Russia-Ukraine war live: US ‘deeply concerned’ by Russia’s arrest of American journalist

The US has new information that Russia is actively seeking to acquire additional munitions from North Korea, the White House has said.

White House spokesperson John Kirby, speaking to reporters, said Russia is seeking to send a delegation to North Korea, offering food in exchange for weapons. Washington is concerned that Pyongyang will provide the aid, he said.

The United States is “deeply concerned over Russia’s widely reported detention of a US citizen journalist”, the US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said, following the arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

US officials have been in touch with the Wall Street Journal, Blinken said in a statement that did not directly name Gershkovich.

The statement continued:

In the strongest possible terms, we condemn the Kremlin’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish journalists and civil society voices.

The White House has confirmed that the US state department “has been in direct touch” with the Russian government over Gershkovich’s detention, “including actively working to secure consular access” for him.

The Biden administration has been in touch with his family and his employer, the White House said in a statement.

The White House added:

US citizens residing or traveling in Russia should depart immediately, as the State Department continues to advise.

The US has imposed sanctions on a Slovakian citizen for trying to arrange the sale of more than two dozens types of North Korean weapons and munitions to Russia, the treasury department said.

Ashot Mkrtychev has had the sanctions placed on him “for having attempted to, directly or indirectly, import, export, or re-export to, into, or from the DPRK any arms or related materiel” to Russia to help Moscow replace military equipment lost in its war with Ukraine, it said.

The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said in a statement:

Russia has lost over 9,000 pieces of heavy military equipment since the start of the war, and thanks in part to multilateral sanctions and export controls, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin has become increasingly desperate to replace them.

The treasury department said that between the end of 2022 and early 2023, Mkrtychev worked with North Korean officials to obtain over two dozen kinds of weapons and munitions for Russia in exchange for materials ranging from commercial aircraft, raw materials, and commodities to be sent to the DPRK.

She added:

Schemes like the arms deal pursued by this individual show that Putin is turning to suppliers of last resort like Iran and the DPRK.

Athletes, including the Ukrainian tennis player Marta Kostyuk, are speaking out against the International Olympic Committee’s recommendation that Russian and Belarusian athletes should be allowed to compete again across all sports.

The players would be allowed to compete as neutral athletes as long as they have no clear links to the military, and would be unable to wear national kit or see their flags and anthems.

The IOC president, Thomas Bach, used the example of Kostyuk competing against the Russian Varvara Gracheva in the recent ATK Open final as an example of athletes competing without friction in sport, despite Kostyuk refusing to shake her opponent’s hand.

Kostyuk in response has said that her “career would be over” if she refused to compete against Russians and that Ukrainian players felt ‘discriminated against’ by the tennis authorities.

The inconspicuous office is in Moscow’s north-eastern suburbs. A sign reads: “Business centre”. Nearby are modern residential blocks and a rambling old cemetery, home to ivy-covered war memorials. The area is where Peter the Great once trained his mighty army.

Inside the six-storey building, a new generation is helping Russian military operations. Its weapons are more advanced than those of Peter the Great’s era: not pikes and halberds, but hacking and disinformation tools.

The software engineers behind these systems are employees of NTC Vulkan. On the surface, it looks like a run-of-the-mill cybersecurity consultancy. But a leak of secret files from the company has exposed its work bolstering Vladimir Putin’s cyberwarfare capabilities.

Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkan’s engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the internet.

The company’s work is linked to the federal security service or FSB, the domestic spy agency; the operational and intelligence divisions of the armed forces, known as the GOU and GRU; and the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence organisation.

Read the Guardian’s report on the Vulkan files, which date from 2016 to 2021, leaked by an anonymous whistleblower angered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

It’s 6pm in Kyiv. Here’s where things stand:

• Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, will chair a UN security council meeting in April when Russia assumes the international body’s presidency, foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has said. Russia’s upcoming UN security council presidency is “the worst joke ever for April Fools’ Day”, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said, and a “stark reminder that something is wrong with the way international security architecture is functioning”.

• Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, has said Moscow will continue to give the US advance notice about its missile tests despite suspending participation in the New Start nuclear arms treaty, reversing a statement he made just yesterday. The White House on Tuesday said the US had told Russia it would cease exchanging certain data on its nuclear forces after Moscow’s refusal to do so.

• Russian authorities have arrested a US journalist working in the country and accused him of espionage, a charge that could carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Evan Gershkovich, a well-respected reporter from the Wall Street Journal, was detained on Wednesday during a reporting trip to the Urals city of Ekaterinburg. On Thursday, he appeared at the Lefortovo courthouse in Moscow, where he was ordered to be held in pre-trial detention until at least 29 May, local media reported. The Wall Street Journal “vehemently denies” allegations of espionage against Gershkovich.

• Russian forces have had some success in the eastern frontline city of Bakhmut, Ukrainian military officials said on Wednesday evening, adding that their fighters were still holding on in a battle that has lasted several months. The US thinktank the Institute for the Study of War’s regular update appeared to support this, saying: “Geolocated footage published on 28 and 29 March indicates that Russian forces advanced in southern and south-western Bakhmut.”

• Russian authorities are preparing to launch a significant recruitment campaign aimed at signing up 400,000 new troops to fight in Ukraine, the UK Ministry of Defence said in its latest intelligence update, citing Russian media. Moscow is presenting the campaign “as a drive for volunteer, professional personnel, rather than a new, mandatory mobilisation”, it said, adding that in practice regional authorities might try to coerce men to join up. “It is highly unlikely that the campaign will attract 400,000 genuine volunteers,” it said.

• Some parents have been hiding their children in basements to prevent them from being taken, Ukrainian volunteers who have been evacuating civilians from the frontlines of the war with Russia have said. While parents have given different reasons, most volunteers have attributed the phenomenon to a combination of poverty and the psychological condition of the families, who have been living under bombing for months.

• A Russian man who fled house arrest after being sentenced to two years in prison for discrediting Russia in social media posts after an investigation prompted by his daughter’s anti-war drawings, has been arrested, his lawyer said. Alexei Moskalyov was sentenced to two years in prison as punishment for his criticism of Kremlin policies in social media posts. Police investigated him after his 13-year-old daughter, Maria, refused to participate in a patriotic class at her school and made drawings showing rockets being fired at a family standing under a Ukrainian flag and another that said “Glory to Ukraine!”

• Four bankers who helped a close friend of Vladimir Putin move millions of francs through Swiss bank accounts have been convicted of lacking diligence in financial transactions. The four were found guilty on Thursday of helping Sergey Roldugin, a concert cellist who has been nicknamed “Putin’s wallet” by the Swiss government. The executives – three Russians and one Swiss citizen – helped Roldugin, who is godfather to Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria, deposit millions of francs in Swiss bank accounts between 2014 and 2016.

• Lawmakers from the pro-Russia, far-right Freedom party walked out of the lower house of Austria’s parliament on Thursday during a speech by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, claiming it violated Austria’s neutrality. Austria says its neutrality prevents it from military involvement in the conflict and while it supports Ukraine politically it cannot send the country weapons in its fight against the Russian invasion. The Freedom party had said days before that it would hold some form of protest against the address.

• The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, has hit back at criticism by some European governments – including Ukraine’s – of a plan for a full return of Russian and Belarusian athletes to international sport. “It is deplorable to see that some governments do not want to respect the majority within the Olympic movement and all stakeholders, nor the autonomy of sport,” Bach said on Thursday.

• King Charles III has lauded the current unity between the UK and Germany in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “the scourge of war is back in Europe”. Both the UK and Germany had shown “vital leadership”, the king said in a bilingual speech in the Bundestag, praising Berlin’s decision to provide large military support to Ukraine as “remarkably courageous, important and appreciated”.

• China must play a part in pressing for a “just peace” in Ukraine and its role in the conflict will be vital in shaping relations with the EU, the European Commission president has said. “Any peace plan which would in effect consolidate Russian annexations is simply not a viable plan. We have to be frank on this point,” Ursula Von der Leyen said in a speech in Brussels on the eve of a trip to Beijing.

Good afternoon from London. It’s Léonie Chao-Fong still here with all the latest developments from the Russia-Ukraine war. Feel free to get in touch on Twitter or via email.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, will chair a UN security council meeting in April when Russia assumes the international body’s presidency, foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has said.

Zakharova, in a press briefing, said:

Another key event of the Russian presidency [of the security council] will be a high-level open debate on the ‘effective multilateralism through the defence of the principles of the UN charter’.

The Guardian’s Dan Sabbagh is travelling through Donbas today.

The EU’s agriculture commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, would support curbs on trading with Ukraine if Poland proposed such a solution, he said on Thursday, amid anger from farmers over the effect of Ukrainian imports on grain prices.

“If the Polish government requests trading curbs with Ukraine obviously I will support that proposal,” Reuters reports he told the media in Brussels.

Several European countries have expressed concerns that the market could be flooded with cheap Ukrainian grain that it has been unable to export due to the limited volume of produce that can leave Ukraine’s ports.

Criticism by some European governments – including Ukraine’s – of a plan for a full return of Russian and Belarusian athletes to international sport is deplorable and cuts into the autonomy of sport, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) president, Thomas Bach, said on Thursday.

The IOC on Wednesday issued a set of recommendations for international sports federations that will allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to return since their ban last year following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Governments in Ukraine, Poland and the Czech Republic among others have been angered by the plan, arguing that Russian and Belarusian athletes have no place in world sport with the war still ongoing. Reuters quotes Back saying:

It is deplorable to see that some governments do not want to respect the majority within the Olympic movement and all stakeholders, nor the autonomy of sport. It is deplorable that these governments do not address the question of double standards. We have not seen a single comment on their attitude on the participation of athletes from countries of the other 70 wars and armed conflict around the world.

“Government interventions have strengthened the unity of the Olympic movement,” Bach continued. “It cannot be up to the governments to decide which athletes can participate in which competition.

“This would be the end of world sport as we know it today.”

The return plan does not include the 2024 Olympics in Paris, but the IOC’s latest guidelines allow for the return of Russian and Belarusian athletes citing human rights concerns for Russian athletes, and the current participation of Russians and Belarusians in some sports as reasons for the decision.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, plans to attend the Nato foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on 3 April to 5 April, where he will emphasise continued US support for Ukraine and transatlantic security, the state department said.

While there he will meet the top EU diplomat Josep Borrell, the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, and the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dymtro Kuleba, Reuters reports it said in a statement on Thursday.