Ukraine-Russia war live: Putin ‘invokes Cuban Missile Crisis’ as he moves ‘nuclear-capable’ ships to Havana

Ukrainian attacks left at least 28 people dead as Moscow and Kyiv continued to engage in drone strikes overnight, Russia-installed officials in the partially-occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Luhansk said.

A Ukrainian attack yesterday on the small town of Sadove in the Kherson region killed 22 and wounded 15 people, Moscow-appointed governor Vladimir Saldo said.

Russian state news agency Tass cited Mr Saldo as saying that Ukrainian forces first struck the town with a French-made guided bomb, then attacked again with a US-supplied HIMARS missile.

He said Ukrainian forces had “deliberately made a repeat strike to create greater numbers of casualties” when “residents of nearby houses ran out to help the injured.”

Officials declared Saturday a day of mourning in Luhansk, and public events will be similarly cancelled today and tomorrow in Kherson.

Further east, Leonid Pasechnik, the Russia-installed governor in Ukraine’s partially occupied Luhansk region, said yesterday that two more bodies had been pulled from the rubble following Friday’s Ukrainian missile attack on the regional capital, also called Luhansk.

Russian state news agency Interfax cited regional authorities as saying this brought the death toll to six. Pasechnik also said 60 people were wounded in the attack.

Joe Biden has said in France that Russian president Vladimir Putin is not going to stop with the war in Ukraine and all of Europe was threatened.

French president Emmanuel Macron welcomed his American counterpart, Mr Biden, in Paris yesterday for a state visit that included talks about the Middle East, Ukraine, and trade.

“The United States is standing strong with Ukraine. We’re standing with our allies,” Mr Biden said.

“We are standing with France,” he added.

“Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine…. All of Europe will be threatened. We’re not going to let that happen.”

The two countries will work harder to prevent a regional escalation from Israel’s war with militant group Hamas in Gaza and focus on calming tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, Mr Macron told reporters at the Elysee presidential palace, with the US president at his side.

Ukrainian air defence and mobile drone hunters groups shot down nine out of 13 Russian drones over four regions of the country, the air force said on Saturday.

The Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over the central Poltava region, southeastern Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, and the Kharkiv region in the northeast, the statement said. One X-59 Russian missile launched from Russia’s Kursk region was also downed.

Serhiy Lysak, Dnipropetrovsk regional governor, said the overnight drone attack damaged commercial and residential buildings and also a power line. Details of the damage in other regions were not immediately clear.

Mary Dejevsky travels to Finland, the Baltic states and Poland, where one issue stands above all others

Foreign secretary Lord David Cameron has been the victim of hoax a video call and messages from someone claiming to be the former president of Ukraine, it has been revealed.

In order to stave off any attempts to manipulate video footage of Lord Cameron from the communications, the government has made public what happened.

A statement from the Foreign Office said a “number of text messages were exchanged followed by a brief video call between the Foreign Secretary and someone purporting to be Petro Poroshenko, former president of Ukraine”.

Mr Poroshenko served as Ukrainian president between 2014 and 2019, and has remained a prominent figure in the country since leaving office.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has hit back at Vladimir Putin for raising questions over the legitimacy of his presidency in the absence of elections in the war-torn country.

In a joint news conference with France’s President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, Mr Zelensky said: “President Zelensky’s legitimacy is recognized by the people of Ukraine only, he is elected by the people of Ukraine.”

“I am very grateful for the support. Our people are free. To be honest, that’s what we are fighting for (freedom). I am grateful for the support,” he said.

He added said Mr Putin’s legitimacy is recognized only by the Russian president himself.

“Putin elects himself. Russian people are just a decoration, they only have one actor,” Mr Zelensky said, pointing to Russia’s presidential election,

Ukraine had to undergo elections in March 2024 after Mr Zelensky’s first term ended in May. However, martial law was imposed following the Ukraine war in February 2022, banning elections during wartime.

Askold Krushelnycky visits the concealed base of the ‘Barney Unit’ in eastern Ukraine. Created by Stepan Barna in the wake of the death on the front line of his older brother Oleh, its drone operators claim to have achieved more than 100 kills

Russian president Vladimir Putin said there was no need to use nuclear weapons to deliver victory for Moscow in Ukraine, the strongest signal yet from the Kremlin chief that there will not be a nuclear strike.

Mr Putin, whose forces have been making advances in eastern Ukraine in recent months, said he did not see the conditions for the use of such weapons and requested that people stop discussing the nuclear topic.

However, Mr Putin, who leads the world’s biggest nuclear power, said he did not rule out changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which sets out the conditions under which such weapons could be used.

He also said that if necessary Russia could test a nuclear weapon, though he saw no need to do so at the present time.

Mr Putin’s response came to a question from Sergei Karaganov, an influential Russian analyst, who asked if Mr Putin should hold a “nuclear pistol to the temple” of the West over Ukraine.

“The use is possible in an exceptional case – in the event of a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country. I don’t think that such a case has come. There is no such need,” he said at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum.

“But this doctrine is a living tool and we are carefully watching what is happening in the world around us and do not exclude making some changes to this doctrine. This is also related to the testing of nuclear weapons.”

Leaders such as Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron used D-Day celebrations to underline their support for Kyiv, writes Kim Sengupta, but the West is struggling to find the production capacity for the shells and missiles the country desperately needs