Russia-Ukraine war: Kyiv rocked by missile strikes during UN chief’s visit, Ukraine responds to ‘heinous act of barbarism’ – live

The US House has given final passage to legislation that would streamline a World War II-era military lend-lease program to more quickly provide Ukraine with military aid.

The measure, which passed on Thursday evening by an overwhelming 417-10 vote, now goes to the White House for President Joe Biden to sign into law.

House foreign affairs committee Gregory Meeks of New York said with unified support from the US Congress, “Ukraine will win.”

The Biden administration announced earlier it will seek another $30 billion from Congress in military and humanitarian aid, on top of the nearly $14 billion Congress approved last month to help Ukraine fight the war.

The measure would update the 1941 legislation Franklin Roosevelt signed into law to help allies fight Nazi Germany. At the time, the then-US president ushered the Lend-Lease Act through Congress, responding to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s appeal for aid, even as America initially remained neutral in the war, according to the US National Archives, the Associated Press reports.

Biden is expected to sign the bill into law, giving the administration greater leeway to send military equipment to Ukraine and neighbouring allies in Eastern Europe.

“It is a real moment in history that we are back on this House floor supporting lend-lease,” said Rep. French Hill, R-Ark.

The congressman said he hoped the “Churchillian idea” would end delays in shipping aid to Ukraine, much the way the original law sped help to Britain fighting Adolf Hitler’s Germany in World War II.

Today we find ourselves in a very similar situation with Putin systematically bombing and shelling the peaceful villages and cities of Ukraine,” he said.

Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Finland and Sweden would be “warmly welcomed” should they decide to join the 30-nation military organisation and any membership process could “go quickly”.

“It’s their decision,” Stoltenberg said. “But if they decide to apply, Finland and Sweden will be warmly welcomed, and I expect that process to go quickly.”

He gave no precise time frame, but did say that the two could expect some protection should Russia try to intimidate them from the time their membership applications are made until they formally join.

Stoltenberg said he’s “confident that there are ways to bridge that interim period in a way which is good enough and works for both Finland and Sweden.”

Nato’s collective security guarantee ensures that all member countries must come to the aid of any ally under attack. Stoltenberg added that many Nato allies have now pledged and provided a total of at least $8 billion in military support to Ukraine.

A 22-year-old former US marine and American citizen, Willy Joseph Cancel, was reportedly killed while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces in Ukraine, members of his family have told CNN.

Cancel was working with a private military contracting company when he was killed on Monday, his mother, Rebecca Cabrera, said.

Cancel signed up to work for the company on top of his full-time job as a corrections officer in Tennessee shortly before the war in Ukraine broke out at the end of February, she added.

Cancel flew to Poland on March 12 and crossed into Ukraine sometime over March 12 and 13, Cabrera said.

He wanted to go over because he believed in what Ukraine was fighting for, and he wanted to be a part of it to contain it there so it didn’t come here, and that maybe our American soldiers wouldn’t have to be involved in it.”

Cabrera said she was told by those who notified her of her son’s death that his body had not been found.

They haven’t found his body. They are trying, the men that were with him, but it was either grab his body or get killed, but we would love for him to come back to us.”

A State Department official told CNN they are “aware of these reports and are closely monitoring the situation.”

Ukraine’s president Zelenskiy has spoken of how Russian troops came within minutes of finding him and his family in the first hours of the war in an interview with Time magazine.

Reporter Simon Shuster interviewed the Ukrainian leader while spending two weeks in the presidential compound in Kyiv earlier this month.

On the first day of war, Shuster writes that officials attempted to seal the compound “with whatever they could find” as Ukrainian troops fought the Russians in the streets.

“Russian troops came within minutes of finding him and his family in the first hours of the war, their gunfire once audible inside his office walls,” he added.

The military reportedly informed Zelenskiy that Russian strike teams had parachuted into Kyiv to kill or capture him and his family.

As night fell that first evening, gunfights broke out around the government quarter. Guards inside the compound shut the lights and brought bulletproof vests and assault rifles for Zelenskiy and about a dozen of his aides. Only a few of them knew how to handle the weapons,” Shuster said.

Russian troops made two attempts to storm the compound, Oleksiy Arestovych, a veteran of Ukraine’s military intelligence service and a senior presidential advisor, told the reporter. Zelenskiy later added that his wife and children were still there at the time.

The US offered to evacuate the President and his team and help them set up a government in exile, most likely in eastern Poland. Speaking on a secure landline with the Americans, Zelenskiy responded: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

As the war rages on two months later and casualties rise, the president said he has aged in the face of such brutality.

I’ve gotten older. I’ve aged from all this wisdom that I never wanted. It’s the wisdom tied to the number of people who have died, and the torture the Russian soldiers perpetrated...To be honest, I never had the goal of attaining knowledge like that...

People see this war on Instagram, on social media. When they get sick of it, they will scroll away.”

Rescuers have found two more bodies after a fire at a Russian aerospace defence research institute broke out last week, bringing the total number of deaths to 22, Tass news agency cited local emergency services as saying on Thursday.

One person is still believed to be missing, the Russian state outlet said. The institute is in the city of Tver, about 160km (100 miles) northwest of Moscow.

Authorities have opened a criminal investigation after media reports that an electrical fault caused the blaze.

The fire erupted in an administrative building of the aerospace defence forces’ central research institute, which operates under the Russian defence ministry. It quickly engulfed the building’s upper three floors, forcing those inside to jump from windows and causing the roof to cave in.

If you have just joined our live coverage of the war in Ukraine, here is a quick re-cap of where things currently stand.

• Russia attacked western Kyiv with two cruise missiles during a visit by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to the Ukrainian capital. Two loud explosions rocked Kyiv on Thursday evening after Guterres visited the site of massacres and mass graves on the city’s outskirts. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the strikes happened “immediately after” his talks with the UN chief.
• Ten were injured in the blast, which hit the central Shevchenkivskyi district, and three people were hospitalised, according to Ukraine’s state emergency service. A 25-storey residential building was partially destroyed.
• In his latest address, Zelenskiy addressed the strike on Kyiv, saying that Ukraine could not let its guard down. “Moscow claimed they had allegedly ceased fire in Mariupol. But the bombing of the defenders of the city continues,” he said. “This is a war crime committed by the Russian military literally in front of the whole world.”
• The UK will send 8,000 soldiers to eastern Europe on expanded exercises to combat Russian aggression in one of the largest deployments since the cold war. Dozens of tanks will be deployed to countries ranging from Finland to North Macedonia between April and June.
• Joe Biden has called for a giant $33bn package of military and economic aid to Ukraine, more than doubling the level of US assistance to date. The package would include over $20bn in military aid, including heavy artillery and armoured vehicles, greater intelligence sharing, cyberwarfare tools and many more anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. “We’re not attacking Russia. We’re helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression,” Biden said.
• A British citizen has been killed in Ukraine and a second is missing, the Foreign Office has confirmed, amid reports that both were volunteers who had gone to fight in the country. The Briton who died was understood to be Scott Sibley, a former British soldier who had served in Iraq.
• Russian forces have been hitting the Azovstal steelworks in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol with the heaviest strikes yet, a local official said.
  Meanwhile, a senior US defence official said the US had seen indications that some Russian forces were leaving Mariupol and moving towards the north-west, even as fighting for the Ukrainian port city continued.
• The UN secretary general, Guterres, said the UN was “doing everything possible” to evacuate people from the Azovstal steelworks in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. “They need an escape route out of the apocalypse,” Guterres said. Zelenskiy added that he believed that a “successful result” was still possible “in terms of deblocking” the Mariupol plant.
• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was probing a report that a missile had flown directly over a nuclear power station, adding it would be “extremely serious” if true. The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said Kyiv had formally told the agency the missile flew over the plant in southern Ukraine on 16 April. The facility is near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk, 350km (220 miles) south of Kyiv.
• The UN general assembly will vote on 11 May on a country to replace Russia on the world organisation’s leading human rights body after its suspension over allegations of rights violations by Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Assembly spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said the Czech Republic was the only candidate for the seat on the 47-member human rights council.
• Ukraine’s prosecutor general has named 10 Russian soldiers allegedly involved in human rights abuses during the month-long occupation of Bucha. There were 8,653 alleged war crimes under investigation, according to the prosecutor’s office.
• Guterres described the war as “an absurdity” in the 21st century on a visit to the scene of civilian killings outside Kyiv. Guterres was touring Borodianka, where Russian forces are accused of massacring civilians before their withdrawal, on his first visit to Ukraine since the start of the invasion.
• Moldova’s deputy prime minister, Nicu Popescu, said the country was facing “a very dangerous new moment” as unnamed forces were seeking to stoke tensions after a series of explosions in the breakaway region of Transnistria this week. Popescu said his government had seen “a dangerous deterioration of the situation” in recent days amid attacks in the region.
• The European Union will consider it as a violation of sanctions if European energy companies comply with Moscow’s requirement to open a payment account in roubles with Gazprombank, EU officials warned. The EU “cannot accept” that payments in euros for Russian gas are considered completed by Moscow only after they are converted into roubles, an official said.
• Nato said it was ready to maintain its support for Ukraine in the war against Russia for years, including help for Kyiv to shift from Soviet-era weapons to modern western arms and systems. “We need to be prepared for the long term,” Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, told a summit in Brussels. “There is absolutely the possibility that this war will drag on and last for months and years.”

The world’s largest security body has said it is officially winding up its observer mission in Ukraine after eight years, after Russia vetoed its extension.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in a statement it would “take immediate steps” to close the mission after members failed to find a way around Russia’s objections during a meeting last month, AFP reports.

Poland’s foreign minister Zbigniew Rau, whose country holds the rotating OSCE chairmanship, said the organisation had tried all options but “the position of the Russian Federation left us with no choice”.

The Vienna-based OSCE’s mission to Ukraine began in 2014 after Russia-backed separatists launched an insurgency in the east. The organisation was the only international body monitoring the conflict on the ground.

OSCE monitors were largely withdrawn from the country following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February.

But administrative staff were left behind, and four of them have since been detained.

OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid said the organisation would continue to push for an “end to the detentions, intimidation, and disinformation that are so dangerous for our national mission members”.

The OSCE has 57 members on three continents - including Russia, Ukraine and the United States.

Earlier today, US president Joe Biden said he was sending Congress a supplemental budget request to “keep weapons and ammunition flowing” to Ukraine.

Biden added a “comprehensive legislative package” would also be included to “hold accountable the Russian oligarchs who enable Putin’s war.”

“We need to seize the yachts, luxury homes, and other ill-begotten gains of Putin’s kleptocrats,” he said.

The United States is analysing strikes on Kyiv that the Ukrainian authorities blamed on Russian missiles, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said on Thursday.

“We’re still trying to analyse this and figure out what happened here, what was struck and with what kind of munition,” he told CNN.

More images of the aftermath of the missile strike on Kyiv have emerged.

Possible pseudo-referendums in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine will complicate negotiations between the countries, President Volodymyr Zelenskyiy has said.

In the event of any pseudo-referendums in the occupied territories they will not be recognised by Ukraine and the world and will complicate possible negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, Zelenskyiy said during a press briefing following talks with UN Secretary-General António Guterres in Kyiv.

I believe that it is impossible and will not be possible to annex one or another part of our territories by force.

This (pseudo-referendum - ed.) will not bring anything, except that this is another complication of probable, at least some kind of probable negotiations between Ukraine and Russia... It seems to me that this is a complication of any negotiations ...

If they want to complicate all this for the whole of Europe and the world, they can continue to play with these referendums, which will not yield any results - either current or historical.”

About 8,000 British army troops will take part in exercises across eastern Europe to combat Russian aggression in one of the largest deployments since the cold war.

Dozens of tanks will be deployed to countries ranging from Finland to North Macedonia this summer under plans that have been enhanced since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Joining them will be tens of thousands of troops from Nato and the Joint Expeditionary Force alliance, which includes Finland and Sweden.

The Ministry of Defence said the action had been long planned and had been enhanced in response to Russia’s invasion of its neighbour in late February.

The UK deployment is expected to build to a peak of about 8,000 personnel operating in mainland Europe between April and June.