Closing summary
The Lithuanian government has said there have been “false Russian claims of sabotage planned by a person who allegedly entered to Russia from Lithuania in March”. Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Crisis Management Centre said Russia claims that a saboteur had any links to Lithuania were false. He said he did not have any information about the incident reported by Interfax but “this element of linking that to a Nato state” was disinformation.
Any Western-backed Ukrainian strike against the Crimean bridge or Crimea itself will be met with a powerful revenge strike from Russia, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “I would like to warn Washington and Brussels that any aggressive actions against Crimea are not only doomed to fail, but will also be met with a devastating revenge strike,” said Zakharova.
The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, has confirmed Russian security forces have been deployed to the same airbase as American troops in the Nigerien capital, Niamey. It remains unclear when the Russian troops, who have been in Niger for weeks, were deployed to Airbase 101, which is next to Diori Hamani international airport in Niamey. It is also unclear how many troops are on the ground.
Ukraine’s president and foreign minister has pressed British foreign secretary David Cameron to accelerate the delivery of promised military aid to Kyiv, as Russia heaps battlefield pressure on depleted Ukrainian forces in the third year of war. “It is important that the weapons included in the UK support package announced last week arrive as soon as possible,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on the social platform X, as Cameron visited Kyiv on Thursday.
A Russian activist has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for attempting to set fire to a military conscription office in protest against the Russian action in Ukraine, officials said Friday. A military court in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s far east, said Angel Nikolayev was convicted on charges of terrorism for placing two bottles containing a flammable substance in the windows of a district conscription office in the city and setting them ablaze.
The US has been preparing since 2022 for the possibility that Russian president Vladimir Putin would stop selling it nuclear power fuel, and a pending ban on Russian imports will help boost domestic capacity to process uranium fuel, the outgoing top nuclear energy official told Reuters. The US senate passed legislation on Tuesday that bans the imports from Russia, the latest move by Washington to disrupt Putin’s ability to pay for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022.
The Czech Republic’s institutions have been targeted by a Russian cyber attack since last year, the Czech foreign ministry said on Friday. It said the Russian APT28 group, believed to be connected to Russia’s GRU military intelligence, had exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Outlook programme, Reuters reported. The ministry issued its statement after the German Interior Ministry said on Friday a series of cyber attacks attributable to the GRU targeted Germany’s governing Social Democrats as well as the country’s logistics, defence, aerospace and IT sectors.
Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said on Friday that Russian troops had captured 547 sq km of territory in Ukraine this year. Shoigu said Ukrainian forces were retreating all along the front line.
The Russian defence ministry said on Friday that its air defence forces destroyed six drones that Ukraine launched overnight. Five of the drones were downed over the Belgorod region that borders Ukraine and one over the Crimean Peninsula, the defence ministry said on the Telegram messaging app.
Germany has said it has evidence that Russian state-sponsored hackers were behind an “intolerable” cyber-attack last year in which several websites were knocked off line in apparent response to Berlin’s decision to send tanks to Ukraine. The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said a federal government investigation into the 2023 cyber-attack on the Social Democrat party (SPD) had just concluded.
Ukraine will at some point have to enter into talks with Russia to bring an end to their more than two-year-old war, a senior Ukrainian intelligence official said in an interview published on Thursday. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly ruled out talks with the Kremlin, and a decree he issued after Russia formally annexed four Ukrainian regions in 2022 deems negotiations “impossible”, Reuters reports.
That’s it for the Ukraine live blog for today. Thanks for following along.
