Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has cast doubt on whether Poland would be able to supply Ukraine with fighters jets. Duda said sending F-16 aircraft would be a “very serious decision” that was “not easy to take”.
The latest defence intelligence update from the UK Ministry of Defence says that over the past two weeks Russia is likely to have had its highest rate of casualties since the first week of the invasion of Ukraine.
Russian forces have continued to shell Ukrainian cities over the weekend amid a grinding push to seize more land in the east of the country. One person was killed and another was wounded on Sunday morning in shelling of Nikopol, a city in the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, said the regional governor, Serhiy Lysak. The shelling damaged four residential buildings, a vocational school and a water treatment facility.
The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, will end his term as planned in October, a spokesperson for the alliance said, after a newspaper reported that a further extension was in the works.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s Wagner group, said the mercenary force had taken the village of Krasna Hora, on the northern edge of the embattled city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk region,
Galina Danilchenko, the Russian-installed mayor of the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, in the south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, said on Saturday that one civilian died in overnight shelling of Melitopol by Ukrainian forces. Two people were injured, she wrote on Telegram.
Reports indicate that three Russian S-300 missiles hit the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Saturday night, the regional governor, Oleh Sinehubov, wrote on Telegram. “One infrastructure facility was damaged. Information about the victims and the scale of the destruction is being clarified,” he said.
Ukraine’s forces are holding defence along the frontline in Donetsk, including in the besieged town of Bakhmut, with the fiercest battles raging for the cities of Vuhledar and Maryinka, Kyiv’s top military commander said on Saturday. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi did not specify where the gains were. He added that Ukrainian forices were trying to “stabilise” the frontline around Bakhmut, a city in the eastern Donbas region that has become the focal point of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and of Moscow’s drive to regain battlefield momentum.
Russia is ready for negotiations with Ukraine, but without preconditions, state media reported the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Vershinin, as saying. In an interview with state-run Zvezda television, Vershinin said it was not Ukraine but the US and the EU that should make the decision on talks with Russia. Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, who headed the country’s negotiating team in the early phases of the conflict, said “talks are out of the question”.
Zemfira, one of Russia’s most popular singers, has been placed on a list of “foreign agents” on grounds that she had supported Ukraine and criticised Russia’s “special military operation” in that country, according to the Russian justice ministry. The ministry has added several other people to its “foreign agents” list, including the opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov, Abbas Gallyamov, a political analyst, and activists Aleksandra Kazantseva and Tatyana Nazambaeva for “LGBT propaganda”.
Immigration authorities in Argentina are cracking down on Russian women who since the invasion of Ukraine have started travelling to Buenos Aires to give birth in order to gain Argentinian citizenship for their children. The director of Argentina’s immigration office, Florencia Carignano, said on Friday that a judicial investigation had been launched into what she described as a lucrative business that promises Argentinian passports for the Russian parents.
