Republicans in the US Senate have defeated a bipartisan bill to bolster US-Mexico border security and fund Ukraine’s defence that had taken months to negotiate, but senators said they might still separately approve aid for Ukraine and Israel, without tying it to the border crisis.
Ukraine has urged the west to speed up and increase deliveries of artillery shells after a Russian missile attack on Kyiv and other regions on Wednesday killed at least four in the capital and wounded more than 40. Officials said one person was also killed in the southern Mykolaiv region.
Leaked documents obtained by hackers are reported to reveal that Russia paid Iran $1.75bn in gold bullion weighing about two tonnes for thousands of the Shahed drones used to attack Ukraine. Based on the quantity ordered in the leaked documents, the deal worked out at $193,ooo each for 6,000 drones, with the balance made up by licensing fees for Russia to build its own, cheaper copies. A hacker group calling itself the Prana Network said it took the files from servers of the drones’ Iranian manufacturer, Sahara Thunder, the Telegraph reported.
The Ukrainian parliament passed at first reading a bill tightening army mobilisation rules aimed at allowing the government to draft more people as war with Russia nears its third year, lawmakers said. “This is not the final decision. There will be a second reading, and changes will be made before it,” said Oleksiy Honcharenko, one of the lawmakers.
A major Chinese international bank has cut off some of its Russian clients, reportedly fearing it could be caught up in sanctions over the Ukraine war, according to the Vedomosti business daily of Moscow. Zhejiang Chouzhou Commercial Bank is one of the main banks for Russian exporters. The paper said other banks had tightened compliance checks, hampering currency transfers in and out of China for Russian businesses. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the government was “working” on addressing the problem with the Chinese government.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Russian-occupied Ukraine is “relatively stable” with a reduction in shelling nearby, the UN’s nuclear energy chief, Rafael Grossi, has said. Grossi, who visited the plant on Wednesday escorted by Russian soldiers, said he inspected water supply wells that had to be drilled after “the episode at the Nova Kakhovka dam”. The dam, which supplied water to stop the nuclear reactors melting down, was blown up on 6 June 2023. The European parliament on 15 June 2023 condemned the dam’s destruction as a Russian war crime.
Sources in the German government said it was examining the possibility of nationalising Russian oil company Rosneft’s operations in Germany. Berlin took control of them following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Germany is not big enough to make up the difference should the US fail to deliver weapons to Ukraine, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has said ahead of a trip to Washington. “That is, I believe, the real danger we currently face.”
Russia’s statistics agency has claimed the economy grew by 3.6% in 2023 thanks to a boost in military spending because of the offensive in Ukraine, although it admitted there are long-term economic challenges. Inflation rose to 7.4% in 2023, the ruble has fallen, interest rates sit at 16% and worker shortages are driving up the cost of labour, with a continued exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians after the Ukraine invasion depriving key sectors of qualified personnel.
