The Czech president, Petr Pavel, has said Nato must respond adequately to Russian airspace violations, including potentially by shooting down Russian jets. “Russia will realise very quickly that they have made a mistake and crossed the acceptable boundaries. Unfortunately, this is teetering on the edge of conflict, but giving in to evil is simply not an option.” The comments were published by the Czech News Agency and picked up by the Associated Press.
Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, has said security guarantees for Ukraine, which are being discussed by the so-called “coalition of the willing”, would compel the European countries that sign to fight Russia if Moscow launched military action against Ukraine again in future.
British fighter jets have flown their first Nato air defence sortie over Poland as part of the Eastern Sentry mission following Russian drone incursions. The two RAF Typhoons took off from England on Friday night to patrol the Polish skies.
Ukrainian drones have hit an oil refinery in the Samara region, south-western Russia, according to the local Russian governor and Ukraine’s military general staff. The Ukrainians announced their strike on the Novokuibyshevsk refinery which provides about 2.5% of all Russian oil refining. The general staff added that Ukrainian special forces struck a production and transit station in Samara for the export-grade Urals oil that comprises up to 50% of the total volume of Russian exports. “All affected facilities are involved in providing support to the Russian armed forces,” said the general staff. The local Russian governor said four people were killed.
The Samara strikes took place on Friday night around the same time Ukrainian UAVs once again blasted Russia’s Saratov oil refinery. A source in Ukraine’s SBU security agency said Ukrainian drone strikes “have stopped the operation of a number of oil pumping stations in Russia”. “It is this infrastructure that brings oil-dollar superprofits to the Russian budget, which fuel the war against Ukraine. Work to block these cashflows will continue.”
Russia announced on Saturday its troops had captured the village of Berezove in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Volodymy Zelenskyy said that in the north-eastern Kharkiv region, there were “intense actions” in the key area of Kupiansk, a rail hub Ukraine recaptured in 2022. Summarising battlefield developments, the Institute for the Study of War said Ukrainian forces advanced in northern Sumy oblast and near Pokrovsk; while Russian forces advanced in northern Kharkiv oblast and near Lyman, Pokrovsk, Novopavlivka, and Velykomykhailivka.
Zelenskyy will again urge Donald Trump to impose sanctions on Russia when they meet next week at the UN in New York, and has called on Ukraine’s allies to “stop wasting time”. Trump has threatened sanctions but then backtracked to say he will do it only after all Nato countries agree to stop buying oil from Russia and put tariffs on China, another big importer of Russia’s oil. Speaking to journalists in Kyiv including the Guardian’s Luke Harding, Zelenskyy said to “tie up” possible US sanctions with demands on European countries to move first was to “slow down the pressure on Putin”.
Russia carried out a large-scale drone and ballistic missile attack on Ukraine overnight into Saturday. At least three people were killed when a missile carrying cluster munitions struck an apartment building in the city of Dnipro. Other regions including Mykolaiv, Chernihiv and Zaporizhzhia were targeted, officials said. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the Kremlin was not bombing military sites but carrying out a “deliberate strategy” designed to terrorise civilians and damage infrastructure.
Health workers are advising torturers on the most painful way to give electric shocks, according to testimony from victims, amid the “seismic decline” of human rights in Russia, according to a new UN expert report. The special rapporteur on rights in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, denounces in her report “the continuing widespread and systematic recourse to torture and ill-treatment by Russian law enforcement officials, security forces, penitentiary officials and members of the armed forces”. The independent expert, who does not speak on behalf of the UN, said Russian authorities had “dismantled institutional independence, bringing the judiciary, legislature and law enforcement under direct political control … This systemic capture transformed public institutions into instruments of repression and war.”
Katzarova, who was appointed by the council in 2023 as the first UN-backed monitor of the rights situation in Russia, warned the official narrative in Russia was “reframing legitimate exercises of human rights as ‘existential security threats’ and portraying such individuals as ‘enemies of the state’”. In a seeming acknowledgment that prosecution in Russia was unlikely, she urged other countries to exercise so-called universal jurisdiction to “prosecute alleged perpetrators of torture” committed inside the country.
