Royal Navy tracks Russian frigate for one month off UK coast

Moscow steps up maritime presence in North Sea after UK threats to seize shadow fleet oil tankers

Britain’s Royal Navy tracked and followed a Russian frigate every day last month as it sailed from the Atlantic to the North Sea, as Moscow steps up its maritime presence after UK threats to seize shadow fleet oil tankers.

The Russian navy’s Admiral Grigorovich escorted six Russia-linked vessels during April, including at least three under economic sanction passing east through the Dover strait, while being watched continuously by four UK ships and helicopters.

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‘Putin only cares about parades’: fury as Russia rains missiles on Ukraine during 24-hour truce

Dozens killed despite ceasefire announced by Zelenskyy, after Moscow asked for Saturday truce for its annual military parade

Kyiv has criticised Russia for attacking several Ukrainian cities overnight with more than 100 combat drones and three missiles, in spite of a unilateral 24-hour ceasefire called by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Ukraine’s president had announced the truce after the Kremlin said it wanted a ceasefire on Saturday during its annual military parade in Red Square – but he said he would reciprocate if Vladimir Putin broke Ukraine’s ceasefire, which ends at midnight on Wednesday.

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Zelenskyy condemns Russian ‘cynicism’ over parade truce as 23 killed in attacks

Kyiv berates Moscow’s request for ceasefire while launching ‘missile and drone strikes every single day leading up to it’

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused the Kremlin of “utter cynicism” for seeking a truce so it can stage a military parade in Moscow as 23 people were killed in attacks on Ukraine.

At least 12 people were killed on Tuesday in a strike on southern city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional governor said. “Russia ended the life of 12 people,” Ivan Fedorov posted on Telegram.

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Reform UK plan to set up migrant detention centres in Green-voting areas condemned by other parties – as it happened

Nigel Farage’s party proposed to place detention centres in places that vote for Green council leaders or MPs

Keir Starmer has said that Europe has to face up to the fact that its alliance with the US is under strain.

He made the remark in public comments during the plenary session at the European Political Community summit in Yerevan in Armenia.

And both of those are impacting all of us in a very material way.

In the United Kingdom, if you look at the economic forecast now and compare it to the economic forecast just three or four months ago, they are in materially different places, and this is going to play out with our electorates in all of our countries.

Reform are now openly threatening voters and not only that they’re threatening them with a power they don’t actually have. This is absolutely pathetic. People across Scotland are proud of the fact that this is a welcoming country that shows solidarity to people who need it.

Reform are essentially saying ‘If you don’t vote the way we want you to, we will punish you’. I think the people of Scotland and voters across the UK are not going to take kindly to that kind of Donald Trumpesque threat.

Reform know that absolutely bombed last week. The only thing they’ve got to move on to are open threats, not against the Greens but against voters across the country. It’s really quite sinister. This is exactly the kind of politics you see in Donald Trump’s America. People across Scotland are going to reject that on Thursday.

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Austria expels three Russian embassy staff after ‘forest of antennae’ discovered

Austrian foreign minister says Russian diplomatic mission in Vienna was being used for illicit collection of data

Austria has expelled three Russian embassy staff on suspicion of spying after determining that a “forest of antennae” on the diplomatic mission in Vienna, Europe’s espionage capital since the cold war, was being be used for illicit data collection.

“It is unacceptable that diplomatic immunity be used to commit espionage,” Austria’s foreign minister, Beate Meinl-Reisinger, said on Monday. She added that the three embassy staff – whose expulsions bring the number of Russian diplomats sent home by Vienna to 14 since 2020 – had already left the country.

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Oscar belonging to co-director of Putin film missing after TSA makes him ship it

Agents would not allow Pavel Talankin to carry statuette for Mr Nobody Against Putin on to flight from New York

The Oscar statuette belonging to Pavel Talankin, star and co-director of the Academy award-winning documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin, has disappeared after officials at New York’s John F Kennedy airport confiscated it before he boarded a flight, claiming it could be used as a weapon.

Talankin, whose documentation of Russia’s propaganda machine in grade schools won international acclaim, told Deadline that he had brought the statuette on several flights without incident. But when he arrived at JFK’s terminal 1 on Wednesday morning, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents said he could not take the 8.5lb trophy on board because it posed a security risk.

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Venice Biennale jury quits amid row over participation of Russia

Decision follows backlash from Italian government and European Commission

The jury of the Venice Biennale has quit just days before the prestigious art exhibition is due to begin, amid a row over the decision to allow Russia to participate.

The resignation of the five-member international jury was announced late on Thursday in a brief statement by the Venice Biennale organisers, and came a day after the Italian culture ministry sent inspectors to Venice in search of information about the decision to allow Russia to have a pavilion at the event.

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Ukraine asks Israel to seize vessel it claims is carrying grain stolen by Russia

Accusation vessel contains grain looted from Russian-occupied territories triggers diplomatic spat between both nations

Ukraine has asked Israel to seize a vessel it claims is carrying grain looted from Russian-occupied territories, triggering a rare diplomatic spat between the two countries.

The dispute spilt into public view this week when president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “another vessel” carrying grain “stolen by Russia” had arrived at a port in Israel and was preparing to unload.

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Britain to create joint naval force with nine European countries as ‘complement’ to Nato

Royal Navy chief says unified naval force will deter future Russian threats from the ‘open sea border’ to the north

Britain has agreed to create a unified naval force with nine European countries to deter future Russian threats from the “open sea border” to the north, the head of the Royal Navy has announced.

Gen Sir Gwyn Jenkins said that despite the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, where the strait of Hormuz remains closed after the US-Israeli war in Iran, “Russia remains the gravest threat to our security”.

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Russia to hold Victory Day parade with no military hardware amid Ukraine strike fears

Annual event in Red Square to feature no armoured vehicles or missile systems for first time in two decades

Russia’s annual Victory Day parade will be held on 9 May without military hardware for the first time in almost two decades because of fears of a long-range attack by Ukrainian drones.

The defence ministry said no armoured vehicles or missile systems would roll across Red Square during the parade, which marks the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, citing “the current operational situation”.

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Russian oligarch’s superyacht allowed through strait of Hormuz, source says

Billionaire Alexei Mordashov’s vessel, Nord, reportedly able to cross blockaded strait with US and Iranian approval

A superyacht owned by the Russian billionaire Alexei Mordashov was able to transit the blockaded strait of Hormuz after undergoing maintenance in Dubai because neither Iran nor the US objected, a source close to Mordashov said on Tuesday.

It has been unclear how the multi-deck pleasure vessel, worth more than $500m (£370m), gained permission to sail on Saturday through the commercially important waterway at the heart of the US-Iran conflict, where traffic has been severely restricted since February.

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Britain becoming ‘soft target’ for Russian propaganda, says security expert

Fiona Hill tells MPs UK is ‘vulnerable’ because it does not educate people on how to deal with information warfare

Britain is becoming a soft target for Russian and other state propaganda because the UK is not prepared to educate people on how to deal with information warfare, according to a former White House adviser and security expert.

Fiona Hill told a parliamentary committee that she feared the UK had become “extraordinarily vulnerable” to online manipulation feeding into the electoral system because there was a lack of discussion about civil defence.

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Mali’s militant attacks expose limits of Putin’s power in Africa

Russian backing for the ruling junta has not stopped rebel fighters striking significant blows in recent days

When Assimi Goïta, the leader of Mali’s military junta, sat down with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in the Kremlin last summer, it symbolised Moscow’s commanding sway over Mali at the expense of the west.

As the two men spoke, roughly 3,500 miles to the south, about 2,000 Russian troops were propping up the regime in the landlocked desert country, as part of Moscow’s broader push for influence across the Sahel region.

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Renewable energy will boost national security and protect UK from sabotage, minister says

Widely dispersed wind farms and solar panels are harder to target than fossil fuel power stations, Michael Shanks says

Renewable energy will boost the UK’s national security and make the country more resilient against potential aggression or sabotage, the government’s energy minister has said.

Michael Shanks said widely dispersed wind farms and solar panels were much harder to target than large-scale fossil fuel power stations. They are also not vulnerable to supply shocks, such as the current oil crisis caused by the US-Israel war on Iran and the soaring gas prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

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Ukrainian action thriller billed as Saving Private Ryan for the drone age

Killhouse is based on real-life story of civilian couple saved from battlefield by Ukrainian drone operators

It is being billed as Ukraine’s answer to Saving Private Ryan, updated for an age of drones.

The war movie Killhouse is an action thriller which shows off the latest in battlefield technology. Released this week, it features cameos by figures well known in Ukraine, including the nation’s former military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. One missing person is Donald Trump. The film is conveniently set in 2024, when Washington and Kyiv were allies.

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Russian airstrikes kill at least seven people in Ukraine overnight

Dnipro bore the brunt of the attacks but Odesa and Kharkiv were also targeted in largest onslaught for several days

Russian drone and missile strikes across Ukraine killed at least seven people overnight, including five in the city of Dnipro, Ukrainian local authorities have said.

Reports say that at least 34 people have been injured in the strikes, which lasted “practically all night”, according to the Dnipropetrovsk regional head, Oleksandr Hanzha. The bodies of four people were found in the ruins of a house destroyed in the attacks, and workers continued to search for bodies on Saturday morning.

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RAF Typhoons scrambled in response to Russian drone threat near Nato airspace

Jets flew from bases in Romania but did not open fire as potential targets stayed within Ukrainian airspace

Two RAF Typhoons have been scrambled from a Romanian air base to engage Russian drones close to Nato airspace, although they did not open fire.

British defence sources said the fighter jets did not enter Ukrainian airspace, contradicting reports that Russian drones had been shot down by the RAF there, an event which would have represented a major escalation in hostilities between the western alliance and Moscow.

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Iran foreign minister to embark on three-nation tour as US peace talks remain stalled

Abbas Araghchi to visit Pakistan, Oman and Russia to see if talks can be reopened, with both sides still in stalemate

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, is planning a tour of Pakistan, Russia and Oman in an effort to see if there is a basis to reopen peace talks that can end with a permanent US-Israeli commitment to cease its attacks on Iran, now one of Tehran’s key demands.

Araghchi is also likely to discuss a potential permanent new arrangement on governing the strait of Hormuz with Oman, which oversees the south of the strait.

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EU formally approves €90bn Ukraine loan and 20th sanctions package against Russia

Ursula von der Leyen hails ‘good news’ after Hungary’s lifting of vetoes allows leaders to sign off on agreements

EU leaders have welcomed the end of diplomatic deadlock over a long-awaited €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine, after the bloc completed the agreement along with a 20th sanctions package against Russia.

After weeks of delay, the EU signed off on the loan on Thursday, in time for a summit in Cyprus that began in the evening and will include talks over a dinner with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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Roman Abramovich takes Jersey to European human rights court over Chelsea sale proceeds

Lawyers for oligarch claim freezing of £5.3bn of assets ‘unfair and abusive’ amid row over use of funds for Ukraine

Roman Abramovich has gone to the European court of human rights (ECHR), claiming that a criminal investigation into his financial affairs by the Jersey authorities has breached his human rights, according to reports.

The former owner of Chelsea FC, who is under UK sanctions over his links to Vladimir Putin, is being investigated in Jersey over allegations of corruption and money laundering.

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