A summary of today's developments
President Zelenskiy said a “very severe” situation persists in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with the “most difficult” fighting near the town of Bakhmut.
Officials in Donetsk, which remains under Russian separatist control, have blamed Ukraine for a rocket attack that did significant damage to the city’s mayor’s office.
More than 30 settlements across Ukraine have been hit by Russian strikes in the last day, according to the Ukrainian military.
The Ukrainian military has also said the estimated number of Russians killed since the start of the war has reached 65,000.
Two schools in the southern Zaporizhzhia region have reportedly been destroyed in Russian strikes.
Ukraine has succeeded in maintaining its energy stability after Russian attacks last week that targeted key parts of its infrastructure, Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal has said.
Russia is “probably incapable of producing advanced munitions at the rate they are being expended”, according to the latest update from the UK Ministry of Defence.
US and allied security officials believe Iran has agreed to provide Russia with surface-to-surface missiles and attack drones intended for use in Ukraine.
The Belarusian defence ministry has said just under 9,000 Russian troops will be stationed in Belarus as part of a “regional grouping” of forces to protect its borders.
Russian soldiers have reportedly shot dead Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson.
US-based thinktank The Institute for the Study of War has said Russia continues to conduct “massive, forced deportations” of Ukrainians that “likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign”.
The UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs has reportedly arrived in Moscow for talks over grain exports.
Poverty in Ukraine has increased tenfold since the start of the war, a top World Bank official has said.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said it was incumbent upon Nato allies and other responsible countries, including China and India, to “send a very clear and decisive message to Russia that they should not contemplate the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict”.
He was a surprise absentee from the leadership race in July, but the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, is now being touted as a replacement for UK prime minister Liz Truss.
Wallace was promoted to defence secretary in 2019 and has been praised for his handling of the Ukraine crisis.
He was one of the first to make Kyiv’s case with western allies, and pushed the government to support Ukraine.
Updated
Retaining control of its electricity assets has given Queensland in Australia an edge over other regions in coordinating and funding the race to decarbonise the economy, Mick de Brenni, the state’s energy minister, said.
Queensland last month unveiled a $62bn plan to rid its power grid of coal by 2036, replacing the generation with 25 gigawatts of large-scale wind and solar farms, new transmission lines and two giant pumped hydro plants for storage.
With its dominant ownership position of electricity generation and distribution assets, the government has been able to offset the impact of higher energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the ground, Ukrainian soldiers told AFP there was now close combat with members of pro-Russian forces.
Enemy troops “start when night falls. They send their reconnaissance units around 6pm,” said one soldier who uses the nom de guerre “Poliak”.
In a bitter tone of voice, the 50-year-old from the 93rd brigade said inexperienced, “single use” soldiers are sent into the line of fire to “divert” attention from more experienced units carrying out sabotage.
“Between then and 5 am, we get about seven or eight (diversion) attacks like that,” he explained.
Poliak recently suffered a minor shrapnel injury and returned exhausted from the most intense of the fighting.
After four sleepless nights, the former truck driver said he experiences “hallucinations” from the stress and fatigue.
One evening, his unit opened fire, thinking they could see a Russian commando through night-vision goggles.
Early in the morning, they realised they had been shooting at a pile of logs.
Updated
The Russian missiles come to Zaporizhzhia when the “people’s dreams are at their deepest”, says Oleksandr Starukh.
The governor of this south-eastern region of Ukraine since 2020, Starukh, 49, took the call from his bed at 5.08am on the morning of 24 February when one the first missiles of the Russian invasion had hit a local air defence system. Nearly eight months later he is still taking the dawn calls.
The Russians generally strike, he says, at 2am, 4am and 6am.
The latest raid out of the dark had been just a few hours earlier, when 10 S-300 cruise missiles and four Iranian-made Shahed-136 kamikaze drones crashed into the suburbs of the region’s eponymous capital at 5.30am on Saturday morning.
An update from the ministry of defence of Ukraine.
Half a year has passed since the russian occupiers were driven out of the Kyiv region. Ukrainians are cleaning up the mess. Step by step. House by house. This will continue to be the case - until complete victory over russian darkness and tyranny. pic.twitter.com/Onokv0Ux79
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) October 16, 2022
Updated
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday it was incumbent upon Nato allies and other responsible countries, including China and India, to “send a very clear and decisive message to Russia that they should not contemplate the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict”.
Updated
Updated
Summary
If you’re just joining us, here’s a quick roundup of all the day’s news from the war in Ukraine.
President Zelenskiy has said a “very severe” situation persists in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with the “most difficult” fighting near the town of Bakhmut.
Officials in Donetsk, which remains under Russian separatist control, have blamed Ukraine for a rocket attack that did significant damage to the city’s mayor’s office.
More than 30 settlements across Ukraine have been hit by Russian strikes in the last day, according to the Ukrainian military.
The Ukrainian military has also said the estimated number of Russians killed since the start of the war has reached 65,000.
Two schools in the southern Zaporizhzhia region have reportedly been destroyed in Russian strikes.
Ukraine has succeeded in maintaining its energy stability after Russian attacks last week that targeted key parts of its infrastructure, Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal has said.
Russia is “probably incapable of producing advanced munitions at the rate they are being expended”, according to the latest update from the UK Ministry of Defence.
US and allied security officials believe Iran has agreed to provide Russia with surface-to-surface missiles and attack drones intended for use in Ukraine.
The Belarusian defence ministry has said just under 9,000 Russian troops will be stationed in Belarus as part of a “regional grouping” of forces to protect its borders.
Russian soldiers have reportedly shot dead Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson.
US-based thinktank The Institute for the Study of War has said Russia continues to conduct “massive, forced deportations” of Ukrainians that “likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign”.
The UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs has reportedly arrived in Moscow for talks over grain exports.
Poverty in Ukraine has increased tenfold since the start of the war, a top World Bank official has said.
Updated
Ukraine has 'maintained energy stability' after Russian attacks, says PM
Ukraine has succeeded in maintaining its energy stability after Russian attacks last week that targeted key parts of its infrastructure, Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal has said.
In a post on Facebook, Shmyhal said that, in the first three days of the week, Russia launched up to 130 missile and drone strikes against civilian and energy facilities, particularly in the capital, Kyiv.
He said maintenance workers had been able to restore electricity to some 4,000 settlements, and that people across Ukraine had voluntarily reduced their consumption by an average of 10%, making it easier to avoid outages.
“The aggressor sought to intimidate Ukrainians and paralyse the state’s energy industry. He did not achieve his goal,” Shmyhal said.
Updated
Four ships carrying 140,000 tonnes of agricultural products left Ukrainian ports on Sunday, the country’s ministry of infrastructure has said.
The ministry said the ships left the ports of Odesa and Pivdennyi on Ukraine’s south-western coast and were destined for Africa, Asia, and Europe.
It added that, since a deal agreed in July, 1.1m tonnes of grain had been sent to Africa, including five ships’ worth chartered by the UN World Food Programme.
Many African countries depend heavily on Russian and Ukraine for their grain imports.
In September, Russia’s President Putin threatened to reintroduce limits on exports, claiming the majority of the grain leaving Ukraine was going to the European Union, not developing countries.
UN data shows that, since the deal was signed, dozens of shipments have gone to developing countries in Africa and elsewhere.
Speaking during a visit to Senegal earlier this month, the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said his country would “do our best until the last breath to continue exporting Ukrainian grain to Africa and the world for food security”.
As per our previous post, the UN’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs is currently in Moscow negotiating an extension to the July deal.
Updated
Martin Griffiths, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, has arrived in Moscow for talks over grain exports, Russian state media agency Tass reports, citing a diplomatic source.
The agency said Griffiths – along with Rebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development – is attending talks with the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Vershinin.
Since a deal brokered in July between the UN, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, more than six million tonnes of grain and other agricultural exports have been allowed to leave Ukraine.
The original deal applied for 120 days after signing and is set to expire next month.
Speaking earlier this week, Griffiths said he was “reasonably confident” the deal could be extended, possibly to apply for a longer period.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Israel prepared for a new wave of immigration from the former Soviet state. About 13,000 Ukrainians with Jewish heritage have made aliyah, or emigrated, since then.
Unexpectedly, double that have come from Russia, meaning around one in eight Russian Jews have left the country. Since Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation announcement in September, their numbers are growing.
“I got an Israeli passport many years ago because I always knew something like this was possible. I always knew the dark days of the Soviet Union could return,” said Anna Klatis, a journalism professor at Moscow State University who left for Jerusalem with her 16-year-old daughter in February.
“I could not let [my daughter] grow up in a place where freedoms are vanishing.”
Read the full story here:
Just under 9,000 Russian troops to be stationed in Belarus, says official
The Belarusian defence ministry has said just under 9,000 Russian troops will be stationed in Belarus as part of a “regional grouping” of forces to protect its borders, Reuters reports.
Last week, the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, said his troops would be deployed with Russian forces near the Ukrainian border as part of a “joint grouping”, citing what he said were threats from Ukraine and the west.
“The first troop trains with Russian servicemen who are part of the [regional grouping] began to arrive in Belarus,” Valeriy Revenko, the head of the defence ministry’s international military cooperation department, tweeted on Sunday.
“The relocation will take several days.
“The total number will be a little less than 9,000 people.”
Updated
People in the Kyiv region have averted blackouts by reducing their power usage, the regional governor has said.
Posting on Telegram, Oleksiy Kuleba said that, by exercising “responsibility and solidarity, residents had helped reduce energy consumption by 7%”.
“This made it possible to spend the evening without forced power outages,” he said.
“In the evening, turn off at least one electrical appliance and unnecessary lighting. Let’s hold another front! Let’s use energy wisely!”
Ukrainian authorities have been concerned about the country’s power supply since Russian strikes at the start of this week damaged key parts of its energy infrastructure.
Updated
US and allied security officials believe Iran has agreed to provide Russia with surface-to-surface missiles and attack drones intended for use in Ukraine, the Washington Post reports.
The paper says intelligence from a US-allied country suggests Iranian officials visited Moscow last month to finalise the terms of a shipment of additional weapons.
It comes after UK intelligence suggested Russia was unlikely to be able to produce missiles as fast as it is currently using them.
On Monday, Russia is believed to have used up more than 80 missiles in a series of strikes across Ukraine, including onthe capital, Kyiv.
On Saturday, Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said the country “has not and will not provide any weapon to be used in the war in Ukraine”.
Updated
No matter what Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, says, international opinion is dead against Putin’s war of aggression. More than 140 countries condemned Moscow at the UN last week. Only North Korea, Syria, Belarus and Nicaragua voted in support.
Yet despite this huge anti-war consensus, backed by three-quarters of the world’s countries, substantive steps to halt the fighting and pursue a genuine peace process remain wholly absent.
The reason there’s no peace – the reason diplomacy isn’t working – is simple. Putin does not want it. Since the US first warned of invasion, he has rebuffed all efforts to resolve matters peacefully.
Western leaders must now deploy the one big non-military weapon they still have in reserve.
It’s time to admit diplomacy has failed. It’s time to complete Moscow’s isolation by withdrawing all American, European and G7 diplomats, closing all western embassies, and ostracising Russian officials in international forums, including the UN. All Russian diplomats must simultaneously be expelled.
Read Simon Tisdall’s full piece here:
423 children killed since start of invasion, says prosecutor general
The number of children killed since the start start of the war now stands at 423, the office of the Ukrainian prosecutor general has said.
It added that a further 810 children had been injured in the conflict and that the most child casualties were suffered in the regions of Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Kyiv.
It also said the numbers were not final because work was ongoing to collate tallies of those killed and injured in areas still occupied or where fighting is ongoing.
Updated
Russian-installed officials have said Ukraine is responsible for a rocket attack that struck the mayor’s office in a key Ukrainian city controlled by pro-Kremlin forces. Separately, Ukrainian officials said Russian rockets struck a city across from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, injuring six people.
The municipal building in separatist-controlled Donetsk was seriously damaged by the rocket attack, the Associated Press reports. Plumes of smoke swirled around the building, which had rows of blown-out windows and a partially collapsed ceiling. Cars nearby were burned out.
There were no immediate reports of casualties. Kyiv did not immediately claim responsibility or comment on the attack.
Ukrainian authorities have also reported that at least six people were wounded as a result of rocket attacks across from Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, where Russia has stationed its troops.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said that two residents of Nikopol had been hospitalised following the strikes, which also damaged five power lines, gas pipelines, and civilian businesses and residential buildings.
Ukraine’s presidential office and regional authorities also reported that Russian rockets destroyed two schools, a park and private houses in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, which has undergone sustained Russian shelling since Moscow illegally annexed it along with three other Ukrainian provinces last month.
The presidential office also said Moscow continued to shell civilian settlements along the frontline in the eastern Kharkiv and Luhansk regions, where Kyiv has been pressing a counteroffensive. It added that “active hostilities” continued in the southern Kherson region, another key focus of the Ukrainian advance, with repeated Russian strikes on a series of villages recently retaken by Kyiv.
Updated
Russia claims to have repelled efforts by Ukrainian troops to advance in the Donetsk, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, and says its forces have inflicted what it described as significant losses against the enemy as well as destroying three US-made M777 howitzers. The battlefield reports could not immediately be verified.
Russia also said it was continuing airstrikes on military and energy targets in Ukraine, using long-range precision-guided weapons.
Updated
Two schools in the southern Zaporizhzhia region have been destroyed in Russian strikes, the regional governor has said.
Posting on Telegram, Oleksandr Starukh said a school in the village of Vozdvizhivka was “almost completely destroyed” after being hit by two rockets.
A second school in the village of Dobropilla was also destroyed, he said, as were a number of private homes.
Starukh added that there were no casualties in the attacks.
“The enemy is defeated on the front, so it destroys and destroys the civilian infrastructure,” he said.
Updated
Russian soldiers have shot dead a Ukrainian musician in his home after he refused to take part in a concert in occupied Kherson, according to the culture ministry in Kyiv.
Conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko declined to take part in a concert “intended by the occupiers to demonstrate the so-called ‘improvement of peaceful life’ in Kherson”, the ministry said in a statement on its Facebook page.
The concert on 1 October was intended to feature the Gileya chamber orchestra, of which Kerpatenko was the principal conductor, but he “categorically refused to cooperate with the occupants”, the statement said.
Read the full story here:
Poverty in Ukraine has increased tenfold since the start of the war, a top World Bank official has said.
Speaking to Reuters, Arup Banerji, the bank’s regional director for eastern Europe, said Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure away from the frontlines of the conflict have complicated an already dire economic situation in the country.
“If this continues, the outlook is going to be much, much harder,” he said.
“As winter really starts biting ... certainly by December or January, and if the houses are not repaired ... there may be another internal wave of migration, of internally displaced persons.”
He said that, by the end of next year, more than half of the population of Ukraine could be living in poverty.
Updated
More than 30 settlements in Ukraine hit by Russian strikes
More than 30 settlements in Ukraine have been hit by Russian strikes in the last day, according to the Ukrainian military.
The latest update from the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said the strikes had hit civilian areas.
It said particularly targeted had been an area east of the capital, Kyiv, as well as others in the eastern regions of Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia and the southern regions of Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson.
“Violating the norms of international humanitarian law … [Russia] strikes critical infrastructure and the homes of the civilian populations,” it said.
It added that Russia also continued to shell the position of Ukrainian troops “along the entire contact line”.
Updated
For years, and especially since the invasion of 24 February, Russian state media has been calling to wipe Ukraine off the map, for killing Ukrainians en masse, and dehumanising its people, smearing them as “Nazis” who need to be “denazified”.
As the cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and genocide pile up against the Russian leadership and military, is there a way to hold members of the propaganda machine accountable as well?
Are they protected by freedom of speech or is their role qualitatively different: not mere trumpeters of abhorrent opinion but facilitators of crimes?
Read the full piece from Peter Pomerantsev, author of a number of acclaimed books on modern Russia, here:
In case you missed it last night, Elon Musk has said SpaceX will continue to provide Starlink satellite internet over Ukraine.
Musk, who runs SpaceX alongside electric car manufacturer Tesla, had earlier said the company had spent $80m providing the service for free, and that it couldn’t continue doing so indefinitely.
The US military had confirmed it was communicating with Musk about funding the network.
But on Saturday night, Musk tweeted: “The hell with it… even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to President Zelensky, replied to the post with a Star Wars reference.
“You were supposed to destroy the Sith… So you did…” he said. “Thank you for joining the right side. Ukraine appreciates that.”
The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2022
Norway has arrested a Russian national carrying a drone and camera equipment after he was seen taking photos of an airport in the far north, the second such arrest in a week.
Agence France-Presse reports that Norway is on high alert following accounts of mysterious drone sightings close to offshore oil and gas drilling platforms run by the country’s major energy producer.
Last month’s Nord Stream gas pipeline blasts in the Baltic Sea are widely assumed to be the result of sabotage.
The 51 year-old Russian man, whose name was not disclosed, was arrested on Friday on suspicion of flying a drone in Norway, to which he confessed.
Along with several other Western nations, Norway has banned Russian nationals from overflying its territory, with breaches punishable by up to three years in jail.
In a statement, police in the northern town of Tromso:
Police have confiscated a large amount of photography equipment, including a drone and a cache of memory cards.
Russia continues 'massive, forced deportations', says think tank
Russia continues to conduct “massive, forced deportations” of Ukrainians that “likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign”, according to a US-based think tank.
In its latest assessment of the conflict, the Institute for the Study of War notes that Russian officials have “openly admitted to placing children from occupied areas of Ukraine up for adoption with Russian families”.
It adds: “Russian authorities may additionally be engaged in a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing by depopulating Ukrainian territory through deportations and repopulating Ukrainian cities with imported Russian citizens.”
Updated
Russia 'probably unable to replenish missile stocks', says UK intelligence
Russian is “probably incapable of producing advanced munitions at the rate they are being expended”, according to the latest update from the UK ministry of defence.
The ministry said attacks like those launched across Ukraine on Monday, in which Russia fired some 80 cruise missiles, represent a “further degradation of Russia’s long-range missile stocks, which is likely to constrain their ability to strike the volume of targets they desire in future”.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 16 October 2022
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) October 16, 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/cSR06lXKTG
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/UYBkbW8aYS
Andrei Nikiforov, a lawyer from St Petersburg, was one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilised since last month to hold the frontlines in his country’s faltering war in Ukraine. On 25 September he received his call-up papers. By 7 October, just two weeks later, he was dead.
“We don’t know what happened,” said Alexander Zelensky, the head of the Nevsky Collegium of Lawyers, of which Nikiforov was a member. Zelensky and a member of Nikiforov’s family confirmed his call-up and death. “All we have is a date and a place.”
That place was Lysychansk, one of the most dangerous spots near the frontlines.
The first coffins are now returning to Russia from Ukraine, bringing the remains of ordinary Russians who at first were promised a quick “special military operation” and now have been drafted to go and fight in a war. Their deaths may mark another inflection point for Russia in the conflict, where at least half a million men have been drafted or fled their homes to avoid it.
Andrew Roth in Moscow has the full story:
Russian death toll reaches 65,000, Ukraine military says
The estimated number of Russians killed since the start of the war has reached 65,000, according to the Ukrainian military.
This morning’s update from the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said the death toll had risen by 300 over the last 24 hours.
It added that the number of tanks lost had reached 2,529, and that 5,193 armored personnel vehicles had also been destroyed.
Загальні бойові втрати противника з 24.02 по 16.10 орієнтовно склали / The total combat losses of the enemy from 24.02 to 16.10 were approximately:https://t.co/Sacj4PkeJm pic.twitter.com/TAutd0uRXC
— Генеральний штаб ЗСУ (@GeneralStaffUA) October 16, 2022
Updated
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said the situation in eastern Ukraine is “the most difficult” near the town of Bakhmut, a few days after pro-Russian forces announced they were moving closer to the city.
“A very severe situation persists in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions” in the Donbas, the Ukrainian president said in his daily address on Saturday.
The most difficult is near Bakhmut, like in previous days. We are still holding our positions.
Agence France-Presse also reported that Zelenskiy’s comments came after Russian-backed separatist forces in the Donetsk region of Ukraine’s said on Thursday that they had captured two nearby villages, Opytine and Ivangrad.
Russian troops have for weeks been pummelling Bakhmut, a wine-making and salt-mining city that used to be populated by 70,000 people, in the hope of capturing the city.
Shelling from Ukrainian forces damaged the administration building in the city of Donetsk, the Russian-backed administration of the city said on Sunday.
Reuters reported it saying on the Telegram messaging app that the main entry into the building was hit and several nearby cars damaged.
There was no immediate reaction from Ukraine to the attack on the eastern city, which is the capital of the Donetsk region and is controlled by Russian-backed forces.
No civilians were killed in the attack at a military base in Russia’s Belgorod region, but many soldiers were killed or wounded, the governor of Belgorod region said early on Sunday.
Vyacheslav Gladkov was quoted by Reuters as saying on the Telegram messaging app:
A terrible event happened on our territory, on the territory of one of the military units.
Many soldiers were killed and wounded ... There are no residents of the Belgorod region among the wounded and killed.
Gladkov did not say how many soldiers were killed. The Russian state news agency RIA cited the defence ministry as saying 11 people were killed and 15 wounded.
Some Russian independent media outlets reported that the number of casualties was higher than the official figures.
Russian attack on fellow troops followed 'argument over religion', says Ukraine
An adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said the two Russian volunteers who opened fire on fellow volunteers at a military base had carried out the attack after an argument over religion.
At least 11 people were killed and 15 wounded in the shooting at a military training ground in the Belgorod region in south-western Russia on Saturday, the Russian defence ministry has said. The two attackers were shot dead.
Reuters reported that Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Zelenskiy, said in a YouTube interview that the attackers were from the Central Asian nation of Tajikistan and had opened fire on the others after an argument over religion.
Tajikistan is predominantly Muslim, while around half of Russians follow various branches of Christianity. The Russian ministry had said the attackers were from a nation in the Commonwealth of Independent States, which groups nine ex-Soviet republics, including Tajikistan.
Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the comments by Arestovych, a prominent commentator on the war.
The independent Russian news website Sota Vision said the attack occurred in the small town of Soloti, close to the Ukrainian border and about 105km (65 miles) south-east of Belgorod.
The Russian state media outlet RIA cited a defence ministry statement as saying:
During a firearms training session with individuals who voluntarily expressed a desire to participate in the special military operation [against Ukraine], the terrorists opened fire with small arms on the personnel of the unit.
The attack took place a week after an explosion damaged a bridge in Crimea linking to Russia.
Updated
Summary
Hello and welcome back to the Guardian’s continuing live coverage of the war in Ukraine. Here’s a rundown on the latest news and overnight developments as it just passes 9.30am in Kyiv.
At least 11 people were killed and 15 wounded at a military training ground in south-west Russia’s Belgorod region when two volunteers opened fire on other troops, the Russian defence ministry said. The shooters were nationals from a former Soviet republic and had been shot dead after Saturday’s shooting, the ministry said, calling it a terrorist attack. Baza, a Russian news site with close ties to police, said the attack occurred at 10am local time during shooting practice.
Elon Musk has announced his company SpaceX will continue to pay for Starlink satellite internet in Ukraine, a day after suggesting he could not keep funding the project. “The hell with it,” the billionaire tweeted on Saturday. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”
Russia has continued to try to hit Ukrainian’s energy infrastructure but Vladimir Putin’s forces did not appear to have enjoyed any significant success. One missile seriously damaged a key energy facility in the region around Ukraine’s capital, however, and 10 missiles and four drones hit locations in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia.
Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks near 11 settlements, the Kyiv Independent has reported. According to the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces, Russian forces were attempting to advance near the settlements of Novosadove, Yakovlivka, Berestove, Bakhmut, Bakhmutske, Opytne, Krasnohorivka, Nevelske, Pervomaiske, Mariinka, and Pobieda.
France will train up to 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers on its territory, France’s minister for the armed forces told Le Parisien newspaper in an interview on Saturday. Sebastien Lecornu said soldiers would “be taken into our units for several weeks”, and that France would also provide Ukraine with Crotale air defence systems, without specifying how many.
Iran has reiterated that it rejects accusations it has supplied Russia with weapons “to be used in the war in Ukraine”, its foreign ministry said. The topic is due to be discussed by EU foreign ministers in a meeting in Luxembourg on Monday. In a statement, the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, “emphasised that the Islamic republic of Iran has not and will not provide any weapon to be used in the war in Ukraine”.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence has revealed the identity of the “Ghost of Vinnytsia” who had replaced the “Ghost of Kyiv”, which turned out to be propaganda. The pilot, named as Vadym, has been Ukraine’s poster fighter in the past few weeks after multiple reports of Russian losses in Ukrainian skies.
A fuel depot in Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, caught fire after shelling on Saturday, its governor said, without specifying the shelling’s origin.
The Russian foreign ministry has confirmed the re-equipping of Belarusian Su-25 aircraft to carry nuclear weapons, according to the Belarusian Hajun project.
Ukrainian troops have launched an offensive in Kherson oblast, the Kyiv Independent reported, while it has not been confirmed by Ukraine.
Dane Partridge, a 34-year-old man from Idaho who fought as a volunteer soldier in Ukraine, died on Tuesday from injuries sustained during a Russian attack in Luhansk, AP reported.
