Ukraine-Russia war – live: Putin targets key industrial site in missile strike

A Russian missile struck an industrial site in the central Ukrainian district of Kremenchuk on Sunday for a second day, the regional governor said.

“For the second day in a row, the enemy is attacking Poltava region,” Poltava Regional Governor Filip Pronin wrote on the Telegram messaging app, noting that the target was in Kremenchuk district. He gave no further details.

A missile attack on Saturday hit an industrial site in the same area, triggering a fire but causing no casualties.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said he fears the Ukrainian conflict will escalate into a third world war if Russian aggression is not contained with support from Kyiv’s Western allies.

In an interview with German state broadcaster ARD on Sunday, Mr Zelensky warned that if Russia struck a Nato country it would be “the beginning of the Third World War”.

“It seems to me that the chancellor (Olaf Scholz) is aware of this risk,” Mr Zelensky said.

My colleague Shweta Sharma has more in this report:

Ukraine could win the war against Russia much faster if it was allowed to use western weapons to strike military targets across the border, the head of Ukraine’s navy has claimed.

Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa called on Kyiv’s western backers to stop restricting Ukraine from firing on military targets inside Russia after the recent success of long-range attacks on Russian-occupied Crimea.

While the US, UK and France have supplied long-range missiles to Ukraine – albeit after 15 months of Russia’s full-scale invasion – Kyiv’s forces are still not allowed to use those weapons outside of its own territory.

France will send 3,000 rounds of vital 155m artillery shells to the Ukrainian armed forces every month, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister has claimed after a visit to the French capital.

Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Lieutenant General Ivan Havryliuk, chief of the Ukrainian delegation at the first meeting of the Artillery Coalition in Paris, spoke in an interview with NV.

“France intends to produce 78 Caesar howitzers for Ukraine, six of which will be delivered in the near future,” he said.

“As for 155mm projectiles for French artillery systems, the Minister of the French Armed Forces, Sebastien Lecornu, said France would be able to provide the Ukrainian Army with 3,000 rounds each month.”

Officials in Ukraine said Russia has provided no credible evidence to back its claims that their own forces shot down a military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war who were to be swapped for Russian POWs.

The Ukrainian agency that deals with prisoner exchanges said late Friday that Russian officials had “with great delay” provided it with a list of the 65 Ukrainians who Moscow said had died in the Wednesday plane crash in Russia’s Belgorod region.

A father crying over the body of his 16-year-old son, who was hit by a Russian missile in Mariupol while playing football with his friends. Frightened and wounded pregnant women being pulled out of a maternity ward, minutes after the building was hit in an airstrike. The first sighting of a Russian tank – the letter “Z” plastered on its side – turning its turret toward the top floor of a hospital as Moscow’s forces took over the southern Ukrainian city.

These are all harrowing scenes documented by journalists Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko before they were forced into using the humanitarian corridor out of the besieged city as the Russians were closing it. Those left behind have been living under Russian rule ever since, for nearly two years.

20 Days in Mariupol, the Chernov-directed documentary covering the first few weeks of Russia’s advance into the southern city, has just been nominated for an Academy Award.

In a new investigation, the BBC discovered the UK based company is not only actively recruiting new sales agents in Russia but operating a significant production operation in Moscow.

In March 2022, at the outbreak of the invasion of Ukraine it had announced that it would be suspending all investments in Russia and would “stop exporting products from the Russian factory to all other markets”.

Under the proposals, warheads three times as strong as the bomb which devastated Hiroshima would be based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, according to Pentagon documents seen by The Daily Telegraph.

They set out plans for a “nuclear mission” to take place “imminently” at the base.

Officials in Ukraine said Russia has provided no credible evidence to back its claims that their own forces shot down a military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war who were to be swapped for Russian POWs.

The Ukrainian agency that deals with prisoner exchanges said late Friday that Russian officials had “with great delay” provided it with a list of the 65 Ukrainians who Moscow said had died in the Wednesday plane crash in Russia’s Belgorod region.

The Russian city of St. Petersburg on Saturday marked the 80th anniversary of the end of a devastating World War II siege by Nazi forces with a series of memorial events attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and close allies.

The Kremlin leader laid flowers at a monument to fallen Soviet defenders of the city, then called Leningrad, on the banks of the Neva River, and then at Piskarevskoye Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of siege victims are buried.