The Russian president ordered the army across the border to "maintain peace", after he recognised the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in a televised address to the nation #RussiaUkraineCrisis
In an ominous speech that lasted almost an hour, Mr Putin accused the Ukrainian government of "genocide" and said it was sure to seek nuclear weapons with the assistance of the West
Afterwards, he signed a decree that recognised the independence of the Russian-speaking separatist regions, which have been under effective control since Russia stoked a separatist war there in 2014
In Mr Putin’s eyes, it could create a legal basis for the Russian army to move across the border into the Donbas region and engage in direct conflict with Ukrainian forces - dashing months of Western diplomatic efforts aimed at averting an invasion
🔴The announcement drew immediate condemnation from Western governments, which threatened to impose sanctions
🇬🇧Boris Johnson said “The UK will do everything we can to stand by the people of Ukraine, with a very robust package of sanctions”
🇺🇦Ukraine immediately requested a meeting of the UN Security Council to address the threat of a Russian invasion, citing security assurances it received in return for giving up its Soviet-era nuclear stockpile
🇷🇺The move means Russia is abandoning the 2015 Minsk II peace agreements that would have re-integrated the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics back into Ukraine
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.