Ukraine’s security service said on Monday it had detained an informer accused of helping Russia plot an attack on President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as he visited a flood-hit region. The SBU security service said the detained woman was gathering intelligence to try to find out Zelenskiy’s itinerary before his visit to the southern Mykolaiv region. It published a blurred image of the woman being detained by masked officers in a kitchen, as well as some phone messages and handwritten notes about military activity. On Telegram, Zelenskiy said that the head of the SBU had updated him about the “fight against traitors”.
Russia said on Monday its troops had advanced three kilometres (two miles) along the Kupiansk front in north-east Ukraine over the past three days, as it seeks to regain territories it lost earlier in its offensive. The city of Kupiansk and surrounding areas of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region were liberated by Ukrainian forces last September, but Moscow has since renewed its assault on the region
Ukraine has released images of prisoners of war on Monday returned by Russia. Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian presidency, announced that 22 more Ukrainian soldiers had been returned from captivity, stating that all of them are soldiers of the armed forces of Ukraine.
Yermak also reported that “the Russians shelled the village of Kucherivka, in Kupyan district, hitting a house. Two dead and three injured people are known”. The deaths were in addition to a person killed and several injured during a “difficult night” of Russian shelling of Kherson, the city’s governor Oleksandr Prokudin, has said.
Serhiy Lysak, governor of Dnipropetrovsk oblast, claimed Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian drone over his region on Monday. Lysak also reported that a 36-year-old man has died and another 68-year-old man has been injured after Russian attacks on Nikopol.
China’s foreign ministry said on Monday that recent international talks in Saudi Arabia on resolving the Ukraine crisis helped “consolidate international consensus”. China’s special envoy for Eurasian Affairs, Li Hui, “had extensive contact and communication with all parties on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis … listened to all sides’ opinions and proposals, and further consolidated international consensus,” the foreign ministry said in a written statement.
Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the office of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, says there can be no compromise on the president’s peace formula for Ukraine. Podolyak said this includes negotiations around “immediate ceasefires” that he says would “give Russia time to stay in the occupied territories”.
Ukrainian MP Yehor Chernev claimed on Monday that key parliamentary factions in Germany had “reached a consensus” to supply Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles with a range of 500km (310 miles), but that an official decision was yet to come.
Poland’s border guard has asked the defence ministry to send another 1,000 troops to the border with Belarus.
A hostile drone was destroyed by Russian air defences as it approached Moscow on Sunday morning, the city’s mayor said. The capital’s Vnukovo airport temporarily suspended flights.
A multi-wave overnight assault on Ukraine on Saturday night – said to be in retaliation for successful strikes against Russian naval vessels – killed six people and destroyed a blood transfusion centre. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned the “guided air bomb” strike against the medical facility as a war crime of “beasts”.
Despite the strikes, Zelenskiy said Ukraine was seeing “significant results” from US and German air defence systems. Ukraine had shot down a significant part of Russia’s attacks over the past week, which included 65 missiles of various kinds and 178 assault drones, including 87 Shaheds, he said.
The Chonhar bridge to the occupied Crimean peninsula was damaged by a missile strike on Sunday, the Moscow-installed governor said. Another of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk, was shelled and a civilian driver wounded, a Moscow-appointed official said. Denis Pushilin, the Russian-imposed leader in occupied Donetsk, said on Monday that travel by road in the region is safe despite Ukrainian attacks on key bridges.
Russia has said its forces struck military airbases in the Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions in western Ukraine and that “all targets were hit”. The deputy governor of the Khmelnytskyi region, Serhiy Tiurin, said on Sunday that a military airfield in Starokostiantyniv was among the targets. He said most of the missiles were shot down but explosions had damaged several houses, a cultural institution and the bus station, and a fire had broken out at a grain silo.
The Mother Ukraine statue in Kyiv, one of the nation’s most recognisable landmarks, has lost its hammer-and-sickle symbol after officials replaced the Soviet-era emblem with the country’s trident coat of arms. The move is part of a wider shift to reclaim Ukraine’s cultural identity from the Communist past.
