Ukraine war: Putin’s forces hit civilian targets as ‘Russia losing Black sea’

Russian drones reportedly struck civilian targets, sparking a fire in and around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Ukrainian officials said.

Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov, in a Telegram message, revealed that the attacks specifically targeted civilian infrastructure in the city’s northeast and also affected a nearby locality.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov indicated that efforts were underway to control the fire but did not provide further details.

Ninety minutes after the initial reports, the air raid alert in Kharkiv and other central regions was lifted, and there have been no subsequent updates on the situation on the ground.

Meanwhile, alerts remain in place in western regions, with the Ukrainian air force reporting the presence of Russian drones in three different areas.

Maksym Kozytskyi, governor of the Lviv region near the Polish border, noted the activation of anti-aircraft units in response to the situation.

The attacks came as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address Moscow was losing control of Black Sea.

He expressed gratitude for efforts to maintain Ukraine’s maritime export corridor, which has yielded positive results following a conference with military, intelligence, security forces, and government officials

He said it suggested that Russia’s influence in the Black Sea is diminishing, with a plan to pursue them further in the eastern waters.

The Belarus foreign ministry has summoned the Polish charge d’affaires Marcin Wojciechowski over a violation of its airspace on Nov. 2, it said in a statement on social media platform X, without providing details of the incident.

“The Polish side was asked to thoroughly investigate the incident and take effective actions to prevent similar incidents in the future,” it said.

A spokesperson for the Polish army’s operational command said the information provided by Belarus was being subjected to “detailed analysis”.

“We are checking records from our radar systems and aircraft systems to see if any such violation had occurred, the spokesperson said.

In late September Belarus also summoned Wojciechowski after saying a Polish helicopter had violated its airspace but Warsaw said none of its helicopters had crossed the border between the two countries.

Tense relations between the neighbours have been further strained by Belarusian ally Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February last year.

The United States will provide $425 million worth of additional arms and equipment to Ukraine for its ongoing fight against Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration announced on Friday.

The package uses the last of the funds in the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), a more than $18 billion fund that allowed the Biden administration to buy weapons from industry, rather than pull from U.S. weapons stocks.

The USAI funds will be put toward $300 million worth of laser-guided munitions to shoot down Russian drones, which will include some for the Vehicle Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) kit made by L3Harris Technologies , a U.S. official and a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The administration also announced $125 million worth of weapons pledges made possible by utilizing the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which authorizes President Joe Biden to transfer excess articles and services from U.S. stocks without congressional approval during an emergency.

Authorities in Moldova on Friday barred a pro-Russian party from taking part in local elections on the grounds it endangers national security — two days before the vote viewed as a litmus test of President Maia Sandu’s campaign to join the European Union.

Prime Minister Dorin Recean announced the bar on candidates from the Chance Party linked to fugitive business magnate Ilan Shor – jailed in absentia earlier this year on fraud charges.

The ban was imposed hours after Moldova’s national security service accused Shor of helping funnel 1 billion lei (50 million euros) into the country to stage anti-government protests during the war in Ukraine and to “buy” voters in Sunday’s elections.

Recean told a briefing that Moldova’s Commission for Emergency Situations introduced the bar “for reasons of state security” because of a “hybrid war” waged against Moldova by Russia, which the Moldovan government says is funding and backing Shor.

“Russia cannot invade Moldova with tanks like in Ukraine, instead it invades using criminal groups,” he said.

Alexei Lungu, Chance’s leader and one of the candidates sidelined by the ban, said the party was instructing voters to back alternative independent candidates still permitted to run.

“Nothing dreadful has happened. They are just afraid of us,” Lungu wrote on Telegram. “What Dorin Recean said today amounts to nothing other than the murder of our people.”

Some 600 candidates in Sunday’s election are set to be affected by the ban. Voters in Moldova, a former Soviet Union country that lies between Ukraine and Romania, will elect 12,000 officials, including the mayor of capital Chisinau.

The Russian Orthodox Church on Friday called for an apology from Alla Pugacheva, the country’s most renowned pop singer who returned home this week, over her criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Pugacheva, for decades hugely popular in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, left the country for Israel along with her husband several weeks after Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

In September of that year, she sparked widespread attention by both supporters and opponents of the conflict by saying that Russian soldiers were dying for “illusory goals” and that the country had become “a pariah.”

She also provocatively suggested that authorities should name her a “foreign agent” — a status already applied to her husband Maxim Galkin, an actor and comedian.

The United States will provide additional arms and equipment to Ukraine for its ongoing fight against Russia’s invasion, US Secretary of Staten Antony Blinken has said.

The announced $125m worth of weapons, authorised under previously allowed “drawdowns” for Ukraine, comes amid other expected defence aid for Kyiv that could include about $300m worth of laser-guided munitions to shoot down Russian drones, according to a document seen by Reuters and a US official.

That batch of weapons could be announced later.

Any “normal person” would be outraged by images of “bloodied children” in the Gaza Strip, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

Mr Putin was commenting on a riot at Makhachkala airport in Russia’s Muslim-majority Dagestan region, when hundreds of people stormed the airport in search of Jewish people who had arrived on a flight from Tel-Aviv.

“As for these events in Makhachkala…it was easy to throw a spark, very easy. Against the background of the horrors taking place there (in Gaza), it is easy to do so, because…when you look at the suffering and bloodied children, you clench your fists and tears come to your eyes.”

Seven people were killed and another seven wounded in an Ukrainian missile attack in the Russian-controlled part of Kherson region, the Russian senator for Kherson region Konstantin Basyuk wrote on his Telegram channel.

The Kherson region is a key gateway to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 and is now home to a lot of Moscow’s war logistics operations and rear supply depots.

Ukrainian forces recaptured the city of Kherson last November.

Ukraine’s defence ministry says it will relax testing processes for home-produced weapons, allowing them to reach the front faster, the Kyiv Independent reports.

Requirements such as a six-month minimum climatisation test are unnecessary in times of war, the ministry said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine is prioritising domestic arms manufacturing, and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal says more than 200 Ukrainian companies have begun developing drones.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has claimed Western weapons supplied to Ukraine are finding their way to the Middle East through the illegal arms market and being sold to the Taliban.

“Now they say: weapons are getting into the Middle East from Ukraine. Well of course they are because they are being sold,” Mr Putin said. “And they are being sold to the Taliban and from there they go onto wherever.”

Ukraine says it keeps tight control over any weapons supplied to it, but some Western security officials have raised concerns and the United States has asked Ukraine to do more to tackle the broader issue of corruption.

In June last year, the head of Interpol, Jürgen Stock, warned that some of the advanced weapons sent to Ukraine would end up in the hands of organised crime groups.

A report about the Ukraine war and the illegal arms trade by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said in March that there was “currently no substantial outflow of weapons from the conflict zone.

“However, every precedent suggests that, especially if the threat is not addressed proactively and imaginatively, when the current war ends, Ukraine’s battlefields could and will become the new arsenal of anarchy, arming everyone from insurgents in Africa to gangsters in the streets of Europe,” the report said.