Ukraine news today latest live: Putin appoints ‘Grey Hair’ warlord to lead Wagner mercenaries

Russian President Vladimir Putin was on Friday shown meeting one of the most senior former commanders of the Wagner group, Andrei Troshev.

Alongside Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, they discussed how volunteer units could fight in Ukraine. The Kremlin also confirmed that the mercenary now worked for the defence ministry.

Addressing Troshev, Putin said that they had spoken about how “volunteer units that can perform various combat tasks, above all, of course, in the zone of a special military operation.”

“You yourself have been fighting in such a unit for more than a year,” Putin said. “You know what it is, how it is done, you know about the issues that need to be resolved in advance so that the combat work goes in the best and most successful way.”

The meeting underscored the Kremlin’s attempt to show that the state had now gained control over the mercenary group after a failed June mutiny by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed in a plane crash in August.

Just days after the Wagner’s mutiny, Putin offered the mercenaries the opportunity to keep fighting but suggested that commander Andrei Troshev take over from Prigozhin, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper has reported.

Troshev is a founding member and Executive Director of the Wagner Group.

At least one civilian was injured during the Russian bombardment of a residential area in Kostyantynivka, Ukraine, officials said.

Firefighters extinguished fires at the scene on Wednesday 27 September and pulled down the remains of a damaged roof as the house’s owner, Olena Kononenko, looked on.

Liudmila Ivanchuk, another resident, said the windows shattered during the bombardment and that she was taken to hospital for stitches.

“Everything was falling on me. The door was stuck. You can see what happened,” Ivanchuk, 61, said.

Kostyantynivka is located in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

Kosovo’s interior minister on Thursday accused Serbia of direct involvement in weekend clashes and was investigating the possibility of Russian involvement in the violence that left four people dead and further strained relations between the former wartime foes.

One Kosovo police officer and three gunmen were killed in Sunday’s shootout between Serb insurgents and Kosovo police. Eight people were initially arrested, but four of them have been released from custody because of a lack of evidence.

Kosovo Interior Minister Xhelal Sveçla told The Associated Press in an interview that investigators were looking at evidence linking Russia, an ally of Serbia, to the armed assault. Russian weapons, other equipment and documents suggesting Russian involvement were discovered after the daylong gunbattle, he said.

Russia has published a second clip purporting to show a top naval officer alive and well, after Ukraine claimed he had been killed in a missile strike on the headquarters of Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.

Ukraine’s special forces claimed on Monday that the Russian fleet’s commander, admiral Viktor Sokolov, was among 34 officers killed in the huge strike on Sevastopol, which they said had caused irreparable damage to the headquarters building.

But the military body backpedalled the following day, saying its units were “clarifying the information” which had been based on open sources, adding that many of those killed in the strike “still have not been identified due to the disparity of body fragments”.

A court in northern Switzerland on Thursday acquitted a former security Belarusian operative over the enforced disappearances of three of President Aleksander Lukashenko’s political opponents in the late 1990s, said an advocacy group that spearheaded the case.

Judges in the northern town of Rorschach said they were not convinced that the defendant, Yuri Harauski, a former member of a Belarusian military unit known as SOBR, was involved in the disappearances.

According to the Geneva-based advocacy group TRIAL International, the court ruled that Harauski’s participation in the crimes could not be established beyond reasonable doubt.

Ukraine has fought back courageously against Mr Putin’s warped bid to restore territory lost to Moscow with the collapse of the Soviet Union and has continued to defy the odds by defending itself against Russian onslaughts with the help of Western military aid.

The Defence Secretary used the visit to reaffirm the UK’s commitment to support Ukraine as it defends itself against the Russian invasion of its territory.

In his second visit to Kyiv in two months, Mr Shapps held meetings with his Ukrainian counterpart Rustem Umerov, alongside the UK’s chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin.

Several hundred fighters of the Wagner mercenary group have returned to Ukraine to fight in Russia’s continuing invasion but have not made a significant impact on the battlefield, military officials in Kyiv said.

“We have recorded the presence of a maximum of several hundred fighters of the former Wagner PMC (private military company),” spokesperson for the eastern military command Serhiy Cherevatyi said.

These Wagner fighters were scattered in different places, were not part of a single unit, and had had no significant impact, he said.

Ukrainian soldiers fought off fierce Russian attacks on the battlefield on Wednesday as the invading troops continued to recapture lost territory in eastern Ukraine, military officials said.

Some progress was also seen in southern Ukraine – another pocket of heavy territorial battle in Russia’s 20-month-old invasion.

“We continue to repel intense enemy attacks near Klishchiivka and Andriivka. The enemy is still storming these positions with the hope of recapturing lost positions, but without success,” Ilia Yevlash, a spokesperson for Ukraine‘s eastern group of forces, told national television.

A desperate Vladimir Putin, increasingly isolated on the world stage, is eyeing a return to the UN Human Rights Council – and he has launched a shameless charm offensive to get him there.

Armed with stolen Ukrainian grain, the Russian president is on a mission to curry favour with potential backers ahead of a vote for council membership next month, although his efforts are likely to fall short.

Two years after being kicked off the panel for invading its neighbour, Putin has ordered his diplomats to try and secure the backing of enough countries for Moscow to beat two other eastern European nations on 10 October.

Russia is on a mission to grab a seat on the UN’s Human Rights Council – and to add insult to injury it’s using crops plundered from its illegal war to curry favour with potential backers, writes Arpan Rai: