Russia Ukraine conflict reside: Putin loses greater than 1,500 troopers in faltering Kharkiv offensive | EUROtoday

Defence secretary Grant Shapps, talking at defence questions, advised the Commons: “We are very mindful of the situation in Ukraine and particularly in Kharkiv, where Russia are making, or trying to make, inroads.

“This is an existential battle for all civilised countries that believe in democracy and freedom and it is the case that we must ensure the world continues to keep up the efforts.

“It is not right for there to be pauses in our support and when there are, the sort of losses we’ve seen, I hope on a very temporary, and believe on a very temporary, basis, in Kharkiv around the villages to the north are an inevitable consequence of inaction.”

Mr Shapps later advised MPs: “This bloody war is now killing up to 1,000 Russians a day, or causing casualties, and it needs to come to a stop.”

A Russian court docket yesterday opened the trial of a theatre director and a playwright accused of advocating terrorism in a play, the newest step in an unrelenting crackdown on dissent in Russia that has reached new heights since Moscow despatched troops into Ukraine.

Zhenya Berkovich, a outstanding unbiased theatre director, and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk have been jailed for over a 12 months. Authorities declare their play Finist, the Brave Falcon justifies terrorism, which is a felony offence in Russia punishable by as much as seven years in jail. Berkovich and Petriychuk have each repeatedly rejected the accusations towards them.

Berkovich advised the court docket that she staged the play to be able to stop terrorism, and Petriychuk echoed her sentiment, saying that she wrote it to be able to stop occasions like these depicted within the play.

The girls’s legal professionals have identified at court docket hearings earlier than the trial that the play was supported by the Russian Culture Ministry and received the Golden Mask award, Russia’s most prestigious nationwide theatre award. In 2019, the play was learn to inmates of a girls’s jail in Siberia, and Russia’s state penitentiary service praised it on its web site, Petriychuk’s lawyer has mentioned.

The case towards Berkovich and Petriychuk elicited outrage in Russia. An open letter in help of the 2 artists, began by the unbiased Novaya Gazeta newspaper, has been signed by greater than 16,000 individuals since their arrest. The play, the letter argued, “carries an absolutely clear anti-terrorist sentiment”.

Dozens of Russian actors, administrators and journalists additionally signed affidavits urging the court docket to launch the 2 from custody pending investigation and trial.

The US will not be planning to ship navy trainers into Ukraine and would seemingly accomplish that solely when the conflict there with Russia is over, Washington mentioned.

More than two years into the conflict, Russian are slowly advancing in jap Ukraine, exploiting Ukrainian shortages of manpower and months of delays in arms provides from the West.

That has raised questions on what extra the United States and its allies can do, past funneling billions of {dollars} in weaponry and offering intelligence and coaching to Ukrainian navy forces from exterior of the nation.

“Right now, there are no plans to bring US trainers into Ukraine,” General Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned.

The head of Ukraine’s Russia-annexed Luhansk area mentioned on Monday that Ukrainian shelling had broken a gasoline depot and triggered a hearth within the city of Dovzhansk. It was the third such Ukrainian assault on depots within the area this month.

Leonid Pasechnik, writing on the Telegram messaging app, mentioned Ukrainian forces had used cluster bombs within the assault in town, known as Sverdlovsk, its Soviet-era title, by the Russia-installed native administration.

Pasechnik mentioned emergency companies have been on the scene to maintain close by buildings protected from the fireplace within the city, which lies south of the area’s essential city, Luhansk.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has mentioned that the Russian military is intensifying its use of Iranian drones to focus on civilian areas.

“The Kremlin continues to intensify its bombardment of Ukraine, using Russian missiles and Iranian drones to strike more civilian targets across Ukraine’s territory and to put more innocent civilians — Ukrainians in the crosshairs,” Mr Austin mentioned on the Pentagon throughout his opening remarks on the twenty second assembly of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.

This comes after the demise of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and overseas minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in a helicopter crash in a rural a part of the nation as they returned from a gathering on the border with Azerbaijan.

The three Russian glide bombs pound into the residential tower block, ripping aside a number of flooring. At least 10 are injured in a strike that’s a part of what has grow to be a near-daily aerial assault on Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis.

In his workplace a number of streets away is Kharkiv’s mayor Igor Terekhov, who’s rapidly rushed into a gathering as our interview is placed on maintain. Images then begin to flood social media exhibiting the destruction wrought upon the civilian-populated space close to the Peremoha metro station within the metropolis centre.

When the interview resumes, Terekhov is pressured to take three calls whereas emergency companies rushed to the scene close by to assist the wounded. Aides intermittently seize the mayor to replace him on the creating scenario.

“His country is at war, so people are siding with the country at war,” Fury mentioned within the ring after his loss – the primary defeat of his skilled profession, whereas Usyk stayed unbeaten.