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Ukrainian long-range drones hit a warehouse beloning to Russia’s biggest online retailer in the Ural Mountains, more than 2,000km (1,200 miles) from the two countries’ border, local officials and the company said on Friday. Wildberries said its warehouse in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, was set ablaze in the attack. Most merchandise was not damaged, the company said. More than a dozen other Wildberries depots struck by Ukraine in recent weeks have burned down. The regional governor, Denis Pasler, said three drones hit the warehouse’s roof. The Kremlin’s representative in the region, Artyom Zhoga, said 800 people were evacuated from the warehouse and nobody was hurt. Vladimir Putin chaired a meeting of Russia’s security council on Friday and said in televised opening remarks that the meeting would focus on additional measures to “strengthen … protection of infrastructure facilities” but gave no further details.
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked the US Senate on Friday for passing a bill backing sweeping energy sanctions on Russia, saying it helped increase pressure on Moscow. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, also welcomed the vote, saying it came on the back on the EU’s 21st sanctions package against Russia and showed that with complementary sanctions “Europe and the United States can once again show what historic partners can achieve when we act together”. The US bill, intending to punish Russia and countries that buy its petroleum exports, advances a long-delayed measure backed by the late senator Lindsey Graham.
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Russian strikes killed three people – including a child – in a district north-east of the Ukrainian capital, a regional military official said on Saturday. Three people were also wounded in the strikes on the Brovary district, Kyiv’s regional military administration chief, Tymur Tkachenko, said on Telegram. In the capital, four people were wounded from overnight attacks, the administration said, with mayor Vitali Klitschko saying fires were reported in two districts. On Friday Russian strikes on Ukraine’s south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region killed two people and injured six, regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said, amid nearly 50 attacks. Two people were killed near the town of Nikopol on the western bank of the Dnipro River, opposite the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Russia’s defence ministry said its forces struck two more cargo vessels in the Black Sea being used in the Ukrainian military’s interests.
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In Russian-occupied Crimea, two people were killed after a Ukrainian drone struck an apartment building in Kerch on Friday, said the peninsula’s Russia-installed governor, Sergei Aksyonov.
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A fire broke out at the Ilsky oil refinery and five people were wounded in Russia’s Krasnodar region after a Ukrainian drone attack, local authorities said on Saturday. Separately, drones targeted an industrial facility in Russia’s Samara region, the regional governor said, without identifying the enterprise.
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Zelenskyy on Friday began his first official visit to Serbia to discuss security with a European country still closely allied with Moscow. Welcomed at Belgrade airport by the energy minister, the Ukrainian president had dinner with his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vučić. Zelenskyy said on X: “We will discuss expanding economic ties between our countries, relations with the European Union, other areas that can benefit our nations, and security issues.” Vučić and Zelenskyy are to hold official talks on Saturday at the presidential palace and make a statement to the press, according to the Serbian presidency. A senior Ukrainian official told AFP ahead of the trip it was an attempt to “pull the Serbs away from Russia’s side”, but Vučić has insisted his decision not to sanction Moscow will not change.
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Chancellor Friedrich Merz convened Germany’s national security council on Friday to discuss an explosive-laden drone found near a Ukrainian cargo plane and the midair collision of another aircraft with an unidentified object this week. Germany has not blamed anyone for the incident at Leipzig-Halle airport early on Wednesday, but the Russian embassy in Berlin on Friday claimed the discovery of a “fabricated provocation” was set up to blame Moscow. German interior minister Alexander Dobrindt has called the discovery “a hybrid attack” that spelled “a new level of danger”.
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Russia’s supreme court said on Friday it would consider a lawsuit to bar Yabloko, the only officially registered party that opposes Moscow’s war in Ukraine, from contesting parliamentary elections in September. The suit was filed by Rodina (or Motherland), a small pro-Kremlin nationalist party whose leader, Alexei Zhuravlev, denounced Yabloko as a western-backed movement bent on discrediting the elections and Russia itself. Yabloko accused Zhuravlev of making defamatory statements against it and said it would launch its own suit to protect its reputation.
