Russia-Ukraine war live: EU could use frozen Russian asset profits for Ukraine’s military, says von der Leyen | Ukraine

Yulia Navalnaya, wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, on Wednesday urged European politicians and officials to investigate financial flows in the west linked to Russian president Vladimir Putin and his allies, reports Reuters.

Navalnaya was speaking to the European parliament in Strasbourg, 12 days after her husband died suddenly in a Russian penal colony. Reuters report that she was greeted with a standing ovation.

“Putin is the leader of an organised criminal gang. This includes poisoners and assassins but they’re just puppets. The most important thing is the people close to Putin – his friends, associates and keepers of mafia money,” she said.

She added:

You and all of us must fight the criminal gang. And the political innovation here is to apply the methods of fighting organised crime, not political competition. Not statements of concern but the search for mafia associates in your countries, for discreet lawyers and financiers who are helping Putin and his friends to hide money.”

Navalnaya has accused Putin of having her husband killed, an allegation the Kremlin has rejected. She has promised to continue his work, urging Russians to share her rage against Putin, and has met western politicians, including US president Joe Biden last week.

In reference to her husband’s funeral, Navalnaya said she was not sure whether the service would be peaceful or whether the police would make arrests.

The funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died earlier this month in a remote Arctic penal colony, will take place on Friday in Moscow after several locations declined to host the service, his spokesperson says.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Kira Yarmysh said the funeral would be held at a church in Moscow’s southeast Maryino district on Friday afternoon. The burial is to be at a nearby cemetery.

Navalny died in mid-February in one of Russia’s harshest penal facilities. Russian authorities said the cause of his death at age 47 is still unknown. Many western leaders have said they hold Russian president Vladimir Putin responsible for his death.

Yarmysh spoke of the difficulties encountered in trying to find a site for a “farewell event” for Navalny. Writing on X, she said most venues said they were fully booked, with some “refusing when we mention the surname ‘Navalny’,” and one disclosing that “funeral agencies were forbidden to work with us.”

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said the funeral was initially planned for Thursday – the day of Putin’s annual address to Russia’s federal assembly – but no venue would agree to hold it then.

“The real reason is clear. The Kremlin understands that nobody will need Putin and his message on the day we say farewell to Alexei,” Zhdanov wrote on Telegram.

The committee that decides the winner of the Nobel peace prize, said on Wednesday that the sentencing of human rights campaigner Oleg Orlov in Russia to a prison term was an attempt to “silence” critics, reports AFP.

The 70-year-old Orlov – a key figure of the Nobel prize-winning Memorial group – was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Tuesday.

Orlov was accused of discrediting the Russian army in a column written for the French online publication Mediapart, and fined in October after a first trial. The fine was a relatively lenient punishment and prosecutors called for a new trial.

Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee, said in a statement that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “regime has for many years tried to silence the leadership of Memorial and other important civil society organisations in Russia”.

“They are now using the war on Ukraine as a pretext to finish the job,” Frydnes said in a statement. “It is important that they won’t succeed,” he added.

In 2022, Memorial was awarded the Nobel peace prize together with Ales Bialiatski from Belarus and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties.

The Nobel committee said that Memorial was honoured for “its outstanding efforts in documenting war crimes, human rights abuses, and the abuse of power in the former Soviet Union as well as in post-Soviet Russia.”

My colleagues, Patrick Wintour, Angelique Chrisafis and Miranda Bryant have written on how the French president, Emmanuel Macron faced an EU backlash after suggesting sending troops to Ukraine. You can read more at the link below:

Emmanuel Macron has faced criticism from France’s Nato and EU partners and a warning of conflict from Russia after he suggested it might be necessary to send ground troops to Ukraine.

After a high-level meeting in Paris of mainly European partners to discuss what urgent steps could be taken to shore up Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s recent frontline advances, the French president told a press conference he did not rule out sending troops.

He said he accepted no consensus existed for the plan, but in a taboo-breaking move he said nothing should be ruled out to achieve the defeat of Russia and the maintenance of security in Europe. “Today there is no consensus about sending ground troops in an official way, standing up for it and taking responsibility for it,” he said.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has arrived in the Albanian capital of Tirana, where he will attend a summit with countries of the western Balkans and hold bilateral meetings with their leaders, his office said.

Kyiv is seeking international support for a Zelenskiy peace plan as Russia’s invasion drags into its third year and Ukrainian troops struggle to hold ground against Russian attacks.

“I will propose supporting Ukraine’s efforts to achieve [a] just and lasting peace, as well as organising the Global Peace Summit in Switzerland,” the Ukrainian leader said in a statement, reports Reuters.

Zelenskiy, who was in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, is scheduled to meet Albanian prime minister Edi Rama as well as the leaders of Serbia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Montenegro.

Albania, North Macedonia and Montenegro are Nato members and have joined western sanctions against Russia and sent weapons and equipment to Ukraine.

“A pivotal moment for fostering bilateral ties, and standing in solidarity with Ukraine in its heroic fight against Russia’s aggression,” Albanian foreign minister Igli Hasani wrote on X shortly after Zelenskiy’s arrival.

The EU should consider using profits from frozen Russian assets to buy military supplies for Ukraine, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday, reports news agency Reuters.

“It is time to start a conversation about using the windfall profits of frozen Russian assets to jointly purchase military equipment for Ukraine,” she told the European parliament in a speech urging the EU to do more on defence policy.

She added: “There could be no stronger symbol and no greater use for that money than to make Ukraine and all of Europe a safer place to live.”

China’s Eurasia envoy Li Hui will visit Russia, Ukraine and the headquarters of the EU this week for talks on the two-year-old war between Moscow and Kyiv, according to news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The trip will represent “the second round of shuttle diplomacy on seeking a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis”, China’s foreign ministry said in a statement, adding Li would also go to France, Germany and Poland.

Li visited the region last year as part of efforts to mediate the conflict, holding talks in Moscow, Kyiv and a host of European capitals. China says it is a neutral party in the Russia-Ukraine war but has been criticised for refusing to condemn Moscow for its invasion in February 2022.

Beijing released a paper last year calling for a “political settlement” to the conflict, which western countries said could enable Russia to retain much of the territory it has seized in Ukraine.

China said on Wednesday the “most urgent thing at the moment is to restore peace”. “In the past two years, we have never given up in our efforts to promote peace and have never stopped promoting talks,” foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a briefing.

“Everything we have done leads to one target, which is to build consensus to end the war and pave the way for peace talks,” she said.

“We will continue to play our unique role, conduct shuttle diplomacy, build consensus among all parties, and contribute Chinese wisdom to promote a political settlement of the Ukrainian crisis,” Mao said.

China and Russia have in recent years ramped up economic cooperation and diplomatic contacts, and their strategic partnership has grown closer since the invasion of Ukraine.

Chinese president Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin declared during a summit in Moscow last year that ties were “entering a new era”. And in Russia this week, China’s vice foreign minister Sun Weidong declared relations “are at their best period in history”.

According to AFP, analysts say China holds the upper hand in the relationship with Russia and that its sway is growing as Moscow’s international isolation deepens.

It has gone 10am in Kyiv and 11am in Moscow. This is our latest Guardian blog covering all the military and diplomatic developments over the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Here are the latest developments:

• Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, has arrived in Albania for the “Ukraine-Southeast Europe Summit” on security. Albania’s foreign minister, Igli Hasani, said Albania was “standing in solidarity with Ukraine in its heroic fight against Russia’s aggression”. Albania, a Nato member since 2009, has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine but has been quieter in public about supplying it with arms.

• Russian drones and S-300 missiles attacked Ukraine over Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, Ukraine’s air force said. All 10 drones were shot down, claimed the air force. It did not say whether the missiles reached their targets.

• A day earlier, Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian Su-34 fighter jet on the eastern front, air force commander Mykola Oleshchuk said.

• Ukraine’s troops withdrew from the villages of Severne and Stepove near the eastern town of Avdiika, recently captured by Russian forces, military spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy said. The general staff said Ukrainian forces undertook airstrikes on Russian positions in the settlement of Krasnohorivka near Avdiivka.

• Around Avdiikva, recently captured by Russian invasion troops, heavy fighting was reported on the eastern side of Orlivka and just north of Tonen’ke; while east of Semenivka, Ukrainian troops were using mines and artillery against advancing Russian armour. In the Zaporizhzhia oblast, Ukrainian forces reportedly fought off assaults around Malynivka and Robotyne.

• Ukraine is expected to remain short of ammunition and on the back foot in its war with Russia for several months until the west sorts out further support, Adm Sir Tony Radakin, the head of Britain’s armed forces, has said.

• The US president, Joe Biden, met congressional leaders in the White House on Tuesday for talks on the Ukraine aid bill, in a meeting described by the Democrats’ Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, as intense. Biden said of Ukraine aid: “The need is urgent … the consequences of inaction every day in Ukraine are dire.”

• Mike Johnson – the Republican speaker of the House, who has been blocking further consideration of Ukraine aid, did not mention the topic in brief remarks outside the West Wing afterwards. He talked about security of the Mexico border and continued funding of the government, as well as a one-on-one with Biden. Republican hardliners have presented themselves as being focused on securing the border from illegal immigrants ahead of further help for Ukraine, despite having negotiated and then rejected legislation that deals with both.

• Several European countries and the US said they were not considering sending ground troops to Ukraine after France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, refused to rule it out. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, went so far as to say there was agreement at the Paris Ukraine conference on Monday “that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil” sent by European states or Nato states.

• The French foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, in an address to the French parliament, said: “We must consider new actions to support Ukraine. These must respond to very specific needs, I am thinking in particular of mine clearance, cyber, the production of weapons on site, on Ukrainian territory. Some of these actions could require a presence on Ukrainian territory, without crossing the threshold of belligerence. Nothing should be excluded. This was and still is the position today of the president of the republic.”

• France’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, also said nothing was off the table in western efforts to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine. “No dynamic can be ruled out. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” he said. The Kremlin suggested that conflict between Russia and Nato would become inevitable if European members of Nato fought in Ukraine.

• Janet Yellen, the US secretary of the treasury, has called for G7 countries to urgently seize profits from Russian assets frozen in the west and redirect them to Ukraine. “There is a strong international law, economic, and moral case for moving forward. This would be a decisive response to Russia’s unprecedented threat to global stability.”

• Two police officers were killed and four were injured by Russian shelling in the northern Ukrainian region of Sumy, Ukraine’s interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said. Klymenko wrote on Telegram that an investigative team was deliberately fired upon while documenting damage caused by an earlier Russian strike.

• North Korea has shipped about 6,700 containers carrying millions of munitions to Russia since July to support Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, South Korean media reported on Tuesday. South Korea’s defence minister, Shin Won-sik, said the containers might carry more than 3 million 152mm artillery shells, or 500,000 122mm rounds.