Latest Ukraine updates: Moscow seeks UNSC meeting on Nord Stream

The ex-Soviet state of Moldova must boost defences because Russia is not respecting its neutrality, pro-Western President Maia Sandu has told national television.

“Moldova is a neutral country … but now Russia does not respect our neutrality, keeping its military on the territory of Moldova. We therefore need to strengthen our defence capability,” Sandu said.

Russia has stationed peacekeeping troops in Transnistria since the early 1990s when an armed conflict saw pro-Russian separatists wrest most of the region from Moldovan control.

Moldova, which borders Ukraine and Romania, applied for European Union membership this year and strongly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Russian court has remanded three young poets who took part in an event against the mobilisation to fight in Ukraine, with one claiming he was raped by police during his arrest.

OVD-Info, a non-governmental organisation monitoring human rights issues, said Artyom Kamardin, Egor Shtovba and Nikolay Dainenko were remanded in custody for two months.

It said they were suspects in an open case for “inciting hatred with the threat of violence”. If charged, they face six years in prison.

On Sunday, they took part in a reading in front of the statue of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in central Moscow, a place where dissident intellectuals gathered during the Soviet era. At the start of the readings, a speaker stated that it was an “anti-mobilisation” action.

Russia has set up draft offices at border crossings, Russian news agencies said, as long lines of Russians trying to escape being called up to fight in Ukraine continue to clog highways out of the country.

North Ossetia restricted many passenger cars from entering its territory and set up a draft office at the Verkhny Lars border crossing, with some media outlets releasing photos showing a black van with “military enlistment office” written on it.

Another such draft checkpoint was set up in Russia along the Finnish border, according to the independent Russian news outlet Meduza.

The United States has said it will not recognise Russian-annexed areas across Ukraine amid what the White House called “illegal and illegitimate” referendums that were manipulated by Moscow and would be challenged internationally.

“Based on our information, every aspect of this referenda process was pre-staged and orchestrated by the Kremlin,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a briefing, adding that Washington would rally opposition to recognising the annexed territories, “including at the UN”.

“Regardless of Russia’s claims, this remains Ukrainian territory,” she said.

Russia’s FSB security service is investigating the damage sustained by the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea as “international terrorism”, the Interfax news agency has cited the general prosecutor’s office as saying.

Germany, Denmark and Sweden said attacks caused gas from the two Russian-owned pipelines, at the centre of an energy standoff, to pour into the sea. The countries have not said who they suspect of carrying out the attacks.

The United States has announced a new package of arms and supplies for Ukraine worth $1.1bn for reinforcing Kyiv’s forces over the medium and long term.

It includes 18 more high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS), which the Ukrainians have been using effectively since June to hit Russian arms depots and command posts far behind the front lines, according to a US Department of Defense statement.

The package “represents a multi-year investment in critical capabilities to build the enduring strength of Ukraine’s Armed Forces” as they continue to battle the invading Russian army, the Pentagon said.

Denmark has said that more than half of the gas in the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea had leaked into the atmosphere after they were damaged by suspected sabotage.

“A clear majority of the gas has already come out of the pipes,” head of the Danish Energy Agency, Kristoffer Bottzauw, told a press conference.

“We expect the rest to escape by Sunday,” he added.

According to climate groups, Nord Stream 1 and 2 contained some 350,000 tonnes of natural gas.

Russia has questioned whether the US caused undersea gas pipeline leaks in Europe that have been blamed on sabotage, in a turn of the tables that US officials bluntly called “ridiculous”.

President Joe “Biden is obliged to answer the question of whether the US carried out its threat”, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on social media.

Washington dismissed the suggestion, with a spokeswoman for the National Security Council saying: “We all know Russia has a long history of spreading disinformation and is doing it again here.”

The United States is working with allies and partners to quickly impose severe economic costs on Moscow over “sham” referendums held by Russia in occupied regions of Ukraine, according to the US Department of State’s head of sanctions coordination.

“There will be more packages. We are working on more sanctions,” James O’Brien told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Everything is on the table,” he said, adding that Washington would look to the financial sector and high technology, especially for energy exploitation, and to human rights violators.

The United Nations Security Council will meet to discuss the leaks on the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, suspected to be sabotage.

The deputy head of Russia’s UN mission in New York, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said on Telegram that Russia had called for a special session of the UN Security Council that would be held on Friday.

Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde told a press conference that “the current Security Council president France has informed us today that Russia has requested a meeting about the Nord Stream leaks and this meeting is being planned for Friday”.

Finland has shut down a section of one of its main highways for five days for the first time in decades to allow its fighter jets to practice landings and take-offs on a reserve road runway.

The reserve road base, located in Joutsa in central Finland, had not been used for decades due to its importance as the main highway connecting the capital Helsinki to the more northern parts of the country.

The site was used for an exercise involving some 200 staff and Finland’s F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets, older Hawk Mk 51 trainer planes and other military aircraft, the head of Finnish Air Force Academy, Colonel Vesa Mantyla, told Reuters.

The Finnish Air Force can rapidly disperse all its aircraft across the country. “The threat from Russia or the actions from Russia with the cruise missiles and ballistic missiles [in Ukraine] proves that the concept of dispersed operations is right,” Mantyla said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sought to rally international support for his country against Russia in a series of calls with foreign leaders, as Moscow looked poised to annex a swath of Ukrainian territory.

Zelenskyy spoke to the leaders of countries including Canada, Germany, Turkey and the United Kingdom to press demands for more military aid and tougher sanctions on Moscow after what Kyiv and the West denounced as illegal sham referendums in four partially occupied provinces on Ukraine.

“We expect London’s leadership in reaction to Russian sham referenda as well. Defence and financial aid to Ukraine must be enhanced in response,” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter after speaking to UK Prime Minister Liz Truss.

He told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau separately that the world must not bow to Russian “nuclear blackmail”.

“The aggressor must clearly understand all the consequences of his irresponsibility,” Zelenskyy added.

Poland’s Foreign Ministry has condemned referendums in Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.

“We call on members of the international community not to recognise the legitimacy of these pseudo-referendums and their ‘results’, which cannot in any way reflect the will of the people of these regions, who were often forcibly coerced into voting,” the ministry said in a statement.

Moscow’s foreign ministry has said that Russian-occupied regions in Ukraine made a “conscious and free choice” to join Russia.

“The results of the plebiscites speak for themselves: the people of the Donbas, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions do not want to go back to their old lives and have made a conscious and free choice in favour of Russia,” the ministry said in a statement.

The statement said that an “overwhelming majority” had backed joining Russia, and claimed almost one hundred percent backing in the Donetsk region — “99.23 percent”.

British Prime Minister Liz Truss has told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the United Kingdom will never recognise Russian attempts to annex its territory, according to a spokesperson for her office.

“The prime minister made clear that the UK would never recognise Russian attempts to annex sovereign territory. She reiterated that Ukraine could depend on the UK’s support until President Putin was defeated,” the spokesperson said following a call between the pair.

The two leaders also discussed how to work together to secure gas supplies in the long term, the spokesperson added.

Russia’s foreign ministry has said that Moscow will soon take action to meet the aspirations of four occupied regions in Ukraine to become part of Russia, a day after the completion of what Kyiv and the West said were illegal sham referendums.

In a statement, the ministry claimed the votes in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia were held in compliance with international law.

Authorities in North Ossetia, a Russian region that borders Georgia, have imposed restrictions on cars arriving from other parts of the country as an exodus of military-age men led to a queue of over 3,000 vehicles at a crossing point into Georgia.

North Ossetia Governor Sergei Menyailo said the ban was being introduced after 20,000 people crossed the border in two days, with far more remaining in line waiting to leave following Moscow’s partial mobilisation order last week.

“We will not be physically able to ensure order and security if this flow continues to grow,” Menyailo said in a statement posted on Telegram. He added the ban would not apply to residents or tourists.

The move came after North Ossetian authorities on Tuesday announced the creation of a temporary draft office at the region’s Verkhny Lars crossing point into Georgia that would issue draft papers to reservists barred from leaving Russia under the mobilisation order.

Moscow’s traditional allies in Central Asia are quietly making moves that are likely to upset Russia’s leader.

Read more here.

The president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, has proposed a new package of sanctions on Russia designed “to make the Kremlin pay” for escalating the war in Ukraine with what she called “sham” annexation votes in occupied territory.

“We do not accept the sham referenda and any kind of annexation in Ukraine, and we are determined to make the Kremlin pay for this further escalation,” Ursula von der Leyen told reporters in Brussels.

The proposed eighth sanctions package includes further import bans on Russian products, expected to deprive Moscow of an additional seven billion euros ($6.7bn) in revenues, and more export bans on key technology used for the military such as aviation items, electronic components and specific chemical substances, von der Leyen announced.

Beyond this, the sanctions package will lay the legal basis for an oil price cap and ban EU citizens from sitting on governing bodies of Russian state-owned companies, she said.

On Moscow’s famous Red Square, a stage with giant video screens has been set up, with billboards proclaiming “Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson – Russia!”

The site has been readied as Putin reportedly prepares to officially announce the incorporation of the four partially occupied regions in Ukraine into Russia within days.