Russians bombed several areas of southern Ukraine on Saturday night as Moscow sought to justify its war to the United Nations, even as it seeks to escalate the conflict.

The main thing from Sunday, the 214th day of the Ukrainian war, LIVETEXT:

08:26 According to an interview released on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was “shocked” that Israel had not provided Kyiv with anti-missile systems to counter Russian attacks.

Zelensky is asking for weapons right after the start of the war in February. He mentioned Israel’s Iron Dome system, which is often used to intercept rockets fired by Palestinian militants into Gaza.

“I don’t know what happened to Israel. I’m honest, I’m in a state of shock because I don’t understand why they couldn’t give us air support,” he said. (Reuters, News.ro)

A brief summary of recent events:

• On Friday, Russia launched “referendums” aimed at annexing four occupied regions of Ukraine, drawing condemnation from Kyiv and Western countries, which called the vote a farce and vowed not to recognize the results.
• Ukrainian officials said people were barred from leaving some occupied territories until the end of four days of voting, that armed groups went door-to-door to force people to vote, and that staff were threatened with dismissal if they did not participate.
• Russia claims that the “referendums” give people in these regions the opportunity to express their opinion, and Sergey Lavrov has said that the regions will be under Moscow’s “full protection” if they are annexed. Lavrov blamed the UN and the “unprecedented Russophobia” event.
• In the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma may consider draft laws on the annexation of the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia on Thursday, TASS reports.
• Margarita Simonyan, head of Russia’s state-run news channel RT, expressed concern that police officers sent draft documents to the wrong people as disillusionment with military mobilization grows across Russia.
• The head of the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council, Valery Fadeev, said that he had appealed to Defense Minister Serhiy Shoigu to “urgently resolve” issues related to mobilization.
• In another rare public sign of turmoil in Russia’s top leadership, the Defense Ministry said the deputy minister of logistics, four-star general Dmytro Bulgakov, had been replaced “for a transfer to a different role.”
• Protests against mobilization took place in Russia: hundreds were detained, security forces beat civilians. They chanted “Putin in the trenches!”
• It is necessary for the EU to show “openness towards those who do not want to be instrumentalized by the Kremlin”, assesses the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, calling to accept those fleeing from mobilization.
• China supports all efforts aimed at a peaceful resolution of the “crisis” in Ukraine, China’s foreign minister said at the UN General Assembly, adding that the urgent priority is to promote peace negotiations.
• A total of 211 vessels with 4.7 million tons of agricultural products on board left Ukraine as part of the UN-Turkey agreement to unblock Ukrainian seaports.

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• Saturday’s events were broadcast live on HotNews,ro