The head of Russia‘s Wagner mercenary force fighting in eastern Ukraine said on Tuesday said he had been told he and his men would be regarded as traitors if they abandoned their positions in the city of Bakhmut.

But Yevgeny Prigozhin said for the second time in a matter of days that his forces would leave Bakhmut if they did not receive the ammunition they needed to press the battle.

He delivered his latest tirade in a profanity-laced audio message which coincided with Russia marking the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two with its traditional parade on Moscow’s Red Square.

“A combat order came yesterday which clearly stated that if we leave our positions (in Bakhmut), it will be regarded as treason against the motherland. That was the message to us,” Prigozhin said.

“(But) if there is no ammunition, then we will leave our positions and be the ones asking who is really betraying the Motherland. Apparently, the one (betraying the Motherland) is the person who signed it (the order to supply too little ammunition.”

He said his forces would stay in Bakhmut and keep insisting they get their ammo “for a few more days”.

Prigozhin has previously accused the defence ministry of deliberately starving his forces of ammunition. The ministry has said it is working to ensure all battlefield units have what they need.

Late on Monday, Prigozhin said there were signs the ammunition problem was being solved but on Tuesday he said the size of the shipment had been slashed.

“They’ve given us only 10% of what we asked for. We’ve been deceived,” he said.

Russia attacked Ukraine with its latest barrage of cruise missiles, before Vladimir Putin made an angry speech to mark Victory Day in Moscow – hitting out at Western countries for starting what he claims is a “real war” against his nation (Chris Stevenson writes).

However, in a sign of the toll that his invasion of Ukraine has taken on Russia’s forces, the annual military parade across Red Square was pared back as Moscow throws manpower and weaponry at the frontlines following an underwhelming winter offensive and an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.

“Today civilisation is once again at a decisive turning point,” Mr Putin said as he again sought to defend his invasion of Ukraine by painting Russia as being cornered by “Western global elites”.

“A real war has been unleashed against our motherland,” he said.

The most abiding image of the parade, part of commemorations of the Soviet victory over the Nazi’s in the Second World War that have become a centrepiece of Putin’s time in office, was of a single T-34 Soviet-era tank rolling down the road near the start of what is usually a show of Russian military might. The T-34 has traditionally opening the display, but it is usually accompanied by more modern battle tanks, such as the T-14 Armata and a T-74, both of which have been used in Ukraine.

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Russia fired cruise missiles at Kyiv and paraded troops across Moscow’s Red Square for its annual celebration of victory in World War Two, pared back amid shortages of manpower and arms at the front after a failed winter campaign in Ukraine.

In a fiery 10-minute speech in front of the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin thundered against “Western global elites” and said civilisation was at “a decisive turning point”.

“A real war has been unleashed against our homeland,” said the Russian leader, who last year ordered what the West calls an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, destroying cities and killing thousands of civilians.

Underlining how the war has isolated Russia from most of Europe and pushed Ukraine closer to the West, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was visiting Kyiv, where she called Ukraine “the beating heart of today’s European values”.

The holiday commemorating the Soviet victory in World War Two is the most important day in the calendar in Russia under Putin, who casts his invasion of Ukraine as analogous to Russia’s fight against the Nazis. Ukraine, which suffered proportionally greater losses than Russia in World War Two, calls that an abuse of shared history to justify aggression.

The parade was full of traditional pomp but unmistakably scaled down from previous years. In place of phalanxes of modern battle tanks, a single World War Two-vintage T-34 rolled across Red Square. The usual fighter jet flyover was cancelled.

Putin’s message was also undermined by a new profanity-laced tirade from the boss of Russia’s Wagner private army directed at Moscow’s generals for failing to give his forces enough weapons.

“A combat order came yesterday which clearly stated that if we leave our positions (in Bakhmut), it will be regarded as treason against the motherland,” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in an audio message. “(But) if there is no ammunition, then we will leave our positions and be the ones asking who is really betraying the Motherland.”

The US Justice Department says it has disrupted a long-running Russian cyberespionage campaign that stole sensitive information from computer networks in dozens of countries, including the U.S. and other NATO members.

Prosecutors linked the spying operation to a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, and accused the hackers of stealing documents from hundreds of computer systems belonging to governments of NATO members, an unidentified journalist for a U.S. news organization who reported on Russia, and other select targets of interest to the Kremlin.

“For 20 years, the FSB has relied on the Snake malware to conduct cyberespionage against the United States and our allies — that ends today,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement.

The specific targets were not named in court papers, but U.S. officials described the espionage campaign as “consequential,” having successfully exfiltrated sensitive documents from NATO countries and also targeted U.S. government agencies and others in the U.S.

The Russian operation relied on the malicious software known as Snake to infect computers, with hackers operating from what the Justice Department said was a known FSB facility in Ryazan, Russia.

U.S. officials said they’d been investigating Snake for about a decade and came to regard it as the most sophisticated malware implant relied on by the Russian government for espionage campaigns. They said Turla, the FSB unit believed responsible for the malware, had refined and revised it multiple times as a way to avoid being shut down.

The Justice Department, using a warrant this week from a federal judge in Brooklyn, launched what it said was a high-tech operation using a specialized tool called Perseus that caused the malware to effectively self-destruct. Federal officials said they were confident that, based on the impact of its operation this week, the FSB would not be able to reconstitute the malware implant.

Japan is working towards the opening of a NATO liaison office in Tokyo, Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. Koji Tomita said on Tuesday.

Tomita made the comment at an event hosted by the National Press Club in Washington when asked about a report in the Nikkei Asia this month saying that the U.S.-led alliance was planning to open such an office, its first in Asia, to facilitate consultations in the region.

“The point you mentioned is one of the things that we are working on to strengthen our partnership. But I really haven’t heard any final confirmation of that, but we are working in that direction,” he said.

NATO has not confirmed the Nikkei report, saying it would not go into details of NATO allies’ ongoing deliberations.

Tomita, who was briefing on the G7 summit Japan will host in Hiroshima from May 19-21, said the meeting would be looking for closer alignment of the group’s approach towards China.

Nikkei Asia said the liaison office was due to open next year and would enable discussions with NATO’s security partners, such as South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, with geopolitical challenges from China and Russia in mind.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg visited Japan in January and pledged with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to strengthen ties in the face off “historic” security challenges, citing Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine and China’s rising military power.

After the Nikkei Asia report,

China said “high vigilance” was needed in the face of NATO’s “eastward expansion.”

Ukraine has fought back courageously against Mr Putin’s warped bid to restore territory lost to Moscow with the collapse of the Soviet Union and has continued to defy the odds by defending itself against Russian onslaughts with the help of Western military aid.

A British-led group of European countries has asked for expressions of interest to supply Ukraine with missiles with a range of up to 300 km (190 miles) in what would be another step-up in military support for Kyiv against Russia‘s invasion.

The call for responses from companies who could provide such missiles was included in a notice posted last week by the International Fund for Ukraine - a group of countries including Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden - set up to send weapons to Kyiv.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which administers the fund, asked companies to get in touch if they could provide missiles that can be launched from land, sea or air with a payload of between 20 and 490 kg (44 and 1,078 pounds).

The notice asked for other desirable requirements including a “low probability of intercept”, “mission planning capability”, and “air defence penetration methods to increase probability of successful strike”. The notice said companies that responded would be contacted from June 5.

A British official said no final decision had been made to send missiles with these capabilities to Ukraine.

The Washington Post reported details of the procurement notice earlier on Tuesday.

Britain and other Western countries have scaled up their pledges of military aid for Ukraine this year.

Britain said in January it would send 14 of its main Challenger 2 battle tanks to Ukraine. Other nations including the United States and Germany subsequently committed to supply tanks.

Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine‘s defence minister, told Reuters that Kyiv had no concrete information about the UK-led effort to supply long-range missiles, but that Ukraine had for months been consistently appealing to Western governments to provide long-range weapons.

“We would welcome it if the UK takes on a leadership role with the long-range missiles, in the same way they did with the Challenger 2 main battle tanks,” he said.

A bank has issued an apology after rejecting a homeowner’s mortgage application due to them hosting two Ukrainian refugees.

A mother and her young daughter have been staying in an annexe at Dominik Zaum’s family home since June 2022.

Fixed-rate mortgage deals leapt up in the wake of last autumn’s disastrous mini-budget, with many predicting they will continue to edge up even further as the Bank of England looks set to hike interest rates.

When his mortgage came up for renewal, Mr Zaum, like many others, begun shopping around for a new deal – and eventually applied for one with Halifax, he told BBC Radio 4’s Money Box programme.

Emily Atkinson reports:

The Russian president also accused the “Western elite and globalists” of encouraging “Russophobia” as he addressed crowds on Tuesday 9 May.

“We see that in a number of countries, they are destroying the memorials to the Soviet fighters, to the great generals, they are creating a real cult of Nazism,” Mr Putin said.

He also suggested the “mocking of the memory of past generations is a real crime”.

It was a month into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces had withdrawn from around Kyiv and in their wake Bel Trew and her team stumbled on a body by an abandoned Russian camp.

His hands were tied. He had been burned and shot in the back. Soldiers said he was a teenager.

As Bel tried to find out who he was and what had happened, she uncovered a nightmare world: a nation struggling to find thousands of its missing and to identify its dead.