Andrei Kelin tells BBC: ‘It is an idealistic mistake to think that Ukraine will prevail’
The death toll from a Russian missile attack on a clinic in Dnipro has risen from two to four people, according to the region’s governor.
In a post on Telegram, Serhii Lysak said further analysis had confirmed that three missing people had been killed in the attack on Friday.
Those killed were doctors and employees of the clinic and neighbouring vet clinic.
The initial two who were identified as being killed were a 69-year-old man who was passing by the centre and an employee at the vets.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has appointed a panel to investigate US allegations that a Russian ship collected weapons from a naval base near Cape Town last year, the presidency said in a statement on Sunday.
The US ambassador to South Africa, Reuben Brigety, said on 11 May that he was confident that a Russian ship, which docked at a naval base in Simonstown in the western Cape in December last year, took aboard weapons from South Africa.
The South African has since denied it, Reuters reports.
The allegations have caused a diplomatic row between the US, South Africa and Russia and called into question South Africa’s non-aligned position on the Ukraine conflict.
South Africa says it is impartial and has abstained from voting on UN resolutions on the war.
“The president decided to establish the inquiry because of the seriousness of the allegations, the extent of public interest and the impact of this matter on South Africa’s international relations,” said the statement.
Author Bill Browder, appearing on a panel on the BBC One current affairs show Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, said the Russian government was “failing miserably”.
Browder has written two books about Russia and his experience in finance there, which covers corruption and money laundering.
He said: “Corruption inside Russia has hollowed out the military. The supposed strong force failed at every step, they lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, they lost huge amounts of equipment.
“As he said Ukraine is a small country compared to Russia and they are being decimated by this small country.
“It is difficult watching that interview because everything he said is a lie. It will be painful when [Ukraine] launch that spring offensive.”
He said it is impossible that Putin is popular, as is claimed, when he has to rely on “totalitarian” measures.
When Kuenssberg mentions war crimes, including a maternity hospital being attacked in Mariupol and asks why Kelin won’t be honest about what has happened, he replies that the war has been going on since 2014 in the Donbas with crimes being committed on the Ukrainian army side.
He adds: “We want peace. We want no threat from Ukraine to Russia, this is one thing, and second that Russians in Ukraine will be treated like all other nations in the world. Like a French person in Ukraine.
“It is a big idealistic mistake to think that Ukraine will prevail. Russia is 16 times bigger than Ukraine. We have enormous resources and we haven’t just started yet to act very seriously.
“We are just defending the lands which are under control and assisting Russian people over there. We are rebuilding the Donbas.
“It depends on the escalation of war that is taking place. Sooner or later this escalation might have a new dimension that we do not need and we do not want. We can make peace tomorrow, if Ukrainian side will be prepared to negotiate but there is no preconditions for that.
“The German defence minister said if we stop supplying weapons to Ukraine, it will stop the day after tomorrow,” he said and laughs, saying he is right.
“If supplies of weapons will be stopped, it will be stopped the day after tomorrow. Please, stop it.”
The jailed Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia is then able to ask a question via Kuenssberg’s phone.
She asks why the Russian government needs to use oppression when it says it has support of the people.
Kelin says that Kara-Murza has been treated as a Russian citizen despite his dual-nationality, which Kelin acknowledges. He said he had not been treated differently from any other prisoner, and it is the court’s judgment.
On the subject of jailed westerners in Russia, Kelin claims that Evan Gershkovich was arrested as a spy.
The Kremlin’s man in London, Andrei Kelin, has spoken to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday morning about the war in Ukraine.
He said that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner group, is a “free man” who is “commenting on what is happening in Bakhmut, and how the battle has gone”.
“I don’t think that he is very much wrong because the threat that existed for us on the eve of the military operation … was really the danger that presented to the existence of our state,” he said, in regards to Prigozhin saying Russia’s existence is at threat.
Kuenssberg challenged him on this, saying it was untrue. Kelin replied with conjecture about the size of the Ukrainian army.
Kelin went on to say that he did not agree with Prigozhin that there was a chance of “losing Russia”.
In response to a question about whether the attack on a hospital is justified, he brought up apparent incidents in Luhansk and Donetsk and claimed there had not been any mentions of it in British press.
An interesting piece here from the Kyiv Post on President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s speechwriting team and process.
Senior correspondent Maryna Shashkova said that Zelenskiy’s team say that speeches are “80%” him.
“He always knows what he wants to say, and he immediately formulates it in sentences and phrases. He speaks ready-made thoughts, the speechwriter needs to listen, take notes and possibly add what the president did not say,” a source told the Post.
Others involved are Dmytro Lytvyn, a speechwriter, and Yuriy Kostyuk, who worked with Zelenskiy when he was an actor.
“The main task of a speechwriter is to completely turn off your ego and become a reflection of another person. They can do it,” an official in the president’s office said.
A 41-year-old man died during Russia’s mass drone strike on Kyiv on Sunday morning, after being hit by falling debris.
The death was confirmed by mayor Vitali Klitschko. Posting on Telegram he said that the man had been killed, along with a 35-year-old woman who was injured by the fall of a Shahed drone’s wreckage near a petrol station in Solomyanskyi, in the south-west of the city.
Fires were also reported in Kyiv, caused by the drones, as well as damaged buildings which had been struck by the UAVs.
Ukrainian officials are calling the raid on Kyiv the largest drone attack on the city since the start of the war.
Ukraine’s air force said it downed 52 out of the 54 Russia-launched drones, calling it a record attack with the Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones. It was not immediately clear how many of the drones were shot over Kyiv.
The air force said on Telegram that Russia had targeted military and critical infrastructure facilities in the central regions of Ukraine, and the Kyiv region in particular.
Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said earlier that preliminary information indicated the air raid was the largest drone attack since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
He added that Russia used the Iranian-made Shahed drones in the attack. Reuters was not able to independently verify that information.
“Today, the enemy decided to ‘congratulate’ the people of Kyiv on Kyiv Day with the help of their deadly UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles),” Popko said on the Telegram messaging app.
“The attack was carried out in several waves, and the air alert lasted more than five hours.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged Iran earlier this week to reconsider the supply of deadly drones to Russia in order to stop their slide into “the dark side of history”. But Iran on Saturday said his comments were really designed to attract more arms and financial aid from the west.
Welcome back to our live coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine. This is Christine Kearney and here’s an overview of the latest.
Russia carried out a major two-wave overnight air attack on Kyiv that killed at least one person, officials said, calling it the biggest drone attack on the capital since the start of the war, as Kyiv prepares to celebrate its birthday on Sunday.
The pre-dawn attacks came on the last Sunday of May when the capital celebrates Kyiv Day, the anniversary of its official founding 1,541 years ago. Ukraine says it shot down more than 40 drones.
More on that story soon. In other news:
Preliminary operations have begun to pave the way for a counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces, a Ukrainian presidential adviser has said. “It’s a complicated process, which is not a matter of one day or a certain date or a certain hour,” Mykhailo Podolyak said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s an ongoing process of deoccupation, and certain processes are already happening, like destroying supply lines or blowing up depots behind the lines.
The commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, raised expectations that a major operation could be imminent, declaring on social media: “The time has come to take back what’s ours.” Zaluzhnyi’s declaration on the Telegram messaging app on Saturday was accompanied by a cinematic video showing heavily armed Ukrainian soldiers preparing for battle.
Ukraine’s defence ministry has claimed Russia is planning to simulate a major accident at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station to try to thwart Kyiv’s long-planned counteroffensive. The plant, in an area of Russian-occupied southern Ukraine, has been repeatedly hit by shelling that each side blames the other for.
Russian forces have temporarily eased their attacks on the besieged eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut to regroup and strengthen their capabilities, a senior Kyiv official said on Saturday. Russia’s Wagner private army began handing over its positions to regular Russian troops this week after declaring full control of Bakhmut after the longest and bloodiest battle of the war, Reuters reported. In a statement on Telegram, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar, said Russian forces have continued attacking but that “overall offensive activity has decreased”.
Russian forces have intercepted two long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles supplied to Ukraine by Britain, the RIA news agency cited the defence ministry as saying on Saturday. Reuters reports that the ministry said it had intercepted shorter-range US-built Himars-launched and Harm missiles, and shot down 13 drones in the last 24 hours, RIA reported.
Defeat in its war against Ukraine would leave Russia “vindictive” and “brutal” and posing a threat to Nato countries, the outgoing head of the RAF said. Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston told the Telegraph that Russia’s air force, surface navy and submarine force are a threat to Britain and Nato. He warned its threat could even get worse if the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was ousted.
A construction worker has been killed near the Russian village of Plekhovo, a few kilometres from the border with Ukraine after shelling from the Ukrainian side, said Roman Starovoyt, the governor of the Kursk region. Works were being carried out not far from Plekhovo on fortifying defensive lines for the state border, the governor said on Telegram.
Ukraine struck oil pipeline installations deep inside Russia on Saturday with a series of drone attacks including on a station serving the vast Druzhba oil pipeline that sends western Siberian crude to Europe, according to Russian media. Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russia have been growing in intensity in recent weeks, and the New York Times reported that US intelligence believes Ukraine was behind a drone attack on the Kremlin earlier this month.
Ukraine has asked Germany to supply it with Taurus cruise missiles, an air-launched weapon with a range of 500km (310 miles), a spokesperson for the defence ministry in Berlin said on Saturday. Germany received the request several days ago, the spokesperson said, confirming a report by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She declined to provide further details or say how likely it was that Germany would supply the missiles to Ukraine.