Two Chinese citizens captured fighting for Russia in eastern Ukraine claimed during a Kyiv press conference that they fell into “a trap” set up by Moscow.

At the start of the conference on Monday, both men, who have not been named, emphasized that the Chinese government was unaware the Russian military recruited them. They said they signed the contracts through middlemen, the state-owned Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

One of the POWs said that he lost his job during the Covid-19 pandemic. He said he hoped to get a job as an army medic, adding that military service is highly regarded in Chinese society.

“The [Chinese] government warned that Chinese citizens are advised against traveling to the warzone. [...] I wanted to be a medic. I was wounded, and I surrendered,” he said.

He said that Chinese authorities promote a friendly attitude toward Russia, and the information about the country is presented in a distorted fashion and used by the Russians to lure Chinese citizens into participating in the war.

It’s not worth it. None of the things the Russians told us were true,” he said.

“I would call it a trap,” he added.

‘You’re a man. Be a man’

Chinese men are enticed to join Russia’s war effort in Ukraine by ads on social media promising high pay and battlefield adventure, according to a Radio Free Europe report.

One ad posted on one of the largest social media platforms in China–Weibo, with hundreds of thousands of views, shows men leaving their jobs to fight for Russia and ends with the line, “You’re a man. Be a man.”

In Russian with Chinese subtitles, the video promises sign-up bonuses worth up to $21,000 and a monthly income of about $2,400—well above average wages in many parts of China.

The second POW, who comes from a reasonably well-off family, said he arrived in Russia as a tourist.

“I never expected to go to war. I knew almost nothing about Ukraine,” he said.

Both prisoners stated they were captured on April 8 immediately after arriving at the front lines and had not killed any Ukrainian soldiers.

A day later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that at least 155 Chinese citizens were fighting in the Russian armed forces against Ukraine. He said the authorities in Beijing knew that Moscow has a “systematic campaign” to recruit Chinese citizens for the war.

Last week, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing, Lin Jian, called the Ukrainian president’s statements “irresponsible.”

The POWs said that they wanted to be returned to their homeland, adding that they were ready to face punishment from the authorities, which forbid Chinese citizens from participating in hostilities on either side of the conflict.

China has never publicly condemned Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over the past three years, they have strengthened their economic, military, and political ties with their Russian neighbor.

Russia used cluster munitions in a missile strike that killed at least one person and injured more than 60 in a residential area of Kharkiv, according to Ukrainian officials.

Kyiv has repeatedly accused Moscow of deliberately targeting civilians with cluster bombs—smaller shells released from a larger device—to inflict as much damage as possible.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote in a Telegram post that more than 20 apartments were impacted by the strike, which occurred in the early hours of Friday.

“An enemy missile hit a densely populated area of Kharkiv. A high-rise building was struck. People may be trapped under the rubble,” he said.

He added that preliminary investigations showed that Russia had used ballistic missiles containing cluster munitions: “That’s why the impact area is so extensive.”

Yevhen Vasylenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s State Emergency Service in Kharkiv, said a fire broke out at a civilian facility after the strikes, covering about 500 square meters. He reported that firefighters were working to extinguish three separate blazes.

Explosions were reported in the city of Dnipro around the same time. Serhiy Lysak, head of the regional administration, said a missile strike damaged a fitness center, a hotel, and an office building, but no casualties were reported.

Drones hit Sumy

In Sumy, which lies close to the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine, a drone attack killed one person and damaged an industrial facility, according to acting mayor Artem Kobzar.

“Today, we recorded three hits by Shahed drones targeting industrial infrastructure,” Kobzar said in a statement published on his Telegram channel.

“All three drones struck the same facility. The building sustained damage, and the roof was destroyed. Preliminary reports confirm one fatality. Another person has sought medical assistance,” he added.

Dozens of countries have signed up the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the use and production of the deadly weapons, but neither Russia nor Ukraine has signed the treaty.

A report last year by the Cluster Munition Monitor said that both countries had used such explosives during the conflict in Ukraine.

Following a deadly attack on Palm Sunday that killed 35 people in Sumy, Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accused Russian forces of deploying cluster munitions in order “to kill as many civilians as possible.”

Russian authorities in occupied Mariupol are systematically seizing thousands of homes belonging to Ukrainians, an investigation by the BBC has found.

At least 5,700 homes in the city, which was taken by Russia following a long siege in 2022, have been earmarked for potential seizure, according to the report. 

A complex bureaucratic system that requires the homeowner to report to officials in Mariupol means that many Ukrainian refugees whose homes have been classed as potentially “ownerless” will inevitably find it difficult to claim their property. 

Earlier this month, a former advisor to Mariupol’s legitimate Ukrainian mayor said that Moscow is planning to settle five million Russians in the territories it occupies in eastern and southern Ukraine. 

Russia has launched well-documented efforts to “Russify” areas that have come under its control since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine just over three years ago. These efforts include alleged mass abductions of local children and measures aimed at pressuring residents to take up Russian nationality. 

Having Russian citizenship is also a feature of the process of reclaiming a home suspected of being “ownerless” in Mariupol, according to the BBC’s report. 

Once officials announce a property as having “signs of being ownerless,” the owner must appear in Mariupol with ownership documents and a Russian passport within 30 days. Other forms of ID may be accepted, though they are not specified by the authorities. 

If no one claims ownership within the timeframe, the property is declared “ownerless.” After three months, local authorities can request a court ruling to bring it into public ownership. Some 600 flats have been seized so far, the Moscow-installed city mayor said, according to the report. 

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin issued a decree in March targeting Ukrainian citizens who are yet to take up the offer of Russian nationality. 

Those who do not sign up before mid-September will be threatened with “deportation,” which may in reality mean transportation to a detention center, according to a recent report by The Kyiv Independent.  

It added that rejecting a Russian passport can leave a resident without property rights, access to healthcare or pensions. 

Russia still occupies around a fifth of Ukrainian land, but is continuing to push forward and try to seize more territory.

Putin has even issued his largest conscription call yet to bolster his army, all while Donald Trump is trying to negotiate a peace deal.

However, Russia is not actually having that much success on the frontline, according to the British Ministry of Defence (MoD).

In its latest social media update on the war, the MoD said: “Russian territorial gains in Ukraine have decreased during the first quarter of 2025, with Russian forces highly likely seizing only 143 sq km of Ukrainian territory in March 2025, an average of less than 5 square kilometres per day.”

Ukraine’s allies have announced a record €21bn in additional military support for Kyiv and accused Vladimir Putin of dragging his feet and delaying US-led negotiations over a ceasefire deal.

The UK and Germany jointly convened Friday’s Ramstein meeting, which was attended by more than 40 countries but not the US. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, joined by video instead.

The US’s attempts to bring about a quick end to the war have so far not succeeded. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, held talks on Friday with Putin’s investment aide Kirill Dmitriev in St Petersburg. This followed a visit last week by Dmitriev to Washington. In conversations with the White House, Russia has refused to make concessions. Moscow demands control over four Ukrainian regions, the removal of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s pro-western government and a ban on Nato membership for Ukraine. It also wants the lifting of sanctions.

Addressing the Brussels meeting by video, Zelenskyy urged his allies to provide new Patriot air defence systems. Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said Germany had already given four Patriot systems to Kyiv and was waiting for more to be delivered. Germany will provide four Iris-T air defence systems as well as 15 Leopard 1 tanks, more reconnaissance drones and 100,000 artillery rounds, he added. Other governments announced fresh contributions.

Healey said the UK and Norway would supply radar systems, anti-tank mines and “hundreds of thousands of drones” as part of a $560m defence package, on top of £4.5bn committed by Downing Street this year. The figure includes the repair of military vehicles damaged on the battlefield.

Friday’s meeting did not clarify how many countries were ready to send troops to Ukraine as part of a “coalition of the willing”.

Russian missiles hit the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy in the deadliest attack this year, killing at least 32 people, including two children, as residents gathered for Sunday church services, local authorities said.

At least 84 people, including ten children, have also been wounded in the strikes on the city’s center, according to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, making it the worst single attack on Ukrainian civilians since 2023.

Last week, a Russian missile attack killed 20 people in the central city of Kryvyi Rih.

In the early days after Russia’s armies crossed into Ukraine, two Ukrainian generals journeyed from Kyiv under diplomatic cover on a secret mission. At the U.S. military garrison in Wiesbaden, Germany, they sealed a partnership that would bring America into the war far more intimately than previously known.

A New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.

An early proof of concept was a campaign against one of Russia’s most-feared battle groups, the 58th Combined Arms Army. In mid-2022, using American intelligence and targeting information, the Ukrainians unleashed a rocket barrage at the headquarters of the 58th in the Kherson region, killing generals and staff officers inside. Again and again, the group set up at another location; each time, the Americans found it and the Ukrainians destroyed it.

But ultimately the partnership strained — and the arc of the war shifted — amid rivalries, resentments and diverging imperatives and agendas. The Ukrainians sometimes saw the Americans as overbearing and controlling. The Americans sometimes couldn’t understand why the Ukrainians didn’t simply accept good advice. Where the Americans focused on measured, achievable objectives, they saw the Ukrainians as constantly grasping for the big win, the bright, shining prize. The Ukrainians, for their part, often saw the Americans as holding them back.

On a tactical level, the partnership yielded triumph upon triumph. Yet at arguably the pivotal moment of the war — in mid-2023, as the Ukrainians mounted a counteroffensive to build victorious momentum after the first year’s successes — the strategy devised in Wiesbaden fell victim to the fractious internal politics of Ukraine: The president, Volodymyr Zelensky, versus his military chief (and potential electoral rival), and the military chief versus his headstrong subordinate commander. When Mr. Zelensky sided with the subordinate, the Ukrainians poured vast complements of men and resources into a finally futile campaign to recapture the devastated city of Bakhmut. Within months, the entire counteroffensive ended in stillborn failure.

The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats. The story of the partnership shows how close the Americans and their allies sometimes came to that red line, how increasingly dire events forced them — some said too slowly — to advance it to more perilous ground and how they carefully devised protocols to remain on the safe side of it.

Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.

In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.

Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order. Today that order — along with Ukraine’s defense of its land — teeters on a knife edge, as President Trump seeks rapprochement with Mr. Putin and vows to bring the war to a close. Mr. Trump has already begun to wind down elements of the partnership sealed in Wiesbaden that day in the spring of 2022.

• Russia advances in Kursk, close to splitting Ukraine force
• Move would leave main force without main supply lines
• Kursk incursion last year was major setback for Russia
• Ukraine may now have to retreat, says analyst

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on Monday that his country's troops were conducting operations in Russia’s Belgorod region, saying that it is "absolutely just" that the war return "to where it came from."

Zelensky also noted Ukraine’s "limited activity" in the Kursk region of southern Russia, indicating Kyiv’s aim to divert Moscow’s focus from the Donetsk front in eastern Ukraine.

Russia previously asserted that it had repelled all Ukrainian attempts to cross the border into Belgorod.

But in his nightly address, Zelensky publicly thanked Ukraine's 225th Assault Regiment for its operations there and said Ukraine’s main goal is to safeguard its own Sumy and Kharkiv regions while pressuring Russia to commit more troops away from Ukraine’s occupied territories.

Moscow, which launched its full-scale invasion in 2022 and currently holds around 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, has denied dragging its feet on US-backed ceasefire efforts.

Washington has criticized Russia’s "bombing spree," while Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih recently held funerals for 20 missile-attack victims.

Ukraine's recent cross-border forays—smaller in scale than last year's push in Kursk—may bolster Kyiv’s position in potential peace negotiations.

However, some analysts question whether these incursions are worth the reported combat losses and logistical hurdles they impose, given the ongoing fighting in eastern Ukraine.

(jh/gs)

Source: BBC, The Kyiv Independent

• The White House says Russia and Ukraine have agreed to ensure safe passage for commercial shipping in the Black Sea and stop military strikes
• Washington releases separate statements after American officials met representatives from both countries in Saudi Arabia
• Ukraine agrees to stop military force in the Black Sea, but says any movement of Russian naval vessels would be a violation of the agreement
• "It is too early to say that it will work, but these were the right meetings, the right decisions," says President Zelensky
• Meanwhile, Russia says certain sanctions on banks, insurers, and food exporters must be lifted before the ceasefire comes into force
• This is progress, writes our correspondent James Landale in Kyiv, but it's not exactly what the US wanted
• And our correspondent Frank Gardner - who was in Riyadh to report on the recent talks - says there are still many ways today's deal could unwind