Russia again struck at the port city of Odesa overnight, with the Ukrainian air force reporting that eight Shahed drones and two Kalibr cruise missiles were fired over Ukraine. The air force reported a security guard was killed when a rocket hit the administration building of the port, and the equipment of one of the cargo terminals was damaged.
Natalia Humeniuk, spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern military command, said an overnight thunderstorm had helped Russia in the attack on Odesa. “The enemy took advantage of the weather conditions, and launched the missile during the thunder and wind and at an extremely low height in order to make spotting them more difficult,” she said.
Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukraine’s minister for infrastructure, said that over the past nine days, 26 port infrastructure facilities and five civilian vessels have been damaged and partially destroyed by Russian attacks on Odesa. He also claimed that Russian is restricting shipping near Crimea and the territorial waters of Bulgaria, blocking the movement of ships in the direction of seaports of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the city of Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine on Thursday and in a meeting with senior officials discussed supplies to the war front and air defences.
Russian state-owned news agency Tass reports that two people were injured in the occupied city of Tokmak in Zaporizhzhia region by Ukrainian shelling.
Russian-imposed authorities in Lysychansk in occupied Luhansk claim that a school was destroyed after being attacked by Ukraine with cluster munitions.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, has given civilian casualty figures in the Ukraine-controlled portion of the region. On Telegram he stated that in the last 24 hours one person was killed and nine injured.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Thursday it had found traces of explosives on board a foreign vessel en route from Turkey to Russia that had previously entered a Ukrainian port. It was the second such announcement this week.
The Ukrainian security service has claimed responsibly for the Crimea Bridge blast that happened in October last year. Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said his agency was behind the attack, speaking in comments shown on television as he presented a commemorative postage stamp marking wartime special forces operations.
Nato said on Wednesday it was stepping up surveillance of the Black Sea region as it condemned Russia’s exit from a deal assuring the safe passage of ships carrying Ukrainian grain. The announcement came after a meeting of the Nato-Ukraine Council, a body established earlier this month to coordinate cooperation between the Western military alliance and Kyiv.
The Kremlin said it was impossible for Russia to return to the Black Sea grain export deal for now, as an agreement related to Russian interests was “not being implemented”. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters, however, that Vladimir Putin had made it clear the deal could be revived if its Russia-focused part was honoured.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that just 17 African heads of state would be attending this week’s Russia-Africa summit. This is far fewer than at its 2019 conference or at similar summits held elsewhere, including a meeting in December with Joe Biden that dozens of African leaders flew to Washington DC to attend.
The EU announced a ban on exports of battlefield equipment and aviation parts to Belarus. Spain, the current holder of the EU’s rotating chair, said in a post on social media that the new sanctions were a response to “the situation in Belarus and the involvement of Belarus in the Russian aggression against Ukraine”.
Moldova has ordered 45 Russian diplomats and embassy staff to leave “over numerous unfriendly actions”, officials said on Wednesday, with tensions between the two countries running high. Moldova’s pro-EU government has firmly condemned Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine and alleged a Russian plot to overthrow the current government.
