Category Archives: Russia

Russian authorities scramble to quell Ukraine’s week-long Kursk incursion

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Confused messaging from leaders as Kremlin attempts to play down significance of events

Russian authorities are scrambling to bring the situation in Kursk under control, a week after Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack in the region that has left a swathe of Russian territory under Kyiv’s control.

Russia used missiles, drones and airstrikes on Tuesday in an attempt to claw back territory, with one senior commander claiming Kyiv’s advance was over, even as the evacuation of residents from border areas continued.

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Ukraine says it has seized 1,000 sq km in Kursk offensive as Putin vows ‘worthy response’

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Claim by Kyiv comes as Russian official admits Ukraine has seized 28 settlements during attack on border region

Ukraine’s top commander says his forces have captured 1,000 sq km (386 square miles) of Russia’s bordering Kursk region, while Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has vowed a “worthy response” to the attack and ordered his troops to “dislodge the enemy from our territories”.

With Russia still struggling to repel the surprise assault a week after it began, Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, briefed President Volodymyr Zelenskiy by video link and said the advance into Russian territory was ongoing.

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‘I felt euphoria’: Ukraine’s borderland refugees praise incursion into Russia

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While thousands have had to flee their homes, there is widespread feeling that the attack is a justified defence

Last Tuesday, Oksana and her family could not escape fast enough. Though they did not know it, Ukrainian regular forces had entered Russia for the first time, and Moscow’s military wasted little time in hitting back, bombing their village around seven miles from the border.

“It was 9am and the first glide bomb hit the village,” she said, and its ferocity – “very scary, much bigger” than ordinary shelling – was such that they immediately knew they had to escape. “Our neighbour drove his children first and then came back and picked me and my sister and family,” the mother of two explained.

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Ukraine aims to destabilise Russia with Kursk attack, official says

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Troop numbers sent into Russia are in thousands, source says; cooling tower at Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility reportedly damaged by fire

Ukrainian sources have indicated that thousands of troops have been committed to its incursion into Russia’s Kursk province, as Moscow and Kyiv traded accusations about a fire at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant 250 miles to the south.

A Ukrainian security official told the Agence France-Presse that the aim of the incursion was to destabilise Russia and string out Russian forces with light, fast-moving attacks. It remains unclear how sustainable the operation will be in the medium term amid Kremlin threats that it will be snuffed out using Russian reserves.

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Far-right disorder had ‘clear’ Russian involvement, says ex-MI6 spy

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Christopher Steele says officials will ‘look very carefully’ at online instigators such as Tommy Robinson

There is “clear” Russian involvement in the far-right riots and security services will be looking closely at the instigators, a former head of the MI6 Russia desk has said.

Christopher Steele, the ex-spy who compiled a notorious dossier on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that security officials would be “looking very carefully” at the people encouraging anti-immigration riots in the past fortnight.

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Russia claims to have thwarted Ukraine’s advance in Kursk

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Fighting said to be continuing, with reports of power outages near nuclear power station, despite Moscow’s claim

Russia’s defence ministry claimed it prevented Ukraine from advancing further on the fifth day of the unprecedented attack into the province of Kursk, though there were reports of regional power outages after an electricity substation was hit.

Fighting was said to be taking place in three villages between seven and 11 miles from the international border – Ivashkovskoye, Malaya Loknya and Olgovka – similar locations to where Ukraine is estimated to have advanced previously.

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Ukraine justifies Kursk attack in first acknowledgment of incursion into Russia

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Zelenskiy aide says ‘root cause of any escalation’, including into Kursk, is Moscow’s ‘unequivocal aggression’

Ukraine has publicly justified its attack into Russian territory for the first time, amid reports that its forces are advancing towards a village 13 miles (20km) inside the Kursk region on the third day of its incursion.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to the president’s office, said “the root cause of any escalation”, including into Kursk, was “unequivocal aggression” on the part of Russia in believing it could invade Ukraine with impunity.

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Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region continues into second day

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Vladimir Putin convenes meeting with top officials as defence ministry acknowledges fighting is ongoing

Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region has continued into a second day, prompting Vladimir Putin to convene a meeting with his top defence and law enforcement officials.

A report from one Russia military blogger suggested Ukrainian forces had advanced northwards, possibly as far as nine miles (15km) from the border, along a highway north of the border village of Sverdlikovo and near a major natural gas transmission hub, but this could not be verified.

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Moscow says Ukraine has launched cross-border attack inside Russia

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Russian military claims it repelled incursion by 300 soldiers up to six miles into Kursk border region

Moscow has said about 300 soldiers from Ukraine launched a cross-border attack into a hitherto quiet part of the front on Tuesday, with reports of fighting at a town as deep as six miles (10km) inside Russia.

Moscow’s ministry of defence said late on Tuesday that up to “300 Ukrainian militants” from Ukraine’s 22nd mechanised brigade launched the attack at 8am, supported by “11 tanks and more than 20 armoured fighting vehicles”.

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Putin reportedly calls for Iran to limit damage in any retaliation against Israel

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Leaders expect a military response over Hamas assassination but fears grow of escalation into regional war

Vladimir Putin has reportedly told Iran to avoid civilian casualties in any retaliatory attack on Israel for the assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, an underlining of the constraints it faces as it frames its response.

It is a call for restraint that is likely to be echoed by many foreign ministers from the 57 countries inside the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) at a meeting in Jeddah on Wednesday as tensions in the Middle East grow.

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Bloomberg fires reporter for ‘premature’ publication of Evan Gershkovich release – reports

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At least one reporter appears to have been fired for a decision that would’ve been reviewed by senior editors

Bloomberg News said it had taken “disciplinary action” against a number of its editorial staff after the outlet “prematurely” published news of the historic prisoner swap between Russia and the United States last week that it said could have endangered the safety of the Americans being released.

In an email to staff on Monday, editor-in-chief John Micklethwait wrote that a number of staff members had been disciplined, although the company did not say who, how many or what their punishment had been. At least one reporter on the story appears to have been fired in a rare case where a journalist was punished for a decision to publish a major news story that would likely have been reviewed by senior editors at the outlet.

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‘Everything is a target’: Dnipro suffers consequences of Russia’s bloody war

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Ukrainian city of 1 million people hit by number of deadly aerial attacks seemingly aimed at terrorising the population

At 5pm on 28 June, Lana Yefimova left work as usual, walking from her office in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Minutes later a Russian rocket hit the nine-storey apartment block opposite her workplace and crashed through the upper floors, ripping through ceilings. “I ran back to find a fire. It was huge. My colleague Yulia was hurt. She broke her pelvis. I was in shock,” Yefimova said.

Four people were killed inside the residential building at 24a Vikonkomivska Street and 12 injured, including a pregnant woman and a baby. The attack was seemingly random – another erratic death-bringing moment in Russia’s bloody war. “They want to frighten us so we leave,” Yefimova said. “It’s politics. And terror.”

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White House will work ‘every single day’ to free US teacher from Russian prison

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Aide says US had tried to include Marc Fogel in prisoner swap and officials will do ‘what they can’ to bring him home

Deputy US national security adviser Jonathan Finer said Sunday that the White House worked hard to get Pennsylvania schoolteacher Marc Fogel included in the recent landmark prisoner swap involving Russia and western American allies – and though those efforts were unsuccessful, government officials continue doing “what they can” to bring him home as soon as possible.

Appearing on CBS News’s Face The Nation, Finer declined to provide further details about Fogel’s case and what his return to the US may entail. But he did assure the US is doing “novel things” to ensure US nationals will not be detained in Russia – like Fogel – or elsewhere in the future.

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Zelenskiy praises Ukraine’s strikes on military targets inside Russia

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Ukrainian army reports several hits on sites including Russian airfields, oil refineries and logistics

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, praised his forces on Saturday for hitting military targets inside Russia, after his army reported several strikes including on an airfield and an oil depot.

“I would like to thank each of our soldiers and all those who work in our defence industry for striking Russian airfields, oil refineries and logistics,” he said in his daily statement.

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Russian dissidents freed in prisoner swap speak of deal ‘dilemma’

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Activists say they never agreed to leave their homeland and vow to continue fighting for democracy in Russia

Russian dissidents freed as part of a prisoner swap between Moscow and the west have shared their mixed feelings about the deal and vowed to continue their political activity from abroad.

The exchange represented a “difficult dilemma”, said the Russian liberal opposition politician Ilya Yashin at an emotional press conference in Bonn.

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Russian prisoner swap deal was to have included Alexei Navalny

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Negotiations, which began months earlier, originally included release of late opposition leader

At Cologne airport on Thursday evening, a group of associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny gathered waiting for a plane to arrive from Ankara. On board were 13 people who, until that morning, had been incarcerated in Russian prisons, including three people who had worked as Navalny’s regional coordinators in various Russian cities and been jailed for “extremism”.

After a swap in Turkey, they were now free, along with the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other Americans, who were heading back home on a separate plane.

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Evan Gershkovich’s most tireless advocate to secure his release: his mother

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Ella Milman pressed world leaders and researched the scheme that would eventually lead to the release of her son

Much has been made of the public diplomacy behind the largest prisoner swap between Russia and the US since the cold war, with officials from at least seven countries spending years making calls and holding secret meetings in far-flung capitals.

But since Evan Gershkovich, the formerly imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter, and others stepped off the plane in Maryland on Thursday, new details have emerged about the role of a crucial player in that effort: his mother.

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Kremlin admits Vadim Krasikov is a Russian state assassin

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Spokesperson hints killer exchanged in prisoner swap was linked to Putin’s personal guard

The Kremlin has admitted that Vadim Krasikov, the assassin freed by Germany in a historic prisoner swap on Thursday, is a serving officer of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), essentially an acknowledgment that his 2019 murder of a Chechen exile in Berlin was a state-ordered hit.

It also hinted that he was linked to Vladimir Putin’s personal guard.

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Russia-US prisoner swap: Kremlin confirms hitman Vadim Krasikov worked for FSB security service – as it happened

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Yesterday evening, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris met Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other freed American prisoners just hours after Washington and Moscow completed their largest prisoner exchange since the cold war.

Gershkovich spoke about his feelings boarding the bus with the other freed detainees on Thursday and said he was happy to see Russians on board as well.

He also said: “I spent a month in prison in Yekaterinburg where everyone I sat with was a political prisoner. Nobody knows them publicly, they have various political beliefs, they are not all connected with Navalny supporters, who everyone knows about. I would potentially like to see if we could do something about them as well.”

The Kremlin said that Vladimir Putin’s decision to meet released prisoners as they arrived by plane in Russia “was a tribute to people who serve their country and who after very difficult trials, and thanks to the hard work of many people, have been able to return to the Motherland.”

The Kremlin also confirmed that Vadim Krasikov, a hitman returned by Germany as part of yesterday’s major prisoner swap, was an employee of Russia’s FSB security service and had served in Alpha Group, the FSB’s special forces unit.

France urged Moscow to set free French citizen Laurent Vinatier and other people still “arbitrarily” detained.

Amnesty International has welcomed the release of people held in Russia but stressed that “this isn’t the end” and “Russia must free all persons jailed for peaceful dissent.”

For a few seconds, no one even noticed that Evan Gershkovich had taken his first steps back on US soil as a free man.

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Evan Gershkovich release: Biden and Harris greet Americans freed after prisoner swap

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Emotional scenes at Andrews air force base as Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Alsu Kurmasheva step onto American soil

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris met the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two other freed American prisoners just hours after Washington and Moscow completed their largest prisoner exchange since the cold war.

On a muggy evening at Andrews air force base near Washington DC, Gershkovich and the other freed prisoners, the ex-marine Paul Whelan and the journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, touched down on US soil and shortly later disembarked a Bombardier jet from Turkey. They were met by their families and the US president and vice-president.

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