Ukraine news – live: Kyiv lost up to 13,000 soldiers in war so far, says Zelensky aide

It added that after Russia’s withdrawal from the west bank of the Dnipro River last month, the Ukrainian Armed Forces gained the opportunities to strike additional Russian logistics nodes and lines of communication.

Joe Biden has said that the “one way” for the war to end in a “rational way” is for Russian President Vladimir Putin to “pull out of Ukraine” but he said he has no plans to engage with the Russian leader in the immediate future.

“He’s paying a very heavy price for failing to do it, but he’s inflicting incredible, incredible carnage on the civilian population of Ukraine. I mean, nurseries, hospitals, children’s homes, it’s sick, what he’s doing, but the fact of the matter is, I have no immediate plans to contact Mr Putin,” he said, adding later that the idea that Russian forces would ever be victorious in Ukraine is “beyond comprehension”.

Volodymyr Zelensky commemorated the anniversary of a referendum held in Ukraine 31 years ago when the country was still part of the Soviet Union - voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence.

“Our desire to live freely ... will not be broken. Ukrainians will never again be a tiny stone in some empire,” Mr Zelensky added.

Hours later in the early hours today, Russian forces shelled a building in the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia, setting it ablaze, city official Anatoly Krutyev said.

Britain has today announced sanctions on Russian officials responsible for the forced mobilisation of citizens to fight in Ukraine.

Also targeted was the head of Russia’s prison system, accused of supporting the recruitment of convicts to fight as mercenaries in return for pardons for crimes including murder and sex attacks.

Ill-equipped and poorly trained conscripts – many of them drawn from Russia’s ethnic minorities – have been sent to the frontline in recent months as “cannon fodder” as Vladimir Putin’s invasion met fierce resistance from Ukraine.

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Mobilised civilians believed to be used as ‘cannon fodder’ in stalled invasion of Ukraine

This comes as Ukraine’s armed forces reported heavy shelling of a number of eastern frontline villages near the city of Bakhmut.

Russian rockets pounded neighbourhoods in Kherson knocking out power in the city where electricity had only begun to be restored nearly three weeks after Russian troops left.

Sergei Lavrov, the Kremlin’s foreign minister who has a reputation for wild statements, used a press conference on Thursday to condemn Washington and Nato, while defending Russia’s bombing of Ukraine’s civil infrastructure.

He said the Kremlin’s assault on the Ukrainian power grid was aimed at cutting off the country’s supply of western arms, countering the view held by Kyiv and allies that knocking out heat and electricity for ordinary citizens was an attempt to break the national spirit.

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Putin’s foreign minister made several anti-Western claims in a rambling press conference

Joe Biden said he would be willing to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin to learn whether he’s willing to end his nearly year-long invasion of Ukraine, but not unilaterally and only after discussions with America’s Nato allies first.

The US president said he’d take a meeting with Mr Putin “if he’s willing to talk to find out what he’s willing to do”, speaking at a news conference alongside French president Emmanuel Macron after a three-hour bilateral meeting between the two leaders and their respective advisers.

“But I’ll only do it in consultation with my Nato allies. I’m not going to do it on my own,” he added.

He also thanked his French counterpart for welcoming over 100,000 Ukrainian refugees to his shores, adding that such actions were “a mark of who you are as a people”.

“Putin thinks that he can crush the will of all those who oppose his imperial ambitions by attacking civilian infrastructures in Ukraine, choking off energy to Europe as a driver of crisis, [and] exacerbating [a] food crisis that’s hurting very vulnerable people not just in Ukraine, but around the world. And he’s not going to succeed,” he said.

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Mr Biden says the United States and France stand ‘as strong as ever against Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine’