Category Archives: Russia

Russia strikes Kyiv bridge as German chancellor visits Ukraine in show of support

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Attack shortly after Friedrich Merz arrived on unannounced visit intended to underline Germany’s backing

Russia has struck another major bridge in Kyiv as the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, arrived in the capital in a show of support for Ukraine.

A Russian drone hit Kyiv’s key Northern Bridge over the Dnipro River, marking the fourth consecutive day that Russia has targeted bridges used by tens of thousands of residents commuting between the city’s two banks. Video footage showed cars driving across the bridge as the drone plunged into the roadway and exploded in a burst of fire. Two people were injured in the strike, said Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg accuses Tucker Carlson of ‘verging on defending Hitler’

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Former Tory minister defends UK decision to enter war in podcast with US rightwinger and Putin sympathiser

The former Tory minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has found himself defending Britain’s decision to fight against Adolf Hitler after inviting the US rightwinger and Vladimir Putin sympathiser Tucker Carlson into his home for an interview.

During the encounter, Carlson repeatedly suggested the west was to blame for inviting aggression from Russia and said of the prospect that Britain could have lost to Hitler: “Who cares?”

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‘The enemy is tearing our city apart’: terror in Kyiv as Russia ramps up attacks

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Mayor Vitali Klitschko says Kyivans can no longer pretend it is ‘peacetime’ amid strikes on school, hospital and bridge

Valeriya Tkachenko was dropping her son off at school in central Kyiv when the air raid alert sounded. Staff hurried the children and parents into the shelter, where the frightened lawyer spent the next two hours with her son.

“I’m scared to death all day about what could happen to my son,” she said as she emerged from the shelter, already late for work.

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Kanye West’s sold-out Russia concerts cancelled, organisers confirm

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Russia’s foreign ministry had called planned shows unacceptable due to rapper’s ‘glorification’ of Adolf Hitler

Two sold-out shows that Kanye West was due to play in Russia have been cancelled after weeks of confusion, organisers have confirmed.

The US rapper, who now goes by the name Ye, had been due to perform at the Gazprom Arena in St Petersburg on 10 and 11 October.

Press Association contributed to this report

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Finnish PM says suspected break-ins at MPs’ homes could be work of foreign power

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Police investigating reports of politicians’ homes being broken into in last year with nothing being stolen

The Finnish prime minister, Petteri Orpo, has said a foreign power could be responsible for a series of suspected break-ins at the homes of several members of parliament.

Police said on Thursday they were investigating multiple reports of MPs’ homes being broken into in the Helsinki area in the last year in which nothing was stolen but subtle signs of breaking and entering were left.

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Ukraine persists with Russian oil refinery strikes in defiance of Trump

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US president blames attacks for driving up fuel prices before midterms, though analysts say his Iran war is main cause

Ukraine is pressing on with strikes on Russian oil refineries, defying Donald Trump, who blames the attacks for exacerbating a global diesel shortage and pushing up fuel prices.

Kyiv struck an oil facility in Russia’s southern Samara region overnight, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday in a statement on social media. The Ukrainian president added that a Russian vessel in the Black Sea was hit, as well as a launch and storage site for attack drones in the Oryol region.

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‘If people are in a bunker, business stops’: Missile alerts cost Ukraine $45m for every hour they halt businesses

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Minister tells Guardian of trade-offs Kyiv facing as it tries to keep normal life moving amid Russian strikes

Missile alerts are costing Ukraine an estimated $45m (£34m) for every hour they bring business to a halt, according to the country’s economy minister, as Kyiv searches for ways to keep the economy running under an intensifying Russian bombardment.

Russia has increasingly targeted the infrastructure underpinning Ukraine’s economy, striking industrial sites, warehouses, logistics hubs and datacentres in what Oleksandr Kravchenko, the minister for economy and the environment, described as an effort to “destroy pretty much the entire economy”.

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Estonia blames Russia for arson attack on drone maker supplying Ukraine

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European and Nato leaders express support for Estonia after August attack on manufacturer in Tallinn

European and Nato leaders have expressed full support for Estonia and Ukraine after the Baltic state said an August arson attack on a drone manufacturer supplying Kyiv was an act of sabotage commissioned by Moscow’s security services.

Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, said on social media on Tuesday that such attacks were “absolutely unacceptable” and that Russia’s chargé d’affaires in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, was being summoned to his ministry.

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Daytime Russian strike on Kyiv’s science academy kills at least one

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Three others wounded as jet-powered drones increasingly target Ukraine’s capital, with medical centre also hit

A Russian drone hit the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv on Monday, killing at least one person, in the latest daytime attack on Ukraine’s capital.

Flames tore through the historic building as people clambered out of first- and second-floor windows to escape, in dramatic scenes increasingly familiar in the heavily bombarded city.

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Russia could attack a Nato country within months, Danish intelligence says

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Warning comes hours after Poland says fire at Starlink satellite station was ‘act of sabotage’

Russia could launch a limited military attack against a Nato country in the coming months, Danish intelligence said, in one of the starkest warnings yet by western security services.

In a report published on Thursday, the Danish defence intelligence service warned of a “low but growing risk” that Russia could launch long-range strikes on Nato infrastructure supporting Ukraine, or carry out a limited incursion into a neighbouring country with a small number of troops, potentially operating without insignia.

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‘We hope he’ll accept’: US invites Putin to G20 summit at Trump golf club

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Kremlin yet to respond publicly to US invitation that is likely to raise concerns from Ukraine and EU countries

The United States has invited Vladimir Putin to take part in the meeting of the G20 scheduled in Miami in December in what would be the first major summit with the Russian leader present since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The invitation, which marks a significant reversal by the Trump administration of Russia’s international isolation, was announced by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, during a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations conference in New York.

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EU removes two oligarchs from Russia sanctions list as deadline looms

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Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman delisted in what Ireland’s EU presidency calls ‘a difficult compromise’ for the bloc

The EU has agreed to remove two Russian billionaires, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, from its sanctions list, while extending restrictions on nearly 3,000 individuals and companies accused of supporting the war on Ukraine for the next three years.

With an end-of-Tuesday deadline looming to preserve the Russia blacklist, the EU’s 27 member states found a compromise that meant delisting the two oligarchs in spite of very few countries wanting this outcome. EU sanctions have to be approved unanimously.

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‘The choice was prison or exile’: journalists who fled Russia publish grim portrait of Putin

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Roman Badanin and Mikhail Rubin, who were forced to move abroad in 2021, tell of president capable of ‘limitless cruelty’

At 6am on 29 June 2021, the Russian journalist Roman Badanin was woken by a knock on the door of his family’s Moscow apartment. “Come quickly, someone has scratched your car in the courtyard,” a voice shouted from outside. As he opened the door, masked men pushed their way in.

Across the city, a similar raid was happening at the home of Badanin’s colleague Mikhail Rubin. The masked men were officers of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, instruments of the “climate of fear and violence” that the journalists say Vladimir Putin has imposed on Russia in their forensically detailed biography of the Russian president.

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Putin consolidates grip on Russia as 49 Ukraine war veterans elected to parliament

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United Russia party’s record victory in tightly controlled vote likely to be used as evidence of support for war against Ukraine

Russia’s new parliament will include 49 deputies who have taken part in the war against Ukraine, officials have said after a landslide victory by the ruling United Russia party in widely criticised elections.

The pro-Kremlin party won a record 355 seats in the country’s 450-seat Duma lower house of parliament, according to preliminary figures. The result further consolidates Vladimir Putin’s grip on power and gives United Russia a super-majority bigger than its previous 2016 record of 343 seats.

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Hundreds of drones target Moscow on last day of voting in Russia’s parliamentary election

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Authorities accuse Ukraine of trying to disrupt poll and say 1,600 drones in total intercepted, while at least two people killed and oil refinery damaged

Hundreds of drones targeting Moscow and its surrounding region killed at least two people and damaged a major refinery on the final day of the country’s parliamentary elections, authorities said on Sunday.

The capital’s mayor said that more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted and shot down, 450 of which were aimed at Moscow.

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‘My fear was too great’: the Pussy Riot member recruited by Russian spies to inform on fellow activists

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Exclusive: In her first media interview since fleeing Russia, Rita Flores describes her three years of being run by the FSB

First came the blackmail and death threats to secure cooperation, then came a series of tasks, each more sinister than the last: to inform on fellow activists, to elicit personal information from protest-minded artists and – eventually – to help with a plot to kidnap and murder a Kremlin enemy.

That is how Rita Flores, a 29-year-old Russian artist, activist and former member of the Pussy Riot collective, described her recruitment and three-year handling by officers from Russia’s FSB security service, a cooperation she only broke when she fled the country last month.

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Latvia’s president warns that Europe is not up to date with drone and aerial warfare in Ukraine

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Edgars Rinkēvičs says drone warfare in Ukraine is moving at ‘lightning speed’ and efforts to prepare for an aerial war could be obsolete by next year

Latvia’s president has warned that Europe is not keeping up with developments of drone and aerial warfare in Ukraine and that most countries in Nato could not repulse an attack by Russian missiles if the conflict expands.

The remarks came during a Guardian interview in Washington DC in which Edgars Rinkēvičs said that the technological developments in drone warfare in Ukraine are moving at “lightning speed” and that current efforts to prepare for an aerial war could be obsolete by the middle of next year.

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Russians go to polls against backdrop of Ukraine war and Putin’s tightening grip

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President’s United Russia party faces no meaningful opposition after liberal anti-war party barred from ballot

Russians are going to the polls to elect a new State Duma in a tightly controlled vote stripped of meaningful competition and with little doubt about the result.

Vladimir Putin’s United Russia is expected to extend the grip on parliament it has held for 23 years, alongside a handful of nominal opposition parties that reliably vote with the Kremlin on the issues that matter. The three-day vote begins on Friday, with results expected after polls close on Sunday.

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Russia plotting to kill Ukraine allies in US and Europe, FBI says

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Intelligence services allegedly attempted to pay people to surveil and kill people perceived to be aligned with Ukraine

Russia’s intelligence services are plotting to carry out targeted killings in the United States and in European nations supporting Ukraine, federal authorities said Tuesday as they announced charges against five people who remain at large.

An indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court said a network of the intelligence services had paid and attempted to pay individuals in the United States and in other countries to surveil targets to be killed with plans to then kill them.

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Russian warship fires flares at Danish helicopter as Nato jets shoot down drone over Lithuania

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Ursula von der Leyen says incidents ‘part of broader pattern of Russian aggression and provocation against Europe’

A Russian warship fired two emergency flares at a Danish helicopter in the Baltic Sea and an Italian Nato fighter jet shot down a drone carrying an explosive device over Lithuania in what the EU described as “reckless and dangerous” Russian behaviour.

Poland also scrambled fighter jets “due to the activity of Russian jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles conducting strikes on Ukrainian territory”, the day after Polish security forces retrieved a suspected Russian drone adrift in its waters.

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