Russia-Ukraine war live: Putin’s nuclear war threats ‘unacceptable’ say quad ministers; Biden and Scholz to meet

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Biden and Scholz to meet at White House

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will hold confidential talks on Friday in Washington with US President Joe Biden about the war in Ukraine amid growing concerns that China may provide weapons to Russia.

Scholz set off on the one-day trip, which unusually will not include a press delegation, late on Thursday.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

Biden and Scholz will meet for an hour at the White House, including a significant “one-on-one component,” a senior US official said, giving the two men a chance to “exchange notes” on their respective recent meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the state of the war.

“Both of the leaders wanted this to be a working-level meeting, wanted it to be very much a get down into the weeds, focused on the issues of Ukraine,” the official said.

Putin’s nuclear war threats ‘unacceptable’ say quad ministers

Foreign ministers of the so-called Quad group denounced Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war as unacceptable, according to a statement issued after a meeting on Friday.

The ministers also said they opposed any unilateral actions to increase tensions in the South China Sea, and expressed concerns about the “militarisation” of disputed territories, in a thinly veiled reference to China.

The Quad groups India, Australia, Japan and the United States.

Welcome and summary

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next few hours.

Our top stories this morning: foreign ministers of the so-called Quad group denounced Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war as unacceptable, according to a statement issued after a meeting on Friday.

And German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will hold confidential talks on Friday in Washington with US President Joe Biden about the war in Ukraine amid growing concerns that China may provide weapons to Russia as its invasion of Ukraine grinds into a second year.

More on these stories soon. Here are the other key recent developments:

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner group, has published a video that he said showed his fighters in the key eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In a post on Telegram, uniformed men are seen lifting a Wagner banner on top of a heavily damaged building. The video has been geolocated to the east of Bakhmut, about 1.2 miles from the city centre, where Wagner fighters have been for a while.

• Joe Biden, the US president, and Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, will focus their discussions on Friday on war aid for Ukraine and may also touch on concerns that China may provide lethal aid to Russia, a senior US administration official has said.

• Scholz has urged China not to send weapons to help Russia’s war in Ukraine, and instead asked Beijing to exert pressure on Moscow to pull back its forces.

• The US will announce a new military aid package for Ukraine on Friday, worth roughly $400m and comprised mainly of ammunition, two officials and a person familiar with the package have told Reuters.

• The US is hosting war planning exercises in Germany for Ukrainian military officers to help them think through battlefield decisions in the next phase of the conflict, officials have said.

• A meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations in New Delhi has ended with no consensus on the war in Ukraine. Most G20 members strongly condemned the Ukraine war, with Russia and China disagreeing, said the G20 president, India.

• The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, spoke for less than 10 minutes on the margins of the G20 meeting in New Delhi, according to a US state department official. Blinken reiterated to Lavrov that Washington was prepared to support Ukraine’s defence for as long as it took, the official said, in what is believed to be their first one-on-one conversation in person since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

• Blinken said he told Lavrov that Washington would push for the war in Ukraine to end through diplomatic terms that Kyiv agreed to. Blinken said he had also urged Moscow to reconsider its “irresponsible decision” and return to participation in the New Start nuclear treaty, and that he had also urged Russia to release the detained US citizen Paul Whelan.