Closing Summary
It is approaching 5pm in Ukraine. Here’s a roundup of the day’s events:
Ukraine shot down 24 of 28 Shahed drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack that damaged residential buildings in Kyiv and an infrastructure facility and grain warehouse in southern regions, officials said.
More than two dozen Russian drones targeted Ukraine’s capital, hitting the 24th, 25th and 26th storeys of an apartment building and injuring two people, and causing lesser damage to several other residential buildings, according to Reuters.
In the south, Russia again tried to hit port infrastructure – a frequent target since it pulled out of a UN-brokered deal that allowed safe passage of Ukrainian grain shipments through the Black Sea.
On Friday, Russia said its air defences intercepted five Ukrainian drones south of Moscow in the space of less than an hour. The defence ministry said four were intercepted over Kaluga region and a fifth was destroyed inside the Moscow region.
Russia may sever diplomatic ties with the US if Washington confiscates Russian assets frozen over the Ukrainian conflict, the Interfax news agency quoted the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, as saying on Friday.
Russia will never leave in peace any country that seizes its assets, the Kremlin said on Friday, saying it would look at what western assets it could seize in retaliation in such a scenario. The Kremlin was commenting on an idea being actively discussed in the west, where some politicians have suggested that frozen Russian assets worth $300bn be handed to Ukraine.
The Dutch government will send an initial 18 F-16 jets to Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced on Friday following a conversation with the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte.
Russia is ready to swiftly respond in kind to Washington deploying short- and medium-range missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, has said.
The Kremlin accused the Wall Street Journal of publishing “pulp fiction” on Friday after it reported that the death of the mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash had been orchestrated by a Russian security official, Nikolai Patrushev.
A top Russian diplomat has said Moscow and Washington were still engaged in sensitive negotiations over a prisoner exchange, but accused the US side of leaking details to the media.
The United States said on Friday it would place sanctions on foreign banks that supported Russia’s war in Ukraine, in a new bid to exert economic pressure on Moscow as it diversifies from the west to China.
The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, visited Kyiv on Friday to present an aid package for Ukraine on his first official foreign visit, a ministry spokesperson said.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, held a telephone call with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Friday to discuss ways to de-escalate the conflict in Gaza as well as humanitarian relief efforts, the Kremlin said.
The renowned Russian writer Boris Akunin, who was declared a terrorist by Moscow and became the target of a criminal inquiry this week, says he fears the moves signal a new milestone in the country’s history under Vladimir Putin. “Putin’s regime has clearly decided to take a very important new step on its way from a police, autocratic state to a totalitarian state,” Akunin, who lives in exile, told Agence France-Presse.
Updated
Photojournalist Jelle Krings has been documenting Ukraine’s flower industry since the start of the Russian invasion, looking at how it helps the country cope with war. From a greenhouse production plant built with Dutch technologies, we follow the supply chain of flowers throughout the country to the people who use them, exploring the meaning of flowers in Ukraine’s wartime society.
At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Moscow’s troops just a few miles away from Kyiv, a sudden explosion from an incoming mortar sent shock waves through the glass of one of the largest greenhouses in the outskirts of the capital. Despite the chaos, a few hours after the blast a small group of workers inside the facility carried on with their invisible yet crucial task for the country’s morale and resilience – to cut flowers.
Read more here by Lorenzo Tondo and Jelle Krings:
