Ukraine’s air force said on Wednesday it downed 37 out of 63 targets in an Russian overnight missile and drone attack. The air force said critical infrastructure and military facilities had been attacked in the nighttime strikes, and that the main target was Ukraine’s southern Odesa region.
The Guardian’s Shaun Walker described it as “a second noisy night for residents of Odesa, with numerous explosions audible from the centre of the city and officials telling residents to take cover in bomb shelters. Since Russia pulled out of the grain deal on Monday it has been targeting Ukraine’s main port city relentlessly.”
“A difficult night of air attacks for all of Ukraine, especially in the south, in Odesa,” Serhiy Popko, head of the Kyiv’s city military administration, said on the Telegram channel.
A fire broke out at the military training grounds in the Kirovske district on the Crimean Peninsula, the Moscow-backed governor of Crimea said on Wednesday. The fire forced the closure of the nearby Tavrida Highway, Russian-installed Governor Sergei Aksyonov of Crimea said on the Telegram messaging app.
Serhiy Bratchuk, spokesperson for the Odesa military administration in Ukraine, posted two videos which purport to show fire in an uninhabited area of Crimea, saying, “Enemy ammunition depot. Staryi Krym”. Staryi Krym is a small historical town in the Kirovske district of Crimea, the peninsula that Russia unilaterally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The fire comes two days after a blast damaged a bridge linking Russia to Crimea that Moscow blamed on Ukraine.
Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermak has criticised the west for not tightening loopholes in sanctions which are allowing Russia to re-stock its military supplies.
The Russian defence ministry said on Wednesday its forces destroyed a stray Ukrainian mine drifting in the south-western part of the Black Sea. It said the mine was detected by Russia’s Black Sea fleet, floating about 180 km (111 miles) northeast of the Bosporus Strait. Ukraine defensively mined its coast to prevent the closer approach of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which has been repeatedly used to launch cruise missile attacks at targets within Ukraine.
Vitaliy Kim, governor of Mykolaiv, reports on Telegram that overnight, after a Russian attack, “recreational infrastructure facilities in a coastal zone were destroyed and set on fire. Detailed information is being clarified. Two people were injured, one of them was hospitalised.”
The head of Britain’s MI6 foreign spy service Richard Moore has said the Wagner group’s mutiny attempt in June showed Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was under pressure, adding he was optimistic about Ukraine’s counteroffensive. In a rare public address Moore said Iran’s decision to supply Moscow with suicide drones for the Ukraine conflict was “unconscionable”, and appealed to Russians appalled by the war in Ukraine to “join hands” with his intelligence service and bring the bloodshed to an end.
On Tuesday Russia’s defence ministry said it had carried out overnight strikes on Ukrainian port cities in what it called “a mass revenge strike” after the bridge attack, which it blamed on Kyiv. The ministry claiming thats it hit “facilities where terrorist acts against the Russian Federation were being prepared using crewless boats, as well as at the place of their manufacture at a shipyard near the city of Odesa”, and fuel depots in Mykolayiv.
Russia and Ukraine presented vastly different accounts of fighting in northeastern Ukraine on Tuesday, with Moscow reporting advances by its troops and Kyiv saying it had seized the initiative in the region. Both sides reported no letup in the fighting. Ukraine has reported a measure of progress in a counteroffensive launched early last month in the east and in capturing villages in the south, while Moscow says it has contained any move forward by Kyiv’s forces.
Both sides have achieved “marginal advances” in different areas over the past week, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update on the conflict.
There are a “number of ideas being floated” to help get Ukrainian and Russian grain and fertiliser to global markets after Moscow quit a deal allowing the safe export of Ukraine grain through the Black Sea, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
The head of USAid accused Putin of making a “life and death decision” affecting millions of the world’s poorest people by withdrawing from the Black Sea grain deal. Speaking in the shadow of several vast grain silos in the key trading port of Odesa, Samantha Power pledged a further $250m to create and expand alternative routes for Ukrainian grain to leave the country, but admitted nothing would compensate for the loss of the Black Sea ports.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, discussed with his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, ways of exporting Russian grain via routes “that would not be susceptible to Kyiv and the west’s sabotage”, Russia’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has asked permission from the international criminal court not to arrest Russia’s Vladimir Putin, because to do so would amount to a declaration of war, a local court submission published on Tuesday showed.
An investigation has identified military units under Russia’s command that carried out human rights abuses last year during the occupation of the Ukrainian city of Izium. The report by the Centre for Information Resilience names four militia units that allegedly abused civilians and prisoners of war.
Ben Wallace, the outgoing UK defence secretary, said Tuesday the war in Ukraine is “winnable”, arguing the Nato alliance “does function” as a deterrent against Russia at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change conference in London.