Ukrainian drone strike kills 1 in as fighting rages ahead of a planned Trump-Putin summit
Nizhny Novgorod Gov. Gleb Nikitin said in an online statement that drones targeted two 'industrial zones' that caused unspecified damage along with the three casualties.
A Ukrainian official said at least four drones launched by the country's security services, or SBU, struck a plant in the city of Arzamas that produced components for the Khinzal 32 and Khinzal 101 missiles.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operations, said the Plandin plant produces gyroscopic devices, control systems and on-board computers for the missiles and is an 'absolutely legitimate target' because it is part of the Russian military-industrial complex that works for the war against Ukraine.
Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted and destroyed a total of 39 Ukrainian drones overnight and Monday morning over several Russian regions as well as over the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
The summit, which U.S. President Donald Trump will host in Alaska later this week, sees Putin unwavering on his maximalist demands to keep all the Ukrainian territory his forces now occupy but also to prevent Kyiv from joining NATO with the long-term aim to keep the country under Moscow's sphere of influence.
Putin believes he enjoys the advantage on the ground as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold back Russian advances along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insists he will never consent to any Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory nor give up his country's bid for NATO membership. European leaders have rallied behind Ukraine, saying peace in the war-torn nation can't be resolved without Kyiv.
Meanwhile on the front lines, few Ukrainian soldiers believe there's an end in sight to the war, other than a brief respite before Moscow resumes its attacks with even greater might.
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The Independent
25 minutes ago
- The Independent
How Russia's war on Ukraine led to crucial Trump-Putin summit - and why the stakes are so high
Donald Trump is meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska in what the US president has said may be little more than a 'look see', but in truth may prove an encounter that defines Europe -and global security - for decades. From Trump's perspective, the summit may be part of his drive for a Nobel Peace Prize by ending Putin's war against Ukraine using the 'art of the deal'. Putin, however, is likely to prevail and his agenda is the art of the steal – specifically a massive grab of his neighbour's land. Missing from the meeting is the country most affected – Ukraine itself. Led by Volodymyr Zelensky, it has held out against the Kremlin for 11 years. Trump, Putin, and many others (including parts of the media) seem to think that Ukraine's future can be decided by the two nuclear powers and then presented to Kyiv as a done deal. Europe, the region most affected by what happens in Ukraine, has worked hard to underline that that is neither true nor sensible – while simultaneously keeping the mercurial US president 'on side' when every indication is that he's firmly in Russia 's camp. Here's how things currently stand. How Russia and Ukraine ended up at war in 2022 In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in return for written guarantees from Russia, the US and the UK to respect Ukrainian sovereignty. Twenty years later, Russia ignored those guarantees and invaded the Crimean Peninsula, claiming the land for itself and the right to protect Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine. Putin annexed Crimea illegally, sponsoring 'rebels' and sending troops into eastern Ukraine to capture large areas of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts (provinces). The US, Europe and the UK did nothing to help or protect Ukraine, even banning lethal arms exports to the embattled nation. In 2022, the Russian president went one step further and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was stunned that it stalled and then failed. Limited weapons supplies from the US and UK helped partisans and Ukrainian forces hold the Russians back and then turn them around. Ferocious fighting turned the front lines into a 'meat grinder' conflict of attrition, with the exception of summer 2022, where Ukraine managed to recapture large areas of territory. Three years on and Russia now holds almost all of Luhansk oblast, much of Donetsk, a significant area of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and all of Crimea. Still fighting determinedly, Ukraine has a toehold inside Russian territory in Kursk and has been conducting punishing attacks deep into Russian territory. In response, Russia has stepped up drone and missile attacks across Ukraine, often launching 500 in a single night. In the Black Sea, Russia's navy has been driven out by Ukraine, which doesn't have a navy to speak of, using special forces and drone attacks. What Russia wants Putin has repeatedly said that there is no nation called 'Ukraine' and that its territory is naturally part of Russia. His imperial ambitions are underpinned by Russia's conquest of much of modern eastern Ukraine by Catherine the Great in the 18th century. But above all, the Russian president is driven by a colonel's Soviet mentality that led to Moscow's attempts to annihilate the Ukrainian language, history and culture. As a condition of a ceasefire of any kind, Russia has demanded that Ukraine withdraw its forces from territories Moscow claims as its own, including the entirety of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts. In a memorandum circulated at the Istanbul talks in March, Russia insisted a 30-day ceasefire would only take effect once Ukraine had fully pulled back from these four regions. Russia also insists that Ukraine formally recognise all of Crimea and the four annexed oblasts as Russian territory in any future peace treaty. This 'international legal recognition' would enshrine Russia's gains, obliging Kyiv to abandon any claim on those lands and to lift sanctions against Russia as part of a comprehensive settlement. Moscow also insists that Ukraine amend its constitution to enshrine permanent neutrality. This means giving up on its constitutionally mandated effort to join Nato. Ukraine must also be left vulnerable, with the banning of third-party foreign military bases from its territory, a ban on Western arms deliveries, and the prohibition of 'neo-Nazi ideology,' which Russia uses to justify a forced 'denazification' of Ukrainian society. Longer term, Putin has demanded that the Russian language should have equal status with Ukrainian as an official language. In return, Ukraine will get no guarantee that Russia's ambitions will stop at the five regions it has already taken as part of a ceasefire. What Trump is trying to achieve The US had been supporting Ukraine but was quick to turn on Zelensky, drop military aid, cut civilian support, weaken intelligence sharing, to swing firmly behind Putin in supporting Russian demands long before talks were even close to starting. Trump's latest pitch is that Ukraine should accept territorial losses. Some kind of a 'land swap' has been mooted, but this is Ukrainian territory for Ukrainian territory. This is ahead of a ceasefire, let alone a long-term peace. This could mean Ukraine would cede the remaining parts of Donetsk that it still controls in exchange for Russia freezing its lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Trump has also said there would be no US element to any future force to guarantee a longer-term peace deal in Ukraine. The US president has weakened Ukraine by cutting military aid. The US had given about $114bn to Ukraine. That figure is now zero. Trump now insists that Ukraine and its allies purchase weapons from the US. He has also forced a minerals deal on Ukraine that swaps profits from resources for arms. What Ukraine is hoping will happen Constitutionally, Zelensky can make no territorial concessions as part of a ceasefire. He would need a nationwide referendum to do so. He also cannot abandon Ukraine's attempts to join Nato as this has been enshrined in Ukrainian law since 2019. He'd need a referendum to change this. Kyiv demands a full and unconditional ceasefire as the only basis for genuine negotiations and rejects any proposal that would require it to abandon its ambitions. It sees Russian demands that Ukraine become neutral as 'an attack on its sovereignty'. Ukraine also insists on binding security guarantees from its Western partners, covering political, financial, military and diplomatic support. And how does Europe fit into all this? Slow to respond to Russia's invasion, Europe is now by far the biggest donor in terms of weapons, money, and other aid to Ukraine. In total, some €250bn has been pledged by the EU and UK. The European mantra of 'no talks about Ukraine without Ukraine' has been ignored by Trump and Putin. The US is saying only that Zelensky and then European leaders will get a call from Trump after he's finished talking to the Russian president. Europe insists that only Ukraine make decisions on territorial changes, its long-term neutrality and all other sovereign issues. By threatening the viability of Nato itself, Trump has forced Europe into huge increases in military spending towards a target of 5 per cent of GDP. Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and others in Scandinavia are preparing their populations to withstand potential Russian incursions. The most obvious route to 'restoring' the Soviet empire by reclaiming lost influence in Eastern Europe is through the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in the Baltics, and in Transnistria, a breakaway part of Moldova backed by Russia. Ursula von de Leyen, the EU president summed it up succinctly: 'Putin wants to force Ukraine into accepting the unacceptable, so the task we face is to help Ukraine stand strong, defy Putin's intimidations, and engage in peace talks based on its own conditions'.
Daily Mirror
26 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Putin 'same as Hitler' says war crimes detective who pieces together body parts
Colonel Serhii Bolvinov doesn't let being on a Russian hit-list stop him from investigating the horrors of Russian atrocities committed by President Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion army One of Ukraine's most senior war crimes investigators has described the horror of probing tens of thousands of Russian war atrocities. Veteran police officer Colonel Serhii Bolvinov landed 448 crimes in the immediate aftermath of the Kremlin invasion - a task that has now swollen to 22,000 atrocities. And his grim job has put him high up on Russia 's hit list. US President Donald Trump will tomorrow hold his peace summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who is an International Criminal Court war crimes suspect. And there has been no mention of the tens of thousands of war crimes allegedly committed by Russian troops during the war. As the world awaits the result of Friday's Alaska meeting International law firm Global Right Compliance, has warned any peace deal must not side-step the quest for justice for Ukrainian victims.. And Col Bolvinov, 43, is on the frontline of that quest. Col Bolvinov tells how he and his officers arrived at a forest outside the city of Izium, which is close to the Russian border. It comes after Putin warns of nuclear war after unleashing another night of hell on Ukraine Soon after Vladimir Putin's tanks and troops poured into Ukraine on February 24 2022 they threw themselves into an orgy of violence and depravity. In the weeks after the invasion the Mirror witnessed the aftermath of these crimes in areas such as Buch, north west of Kyiv, where corpses were dug up in huge mass graves. Civilians had been forced at gunpoint to bury their neighbours in these grim pits as the Russians did not want to be reminded of their crimes. It was the same wherever Russian troops appeared after the invasion and Col Bolvinov's team spent months exhuming decomposing civilian bodies after Putin's cowardly troops fled a ferocious Ukrainian counter-offensive. More than two years later Colonel Bolvinov, who commands the Kharkiv police investigations department, recalls: 'The smell was terrible from the very first minutes of the exhumation. Most of the bodies were badly decomposed because they were just thrown into the ground. As police investigators, we have seen many things. But this was terrifying because we were confronted with hundreds of bodies that had to be exhumed and accounted for. 'But all those war crimes must be accounted for - however long it takes.' In 2021 Bolvinov was appointed as head of police investigations for Kharkiv, which borders Russia, population 2.6m and the size of the Netherlands. On February 23, 2022, Bolvinov finished work in Kharkiv city at midnight and went to his rural home where he lived with his wife and three children. He said: 'My wife waited up for me and we talked about possible invasion and what we should do. She had prepared the car, but we did not think there would be an invasion. 'At about 4.30am, my wife heard these explosions, and she hit me so hard that I fell out of the bed. In 20 minutes, we had fully packed the car, we hugged goodbye and at that point we did not know if we would ever see each other again. It was horrible.' Bolvinov put his uniform on and headed into work in Kharkiv city, just 25 miles from the Russian border. His family, who he cannot name for safety reasons, have remained abroad ever since. He said: 'At 6pm I was at my post, ready to show my colleagues we needed to protect the city. 'I started to do typical police work. I slept on the floor in the office but by the 27th the Russians were just 500 metres away. We developed a rule of two walls. If a rocket or bomb is coming your way you need to be behind two walls. But I was beginning to get videos on Telegram from civilians and colleagues. 'We started to collect these videos from across the Kharkiv region and share them with the Ukrainian military, but we also had to control the situation because there were also looters and ordinary criminals.' Bolvinov and his 1000-strong team began to create a map of the region in order to track the shifting frontline. Three days later it came to their front door. He said: 'On February 27th the Russians infiltrated Kharkiv city. They were 500 metres from my office and I was at the office at the time. As a police officer you have to stay in your position. It doesn't matter who the criminal is, whether it is a civilian or Russian military. We started to collect evidence about war crimes.' Bolvinov and his team adapted quickly to survive. He said: 'As police officers we had never seen this before and didn't even know what war crimes were. But we started to collect evidence because there were a lot of dead people, a lot of wounded people, injured people, because Russia used cluster bombs, ballistic missiles, high explosive bombs dropped from the air. 'We started to learn about international law, how to gather evidence to the same standard, understand the weapons used. There were so many dead bodies in the streets.' Within months mobile DNA vans arrived, meaning it took hours instead of months or even years to identify victims. As civilian police they focus on civilians and civilian property when it comes to war crimes. These cover murder, torture, rape, and wounding, as well as destruction of property. Among them so far are 2854 civilians killed, including 96 children. The Russians have targeted Bolvinov and his colleagues, with their buildings hit by bombs and missiles and they have to dodge from building to building. In 2023 Bolvinov narrowly dodged being killed. He said: 'One day I was 200 metres away from a Russian rocket explosion. I was in a car driving through Kharkiv and there were no air defence systems at that time. They hit a building very close to me, the noise was deafening and very scary.' The Russians have him on their hit list, publishing his personal details, including his phone number. In October 2023, Bolvinov went to a village called Hroza after a Russian strike on a cafe. He said: 'Collaborators had sent information that a café was a Ukrainian military location and Russia used ballistic missiles. Because it was such a large missile, we could visually identify only 20 people. There were 59 civilians there, so many in such a small location there were a lot of body parts. 'That was when we started using mobile DNA labs and we spent five days and nights at the scene. It was a human horrible puzzle with parts from a head, an arm. Eventually we pieced together the DNA picture of the victims and pieced together the remains of perhaps a single victim, including a 12-year-old child.' But the scale of the 'cemetery' in Izium continues to haunt Bolvinov. "It required two mobile DNA vans for two months, without days off. We took DNA from the cheeks and lips. It was clear that we are dealing with a big case of Russians murdering civilians. To complicate matters the area had been heavily mined by the Russians.' In one grave marked 319 lay Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who had been seized by soldiers in March, his fate unknown. Investigators calculated he had been shot twice with a semi-automatic Makarov pistol after being taken away by three men from the so-called Lushansk People's Republic. The case was built using eyewitnesses, who identified their car, and heard their call signs, or military names, their commander, and documents abandoned by the Russians. The trio remain at large but only last month, his team presented their case to the Kharkiv court naming Dmytro Katkalov, 36, as one of three soldier suspects. Bolvinov is emphatic that justice will be served. He said: 'One hundred percent. . We are experienced at collecting the evidence, we have the expertise. We know who the criminals are and we know who the victims are. We do this for the future, for justice and we do this risking our lives.' When asked about whether Russian war criminals will ever be brought to justice Bolvinov says: 'You know, that is not my brief. I investigate war crimes and believe in the truth. You know who Hitler is and I know who Putin is. It is the same. I have visited Croatia and it took more than 30 years to get justice.' Wayne Jordash KC, President of international law firm Global Right Compliance, tells the Mirror: 'While a ceasefire would be a welcome development for Ukraine, any deal that sidesteps justice for victims or ignores documented atrocities risks abandoning the fundamental principles of international law. 'It's vital a deal is followed by steadfast support for Ukraine's Office of the Prosecution, to ensure that Russian forces who have committed horrific crimes, including widespread and systematic torture, including sexual violence, killing, and starvation, and a range of other crimes against humanity, are held to account.'
Times
26 minutes ago
- Times
US and Russia ‘plan West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine'
Russia and the United States have discussed Israel's occupation of the West Bank as a model for ending the war in Ukraine, The Times has been told. Under this scenario Russia would have military and economic control of occupied Ukraine under its own governing body, imitating Israel's de facto rule of Palestinian territory seized from Jordan in 1967. The idea was raised weeks ago in discussions between Steve Witkoff, President Trump's peace envoy, and his Russian counterparts, according to a source close to the US national security council. Witkoff, who is also tasked by Trump with bringing peace to the Middle East, is understood to support the idea, which the Americans believe circumvents barriers in the Ukrainian constitution to ceding territory without holding an 'all-Ukraine' referendum. President Zelensky has refused to countenance handing over land but the occupation model may be a mechanism to allow for a truce after three and a half years of war. Under the model, Ukraine's borders would not change, just as the borders of the West Bank have remained the same for 58 years, only under Israeli control. The White House has been asked for comment. 'It'll just be like Israel occupies the West Bank,' the source said before Trump's summit with President Putin in Alaska on Friday. 'With a governor, with an economic situation that goes into Russia, not Ukraine. But it'll still be Ukraine, because … Ukraine will never give up its sovereignty. But the reality is it'll be occupied territory and the model is Palestine.' Israel's occupation has been ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice, which is not recognised by the US and only partially accepted by Russia. In March 2022 the court ordered Russia to 'immediately suspend military operations' in Ukraine, by a vote of 13 to two in which the Russian and Chinese judges were opposed. The order is binding on Russia but the court has no means to enforce it. The United Nations has ordered Israel to end its occupation, most recently in a vote of the general assembly last September by 124 nations to 14, with 43 abstentions. The resolution called for Israel to comply with international law within 12 months and withdraw its military forces, immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank. Israel, which voted against the measure along with the US, has ignored the resolution, on which Britain abstained. This outcome for Ukraine's occupied territories is seen by some US negotiators as simply reflecting the reality of the war and the refusal by all other nations to become directly involved in fighting Russia. In this view, all that remains is to establish the exact boundaries of Russian occupation, which Putin is seeking to push as far as possible before his talks with Trump in Alaska. The scenario would reflect the US foreign policy world view as expressed by Sebastian Gorka, Trump's senior director for counterterrorism, in an interview in May. 'We live in the real world. The Trump administration lives in the real world,' Gorka told Politico. 'We recognise the reality on the ground. Number one, that's the beginning because we're not utopianists and we're not human engineers. We're not some kind of pie in the sky believers in utopia. 'We recognise the reality on the ground and we have one priority above all else, whether it's the Middle East or whether it's Ukraine. It's to stop the bloodshed. Everything else comes after the bloodshed has been halted.' It remains to be seen just how far the imitation of the West Bank situation would go if the plan is put into effect, since this is a model that has been a basis for discussion on ending the bloodshed and will not replicate factors unique to the West Bank. Israel's occupation has been widely criticised for establishing settlements, seizing land ownership and imposing a two-tier system of citizenship: Israeli civilians living or passing through the West Bank are subject to Israeli law while Palestinian civilians are subject to martial law and not permitted to vote in Israel's national elections. • Not a subscriber? Sign up for more exclusive reporting and expert analysis from The Times
