July 24, 2023 at 1:32 am EDT
Windows of a high-rise building were destroyed in a drone attack in downtown Moscow on Monday. (AP)
According to Russian officials, a drone struck a large skyscraper in Moscow early Monday, shattering glass on the 17th and 18th floors. The wreckage of a second drone was found on Komsomolsky Prospekt, a thoroughfare in central Moscow. Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said two non-residential buildings were hit, but there were no injuries.
The incident came after another night of attacks on Ukraine’s Odessa region. Drones targeted port infrastructure along the Danube, injuring six people and destroying a grain hangar, said Oleh Kiper, the region’s governor.
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Moscow shot down the drones electronically, the Russian Defense Ministry said. He blamed Ukraine and called the incident a “terrorist attack”. Drone strikes are a rarity in the Russian capital, and a similar attack on two apartment buildings there earlier this year was widely seen as the prelude to a further escalation of the war. Although Ukraine denied responsibility for the drone strike in May, the event drew a great deal of interest from Russians, who witnessed for the first time hostilities spill into residential areas of the city.
The night drone attack in Odessa lasted four hours. Ukrainian officials said this on Telegram and is part of a series of attacks in the port region that have been ongoing since Russia pulled out of a United Nations-backed grain export deal. An earlier bombing raid destroyed several parts of the southern Ukrainian port city before dawn on Sunday, killing at least one person and injuring 21, including four children.
Ukraine has so far recaptured about half of the land originally confiscated from Russia, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during an interview with CNN on Sunday. However, he dampened Kiev’s advances with warnings of a difficult path: “This is still relatively early for the counter-offensive,” he said.
Ukrainian pilots will begin training with F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft developed by the US Air Force next month. The country’s defense minister told CNN that the training might be split between several European countries. As for the delivery of the planes, Blinken warned Sunday that it could take “months and months” for the F-16s to be delivered and operational. The White House agreed in May not to prevent allied nations from sending the advanced fighter jets to Kiev.
Zelenskyy said the lack of ammunition forced Ukraine to postpone a counter-offensive planned for spring. “We didn’t have enough ammunition and armament and not enough brigades properly trained in these weapons,” he said in a CNN interview that aired Sunday.
Unilever said it allowed Russian employees to be called up if they were called up for combat. “We will always comply with all laws of the countries in which we operate,” Reginaldo Ecclissato, the company’s chief business operations and supply chain officer, said in a letter to the B4Ukraine Coalition this month. He added that Unilever, a The British multinational packaged goods company, which employs about 3,000 people in Russia, “condemns the war in Ukraine as a brutal, senseless act by the Russian state.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko met in St. Petersburg on Sunday. Russian state media reported. The Kremlin earlier said leaders would discuss their nations’ “strategic partnership”. The meeting came two days after Putin warned that any attack on the neighboring state would be treated as an attack on Russia.
Putin accused the Western partners of the Black Sea Grains Agreement of failing to address global food insecurity. In an article published by the Kremlin on Monday, the Russian leader said that high- and middle-income countries benefited from exports shipped under the deal, rather than African countries. The United Nations, which helped broker the deal, has argued that it will bring more grain to the world market and lower food prices around the world.
Analysis of our correspondents
The moral dilemma of sending cluster munitions to Ukraine: For the past week, Ukraine has fired US-supplied cluster munitions at Russian targets. Their deployment poses a moral dilemma – and at a particularly difficult time in the war, writes Ishaan Tharoor.
The bombs are banned in 123 countries, including most NATO member states, but the United States, Russia and Ukraine have not signed a convention banning their use. This month, the Biden administration finally agreed to deploy them to Ukraine — a move that could give Kiev a battlefield advantage, but not without a cost.
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