Russia-Ukraine war: Europe urged to accept Russians fleeing military draft as border crossings surge – live | Ukraine

The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said the country would not be granting asylum to Russians fleeing the country.

“Russians should stay and fight. Against Putin,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday.

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A campaign to repatriate the body of British aid worker Paul Urey has raised more than £8,000 on GoFundMe.

Urey, from Warrington, Cheshire, died after being captured by pro-Russia separatists in April along with another Briton, Dylan Healey. Urey’s daughter, 20-year-old Chelsea Coman, created the campaign and said the return of her father’s body would bring the family closure.

The two men were later charged with “mercenary activities” by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), but in July the Russian proxy authorities announced that Urey had died as a result of “illness and stress”. Healy was one of five Britons released from Russia and reunited with their families this week.

The body was handed to Ukraine in September with “possible signs of unspeakable torture”, according to the country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba.

“As me and my sister is only 20 and 17 years of age and still in college, we have no source of income that could pay near enough that amount,” the campaign says.

Coman and her sister, Courtney, 17, were told by the Foreign Office they would need to pay nearly £10,000 in repatriation costs.

Coman, who found about her father’s death over the news, said:

He doesn’t deserve to be out there at the minute. It would set our mind at ease to be able to lay him to rest and know that he’s not in a different country still suffering even though he’s died. We would get closure.

Queue at Russian border stretches 10km as people flee

More details of overnight attacks are emerging from Ukraine.

Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said Russian forces had shelled settlements near the Russian border.

In the Kupyan district, five people were injured from shelling, including two children, aged 10 and 17, he said.

Sinegubov warned residents against visiting forests due to a large number of mines and unexploded ammunition. “In the past day, the pyrotechnics of the state emergency service defused 578 explosive objects in the region,” he said via his Telegram channel on Saturday.

A 45-year-old man was injured from a mine while picking mushrooms in the Chuguyiv district, he said. A similar incident happed to a 24-year-old resident of Izium, he added.

Vladimir Putin has taken a more direct position in the strategic planning for the war in Ukraine in recent weeks, according to US officials, reports the New York Times.

The Russian president rejected requests from commanders to retreat from the southern city of Kherson and pull back across the Dnieper River, according to the Times.

While such a withdrawal would preserve Russian equipment and lives, it would be another public humiliation for Putin after Ukraine successfully reclaimed large portions of territory in the Kharkiv region earlier this month.

News of Putin’s more direct strategic involvement comes after the Kremlin began mobilising 300,000 militarily reservists to serve in Ukraine. Kherson is one of four Russian-occupied provinces in Ukraine holding “referendums” on joining the Russian Federation, which began on Friday morning.

Two civilians were killed on Friday in the Donetsk region, and three people were injured, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk oblast.

“Currently, it is impossible to establish the exact number of victims in Mariupol and Volnovas,” he said via his Telegram channel on Saturday.

Russian authorities in the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhya and Kherson have allegedly started handing out draft notices and mobilising men of conscription age who “renounced Ukrainian citizenship and received passports of the Russian federation” according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence.

“Servicemen of the Russian occupation forces continue to commit illegal actions against the civilian population and engage in looting,” the ministry’s statement said on Saturday.

“According to available information, in Melitopol, the so-called ‘kadyrivtsi’ seized a dealer’s warehouse of agricultural machinery and are trying to sell off the property.”

Earlier, we reported on president Volodymyr Zelenskiy telling Ukrainians in occupied territory to hide from Russian mobilisation, avoid conscription letters, and get to Ukraine-held land.

Here are the latest photos to come out of Ukraine and elsewhere: