Ukraine updates: Russia says drone heading for Moscow downed

Local officials expect the German government to extend its trusteeship over a major oil refinery in the east of the country.

The refinery is majority-owned by subsidiaries of Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft and the federal government seized it into trusteeship a few months after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The trusteeship was set to expire in September but Jörg Steinbach, the state economy minister for Brandenburg, told German news agency DPA that he is "very much assuming that the trusteeship will be extended for another six months."

"I also think this is the right thing to do," he added.

The PCK refinery, located in Schwedt near the Polish border, supplies fuel to large parts of north-eastern Germany.

The Wagner mercenary group's second-in-command Dmitry Utkin was buried Thursday during a quiet ceremony at a military cemetery in Moscow.

Utkin died in a plane crash last week where all 10 people on board perished, among them Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and other top lieutenants.

The crash occurred somewhere between Moscow and St. Petersburg and came just two months after Prigozhin led his fighters toward the Russian capital in a brief mutiny against the Kremlin.

Utkin, 53, was buried at the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery, where some of Russia's most decorated military heroes are interred.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country has developed a weapon that can hit a target 700 kilometers (400 miles) away, in an apparent reference to the previous day's strike on an airport in western Russia.

Zelenskyy said on his Telegram channel the weapon was produced by Ukraine's Ministry of Strategic Industries but gave no further details.

On Wednesday, a four-hour wave of drones, that Moscow blamed on Ukraine, hit an airport near Russia's border with Estonia and Latvia, damaging four Il-76 military transport planes, according to local reports.

The airport is in Russia's Pskov region, about 700 kilometers (400 miles) north of the Ukrainian border.

In all, six Russian regions were targeted in the barrage.

Kyiv officials normally neither claim nor deny responsibility for attacks on Russian soil, though they sometimes refer to them in vague terms. Zelenskyy's remark was the clearest hint that Ukraine was behind the strike.

Ukrainian troops have secured some new "successes" in the south and east as they try to push forward their counteroffensive against Russian forces, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said.

"There have been some successes, in particular in the direction of Novodanylivka-Novoprokopivka," Maliar said on the Telegram messaging app, referring to two villages in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

Novoprokopivka lies further south of the strategic settlement of Robotyne, which Ukraine said on Monday it had liberated.

Maliar also said Kyiv's forces were pressing on with their offensive operations south of the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut, which was captured by Russian troops in May.

Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine's ground forces, also reported a "positive dynamic" on the Bakhmut front, but gave no details.

Local sham elections condemned by the Ukrainian government have started in some Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories.

Moscow controls around one-fifth of Ukraine's territory: the Crimea peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014 and parts of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions annexed in 2022.

Fighting in those areas is still raging as Ukraine pushes a counteroffensive launched in June along a vast front of almost 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).

Voting was due to take place on September 10, but occupation authorities in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia organized early elections from Thursday, while voting in Kherson and Luhansk will open on Saturday. No real opposition is standing in the election.

Jailed nationalist Igor Girkin said he wanted to run for Russian president in an election next year and piled fresh criticism on leader Vladimir Putin.

The 52-year-old Girkin, also known by his alias Igor Strelkov, was detained on extremism charge in July for criticizing Russia's leadership. He was arrested following a series of posts critical of Putin and he faces up to five years in prison if convicted.

"I consider myself more competent in military affairs than the incumbent president, and certainly more competent than the defense minister," Girkin said in a statement on Telegram announcing his candidacy.

In 2014, Girkin was the leader of Kremlin-backed rebels fighting against Ukrainian troops in Donbas. In 2022, a Dutch court sentenced him to life in prison in absentia for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, with all 298 people on board killed.

Russia is expected to hold a presidential election in March 2024. 

Ukraine has signed a joint arms production contract with Britain's largest defense company, BAE Systems.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at a meeting with the BAE leadership in Kyiv that the company's weapons are already in use in Ukraine. He named artillery pieces of the types L119 and M777 as well as the armored personnel carrier CV90.

According to the Ukrainian government, it plans to develop joint production of the light L119 guns in its own country. A framework agreement on cooperation in the repair and production of these weapons was also signed at the meeting.

BAE Systems has already opened an office in Ukraine and is to develop weapons production with local companies. With sales of around $25 billion (almost €23 billion) last year, BAE Systems is the seventh largest defense company in the world.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov has expressed thanks to Ben Wallace, who has resigned as UK defense secretary.

"He has led by example. His authority has inspired other countries to join in assisting Ukraine," Reznikov wrote on Twitter.

The Ukrainian minister added that military aid from the UK helped Ukraine to repel the first wave of Russian aggression and to begin the rearmament of the Ukrainian army with NATO-style weapons.

Meanwhile, the British government named ex-Energy Secretary Grant Shapps as the country's new defense minister, replacing Wallace who said he wanted to step down after four years in the role.

Wallace, who had been touted as a potential successor to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, had taken a leading role in shaping Britain's response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.

Under him, Britain provided 2.3 billion pounds (€2.7 billion, $2.9 billion) of military aid to Kyiv in 2022 and became the first country to start supplying Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles in May this year to help end Europe's biggest land war since World War II.

The defense role will be Shapps' fifth government job over the last year, after serving in four different ministries — transport, interior affairs, business and then at energy and net zero. His appointment is unlikely to change Britain's support for Ukraine against Russia.

Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko said that demands for the withdrawal of Russia's Wagner mercenaries from Belarus were "groundless and stupid", Belarusian state news agency BELTA reported.

Wagner, whose leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash in Russia last week, relocated some of its fighters to Belarus under a deal brokered by Lukashenko after the mercenary army launched a failed mutiny aimed at ousting Prigozhin's rivals from the Russian Defence Ministry in June.

Poland and Baltic nations on Monday asked Belarus to expel the Wagner Group and warned that they will close their borders with Belarus entirely if a "critical incident" involving Wagner mercenaries takes place.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged his EU counterparts to send more arms to Ukraine to fight back against the Russian invasion. 

"The war is raging," Kuleba said in his address to EU foreign ministers meeting in Spain. He asked for more armoured vehicles and tanks, as well as armored ambulances, which are in high demand.

Kuleba also warned that Russia's capacity to produce drones and missiles was increasing and called on the European Union to stop this development with export controls and a crackdown on anyone evading sanctions. 

An upcoming meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin is "almost the last chance to see Russia return to the Black Sea grain initiative," he added.

According to Reuters' sources in Turkey, Erdogan will meet Putin in Russia's resort of Sochi on September 4 to primarily discuss Black Sea grain exports.

Two Ukrainian "saboteurs" were killed and five captured during an incursion into the region of Bryansk, which is bordering Ukraine, a Russian official said.

Bryansk governor Alexander Bogomaz said that a group of Ukrainian special forces tried to carry out a series of "terrorist acts on military and energy infrastructure facilities" on Wednesday.

"In the course of operational and combat measures in the Navlinsky district, two militants were liquidated, five were detained, three of whom were wounded," he said in a post on social media.

The Navlinsky district is some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

In May, the nearby region of Belgorod was rocked by the largest incursion since the beginning of the offensive in Ukraine, with Moscow claiming it killed dozens of pro-Ukraine militants.

EU foreign ministers are in the Spanish city of Toledo to discuss continued support for Ukraine, among other things.

Ahead of the 78th United Nations General Assembly and the G20 summit in India, the ministers are set to discuss Ukraine's diplomatic campaign to end the Russian full-scale invasion with their Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.

Of concern for Ukraine and its allies is that India did not invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the G20 summit of major economies. The meeting is due to start on September 9.

At last year's G20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali, Ukraine was top of the agenda. Zelenskyy made an appearance via videocall and presented his 10-point peace plan there for the first time.

Russia and North Korea are negotiating weapons deals amid Moscow's war in Ukraine, the Biden administration said. 

"Arms negotiations between Russia and the DPRK [North Korea] are actively advancing," the head of Washington's National Security Council, John Kirby, said on Wednesday.

"Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently travelled to the DPRK to try to convince Pyongyang to sell artillery ammunition to Russia," Kirby added.

Since that visit, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have exchanged letters, pledging to increase their bilateral cooperation, the US official said.

"Information further indicates that following that short visit, another group of Russian officials travelled to Pyongyang for follow on discussions about potential arms deals between the DPRK and Russia," he added.

With the envisaged arms deals, Russia would receive from North Korea "significant quantities and several types of ammunition that the Russian military intends to use in Ukraine," Kirby warned.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decried what he described as systematic corruption in medical exemptions to people avoiding military service, saying the system was subject to bribes and mass departures abroad.

"There are examples of regions where the number of exemptions from military service due to medical commission decisions has increased tenfold since February last year," Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Wednesday.

"It is absolutely clear what sort of decisions these are. Corrupt decisions," he added.

According to Zelenskyy, the investigation had exposed corrupt practices in different regions and by officials in different positions, involving bribes ranging from $3,000 to $15,000.

The Ukrainian president said a separate analysis was needed to determine the numbers of people who had fled abroad, largely on the basis of medical commission decisions. "We are talking about at least thousands of individuals," he said.

Zelenskyy this month dismissed all the heads of Ukraine's regional army recruitment centres.

Russian air defenses destroyed a drone approaching Moscow, the city's mayor said.

Air defense forces in Voskresensky district, about 60 kilometers (35 miles) from the capital, "destroyed a drone flying towards Moscow," mayor Sergei Sobyanin wrote on Telegram.

He did not say where the drone had come from. However, Russia's Defense Ministry claimed in a later statement that the drone was Ukrainian.

There were no casualties or damage, according to initial reports, and emergency services were on the scene, Sobyanin said.

There was no immediate comment from Ukrainian officials and Kyiv does not claim responsibility for specific drone strikes on Russian soil.

On Wednesday, several Russian regions were targeted in a massive overnight attack, including Pskov airport near the Estonian border, where a Ukrainian drone damaged at least two military planes.

dh/rt (AP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)