Russian-backed mayor says Ukrainian shelling killed 13 in Donetsk; Ukraine reports Russian strike on nuclear plant
Thirteen people were killed by artillery shelling on Monday in the east Ukrainian separatist-held city of Donetsk, the city’s Russian-backed mayor said.
Russian forces struck the Pivdennoukrainsk nuclear power plant in Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv region early on Monday, but its reactors have not been damaged and are working normally, Ukraine’s state nuclear company, Energoatom, said.
The Kremlin has said that beefing up ties with Beijing is a top policy goal, a Russian security official said on Monday during a visit to China.
Germany’s Die Linke could split into two parties over the Ukraine war, as the ailing leftwing outfit’s indecisive stance on economic sanctions against Russia triggered a series of high-profile resignations this week.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will visit Saudi Arabia and meet the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as part of a Gulf trip, his spokesperson said on Monday, as Germany rushes to secure energy supplies.
The German central bank said on Monday it was increasingly likely that Europe’s largest economy would shrink for a “prolonged” period as Russia throttled energy supplies to the continent.
The Kremlin has rejected allegations that Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine’s Kharkiv province as a “lie”.
Russia is urging Uefa to ban the manager of the Ukraine men’s national team after he expressed a wish to fight Vladimir Putin’s invading forces, the Guardian has revealed.
The US president, Joe Biden, has warned Vladimir Putin that the use of nuclear or other nonconventional weapons against Ukraine would prompt a “consequential” response from the US.
Russia is highly likely to have lost at least four combat jets in Ukraine within the last 10 days, taking its attrition to about 55 since the beginning of its invasion, the British military said on Monday.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has added it to the small group of countries excluded from Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in London today, which includes Belarus, Myanmar, Syria, Venezuela and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
The Institute for the Study of War thinktank said Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, was “increasingly relying on irregular volunteer and proxy forces rather than conventional units” in its latest update on the Russian campaign.
The Ukrainian military said on Sunday that its forces repelled attacks by Russian troops in the Kharkiv region in the east and Kherson region in the south, where Ukraine launched counteroffensives this month, as well as in parts of Donetsk in the south-east.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, vowed there would be no letup in fighting to regain territory lost to Russia.
In an intelligence update, Britain’s defence ministry said Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure, including a power grid and a dam, had intensified.
Ukrainian forces are refusing to discard worn-out US-provided arms, with many reverse engineering spare parts to continue the counteroffensive against Russia’s invasion.
Reuters contributed to this report
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