Vladimir Putin won’t attend Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral, Kremlin says
Vladimir Putin has no plans to attend the funeral of Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.
He told reporters the Kremlin did not know about the planned funeral arrangements, saying this was a matter for the family, according to Reuters.
Russia’s investigative committee on Sunday confirmed Prigozhin was among the people killed in a plane crash last Wednesday. The committee said in a statement that after forensic testing, all 10 bodies recovered at the site had been identified, and their identities “conform to the manifest”.
The Kremlin has denied it killed the Wagner chief, calling western intelligence assessments of Putin’s potential involvement “an absolute lie”.
Prigozhin had refused to submit his mercenaries to direct state control, despite a direct request from Putin during a meeting at the Kremlin in June. His armed uprising that month came days before a deadline that would have forced the group to sign military contracts.
Key events
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has provided details about what was discussed during his phone call with Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida (see post at 11.04).
Had a phone call with Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida @kishida230.
Thanked for comprehensive assistance, in particular, support for Ukraine’s #PeaceFormula.
Invited Japan to participate in the preparation of the Global Peace Summit.
We appreciate the G7 declaration on…
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 29, 2023
Russian mercenaries gathered today for the funeral of Valery Chekalov, one of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s deputies who was killed with his boss in a plane crash last week, though the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had no plans to attend Prigozhin’s funeral.
Reuters reports that the family of Valery Chekalov, the head of Wagner logistics, was joined by dozens of people, some of whom Reuters identified as Wagner mercenaries, at the Severnoye cemetery in St Petersburg, Russia’s former imperial capital.
A Russian Orthodox priest said prayers and swung a censer before Chekalov’s coffin as family, friends and former colleagues, some holding bunches of flowers, bade farewell, Reuters video showed.
Some, including women and children in sunglasses, came forward to kiss his coffin. Unidentified mourners at the funeral ordered a Reuters videographer and photographer to stop filming.
The private Embraer Legacy 600 private jet on which Prigozhin was travelling to St Petersburg from Moscow crashed in the Tver region north of Moscow on Aug. 23 with the loss of all 10 people on board, including Chekalov, Dmitry Utkin – another top Wagner leader – and four men reported to be Prigozhin’s bodyguards.
The day after the crash, Putin sent his condolences to the families of those killed and said he had known Prigozhin for a very long time, since the chaotic years of the early 1990s.
“He was a man with a difficult fate, and he made serious mistakes in life,” Putin said, while describing him as a talented businessman.
The crash came two months to the day after Prigozhin and his mercenaries staged a mutiny against Putin’s top military commanders in which they took control of the southern city of Rostov and advanced towards Moscow before turning back 200 km (125 miles) from the capital.
The mutiny posed the biggest challenge to Putin’s rule since he took power on the last day of 1999. The Kremlin has rejected as an “absolute lie” the suggestion by some Western politicians and commentators – for which they have not provided evidence – that Putin ordered Prigozhin to be killed in revenge.
St Petersburg’s Fontanka news outlet and some other media said the Wagner mercenary chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, could be laid to rest as early as Tuesday at the city’s Serafimovskoye cemetery, which has been used for high-profile military burials.
Heavy police cordons encircled the cemetery, where Putin’s parents are also buried, but no service was immediately held and increased police patrols were seen at some other city cemeteries, the Associated Press reports.
Russia’s investigative committee on Sunday confirmed Prigozhin was among the people killed in a plane crash last Wednesday. The committee said in a statement that after forensic testing, all 10 bodies recovered at the site had been identified, and their identities “conform to the manifest”.
Summary of the day so far…
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More than 1,300 schools have been totally destroyed in government-held areas of Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Unicef has said.
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Vladimir Putin has no plans to attend the funeral of the Wagner mercenary chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed when his plane crashed last week, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.
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Ukraine said on Tuesday that its forces had pushed deeper into Russian defensive lines near the village of Robotyne, a day after claiming control over the village on the southern front.
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Vladimir Putin will skip the G20 summit in India next month and will send his foreign minister instead, prime minister Narendra Modi’s office said.
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The US has accused Moscow of attempting to intimidate and harass US employees, after Russian state media reported that a former US consulate worker had been charged with collecting information on the war in Ukraine and other issues for Washington.
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Russian air defences reportedly downed Ukrainian drones over the Tula and Belgorod regions, Moscow’s defence ministry said on Tuesday, without indicating if there had been damage or casualties.
The UK foreign secretary, James Cleverly, will challenge Chinese officials in Beijing on Wednesday over their growing military support for Russia, but is intent that his meetings will be seen as the revival of a political dialogue that eventually revives UK trade with China.
Ahead of the meetings, he said that no major international issue could be solved without China but added that the country had to live up to its international commitments and obligations.
No significant global problem – from climate change to pandemic prevention, from economic instability to nuclear proliferation – could be solved without China, he said.
“China’s size, history and global significance means they cannot be ignored, but that comes with a responsibility on the global stage. That responsibility means China fulfilling its international commitments and obligations”.
It is the first visit by a senior British government member to China in five years, and reflects a general post-pandemic desire in the west to see if the relationship can be better managed.
You can read the full story by the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, here:
A German-Russian national is under arrest on suspicion of exporting components used by Russia in the production of military hardware, Germany’s prosecutor general said on Tuesday.
Reuters reports:
The defendant, named only as Waldemar W, is accused of violating sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the prosecutor said in a statement. W has been in pre-trial detention since 9 March.
Between January 2020 and March 2023, he allegedly exported electronic components on 26 occasions to a Russian company involved in the production of military hardware, including the Orlan-10 reconnaissance drone.
The prosecutor general stepped in “because of the special importance of the case”, it said in a statement. Its arrest warrant supersedes another issued by a Mannheim regional court on 8 March.
German authorities have been increasingly cracking down on those suspected of circumventing sanctions. Earlier this month, a businessman was arrested on suspicion of providing machine tools used by the Russian company in the production of sniper rifles.
The Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, said he told Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday that Japan planned to keep on supporting Ukraine, Reuters reports.
Kishida told reporters he had also condemned Russia’s continued attacks on Ukraine, during his phone call with Ukraine’s president.
Kishida has previously indicated he wants to help Ukraine because his administration fears a Russian victory would embolden China to attack Taiwan and embroil his country in a regional war.
A Russian military jet destroyed a Ukrainian drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday, Russia’s defence ministry said without providing any other details. We will update you with more information as it comes in.
More than 1,300 schools destroyed in Ukraine since war began, Unicef says
More than 1,300 schools have been totally destroyed in government-held areas of Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Unicef has said.
Reuters reports:
Persistent attacks mean that only about a third of school-age children there are attending classes fully in person and many are forgetting what they have already learned, it said.
Beyond Ukraine, more than half of the children whose families have fled the conflict to seven countries are not enrolled in national education, Unicef said, citing language barriers and overstretched education systems.
Some schools have suffered direct hits and others have closed down as a precaution in 18 months of missile and artillery attacks on residential areas across the country.
“Inside Ukraine, attacks on schools have continued unabated, leaving children deeply distressed and without safe spaces to learn,” it said.
The war followed Covid disruptions, meaning some Ukrainian children were facing a fourth consecutive school year of disruptions as they return to classes this week after the summer break, Unicef said.
“Not only has this left Ukraine’s children struggling to progress in their education, but they are also struggling to retain what they learned when their schools were fully functioning,” said Regina De Dominicis, Unicef regional director for Europe and Central Asia.
Around half of Ukraine’s teachers have reported a deterioration in students’ abilities in language, reading and mathematics, it said.
Ukraine’s combined grain and oilseed exportable surplus could total 50m metric tons, Denys Marchuk, the deputy head of the Agrarian Council, Ukraine’s largest agribusiness group, said on Tuesday.
He said Ukraine can harvest 76m metric tons of grain and oilseeds in 2023, Reuters reports.
Russia has blockaded Ukrainian ports since it invaded its neighbour in February 2022, and threatened to treat all vessels as potential military targets after pulling out of a UN backed safe-passage deal for Black Sea grain exports last month.
Vladimir Putin won’t attend Yevgeny Prigozhin’s funeral, Kremlin says
Vladimir Putin has no plans to attend the funeral of Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.
He told reporters the Kremlin did not know about the planned funeral arrangements, saying this was a matter for the family, according to Reuters.
Russia’s investigative committee on Sunday confirmed Prigozhin was among the people killed in a plane crash last Wednesday. The committee said in a statement that after forensic testing, all 10 bodies recovered at the site had been identified, and their identities “conform to the manifest”.
The Kremlin has denied it killed the Wagner chief, calling western intelligence assessments of Putin’s potential involvement “an absolute lie”.
Prigozhin had refused to submit his mercenaries to direct state control, despite a direct request from Putin during a meeting at the Kremlin in June. His armed uprising that month came days before a deadline that would have forced the group to sign military contracts.
Between 24 February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and 27 August 2023, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) estimates, 9,511 people have been killed and 17,206 injured in Ukraine.
The UN’s Ukraine civilian casualty update explains:
OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.
This concerns, for example, Mariupol (Donetsk region), Lysychansk, Popasna, and Sievierodonetsk (Luhansk region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties.
Ukraine says its forces are pushing deeper into Russian defensive lines near Robotyne
Ukraine said on Tuesday that its forces had pushed deeper into Russian defensive lines near the village of Robotyne, a day after claiming control over the village on the southern front.
The military spokesperson Andriy Kovalyov said Ukrainian forces were edging further in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Moscow claims is part of Russia, Agence France-Presse reports.
“Ukrainian forces had successes in the direction of Novodanylivka to Verbove,” he told state media on Tuesday, naming two hamlets in the region.
He added that the troops were holding captured territory and attacking Russian artillery. These claims are yet to be independently verified.
Ukrainian troops have also been trying to surround the eastern town of Bakhmut, which was captured by Russian forces in May.
The head of the Donetsk region, where Bakhmut is located, on Tuesday played down the Ukrainian push, after Kyiv claimed successes.
“The flanks are being held. The situation there is already stabilising,” Denis Pushilin reportedly told Russian state media.
EU funding to shore up Ukraine is being held up by disagreements among some member states, the Financial Times reports.
The FT writes:
Brussels’ requests for a total of €86bn in additional funding, aimed at easing strains on the EU budget while locking in four years of support to Ukraine, have divided member states and led to calls for reductions and a longer approval timetable, according to people involved in talks…
So far, funding negotiations have been complicated by the European Commission bundling together financial support for Ukraine with top-up requirements for the EU budget, including provisions to cover debt interest costs and a salary increase for EU officials.
Many member states have said that while the extra financial support for Ukraine is reasonable, the other elements of the package are the result of an internal EU budget management issue that does not merit additional funds.
Countries such as Germany and the Netherlands have led the resistance, arguing that national budgetary belt-tightening owing to rising interest rates and wage demands should also be reflected in Brussels.