Russia-Ukraine War Live: UN Says Russia Has Committed ‘wide Range’ Of War Crimes; Poland To Transfer Four MIG-29 Planes To Ukraine

At least one person was killed and two injured in a blast and fire at a building belonging to Russia’s federal security service (FSB) in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, according to officials quoted by Russian state media.

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Video footage circulating on social media showed thick black smoke billowing into the air near residential buildings and a shopping centre in Rostov, the capital of a region that adjoins parts of eastern Ukraine where battles with Russia are raging.

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In a statement, the FSB said fuel and lubricants had caught fire in a workshop, causing an explosion and the partial collapse of the building housing its border patrol section.

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Rostov Governor Vasily Golubev had earlier said the fire appeared to have been caused by an electrical short-circuit, and that nearby buildings had been evacuated while the fire burned.

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Russian state-owned news agencies cited emergency services as saying one person had been killed and two more injured.

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

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• The Pentagon has released a video showing the moments before a Russian fighter crashed into a $32m US Reaper drone after spraying it with jet fuel on Tuesday morning over the Black Sea. The declassified footage shows an Su-27 Flanker jet making two exceptionally close passes of the uncrewed drone, spraying fuel in front of it, a harassment tactic that US experts say has not been seen before. The US air force has also released a map of the approximate locations and times of the collision.

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• The Kremlin has said a decision on whether to retrieve the downed US MQ-9 Reaper drone from the Black Sea will come from the Russian military. “If they deem it necessary to do that in the Black Sea for our interests and for our security, they will deal with that,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. Moscow said Wednesday it would try to retrieve the wreckage, but US officials have said the debris could be in such deep water that recovery is impossible, and would have no real intelligence value.

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• The Russian and US defence ministers and military chiefs held rare phone conversations on Wednesday to discuss the incident. Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu told his US counterpart Lloyd Austin on Wednesday that operating drone flights near Crimea was provocative and could lead to an escalation, the Russian defence ministry said. Russia, the statement said, “had no interest in such a development but will in future react in due proportion”.

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• Russia has committed a wide-range of war crimes in Ukraine including wilful killings, systematic torture and the deportation of children, according to a report from a UN-backed inquiry published on Thursday. The report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine was released a year to the day after the Russian bombing of a theatre in Ukraine’s south-eastern city of Mariupol that killed hundreds of people. Its head said the team was following the evidence and that there were “some aspects which may raise questions” about possible genocide.

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• Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has said his country will be handing over four MIG-29 planes to Ukraine in the coming days. Speaking at a news conference, Duda said Warsaw would hand over four of the Soviet-made warplanes in the coming days and that “the rest are being prepared, serviced”. His announcement makes Poland the first Nato member country to fulfil Kyiv’s increasingly urgent requests for warplanes.

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• Denis Pushilin, the Russian-installed leader in occupied Donetsk, told state-owned news agency Tass Thursday that he does not see any signs Ukraine is withdrawing from Bakhmut. He is quoted as saying “In Bakhmut, the situation remains complicated, difficult, that is, we do not see that there are any prerequisites there that the enemy is going to simply withdraw units”.

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• Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said he and senior Chinese diplomat, Qin Gang, had discussed the “significance of the principle of territorial integrity” during a phone call today. “I underscored the importance of (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s) peace formula for ending the aggression and restoring just peace in Ukraine,” Kuleba wrote on Twitter.

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• Qin told Kuleba that China “hopes that all parties will remain calm, rational and restrained, and resume peace talks as soon as possible”, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement. Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Vladimir Putin as soon as next week, and to subsequently hold a virtual meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

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• Vladimir Putin has told his country’s leading billionaires that Russia is facing a “sanctions war”. In an address to Russia’s business elite, the president urged them to invest in new technology, production facilities and enterprises to help Russia overcome what he said were western attempts to destroy its economy. He also appeared to mock the UK as he said western leaders were asking their citizens to eat turnips.

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• Ukrainian soldiers have downed a Chinese-made drone near the city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was launched from Russian-held territory on Friday night, before being shot down from a low altitude by Ukrainian forces in the early hours of Saturday.

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• A Russian soldier who confessed to killing a civilian in Ukraine last year has been given a five and a half year suspended jail sentence by a military court in Russia’s far east on charges of spreading “fake news” about the army. Daniil Frolkin, 21, said he shot and killed a male civilian in Andriivka, a village near Kyiv that was occupied by Russian forces shortly after the invasion began.

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• The former mayor of Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, has been detained over a social media post in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Yevgeny Roizman, one of the last opposition figures still in Russia and not behind bars, has denied the charges.

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• Poland claims to have broken up a Russian espionage network operating in the country. Defence minister Mariusz Blaszczak on Thursday said “I would like to emphasise the great success achieved by the officers of the internal security agency, because the whole spy network has been unravelled.”

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Good afternoon from London, it’s Léonie Chao-Fong still here with all the latest developments from the Russia-Ukraine war. I’m on Twitter or you can email me.

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Russia has committed a wide-range of war crimes in Ukraine including wilful killings, systematic torture and the deportation of children, according to a report from a UN-backed inquiry published today.

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Russian forces have carried out “indiscriminate and disproportionate” attacks on Ukraine, resorted to torture, killed civilians outside of combat and failed to take measures to safeguard the Ukrainian population, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, a UN-mandated investigative body, said.

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The report, released a year to the day after the Russian bombing of a theatre in Ukraine’s south-eastern city of Mariupol that killed hundreds of people, marked a highly unusual condemnation of a member of the UN’s security council.

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The commission cited repeated attacks targeting Ukrainian infrastructure that left hundreds of thousands without heat and electricity during the coldest months as potential crimes against humanity.

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The report also described the “systematic and widespread” use of torture across multiple regions under Russian occupation, and gave details of torture methods used in Russian detention facilities where victims were subjected to electric shocks with a military phone – a treatment known as a “call to Putin” – or hung from the ceiling in a “parrot position”.

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The report, based on more than 500 interviews as well as satellite images and visits to detention sites and graves, comes as the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague is expected to seek the arrest of Russian officials for forcibly deporting children from Ukraine and targeting civilian infrastructure.

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The report’s authors also noted a “small number” of apparent violations by Ukrainian forces, including one they said was under criminal investigation by Ukrainian authorities. The vast majority of the report focused however on allegations against Russia. Russia denies committing atrocities or targeting civilians in Ukraine.

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Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has said his country will be handing over four MIG-29 planes to Ukraine in the coming days.

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Speaking at a news conference just now, Duda said other MIG jets are also being prepared for the transfer, Polskie Radio’s Karol Darmoros reports.

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Prezydent @AndrzejDuda: W ciągu najbliższych dni przekazujemy 4 samoloty MiG-29 na Ukrainę.
Jak dodał PAD, pozostałe maszyny są serwisowane i przygotowywane do przekazania. Zastąpimy je dostawami koreańskich FA-50 i amerykańskich F-35 pic.twitter.com/m63OLkwM7y

— Karol Darmoros 🇵🇱 (@KarolDarmoros) March 16, 2023

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Russian ships have been seen near the area where the US MQ-9 Reaper drone crashed two days ago, Reuters has cited a US official as saying.

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They did not appear to have recovered any parts of the drone yet, and it is not clear if they are still in the area.

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Washington has said that any recovery efforts relating to the drone would be difficult because of the depth of water in the region.

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Video footage released by the US European Command earlier today which it said shows the moment of impact between a Russian fighter jet and a US MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea “absolutely confirms” that there was a physical collision and dumping of fuel, CNN’s MJ Lee cites a senior US administration official as saying.

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The footage, however, does not confirm whether it was the Russian pilot’s intent and whether they meant to strike the US drone’s propeller, according to the official.

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The footage released this morning of the encounter between Russian fighter jets and a US drone over the Black Sea “absolutely confirms” that there was a physical collision and dumping of fuel, a senior administration official says.

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) March 16, 2023

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But what it does not confirm, still, is the Russian pilot's intent and whether they meant to strike the US drone's propeller, the official said.

That remains one of the key questions in what has emerged a serious US-Russia dispute.

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) March 16, 2023

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