Russian air defences have shot down “several” drones targeting the Moscow region, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Tuesday, with one hitting a tower that had also been struck on Sunday. The Russian defence ministry said two drones were destroyed by air defence systems in the Odintsovo and Narofominsk districts near Moscow, while a third was jammed and crashed in the capital. The ministry blamed the attacks on Kyiv. Sobyanin said in a Telegram post that no injuries had been reported. “The facade of the 21st floor was damaged. The glazing of 150 square metres was broken,” he said. Moscow’s Vnukovo airport was also temporarily shut and flights redirected.
Russia also downed a drone in the Sevastopol district of Crimea, according to the local governor. Mikhail Razvozhaev wrote on Telegram: “A UAV was shot down in the Kara-Koba area. An explosion occurred on the ground. Grass and bushes caught fire. Fire brigades are already on site and have begun to put out the blaze.”
Poland’s ministry of defence said it will increase the number of troops at its border with Belarus after two helicopters from Belarus violated Poland’s airspace on Tuesday. Poland’s military initially denied that helicopters with Belarusian insignia had crossed into Polish airspace, but by Tuesday evening, the defence ministry acknowledged there “was a violation of Polish airspace by two Belarusian helicopters that were carrying out training near the border”.
The mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, said early on Tuesday that at least three drones hit populated areas of his city and one drone destroyed two floors of a dormitory. Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram: “A fire broke out and emergency services are attending. Details on casualties are being clarified.”
Ukraine’s interior minister has claimed an attempt to cross into the country on its northern border in the Chernihiv region by a Russian saboteur group has been foiled.
The Russian ministry of defence claims it successfully repelled a unmanned boat drone attack on two of its ships in the Black Sea fleet – the Sergey Kotov and the Vasily Bykov. In a statement the ministry said the unsuccessful attack was 340 km southwest of Sevastopol, and that three Ukrainian drone boats were destroyed.
Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces, has visited Russian troops in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, part of which is occupied by Russia and which the Russian Federation claims to have annexed. Gerasimov was one of the key Russian military figures repeatedy criticised by Yevgeny Prigozhin ahead of the Wagner group’s aborted uprising.
Denis Pushilin, the Russian-imposed acting governor of occupied Donetsk, has said the village of Staromaiorske remains hotly contested between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
A resident of Krasnodar in Russia has received a 12-year prison sentence after being found guilty of passing information to the security service of Ukraine.
At least six people, including a 10-year-old child, have been killed and more than 80 people are now known to have been injured after Russia struck a high-rise apartment in Kryvyi Rih on Monday. Oleksiy Kuleba, the deputy head of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office, called for revenge, saying: “Every day, Ukrainian cities are under fire from Russian terrorists.” He said targeting civilians was a sign of “the despair and defeat of the Russian Federation at the front”.
Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza on Monday lost an appeal against his 25-year jail sentence, the RIA state news agency reported. Kara-Murza, who holds Russian and British citizenship, was jailed for 25 years in April for treason and spreading “false information” about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Reuters reports. Britain added six new designations to its Russia sanctions list, an update to the government website showed on Monday, targeting judges and officials involved in the trial of Kara-Murza.
Ukraine and Croatia have agreed on the possibility of using Croatian ports on the Danube and the Adriatic Sea for the export of Ukrainian grain, Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said after talks with his Croatian counterpart on Monday, according to Reuters.
Russian airstrikes destroyed an estimated 180,000 metric tonnes of grain crops in the space of nine days this month, the Ukrainian foreign ministry said on Monday.
Ukrainian forces have recaptured nearly 15 sq km (5.8 sq miles) of land from Russian troops in the east and south over the past week during their counteroffensive, a senior defence official said on Monday. Kyiv’s forces have now retaken 204.7 sq km in the south since they launched a major push back against Russian forces early last month, deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram.
