Russia has brought down at least 24 drones over the Moscow region and three other provinces to the south and west, the Russian defence ministry and the Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin have reported in a series of Telegram updates. One person was injured in Tula when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, the region’s governor, Alexei Dyumin, said.
The spokesman for Ukraine’s ground forces, Volodymyr Fitio, has said that Russian soldiers “seek to reoccupy” the town of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region.
Russia has placed the Meta spokesperson Andy Stone on a wanted list, according to the state-run TASS news agency. TASS said the Russian interior ministry had opened a criminal investigation against Stone but had not disclosed the details of the investigation or charges.
The UK government has been urged to take immediate action to disrupt supply of technology used in electronic warfare. A dossier, compiled by Ukraine and circulated to the leading countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, identifies key Russian companies involved in the development and production of electronic military equipment. It says the UK and other countries have not yet imposed sanctions on some of the firms involved.
The former Russian prime minister turned Kremlin critic Mikhail Kasyanov has been added to a list of “foreign agents”, Russia’s justice ministry has announced. Kasyanov who served as prime minister for the first four years of Putin’s administration, now appears in the justice ministry’s register of foreign agents, a term reminiscent of the Soviet-era “enemy of the people”. He was sacked in February 2004 and he went into opposition to the Kremlin. In 2022, Kasyanov left the country and has criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Switzerland’s president, Alain Berset was in Kyiv and paid homage to the victims of the Holodomor famine that he said was “provoked by Soviet leaders”. Berset met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy to discuss “humanitarian demining, the use of frozen profits from the assets of the aggressor country and the peace formula”, according to Zelenskiy. Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, was also in Ukraine and with met the country’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal to discuss the progress of Ukraine’s integration into the EU.
Ukraine needs more air defences to protect its grain export routes as well as regions bordering Russia, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said as he addressed an international summit on food security in Kyiv. “There is a deficit of air defence – that is no secret,” Zelenskiy told the Grain from Ukraine summit, which was attended by senior officials from European countries, including Swiss president Alain Berset and Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Simonyte. Zelenskiy said Ukraine would be supplied by its foreign partners with vessels to accompany convoys of cargo ships from Ukraine’s ports to guarantee their security.
A Ukrainian soldier who was posthumously awarded a medal after a widely shared video showed him declaring “Glory to Ukraine” before apparently being shot dead, was commemorated with a statue in his northern home town. The video shared in March showed a man the military later named as Oleksandr Matsievskiy, a sniper with a unit from the region of Chernihiv, saying “Slava Ukraini”, a phrase more than a century old that has become a popular expression of resistance to Russia’s February 2022 invasion. Standing smoking a cigarette in a wooded area, carrying no visible weaponry, Matsievskiy is then seen slumping to the ground, apparently struck repeatedly by unseen shooters. Kyiv blamed “brutal and brazen” Russians for his death.
