September 2, 2023 at 1:52 am EDT
A Ukrainian soldier operates an FPV drone on a front line near the village of Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhia region on August 25. (Vyacheslav Ratynskyi/Portal)
The Russian space agency announced that the new Sarmat missile, capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads, was in “combat use.” The announcement, reported by Russian state news agency Interfax, came months after the weapon was expected to be operational and shortly after Ukraine claimed it had used new domestically-made long-range missiles to hit a target about 435 miles away . The Washington Post could not independently verify the claims.
Ukrainian forces have made “remarkable progress” in retaking territory in the southern Zaporizhzhia region in recent days, White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters. The comments follow a weeks-long near-standoff that had sparked concern among Kiev’s supporters.
Here you will find the latest information on the war and its global impact.
The Sarmat missile poses no significant threat to the United States, the Pentagon said in April last year after the Kremlin successfully launched the test. NATO has named the weapon “Satan 2”. When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced it in 2018, he claimed it could penetrate “any missile defense system.”
Kirby told reporters Friday that Kiev forces “have achieved some successes on Russia’s second line of defense.” but “it is not outside the realm of possibility that Russia will respond to Ukraine’s move.” He declined to comment on Ukraine’s claims about its new long-range missiles and reiterated the administration’s policy of neither encouraging nor enabling Ukrainian attacks inside Russia.
Moscow described Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov as a “foreign agent” on Friday a label used to harass human rights organizations and journalists in Russia. Muratov is the one Editor-in-chief of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazet and was a regular critic of the Kremlin invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Filipino journalist Maria Ressa.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that more than 3.7 million children started the new school year on Friday. Most of them were in Ukraine. Every lesson taught was proof that “Ukraine will definitely endure” and that “life goes on,” he said in his evening address.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed early Saturday that it had retaliated Three attempts to attack the Crimean bridge with drones. She blamed Ukraine for not taking responsibility. The British Ministry of Defense said On Friday, Russia said it had built an underwater barrier of sunken ships and floating barriers to prevent attacks on the Crimean Bridge, which was hit by Ukraine in July.
Russia said on Friday that any weapons facilities in Ukraine could be targeted. A day after Zelensky’s office announced that BAE Systems – Britain’s largest defense contractor, which supplies Ukraine with weapons such as artillery systems – would open an office in Kiev.
Russia’s short-term military reinforcement needs could hamper its intended long-term reconstruction efforts, The Institute for War Research announced this in an assessment on Friday. The latest troop deployment “indicates increasing Russian concern about the stability of Russian defenses in light of Ukrainian advances around Robotyne in the Zaporizhzhia region,” the ISW said.
German prosecutors opened an investigation on Friday into an attack on a 10-year-old Ukrainian boy by a man who insisted the boy spoke Russian. Investigators said an unidentified man who spoke Russian approached a group of Ukrainian children in the town of Einbeck on August 26, complained that they spoke Ukrainian and demanded that they speak Russian. He then pushed a 10-year-old over the railing of a canal bridge, prosecutors said, adding that the man was being investigated for attempted murder.
Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has been instrumental in helping Russian propaganda about Ukraine reach more people than before the start of the war, according to a study by the European Commission. The reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts has grown throughout 2022, with further growth this year “particularly driven by Twitter’s removal of security standards,” the study said.
Back in class, Russian students receive a lesson from Professor Putin: On the first day of the school year, Putin spoke via video conference to children at a new school in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol in four Russian regions. He reflected nostalgically on the Soviet era and discussed efforts to impose Russian education on “the new territories, new regions” – a reference to occupied Ukraine.
Putin’s claims that Ukraine is one of Russia’s “historic countries” are now part of the official curriculum, Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova report, and there are new textbooks and new courses that serve the Kremlin narrative.