Russia-Ukraine war live: Putin announces ‘partial mobilisation’ of Russia and pledges to use ‘all means available to us’

Reuters is providing some snap quotes from Russia’s defence minister on what the partial mobilisation entails. It reports he has said

• It applies to those with previous military experience

• People who served as conscripts or students are not being called up

• People called up will receive training before being deployed

• Russia has huge resources, 25 million people, of whom 300,000 reserves will be called up

More details soon …

Former British ambassador to Russia, Sir Tony Brenton, has been speaking on Sky News in the UK. He said that until now Russia had not fully mobilised because “Putin was worried about the effects on Russian public opinion.”

However, the setbacks in the field had changed the calculus. Brenton said:

What Putin has now announced is the mobilisation, which he’s been refusing to do since the war began and has now accepted the advice of his military and has come back to the nuclear threat in the context of alleged nuclear threats from the west. Now, I don’t know whether he believes that or not, but it is obviously a very significant step up in rhetoric.

On the weekend’s proposed referendums, he said:

Referendums in these circumstances are obviously not very honest things, and the outcome is pretty clear that they will say yes, we in the west will say that these are fake referenda and will resist them. But if Putin wants to proceed to annex these provinces, these referendums will give him the pretext to do so.

Asked what impact it would have Putin’s speech today would have in Ukraine, he said the Ukrainians have good reason to continue be confident following their progress on the ground. However, he said the impact on the Russian public may be more significant – the “special operation” becomes closer to being a real war, one that Russian leaders will be under even more pressure not to lose.

Going back to the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin for a minute, he said early in his speech “The aim of the West is to weaken and destroy Russia. They are openly saying that in 1991 they managed to destroy the Soviet Union and now is the time for Russia itself. That Russia will fall into many areas that are fighting themselves. They had those plans for a long time.”

He said of the west that “they made the Ukrainian people, cannon fodder and pushed them into the war”, and that they were “using the army against the civilian population, and organising the genocide and blockade and terror against the people who refused to acknowledge Ukrainian power is a result of the military coup.”

Our Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth reports that Russian soldiers will be having their contracts extended indefinitely as part of the partial mobilisation.

My colleague Luke Harding has just spoken to the BBC’s Today programme live from Kharkiv. He said of Putin’s speech:

It’s the usual kind of grudge list of accusations, and it is strange that more than six months into this conflict, Vladimir Putin is still living in a parallel reality, where really Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, but Ukraine threatened Russia. It is kind of upside down land.

I think we know what is coming next. That there will be a “referendum” in the territories of Ukraine which Russia occupies. And I think this is a kind of classic escalation. It is a Putin move where he says this is now Russia, and if Ukraine tries to seize back these territories, then, essentially, Moscow can do whatever it wants up to and including nuclear weapons. I think it is a bluff, but it is quite a quite a potent bluff.

Asked what other options Putin has, Harding said:

You have to understand the context, which is, where I am, in Kharkiv, the Ukrainian armed forces have just liberated territory about half the size of Wales and in more than 300 settlements they’ve been sort of pulverised and destroyed.

What’s clear, having been talking to people who have been under Russian occupation, is that there’s extremely limited support now for Russia in these occupied territories. And any kind of vote will be entirely fake. I mean, the paradox is that with his invasion, Putin has really kind of consolidated Ukraine as a state, and whatever differences that were there have kind of melted away.

UK Foreign Office minister accuses Putin of ‘a rewriting of history’

Russian president Vladimir Putin announces ‘partial mobilisation’ of Russia

Putin says the Russian army is acting as a military frontline of more than 1,000km facing the whole military operation of the collective west. For the defence of our motherland, Putin says he supports a “partial mobilisation, I stress it is partial mobilisation”. Only those who are currently in reserve will be conscripted. The decree of partial mobilisation has been signed.

Putin is now talking about the referendums, saying that Russia will do all it can to ensure safe conditions for the referendums for people to be able to express their will.

Putin has said that the Ukrainian army has been trained by Nato and is actually commanded by foreign commanders. He said the politics of terror and intimidation against Russia had intensified.

Putin is saying that they need volunteers fighting alongside the professional Russian army to be treated the same way including with payments and social guarantees.

Putin said people in the Donbas were being held hostage by Kyiv. He described the people fighting alongside the Russian army as “true patriots”.

Putin says a pre-emptive military operation was the only option possible because the west refused to have a peaceful solution to “the Donbas problem” and claiming the right to use nuclear weapons.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is currently speaking to the Russian people. He has started with a string of accusations against western countries, saying there have been many years of “total hatred” against Russia. He accuse the west of starting a war against Russia in Ukraine in 2014.

The UK Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update that the referenda in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia may have been brought forward amid “significant pressure” on Russian civilian and military leadership over the last two weeks.

Measures including the referendums and extended punishments for defaulting soldiers “have highly likely been brought forwards due to public criticism and mark a further development in Russia’s strategy”, the ministry said.

There’s still no confirmation of when Vladimir Putin will begin his big speech on annexations of Ukrainian territory. The prime-time televised address was postponed without explanation last night, with some Russian media figures reporting it was rescheduled to around 8AM Moscow time.
Forbes Russia, citing two sources in the Kremlin administration said the speech would be broadcast “when the Far East wakes up.”
There’s been a lot of speculation about the speech – analysts have suggested that the speech may also serve to announce a partial mobilisation in Russia.
In a press conference after a summit of Asian leaders last week, Putin had threatened escalation: “We are, indeed, responding rather restrainedly, but that’s for the time being,” Putin said. “If the situation continues to develop in this way, the answer will be more serious.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the US will never recognise Russian claims to any annexed parts of Ukraine, even if the referenda are held.

“If Russia does stage these sham “referenda”, the United States and the international community will never recognize Russia’s claims to any purportedly-annexed parts of Ukraine. We continue to stand with the people of Ukraine,” he said.

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