, the country where the coronavirus was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, is among the last remaining places following a zero-COVID approach to the pandemic.

The outbreak has taken on an increasingly serious economic dimension, trimming analysts’ growth projections as factories close and millions of consumers are ordered indoors.

Shanghai’s restrictions threaten to snarl supply chains, with shipping giant Maersk saying some depots in the city remained closed and trucking services would likely be hit further due to the lockdown.

The World Health Organisation’s emergencies director Michael Ryan last week said it was important for all countries, including China, to have a plan to wind down pandemic restrictions.

But he said China’s vast population provides a unique challenge to its health system and authorities will have to “define a strategy that allows them to exit [he pandemic] safely”.

DUBAI — A UN-brokered two-month truce took effect in Yemen Saturday, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and analysts hope for a rare respite in the impoverished country's seven-year war.

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led military coalition, which intervened in 2015 to shore up Yemen's government against the insurgents a year after they seized the capital Sanaa, have both agreed to observe the ceasefire.

But will it hold when previous truces have fallen apart? Here are some key questions about the ceasefire agreed in Yemen, the Arab world's poorest country.

Why now? 

Mohammed Al Basha, a Yemen expert for the US-based Navanti research group, says Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the disruption of global food and energy supplies were a trigger.

"The prolonged hostilities in Ukraine are creating urgency to end the war in Yemen," he said.

Yemen's war has killed hundreds of thousands directly or indirectly and displaced millions, triggering the world's worst humanitarian crisis, according to the United Nations.

At least 80 per cent of the country's 30 million people are dependent on foreign aid.

With fighting on the ground at a stalemate, the truce has become necessary, said Ahmed Nagi, of the Malcom H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut.

"The Houthis feel they can no longer progress after the battles of Shabwa and Marib, and the financial losses they incurred," he said.

Pro-government forces seized control of the oil-rich governorate of Shabwa in southern Yemen earlier this year.

Meanwhile the Houthis have tried for months to advance on the neighbouring region of Marib, whose capital city of the same name is the government's last northern stronghold.

According to Nagi, the Saudi-led coalition believes that "pushing ahead with the war will only serve to expand its impact on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates" — the two key players in the coalition.

Over the past year, the Houthis have launched a series of drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE, hitting key infrastructure.

Last month, they attacked 16 targets in Saudi Arabia, turning an oil plant near a Formula One track in Jeddah into a blazing inferno.

Saudi Arabia has warned that such attacks on its oil facilities could derail the kingdom's ability to meet global crude demand following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"The global fuel crisis heightened the value of Saudi fuel supply as it is threatened by... [Houthi] cross-border attacks," said Basha.

Will the truce hold? 

The Houthis and the coalition have not reported any major violations since the truce started on Saturday at 7:00pm (16:00 GMT).

Under the UN-brokered agreement, all ground, air and naval military operations, including cross-border attacks, should cease.

In addition, 18 fuel ships are to be allowed into rebel-held Hodeida Port, a lifeline for Yemen, and two commercial flights a week can resume in and out of Houthi-held Sanaa airport.

"The success of this initiative will depend on the warring parties' continued commitment to implementing the truce agreement with its accompanying humanitarian measures," said UN Special Envoy Hans Grundberg.

But analysts say the truce remains vulnerable.

It "tests the fragile trust between all the warring parties", said Basha, who however welcomed an initiative that coincided with the start of Ramadan.

Maged Al Madhaji, director of the Sanaa Centre for Strategic Studies, agreed.

"The truce is a rare chance for humanitarian relief and to ease the impact of the war on citizens," he said.

"I think it will hold during Ramadan because the Houthis need it. Extending it, however, will depend on political decisions that are not on the horizon."

Can it lead to peace? 

The truce — welcomed by world powers — can be extended beyond two months if both sides agree.

It came after intense diplomacy, including talks underway in Saudi Arabia which the rebels snubbed because they were being hosted by an "enemy".

UN chief Antonio Guterres said he hoped the truce would lead to a "political process" to bring peace to Yemen.

US President Joe Biden stressed "it is imperative that we end this war".

The researcher Nagi said the truce could serve as a basis "for a solution... leading to a political settlement".

Madhaji was more cautious, citing previous failed bids in 2016 and 2018 to halt hostilities.

"The previous attempts indicate that truces in Yemen hold only if needed and do not provide a platform for real peace," he said.

KABUL — The Taliban's supreme leader on Sunday ordered a ban on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, warning that the hardline Islamist government would crack down on farmers planting the crop.

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of poppies, the source of sap that is refined into heroin, and in recent years production and exports have only boomed.

"All Afghans are informed that from now on cultivation of poppy has been strictly prohibited across the country," said a decree issued by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

The order was read out by government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid at a gathering of reporters, foreign diplomats and Taliban officials.

"If anyone violates the decree the crop will be destroyed immediately and the violator will be treated according to the sharia law," it added.

It is not the first time the fundamentalist group has vowed to outlaw the trade. Production was banned in 2000, just before the group was overthrown by US-led forces in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

During their 20-year insurgency against foreign forces, the Taliban heavily taxed farmers cultivating the crop in areas under their control, experts have said.

It became a key resource for the group to generate funds.

Poppy farmer Abdul Rahman told AFP that Sunday's ban was a blow to his livelihood.

"We have taken loans to cultivate this... If these crops are destroyed our income will be gone," said Rahman, who is from the southern province of Kandahar — the Taliban's de facto power centre.

"We too are not fond of cultivating this crop and are fed up with it. We know our future generations will be addicted to it but we are compelled to cultivate."

Tough to enforce ban 

The United States and NATO forces tried to curb poppy cultivation during their two decades in Afghanistan by paying farmers to grow alternative crops such as wheat or saffron.

But their attempts were thwarted by the Taliban, who controlled the main poppy-growing regions and derived hundreds of millions of dollars from the trade, experts have said.

Author David Mansfield, who has written a book on Afghanistan's opium trade, said the Taliban would find it difficult to enforce the latest ban, as farmers had invested considerable resources in a crop that was ready to harvest.

"It's not just opium [farmer] smell, it's cash & what it buys after a cold winter of rising food prices & economic crisis," Mansfield tweeted.

Afghanistan's economic and humanitarian crisis has deepened since foreign donors cut off aid to the country in the aftermath of the Taliban's takeover of the country in August last year.

Mansfield said the ban was an attempt by the Taliban to divert the political debate in the country away from issues such as "girls education & human rights".

Last month the Taliban shut all secondary schools for girls, just hours after reopening them for the first time since seizing power, triggering international outrage.

Afghan media reports, meanwhile, have said poppy production has increased in two southern provinces, Kandahar and Helmand, since the Taliban returned to power, but did not provide data.

Afghanistan has a near-monopoly on opium and heroin, accounting for 80 to 90 per cent of global output, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The amount of land used for planting poppies hit a record high in 2017 and has averaged around 250,000 hectares in recent years, roughly four times the level of the mid-1990s, UN figures show.

According to a UN survey in 2020, poppies were grown in 22 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Torrential downpours triggered flash floods and landslides across Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state, killing at least 14 people including eight children, and leaving five missing, authorities said on Saturday.

Two days of heavy rain have battered a broad swathe of the southeastern state's Atlantic coast, the latest in a series of deadly storms in Brazil that experts say are being aggravated by climate change.

More rain is forecast for the region in the coming days.

The victims included a mother and six of her children, who were buried when a landslide swept away their home, officials said.

President Jair Bolsonaro said on Facebook the federal government had sent military aircraft to help the rescue effort and dispatched national disaster response secretary Alexandre Lucas to the state of 17.5 million people.

The new incidents come six weeks after flash floods and landslides killed 233 people in the scenic city of Petropolis, the Brazilian empire's 19th-century summer capital, also in Rio state.

This time, the areas hit hardest included the tourist town of Paraty, a seaside colonial city known for its picturesque cobblestone streets and colourful houses.

Officials there said a landslide in the Ponta Negra neighbourhood had killed a mother and six of her children, ages two, five, eight, 10, 15 and 17.

A seventh child was rescued alive and taken to the hospital, where he was in stable condition, they said.

Another four people were injured.

Six more victims, including at least two children, were killed in the city of Angra dos Reis, where officials declared a "maximum alert" and state of emergency after landslides devastated the Monsuaba neighbourhood.

Several people were rescued alive, while another five remain missing, they said.

Mayor Fernando Jordao said emergency workers were installing floodlights to continue the search-and-rescue operation through the night if necessary.

"Residents have been working side-by-side with us on the search," he told a press conference.

"We'll continue working hard."

In Mesquita, 40 kilometres northwest of Rio de Janeiro city, a 38-year-old man was electrocuted trying to help another person escape the flooding, officials and media reports said.

Record rains 

The storms turned streets into rivers Friday night in several cities including Rio, the state capital, sweeping up cars and triggering landslides — a frequent tragedy in the rainy season, especially in poor hillside communities.

TV channel Globo News carried images of a family evacuating two young children through the floodwaters in a styrofoam cooler in the Rio suburb of Belford Roxo, while residents posted videos on social media of small alligators swimming through flooded streets.

A hospital in the suburb of Nova Iguacu was badly flooded, turning the corridors of its intensive care unit into streams.

Officials in Angra said the city had received up to 800 millimeters  of rain in 48 hours in some areas, "levels never before registered in the municipality".

Experts say rainy season downpours in Brazil are being augmented by La Nina — the cyclical cooling of the Pacific Ocean — and by climate change.

Because a hotter atmosphere holds more water, global warming increases the risk and intensity of flooding from extreme rainfall.

In December, storms killed 24 people in the north-eastern state of Bahia, and in January, floods and landslides claimed at least 28 lives in south-eastern Brazil, mostly in Sao Paulo state.

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Ukraine on Saturday said Russian forces were making a "rapid retreat" from northern areas around the capital Kyiv and the city of Chernigiv as the Red Cross prepared for a fresh evacuation effort from the besieged southern port of Mariupol.

Ukraine said Russian forces were concentrating in the east and south, a day after thousands of people from Mariupol and surrounding Russian-held areas escaped in a convoy of buses and private cars.

"Russia is prioritising a different tactic: Falling back on the east and south," Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak said on social media.

He said that while Russian forces appeared to be pulling back from Kyiv and Chernigiv, their aim was to "control a vast stretch of occupied territory and set up there in a powerful way".

Podolyak said Russian forces would "dig in there, set up air defence, drastically reduce losses and dictate terms".

Moscow's aim was to "drastically reduce losses and dictate terms", he said on Twitter on Saturday.

"Without heavy weapons we won't be able to drive [Russia] out".

Mariupol has been an important Ukrainian hold-out, suffering weeks of Russian shelling, with at least 5,000 residents killed, local officials said.

The estimated 160,000 who remain face shortages of food, water and electricity.

“We have managed to rescue 6,266 people, including 3,071 people from Mariupol,” Zelensky said in a video address earlier on Saturday.

Dozens of buses carrying Mariupol residents who had escaped the devastated city arrived Friday in Zaporizhzhia, 200 kilometres to the northwest, according to an AFP reporter on the scene.

The buses carried people who had been able to flee Mariupol to Russian-occupied Berdiansk.

“We were crying when we reached this area. We were crying when we saw soldiers at the checkpoint with Ukrainian crests on their arms,” said Olena, who carried her young daughter in her arms. 

“My house was destroyed. I saw it in photos. Our city doesn’t exist anymore.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said its team headed to Mariupol to try and conduct an evacuation was forced to turn back Friday after “arrangements and conditions made it impossible to proceed”.

The ICRC said it would try again on Saturday.

New US aid 

Peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow resumed via video on Friday, but the Kremlin warned that what it described as a helicopter attack on a fuel depot inside Russia would hamper negotiations.

“This is not something that can be perceived as creating comfortable conditions for the continuation of negotiations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

The air strike hit energy giant Rosneft’s fuel storage facility in Belgorod, 40 kilometres from the Ukraine border.

But Kyiv would not be drawn on whether it was behind the attack, with Zelensky telling US network Fox News: “I’m sorry, I do not discuss any of my orders as commander in chief.”

He said Russia was consolidating and preparing “powerful strikes” in the east and south, joining Western assessments that Moscow’s troops were regrouping, not withdrawing.

Ukraine also warned that Russian forces who left the Chernobyl nuclear plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, in 1986, after weeks of occupation may have been exposed to radiation.

“Russia behaved irresponsibly in Chernobyl” by digging trenches in contaminated areas and keeping plant personnel from performing their duties, said Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. 

Zelensky meanwhile repeated his plea for the West to provide greater military support.

“Just give us missiles. Give us airplanes,” he told Fox. “You cannot give us F-18 or F-19 or whatever you have? Give us the old Soviet planes. That’s all... Give me something to defend my country with.”

The Pentagon later said it was allotting $300 million in “security assistance” to bolster Ukraine’s defence capabilities, adding to the $1.6 billion Washington has committed since Russia invaded in late February.

‘Where roses 

used to bloom’ 

A ferocious Ukrainian fightback and Russia’s logistics and tactical problems have hampered Russian efforts and there is growing concern inside the country as military losses mount.

Russia on Friday launched its annual military draft but vowed that conscripts would not be sent to fight in Ukraine.

Referring to the draft, Zelensky urged Russian families not to send their children to war.

“Don’t let them join the army. It’s not their war. We don’t need any more deaths,” he said.

Civilians have trickled out of devastated areas after arduous and daring escapes.

Three-year-old Karolina Tkachenko and her family walked an hour through a field strewn with burnt-out Russian armoured vehicles to flee their village outside Kyiv.

“The shops are closed, there’s no delivery of supplies. The bridge is also blown up, we can’t go for groceries through there,” said Karolina’s mother Karina Tkachenko. 

In Mariupol, Viktoria Dubovytskaya, who had sheltered in the theatre where 300 people are feared to have been killed in Russian bombardments, said she only grasped the extent of the destruction as she fled.

Bodies lay in the rubble and small wooden crosses were planted in the ground, she told AFP.

“When people find their loved ones, they just bury them wherever they can. Sometimes where roses used to bloom,” she said.

SHANGHAI — Nearly all of Shanghai's 25 million residents were under stay-at-home orders on Saturday, as parents raised fears of being separated from their children in the event of a positive COVID-19 test.

The city, which is the epicentre of China's most severe COVID outbreak since the first months of the pandemic, has faced weeks of phased lockdowns.

Authorities had vowed not to shut down the whole city, China's finance hub, but have conceded to rare failures in their attempts to control the outbreak.

On Saturday, Shanghai had over 6,300 local cases — more than two-thirds of the nationwide caseload, which is relatively low by global standards but troubling to a country that recorded double-digit daily cases for much of the last two years.

Over 14 million residents were tested on Friday, state media reported.

But the testing regime has seeded anxiety among parents about being separated from their children.

"My daughter is not yet four-months-old but if she tests positive then she'll be quarantined by herself," a resident in the populous Puxi area, west of the Huangpu River, told AFP.

"This is totally impossible to understand. No matter the circumstances, a newborn should never be separated from their parents," the 33-year-old, who gave his surname as Law, said.

Shanghai will offer "timely support to juveniles" left unattended due to reasons such as their parents being infected with COVID, Zeng Qun, deputy head of the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau, said according to state media outlet Xinhua. 

Those left at home will be allotted a "temporary guardian" or transferred to institutions "for juvenile protection for special care", the report said.

Anger and fear rising 

Anger is rising among Shanghai residents over lockdowns that were initially billed for four days to mass-test the city, but now appear likely to drag into late next week or longer.

An initial four-day shutdown of Pudong, the eastern half of the financial hub, was meant to lapse on Friday. 

But most of its residents are still confined, as complex quarantine rules mean any block with a virus case will have to be locked down for up to two weeks. 

Residents in the city’s western half, Puxi, were ordered to stay home from Friday, meaning almost all of Shanghai’s population is currently quarantined.

“I’m worried both parts of the city will end up remaining closed for a while,” a Puxi resident surnamed Wang told AFP.

Fear is rising in Shanghai, with residents complaining of a lack of fresh food while the city’s health resources are stretched.

There are over 1,500 people in a city exhibition hall that has been converted into a quarantine centre.

An unverified audio clip circulating on social media Saturday purportedly showed a health official telling a resident that state quarantines were full.

While China has managed to quash most of its domestic virus clusters, the highly infectious Omicron variant has piled pressure on the country’s zero-COVID strategy.

Shanghai’s restrictions threaten to snarl supply chains, with shipping giant Maersk saying Friday that some depots in the city remain closed and trucking services will likely be hit further due to the lockdown.

Organisers of mega motor show Auto China 2022 said Saturday that the event in Beijing this month would be postponed over the “widespread and frequent occurrence” of COVID outbreaks in many parts of China.

KYIV, Ukraine — Kyiv said on Thursday it was sending dozens of buses to evacuate civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol after a Russian ceasefire announcement, as the international Red Cross said it was ready to lead the "desperately important" operation.

Over a month into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin's troops have devastated cities like Mariupol with their incessant shelling, killing at least 5,000 in the port city alone. But they have struggled to take control of any significant territory.

Underscoring Russia's underestimation of Ukraine's dogged defence, Western intelligence agents say Putin is being misled by advisers "afraid to tell him the truth" about battlefield losses or the calamitous damages that sanctions have wrought on the country's economy.

Moscow this week said it would scale back attacks on capital Kyiv and concentrate on the east, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has dismissed the vows as a red herring.

Russian forces were continuing to shell Kyiv and the northern city of Chernigiv, where governor of the region, Vicheslav Chaus, poured scorn on Moscow's claim it was deescalating fighting.

"The enemy is taking losses. It is moving on the territory of Chernigiv region. Can we call that a withdrawal of troops? I am not sure. At the minimum, it is regrouping, but it is possible that it is withdrawing. We must not let down our guard," he wrote on Telegram.

Military experts believe that with thousands of Russian troops killed and many thousands more injured, Moscow has no choice but to ditch efforts to advance simultaneously along multiple axes in the north, east and south.

Its focus instead has turned towards the east, and capturing more towns and cities in the Donbas area including Mariupol, while continuing to fire long-range assaults on other cities.

‘Desperately important'

Around the capital Kyiv, villages like Lukianivka have borne the brunt of Russia's assaults.

A trail of destruction bears testament to the ferocity of the fightback mounted by Ukrainian soldiers to recapture the tiny hamlet a week ago.

Surveying the wreckage of a church at the village, Ukrainian army chaplain Nazarii Hahaliuk said it is inexplicable given that Ukraine and Russia both share the Orthodox Christian faith.

He said he did “not believe as a person or a priest” in Russia’s pledge to ease attacks on Kyiv.

“I feel pain, I feel tragedy, I feel spiritual decline like that of a person who has been killed,” he said.

In the south, where tens of thousands of civilians were still trapped in heavily bombarded Mariupol with little food, water or medicine, Ukrainian authorities made a new try at rescue.

Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 45 buses were heading to the port city in a new evacuation operation, as Russia said it would observe a ceasefire from 10:00am (7:00 GMT).

The international Red Cross said it was itself “ready to lead the safe passage operation” on Friday if the terms including the route and duration are agreed upon by all the parties.

Previous repeated attempts to agree a safety corridor to get them out have collapsed but the ICRC said it was “desperately important” to make the latest attempt work.

The ICRC’s own aid warehouse near the city had been struck by Russian aircraft and artillery, Ukrainian ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said.

Russia forces have encircled Mariupol, a strategic city for the Kremlin which needs to capture it to ensure an unbroken link between the breakaway regions in Donetsk and Lugansk which are under de facto Russian control.

‘Don’t believe anyone’

Authorities at the eastern city of Kharkiv, which has also suffered relentless shelling, on Thursday reported it was hammered by 47 artillery strikes and 380 rocket bombardments.

“We are working everyday to secure humanitarian corridors. For the moment, Russia is not offering this possibility,” said Oleg Sinegubov, Kharkiv governor on Telegram, noting that one person was killed and three wounded by “massive” bombardments in the northern suburb of the city.

Zelensky had warned his war-torn nation to brace for a new Russian onslaught in the eastern Donbas region.

“We don’t believe anyone, not a single beautiful phrase,” Zelensky said in a video message late Wednesday. “There is an accumulation of Russian troops for new strikes in Donbas and we are preparing for it.”

“We will fight for every metre of our land,” he said.

Zelenksy on Thursday further pushed Western allies to hit harder on the economic front, this time using an address to The Netherlands’ parliament to urge the Dutch to boycott Russian energy exports.

The EU has joined the United States in imposing unprecedented sanctions against Russia but with some members mindful of ensuring their own power needs, the bloc has stopped short of enforcing a full-on energy embargo.

“Be willing to stop energy [exports] from Russia... so you don’t contribute billions to the war,” he said in a video address to Dutch lawmakers.

‘Misled’

The United Nations estimates that four million Ukrainians — close to one in 10 inhabitants, have been forced to flee the country.

The head of the UN Human Rights Council has warned Moscow that “indiscriminate attacks are prohibited under international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes”.

A new round of video talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials is due to take place on Friday, after recent negotiations in Istanbul billed initially by both sides as having yielded some progress.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Thursday said a higher-level meeting “at least at the level of foreign ministers” could happen in a week or two.

In five weeks of brutal fighting Russian forces have been humbled by dogged Ukrainian resistance, and forced to rethink any ambitions to sack the capital or overthrow the democratically elected government.

“We’ve seen Russian soldiers, short of weapons and morale, refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft,” Britain’s GCHQ spy agency chief Jeremy Fleming on Thursday, after similar claims from the White House.

Citing US intelligence, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said Putin “felt misled by the Russian military”.

But Russia’s ministry of defence on Thursday claimed that its “goals have been met”.

“The first stage of the special military operation,” said major general Igor Konashenkov, was “to force the enemy to concentrate its forces, means, resources and military equipment to hold on to high populated areas”.

He said the aim was to degrade and tie up Ukrainian forces so they could not be used “in the main direction of our armed forces in Donbas”.