Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, has resigned after dozens of his officials allegedly had themselves registered as disabled to avoid military service. “The prosecutor general must take political responsibility for the situation in the prosecution bodies of Ukraine,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, announced after a security council meeting about cracking down on draft dodging. Kostin minutes later called the situation “clearly amoral” and agreed with Ukraine’s president that “it is right to announce my resignation from the position of prosecutor general”. Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, said on Tuesday that 64 members of medical commissions had been named as suspects in criminal investigations in 2024, and nine more had been tried and found guilty.
“It is not only prosecutors, by the way,” Zelenskyy said in his evening address. “There are hundreds of cases of obviously unjustified disability [statuses] among customs and tax officials, in the pension fund system, and in local administrations … All this must be dealt with carefully and promptly.” After the security council meeting, the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, dismissed the management of the central commission overseeing fitness for service, and senior officials in related roles in the health ministry. Zelenskyy ordered his cabinet to urgently draft a law dissolving existing medical commissions and reforming the disability assessment system.
It came as Ukrainian officials said a man wanted for evading a military call-up killed himself after being caught by police and taken to an army recruitment centre in the central city of Poltava. “He refused to undergo a military medical examination,” the recruitment centre said, and his body was found in one of the centre’s “technical rooms” showing “obvious signs” of suicide. An investigation into the circumstances of his death was opened. Mobilisation is a sensitive subject in Ukraine. Most working-age men are barred from leaving the country and those aged 25 and over are subject to being called up to fight.
Ukrainian military intelligence expects North Korean soldiers to start turning up on Wednesday in Russia’s southern Kursk region. “We are waiting for the first units tomorrow in the Kursk direction,” Lt Gen Kyrylo Budanov, head of the HUR intelligence directorate, told US publication The War Zone on Tuesday. “It is unclear at the moment how many or how they will be equipped. We will see after a couple of days.” In Seoul, a senior official in the office of the president said South Korea may consider directly supplying weapons to Ukraine as part of measures to counter military ties between North Korea and Russia, Pjotr Sauer writes.
The deployment of North Korean troops in Ukraine would be a sign of Russian desperation, Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, said on Tuesday. “It relies on Iranian weapons, it relies on North Korean soldiers. How much worse can it get?” he said. Stubb, who will make a state visit to China next week, said he would tell its president, Xi Jinping, there could be no peace deal without Ukraine’s involvement, and urge China not to support Russia in any way, “especially not with dual use materials and goods that can be used for weapons”.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, will meet Vladimir Putin on Thursday, his office has confirmed, after news of the visit was slammed by Ukraine’s foreign ministry, as Patrick Wintour writes. Guterres’s deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, told reporters the UN chief planned to meet with a “large number” of leaders in Kazan for the Brics summit. Asked about talks with Putin, he said Guterres would “reaffirm his well-known positions” on the Ukraine conflict and outline “the conditions for just peace”. Guterres’s decision has infuriated many in the west since the international criminal court issued warrants for Putin’s arrest in March 2023 related to the Ukraine war.
Russian forces advanced over a key waterway in the eastern Ukrainian stronghold of Chasiv Yar, a Ukrainian military official said, marking a setback for the defenders. Chasiv Yar sits on a strategic hilltop and its capture could speed up Russian advances in the Donetsk region. However, the official added: “The enemy managed to break into our line of defence, but there is no critical failure and we are not about to lose Chasiv Yar. Fierce fighting continues now.”
Russian attacks with drones and artillery hit residential buildings, killing five people including a child, in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Sumy and Donetsk, officials said on Tuesday. Separately, emergency services in the eastern Donetsk region said two people had been killed and another wounded by Russian shelling on the town of Myrnograd. Moscow’s defence ministry claimed its latest advances in the region on Tuesday, saying its forces had captured the abandoned frontline settlement of Novosadove in the Donetsk region. In occupied southern Ukraine, Russian-installed officials said a Ukrainian drone attack on the town of Enerhodar, home to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, killed one person.
The Russian war has driven down Ukraine’s population by around eight million by sparking an exodus and sending birthrates plunging, the UN population fund said on Tuesday. “Overall, Ukraine’s population has declined by an estimated 10 million since 2014 and by an estimated eight million since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022,” said the fund’s regional director covering Ukraine, Florence Bauer.
The US plans to contribute $20bn to a G7 loan package for Ukraine of $50bn and could soon announce new sanctions targeting Russian weapons procurement, the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said on Tuesday. The loan will be backed by profits from the interest on Russian assets frozen after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. G7 leaders are due to meet about it later this week. “What I want to emphasise is that the source of financing for these loans – this is not the American taxpayer,” Yellen said. She continued: “We will unveil strong new sanctions targeting those facilitating the Kremlin’s war machine, including intermediaries in third countries that are supplying Russia with critical inputs for its military.