Here are the key events on Saturday, August 13.
Fighting
- Blasts this week at the Russian-operated Saky military airfield in the annexed Crimean Peninsula led to the loss of eight Russian combat jets, the United Kingdom’s defence ministry said.
- Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told government officials to stop talking to reporters about Kyiv’s military tactics against Russia, saying such remarks were “frankly irresponsible”.
- Russia’s defence ministry said its forces destroyed a US-made AN/MPQ-64 radar system in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. In its latest daily briefing, the ministry also said Russian troops had shot down two US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) missiles.
- Ukraine’s defence minister said Kyiv has received a shipment of M20 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) from the UK.
- Ukraine’s military said its artillery hit a Russian ammunition depot near a key bridge in the south on Friday and added it now had the ability to attack nearly all of Moscow’s supply lines in the occupied region.
Economy
- Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 4 percent in the second quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, as economic sanctions by the West take their toll on the economy, the national statistics agency said.
- Russia’s National Settlement Depository (NSD) said it filed a lawsuit at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to overturn European Union sanctions imposed on the country over its invasion of Ukraine.
- A potential new gas connection between Spain and France could be ready to operate in less than a year’s time, Spain’s Energy Minister Teresa Ribera said, if France and other European countries agree on the project. The EU is racing to wean itself off Russian natural gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, bringing new interconnection projects into focus.
- McDonald’s will start reopening some of its restaurants in Ukraine in the coming months, a symbol of the war-torn country’s return to some sense of normalcy and a show of support after the American fast-food chain and others pulled out of Russia.
- Russia is considering buying the currencies of “friendly” countries such as China, India and Turkey to hold in its National Wealth Fund (NWF), having lost the ability to buy dollars or euros due to sanctions, its central bank has said.
- Russian oil flows to the Czech Republic through the Druzhba pipeline are set to resume within hours after transit fee payments were unblocked, Slovak pipeline operator Transpetrol has said.
