Russia-Ukraine war live: strike on Russian Black Sea fleet HQ killed nine and injured senior officers, Ukraine claims

Norwegian police have arrested a former commander of the Wagner mercenary group on suspicion that he attempted to illegally re-enter Russia after seeking asylum in Norway earlier this year, the man’s lawyer is reported as saying on Saturday by Reuters.

Police said in a statement late on Friday that a man in his 20s had been taken into custody for attempting to illegally cross the Russian border, but did not name him.

Andrei Medvedev escaped Russia in January to Norway. His lawyer, Brynjulf Risnes, told Reuters that his arrest was due to a misunderstanding.

“He was up there to see if he could find the place where he crossed (into Norway in January). He was stopped when he was in a taxi. He was never near the border … It was never his intention to cross the border (into Russia),” Risnes said.

Ukrainian forces have broken through in the southern village of Verbove, according to the general leading Ukraine’s counteroffensive along the southern front.

“On the left flank [near Verbove] we have a breakthrough and we continue to advance further,” Brig Oleksandr Tarnavsky told CNN on Friday, though he acknowledged that the troops were making slower progress than expected.

“Not as fast as it was expected, not like in the movies about the second world war,” he said. “The main thing is not to lose this initiative (that we have). And, well, not to lose it in practice, with actions.”

It follows gains by Ukrainian forces in early September. Tarnavsky told the Observerthen that forces had breached Russia’s first defensive line near Zaporizhzhia following weeks of painstaking mine clearance.

Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, will visit Moscow in the next few weeks, according to an Iraqi foreign ministry statement reported by Reuters.

The foreign minister, Fuad Hussein, is quoted as making the statement during a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York.

Ukraine strikes Russian Black Sea fleet HQ – video report

00:48

Andrey Kortunov, an adviser to the Russian foreign ministry and director of Russian international affairs council, has been on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme discussing the strike on Russian navy’s Black Sea HQ.

Kortunov emphasised the “psychological” importance of long range missiles being used in the strike. “I think psychologically it’s important because it’s a long range missile – its destruction power is pretty significant. But militarily, I don’t think it really makes that big a damage – after all it didn’t hit any really critical military targets and the damage at least according to the reports we received is quite limited.”

Is this rattling Russian people, he is asked. “Yes, I think it does have an impact on the Russian population. Paradoxically, I think it strengthens the position of the leadership because what Russians see right now is that it’s not just Putin’s war – it’s their war and it has an impact on the civilian population because at least some of these missiles hit not just military targets but residential areas, like the drone attacks that we saw in Moscow.

“Definitely it has an effect of political mobilisation – we don’t know how long this factor might last for,” he said, acknowledging this is a view based on “anecdotal” evidence.

Kortunov said that “both sides have to make concessions” but that it is difficult to make the case for this because they are “diametrically opposed” to each other. “Once you start talking about [that] you will be labelled as a traitor,” he said.

Hello, this is Clea Skopeliti taking over the blog from my colleague Mark Gerts.

It’s almost a year on since explosions damaged the Nord Stream pipelines. AFP has looked at the investigations since the incident on 26 September 2022, which destroyed a key route for Russian gas exports to Europe and further fuelled geopolitical tensions.

Here’s a reminder, courtesy of AFP, of what we know:

Late last September, a series of underwater blasts ruptured three of the four pipelines that make up Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, spewing gas into the Baltic Sea.

Russian energy giant Gazprom had in August already halted flows through Nord Stream 1, the main conduit for Russian natural gas to Germany, amid disputes over the war in Ukraine.

The newly completed Nord Stream 2 twin pipelines never opened as Berlin pulled the plug on the project days before Russian troops entered Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

The €10bn ($10.6bn) Nord Stream 2 had long been opposed by Ukraine, the US and eastern European countries who feared it would give Russia too much influence over Germany’s energy security.

• Who opened investigations? Germany, Denmark and Sweden, a the leaks happened in their exclusive economic zones.

• What have they found? German federal prosecutors seized objects from a sailing yacht in January and found traces of explosives.

• Meanwhile, Sweden’s public prosecutor said the “primary assumption is that a state is behind it”.

• What has Ukraine said? The New York Times reported in March that US officials had seen information suggesting it was done by a “pro-Ukrainian group”, without Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s knowledge. Zelenskiy has repeatedly denied Ukraine was behind the sabotage.

• Could it be a false flag? Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, views Russia as “the most likely” culprit. The Kremlin has denied responsibility.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and his South Korean and Japanese counterparts have expressed “serious concern” over the discussion of military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, including possible arms trade, South Korea’s foreign ministry has said.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, made a weeklong visit to Russia earlier this month and discussed military cooperation with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

US and South Korean officials have expressed concern that the summit was aimed at allowing Russia to acquire ammunition from the North to supplement its dwindling stocks for its war in Ukraine.

The South Korean president, Yoon Suk-yeol, said on Wednesday that if Russia helped North Korea enhance its weapons programmes in return for assistance for its war in Ukraine, it would be “a direct provocation” and Seoul and its allies would not stand idly by.

In Ukraine, the second summer of the invasion has been a season of unbearable goodbyes: to teachers, artists and loved ones, writes Oleksandr Mykhed in the Guardian.

“If anyone still thinks that Ukraine is regaining the occupied territories too slowly, they should remember that for every de-mined and liberated metre of our free country, the highest price has been paid by our soldiers,” Mykhed writes.

“The pantheon of our national myth is being formed before our eyes. Our friends, teachers, brothers are already in it. And the only thing I dream of is that the living will take their places in the pantheon after victory.”

Read the full piece here:

Russia has handed a long jail term to a political activist over social media posts critical of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.

A spokesman for a military court in the central city of Yekaterinburg confirmed to AFP the activist Richard Rouz had been sentenced to eight years in jail.

He was detained in April last year after reposting a video that accused Russian forces of abuses in Bucha, a town outside Ukraine’s capital that was occupied for several weeks, the OVD-Info rights monitoring group said.

Authorities accused him of spreading illegal disinformation and then opened a terror-related case against Rouz, 38, after finding a post that called for President Vladimir Putin to be killed to end hostilities in Ukraine.

His wife, Marya Rouz, was detained in April 2022 and released pending trial, OVD-Info said.

The group said she fled to Armenia, where she was detained and threatened alongside her son with extradition. She was released and has since fled to Poland, OVD-Info said.

The monitoring group says some 20,000 people in Russia have been detained for speaking out against the conflict. Several high-profile political opposition figures have also been given long jail terms for protesting the conflict.

Russian spies are using hackers to target computer systems at law enforcement agencies in Ukraine in a bid to identify and obtain evidence related to alleged Russian war crimes, Ukraine’s cyber defence chief has told Reuters.

Yurii Shchyhol, head of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine, which handles cyber defence, has claimed the hackers, working for Russia’s GRU and FSB intelligence agencies, have stepped up digital intrusion campaigns targeting the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office and departments documenting war crimes.

There’s been a change in direction, from a focus on energy facilities towards law enforcement institutions which had previously not been targeted that often.

“This shift, towards the courts, prosecutors and law enforcement units, shows that hackers are gathering evidence about Russian war crimes in Ukraine” with a view to following Ukraine’s investigations, he added.

The espionage activity will be flagged in an upcoming report by the service, due to be published on Monday.

The report, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, says hackers were also trying to gather intelligence on Russian nationals arrested in Ukraine, with a view to “help these individuals avoid prosecution and move them back to Russia”.

Russia’s foreign ministry and the FSB have not responded to requests from Reuters for comment. Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency could not be reached for comment.

Shchyhol claimed his department saw evidence that Russian hackers were accessing private security cameras within Ukraine to monitor the outcome of long-range missile and drone strikes.

We have documented several attempts to gain access to video cameras near the facilities they attacked, and to systems that provide information about the stability of the energy network.

“You need to understand that the cyber war will not end even after Ukraine wins on the battlefield,” Shchyhol added.

Three successive commanders of one of Russia’s most prestigious airborne regiments have either resigned or been killed since its invasion of Ukraine, the UK Ministry of Defence has said.

In its latest intelligence update, the MoD lists 247th Guards Air Assault Landing Regiment commanders Col Vasily Popov and Col Konstantin Zizevsky as having died since February 2022, while Pytor Popov resigned.

“The experience of the 247th highlights the extreme attrition and high turnover in Russia’s deployed military, even amongst relatively senior ranks,” the MoD concludes.