Russia Ukraine war live: Drones strike Russian airbase as Putin’s forces suffer significant losses in Kursk

Ukraine’s border guard service said on Thursday that Kyiv had seen no signs of Belarusian troop or military hardware movements near their shared border since Minsk announced it was sending additional forces to the area.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Sunday the country had deployed nearly a third of its armed forces along the border, claiming that Kyiv had stationed more than 120,000 troops there.

“We do not see any movement directly near our border – neither equipment nor personnel,” Andriy Demchenko, Ukraine’s border guard service spokesman, told national television.

He added that the situation near the Belarus border “generally has not changed”.

Ukraine ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, taking a step toward membership and opening the possibility of more prosecutions of Russian officials for war crimes.

Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, voted Wednesday to ratify the ICC statute.

Membership of the ICC is a requirement for joining the European Union, which Ukraine hopes to do. It was formally accepted as a candidate in June 2022, four months after Russia began its full-scale invasion.

A Russian guided bomb attack in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region bordering Russia’s region of Kursk killed two people, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Moscow troops dropped two guided bombs on civilian infrastructure, according to the regional prosecutors’ statement on Telegram.

One person was injured in the attack, it added.

Russia has been pummelling Ukrainian border regions with strikes, and Kyiv said its shock incursion into the Kursk region was aimed at cutting off Moscow’s ability to stage such attacks.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday he had visited the Sumy region and added there had been a decrease in shelling and in civilian casualties since the Kursk operation.

India has chosen to stay on the sidelines since its close ally Russia invaded Ukraine, dismissing pressure from Western nations to join in condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s war while still seeking deeper trade ties with the likes of the US and UK.

This tricky balancing act is one that prime minister Narendra Modi is expected to keep up during his visit to Kyiv this week, the first by an Indian prime minister since the two countries established diplomatic relations over 30 years ago.

Mr Modi was in Poland on Thursday for the first leg of his Europe trip and is expected to depart for the Ukrainian capital by train later in the day, with talks in Kyiv taking place on Friday.