Putin fires Russian transport minister after drones disrupt air travel
There wasn't any official reason given for why Roman Vladimirovich Starovoit was fired from his post, but he was immediately replaced by Andrei Sergeevich Nikitin, according to a statement released Monday.
The move did come after a weekend that saw a great deal of transportation issues as Ukrainian drone attacks led to the cancellation of 485 flights by Russian airlines, while 1,900 were delayed and nearly 90 needed to be redirected.
Airlines were forced to refund 43,000 tickets, place 94,000 people in hotels and spend around $4,500 on food and drink for customers. A report from the website Kommersant states that in the end the issues will combine to cost approximately $255 million.
However, Russia also attacked Ukraine with drones Sunday evening into Monday morning, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted to X Monday that 101 drones were launched by Russia, which left one person dead and 27 injured.
"We are also actively advancing agreements on investing in our domestic weapons production, including all types of drones," he wrote.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
23 minutes ago
- CNN
Five ways the Russia-Ukraine war could end
A Trump-Putin meeting has been floated by both sides for some time. So why might either side want it to happen now? US President Donald Trump wants to bring the force of his personality to bear on forging a deal, believing that six months of intransigence from Moscow might be overcome by meeting the Kremlin head face to face. He seems still to cling to the idea the Kremlin can be cajoled into stopping the war, despite his Russian counterpart recently suggesting the maximalist position that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one, and wherever a Russian soldier steps is Russia. Russian leader Vladimir Putin wants to buy time, having already rejected a European, US and Ukrainian unconditional ceasefire proposal in May, offering instead two unilateral, short and inconsequential pauses. His forces are surging ahead on the front lines in a summer offensive that might bring him close enough to his goals that negotiations in the fall are over a very different status quo in the war. If the two men do meet, one apparent American objective is a trilateral summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss an end to the war – the very summit format Russia rejected in Istanbul in May. The Russian purpose is likely to allow Putin to drag Trump back into the orbit of Moscow's narrative. Still, a summit – floated before, delayed before – may happen this time, and it raises the question of how the war might end. Here are five possible scenarios: Highly unlikely. It's improbable that Putin would agree to a ceasefire in which the front lines stay as they are – the United States, Europe and Ukraine already demanded such a pause in May, under the threat of sanctions, and Russia rejected it. Trump backed away from sanctions, preferring low-level talks in Istanbul which went nowhere. A 30-day ceasefire earlier this year against energy infrastructure met with limited adherence or success. The Kremlin is currently turning incremental gains on the front line into strategic advantages and would see no point in stopping this progress now, as it reaches its height. Not even the threat of secondary sanctions against China and India – who appear resistant to US pressure – will change that immediate military calculus for the remainder of the summer. Until October, at least, Putin will want to fight because he is winning. The talks could agree on more talks later, that seal in Russian gains when winter sets in, freezing the front lines militarily and literally around October. Putin may have taken the eastern towns of Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka and Kupiansk by then, giving him a solid position to sit the winter out and regroup. Russia can then fight again in 2026, or use diplomacy to make these gains permanent. Putin might also raise the specter of elections in Ukraine – delayed because of the war, and briefly a Trump talking point – to question the legitimacy of Zelensky and even unseat him for a more pro-Russian candidate. In this scenario, US and European military aid to Ukraine helps them minimize concessions on the front line in the coming months, and leads Putin to seek to talk, as his military have yet again failed to deliver. Pokrovsk may fall and other eastern Ukrainian strongholds may be threatened, but Ukraine could see the Russian advance slow, as it has before, and the Kremlin could even feel the bite of sanctions and an overheating economy. European powers have already formulated advanced plans for a 'reassurance force' to be deployed to Ukraine as part of security guarantees. These tens of thousands of European NATO troops could sit around Kyiv and other major cities, providing logistical and intelligence help to Ukraine as it rebuilds, and create a sufficient deterrent that Moscow decides to leave the front lines as they are. This is the very best Ukraine can hope for. And if Putin does not stop and diplomacy fails? The next options are not as clean: Putin could correctly see the cracks in Western unity after a summit with Trump that improves US-Russian relations but leaves Ukraine to fend for itself. Europe could do their utmost to back Kyiv, but fail to tip the balance without American backup. Putin could see small gains in the east of Ukraine transform into the slow rout of Ukrainian forces in the flat, open terrain between the Donbass and the central cities of Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and the capital. Ukrainian defenses could prove weak, and Kyiv's military manpower crisis turns into a political disaster when Zelensky demands wider mobilization to prop up the country's defense. Kyiv's safety looks in peril again. Putin's forces move forwards. Europe's powers assess it would be better to fight Russia in Ukraine than later inside actual European Union territory. But Europe's leaders ultimately lack the political mandate to join a war for land inside Ukraine. Putin moves forward. NATO fails to deliver a unified response. This is Europe's nightmare, but is already the end of a sovereign Ukraine. Russia could blunder on, expending thousands of soldiers' lives a week, for relatively small gains, and seeing sanctions erode his alliance with China, and revenue from India. Moscow's sovereign wealth fund financial reserves could ebb, and its revenues dip. Dissent among the Moscow elite could rise at how the Kremlin has dismissed diplomatic off-ramps in its war of choice, in favor of military doggedness and an unsustainable proxy conflict with NATO. Trump becomes a lame duck, and the US focus after the mid-term elections returns to traditional foreign policy norms of opposing Moscow and its backer Beijing. In this scenario, the Kremlin could meet a moment where its resistance to the banal inconveniences of reality, and the economic hardship of its own people, turns toxic. Similar poor political calculus sustained the Soviets' ultimately fruitless occupation of Afghanistan in another war of choice. Similar moments of unexpected Kremlin weakness have already emerged in the Ukraine war, as when Putin's confidante, Yevgeny Prigozhin, appears to have stumbled into leading a shortlived revolt on the capital. Putin is strong on the surface, until he appears frail, and then he might be exposed as critically weak. It's happened before to both an expansionist Soviet Russia, and Putin. The problem with this scenario is it remains the best hope of Western strategists who can neither entertain NATO's full entry into the war to help Ukraine win, nor Kyiv's ability to push Moscow back militarily. None of the options are good for Ukraine. Only one of them spells the actual defeat of Russia as a military power and threat to European security. And none of them can spring from Trump meeting Putin alone, without Ukraine becoming part of any deal later.
26 minutes ago
Senior FBI official who resisted Trump administration demands has been pushed out, AP sources say
WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior FBI official who served as acting director in the first weeks of the Trump administration and resisted demands to turn over the names of agents who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, investigations is being forced out of the bureau, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday. The circumstances of Brian Driscoll's ouster were not immediately clear, but his final day is Friday, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the personnel move by name and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Additional ousters were possible. Spokespeople for the FBI declined to comment. The news comes amid a much broader personnel purge that has unfolded over the last several months under the leadership of current director FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Numerous senior officials including top agents in charge of big-city field offices have been pushed out of their jobs and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst. Driscoll, a veteran agent who worked international counterterrorism investigations in New York and had also commanded the bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, had most recently served as acting director in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group, which deploys manpower and resources to crisis situations. Driscoll was named acting director in January to replace Christopher Wray and served in the position as Patel's nomination was pending. He made headlines after he and Rob Kissane, the then-deputy director, resisted Trump administration demands for information about agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6 riot by a mob of President Donald Trump's supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Emil Bove, the then-senior Justice Department official who made the request and was last week confirmed for a seat on a federal appeals court, wrote a memo accusing the FBI's top leaders of 'insubordination.' Responding to Bove's request, the FBI ultimately provided personnel details about several thousand employees, identifying them by unique employee numbers rather than by names. The FBI has moved under Patel's watch to aggressively demote, reassign or push out agents. In April, for instance, the bureau reassigned several agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday. Numerous special agents in charge of field offices have been told to retire, resign or accept reassignment. Another agent, Michael Feinberg, has said publicly that he was told to resign or accept a demotion amid scrutiny from leadership of his friendship with Peter Strzok, a lead agent on the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation who was fired by the Justice Department in 2018 following revelations that he had exchanged negative text messages about President Donald Trump with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Senior FBI official who resisted Trump administration demands is pushed out, AP sources say
WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior FBI official who served as acting director in the first weeks of the Trump administration and resisted demands to turn over the names of agents who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, investigations is being forced out of the bureau, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday. The circumstances of Brian Driscoll's ouster were not immediately clear, but his final day is Friday, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the personnel move by name and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Additional ousters were possible. Spokespeople for the FBI declined to comment. The news comes amid a much broader personnel purge that has unfolded over the last several months under the leadership of current FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Numerous senior officials including top agents in charge of big-city field offices have been pushed out of their jobs, and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst. Driscoll, a veteran agent who worked international counterterrorism investigations in New York and had also commanded the bureau's Hostage Rescue Team, had most recently served as acting director in charge of the Critical Incident Response Group, which deploys manpower and resources to crisis situations. Driscoll was named acting director in January to replace Christopher Wray and served in the position as Patel's nomination was pending. He made headlines after he and Rob Kissane, the then-deputy director, resisted Trump administration demands for information about agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6 riot by a mob of President Donald Trump's supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Emil Bove, the then-senior Justice Department official who made the request and was last week confirmed for a seat on a federal appeals court, wrote a memo accusing the FBI's top leaders of 'insubordination.' Responding to Bove's request, the FBI ultimately provided personnel details about several thousand employees, identifying them by unique employee numbers rather than by names. The FBI has moved under Patel's watch to aggressively demote, reassign or push out agents. In April, for instance, the bureau reassigned several agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday. Numerous special agents in charge of field offices have been told to retire, resign or accept reassignment. Another agent, Michael Feinberg, has said publicly that he was told to resign or accept a demotion amid scrutiny from leadership of his friendship with Peter Strzok, a lead agent on the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation who was fired by the Justice Department in 2018 following revelations that he had exchanged negative text messages about President Donald Trump with an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.
