Divulging details about Ukraine’s defence plans is ‘frankly irresponsible’, Zelenskiy says
Kazakhstan is expected to sell some of its crude oil through Azerbaijan’s biggest oil pipeline from September to bypass a route Russia threatened to shut.
Reuters reports:
Kazakh oil exports account for more than 1% of world supplies, or roughly 1.4m barrels a day (bpd).
For 20 years, they have been shipped through the CPC pipeline to Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, which provides access to the global market.
Explosions at the Russian-operated Saky military airfield in western Crimea earlier in the week were “almost certainly” from the detonation of up to four uncovered munition storage areas, though the original cause of the blasts remains unclear, the UK Ministry of Defence has said. At least five Su-24 fencer fighter-bombers and three Su-30 flanker H multi-role jets were almost certainly destroyed or seriously damaged in the blasts, according to British intelligence.
The devastation at the Russian air base in Crimea suggests Kyiv may have obtained new long-range strike capability with potential to change the course of the war. The base is well beyond the range of advanced rockets that western countries acknowledge sending to Ukraine so far, with some western military experts saying the scale of the damage and the apparent precision of the strike suggested a powerful new capability with potentially important implications.
A shipment of Ukrainian grain is to be loaded for delivery to Ethiopia later today as another two export ships reportedly left Ukraine’s ports. Turkey’s defence ministry reported that the Marshal Islands-flagged Star Laura ship will transport 60,150 tons of corn to an Iranian port, while the Belize-flagged ship Sormovskiy 121 will transport 3,050 tons of wheat to a Turkish port, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has told officials to stop talking to reporters about Kyiv’s military tactics against Russia, saying such remarks were “frankly irresponsible”. The president’s comments come after news organisations cited unidentified officials saying Ukrainian forces were responsible for blasts that destroyed a Russian air base in Crimea on Tuesday, despite Kyiv declining to say whether it was behind the explosions.
The UN has urged a demilitarised zone around Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant as Russia and Ukraine trade accusations over more shelling of the plant on Thursday. Ukraine’s nuclear energy company said it had been shelled five times by Russian forces on Thursday, resulting in staff being unable to change shifts.
The British defence secretary said Vladimir Putin is unlikely to succeed in occupying Ukraine. Ben Wallace said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “faltered” and was “starting to fail”, as he pledged more financial and military support to the eastern European nation’s defence.
Russia has doubled the number of air strikes on Ukraine’s military positions and civilian infrastructure compared with the previous week, Ukrainian brigadier general Oleksiy Hromov said on Thursday. “The enemy’s planes and helicopters avoid flying into the range of our air defences, and therefore the accuracy of these strikes is low,” he told a news conference.
Ukraine aims to evacuate two thirds of residents from areas it controls in the eastern battleground region of Donetsk before winter, partly out of concern people won’t be able to stay warm amid war-damaged infrastructure, the deputy prime minister said on Thursday. The government plans to evacuate some 220,000 people out of around 350,000, including 52,000 children, Iryna Vereshchuk told a news conference.