Summary
The time in Kyiv is 9pm. Here is a brief round-up of the day’s top stories:
Vladimir Putin has said that he directly ordered his defence minister to make a series of calls to top Nato commanders this week over the potential detonation of a “dirty bomb” in Ukraine. Russia has escalated its rhetoric in recent weeks by claiming without evidence that Ukraine was preparing to detonate a low-yield radioactive device on its own territory, leading Kyiv and other western observers to consider that Putin may be preparing a “false flag” attack of its own.
In a speech near Moscow, Putin claimed once again that Russia knew “about an incident with a so-called ‘dirty bomb’ being prepared”, and that Russia knew “where, generally, it was being prepared”. Once again he gave no evidence of the alleged plot, which included the possibility of the device being loaded on to a Tochka-U or other tactical missile, detonated and then “blamed on Russia”.
In his remarks he also criticised former UK leader Liz Truss for saying she was “ready to do it” regarding the need for a prime minister to be ready to use nuclear weapons. “Well, let’s say she blurted out there – the girl seems to be a little out of her mind,” said Putin. “How can you say such things in public?” He also blamed Washington for failing to distance itself from Truss’ remarks.
Putin used the speech as a platform to rail against western countries and their supposed “hegemony”, saying the world faced the “most dangerous” decade since the second world war. “We are standing at a historical frontier: Ahead is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important decade since the end of World War Two.”
A new timetable of scheduled blackouts will be introduced in Kyiv and the surrounding area over the coming days, after Iranian drones caused more damage to energy infrastructure in Kyiv region last night, the city’s administration said. The new timetable is designed to prevent uncontrolled blackouts and will be stricter and longer than those recently announced by Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s state energy company. Residents in Kyiv apartment buildings have started leaving small packages of snacks in lifts to be used in case people get stuck during a blackout.
Russian-installed authorities in Ukraine’s occupied region of Zaporizhzhia ordered phone checks on local residents on Thursday, announcing the implementation of military censorship under Russian president Vladimir Putin’s martial law decree. “From today in the Zaporizhzhia region, law enforcement officers have begun a selective preventing check of the mobile phones of citizens,” the Moscow-appointed official Vladimir Rogov said.
Moscow has said that provisions of the Black Sea grain deal to ease Russian agricultural and fertiliser exports were not being met, and that it was yet to make a decision on whether the agreement should be extended. A foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, told reporters that the west had not taken sufficient steps to ease sanctions on Russia’s logistics, payments and insurance industries to facilitate Russia’s exports.
The prospect of bitter urban fighting for Kherson, the largest city under Russian control, has come closer as Ukraine’s forces have drawn ever closer in their campaign in the south that has seen Russian forces driven back. With Russian-installed authorities encouraging residents to flee to the east bank of the Dnieper River, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said there was no sign Russian forces were preparing to abandon the city.
The United States has not seen anything to indicate that Russia’s ongoing annual ‘Grom’ exercises of its nuclear forces may be a cover for a real deployment, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin said on Thursday. “We haven’t seen anything to cause us to believe, at this point, that is some kind of cover activity,” Austin told reporters.
An oil depot in the Russian-occupied city of Shakhtarsk, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk, was engulfed in flames overnight on Wednesday. The city’s Russian-installed mayor, Alexander Shatov, claimed the fire was caused by Ukrainian shelling of the railway station.
That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, and indeed the Ukraine live blog for today. Thanks for following.
Russian journalist and Putin’s rumoured goddaughter flees to Lithuania
The Russian journalist and TV personality Ksenia Sobchak – the daughter of Vladimir Putin’s one-time boss – has fled to Lithuania, intelligence services in Vilnius said, after police in Moscow raided one of her homes.
A well-known media figure in Russia, Sobchak first became famous as a reality show presenter before embarking on a career in journalism. She also ran for the Russian presidency in 2018, a move her critics said was a publicity stunt intended to help the Kremlin create the impression of competitive elections.
She is the daughter of the former mayor of St Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak, whom Putin has previously described as his mentor. She is rumoured to be Putin’s goddaughter, and though that is unconfirmed her longstanding family connection to the Russian president has been a source of mistrust among sections of the opposition.
Russian media said Sobchak had fled Russia on Tuesday night, crossing the Belarus-Lithuania border after tricking the Russian authorities by buying plane tickets from Moscow to Dubai via Istanbul.
