Summary
Ukrainian drones struck targets in at least six regions deep within Russia on Wednesday, including an airfield where they destroyed military transport planes.
Russian officials described attacks on targets in the Pskov, Bryansk, Kaluga, Orlov, Ryazan and Moscow regions. The Russian foreign ministry said the attacks would “not go unpunished” and could not have reached so far into Russian territory without western help.
Russia’s defence ministry said in two separate statements on Wednesday that its aircraft had destroyed two Ukrainian speedboats east of Snake Island, in the Black Sea.
The attacks came as authorities in Kyiv reported at least two people killed in what they described as the heaviest series of Russian airstrikes on the Ukrainian capital for months.
Across Ukraine, Ukrainian air defences shot down all 28 Russian missiles and 15 out of 16 drones launched overnight, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, said on Wednesday.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that investigators were considering the possibility that the plane carrying the Wagner mercenary head Yevgeny Prigozhin was downed on purpose, the first explicit acknowledgement that he may have been assassinated.
The Wagner group is expected to remain operational in Africa, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy and vice-president of the European Commission said. “They will remain operational in Africa because it is the armed wing of Russia,” Josep Borrell said.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief has urged member countries to order more ammunition for Ukraine, as figures showed the bloc is a long way from a March target of giving Kyiv a million artillery shells within 12 months.
Russia is in secret, active talks with North Korea to acquire a range of munitions and supplies for Moscow’s fight in Ukraine, the White House said Wednesday. “Arms negotiations between Russia and the DPRK are actively advancing,” the White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said, adding that a key focus of the talks was artillery ammunition for Moscow’s forces.
Tech giants, including TikTok and Twitter, failed to effectively tackle Russian disinformation online during the first year of the war in Ukraine, according to a study published on Wednesday by the European Union. The independent study for the EU comes after tougher rules under the Digital Services Act (DSA) kicked in this month for the world’s biggest online platforms.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his Turkish counterpart will discuss a proposal by Moscow for an alternative to the Black Sea grain deal when they meet this week, Lavrov’s ministry said. Under the plan, Russia would send a million tonnes of grain to Turkey at a discounted price, with financial support from Qatar, to be processed in Turkey and sent to countries most in need, the Foreign Ministry said
Few Russians wanted the war in Ukraine – but they won’t accept a Russian defeat either
It is highly probable that we will never know precisely how or why Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, was killed. It is also highly probable that he was assassinated, most likely on the orders of Vladimir Putin, but possibly on the orders of his enemies in the Russian defence ministry, who had probably been dreaming of this moment for a long time and believed they could finally kill him with impunity.
Most western commentary on the assassination has focused on the fear of Putin that Prigozhin’s death will cause among the Russian elites, or on the underlying fragility it reveals in the Russian regime.
This is not wholly wrong, but it misses several longstanding fears that are widespread within the Russian establishment – and indeed in the wider Russian population – that will influence how events play out: fear of defeat, chaos and of each other. What really worried most members of the elite was Putin’s failure to act much earlier to end the public feud between Prigozhin and the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and that Prigozhin’s armed demonstration risked a catastrophic internal split in Russia, leading to defeat in Ukraine.
