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    ‘How many Britons died?’ Former Ukraine president Poroshenko asks Boris Johnson not to compare war to Brexit

    Former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has suggested Boris Johnson was insensitive to compare Ukraine’s fight against Russia to Brexit.The former leader asked the prime minister to “please” not suggest similarities between the war and the vote.Mr Poroshenko asked: “How many Britons died because of Brexit? Zero.”Speaking to ITV News, he said: “Only today we have 150 Ukrainian children who were killed by Russian soldiers and Russian artillery.“Can I ask you how many houses were destroyed because of Brexit? We have whole cities that have been completely destroyed,” he said, adding: “With this situation, please, no comparison.”Mr Johnson sparked controversy on Saturday when he drew a direct comparison between the war in Ukraine and Brexit in a speech to the Conservative Spring conference.He told Tory party members in Blackpool: “It’s the instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom, every time.“When the British people voted for Brexit in such large, large numbers, I don’t believe it was because they were remotely hostile to foreigners – it’s because they wanted to be free to do things differently and for this country to be able to run itself.”The Ukrainian ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko appeared to defend Mr Johnson over the remarks made at the Tory spring conference.“What we heard in the room, what I heard myself, is that actually we are fighting for freedom – the freedom to do what the nation wants to do,” he told Sky News on Wednesday.However, the ambassador that the UK’s problems with the EU were incomparable to the Russian-Ukrainian war. “You believe you have problems with the European Union when you left? It’s not a problem.”Mr Prystaiko said: “If you compare it to what we have with Russians when we left the Soviet Union, they came to kill us for this decision.”The prime minister has refused to withdraw the incendiary claim despite criticism and insisted Ukraine was not offended.Mr Johnson was reported to be regretting making the comparison after it was branded “insulting” to the Ukrainian people and “insane”.But his spokesman made clear he was not having “second thoughts”, arguing it is legitimate to categorise both struggles as a “desire for freedom”. More

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    New Zealand halves public transport fares in response to fuel price surge

    New Zealand has temporarily halved fares on public transport as part of a package of measures to reduce the cost of living.The move comes in response to soaring fuel costs sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has seen a global surge in prices.Announcing the measure, Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern described the situation as “a wicked perfect storm”.“We cannot control the war in Ukraine nor the continued volatility of fuel prices but we can take steps to reduce the impact on New Zealand families,” she said.”We hope this ensures that where the option of shifting how we travel is available, this makes it more affordable to take that public transport option up.”The three-month subsidy needed to cut fares will cost between $25m and $40m NZ (£12.9 to £20.7m), according to local media.The country’s government is also set to cut fuel excise duty by 25 cents (13p) a litre for three months to ease pressure on people who cannot switch to public transport.The change to transport fares means a one-zone rail fare with a smartcard in Aukland will be cut from £1.14 ($2.20 NZ) to 57p. ($1.10 NZ).New Zealand’s approach differs from that of the UK, where rail fares were this month hiked by the fastest rate in nine years, 3.8 per cent.Instead of reducing fares because of rising inflation, the UK government increases fares in line with inflation every year, meaning a rising cost of living leads to steeper fare rises.Experts have told MPs in the UK that the cost of a litre of petrol could hit £2.50, with diesel topping out at £3.00. More

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    ‘Worst is yet to come’ as Putin vows to bomb Ukraine ‘until the end’

    Vladimir Putin is determined to continue bombing Ukraine “until the end” despite a plea last night from Volodymyr Zelensky for face to face talks to halt the military assault.In a series of phone and video calls on Thursday, the Russian president accused Kyiv of using human shields and behaving “like Nazis”, hailed his fallen soldiers as heroes and claimed the invasion was going “according to plan”. He told members of his Kremlin security council that Russia has only bombed military facilities and his troops haven’t targeted residential areas – despite another day of carnage in which the bodies of Ukrainian civilians were recovered from destroyed homes.Putin reaffirmed his claim that the Russian military was fighting “neo-Nazis”, adding that some Ukrainians were also “fooled by nationalist propaganda”. In a call with French president Emmanuel Macron, Putin was so undaunted by international condemnation that an Elysee official bleakly concluded: “We expect that the worst is yet to come.”The official said Putin initiated the one and half hour call but insisted there would be no let-up in the invasion, blamed the West for the conflict and also “denied having bombarded Kyiv”. More

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    Eurostar to let Ukrainian refugees travel to Britain for free on its trains

    Eurostar is to let Ukrainian refugees fleeing to the UK travel on its trains for free, the company has announced.The cross-channel high-speed rail operator joins other carriers around Europe in extending free travel to Ukraine nationals following the invasion of their country.The company said people with a valid visa to enter the UK and a Ukrainian passport should speak to Eurostar staff in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam or Lille to be issued with a free ticket.”To help Ukrainian nationals travelling to the UK, we can offer a free Eurostar ticket from any Eurostar station to London St. Pancras International,” the company said in a statement issued on Wednesday.The German, French, Dutch, Polish, and Czech state rail operators, as well as high-speed service Thalys, are among national railways to have already announced free travel for Ukrainian nationals.Eurostar’s announcement means people with no resources will now also be able to reach the UK by train if they can secure a visa.Most European Union member states are operating an open door policy and have said they will give Ukrainians refuge without the need to apply for asylum.The Russian invasion is expected to displace millions of people, with hundreds of thousands of people already making their way to join family or seek safety in other countries.But the UK government has not followed suit and is operating a much harsher policy, with only a limited relaxation of visa conditions for those with family member in already in Britain. The new conditions are so limited do not even cover adult children, their parents, brothers or sisters.Opposition party Labour says the UK’s visa system should be simplified and has suggested the exemption should cover more relatives, though they have stopped short of calling for an open door along the lines of the EU.But Ukrainians who can obtain a visa will now be able to travel across the English Channel for free. In its statement, Eurostar said: “It is important to arrive with the necessary visa documents, as these will be checked by the UK Border Force during the check-in process. “The UK government is regularly reviewing the criteria for Ukrainian refugees to enter the UK, so we would strongly recommend contacting the British Embassy or checking the UK government website for the latest information.” The company also clarified that it could not accept pets on trains at this time.Eurostar operates high-speed rail services between London and the continent through the Channel Tunnel.The Independent last week launched its Refugees Welcome campaign, calling on the government to set up a resettlement scheme to grant sanctuary in the UK to Ukrainians fleeing the bloody conflict. Polls suggest a strong backing for the move. More

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    Fears Putin is turning to ‘indiscriminate’ attacks as missiles bombard Kharkiv and Kyiv

    Ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine took place on the worst day of bloodshed so far since the invasion began, with dozens killed in attacks on the city of Kharkiv, and more heavy missile attacks on Kyiv, in which a major military radar complex was destroyed.The bombardment of the capital came after warnings of intense rocket and artillery barrages led to another exodus of residents. Ukrainian commanders said they expected Russian troops to once again try to push through towards the city centre, after previous attempts were repulsed.Western allies fear that the increasing use of rockets and tube artillery marks a shift in tactics, and will be stepped up in the coming days.“I fear that the way in which Russia has been frustrated in achieving its aims on the ground is leading to more indiscriminate fire, and as a consequence we are going to see more civilian casualties,” said one official.The violence, and the negotiations, took place on a day that saw increased sanctions by the international community further hammering the Russian economy, leading to interest rates being doubled to 20 per cent, while at one point the rouble sank by 30 per cent. Moscow’s stock exchange was shut down and will remain closed on Tuesday.Talks between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations at the Belarusian border ended in the early evening, with both sides returning to report to their respective governments. A second round is due to take place in the coming days, but expectations of a resolution of the conflict remain low. Kyiv has asked for a ceasefire along with the withdrawal of Russian troops. The Kremlin has not announced its position, but Vladimir Putin had previously demanded the full “demilitarisation” of Ukraine.As the talks were taking place, the French government said Mr Putin had told Emmanuel Macron he was prepared to suspend operations that targeted infrastructure and could lead to civilian casualties.But the assault on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, was said to have included the use of a BM-21 122mm Grad rocket launcher, which The Independent reported at the weekend was among weapons being moved towards Ukrainian cities by Russian forces. The arsenal also included TOS-1A thermobaric launchers along with BM-21 220mm Uragan and 300mm Smerch systems. All are area-denial systems, which are used not for precision strikes but for clearing stretches of ground.Senior western officials confirmed on Monday that the thermobaric rocket launchers had been seen near major cities, and warned that the Kremlin may want to revert to the Soviet doctrine of overwhelming force, with the probability of massive civilian casualties, if the lack of success they have so far experienced continues.Oksana Markarova – the Ukrainian ambassador to the US – claimed on Monday that Russia had used a thermobaric weapon as part of its assault on the country.The officials said that western states were keeping a close watch on the actions of the Russian military for any human rights abuses, and that those responsible, including individual commanders on the ground, would be held to account before international courts of law in the future.The Russian military went into Kharkiv on Sunday, mainly using armoured personnel carriers rather than tanks, along with comparatively light weaponry, and were driven out by Ukrainian forces after intense firefights. On Monday they resumed the assault with heavier weapons, using, it has been claimed, cluster ammunition.A school was destroyed in Okhtyrka, killing three people including a child. Amnesty International said the attack “appears to have been carried out by Russian forces, which were operating nearby, and which have a record of using cluster munitions in populated areas”.The organisation’s secretary general, Agnes Callamard, stated that “there is no possible justification for dropping cluster munitions in populated areas, let alone near a school”.American and British officials said there was further evidence of Russian armour advancing to surround Kyiv. One set of satellite images showed armour formations at Antonov airport on the outskirts of the city.Western intelligence sources have told The Independent that two Russian armies – the 41st Combined Arms Army (CAA) and the 1st Guards Tank Army – are heading towards Kyiv as part of an encirclement operation from three sides, with a fourth being considered.The threats of further attacks have led to more people leaving the capital. In Yaroslaviv Val Street in the city centre, the Bondarenko family were saying goodbye to each other. Two sons, Nicolai and Valentin, were staying behind to fight with the newly mobilised volunteer force, while their mother and three siblings were leaving for Lviv in the west of the country.Their mother, Ludmilla Bondarenko, said: “My heart breaks to leave my sons, but they want to stay and defend our city. I hope God will keep them safe and we can return here again soon. I also hope God punishes Putin for the terrible things he is doing, and that those Russians who support him are also punished.”Washington imposed severe new sanctions on Monday, blocking American institutions from transactions involving Russia’s central bank, finance ministry and national wealth fund.Switzerland has set aside its historic neutrality and announced that it would adopt all sanctions already imposed on Russia by the European Union.The EU has also barred all Russian planes from using its airspace, forcing Aeroflot to cancel its flights to Europe until further notice.“The economic reality has considerably changed,” acknowledged Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. “These are heavy sanctions, they are problematic, but Russia has the potential to offset the harm. Russia has been making plans for quite a long time.” More

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    Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threat a distraction, says Boris Johnson

    Boris Johnson has said Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he is putting Russia’s nuclear deterrent on high alert are a “distraction” from the “difficulties that the Russian forces are experiencing” in Ukraine.Mr Putin said that Moscow’s nuclear forces are now on a “special regime of combat duty” in response to “aggressive statements” coming from Western powers and economic sanctions – an escalation branded “completely unacceptable” by the US.However Mr Putin’s brinkmanship on Sunday was dismissed by Mr Johnson, who said his actions were more to do with the fact that Russian military forces were meeting with “more resistance than the Kremlin had bargained for”.Mr Johnson also cast doubt on possible negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian delegations to try to resolve the crisis.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed the two sides could meet on the Ukraine-Belarus border having initially rejected an offer of talks in Belarus.However Mr Johnson said he had seen nothing to suggest that Mr Putin was genuine in his offer.Follow our Ukraine war live blog hereFormer national security adviser McMaster says Putin is no longer ‘a rational actor’ More

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    Ukraine crisis: World faces ‘moment of peril’ says UN as Russian troops ‘ready to go’ for full invasion

    The world is facing “a moment of peril” over the Ukraine crisis, the UN has warned, as the White House said Russian troops massed at the border were “ready to go” for a full invasion.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, told the UN general assembly in New York that it is time for “restraint, reason and de-escalation” to avoid “a scale and severity of need unseen for many years”.“It is time to establish a ceasefire and return to the path of dialogue and negotiation,” he said.But there were increasing signs that diplomatic efforts to avoid a war in Europe may be too late.A senior US defence official in Washington said the Russian forces arrayed along Ukraine’s border are “as ready as they can be” for an invasion, with about 80% in “forward positions, ready to go” within three to 30 miles of the border.In Kiev, Russia began evacuating its embassy and by Wednesday afternoon the Russian flag no longer flew over the building.Ukraine’s national security and defence council chief, Oleksiy Danilov, declared a national state of emergency, which was approved by parliament along with a law allowing citizens to carry firearms.Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has also called up reservists to the country’s army.In Britain, the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, wrote to the regulator Ofcom about the Russian state-backed RT news channel, warning it could “look to spread harmful disinformation about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine”.In a response, Ofcom’s chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, said it had “already stepped up our oversight of coverage of these events by broadcasters in the UK”.The British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said Vladimir Putin had gone “full tonto”, comparing him to Tsar Nicholas I during the Crimean War.Mr Wallace, a former Scots Guards officer, said his regiment had “kicked the backside” of the tsar in the Crimea and “we can always do it again”.The unguarded comments came as the cabinet minister spoke with serving military personnel at the Horse Guards building in Westminster.The crisis took a turn for the worse on Monday when the Russian president recognised two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and the neighbouring self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic. The move prompted a backlash and seemed to undermine diplomatic attempts to resolve the crisis.With a growing prognosis that the situation could end in war, the European Union was set to announce a stringent set of sanctions targeting Russian MPs and Moscow’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu. Also expected to be on the list was a St Petersburg troll factory. An announcement was expected later on Wednesday.The sanctions are expected to target several members of President Putin’s inner circle.The EU has been joined by Japan, the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada in announcing plans to target Russian banks and elites, while Germany has halted a major gas pipeline project from Russia.Pope Francis on Wednesday said the threat of war in Ukraine had caused “great pain in my heart”, and urged politicians to make a serious examination of conscience before God about their actions.On the ground in Ukraine, the Russian-backed leader of the breakaway Donetsk region said he wanted to peacefully settle its borders with Ukraine but reserved the right to ask “big Russia” for help.Denis Pushilin, who heads the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said he favoured dialogue with Ukraine. But he told a news conference the situation in their long-running conflict had become critical and that the separatists had accelerated a mobilisation of forces, in which healthy men between 18 and 55 have been called up to fight.“We will win. With people like this, we will win. With such a country, with big Russia, which we respect and value,” he said. “We have no right to lose, or even to doubt in our victory.” More

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    Experts warn of potential surge in Russian cyber attacks on UK organisations

    Warnings have been raised over a potential surge in Russian cyber attacks against British organisations as the crisis in Ukraine escalates.Analysts and officials are expecting retaliation from Kremlin-linked cyber groups after sanctions were imposed by Boris Johnson and the government announced plans to send extra military support to Ukraine.The National Cyber Security Centre has already urged British organisations to “bolster their online defences” amid a deterioration in relations between Russia and the West.This follows several high-profile cyber operations that have been launched against Ukraine by suspected Russian forces since the beginning of 2022. On Wednesday, multiple Ukrainian government and banking websites were knocked offline in the latest wave of attacks linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency.It’s now feared the same tactics, in which Ukrainian websites have been defaced or breached by destructive malware, could also be deployed against UK servers if the current crisis further deepens in the weeks to come.Stefano De Blasi, an analyst at Digital Shadows, which specialises in digital risk protection, said it was “realistically possible that Russia will eventually retaliate against the sanctions recently imposed on them with targeted cyber operations”.He said distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – an attempt to hinder the running of a server or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic – could be launched against Western organisations, alongside the dissemination of destructive malware.Digital Shadows, along with other cyber surveillance and protection companies, have detected a rise in attacks against Ukrainian targets in recent weeks.This include defacement attacks, espionage campaigns, wiper malware deployments, disinformation campaigns, and DDoS operations, Mr De Blasi said.“Although some of these attacks haven’t been attributed to the Russian Federation, overlapping motivations and goals likely indicate a common origin,” he said.“These attacks showcase the breadth of offensive operations that the Russian Federation maintains in its toolkit, and it suggests the potential for future attacks targeting Ukraine and its allies if the situation was to escalate.”On Tuesday, first minister Nicola Sturgeon also warned that the international community must be “vigilant” to retaliatory cyber attacks engineered by the Kremlin and its allies.“I think that is something that we have to be very vigilant about,” she said. “The discussions I’ve mentioned already about domestic impacts, cyber security is one of those.“We know, even before the current situation in Ukraine, that Russia was very active around cyber activity.”Russian state-associated threat groups have consistently used destructive cyber-attacks during military conflicts in the past, Digital Shadows said.This hybrid warfare approach has become a staple of Russian military doctrine and has been observed during its 2008 conflict with Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and against Ukraine since 2014.In an attempt to combat the spread of Russian disinformation and propaganda, the culture secretary has told Ofcom to review the operation of the Kremlin-backed Russia Today (RT) news channel in the UK.Writing to the regulator, Nadine Dorries said RT was “demonstrably part of Russia’s global disinformation campaign”.Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said RT was president Vladimir Putin’s “personal propaganda tool” and argued there is “no reason why it should be allowed to continue to broadcast in this country.”Currently, the NCSC said it was not aware of any specific cyber threats to UK organisations in relation to events in and around Ukraine, while Digital Shadows said “given the tense situation in Ukraine, Moscow is likely to focus on the conflict and on establishing financial and political frameworks to lessen the impact of Western sanctions,” rather than pursuing cyber operations.However, John Hultquist, a vice-president of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, a cyber security consultancy, said there was likely to be an increase in “more aggressive information operations and disruptive cyber attacks within and outside of Ukraine” as the crisis continues.“Russia’s military intelligence service is the most aggressive of its peers when it comes to cyberattacks and other activity in the sphere,” he added. “We have seen them carry out DDoS attacks on several occasions which they use to harass and undermine institutions.“It’s also important not to misjudge the purpose of these attacks – the disruption they cause is designed to intimidate and undermine and is not an end in itself. Furthermore, they may be timed or accompanied by other elements to magnify their psychological impact.” More