Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy says peace negotiations ‘must be stepped up'
At talks last month, Russia outlined demands including Ukraine ceding more territory and rejecting all forms of western military support. Kyiv dismissed them as unacceptable and at the time questioned the point of further negotiations if Moscow was not willing to make concessions. Two rounds of talks in Istanbul between Moscow and Kyiv have failed to result in any progress towards a ceasefire, instead yielding large-scale exchanges of prisoners and the bodies of soldiers.
Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine overnight into Saturday with hundreds of drones, killing at least one person. Zelenskyy said Russia fired more than 300 drones, along with more than 30 cruise missiles, into 10 regions. Russia now often batters Ukraine with more drones in a single night than it did during some entire months in 2024, and analysts say the barrages are likely to escalate.
Two people died after a Russian missile hit Ukraine's central Dnipropetrovsk region, an important industrial hub, into which Russia's forces have recently advanced. Russia launched its biggest ever attack on the eastern Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad early on Saturday, as part of the large wave of strikes across the country. According to the regional governor, Sergiy Lysak, the strike destroyed 'an outpatient clinic, a school and a cultural institution' in the Vasylkivska township, with some private houses and cars damaged as well.
One person died in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, which was hit with more than 20 drones and a missile, said the mayor, Hennadii Trukhanov, while five people were rescued from a fire in a residential high-rise building. According to Zelenskyy, six other people were wounded in the attack on Odesa, including a child, and critical infrastructure was damaged in Ukraine's north-eastern Sumy region.
Russia's defence ministry said it shot down 71 Ukrainian drones overnight into Saturday. The Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said 13 drones were shot down as they approached the Russian capital. Russia had to suspend trains for about four hours, causing extensive delays in the southern Rostov region, when it came under a Ukrainian drone attack that wounded one railway worker.
Ukraine's foreign minister accused Russia on Saturday of deporting Ukrainian citizens into Georgia and leaving them stranded without proper identification. Andrii Sybiha said Moscow has escalated the practice of expelling Ukrainians – many of whom are former prisoners – across its southern border with Georgia, instead of returning them directly to Ukraine. 'Dozens of people, many of whom lack proper documentation, have been stuck in the transit zone.' That amounted to Russia 'weaponising the deportation of Ukrainian citizens', he added. There was no immediate response from Moscow.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Ukraine war briefing: Kyiv faces Russian missile attack as both sides trade strikes
Russia launched a missile attack on Kyiv early on Sunday, the military administration of the Ukrainian capital said on the Telegram messaging app. Reuters' witnesses heard a loud blast shaking the city soon after midnight. The reported attack comes days after Russia's worst airstrike of the year on Kyiv, which killed at least 31 people, including five children, and wounded more than 150. Ukraine on Saturday said it hit military targets and a gas pipeline in drone attacks in Russia, where local authorities said three people were killed and two others wounded. Ukraine's SBU security service said the strikes, carried out on Friday night by long-distance drones, hit a military airfield in the south-western town of Primorsko-Akhtarsk. They caused a fire in an areas where Iranian-built Shahed drones – relied on by Russia to attack Ukraine – were stored, the SBU said. The SBU said the strikes also hit a company in Russia's southern Penza region, which it said 'works for the Russian military-industrial complex', making military digital networks, aviation devices, armoured vehicles and ships. The governor for Russia's Penza region, Oleg Melnichenko, said on Telegram that one woman had been killed and two other people were wounded in that attack. Russia's defence ministry said its air-defence systems had destroyed 112 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory – 34 over the Rostov region – in a nearly nine-hour period, from Friday night to Saturday morning. An elderly man was killed inside a house that caught fire due to falling drone debris in the Samara region, governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev posted on Telegram. In the Rostov region, a guard at an industrial facility was killed after a drone attack and a fire in one of the site's buildings, acting Rostov governor Yuri Sliusar said. 'The military repelled a massive air attack during the night,' destroying drones over seven districts, Sliusar posted on Telegram. More than 120 firefighters were trying to extinguish a blaze at an oil depot in the Russian city of Sochi that was sparked by a Ukrainian drone attack, a regional governor said early on Sunday. In the Krasnodar region where Sochi is located, a fuel tank with a capacity of 2,000 cubic metres was on fire, Russia's RIA news agency reported. Rosaviatsia, Russia's civil aviation authority, said on Telegram that flights were halted at Sochi's airport to ensure air safety. Both sides deny targeting civilians in their strike in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022. Kyiv says that its attacks inside Russia are aimed at destroying infrastructure key to Moscow's war efforts and are in response to Russia's relentless strikes on Ukraine. Indian oil refineries will continue to buy oil from Russia, officials have said, before threatened US sanctions next week against Moscow's trading partners over the war in Ukraine. Media reports on Friday had suggested India, a big energy importer, would stop buying cheap Russian oil. Trump later told reporters that such a move would be 'a good step' if true. 'I understand that India is no longer going to be buying oil from Russia,' he said. 'That's what I heard. I don't know if that's right or not. That is a good step. We will see what happens.' Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday that they had arrested several politicians in connection with a 'large-scale corruption scheme' in the defence sector, shortly after an uproar over the independence of anti-graft bodies. A law passed in late July stripped the National Anti-Corruption Agency (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) of their independence and placed them under the supervision of the prosecutor general, himself appointed by the head of state. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday backtracked and restored the bodies' independence after an outcry from the country's allies and the first anti-government street demonstrations since Russia's invasion. The NABU on Saturday said it and the SAP had exposed 'a scheme for the systematic misappropriation of budget funds allocated by local authorities for the needs of the defence forces, as well as the receipt and provision of unlawful benefits on an especially large scale'. It said the scheme involved inflating prices for electronic warfare and drone equipment, and then funnelling off 30% of the contract amounts. The suspects include a member of parliament, heads of district and city administrations, members of the National Guard, and executives at defence companies. The NABU said it has made four arrests so far but did not identify those detained. Zelensky said in a statement: 'I am grateful to the anti-corruption agencies for their work … It is important that anti-corruption institutions operate independently, and the law passed on Thursday guarantees them all the tools necessary for a real fight against corruption.' A fire that broke out near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant after Ukrainian shelling has been brought under control, the Russian-installed administration of the plant in Ukraine said on Saturday. Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia plant in the first weeks of Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Both sides have accused each other of firing or taking other actions that could trigger a nuclear accident. The plant's administration said on Telegram that a civilian had been killed in the shelling, but that no plant employees or members of the emergency services had been injured. The station, Europe's biggest nuclear power plant, is not operating but still requires power to keep its nuclear fuel cool.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Fighters attack Syrian forces as ceasefire breaks down
Armed fighters attacked Syria's internal security forces in the city of Sweida on Sunday, killing one person and breaking a fragile ceasefire. The renewed violence follows deadly clashes between Druze and Sunni Bedouins in July that drew the intervention of Syrian government forces and tribal fighters who came to support the Bedouins. Israel also entered the fray, carrying out strikes on Syrian troops in support of the Druze, an Arabic-speaking ethno-religious minority with communities in Israel. A ceasefire put an end to the week of bloodshed – which killed 1,400 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – but the situation remained tense, flaring into violence again on Sunday. Syria's state-run Ekhbariya TV reported that one member of the Syrian government forces was killed by the armed gang. Unconfirmed reports also suggested Druze militants had conquered an area west of Sweida from regime forces. Meanwhile, Israeli troops questioned 'several suspects' overnight who are thought to be involved in weapons trafficking in the Hader area in southern Syria. The Israel Defence Force (IDF) said troops entered four locations simultaneously and located 'numerous weapons that the suspects had been trafficking'. Israel entered the conflict last month when Druze civilians were attacked by regime forces, launching airstrikes on government military positions as well as the defence ministry headquarter in Damascus. Hundreds of Israeli Druze crossed the border from Israeli-controlled Golan Heights into Syria to defend their family members from the attacks by regime forces and Bedouin tribes. Geir Pedersen, the UN special envoy for Syria, told ambassadors in the Security Council last week that 'Syrians are reeling after appalling violence in Sweida – violence that should not have happened and which also saw unacceptable foreign intervention'. Edem Wosornu, director of operations at the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, said the city of Sweida was 'teetering on the edge of collapse'. 'The recent violence in Sweida has displaced an estimated 175,000 people... a third of the population in the governorate, where two thirds of people were already in need of assistance,' she said last week. Ahmed Al-Sharaa, Syria's new president, has struggled to unite the country after toppling Bashar al-Assad in December last year. Several rounds of sectarian violence have erupted since, with his regime forces accused of committing atrocities against the Alawite and Druze minorities. The IDF took control last year of a buffer zone established in 1974 between Israel and Syria. Israel said it wouldn't allow a 'jihadi' presence on its border after the fall of the Assad regime, while promising to protect the Druze minority in southern Syria. The Syrian government has lashed out at Israel for attacking its territory and grabbing new territory, while some Druze in Syria and Lebanon have accused Israel of stoking sectarian divisions to seize more land.
Reuters
4 hours ago
- Reuters
Who is Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian war hawk who got under Trump's skin?
Aug 3 (Reuters) - Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has become embroiled in a tense back-and-forth on social media that prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to announce he had ordered the re-positioning of two U.S. nuclear submarines. Who is Medvedev, what is his track record and how influential is he? Medvedev was elected Russian president in 2008 when Vladimir Putin, having served two terms, was barred from standing again under the law in force at that time. Medvedev ran the Kremlin for four years, with Putin as his prime minister but widely assumed by analysts in Russia and the West to be still calling the shots, before the two swapped places after the 2012 election - a political manoeuvre that provoked opposition protests. Medvedev, the son of two university professors, had studied law and worked for a time in the private sector. Short in height and quietly spoken, he was described by contemporaries as cultured and intelligent. As president, he was seen initially in the West as a potential moderniser and reformer, prepared to work to thaw relations with the United States. In 2009 he signed the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with President Barack Obama. But Medvedev's presidency also saw Russia fight a brief war with its neighbour Georgia in 2008, and he failed to achieve his stated goals of tackling pervasive corruption, improving the rule of law in Russia, strengthening the role of civil society and rebalancing the economy to reduce its over-reliance on oil and gas production. Medvedev served as Putin's prime minister for eight years in a period in which tensions with the West escalated anew, particularly over Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. But his political fortunes took a dive when he was removed in January 2020 and replaced by Mikhail Mishustin, who has held the post ever since. Medvedev was shunted into a new role as deputy chairman of the Security Council, a powerful body that includes the heads of Russia's intelligence services. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Medvedev carved out a new role for himself as an arch-hawk and full-throated champion of the war, hurling aggressive rhetoric at Kyiv and the West and warning repeatedly of the risk of a nuclear "apocalypse". In May 2024 he said it would be a "fatal mistake" on the part of the West to think that Russia was not ready to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. He also spoke of the potential to strike unnamed hostile countries with strategic nuclear weapons. His statements - including personal attacks on foreign leaders - were frequently designed to shock, insult and provoke. He referred to Ukrainians as "cockroaches", in language Kyiv condemned as openly genocidal, and called President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a criminal, a drug addict, a louse, a rat and a freak. In January 2023, he accused Japan's prime minister of shameful subservience to the United States and suggested he should ritually disembowel himself. Russian opposition figures have dismissed Medvedev's outpourings as sad, impotent rants. However, some Western diplomats say they give a flavour of the thinking in Kremlin policy-making circles. Until now, they have rarely provoked a direct response from Western leaders. That changed last month when Trump rebuked Medvedev and accused him of throwing around the "N" word after the Russian criticised U.S. air strikes on Iran and said "a number of countries" were ready to supply Iran with nuclear warheads. When Trump imposed a deadline on Moscow to end the war in Ukraine or face further sanctions, including on buyers of its exports, Medvedev accused him of playing a "game of ultimatums" and moving a step closer to war between Russia and the U.S. Trump retorted: "Tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he's still President, to watch his words. He's entering very dangerous territory!" Medvedev waded in again last Thursday, saying Trump's "nervous reaction" showed Russia was on the right course and referring again to Moscow's nuclear capabilities. Trump delivered his statement the following day on posting U.S. nuclear submarines in "the appropriate regions", since when Medvedev has not posted again.
