Three pro-Ukrainian battalions made up of recruits from Russia have launched a fresh incursion into southern Russia in a cross-border raid meant to sow chaos before President Vladimir Putin’s widely expected re-election this weekend. The three armed groups of Russian exiled fighters, who operate closely with Ukraine’s military, said they had crossed the border into the southern Kursk and Belgorod regions. Russia’s national guard said on Thursday it was fighting off attacks from the pro-Ukrainian groups.
Russia is believed to have jammed the satellite signal on an aircraft used by the British defence minister, Grant Shapps, to travel from Poland back to the UK, a government source and journalists travelling with him said on Thursday. The GPS signal was interfered with for about 30 minutes while the plane flew close to Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, they said. There was no danger to Shapps on the travelling aircraft, UK Defence sources said.
Russia and Ukraine downed enemy drones and rockets overnight to Friday as polling stations opened across Russia on the first day of voting in the presidential election. Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired 27 Iranian-style drones – all of which it said it downed – as well as eight missiles at its territory overnight. Russia’s defence ministry said it intercepted five Ukrainian drones and two rockets over the Belgorod border region and the Kaluga region, south-west of Moscow. Local officials said earlier that two people were killed and 12 wounded in Ukrainian missiles strikes over the Belgorod region.
Russia’s defence ministry claimed its troops killed 195 Ukrainian soldiers and destroyed five tanks and four armoured infantry vehicles, two days after saying it killed 234 Ukrainian troops in another border assault. The claims were not independently verified.
Ukrainian drones attacked several oil refineries hundreds of kilometres from the frontline in Russian regions including Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod and Leningrad. The continuing strikes are part of a strategy to cause economic damage.
The European Union and Nato said Russia’s elections would not be free or fair because the Kremlin had crushed all opposition. The two bodies also condemned Russia’s decision to stage the vote in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine that Moscow claims as its own territory. Ukraine’s foreign ministry called votes in the occupied areas illegal and void and urged international partners not to recognise the results.
The chairs of foreign affairs committees in 23 parliaments from the Baltics to the US to Israel signed a statement rejecting the legitimacy of Russia’s elections in occupied Ukrainian territories.
A total of 535 children have been killed and 1,255 injured in Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said, Ukrinform reported.
Vladimir Putin’s comments about nuclear weapons to Russian state media did not constitute a threat to use them, the Kremlin said, accusing the US of taking the remarks out of context in calling them “reckless and irresponsible”. Putin said Russia was technically ready for nuclear war and that if the US sent troops to Ukraine, it would be considered a significant escalation of the conflict.
Putin said setting up a nuclear-powered unit in space was a priority. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said last week that Russia and China were considering putting a nuclear power plant on the moon from 2033-35.
Nato allies must urgently step up delivery of ammunition and weapons to Ukraine, Nato’s secretary general said. Presenting the alliance’s annual report at its headquarters in Brussels, Jens Stoltenberg said Ukrainians were not running out of courage but were running out of ammunition. He also said any attempt to hold Russian elections in occupied Ukrainian regions would be illegal.
The Ukrainian military said Russian forces attacked Ukraine with 34 Shahed drones overnight to Friday and that 22 of them were shot down. About 150 settlements in the Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions came under Russian artillery fire, it said. Authorities in Kharkiv and Sumy regions said infrastructure had been targeted.
EU leaders are to take a significant step towards confiscating €27bn in profit generated by Russian state assets frozen in Europe to help fund the war effort in Ukraine. European Commission officials are poised to put forward what they believe is a legally robust proposal to be considered by member states, possibly before a meeting of prime ministers in Brussels next Thursday. Ukraine’s defence ministry, meanwhile, thanked the EU for agreeing on €5bn for military aid to Kyiv.
The Ukrainian army shelled a critical infrastructure facility at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the facility’s Russian-controlled management alleged. An explosive device was dropped near a fence where diesel fuel tanks were located, it claimed, saying: “Such attacks are unacceptable.”
Germany’s parliament has rejected a call by the opposition for the government to send Taurus long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine, a day after the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, defended his refusal to supply the weapons.
German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall said it planned to set up at least four factories in Ukraine, as it targets a record €10bn ($10.9bn) in sales this year. The company said the factories in Ukraine – which has been suffering from ammunition shortages as Moscow makes battlefield gains – would be for producing shells, military vehicles, gunpowder and anti-aircraft weapons.
