Ukraine’s war – live: Putin drives around Mariupol during first visit to Russian-occupied region

Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with the top brass leading his military operation in Ukraine, state media said today.

The leader, who is facing an arrest warrant for war crimes, also met with Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov who is in charge of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

The meeting took place at the Rostov-on-Don command post in southern Russia, TASS news agency reported.

Countries that supply Russia with weapons can only be “marginals in the free world”, Volodymyr Zelenksy has said.

Ukraine’s president made the comments in a video shared overnight on Twitter as fighting continued on the front lines.

“All those who produce weapons of terror against Ukraine, who help Russia incite aggression, in particular by supplying Shahed drones, who support Russia’s destruction of international law, can only be marginal to the world,” he said.

Trainspotter Mikhail Korotkov’s blog was his passion – but closing up shop and leaving home felt like the only option after pictures he posted of his favorite destination attracted unwanted attention, notes Robyn Dixon.

Germany will have to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he enters its territory and the International Criminal Court demands that the contracting nation be executed, the country’s Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said today.

An arrest warrant for Mr Putin has been issued by the ICC in The Hague, which accuses him of war crimes by taking hundreds of Ukrainian children from orphanages.

The court accuses Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, of “illegal deportation” of children “from occupied territories of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

President Xi Jinping is an unlikely kind of peacemaker. His government has been responsible for unspeakable atrocities against the Muslim Uyghur people in the Xinjiang region, the suppression of protests, the rule of law and democracy in Hong Kong, and routine human rights abuses throughout the People’s Republic.

His armed forces have buzzed and terrorized Taiwan for years, as well as threatening neighbors to the south China Sea. Yet China’s tyrannical supreme leader goes around the world brokering peace deals. It’s an enigma.

Mr Xi is actually on something of a roll. Fresh from getting Saudi Arabia and Iran to re-establish diplomatic relations, thereby beginning to end their merciless proxy war in Yemen, he goes to Moscow next week to preach the ways of peace to Vladimir Putina tough customer.

Read The independent’s editorial here:

Vladimir Putin visited a family at their home in the Nevsky district of Mariupol during his visit to the Ukrainian city now under Russian control, Russian media reported.

The new residential area has been built by the Russian military and the first people moved in last September.

Residents have “actively” returned, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, who accompanied the leader, was quoted as saying by Russian authorities.

Mariupol had half a million people before the war and was home to the Azovstal steelworks, one of Europe’s largest.

“That city center has been seriously damaged,” the deputy prime minister said. “We want to finish (the reconstruction) of the center by the end of the year, at least the facade part. The center is very beautiful.”

Russian media broadcast videos showing the Russian leader driving at night through a built-up area as well as entering what media said was the Philharmonic, restored in just three months.

There was also no immediate reaction to the visit from Kiev.

Russian forces fighting in Ukraine are “highly unlikely” to capture their previously planned key targets in the coming months of fierce war, the British Ministry of Defense said today.

It pointed to a decree published on March 3 in which authorities in the Russian-controlled part of Zaporizhzhia oblast declared occupied Melitopol as the oblast’s capital.

“The Russian-installed head of the oblast, Evgeniy Balitskiy, said this was a temporary measure until the city of Zaporizhzhia was controlled by Russia,” the ministry noted.

It added: “The tacit declaration of an alternative capital is likely a tacit admission within the Russian system that its forces are highly unlikely to seize previously planned major targets in the near future.”

Zaporizhzhia is one of the four oblasts that Putin claimed to have annexed as part of the Russian Federation on September 30 last year.

But the invading nation never occupied the city of Zaporizhzhia, a major industrial center of 700,000 people, located about 35 km from the current front line, the MoD pointed out.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to Crimea on Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of the Black Sea peninsula’s annexation from Ukraine.

His trip came a day after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant charging him with war crimes, claiming he bears personal responsibility for the abduction of children from Ukraine during Russia’s invasion that began nearly 13 months ago.

In Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city, Putin met Moscow-installed governor Mikhail Razvozhaev, with whom he visited an art school and a children’s center that are part of a project to develop a historical park on the site of an ancient Greek colony, Russian state news agencies said.

Keep an eye on Saturday’s big event:

For Mikhail Korotkov, a lifelong train spotter, an unusual train on Russia’s railways became an obsession – like stalking a rare, shy beast.

Korotkov, 31, spent years tracking and photographing President Vladimir Putin’s hush-hush luxury train. He was the first enthusiast to post a picture of the train — an elegant loop with red-and-gray detailing, often pulled by multiple boxy locomotives — online in 2018. “Mere mortals do not travel on such a train,” Korotkov wrote.

Finding and photographing the train was both terrifying and exciting. To Korotkov, it was like a creepy “ghost train”, with a secret timetable, no identifying locomotive numbers and its windows always screened. At least one of the railcars has an unusual dome on top – believed to house special communications equipment.

“I was so deep in my hobby. I was trying to get really rare pictures,” Korotkov recalls. “And for me the challenge was so great that I didn’t think about the consequences.”

The Russian president is known to be fanatically cautious – detractors would say paranoid – when it comes to security.

Robyn Dixon takes a deep dive into the dramatic journey of a daring train spotter:

Vladimir Putin visited the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol in Ukraine on Sunday, TASS news agency reported.

Mariupol in the Donetsk region was captured by Russian forces after a bloody battle last May and has remained under the control of Moscow’s fighters ever since.

The Russian president was seen driving a car around the city as he visited several districts.

He also made stops along the way and talked to residents, TASS news agency reported.

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