Russia-Ukraine war live: Missiles strike near Zelenskiy as Russia says conflict could escalate to war in Europe – The Guardian

Ihor Zhovkva, a top Ukrainian diplomatic adviser, has told CNN that it could not be ruled out that a Russian missile strike had targeted the delegations of Volodymyr Zelenskiy or the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Reuters reported.

“It really was less than 500 meters from us. What was that? … You cannot exclude it was directed at the delegation of my president or the delegation of foreign guest,” he said.

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French president Emmanuel Macron on Thursday pledged his country’s “unwavering support” for Moldova as tensions mount between the eastern European country and pro-Russian separatists, reports AFP.

“France restates its unwavering support for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova within its internationally recognised borders,” he said in a joint statement with Moldovan president Maia Sandu as she visited Paris.

Two years into Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, Moldova faces “multiple challenges caused by the conflict on its borders”, the statement said.

Top of the list is the pro-Russian breakway region of Transnistria, where officials last week appealed to Moscow for “protection”. There is mounting concern that the territory could become a new flashpoint in the conflict, with Moldova “facing intensifying hybrid attacks”, the two presidents said.

The two presidents signed a Chisinau-Paris defence deal as well as an “economic roadmap”, reports AFP.

“The Moldovan state must be in a position to protect its neutrality, defend its territory and its population, and contribute to regional and international security,” they said in the statement.

Macron and Sandu said Paris was “fully backing” Moldova’s reforms aimed at one day joining the EU. It is to hold a referendum later this year.

“Justice reform and the battle against corruption” would be particularly important to a successful membership bid, they added.

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Updated at 14.27 GMT

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said today that Russia did not target Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s delegation in a missile attack yesterday, Reuters reported.

Medvedev said Russia would have hit its target if that had been its aim.

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Sweden is about to complete the process to formally join Nato.

NATO SG Stoltenberg has just informed me that all NATO member states have accepted our accession protocol, and has invited Sweden to accede to the North Atlantic Treaty. Sweden will soon be NATO’s 32nd member.

— SwedishPM (@SwedishPM) March 7, 2024

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Norway will provide new funding to buy artillery shells for Ukraine, under the Czech-led ammunition initiative, the Ukrainian defence ministry said.

Good news from our Norwegian friends 🇺🇦🤝🇳🇴

Norway will provide €140 million to procure artillery shells for Ukraine within the Czech initiative.

Also, Norway joined the Air Defense Coalition. That’s an important step towards strengthening Ukraine’s capabilities, as Norwegian… pic.twitter.com/fYnMBOqtMM

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) March 7, 2024

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Ihor Zhovkva, a top Ukrainian diplomatic adviser, has told CNN that it could not be ruled out that a Russian missile strike had targeted the delegations of Volodymyr Zelenskiy or the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Reuters reported.

“It really was less than 500 meters from us. What was that? … You cannot exclude it was directed at the delegation of my president or the delegation of foreign guest,” he said.

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French president Emmanuel Macron on Thursday met leaders of the country’s main political parties as he sought to hammer home the importance of greater support for Ukraine ahead of European elections this summer, reports AFP.

Last week Macron stunned many in Europe by refusing to rule out the dispatch of western ground troops to Ukraine, pointing to Russia’s hardening stance.

According to AFP, although members of the opposition denounced his remarks, Macron has since doubled down on his calls to ramp up military aid for Ukraine.

The president and party leaders were expected to discuss the war, including the results of an international conference to step up military support for Ukraine held in Paris last week.

France’s parliament will have a chance to vote on the country’s Ukraine strategy, including a bilateral security treaty signed with Kyiv last month, after debates in the National Assembly lower house next Tuesday and the Senate upper house on Wednesday.

Ahead of meeting the opposition, Macron had spoken to his predecessors François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace late on Wednesday.

Former French president François Hollande arriving for a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron (not pictured) at the Élysée Palace in Paris on Wednesday. Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA

Speaking to journalists after the talks, Hollande called for more aid for Ukraine as well as European unity. “The only possible response is to show that we are with the Ukrainians in total solidarity, that we are giving them all the support they need, without taking part in any combat ourselves,” Hollande said.

Asked about the possibility of sending troops, the former president said: “My position on military issues is: the less we say, the better.”

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The EU’s largest political party on Thursday endorsed Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for a second five-year term at the helm of the bloc’s powerful Commission, reports the Associated Press (AP).

Von der Leyen ’s nomination at a gathering of her center-right European People’s party (EPP) in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, comes ahead of the 6-9 June elections for the European parliament, the EU’s only democratically elected institution. The endorsement places her firmly as a frontrunner for the top job in the 27-nation bloc.

The EPP is expected to remain the biggest in the bloc’s legislature after the June voting, but von der Leyen’s posting would still require approval from leaders of the EU’s member states. Almost half of the EU’s 27 national leaders are members of the EPP.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen (C), the EPP candidate for the same position, reacts after winning the ballot at the European People’s party Congress in Bucharest on Thursday. Photograph: Robert Ghement/EPA

As the two-day EPP meeting came to a close on Thursday, von der Leyen warned of the expected rise of populists in the bloc’s upcoming elections and Russia’s attempt “to wipe Ukraine off the face of (the) earth”.

“Our peaceful and united Europe is being challenged like never before by populists, by nationalists, by demagogues, whether it’s the far right or it’s the far left,” she said. “The names may be different, but the goal is the same. They want to trample on our values and they want to destroy our Europe … the EPP will never let that happen.”

According to AP, von der Leyen noted Europe’s push to reduce its dependence on Russian energy after president Vladimir Putin ordered the war in Ukraine two years ago.

“We have resisted Putin’s blackmail with its dirty coal, oil and gas. We got rid of this dependency,” she said. “We are massively investing in clean energy. For the first time we produced more electricity from wind and sun in Europe than from gas. This creates good jobs here at home, drives prices down and cleans up pollution. And it gives us energy security.”

In 2022, wind and solar generated a record 22% of EU’s electricity, for the first time overtaking fossil gas at 20% and remaining above coal power at 16%, according to a recent review by Ember, an energy think tank.

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Updated at 12.19 GMT

Ireland’s prime minister Leo Varadkar has said his government supports a Europe wide defence policy, despite Ireland’s policy of neutrality.

“I do not believe that Putin’s ambitions will stop at Ukraine. This is our war too and it’s not just happening on Ukraine’s territory. It’s happening all around us, in our seas, and in the form of physical and cyber-attacks. As one of my forebears said, a Europe worth building is a Europe worth defending. We should do so by developing PESCO in particular,“ he said in reference to the European security cooperation framework involving all member states bar Malta.

“The people in Ukraine are fighting, sacrificing their lives for European values. Fighting for democracy, liberty and the rule of law. The least we can do is provide them with the tools they need to defend their country and their homes – and progress EU accession negotiations as quickly as possible,” he said.

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Updated at 12.08 GMT

According to Reuters, Norway will donate up to 1.6bn Norwegian crowns ($153m/£120m) for the purchase of ammunition for Ukraine, Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said in a statement on Thursday.

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The recently elected Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, has issued a stark warning that Europe now stands in a new prewar era just as it did before the second world war.

“The times of blissful calm are over. The postwar epoch is gone. We are living in new times, in a prewar epoch. In fact, for some of our brothers, it is no longer even a prewar time. It is a full-scale war in its most cruel form,” he told fellow prime ministers and hundreds of MEPs attending the annual congress of the European People’s party alliance in Bucharest.

“It is not our fault that our daily vocabulary includes, once again, such words as fighting, bombings, rocket attacks, genocide,” he said. Tusk added:

Europe wanted to live and develop itself in a postwar world. But today we must say clearly that we are faced with a simple choice – either we undertake the fight to defend our borders, our territory, our principles, and as a consequence our citizens and future generations, or we will fall.

There is no objective reason to capitulate before evil. The potential of Europe, economic, financial, demographic, moral, is greater than the potential of those who attack us. It is crucial today that Europe believes in its strength.

Also when it comes to the context of our defence capacity, we cannot live on the illusions. No one will take our place in this fight for our safety and for our future. We ourselves are the best guarantors of our safety and of our unity.

As you well know, the only person you can count on is yourself. Europeans will be united when they see with all clarity that the Union is really our Europe, a safe and good home for the people.”

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Updated at 11.36 GMT

The Czech Republic has announced it is suspending intergovernmental consultations with Slovakia amid growing concerns that Bratislava is shifting away from western policy on supporting Ukraine.

The two countries have traditionally enjoyed a special relationship, given their history as part of the former Czechoslovakia, and close economic links.

Slovakia’s foreign minister, Juraj Blanár, left, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, meeting in Antalya, Turkey, earlier this month. Photograph: Russian Foreign Ministry/Reuters

But a recent meeting between Slovakia’s foreign minister, Juraj Blanár, and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Turkey has proved to be a step too far for many in Prague, prompting tensions over foreign policy differences to come to the fore.

“There is no disguising that there are differences of opinion on several very important issues. We consider the meeting between the Slovak foreign minister and the Russian foreign minister to be problematic,” the Czech prime minister, Petr Fiala, said on Wednesday.

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Russian security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, a top ally of president Vladimir Putin, said on Thursday that Nato’s latest military exercise looked like a rehearsal for an armed confrontation with Russia, Reuters reports citing the Interfax news agency.

Nato’s Nordic Response Exercise is taking place across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland and involves 20,000 soldiers from 13 countries.

Patrushev said the exercise, which is due to run until 14 March, was destabilising and was raising tensions, reports Reuters.

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Here are some of the latest images from Ukraine and Russia on the newswires:

Ukrainian soldiers participate in a military training drill at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Wednesday. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Mourners visit the grave of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny at the Borisovskoye cemetery in Moscow on Wednesday. Photograph: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited a makeshift memorial in Odesa to the victims of the previous day’s drone strike that heavily damaged an apartment building. Photograph: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters

In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state owned agency, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during the closing ceremony of the 2024 World Youth Festival (WYF) in Sochi on Wednesday. Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AFP/Getty Images

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The Russian foreign ministry said on Thursday it had summoned the US ambassador in Moscow and warned her against “attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Russian Federation”, reports Reuters.

Ahead of a March presidential election, it said in a statement that such behaviour would be “firmly and resolutely suppressed, up to and including the expulsion as ‘persona non grata’ of US embassy staff involved in such actions”.

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According to a breaking news line by Reuters on the newswires, Russia has summoned the US ambassador. Reuters are citing the Russian state news agency Tass, who say the message has come from the Russian foreign ministry.

More details to follow …

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Updated at 10.34 GMT

Reuters have reported more details on the news that Russia’s FSB shot dead a Belarusian man, who it said had been planning “an act of terrorism” on behalf of Ukraine, in the northern Russian region of Karelia, according to the RIA state news agency.

The FSB said it had “seized weapons and an improvised explosive device” after the shootout.

RIA cited the FSB as saying that the man had intended to blow up an administrative building in the city of Olonets, about 155 miles (250 km) from the Finnish border.

“During the arrest, the criminal opened fire from a firearm at special services officers and was neutralised during the clash,” RIA cited the FSB as saying.

Reuters report that RIA published video footage showing several FSB agents entering a dilapidated, unlit building in a remote area, shouting “come out” and then firing shots. The video then showed a man who appeared to be dead lying on the ground with a handgun next to his body, it said.

The FSB said the improvised explosive device had been made using a plastic explosive manufactured in Britain and had a US-made detonator.

Citing unnamed sources, Russian media reported the man’s name as Nikolai Alekseev, a 49-year-old activist from Belarus who had participated in opposition protests there in 2020.

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Updated at 10.14 GMT