Ukraine Russia war latest: Wagner troops arrive in Belarus after failed Kremlin coup

Ukraine has made small advances against Russian troops in the south of the country, Ukraine’s armed forces has said/

Andriy Kovaliov, spokesperson for the armed forces general staff, said Ukrainian troops had made gains in the direction of the southeastern village of Staromayorske, near settlements recaptured by Ukraine last month in the Donetsk region.

Kyiv says it has retaken more than 192 sq km of land in the south and 35 sq km in the east since launching its counteroffensive, a senior defence official said on Monday.

Two drones have crashed into buildings in Moscow, Russian officials said, with one crashing close to the Defence Ministry in the city centre.

Nobody was hurt in the drone attack early on Monday morning, while a senior Ukrainian official said there would be more to come.

One drone struck close to the Moscow building where the Russian military holds briefings, a symbolic blow which underscores the reach of such drones.

Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Vershinin said on Tuesday that no talks on resuming the Black Sea grain export deal were currently under way, the RIA news agency reported.

The deal, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey last July, aimed to prevent a global food crisis by allowing grain blocked by the war in Ukraine to be safely exported.

Russia announced it was withdrawing from the deal last week.

The British Ministry of Defence has claimed that Russia is now “less politically constrained” after walking out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative and is striking the Odesa port more in recent days as it believes Ukraine is storing military equipment there.

“Since 28 July, Russia has conducted greater numbers of long-range strikes against Odesa and other areas of southern Ukraine. These attacks have featured an unusual number of AS-4 KITCHEN missiles, a 5.5 tonne weapon originally designed to destroy aircraft carriers,” the ministry said today in its latest intelligence update.

It added that the Russian attacks have damaged several grain silos at Chronomorsk Port, south of Odesa, as well as the historic city centre.

The ministry pointed to Russia’s extended one-way attack drone strikes to the docks of the Danube River, approximately 200 metres from the Romanian border, yesterday.

Russia generally refrained from targeting civilian infrastructure in the southern port region between August last year and June this year, when the Black Sea grain deal was still in force, the ministry said.

“Since Russia failed to renew the deal, the Kremlin likely feels less politically constrained, and is attempting to strike targets in Odesa because it believes Ukraine is storing military assets in these areas. Since the start of the war, Russia’s strike campaign has been characterised by poor intelligence and a dysfunctional targeting process,” it added.

Russia-installed officials at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant said the fourth and fifth blocks of the facility were put in a shutdown mode for inspection purposes.

“In order to conduct a scheduled technical inspection of the equipment of power unit number 5, the management of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant decided to transfer it to the ‘cold shutdown,’ state,” the administration said on its Telegram channel.

“And in order to provide steam for the station’s own needs, the reactor plant of power unit number 4 was transferred to the ‘hot shutdown’ state.”

The plant has been under Russia’s control from the early days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has seen continuous shelling from both sides, risking the nuclear plant’s safety.

Russia’s grain and fertiliser exports are going to be discussed by Moscow and other nation’s taking part in this week’s Russia-Africa summit, Oleg Ozerov, ambassador at large at the Russian foreign ministry, said today.

“The creation of logistics corridors, hubs not only for food and fertilizsrs, but also for any other products that the Russian Federation produces – this will be one of the topics of discussion,” Mr Ozerov told Russian state news agency RIA.

“It seems to me that the idea of such logistics corridors and the creation of grain hubs is promising and feasible,” he said.

This comes a week after Russia withdrew from the year-long Black Sea grain deal that ensured the safe export of Ukrainian grains to other parts of the world, saying that Russia’s conditions for the extension of the deal had been ignored.

The summit will start on Thursday in St Petersburg and will see Moscow and the West in a diplomatic battle for influence in Africa.

Air raid sirens wailed for more than three hours across most of Ukraine’s east from about 1.40am (10.40pm GMT), the country’s Air Force said today.

At 5.30am the Air Force said on its Telegram channel that there was a fresh threat of attacks on Ukraine’s east and southeast regions using ballistic weapons and issued air raid warnings for those areas.

Russia launched an air attack on Kyiv in the early hours of this morning, the sixth bombardment targeting the Ukrainian capital this month, the Kyiv military administration said.

Air raid alerts continued blaring for more than three hours over the city as well as other eastern parts of the country.

The attack was carried out using Iranian-made Shahed drones, and based on preliminary information all the drones were downed by Ukraine’s air defence systems, Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said.

There were no casualties or serious damage, though information was still being collected, he added.

Russia has pledged harsh retaliatory measures against Ukraine after two drones damaged buildings in Moscow early yesterday, including one intercepted close to the defence ministry’s headquarters.

“We regard what happened as yet another use of terrorist methods and intimidation of the civilian population by the military and political leadership of Ukraine,” the foreign ministry said of the Moscow and Crimea drone attacks.

“The Russian Federation reserves the right to take harsh retaliatory measures.”

The Kremlin said it would press on with its campaign in Ukraine and meet all the aims of an operation which Kyiv and much of the West say is a brutal war of conquest.

The Moscow drone attack, though not serious in terms of its human cost or damage, was the most high-profile of its kind since two drones reached the Kremlin in May.

No casualties were seen in the attack, of which a senior Ukrainian official said there would be more, but one drone struck close to the Moscow building where the Russian military holds briefings on full-scale invasion of Ukraine and what it calls its “special military operation”.

The ministry claimed that a third “helicopter-type drone” which was not carrying explosives fell on a cemetery in a town outside Moscow.

Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine, but has been saying in recent months that destroying Russia’s military infrastructure helps Kyiv’s counteroffensive.