Closing summary
We will be closing this blog shortly. Here is an overview of today’s developments:
Power has been restored to 270,000 consumers in Kyiv after Russian overnight attacks knocked it out, Ukraine’s energy minister Svitlana Hrynchuk wrote on Facebook on Friday. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia used over 450 drones and 30 missiles in a country-wide attack targeting the energy sector. He reported power outages across nine regions and stressed the need for partners’ support with air defence systems and sanctions enforcement.
Russian drones and missiles damaged 12 apartment buildings in the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing a seven-year-old boy and injuring four people, according to the regional governor. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said 12 people had been injured, with eight of them taken to hospital.
Twenty-three Ukrainian children and adolescents have been brought out of Russian-occupied areas of the country to territory under Kyiv’s control, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff said on Thursday. Andriy Yermak, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the rescue was carried out under the president’s “Bring Kids Back UA” programme aimed at bringing to safe areas children deported to Russia or confined to Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
French president Emmanuel Macron will convene a meeting of France’s mainstream political parties on Friday ahead of a self-imposed deadline to name a new prime minister, as the country’s central bank chief warned the political crisis was curbing growth. Macron is searching for his sixth prime minister in under two years and will need to find a personality whose appeal spans the centre-right to centre-left in order to steer a budget through a fragmented and fractured parliament.
Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado has won the Nobel peace prize. The committee commended Machado as a “brave and committed champion of peace” who “keeps the flame of democracy burning during a growing darkness”. Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, made the announcement at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo.
Spain on Friday rejected US president Donald Trump’s suggestion it should be expelled from Nato for failing to meet his ramped-up defence spending target. Spanish government sources said: “Spain is a committed and full member of Nato. And it meets its capacity targets as much as the United States.”
Police in Belgium have arrested three young adults suspected of plotting a jihadist-inspired attack using drone-mounted explosives, with the Belgian prime minister reported to be among the politicians targeted. The arrests were made in the northern city of Antwerp as part of an investigation into “attempted terrorist murder and participation in the activities of a terrorist group”, the federal prosecutor Ann Fransen told a news conference.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has accused the EU of “an obvious double standard” for maintaining a minerals deal with Rwanda to supply Europe’s hi-tech industries when it deployed a far-wider sanctions regime in response to the war in Ukraine. Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, the DRC foreign minister, urged the EU to levy much stronger sanctions against Rwanda, which has fuelled the conflict in eastern DRC, describing the bloc’s response to violations of DRC territory as “very timid”.
A Swedish appeal court on Friday acquitted one man of accessory to the murder in 2024 of the rapper known by the alias C. Gambino, Reuters reports.
The Swedish award-winning artist, who kept his identity hidden, was shot dead in a suspected gang-related attack in Gothenburg on the country’s west coast.
A lower court had found Hassan Rabeie, 22, Vide Atterstam, 20, and Fatjam Vardari, 21, guilty of accessory to murder.
It sentenced Rabeie to life imprisonment and the other two to 15 years and six months, and 12 years and six months, respectively.
The court of appeal for Western Sweden on Friday acquitted Vardari of the charge, while upholding the verdicts for the other two.
All three have denied all the charges against them.
