Deal to swap around 200 PoWs from each side comes after contested claim that Kyiv downed plane carrying Ukrainian soldiers

Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has told military manufacturers to “stop fooling around” and further increase the production of self-propelled artillery systems.

Shoigu visited arms-producing factories in the Urals industrial city of Yekaterinburg on Tuesday and said Russia was increasing production of air defence missiles after a series of Ukrainian drone attacks that have targeted cities and energy infrastructure.

Listen, stop fooling around here, guys. We got busy with this in 2022. We should have had these machines operating at full capacity in 2023.

I’d like to receive within a week a specific proposal on how we’ll reach the indicators set by the president (Vladimir Putin) ... this must be done, because all these orders are connected with the performance of very specific work on the battlefield.

Two ministry of defence officials among those arrested over contract for mortar shells that never arrived

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

Ukraine’s SBU security service has arrested five people who allegedly tried to steal nearly $40m (£31m) that was supposed to be used to buy shells for the country’s military in its war against Russia.

The SBU said on Saturday it had arrested two senior officials from the ministry of defence. They had allegedly conspired with the chief executive of a little-known arms firm, Lviv Arsenal, over a contract for 100,000 mortar shells. Another employee and an alleged accomplice were also detained.

Igor Girkin has been critical of war effort; Darya Trepova delivered bomb that killed pro-war blogger

Russian courts have jailed a prominent ultra-nationalist critic of Vladimir Putin and, separately, a woman convicted over a blast that killed a pro-war blogger.

In Moscow, a court sentenced Igor Girkin, a former battlefield commander of Russian proxy forces in east Ukraine who was convicted by a Dutch court over the shooting down of flight MH17, to four years in jail on extremism charges prompted by his criticism of the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

Moscow says aircraft that went down in border region of Belgorod was carrying prisoners who were to be swapped

Russia has accused Kyiv of downing a large military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war to an exchange on Wednesday, after a crash in the Belgorod region that killed everyone onboard.

Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied that it hit the plane but said Moscow had created a “deliberate threat to the life and safety” of its PoWs by failing to warn Kyiv to deconflict the airspace before the swap.