Wars 2022 02/24 Monitoring Russian and Ukraine War.

[Saif]

Kyiv says struck ammo depots in Russia

Ukraine said on Saturday it had successfully struck two Russian weapons depots in the southern Krasnodar and western Tver regions, with Moscow announcing more than 1,000 evacuations...

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Kyiv says struck ammo depots in Russia
Agence France-Presse . Kyiv 22 September, 2024, 00:45

Ukraine said on Saturday it had successfully struck two Russian weapons depots in the southern Krasnodar and western Tver regions, with Moscow announcing more than 1,000 evacuations.

Kyiv regularly hits Russian infrastructure with drones as Moscow’s offensive drags on for more than two and a half years.

The Ukrainian army said it had hit a depot near the city of Tikhoretsk in Krasnodar, calling it one of Moscow’s ‘three largest ammunition storage bases’ important to the Russian army’s logistics for its Ukraine invasion.

It also said it struck an arsenal in Tver region’s Oktyabrsky village, resulting in a ‘fire and detonation’.

The governor of the Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, announced the evacuation of 1,200 people after a drone attack had caused a fire that ‘spread to explosive objects’ near Tikhoretsk.

Videos on social media showed a massive explosion in the dark resembling fireworks at first before blowing up loudly, with online reports that an ammunition depot was struck.

Kondratyev called it a ‘terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime’ and said an unnamed village near the fire had been evacuated, with most people staying with relatives but others placed in temporary accommodation in Tikhoretsk.

Videos on social media later showed sirens ringing around the city of some 50,000 people in the daylight, with smoke rising into the air in the distance.

AFP could not immediately verify the authenticity of the images.

Krasnodar is separated from occupied Ukraine by the Azov Sea and had been relatively spared from the type of attacks on Russian border or other southern regions, but has seen increased attacks over the last year.

Authorities in the western Tver region also announced a night-time drone attack near the city of Toropets, which lies in the western part of the region.

Its governor Igor Rudenya said the ‘consequences of falling debris’ from the attack were being ‘cleared’.

He said there was no evacuation in Toropets but announced a temporary closure of the federal M-9 highway, promising it will reopen soon.

The attack also caused some disruption on passenger trains, with railway services saying a train going from Moscow to the western city of Pskov was sent on an alternative route, while another train was delayed.

Russia’s defence ministry earlier said it had downed 101 Ukrainian drones, mostly over the border Bryansk region and 18 over Krasnodar.

Russia has recently announced shooting down Ukrainian drones almost daily.​

 

[Saif]

Russian strike on Kharkiv wounds 21
Agence France-Presse . Kharkiv, Ukraine 22 September, 2024, 22:53

A Russian late-night strike on a residential neighbourhood of the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv wounded 21 people, Kyiv said on Sunday.

The strike hit late on Saturday, hours after Russian attacks killed five people — including two children — in central Ukraine.

Kyiv earlier said it struck two ammunition depots in Russia this weekend, including what it called a key arsenal for Moscow’s invasion.

Kharkiv — which almost fell to Russian forces in 2022 before they were pushed back by the Ukrainian army — has seen relentless attacks this year.

‘Last night, Russia struck Kharkiv again, this time with aerial bombs targeting an ordinary residential building,’ President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media.

‘As a result, 21 people were injured, including an eight-year-old child and two 17-year-olds,’ he added.

Regional leader Oleg Synegubov said two people were in critical condition. He said dozens of residents were asleep when the building was struck.

AFP saw rescuers scrambling through a heavily damaged building, with burned-out cars in the parking lot outside, using chainsaws to cut through walls to get to distressed residents in the dark.

‘Mama, mama, mama,’ sobbed one woman, who struggled to breathe and was too scared to descend the stairs.

Rescuers helped her down to find her mother, who hugged her tightly as the woman trembled.

‘She is scared,’ her mother, Oleksandra Ivanivna, told AFP. ‘It’s not the first time.’

Kharkiv — which was home to 1.4 million residents before Russia’s invasion — has been bombed heavily this year.

‘We were asleep. It (the building) was just blown up... the place is a wreck,’ Ivanivna said.

The city’s mayor Igor Terekhov said at the site: ‘As you can see, there are no military here.’

‘Every day and every night Kharkiv suffers the hits,’ he added.

AFP saw an elderly man with his head bandaged being brought to an ambulance, as well as a man whose face was covered in blood, holding a small terrier dog.

Zelensky said the attack showed why his forces needed to use weapons supplied by Western allies to strike deeper into Russian territory, which so far they have refused to authorise.

He is due in the United States in the coming days, in a last-ditch effort to convince the West to let Kyiv use delivered long-range weapons to hit Russian targets.

‘We need to strengthen our capabilities to better protect lives and ensure safety. Ukraine needs full long-range capabilities,’ he said.

‘We are working to convince our partners of this. We will continue these discussions next week.’

In Washington, he is due to hold talks with Joe Biden, as well as both US presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.​

 

[Saif]

Ukraine to spend 60pc of 2025 budget on defence

Kyiv will spend more than 60 per cent of its entire state budget on defence and security next year, according to a draft plan, as Russia’s invasion grinds on...

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Ukraine to spend 60pc of 2025 budget on defence
Agence France-Presse . Kyiv, Ukraine 24 September, 2024, 23:50

Kyiv will spend more than 60 per cent of its entire state budget on defence and security next year, according to a draft plan, as Russia’s invasion grinds on.

Moscow’s war has battered the Ukrainian economy over the last two and a half years, causing tens of billions of dollars in destruction, punching a huge hole in state finances and forcing Kyiv to rely on Western support to keep itself afloat.

In a draft plan presented by the finance ministry, Ukraine said it will spend 2.22 trillion hryvnia ($54 billion) on ‘national security and defence’ in 2025.

That represents around 26 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP and 61 per cent of the government’s overall outlays, planned at 3.64 trillion hryvnia.

‘I can confidently say that based on the budget plan for 2025, Ukraine’s defence will be ensured,’ Ukraine’s finance minister Sergiy Marchenko told reporters Tuesday.

By comparison, Russia plans to spend 10.8 trillion rubles ($115 billion) on defence this year, or about 30 per cent of its budget.

In Ukraine, around 740 billion hryvnia would go on weapons production and procurement, with almost 1.2 trillion on soldiers’ salaries.

Marchenko warned Ukraine faces ‘rather slow economic growth due to the impact of attacks on energy infrastructure,’ predicting GDP would expand by 2.7 per cent next year.

Kyiv last week upped its planned defence spending for 2024 by almost one-third amid mounting war costs.

The 2025 defence budget is set to be just two per cent higher than the revised 2024 figure.

Ukraine said it will need $38.4 billion in financial support from its Western backers and international financial organisations, slightly down on this year’s requirements.

The war-torn country has received $98 billion in international financial aid since Russia invaded in February 2022 — on top of tens of billions in military and humanitarian aid.

‘This is perhaps the most important area — to ensure rhythmic and full funding from our partners,’ Marchenko said.

Meanwhile, Russian strikes killed three people and wounded at least 24 in the northeast Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Tuesday afternoon, president Volodymyr Zelensky said.

The northeastern city lies around 30 kilometres from the Russian border and has been pounded by Russian aerial attacks throughout the two-and-a-half-year war.

‘The targets of the Russian bombs were an apartment building, a bakery, a stadium. In other words, the everyday life of ordinary people,’ Zelensky said in a post on social media.

He posted a picture showing the facade of a nine-storey apartment block partially ripped off, the windows blown out and debris strewn across the street.

A search and rescue operation was underway, he added.

‘So far, we know of 3 killed and 24 injured,’ he said.

Zelensky, who is in the United States this week for the latest round of international diplomacy on the war, called for the United Nations General Assembly to discuss Russia’s attacks on his country.

‘We just need to stop the terror. To have security. To have a future. We need Russia to end this criminal and unprovoked aggression that violates all global rules,’ he said.​

 

[Saif]

Russia targets Kyiv, Odesa in latest drone attack

Russia unleashed an overnight drone attack across Ukraine targeting the capital Kyiv and hitting infrastructure in the Black Sea port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said yesterday.

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Russia targets Kyiv, Odesa in latest drone attack

Russia unleashed an overnight drone attack across Ukraine targeting the capital Kyiv and hitting infrastructure in the Black Sea port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said yesterday.

The State Emergency Service said one person was wounded and warehouses and cargo trucks were damaged in Odesa during the multi-wave attack, which kept much of the country under air-raid alert for several hours.

The Ukrainian military shot down 56 out of at least 87 drones launched by Russia over various regions of the country, the air force said. It added that another 25 were "lost" due to electronic jamming but did not elaborate.

Kyiv city military administrator Serhiy Popko said air defences destroyed all the drones that had been aimed at the capital. No injuries were reported.

Air raid alerts for Kyiv and the surrounding region were announced three times throughout the night, totalling more than five hours, Popko added.

Russia has denied targeting civilians in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, begun in February 2022, but regularly launches missiles, drones and bombs at population centres far behind the front line.​

 

[Saif]

Ukraine hits Crimea oil terminal, Russia claims gains

Kyiv said on Monday its forces had struck a large oil terminal overnight on the occupied Crimean peninsula as Moscow claimed the capture of another village in east Ukraine.

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Ukraine hits Crimea oil terminal, Russia claims gains
Agence France-Presse . Kyiv, Ukraine 08 October, 2024, 01:15

Kyiv said on Monday its forces had struck a large oil terminal overnight on the occupied Crimean peninsula as Moscow claimed the capture of another village in east Ukraine.

Kyiv has ramped up strikes targeting Russia’s energy sector in recent months aiming to dent revenues used by Moscow to fund its invasion, now grinding through its third year.

'At night, a successful strike was carried out on the enemy’s offshore oil terminal in temporarily occupied Feodosia, Crimea,’ the Ukrainian military said in a post on social media.

Russian-installed authorities in Crimea said a fire had broken out at an oil facility in the Black Sea port town of some 70,000 people and that there were no casualties.

The defence ministry said that 12 Ukrainian attack drones had been downed over the peninsula overnight, out of a total of 21 deployed by Kyiv against Russian targets.

‘The Feodosia terminal is the largest in Crimea in terms of transshipment of oil products, which were used, among other things, to meet the needs of the Russian occupation army,’ the Ukrainian military said, vowing to continue such attacks.

Ukraine insists the strikes are fair retaliation for Russian attacks on its own energy infrastructure that have plunged millions into darkness.

Russia’s defence ministry meanwhile claimed the capture of a village in eastern Ukraine close to the strategically important city of Pokrovsk.

The defence ministry in a briefing said it captured the village of Grodivka, a settlement in the Donetsk region near Pokrovsk, as Russian troops close in on the key logistics hub.

The settlement with an estimated pre-war population of around 2,000 is the latest in a series of towns in the Donetsk region to have fallen to Russian forces, as they push towards Pokrovsk.

Last week, Ukraine’s army said that it had withdrawn from the mining town of Vugledar also in the Donetsk region, handing Russia one of its most significant territorial advances in weeks.

In a wave of separate attacks Monday, Ukrainian authorities said three civilians had been killed in overnight Russian attacks — two brothers aged 35 and 38 in the eastern region of Sumy and a 61-year-old woman in the southern Kherson region.

The governor of Kherson later said a Russian strike on the town had wounded 19 people and damaged an educational facility and various residential buildings were damaged.

And in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Russia claimed to have annexed alongside three other Ukrainian regions in 2022, three people were wounded after Russian attacks on infrastructure facilities, local authorities said.

Russian forces also launched several missiles and dozens of drones overnight at Ukraine, the air force in Kyiv said, with two missiles shot down over the capital and the third exploding near an airfield in the central Khmelnytsky region.

Authorities in Kyiv said debris from the downed missiles had landed near a kindergarten.

Russian media company VGTRK, which operates the country’s main state-run television channels, said earlier Monday it had been targeted in a ‘unprecedented’ hacker attack, claimed by Kyiv.

‘Despite attempts to interrupt broadcasting of federal TV channels and radio stations of the holding, everything is working in normal mode, there is no significant threat,’ state media reported.​

 

[Saif]

Zelensky hopes war with Russia will end next year

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky voiced hope Friday that the war with Russia will end next year, speaking during a visit to Berlin to ask for sustained military support.

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Zelensky hopes war with Russia will end next year
Agence France-Presse . Berlin 12 October, 2024, 01:06

Volodymyr Zelensky

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky voiced hope Friday that the war with Russia will end next year, speaking during a visit to Berlin to ask for sustained military support.

As Ukraine faces a gruelling third winter at war, Zelensky has been seeking support on a two-day whirlwind tour of European capitals that earlier took him to London, Paris and Rome.

Visiting chancellor Olaf Scholz, Zelensky, dressed in his trademark military clothes, thanked Germany for its backing and said that ‘it is very important for us that this assistance does not decrease next year’.

He said he would present Scholz with his plan for winning the war, voicing hope that the conflict would end ‘no later than next year, 2025’.

‘Ukraine more than anyone else in the world wants a fair and speedy end to this war,’ Zelensky said. ‘The war is destroying our country, taking the lives of our people.’

Scholz pledged Germany and EU partners would send more defence equipment this year, and German aid worth four billion euros in 2025, vowing that ‘we will not let up in our support for Ukraine’.

Scholz said he and the Ukrainian leader agreed on the need for a peace conference that includes Russia, but that a peace ‘can only be brought about on the basis of international law’.

‘We will not accept a peace dictated by Russia,’ Scholz said.

Zelensky has been seeking fresh military and financial aid from his European allies amid fears of dwindling support if Donald Trump wins the US presidency next month.

A scheduled Ukraine defence meeting Saturday at the Ramstein US air base in western Germany was postponed after US President Joe Biden called off a state visit to Germany because of Hurricane Milton.

Germany has been Ukraine’s biggest military aid supplier after the United States.

However, Scholz has rejected sending the German long-range Taurus missile system, fearing an escalation of NATO’s tense standoff with nuclear-armed Russia.

Zelensky had started the day at the Vatican for talks with the 87-year-old leader of the world’s almost 1.4 billion Catholics — his second private audience with Pope Francis since Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

Francis has repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and regularly prays for its ‘martyred’ people, but he sparked outrage in Kyiv earlier this year after giving an interview in which he urged Ukrainians to ‘raise the white flag and negotiate’.

In a post on social media Friday, Zelensky said his talks with the pope had focused on the ‘incredibly painful’ question of people captured and deported from Ukraine to Russia, saying he hoped the Holy See could help.

The Vatican said Zelensky had discussed during the visit ‘the state of the war and the humanitarian situation in Ukraine’ and ways to reach a ‘just and stable peace’.

In Paris on Thursday, Zelensky held talks with French president Emmanuel Macron, after which he denied media reports that he was discussing the terms of a ceasefire with Russia.

‘This is not the topic of our discussions,’ he told the press in the French capital. ‘It’s not right. Russia works a lot with media disinformation so it (such reports) is understandable.’

Zelensky has rejected any peace plan that involves ceding land to Russia, arguing Moscow must first withdraw all troops from Ukrainian territory.

Russian forces have made advances across the eastern frontline and targeted the power grid as Ukraine faces its toughest winter since the full-scale Russian invasion started in February 2022.

Russia said Friday its forces had captured the frontline villages of Zhelanne Druge and Ostrivske, the latest in a string of territorial gains for Moscow.

Russian strikes overnight on the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa killed four people, including a teenage girl, and wounded 10 more, according to the regional governor.

Zelensky has pushed for clearance to use long-range weapons supplied by allies, including British Storm Shadow missiles, to strike military targets deep inside Russia.

Washington and London have stalled on giving approval over fears it could draw NATO allies into direct conflict with Russia.

In Germany, Scholz’s refusal to deliver Taurus missiles is controversial, even within his own three-party coalition with the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats.

‘We must supply Ukraine with significantly more air defence, ammunition and long-range weapons,’ the Greens’ European MP Anton Hofreiter told the Rheinische Post newspaper Friday.

‘Restrictions on the range of weapons supplied do not contribute to de-escalation but rather enable further Russian attacks.’

The FDP’s defence expert Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann told the same newspaper: ‘I very much hope that Zelensky will make it clear to the Chancellor once again that if Ukraine loses this war, this will not be the last war in Europe.’​

 

[Saif]

Ukraine, Russia foil dozens of drone attacks

Russia and Ukraine traded drone attacks overnight, with Russian officials saying on Saturday that Ukrainian strikes had killed one person in the Belgorod border region...

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Ukraine, Russia foil dozens of drone attacks
Agence France-Presse . Kyiv 12 October, 2024, 23:57

Russia and Ukraine traded drone attacks overnight, with Russian officials saying on Saturday that Ukrainian strikes had killed one person in the Belgorod border region.

Russia said it had downed 47 Ukrainian drones overnight, while Ukraine reported it neutralised 24 drones fired by Moscow.

The Ukrainian air force said many missiles were fired from Belgorod, without specifying the number or type.

It said Russia had fired 28 drones at Ukraine, of which 24 were destroyed in the Sumy, Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Kherson regions.

In the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, Russian bombardments wounded four people, the head of the regional administration said.

The Russian defence ministry said the 47 Ukrainian drones taken down overnight included 17 in the southeastern Russian region of Krasnodar, 16 over the Azov Sea and 12 over the border region of Kursk.

A separate Ukrainian drone attack killed one person in the village of Ustinka in the Belgorod region, the regional governor said on Telegram.

The Ukrainian chief of staff said Kyiv’s forces had struck a fuel depot overnight near Rovenky in the eastern region of Lugansk, which is occupied by Russian forces.

It said the strike caused a fire at the depot, which it said supplied Russian forces, but did not provide details about the blaze.

Moscow did not confirm the attack.

Separately, Russian emergency services said they had brought a massive fire under control at the Feodosia oil terminal in Russian-annexed Crimea, which had burned for six days after being struck by Ukraine, state news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Russian forces have made advances across the front line in eastern Ukraine, targeting the country’s power grid as it faces its toughest winter since the full-scale Russian invasion started in February 2022.​

 

[Saif]

Russia launches 130 drones over Ukraine: Kyiv

Russia launched one of its largest drone salvos at Ukraine in recent months, targeting Kyiv and other cities and igniting a fire at an industrial facility in the western region of Ternopil, officials said yesterday.

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Russia launches 130 drones over Ukraine: Kyiv
Industrial facility hit

Russia launched one of its largest drone salvos at Ukraine in recent months, targeting Kyiv and other cities and igniting a fire at an industrial facility in the western region of Ternopil, officials said yesterday.

Air defences shot down 51 of 136 drones used in the attack, the air force said in its readout. Twenty drones were still in the air and 60 were unaccounted for, possibly after being intercepted by electronic warfare systems, it added.

Almost 50 firefighters put out a "large-scale fire" in the Ternopil region, the military administration wrote on the Telegram messaging app. "There were no injuries," it said.

The air force said Russia also fired two missiles at the northern Chernihiv and eastern Donetsk regions, but did say what happened to them. There was no immediate comment from Russia on its latest strike. The drone attack caused a fire at a private residence in the region outside the capital and damaged several other buildings, according to governor Ruslan Kravchenko.​