Drone debris sparks small fire at Russian refinery
KRASNODAR : A small fire ignited by debris from a destroyed drone was promptly doused at the Slavyansk oil refinery in Russia's region of Krasnodar, authorities said today.
Russia's air defence units destroyed 46 Ukrainian drones overnight, the defence ministry said on Telegram, including five over the Krasnodar region.
The ministry reports only drones downed, not the number launched by Ukraine.
'There are no casualties reported,' the administration said on the Telegram messaging app.
'The fire was promptly extinguished. Emergency and special services are working at the scene,' the administration said.
A car caught fire at the refinery, the regional administration added in its post.
Reuters was not able to independently verify the reports.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, which says its strikes inside Russia aim to destroy infrastructure key to Moscow's war efforts, including energy facilities.
The Slavyansk refinery is a private plant with a capacity of around 100,000 barrels per day, supplying fuel for both domestic use and export.
'The overnight Ukrainian drone attack also targeted Russia's southern region of Volgograd,' the regional governor said.
'Drone debris fell on a 16-story residential building in the city of Volgograd, forcing residents to leave their homes, the governor,' Andrei Bocharov, said on Telegram.
The city of Volgograd is the administrative centre of the broader region of the same name.
The Russian defence ministry said its units destroyed 11 drones overnight over Volgograd.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Straits Times
3 hours ago
- New Straits Times
Putin wins Ukraine concessions but doesn't get all he wants
IN a few short hours in Alaska, Vladimir Putin managed to convince Donald Trump that a Ukraine ceasefire was not the way to go, stave off US sanctions, and spectacularly shatter years of Western attempts to isolate the Russian president. Outside Russia, Putin was widely hailed as the victor of the Alaska summit while at home, Russian state media cast the United States president as a prudent statesman, even as critics in the West accused him of being out of his depth. Russian state media made much of the fact that Putin was afforded a military fly-over, that Trump waited for him on the red carpet, and then let the Russian president ride with him in the back of the "Big Beast", the US presidential limousine. But Putin's biggest summit wins related to the war in Ukraine, where he appears to have persuaded Trump, at least in part, to embrace Russia's vision of how a deal should be done. Trump had gone into the meeting saying he wanted a quick ceasefire and had threatened Putin and Russia's biggest buyer of its crude oil — China — with sanctions. Afterwards, Trump said he had agreed with Putin that negotiators should go straight to a peace settlement and not through a ceasefire as Ukraine and its European allies had been demanding — previously with US support. "The US president's position has changed after talks with Putin, and now the discussion will focus not on a truce, but on the end of the war. And a new world order. Just as Moscow wanted," Olga Skabeyeva, one of Russian state TV's most prominent talk show hosts, said on Telegram. The fact that the summit even took place was a win for Putin before it even started, given how it brought him in from the diplomatic cold with such pomp. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's former president and a close Putin ally, said the summit had achieved a major breakthrough when it came to restoring US-Russia relations, which Putin had lamented were at their lowest level since the Cold War. "The mechanism for high-level meetings between Russia and the United States has been restored in its entirety," he said. But Putin did not get everything he wanted and it's unclear how durable his gains will be. For one, Trump did not hand him the economic reset he wanted — something that would boost the Russian president at a time when his economy is showing signs of strain after more than three years of war and increasingly tough Western sanctions. Yuri Ushakov, Putin's foreign policy aide, said before the summit the talks would touch on trade and economic issues. Putin had brought his finance minister and the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund all the way to Alaska with a view to discussing potential deals on the Arctic, energy, space and the technology sector. In the end, though, they didn't get a look in. Trump told reporters on Air Force One before the summit started there would be no business done until the war in Ukraine was settled. It's also unclear how long the sanctions reprieve that Putin won will last. Trump said it would probably be two or three weeks before he would need to return to the question of thinking about imposing secondary sanctions on China, to hurt financing for Moscow's war machine. Nor did Trump — judging by information that has so far been made public — do what some Ukrainian and European politicians had feared the most and sell Kyiv out by doing a deal over the head of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy. Trump made clear that it was up to Zelenskyy as to whether he would agree — or not — with ideas of land swaps and other elements for a peace settlement that the US president had discussed with Putin in Alaska. While deliberations continue, Russian forces are slowly but steadily advancing on the battlefield. According to the New York Times, Trump told European leaders that Ukrainian recognition of Donbas as Russian would help get a deal done. And the US is ready to be part of security guarantees for Ukraine, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said. "For Putin, economic problems are secondary to his goals, but he understands our vulnerability and the costs involved," said one source familiar with Kremlin thinking. "It will be Trump's job to pressure Ukraine to recognise the agreements."
Malay Mail
5 hours ago
- Malay Mail
Putin wins optics, Trump shifts tone — but summit leaves key issues open
MOSCOW, Aug 17 — In a few short hours in Alaska, Vladimir Putin managed to convince Donald Trump that a Ukraine ceasefire was not the way to go, stave off US sanctions, and spectacularly shatter years of Western attempts to isolate the Russian president. Outside Russia, Putin was widely hailed as the victor of the Alaska summit while at home, Russian state media cast the US president as a prudent statesman, even as critics in the West accused him of being out of his depth. Russian state media made much of the fact that Putin was afforded a military fly-over, that Trump waited for him on the red carpet, and then let the Russian president ride with him in the back of the 'Big Beast', the US presidential limousine. 'Western media are in a state that could be described as derangement verging on complete insanity,' said Maria Zakharova, Russia's foreign minister spokeswoman. 'For three years, they talked about Russia's isolation, and today they saw the red carpet rolled out to welcome the Russian president to the United States,' she said. But Putin's biggest summit wins related to the war in Ukraine, where he appears to have persuaded Trump, at least in part, to embrace Russia's vision of how a deal should be done. Trump had gone into the meeting saying he wanted a quick ceasefire and had threatened Putin and Russia's biggest buyer of its crude oil — China — with sanctions. Afterwards, Trump said he had agreed with Putin that negotiators should go straight to a peace settlement and not via a ceasefire as Ukraine and its European allies had been demanding - previously with US support. 'The US president's position has changed after talks with Putin, and now the discussion will focus not on a truce, but on the end of the war. And a new world order. Just as Moscow wanted,' Olga Skabeyeva, one of Russian state TV's most prominent talkshow hosts, said on Telegram. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, saying Kyiv's embrace of the West had become a threat to its security, something Ukraine has dismissed as a false pretext for what it calls a colonial-style land grab. The war — the deadliest in Europe for 80 years — has killed or wounded well over a million people from both sides, including thousands of mostly Ukrainian civilians, according to analysts. No economic reset The fact that the summit even took place was a win for Putin before it even started, given how it brought him in from the diplomatic cold with such pomp. Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court, accused of the war crime of deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. Russia denies any wrongdoing, saying it acted to remove unaccompanied children from a conflict zone. Neither Russia nor the United States are members of the court. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's former president and a close Putin ally, said the summit had achieved a major breakthrough when it came to restoring US-Russia relations, which Putin had lamented were at their lowest level since the Cold War. 'The mechanism for high-level meetings between Russia and the United States has been restored in its entirety,' he said. But Putin did not get everything he wanted and it's unclear how durable his gains will be. For one, Trump did not hand him the economic reset he wanted - something that would boost the Russian president at a time when his economy is showing signs of strain after more than three years of war and increasingly tough Western sanctions. Yuri Ushakov, Putin's foreign policy aide, said before the summit that the talks would touch on trade and economic issues. Putin had brought his finance minister and the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund all the way to Alaska with a view to discussing potential deals on the Arctic, energy, space and the technology sector. In the end, though, they didn't get a look in. Trump told reporters on Air force One before the summit started there would be no business done until the war in Ukraine was settled. It's also unclear how long the sanctions reprieve that Putin won will last. Trump said it would probably be two or three weeks before he would need to return to the question of thinking about imposing secondary sanctions on China, to hurt financing for Moscow's war machine. Nor did Trump — judging by information that has so far been made public — do what some Ukrainian and European politicians had feared the most and sell Kyiv out by doing a deal over the head of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Trump made clear that it was up to Zelensky as to whether he would agree — or not — with ideas of land swaps and other elements for a peace settlement that the US president had discussed with Putin in Alaska. Although as Trump's bruising Oval Office encounter with Zelensky showed earlier this year, if Trump thinks the Ukrainian leader is not engaging constructively, he can quickly turn on him. Indeed, Trump was quick to start piling pressure on Zelensky, who is expected in Washington on Monday, saying after the summit that Ukraine had to a deal because, 'Russia is a very big power, and they're not'. 'The main point is that both sides have directly placed responsibility on Kyiv and Europe for achieving future results in the negotiations,' said Medvedev, who added that the summit showed it was possible to negotiate and fight at the same time. Donbas demand While deliberations continue, Russian forces are slowly but steadily advancing on the battlefield and threatening a series of Ukrainian towns and cities whose fall could speed up Moscow's quest to take complete control of the eastern region of Donetsk, one of four Ukrainian regions Russia claims as its own. Donetsk, some 25 per cent of which remains beyond Russia's control, and the Luhansk region together make up the industrial Donbas region, which Putin has made clear he wants in its entirety. Putin told Trump he'd be ready to freeze the front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, two of the other regions he claims, if Kyiv agreed to withdraw from both Donetsk and Luhansk, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Zelensky rejected the demand, the source said. According to the New York Times, Trump told European leaders that Ukrainian recognition of Donbas as Russian would help get a deal done. And the US is ready to be part of security guarantees for Ukraine, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said. Some Kremlin critics said it would be a mistake to credit Putin with too much success at this stage. 'Russia has re-established its status and got dialogue with the US,' said Michel Duclos, a French diplomat who formerly served in Moscow and who is an analyst at the Institut Montaigne think-tank. 'But when you have a war on your hands and your economy is collapsing, these are limited gains.' Russian officials deny the economy, which has been put on a war footing and has proved more resilient than the West forecast despite heavy sanctions, is collapsing. But they have acknowledged signs of overheating and have said the economy could enter recession next year unless policies are adjusted. 'For Putin, economic problems are secondary to his goals, but he understands our vulnerability and the costs involved,' said one source familiar with Kremlin thinking. 'Both sides will have to make concessions. The question is to what extent. The alternative, if we want to defeat them militarily, is to mobilise resources more deeply and use them more skilfully, but we are not going down that road for various reasons,' the person said. 'It will be Trump's job to pressure Ukraine to recognise the agreements.' — Reuters
Borneo Post
7 hours ago
- Borneo Post
European leaders to join Zelensky in US for Ukraine talks with Trump
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia's President Vladimir Putin makes a statement during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow on August 16, 2025, a day after US-Russia summit on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. – Sputnik/AFP source photo BRUSSELS (Aug 17): European leaders will join Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his visit to Washington on Monday seeking an end to Moscow's invasion, after President Donald Trump dropped his push for a ceasefire following an Alaska summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Securing a ceasefire in Ukraine, more than three years after the Kremlin ordered the invasion, had been one of Trump's core demands before the summit, to which Ukraine and its European allies were not invited. But after the meeting yielded no breakthrough, Trump ruled out an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine — a move that would appear to favour Putin, who has long argued for negotiations on a final peace deal. Ukraine and its European allies have criticised Putin's stance as a way to buy time and press Russia's battlefield advances. The leaders heading to Washington on Monday to try and bend Trump's ear on the matter include German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Ahead of the visit, von der Leyen said on X she would welcome Zelensky for a meeting in Brussels on Sunday which other European leaders would join by video, before accompanying the Ukrainian leader on his US trip at his 'request' and with 'other European leaders'. The German government, which confirmed Merz was going, said it would try to emphasise 'interest in a swift peace agreement in Ukraine'. Trump had briefed Zelensky and European leaders on his flight back from Alaska to Washington, saying afterwards that 'it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a peace agreement which would end the war'. Ceasefire agreements 'often times do not hold up,' Trump argued on his Truth Social platform. But Zelensky has appeared unconvinced by the change of tack, saying on Saturday that it 'complicates the situation'. If Moscow lacks 'the will to carry out a simple order to stop the strikes, it may take a lot of effort to get Russia to have the will to implement (something) far greater — peaceful coexistence with its neighbours for decades,' he said on social media. European leaders for their part have expressed unease over Trump's outreach to Putin from the outset. – 'Harsh reality' – Trump expressed support during his call with Zelensky and European leaders for a proposal by Putin to take full control of two eastern Ukrainian regions that Russia largely controls in exchange for freezing the frontline in two others, an official briefed on the talks told AFP. Putin 'de facto demands that Ukraine leave Donbas,' an area consisting of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in eastern Ukraine, the source said. In exchange, Russian forces would halt their offensive in the Black Sea port region of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, where the main cities are still under Ukrainian control. Several months into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia in September 2022 claimed to have annexed all four Ukrainian regions even though its troops still do not fully control any of them. 'The Ukrainian president refused to leave Donbas,' the source said. Trump notably also said the United States was prepared to provide Ukraine security guarantees, an assurance Merz hailed as 'significant progress'. But there was a scathing assessment of the summit outcome from the European Union's top diplomat Kaja Kallas, who accused Putin of seeking to 'drag out negotiations' with no commitment to end the bloodshed. 'The harsh reality is that Russia has no intention of ending this war any time soon,' Kallas said. – Zelensky back in White House – The diplomatic focus now switches to Zelensky's talks at the White House on Monday with the European leaders in tow. The Ukrainian president's last Oval Office visit in February ended in an extraordinary shouting match, with Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly berating Zelensky for not showing enough gratitude for US aid. In an interview with broadcaster Fox News after his sit-down with Putin, Trump had suggested that the onus was now on Zelensky to secure a peace deal as they work towards an eventual trilateral summit with Putin. 'It's really up to President Zelensky to get it done,' Trump said. Meanwhile, the conflict in Ukraine rages on, with both Kyiv and Moscow launching attack drones at each other Sunday. In his post-summit statement in Alaska, Putin had warned Ukraine and European countries not to engage in any 'behind-the-scenes intrigues' that could disrupt what he called 'this emerging progress'. – AFP ceasefire European peace talks Russia-Ukraine war
