Ukraine claims to have incapacitated a ship in Russia’s Black Sea fleet; Ukraine and allies aim to rally global support for Saudi peace talks

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Ukraine’s security service and navy claimed to have used an unmanned boat, known as a sea drone, to scupper a landing ship in Russia’s Black sea port of Novorossiysk, as on-board camera footage emerged of an apparent twilight attack. The 112 metre long Olenegorsky Gornyak from Russia’s Northern Fleet, which has been used to transport troops and military hardware into occupied Ukrainian ports, was said by officials in Kyiv to be sufficiently damaged to have been put out of combat action.

The claim came as images emerged of both a Russian war ship tilting to its side and then footage from the head of the marine drone of it apparently moving stealthy across the Black Sea towards the ship and then striking it at its centre. The images could not be immediately independently verified. Earlier, Russia’s defence ministry had claimed that they had successfully destroyed two unmanned sea boats targeting the Russian naval base overnight. The Black Sea port of Novorossiysk hosts the terminus of a pipeline that carries most Kazakh oil exports through Russia.

The Security Service of Ukraine accused Russia on Friday of preparing to stage a “false flag” attack at the Mozyr oil refinery in Belarus in order to blame Ukrainian saboteurs as part of an effort to draw Minsk into the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine and its allies aim to rally global support for a peace blueprint in talks hosted by Saudi Arabia this weekend, with western officials increasingly optimistic that China will attend, lending the talks a new weight.

The UN nuclear watchdog has “finally” been granted access to areas of the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine that it first requested a month ago and has found no explosives, the agency said in a statement on Friday.

The jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was sentenced on Friday to an additional 19 years in prison after being found guilty on a series of new charges, according to his supporters. James Cleverly, the British foreign secretary, has condemned the court’s decision on Friday to add an extra 19 years to the jail term of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

President Vladimir Putin has signed a law introducing a windfall tax on excess profits of Russian companies, which was published on a government website on Friday.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has visited a combat zone in Ukraine to inspect a command post and meet senior military officers, the army said Friday. Shoigu got an update on the situation on the front and “thanked commanders and soldiers... for successful offensive operations” in Lyman in eastern Ukraine, it said, without mentioning when the visit took place. The minister, the subject of intense criticism from Yevgeny Prigozhin leading up to the aborted Wagner rebellion, was also shown getting on a Swedish CV90 - “one of the many armoured vehicles taken during fighting”, the army statement said.