The Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida told reporters that he and the US president, Joe Biden, have agreed to continue sanctions against Russia and support of Ukraine as the two leaders met in the Japanese city of Hiroshima today, Reuters reports. Reuters was unable to verify his assertion and there was no immediate comment from the defence ministry. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, on Thursday accused regular Russian army units of pulling back 570 metres north of the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, leaving his own fighters’ flanks exposed.

The claim comes a day after a major wave of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, the Russian state-owned news agency Tass has reported. The Russian defence ministry said on Thursday that it had struck Ukrainian military targets using high-precision missiles. While Russia boosted its forces in the city, attacked the suburbs to the north and engaged in fierce fighting in the southern suburbs, Ukraine’s forces advanced 500 meters in the north and in some areas in the south by one kilometre, deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said on her Telegram channel. Ukraine said it had repelled a day of Russian attacks in and around the ruined eastern city of Bakhmut on Thursday and made gains of a kilometre in some places while buying time for “certain planned actions”. At a press conference alongside his Norwegian counterpart at the Northwood military base on Thursday, the Wallace said Moscow has submarines and spy ships “specifically designed” to “potentially sabotage or attack critical national infrastructure belonging to its adversaries”. There is no doubt Russia has “the intent and the ability” to target the West’s underwater energy and communication lines, the British defence secretary Ben Wallace said. Meanwhile, Gram said Norway donating F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine was not on the agenda at the moment.

“All I can say is it is my understanding that it has been used since we announced its deployment to Ukraine, but I’m not going to go into further details,” Wallace said at a joint press conference with Norway’s defence minister, Bjørn Arild Gram. Long-range Storm Shadow missiles provided to Ukraine by Britain have been used, the British defence minister, Ben Wallace, said on Thursday.

Ukraine war 2020 map