.theguardian - 10 days ago

Russians confirm attack on Bryansk region home to explosives f Trump-Putin talks shelved, US diplomacy ‘going in circles’. What we know on day 1,337Storm Shadow missiles struck a Russian chemical plant making gunpowder, explosives and rocket fuel in the Bryansk region, Ukraine’s military said late on Tuesday. The French-British missiles are also known as Scalp. “A massive combined missile and airstrike was carried out, including with air-launched Storm Shadow missiles that penetrated Russia’s air defence system,” said Ukraine’s armed forces general staff. Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of Bryansk region, said on Tuesday afternoon that Ukraine attacked the region with drones and missiles. The Russian defence ministry also confirmed an attack.Kyiv was under air attack on Tuesday night, with Russian missile attacks sparking fires and shattering windows in several districts, mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Emergency services were dispatched to several sites where the debris from the destroyed air weapons fell, but no casualties have been reported, Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app. Other areas being hit included Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, and the city of Izmail, a port on the Danube river.Plans for a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Budapest have been shelved, Dan Sabbagh reports, after an apparently unproductive phone call between Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov. Their call also led to the cancellation of a meeting planned in Hungary’s capital for this Thursday between Rubio, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, and Lavrov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister. A senior European diplomat told Reuters the Russians “haven’t at all changed” their maximalist position of Ukraine giving up the entire Donbas region. “And I assume Lavrov gave the same spiel, and Rubio was like: ‘See you later’.” Another European diplomat thought that “it became evident for the Americans that there will be no deal for Trump in Budapest”.Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia “almost automatically became less interested in diplomacy” once US Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine were no longer an immediate prospect. The Ukrainian president continued: “The greater the Ukrainian long-range capability, the greater the Russian willingness to end the war … As soon as the issue of long-range [capability] became a little further away for us – for Ukraine – Russia almost automatically became less interested in diplomacy.”The diplomatic efforts centred around Trump were “going in circles” and felt as if they were being dragged out, a senior Ukrainian official told Agence France-Presse. While varying from day to day, Trump’s most recent stance is that the war should be halted along the current frontline without Ukraine making territorial concessions.European diplomats meanwhile said countries were working with Ukraine on a new proposal for a ceasefire along current battle lines. One told Reuters the proposal included a reference to a peace board that would be chaired by Trump, while another said it would be modelled on the US 20-point plan on Gaza. Some 35 allies of Ukraine will meet on Friday in London for a summit among countries willing to provide long-term support to Kyiv.The European work on a peace proposal seems at least partly calculated to simply keep Washington engaged with helping Ukraine by giving Trump and the US an important role, rather than produce a deal both sides would actually accept. For example, a proposal to siphon off some of Russia’s frozen assets to fund a portion of reparations payments to Ukraine “would be a non-starter for Russia”, one diplomat said.Russian attacks killed four people and left hundreds of thousands without power and many without water in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region on Tuesday. The energy ministry said the regional capital, Chernihiv city, and the northern part of the province lost all electricity supply after strikes on power facilities. By the afternoon, Reuters reporters in Chernihiv saw that power supply was back in some places. A daytime attack by about 20 Russian kamikaze drones killed four civilians and wounded at least seven more including a 10-year-old child in the town of Novhorod-Siverskyi, local officials said. Continue reading...

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