Putin warns of lightning fast retaliation if West interferes in Ukraine

In an address to lawmakers in St Petersburg earlier today, Vladimir Putin warned any countries attempting to interfere in Ukraine would be met with a lightning-fast response from Moscow.

The Russian president said the West wanted to cut Russia up into different pieces and accused it of pushing Ukraine into conflict with Russia, adding:

If someone intends to intervene into the ongoing events (in Ukraine) from the outside and creates unacceptable strategic threats for us, then they should know that our response to those strikes will be swift, lightning fast.

Russian troops would not hesitate to use the most modern weaponry, Putin said:

We have all the tools for this ones that no one can brag about. And we wont brag. We will use them if needed. And I want everyone to know this.

We have already taken all the decisions on this.

Updated at 12.29EDT

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Here is a little more on our earlier story on how Ukrainians are renaming streets and squares associated with Russia.

Cities in Ukraine have in recent days begun to rename streets associated with Russian figures or to dismantle monuments related to the Soviet Union.

The city of Ternopil, in western Ukraine, has renamed a street dedicated to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and removed a Soviet tank and aircraft. The aircraft is to be replaced with a heroes of Ukraine monument.

Fontanka, a village near Odesa, decided to turn a street dedicated to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky into Boris Johnson Street, after the UK promised to send a 100m weapons package to Ukraine.

And the mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov, said streets named after Russian towns would be rededicated to Ukrainian cities and symbols: Abkhazia Street became Irpin, while the street of the 30th Irkutsk Division is now called Ukrainian Soldiers.

Russia has nearly doubled its revenues from selling fossil fuels to the EU during the two months of war in Ukraine, benefiting from soaring prices even as volumes have been reduced, Guardian reporter Fiona Harvey writes for us today.

Russia has received about 62bn from exports of oil, gas and coal in the two months since the invasion began, according to an analysis of shipping movements and cargos by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

For the EU, imports were about 44bn for the past two months, compared with about 140bn for the whole of last year, or roughly 12bn a month.

The findings demonstrate how Russia has continued to benefit from its stranglehold over Europes energy supply, even while governments have frantically sought to prevent Vladimir Putin using oil and gas as an economic weapon.

A number of Ukrainian cities plan to rename streets and squares associated with Russia under a process of derussification following Moscows invasion.

A day after the dismantling of a huge Soviet-era monument in Kyiv that was meant to symbolise friendship between Russia and Ukraine, the city council said on Wednesday it had compiled a list of 467 locations that could be considered for renaming, Reuters reports.

They included a central square named after 19th century writer Leo Tolstoy and a street named Russias Lake Baikal. A road named after Minsk, the capital of close Russian ally Belarus, was also on the list.

Since Ukraine declared independence of the Soviet Union in 1991, the names of some cities have been changed to erase the legacy of hated Soviet officials. Some officials now want to remove the names of Russian authors, poets and mountain ranges, the news agency reports.

Ihor Terekhov, mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, said on Wednesday that as soon as the war with Russia was over, he would table a bill to his city council to rename places with Russian-affiliated names.

Even without these names, there will be too many scars that will remind us for a long time about what kind of neighbour is beyond our eastern and northern borders, he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Cities and towns in Ukraines north have started the process of renaming streets after army units that defended them.

Under a proposal by the governor of the Chernihiv region, streets or squares in the regional capital would be renamed after the 1st Separate Tank Brigade.

Here are some of the latest images to come out Ukraine today.

Countries opposed to Russias invasion of Ukraine must double down on their support for Kyiv, including the supply of heavy weapons, tanks and aeroplanes, British foreign secretary Liz Truss has said.

So far Britain, EU states, the US and other allies have supplied weaponry to help Ukrainian forces fight the Russian army, but they have stopped short of engaging in direct conflict with Moscow.

Truss outlined a new approach in which countries should spend more on defence, and where Nato takes a more global outlook while economic dependency on aggressor nations is reduced.

Watch the video of Truss remarks below.

Russia has deployed trained military dolphins at its naval base in the Black Sea possibly to protect its fleet from an underwater attack according to new analysis of satellite images.

The US Naval Institute (USNI) reviewed satellite imagery of the naval base at Sevastopol harbor, and concluded that two dolphin pens were moved to the base in February at the start of Moscows invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has a history of training dolphins for military purposes, using the aquatic mammal to retrieve objects or deter enemy divers.

The Sevastopol naval base is crucial for the Russian military, as it sits in the southern tip of Crimea which Moscow seized in 2014. According to the USNIs analysis, many of the Russian ships anchored there, while out of range from missiles, are potentially vulnerable to undersea attacks.

Ukraine had also trained dolphins at an aquarium near Sevastopol, in a program born out of a Soviet-era scheme that fell into neglect in the 1990s.

During the cold war, both the US and the Soviet Union developed the use of dolphins whose echolocation capabilities can allow them to detect underwater objects such as mines.

Updated at 22.22EDT

A supplemental budget request that includes Ukraine aid could be sent to the Congress as soon as Thursday, the White House said on Wednesday.

The plan will cover military, humanitarian and economic assistance for Ukraine, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters.

More than 4,000 applications have been filed to sponsor Ukrainians seeking to come to the US within 48 hours of the Biden administration launching Uniting for Ukraine, a streamlined process for those fleeing war-torn Ukraine, a USCIS spokesperson told CNN.

The move comes come nearly one month after Biden pledged to admit up to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing Russias invasion and is designed to more quickly get Ukrainians interested in coming to the US.

This new humanitarian parole program will complement the existing legal pathways available to Ukrainians, including immigrant visas and refugee processing. It will provide an expedient channel for secure legal migration from Europe to the United States for Ukrainians who have a US sponsor, such as a family or an NGO, Biden said.

Fresh from his visit to Russia to meet Vladimir Putin, the UN Secretary General Antnio Guterres arrived in Kyiv on Wednesday where he is due to hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Thursday.

Updated at 21.45EDT

The rouble soared to a more than two-year high against the euro in Moscow trade on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

Russia halted gas supplies to Bulgaria and Poland for rejecting its demand for payment in roubles on Wednesday.

By 2:18pm GMT, the rouble had gained 1.8% to trade at 75.43 versus the euro , its strongest since early March 2020.

It was 1.1% stronger against the dollar at 72.75 .

Canadian lawmakers have voted unanimously to call Russias attacks in Ukraine a genocide, with members of parliament saying there was ample evidence of systemic and massive war crimes against humanity being committed by Moscow.

The Canadian House of Commons motion said war crimes by Russia include mass atrocities, systematic instances of wilful killing of Ukrainian civilians, the desecration of corpses, forcible transfer of Ukrainian children, torture, physical harm, mental harm, and rape, Reuters reports.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was absolutely right for more and more people to describe Russias actions in Ukraine as genocide, supporting an accusation made by US President Joe Biden a day earlier.

Uniper, Germanys top importer of Russian gas, will transfer payments for Russian gas to a Russian bank and no longer to a Europe-based bank, newspaper Rheinische Post is reporting.

The plan is to make our payments in euros to an account in Russia, the daily paper cited a Uniper spokesperson as saying.

Even though Russia has demanded rouble payments for its gas, the payments system it has proposed foresees the use of accounts at Gazprombank, which would convert payments made in euros or dollars into roubles.

This offers wiggle room some countries could try to use to keep buying Russian gas against western currencies.

The European Commission said last week that if buyers of Russian gas confirmed payment was complete once they had deposited euros, as opposed to later when the euros have been converted to roubles, that would not breach sanctions.

Uniper said it considered Russian gas flows into Germany secure for now despite a halt in supplies to Poland and Bulgaria as transit volumes headed elsewhere would be unaffected.

Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskiy also addressed what he called Russias energy blackmail against Europe in his nightly national address.

Zelenskiy said Russias decision to cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria shows no one in Europe can hope to maintain any normal economic cooperation with Russia.

This week, Russias leadership launched a new series of energy blackmail of Europeans. The decision to cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria is another argument in favour of the fact that no one in Europe can hope to maintain any normal economic cooperation with Russia.

Russia considers not only gas, but any trade as a weapon. It is just waiting for the moment when one or another trade area can be used. To blackmail Europeans politically. Or to strengthen Russias military machine, which sees a united Europe as a target.

Hence, the sooner everyone in Europe admits that it is inadmissible to depend on Russia in trade, the sooner it will be possible to guarantee stability in European markets.

The White House has denounced Russias move to cut off energy supplies to Poland and Bulgaria.

Press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a daily briefing on Wednesday:

Unfortunately this is the type of step, the type of almost weaponising energy supplies that we had predicted that Russia could take in this conflict.

And we have been working for some time now, for months, with partners around the world to diversify natural gas supply to Europe to in anticipation of and to also address near-term needs and replace volumes that would otherwise come from Russia.

Kazakhstan may declare a prominent Russian television host persona non grata after he said the central Asian nation could meet the same fate as Ukraine if it did not side decisively with Russia, a Kazakh official said on Wednesday.

Reuters has this report below:

Tigran Keosayan - married to Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-backed media outlet RT - said on his YouTube show that Kazakhstan was being ungrateful and sly by failing to show its support for Russia.

Kazakh foreign ministry spokesperson Aibek Smadiyarov said Keosayans comments were insulting and lacked objectivity.

Perhaps his statement reflects the views of some parts of the Russian public and political establishment, but it goes against the spirit and essence of the cooperation between our countries and the existing agreements between our leaders, he added.

I expect he will be included in the list of people who are not welcome in Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan, an oil-rich former Soviet republic, has so far not condemned Russias invasion of Ukraine but has called for the crisis to be resolved in line with the United Nations charter. It has also sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and has said it will abide by Western sanctions against Moscow.

A snapshot of daily life in Ukraine is seen in the home below.

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United Nations secretary general, Antnio Guterres, arrives in Ukraine as it happened - The Guardian