Summary
Ukraine will become a member of Nato subject to reforms after the war, the military alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said. Nato states still agreed that full membership remained impossible in the midst of war, even while ways to move Ukraine and Nato closer continued, he added.
The Nato secretary-general said that some of the most intense fighting of the war has taken place in recent weeks in the east of Ukraine. Russian forces have made confirmed advances north-west and south-east of Avdiivka over the weekend, according to the US-based Institute for the Study of War.
The UK ministry of defence has described as “plausible” Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties running at a daily average of almost 1,000 in November. This would, on the face of it, make November 2023 one of the most difficult months for Russian forces, with many of its losses coming from its assault on Avdiivka – although figures on Ukrainian losses were not provided.
Moscow does not have plans to expand its territory any farther in Europe, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, insisted in response to remarks by the US defence secretary last week that Putin would not stop at Ukraine if he was victorious.
Exports to Russia from Turkey of civilian goods used by the military such as microchips and telescopic sights are increasing, causing concern to the US and the EU, which seeks to prevent such items entering the country.
Ancient Scythian artefacts from museums in Russian-occupied Crimea have been returned to Ukraine after a legal dispute over ownership rights during which they spent almost a decade in the Netherlands, a Ukrainian museum said.
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A Russian court has accused Meta Platforms spokesperson Andy Stone of “promoting terrorism” and ordered his arrest, Russian news agencies have reported.
The move follows a crackdown on freedom of speech in Russia following the launch of its war in Ukraine in February 2022, including against social platforms such as Meta that refuse to remove content judged illegal. In October 2022, Russia listed Meta as a “terrorist and extremist” organisation, opening possible criminal investigations and fines for users in the country.
“Andy Mark Stone was (ordered) arrested in absentia in a case of supporting terrorism,” court spokeswoman Olga Nazarova said, according to the Tass news agency. Stone, who is not in Russia, was placed on the interior ministry’s list of wanted people yesterday. The reports did not provide any further details regarding the case.
Facebook and Instagram have been blocked in Russia since shortly after the start of the Ukraine offensive and are only accessible via VPN. Twitter is also banned, as well as Russian independent media critical of the Kremlin.
Before the bans, millions of Russians used applications belonging to Meta, especially Instagram, which remains hugely popular with young Russians, reports AFP.
In April 2022, Russia put Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a blacklist of people banned from entering the country.
Hungary’s foreign minister has suggested the EU should study the consequences of its sanctions regime against Russia before working on its latest package.
Peter Szijjarto said on Facebook: “While the East-West cooperation, which had long been a solid foundation for European growth, continues to break down, we are already discussing the 12th package of sanctions without any honest analysis of the effects of the 11 packages that have already been adopted.”
Sky News reports that he added that “failed decisions in Brussels” caused Europe’s competitiveness to reach a “low level”.
Proposals for a fresh round of sanctions against 120 Russian individuals and entities have been presented to EU member states for consideration.
Hungary prime minister Viktor Orban recently threatened to bloc aid to Kiev if EU leaders did not review their strategy of support for Kyiv, according to Politico.
Mariana Bezuhla, deputy head of the Ukrainian parliament’s national security committee, has called for the sacking of the army’s commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, for allegedly not preparing a plan for the war next year.
“If the military leadership can’t provide any plan for 2024, and if all their proposals for mobilisation boil down to needing more people without any proposal for changes in the military system, then this leadership should step down,” she said, according to Sky.
It comes after a high-profile disagreement between Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and Zaluzhny over whether the state of the war had reached stalemate, following few advances on either side over the course of many months. The latter told the Economist that there would be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough”.
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Moscow does not have plans to expand its territory any farther in Europe, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has insisted in response to remarks by the US defence secretary last week that Putin would not stop at Ukraine if he was victorious.
The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, said last week: “Putin won’t stop if he takes Ukraine. The next thing is he’s rolling across the Baltics … and the next thing you know, you and your comrades will be on the frontlines fighting against a Putin that we should have stopped, or Ukraine could have stopped early on.”
In comments covered by Russian news agency Tass, Lavrov said:
This comes from a man who holds a high-ranking position and cannot but receive expert views, including of Pentagon specialists who specialise in analysing relations between Moscow and Washington and who cannot but understand what is going on in Ukraine and that Russia has never had and can never have any aggressive or expansionist plans.
He said Russia invaded because Ukraine was “exterminating everything Russian” after the use of Russian in schools and other official spaces was brought to an end.
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Věra Jourová, vice-president for values and transparency at the EU Commission, is part of a delegation in Kyiv this week and has released the following post outlining the priorities for Ukraine in the path towards accession to the bloc.
.@EU_Commission recommended 🇺🇦 to work on 4 priorities by March 2024:
— Věra Jourová (@VeraJourova) November 27, 2023
👉anti-corruption
👉de-oligarchisation
👉regulating lobbying
👉minorities' rights
Quality & speed matter.
Honored to discuss #Ukraine's 🇪🇺 accession w/ @ua_parliament representatives from all political groups. pic.twitter.com/Wq2Rn27dta
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The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is turning his attention to Ukraine, Nato and the Western Balkans after weeks of intense focus on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, AP reports.
Blinken has spent much of the last month-and-a-half deeply engaged on the Gaza crisis, making two trips to the Middle East. Now, amid signs that a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas due to expire on Monday may be extended, Blinken is departing for Brussels for a Nato foreign ministers meeting.
In Brussels, the alliance will reaffirm its support for Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion, explore ways of easing tensions between Kosovo and Serbia and look at preparations for Nato’s 75th anniversary next year.
The two-day session on Tuesday and Wednesday will include the first foreign minister-level meeting of the Nato-Ukraine Council, a body created by alliance leaders at their last summit to improve cooperation and coordination and help prepare Kyiv for eventual membership.
“Allies will continue to support Ukraine’s self-defence until Russia stops its war of aggression,” said Jim O’Brien, the top US diplomat for Europe.
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Finland considers the inflow of asylum seekers from Russia a national security issue, the prime minister, Petteri Orpo, has said.
Orpo said his country expects more asylum seekers to arrive at its border via Russia and plans to take further measures to stem the flow after closing all but one entry point in recent weeks.
“Intelligence information from different sources tells us that there still are people on the move... If this continues, more measures will be announced in the near future,” he told a press conference.
Some 900 asylum seekers from nations including Afghanistan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen have entered Finland from Russia in November, an increase from less than one per day previously, according to the Finnish Border Guard.
Finland blames a change in Russian border protocol for the increase, and calls this a hybrid attack. Moscow has denied the charge.
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Heavy snow has caused power outages in more than 2,000 towns and villages across 16 regions of Ukraine (see 9:45). Here are some of the latest images from the news wires.
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Here is a selection of the Russia-Ukraine war photos which have made AFP’s pictures of the year.
There are now almost 300,000 Ukrainian children registered in Polish educational institutions, including about two-thirds who fled the Russian invasion with their families, according to the Ukrinform agency.
As of this month, there are more than 286,000 Ukrainian children studying in Poland, BBC Russia cites Ukrinform as saying, from Polish education ministry data. Two-thirds of these children fled Ukraine from February last year, according to the data.
However, according to Ukrinform, another 200,000 Ukrainian children may be living in Poland but are not attending Polish educational institutions. More than 3 million Ukrainains now live in Poland, with about half arriving since the Russian invasion.
Ancient Scythian artefacts from museums in Russian-occupied Crimea have been returned to Ukraine after a legal dispute over ownership rights during which they spent almost a decade in the Netherlands, a Ukrainian museum has said.
More than a thousand artefacts, including a solid gold Scythian helmet and golden neck ornament, were on loan to Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum when Russian troops seized and annexed the peninsula in 2014. Both Ukraine and the museums located on the Moscow-controlled territory claimed ownership rights when the exhibition ended, reports Reuters.
“After almost 10 years of court hearings, artifacts from four Crimean museums that were presented at the exhibition ‘Crimea: gold and secrets of the Black Sea’ in Amsterdam have returned to Ukraine. The Allard Pierson Museum handed them over to the National Museum of History of Ukraine,” Ukraine‘s national museum said.
It said the collection would be stored in the national museum until the de-occupation of Crimea. The Allard Pierson Museum said the artifacts had been returned to Kyiv on Sunday.
Ukrainian customs services reported that a truck carrying “2,694 kg of cultural property” entered the 980 year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, where a further identification process would take place.
Scythian gold is already in Ukraine! A truck with 2,694 kg of cultural property entered the territory of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, where Kyiv customs officers will identify the treasures in the Treasury of the National Museum of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/MZwEChaEZM
— Oleksiy Goncharenko (@GoncharenkoUa) November 27, 2023
“This was a special case, in which cultural heritage became a victim of geopolitical developments,” said Els van der Plas, director of the Allard Pierson. “We are pleased that clarity has emerged and that they have now been returned.”
In June, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled the items should be returned to Ukraine. Kyiv sees the artefacts as part of its national heritage, while the Moscow-controlled museums said they had to return to the peninsula due to loan terms.
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The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said that he would take part in an OSCE meeting in North Macedonia if Bulgaria opened its airspace, and that some western countries had asked for meetings with him.
“Apparently Bulgaria has promised Macedonia it will open its air space – if that happens then we will be there. Let’s see,” Lavrov told a conference in Moscow. “There are already several requests for meetings, including from western representatives.”
He met the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, at the G20 last year. Lavrov added: “If someone approaches us, we never run away or hide.”
Foreign ministers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe are due to meet in Skopje from 30 November to 1 December.
Bulgarian airspace is closed to Russian aircraft as part of EU sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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Russian forces advanced around Avdiivka over weekend, says US thinktank
Russian forces have made confirmed advances north-west and south-east of Avdiivka over the weekend, according to the US-based Institute for the Study of War.
Russia continued to intensely attack the eastern town of Avdiivka and the southern village of Robotyne, where fighting has centred in recent weeks, Ukraine said today. “The enemy continues offensive actions near Avdiivka.”
It said Moscow’s forces had launched “more than 150” attacks on Ukrainian positions in villages around the town. Yesterday, Ukraine said it had “repelled” two dozen attacks around Avdiivka, AFP reports. Kyiv did not report gains or losses in the area.
Moscow controls territory to the north, east and south of Avdiivka, which lies just 10km from the Moscow-held city of Donetsk.
In the south, Kyiv said Russian forces had “conducted around 20 attempts to restore lost position near Robotyne of the Zaporizhzhia region, but gained no success”.
Ukraine recaptured the tiny village of Robotyne in August, announcing a strategic victory in its counter-offensive. But Russia has attacked Robotyne since, with Ukraine appearing to struggle to hold on.
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The Nato secretary-general says that some of the most intense fighting of the war has taken place in recent weeks in the east of Ukraine.
[It is an] extremely difficult situation along the front line, especially in the east. We see high casualty numbers and some of the most intense fightings that we have seen throughout the whole war has actually taken place over the last weeks and couple of months.
At the same time, the frontline has not shifted in any significant way, so I think we need to distinguish between the fact that the frontline is not moving so much and the fact that actually there is very heavy fighting going on.
Again we are impressed by the bravery, the competence of the Ukrainian forces, and also their ability to actually strike behind the Russian lines, deep into Russian controlled territory. And of course military achievements can partly be measured in square meters but also on the losses you are able to inflict on your adversary.
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Stoltenberg says that Ukraine will be free to negotiate whatever peace it wishes to agree with Russia, when and if the time comes for peace talks.
It is for Ukraine to decide what are acceptable ways to end this war. Our responsibility is to support Ukraine and to enable them to liberate as much land as possible and to put them in the best possible place, when or if negotiations may start.
Wars are by nature unpredictable. We have seen no sign that president Putin is planning for a peace, he is actually planning for more war. So what we do know is that the more military support we provide to Ukraine, the stronger their position will be on the battlefield and the stronger their position will be on a potential negotiating table
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Some further quotes from the press conference with Stoltenberg.
Nato allies are following up and implementing the decisions we made on Ukraine and Nato membership at our summit in Vilnius in July this year. We made three important decisions. First of all we shortened Ukraine’s path to membership from a two-step process to one step process by removing the requirement for a membership action plan for Ukraine, so that step has already been taken.
Second, we have established a Nato-Ukraine Council which is an important body where Ukraine and all Nato allies meet around the same table with the same rights, the same obligations, and that’s a body where you can make decisions together, so that moves Ukraine of course significantly closer to Nato by establishing a decision making body. That council will meet for the first time at the foreign ministerial level this week.
Thirdly we have agreed a comprehensive, substantial program for ensuring full interoperability between Ukrainian forces and Nato forces. This will of course help them also to come closer to us, that they are more capable of operating together with Nato forces. On top of that, of course, the fact that Nato allies are delivering F-16s, battle tanks, artillery, training; all of that is in a very practical way, helping Ukraine to come closer to Nato because they are more and more capable of operating and working together with Nato soldiers and based on Nato doctrines and and training procedures.
It’s too early to say exactly what we will be the decision at the Washington summit. All allies agree that in the midst of war full membership is not possible but of course we will continue to look into to address how we can move Ukraine and Nato even closer together.
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Ukraine will become a Nato member subject to reforms after the war, says secretary general
Ukraine will become a member of Nato subject to reforms after the war, the military alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said.
Allies agree that Ukraine will become a member of Nato. At [the Nato-Ukraine] meeting, we will agree recommendations for Ukrainians … reforms, as we continue to support Kiev on this path to Nato membership.
However, all allies still agree that full membership remains impossible in the midst of war, even while ways to move Ukraine and Nato closer continue, he added.
This month Germany and the Netherlands pledged €10bn for Ukraine, he added. Romania added a F16 training centre for Ukrainian pilots. Allies including the US and Finland are sending more air defences and ammunition to protect Ukrainian cities from Russian attacks.
Stoltenberg also said that Sweden’s pending Nato membership “will make us all safer” and he called on Turkey and Hungary to complete its ratifications.
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AFP has the following dispatch from Avdiivka, a town in Ukraine‘s eastern region of Donetsk, which has become the focus of the fighting amid a Russian assault on the strategically important former coal hub.
The only signs of life are a few chirping birds and barking dogs. The crump of explosions, some far away, some closer to home, is constant. Avdiivka has faced incessant attacks from Russian forces looking to surround and seize it.
Only around 1,350 people still live there, compared to 30,000 before the war. Russian troops hold large parts of the town just outside Donetsk – the regional capital under Russian occupation. The Ukrainians still defend an area approximately eight kilometres wide, from the city to the northwest.
In Avdiivka, there remains a solitary humanitarian aid centre, open in the basement of an uninhabited building and equipped with a generator. Each day, residents come to get warm, have a chat, a cup of coffee and charge their phones.
Until this summer Oksana worked as an executive in Ukraine‘s largest coking and chemical plant – a 340-hectares (850 acres) on the north side of Avdiivka. Only a handful of employees remain out of a pre-conflict workforce of 4,000. The Russians have moved in closer and taken up positions within sight of the plant’s tall chimneys. Ukrainian soldiers are still dug in defending the site. Oksana does not want to leave.
“We’ve spent 30 years investing everything we have in our house,” she said. “I shall be 50 on January 1. Why should I start again from scratch somewhere else?”
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Ukrainian estimates of almost 1,000 Russian casualties a day in November 'plausible', says UK
The UK ministry of defence has described as “plausible” Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties running at a daily average of almost 1,000 in November.
This would, on the face of it, make November 2023 one of the most difficult months for Russian forces, with many of its losses coming from its assault on Avdiivka. The publication of the figures also betrays some bias without any comparative estimates on Ukrainian losses.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 27 November 2023.
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) November 27, 2023
Find out more about Defence Intelligence's use of language: https://t.co/La7njOX8O7
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/YZmSKSpvsj
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Ukraine’s national security adviser has claimed that Russia has instructed a network of its spies in Ukraine to destabilise society.
“They realise they cannot win this militarily so attempts at internal destabilisation have become the priority,” he said in an interview with the Times.
We made a big mistake in 1991 when we didn’t close down the KGB but just changed its name to SBU and the metastases of the KGB remained.
We are all adults here. Unfortunately, we recognise that we have not been able to clean up all of the security systems. So of course there are traitors that exist there. The fact that there is an ongoing trial over Oleh Kulinich [the former head of the SBU in Crimea] on charges of high treason is a solid proof of that.
Danilov wrote last week for the online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda: “The perfect situation for Russia and Putin is for Ukraine to return to the state of ungovernability and complete anarchy that it experienced in 1917-1921, when the war was waged from within and without.
“These measures pursue the goal of creating a critically negative public backdrop, sowing despondency and depression, increasing the number of those willing to compromise and reducing those who are confident of victory — ultimately leading to a coup d’état.”
One person killed and almost half a million left without power after storm in Black Sea area, says Russian news agency
Almost half a million people have been left without power and one person was killed after a storm in the Black Sea area flooded roads, ripped up trees and took down power lines in Crimea, the Russian state news agency Tass has said.
The storm also hit southern Russia and sent waves flooding into the beach resort of Sochi, blew the roof off a five-storey building in Anapa and damaged homes and schools in Kuban, the state news agency said.
It was part of a weather front that earlier left one person dead and hundreds of places without electricity amid heavy snowfall and strong blizzards in Romania and Moldova yesterday, reports AP.
The storm prompted several Crimean regions to declare a state of emergency after it became the strongest recorded in the past 16 years with wind speeds reaching 144km per hour, Tatyana Lyubetskaya, a Russia-installed official at the Crimean environmental monitoring department, told Tass.
The government in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, told people to stay at home today and closed government offices including schools and hospitals as strong winds are still expected.
The head of one Crimean region, Natalia Pisareva, said everyone in the Chernomorske area of western Crimea had lost water supply as well as central heating because pumping stations had lost power. There were also reports of a problem with a gas pipeline in Saky, western Crimea.
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A storm has left more than two thousand towns and villages in war-torn Ukraine without power on Monday, the government has said, piling pressure on the country’s fragile power grid.
The energy infrastructure has been targeted systematically by Russian forces and Kyiv has warned that Moscow is preparing fresh strikes on key facilities this winter.
“In total, 2,019 settlements in 16 regions are cut off from the grid,” the interior ministry said. In the southern city of Odesa, which has been subjected to repeated Russian strikes, authorities said they had helped 1,624 people who had been trapped due to snow.
Regional authorities said the temperature had fallen to below freezing with reports of gusts of up to 72 kilometres an hour, reports AFP.
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Yekaterina Duntsova, who wants to run for Russian president, said the Kremlin should end the conflict in Ukraine, free political prisoners and undertake major reform to halt the slide towards a new era of “barbed wire” division between Russia and the West.
Nearly 32 years since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union stoked hopes that Russia would blossom into an open democracy, Duntsova, 40, said she was afraid as she spoke to Reuters in Moscow.
“Fear is present but it is conscious,” said Duntsova, who this month announced she wanted to run for president in the March 2024 election. “Any sane person taking this step would be afraid - but fear must not win.”
She said she had to choose her words carefully given laws which can be used to prosecute those criticising what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation”, and that she had been warned about speaking too much to foreign correspondents.
The divorced former regional TV journalist who has three children refused to use the word “war” to describe the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two due to Russian law. “Sooner or later every armed conflict ends, and I hope that it ends as soon as possible,” Duntsova said. “The people are very tired of what is going on. But that weariness is not voiced.”
Duntsova needs to collect 300,000 signatures to be allowed to stand. Russian state media ignore her.
Yekaterina Duntsova, a 40-year-old journalist and single mother of 3 from Rzhev, announced her bid for Russian presidency last week. “I am not scared because my family and loved ones are supporting me. They are ready, so I am ready too,” she told me. https://t.co/y9oTgz9Mie
— Leyla Latypova (@LatypovaLeyla) November 22, 2023
Exports of civilian goods used by military to Russia from Turkey increasing
Exports to Russia from Turkey of civilian goods used by the military such as microchips and telescopic sights are increasing, causing concern to the US and the EU, which seeks to prevent such items entering the country.
The Financial Times reports that over the first nine months of this year, Turkey reported $158m of exports of such “high-priority” goods to Russia and former Soviet countries suspected of being conduits to Moscow – far above 2022.
Brian Nelson, the US Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, is to visit Turkey this week to discuss “efforts to prevent, disrupt, and investigate trade and financial activity that benefit the Russian effort in its war against Ukraine”.
“With some of the third-party countries like Turkey, we’re really at a weaker enforcement position than we’d ultimately like to be,” Emily Kilcrease, a former deputy assistant US trade representative, told the FT. “We really have to lean on those countries to take enforcement actions in their own jurisdictions, to get at the specific entities that are facilitating the trans-shipment.”
Kilcrease added that if Turkey did not make changes, then “the US and its partners are going to have to take enforcement action”.
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Daniil Melnyk is one of up to 50,000 Ukrainians who have lost limbs during the Russian invasion. With photographer Marta Syrko, he is sharing his story to battle stigma around disability.
Official figures put the number of Ukrainians who have undergone amputations at 20,000 since the start of the full-scale invasion, though experts on the ground suspect the real figure is much higher, perhaps as many as 50,000.
The numbers are edging towards those of the first world war (historians estimate that 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had amputations between 1914 and 1918). The scale of what is happening is obvious on the streets of Ukraine’s cities. And yet, Syrko noticed that this reality was not being reflected in the Ukrainian media.
Many of the countries that have sanctioned Russia over the war in Ukraine need to take urgent action to disrupt the supply of technology for its electronic warfare campaign, according to a report.
The dossier compiled by Ukraine and circulated to the major countries which have imposed sanctions identifies key Russian firms involved in the development and production of electronic military equipment. It says the UK and other countries have not yet sanctioned some of the firms involved.
It identified what it claims is technology made by British firms in some of the advanced electronic equipment engaged in the conflict, and says more effective action is required to block the use of foreign components.
The report states:
The effectiveness of Russian electronic systems largely depends on access to imported components that are widely used in the production of such systems … Specific steps should be taken immediately to reduce the Russian military-industrial complex’s capability.
Senior military commanders in Ukraine are concerned at recent advances by Russia in the electronic warfare battle. In a recent article in the Economist, Valery Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, wrote: “[Electronic warfare] is the key to victory in the drone war.
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Summary
Welcome, as we resume the Guardian’s coverage of the Russian war against Ukraine. Here are the developments making news this morning.
Russia is having to pull air defence systems out of Kaliningrad, its external province on the Baltic Sea, to replace those it has lost in the Ukraine war, according to an intelligence update from the UK’s Ministry of Defence. “This follows an increase in losses of SA-21 air defence systems in Russian-occupied Ukraine in late October 2023.”
The move shows that Russia is so overstretched by the conflict that it is having to accept additional risk to strategically important Kaliningrad, which is bordered on three sides by Nato member states, according to the MoD.
The Russian military death toll in Ukraine has reached 324,830, according to estimates provided by the Ukrainian military.
Russia sent waves of kamikaze drones into Ukraine on Saturday in what Kyiv said was the most intensive drone attack since the start of the war. Five people were wounded by falling debris, while several buildings were damaged as about 17,000 people in the Kyiv region were left without electricity, reports said. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 74 of the 75 drones.
In Russia, 24 drones reportedly attacked the Moscow region and three other provinces to the south and west, while two Ukrainian missiles were launched over the Azov Sea. One person was injured in the city of Tula, south of Moscow, when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, it was reported.
Russian troops continue attempts to advance near Avdiivka with Ukrainian forces repelling attacks to its north-east, west and south-west. According to reports by the Ukrainian general staff, Russia has conducted airstrikes in support of ground operations geared toward encircling the city on the outskirts of Donetsk.
Russian soldiers “seek to reoccupy” the town of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, according to the spokesperson for Ukraine’s ground forces, Volodymyr Fitio. “The enemy intends to advance to the settlement of Sinkivka in order to develop their further success in the offensive on Kupiansk,” he said.
Ukraine’s arms industry minister has called for the country to turn itself into the “arsenal of the free world” and provide weapons for export. Oleksandr Kamyshin aims to revive the state sector and coordinate private enterprises to boost export of weapons.
Many of the countries that have sanctioned Russia over the war in Ukraine need to take urgent action to disrupt the supply of technology for its electronic warfare campaign, according to a report. It names companies whose parts have been found in Russian equipment.
Ukraine needs more air defences to protect grain export routes, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said at the Grain from Ukraine summit on food security in Kyiv, which was attended by leaders from European countries including Switzerland and Lithuania.
About 2,100 vehicles are unable to get into Ukraine because of a Polish blockade. According to an update by Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry reported by the Kyiv Independent, the flow of traffic at the Dorohusk-Yahodyn crossing – usually 680 lorries a day – is down to a few dozen every 24 hours.
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