A 6-year-old child was killed and four people were wounded by artillery shelling in the Kherson region shortly after midnight Thursday in the village of Novodmytrivka, the Office of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General said. The prosecutor blamed Russia for the strikeand said the wounded included the child’s teenage brother and “three neighbors who tried to help” but “came under enemy fire.”
Russia said it thwarted drone attacks over Bryansk Oblast, a region southwest of Moscow near the Ukrainian border. The Russian Defense Ministry said air defenses shot down drones shortly after midnight Thursday. The local governor said there were no reports of casualties or damage.
Russian officials accused Ukraine of shelling a village in the Kursk region overnight, killing one person and injuring another. Kursk regional governor Roman Starovoyt said a distillery in the village of Tyotkino was hit, killing a forklift driver. More shelling of settlements in the region thereafter resulted in one injury, he said. The Kursk region borders Ukraine, and Russian border areas have frequently been the target of attacks since the start of the war.
Russia said it had declared two U.S. diplomats working in Moscow as “persona non grata,” asking them to leave the country within seven days. The two diplomats were accused of maintaining contact with a Russian citizen performing “tasks for financial remuneration with the aim of damaging the national security of the Russian Federation,” according to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Russian has been named as Robert Shonov, a former employee of the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok, in other news releases. The U.S. State Department condemned Shonov’s arrest earlier this year and said the accusations against him “are wholly without merit.”
The U.S. Treasury announced nearly 100 new sanctions on elites and companies it says are aiding Russia’s war effort.Those sanctioned include not only Russians who had previously avoided rounds of sanctions, such as Mkrtich Okroyan, the chief designer for Soyuz, a company that manufactures engines for many of the missiles being fired at Ukraine, but also Turkish firms involved in the trade of sanctioned goods to Russia.
Ukraine’s plans “to diversify its supply” of nuclear fuel away from Russian sources hit a milestone earlier this week, Britain’s Defense Ministry said, when “Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear power plant operator, announced it had a successfully refueled a reactor at its Rivne Nuclear Power Plant” in northwestern Ukraine near the border with Poland and Belarus, “using Western-produced nuclear fuel assemblies.” The ministry said Thursday that Ukraine’s nuclear sector was dependent on Russian fuel and Soviet-era designs but that, since the invasion, Kyiv has “accelerated” plans for a “long-term decoupling from Russia, whose influence over Ukraine’s energy supply is severely diminished.”
Kim Jong Un’s visit to Russia hints at grim battlefield math for Putin: The visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un highlights the predicament that Russian President Vladimir Putin has found himself in: fighting a war with a dwindling chest of arms.
Russia’s armed forces are churning through artillery in Ukraine at an unsustainable rate, The Post’s Adam Taylor writes, forcing Putin to try to find ways to bolster the military’s stockpiles of ammunition. That may have contributed to Kim’s visit this week to Russia, where the two leaders are expected to discuss supplying artillery shells, though it’s unclear exactly how much North Korea could send to Russia…
top image….Ukrainian soldiers playing World of Tanks Blitz and other games after training outside the eastern city of Bakhmut in June.Credit…Thomas Gibbons-Neff/The New York Times
I am reading a book on Zelensky and Ukraine/Russia history……
Very interesting guy