VLADIMIR Putin has been hit by a huge blow as two colonels have been killed in Ukraine as the bloody war continues in Ukraine.
One of the tow colonels that were killed was Russia's youngest to reach such a high rank.
Aged only 36, Lt-Col Vadim Gerasimov, died during conflict in Ukraine, and was posthumously awarded a Hero of Russia – the country's highest honour – on Putin's orders
The second high-ranked officer whose death was revealed today is Colonel Ruslan Shirin, a brigade commander.
The deaths of the two high-ranking military figures mean the Kremlin has seen at least 52 colonels killed during the bloody conflict.
The news comes as Putin's 'brutal' battle for the key city of Severodonetsk will determine the fate of the Donbas region according to Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Ukrainian president has made the crucial statement as Russian troops have continued to bombard the city in an assault aimed at controlling eastern Ukraine.
During his daily briefing, Volodymyr Zelensky said: "This is a very brutal battle, very tough, perhaps one of the most difficult throughout this war.
"Sievierodonetsk remains the epicenter of the encounter in Donbas … Largely, that is where the fate of our Donbas is being decided now."
Ukrainian fighters have been forced to the outskirts of Sievierodonetsk on Wednesday but have vowed to fight there for as long as possible.
Read our Ukraine war live blog below for the latest news & updates…
- Louis Allwood
Putin accused of holding Ukrainians in “torture chambers”
VLADIMIR Putin's regime is holding Ukrainian activists, journalists and prisoners of war in “torture chambers”, a Kyiv official has claimed.
According to The New York Post, around 600 Ukrainian civilians are being held in and around the Russian-occupied city of Kherson
Speaking at a media briefing, Tamila Tasheva, Kyiv’s representative to Crimea, said: “According to our information, in the Kherson region there are about 600 people who are in basements, in specially equipped rooms, in torture chambers.”
Tasheva said roughly 300 of those being held were held in the city proper, with the other 300 held in nearby locations.
- Louis Allwood
Zelensky calls for Russia to be expelled from UN agriculture agency
Zelensky has called for Russia to be expelled from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.
Zelensky said, as quoted by the AFP news agency: "There can't be any discussion on prolonging Russia's membership in the FAO. What is there for Russia to do if they are causing hunger for at least 400 million, or potentially more than a billion people?"
Western nations have accused Russia of creating the risk of a global famine by blocking Black Sea ports.
- Louis Allwood
UK's Ministry of Defence has released it's latest intelligence update
The UK's Ministry of Defence, (MoD) has said that Russia's advances on the Izium axis has stalled as Ukrainian forces have been bale to make good use of the terrain.
In their latest update the UK's MoD said: "Fighting continues in the Sieverodonetsk pocket but, in the last 48 hours, Russia’s Eastern Group of Forces (EGF) have also likely increased their efforts to advance to the south of Izium.
"Russia’s progress on the Izium axis had remained stalled since April, after Ukrainian forces made good use of the terrain to slow Russia’s advance.
"Russia has likely attempted to reconstitute EGF after they suffered very heavy casualties in the failed advance on Kyiv, but its units likely remain understrength.
"Russia likely seeks to regain momentum in this area in order to put further pressure on Sieverodonetsk, and to give it the option of advancing deeper into the Donetsk Oblast."
- Louis Allwood
Russia's UN ambassador says forces will control Donbas 'soon'
Moscow's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia has told the BBC that Russia will gain control of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions soon.
He added Russia is making progress in the two regions, which comprise Donbas.
He also dismissed comments about Moscow's operation stalling, or not moving as envisaged, saying "progress is being made".
"Nobody promised to deliver it [victory] in three or seven days."
- Louis Allwood
Russia claims to have shot down Ukrainian missiles in Kherson
Russia has claimed to have shot down three Ukrainian missiles in the outskirts of the city of Kherson.
Russia’s foreign ministry has today claimed three Tochka-U missiles were fired on the region by Ukrainian nationalists.
The southern city of Kherson was the first in Ukraine to fall into Russian hands.
- Louis Allwood
Mariupol bodies are being removed found among the rubble
Workers are removing bodies from the ruins of high-rise buildings in the devastated port city of Mariupol.
According to an adviser to the city's mayor hundreds of bodies are being found.
Petro Andryushchenko spoke on Telegram of an "unending caravan of death" in the occupied port city, where between 50 and 100 bodies per block of flats are being retrieved from under the rubble and transported to morgues.
He added that the debris of about two-fifths of buildings have been searched by the occupying forces so far.
- Louis Allwood
Body of French journalist flown home
The body of French journalist, Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff has been flown back to France following his death on 30 May.
He was killed when he was hit by shrapnel near Severodonetsk.
Leclerc-Imhoff's parents, partner, some of his relatives and France's Culture Minister, Rima Abdul-Malak, were all in attendance as his coffin was carried off an aircraft.
Officials from French TV channel BFMTV, where Leclerc-Imhoff had worked for six years, were also there.
- Louis Allwood
Long-range weapons 'could help' Ukraine
In recent days fighting has intensified in Severodonetsk and Zelensky has said the battle in the city would determine the future of the Donbas region.
The governor for the Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai, said if the West supplied long-range artillery, Ukraine would have the firepower it needs to push back Russian forces, preventing their advances.
He said if Ukraine gets Western long-range weapons, Russia would "lose to the West, and our defenders will be able to clean up Severodonetsk in two to three days".
- Louis Allwood
Putin is using Adolf Hitler tactics in his invasion of Ukraine, claims Ben Wallace
VLADIMIR Putin is using Adolf Hitler tactics in his invasion of Ukraine, says Ben Wallace.
Mad Vlad’s desire to “rub a state from the map”, mass executions, infiltration camps and deportations were straight out the German war leader’s playbook.
Defence Secretary Mr Wallace said the “messages we hear from the Kremlin echo what we heard in the 1930s and 1940s from Nazi Germany”.
He told a conference of the Northern Group of allied nations in Iceland that Russia’s President Putin was shoving troops into a “meat grinder”.
Mr Wallace said Putin had “a desire to use ethnic nationalism to remove people whose identities challenge the current Russia as the Kremlin sees it.”
He said around 80,000 Russians had been killed or injured so far.
- Louis Allwood
'Absolutely rational, cold, cruel, black evil'
UKRAINE'S former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, has branded Russia's Vladimir Putin as "absolutely rational, cold, cruel, black evil".
She also claimed he is determined to go down in Russian history alongside Stalin and Peter the Great.
In an exclusive interview, Tymoshenko dismissed the suggestion that the Russian president was “crazy”.
“He acts according to his own dark logic,” she said.
“He’s driven by this idea of historic mission and wants to create an empire. That’s his hyper-goal. It comes from a deep inner desire and belief.”
Tymoshenko, was the leader of the 2004 Orange revolution and prime minister twice. She also had several one-on-one meetings with Russian President Putin.
Close up, Putin was “always cautious”, she added.
“He is from a KGB school”.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, he made no secret of his belief that there was “no such nation as Ukraine, and no such people as Ukrainians”, she said.
- Milica Cosic
‘Caravan of death’ in Mariupol
Workers are removing bodies from the ruins of high-rise buildings in the devastated Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and transporting them in an endless caravan of death, a mayoral aide said yesterday.
Petro Andryushchenko said on the Telegram app that in a search of about two-fifths of the buildings they have found from 50 to 100 bodies in each. They are taking the bodies to morgues and landfills.
Ukrainian authorities estimate at least 21,000 civilians were killed and hundreds of buildings destroyed during a weekslong Russian siege of Mariupol.
Reports have surfaced of mass graves holding thousands of bodies.
Russia claimed full control of Mariupol last month.
- Milica Cosic
Putin branded 'cold, cruel & black evil' by Ukrainian former PM
UKRAINE'S former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, has branded Russia's Vladimir Putin as "absolutely rational, cold, cruel, black evil".
She also claimed he is determined to go down in Russian history alongside Stalin and Peter the Great.
In an exclusive interview, Tymoshenko dismissed the suggestion that the Russian president was “crazy”.
“He acts according to his own dark logic,” she said.
“He’s driven by this idea of historic mission and wants to create an empire. That’s his hyper-goal. It comes from a deep inner desire and belief.”
Tymoshenko, was the leader of the 2004 Orange revolution and prime minister twice. She also had several one-on-one meetings with Russian President Putin.
Close up, Putin was “always cautious”, she added.
“He is from a KGB school”.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, he made no secret of his belief that there was “no such nation as Ukraine, and no such people as Ukrainians”, she said.
- Milica Cosic
EU chief: Kremlin using food as ‘arsenal of terror’
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said yesterday that the Kremlin regime is using food as an “arsenal of terror”.
Speaking to members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Ms von der Leyen said the West “could not tolerate” Russia’s bombarding of grain storage facilities and the blockade of the Ukrainian ports.
She said: “Food has become now part of the Kremlin’s arsenal of terror. And we cannot tolerate this.
“I think that this is the only way to describe Russia’s bombarding of grain storage facilities, the blockade of the Ukrainian ports – actually also in some cases even theft of grain from Ukraine.
“So at the moment being, there are round about 20 million tonnes of grain trapped in Ukraine. And it is our duty to dismantle Russia’s disinformation.”
- Milica Cosic
Brit fighters Aiden Aslin & Shaun Pinner face 20 YEARS in prison
CAPTURED Brit fighters Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner face 20 years behind bars after "pleading guilty" in a pro-Russian court.
The two volunteers who have been fighting alongside the Ukrainian army since the start of the war in February were accused by Russian forces of being mercenaries – charges which can carry the death penalty.
Aslin and Pinner pleaded guilty to "training in order to carry out terrorist activities" according to a video released by DPR Supreme Court, Russian state media report.
Aiden Aslin, 28, from Nottinghamshire and Shaun Pinner, 48, from Bedfordshire are being held in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic – a breakaway region in the east of Ukraine.
Both men – who have lived in the country since 2018 – say they were serving with regular military units in Mariupol and so should be protected as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
- Milica Cosic
UN: More than 7m border crossings registered from Ukraine
According to the UN Refugee Agency, more than 7 million people have crossed the border from Ukraine since war broke out there.
A total of 7,023,559 border crossings have been recorded since the Russian invasion began, the agency’s tally showed today.
- Milica Cosic
Ukraine's ministry shares pics of soldiers sleeping in 'cold trenches'
The Ukrainian foreign ministry has shared a heart-breaking and emotional photo showing two soldiers curled up asleep in a trench.
"These Ukrainian defenders in their positions. They sleep in cold trenches so we can sleep in our homes," the ministry said.
- Milica Cosic
Russia has stolen 600,000 tonnes of grain, Ukrainian producers say
Russia has stolen about 600,000 tonnes of grain from occupied Ukrainian territory and exported some of it, the deputy head of Ukrainian agriculture producers union UAC said on Wednesday.
Ukraine will demand Russia compensate for both the theft of the grain and the destruction of the property of farmers, UAC deputy head Denys Marchuk told Ukrainian television.
"To date, about 600,000 tonnes have been stolen from agricultural companies and taken to the temporarily occupied territory of the Crimean Peninsula and from there it moves to ports, in particular to Sevastopol, and from there, ships go to the Middle East," Marchuk said.
He added that about 100,000 tonnes of grain had already been trans-shipped in Syria, according to evidence "recorded by the USA".
He provided no additional detail. Reuters – who reported this first – was not able to verify the claims.
- Milica Cosic
Kyiv: 'Russian aggression' – not sanctions – fuelling grain crisis
Ukraine has yesterday said that Moscow's invasion was responsible for a global grain crisis, dismissing Russian claims that Western sanctions on Moscow had sent prices soaring.
"We have been actively communicating, the president and myself, about the true cause of this crisis: it is Russian aggression, not sanctions," Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said during a briefing with Ukrainian journalists released on social media.
- Milica Cosic
Ukraine & Russia exchange bodies of dead soldiers
The Ukrainian Ministry of Reintegration has said Wednesday that Ukraine and Russia have exchanged the bodies of 50 dead soldiers.
In a Facebook post, the authority added that 37 of the fighters were killed at Mariupol's Azovstal steel works.
"On the front line in the Zaporizhzhya region, an exchange of bodies of dead soldiers between Ukraine and Russia under the formula 50 by 50," the ministry said.
"The process of returning the bodies of dead Ukrainian soldiers is ongoing."
- Milica Cosic
Former Russian president lashes out at those who ‘hate’ Russia
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president who served between 2008 and 2012, has lashed out at those who “hate” Russia – calling them “degenerates” and vowing to “make them disappear”.
Medvedev, who is now deputy head of the Security Council, wrote on Telegram: “I am often asked why my Telegram posts are so harsh. The answer is I hate them. They are bastards and degenerates.
“They want death for us, Russia. And while I’m alive, I will do everything to make them disappear.”
However, he did not say nor specify who “they” were.
- Milica Cosic
Russia DENIES responsibility for global food crisis
Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday the onus was on Ukraine to solve the problem of resuming grain shipments by de-mining its ports.
Lavrov said no action was required on the Russian side because it had already made the necessary commitments.
"We state daily that we're ready to guarantee the safety of vessels leaving Ukrainian ports and heading for the (Bosphorus) gulf, we're ready to do that in cooperation with our Turkish colleagues," he said after talks with his Turkish counterpart.
"To solve the problem, the only thing needed is for the Ukrainians to let vessels out of their ports, either by demining them or by marking out safe corridors, nothing more is required."
Ukraine is one of the world's biggest exporters of grain, and Western countries have accused Russia of creating the risk of global famine by shutting Ukraine's Black Sea ports.
Moscow denies responsibility for the international food crisis, blaming Western sanctions.
- Milica Cosic
Russian troops ‘control most of Severodonetsk’
Ukraine has said that Russian forces control most of the strategic city of Severodonetsk, according to the Luhansk region’s governor Serhiy Gaidai.
It has been said that they are also heavily shelling the twin city of Lysychansk.
In an online post, Mr Gaidai also said there was no chance of Ukrainian troops in the Luhansk region being encircled.
Russian forces temporarily control 90 per cent of the region, he added.
- Milica Cosic
'Caravan of death' in Mariupol
Workers are removing bodies from the ruins of high-rise buildings in the devastated Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and transporting them in an endless caravan of death, a mayoral aide said today.
Petro Andryushchenko said on the Telegram app that in a search of about two-fifths of the buildings they have found from 50 to 100 bodies in each. They are taking the bodies to morgues and landfills.
Ukrainian authorities estimate at least 21,000 civilians were killed and hundreds of buildings destroyed during a weekslong Russian siege of Mariupol.
Reports have surfaced of mass graves holding thousands of bodies.
Russia claimed full control of Mariupol last month.
- Milica Cosic
EU chief: Kremlin using food as 'arsenal of terror'
European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said today that the Kremlin regime is using food as an "arsenal of terror".
Speaking to members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Ms von der Leyen said the West "could not tolerate" Russia's bombarding of grain storage facilities and the blockade of the Ukrainian ports.
She said: "Food has become now part of the Kremlin's arsenal of terror. And we cannot tolerate this.
"I think that this is the only way to describe Russia's bombarding of grain storage facilities, the blockade of the Ukrainian ports – actually also in some cases even theft of grain from Ukraine.
"So at the moment being, there are round about 20 million tonnes of grain trapped in Ukraine. And it is our duty to dismantle Russia's disinformation."
- Milica Cosic
Russia attacking Ukraine food targets to scare world, says regional governor
Russia is attacking food and agriculture targets in Ukraine in order to scare the world into agreeing a deal to reopen the Black Sea on Moscow's terms, the head of the region said.
Vitaliy Kim, governor of the Mykolaiv region, where Russian shelling destroyed the warehouses of one of Ukraine's largest agricultural commodities terminals over the weekend, said Moscow wanted to make global food shortages "look like a catastrophe".
"They want to do this because they are trying to trade about opening the Black Sea" in the hope of a deal that might allow Ukrainian and Russian grain to use the waterway, possibly in exchange for an easing of sanctions, Kim told Reuters in an interview today.
"That is why they shoot more. Why they shoot the agricultural enterprises and even fields – just for their own movie that fields are on fire," said Kim, who was speaking outside his former office.
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