Ukraine-Russia war – live: Putin told to end war by own Wagner mercenary chief

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been urged to end the war in Ukraine by the head of the Wagner mercenary army deployed by the Kremlin.

Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed Russia had taken a “fat chunk” of Ukrainian territory and said president Putin should tell the world Russia has achieved the aims of its “special military operation,” in a video posted online on Friday night.

Mr Prigozhin also said Russian armed forces – who have suffered severe losses – should defend existing gains.

The Wagner mercenary chief also warned that the Russian people may seek a “scapegoat” for military failures as the war drags on, which could lead to revolutionary fervour.

Mr Prigozhin claimed Russia has destroyed “a large part of the active male population of Ukraine” and caused others to flee the country.

“For the authorities and society as a whole, it is today necessary to put a solid full stop on the special military operation,” said Mr Prigozhin.

“The ideal option is to announce the end of the special military operation, to inform everyone that Russia has achieved the results that it planned, and in a sense we have actually achieved them.

“We have ground down a huge number of fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and we can report to ourselves that the tasks of the special military operation have been completed.”

He continued: “Theoretically, Russia has already [made a point] by destroying a large part of the active male population of Ukraine, and by intimidating another part of it, which fled to Europe.

“Russia cut off the Sea of Azov and a large piece of the Black Sea, seized a fat piece of Ukrainian territory and created a land corridor to the Crimea.

“Now there is only one thing left: to firmly gain a foothold, to claw in those territories that already exist.”

The comments mark the first time a senior Putin henchman directly involved in fighting on the ground has publicly called for the Kremlin to halt the war.

Two women were killed in Russian shelling in Kherson on Saturday, the head of the Office of the Ukrainian Presidency has said.

“They received mine-explosive injuries incompatible with life,” Andriy Yermak wrote on Twitter.

Eleven people were killed and 21 wounded, Ukrainian public braodcaster Suspilne reported on Saturday, citing regional emergency services.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of Donetsk Region, told national television earlier that seven Russian S-300 missiles had been fired.

He said there were “no fewer than seven spots hit” in Sloviansk, west of the city Bakhmut, site of the heaviest fighting on the Ukrainian frontline.

Rescue teams searching for victims sifted through rubble through the night, using cranes, ladders and other heavy equipment in the shells of apartments and stairwells. Workers perched precariously on slabs of concrete and moved gingerly up and down ladders.

For some of the shattered apartments, little more than window frames and dangling scraps of plaster remained.

One section of apartments was all but obliterated. A set of crimson curtains remained in place on one balcony.

Much of the work, carried out under night illumination, involved reaching the top of sprawling apartment buildings — the top two floors of one five-storey building collapsed.

Emergency services said more than 50 rescue workers remained at the site.

Kyrylenko said teams had pulled from the rubble one woman born in 1946. A senior official in President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office, Daria Zarivna, had earlier said a child pulled alive from the site of the attack had died on the way to a hospital.

Emergency services said several dozen multi-storey buildings and individual houses were damaged in the assault.

“The evil state once again demonstrates its essence,” Zelenskiy wrote in a separate post accompanied by footage of a damaged building. “Just killing people in broad daylight. Ruining, destroying all life.”

In his nightly video address, issued later, Zelenskiy said not a single hour had passed in the run-up to this weekend’s Orthodox Easter services “without Russian murders and terror. This is the evil state and it will be the loser. Victory is our duty given humanity of this sort.” Sloviansk and the nearby city of Kramatorsk are both coveted by Russian forces, currently bogged down in nearby Bakhmut, as they push ahead with their invasion of Ukraine.

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The far-right Republican lawmaker took to Twitter to show her support for Jack Teixeira who she lauded for being “white, male, christian and antiwar” – although she referred to him as “Jake Teixeira”.

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Graeme Massie reports:

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky held a call with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Saturday in which the leaders discussed Macron’s visit to China, president Zelensky said.

President Macron visited China last week, where he urged Chinese leader Xi Jinping to “reason” with Russia to stop the war in Ukraine.

“I told him about the situation at the front and further intentions to liberate all our territories,” president Zelensky wrote on the Telegram app. “I praised France’s intention to further strengthen important support for Ukraine on the battlefield.”

The Polish government has decided to ban imports of grain and other food from Ukraine to protect the Polish agricultural sector, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), Jaroslaw Kaczyński, said on Saturday.

Large quantities of Ukrainian grains, which are cheaper than those produced in the European Union, have ended up staying in Central European states amid logistical bottlenecks, hitting prices and sales for local farmers.

This has created a political problem for the PiS in an election year.

“Today, the government has decided on a regulation that prohibits the entry, importation of grain into Poland, but also dozens of other types of food (from Ukraine),” Mr Kaczyński said during the PiS party convention.

The list of these goods will be included in the government regulation, and there are goods “from grain to honey products, very, very many things,” he added.

“We are and remain unchanged friends and allies of Ukraine. We will support her and we support her. … But it is the duty of every state, every authority, good authority in any case, to protect the interests of its citizens,” Mr Kaczyński said.

Mr Kaczyński said Poland was ready to start talks with Ukraine to settle the grain issue and the Ukrainian side had already been notified of the decisions of the Polish government.

Ukraine’s air force said the country would soon have weapons with which to try to prevent attacks like the Russian missile strikes in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk which took place on Friday.

The delivery of the Patriot air defence system promised by the U.S. was expected in Ukraine sometime after Easter, Ukrainian air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said.

The primarily Orthodox Christian country is preparing to observe Easter on Sunday. Speaking Saturday on Ukrainian state TV, Ihnat declined to give a precise timeline for the arrival of the defensive missile system but said the public would know “as soon as the first Russian aircraft is shot down.”

A group of 65 Ukrainian soldiers completed their training at Oklahoma’s Fort Still Army Post last month and returned to Europe to learn more about using the defensive missile system to track and shoot down enemy aircraft.

Officials said at the time that the Ukrainians would then go back to their country with a Patriot missile battery, which typically includes six mobile launchers, a mobile radar, a power generator and an engagement control center.

Germany and the Netherlands also have pledged to provide a Patriot system each to Ukraine. In addition, a SAMP/T anti-missile system pledged by France and Italy “should enter Ukraine in the near future,” Ihnat said this week.

The Ukrainian military is looking to beef up its ability to intercept missiles as it prepares for an expected spring counter-offensive to retake Russian-occupied areas of the country. Although more than a year of fighting has depleted weapons supplies on both sides, Russian forces have intensified their eight-and-a-half month campaign to seize the city of Bakhmut, the focus of the war’s longest battle so far.

Bakhmut and Sloviansk both are located about 45 kilometers (28 miles) apart in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province.

The death toll from Russian missile strikes on eastern Ukraine’s city of Sloviansk rose to 11 Saturday as rescue crews tried to reach people trapped in the rubble of an apartment building, Ukrainian authorities said.

A two-year-old boy was among the eleven people killed after Russian forces shelled a block of flats. 21 people were wounded.

Rescue teams in Sloviansk recovered the bodies of two people from under the rubble of a house hit in Friday’s missile strikes, according to the State Emergency Service. They also searched Saturday for five people who remained in the wreckage of the apartment building, as well as the residents of three units who were reported missing, Vadym Liakh, the head of the local government, said.

Kyiv said Sloviansk was hit by seven missiles which hit five buildings, five homes, a school and an administrative building.