Russia- Ukraine war live: Ukraine ‘strikes warship that Russia captured in 2014’
Good morning, it has just passed 10.30am in Kyiv and 11.30am in Moscow. Welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian navy has claimed a tactical victory after it said it had struck the Konstantin Olshansky landing ship, which Russia captured from Ukraine in 2014, with a missile.
“Currently, this ship is not combat-capable,” Ukrainian navy spokesperson, Dmytro Pletenchuk, said on Tuesday morning.
Russia took the Konstantin Olshansky from Ukraine, along with most of Kyiv’s navy, when its troops occupied the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
“It had gone through a renovation and was being prepared for use against Ukraine, so unfortunately the decision was taken to strike this (ship),” Pletenchuk said.
Built in 1985, the ship was transferred to the Ukrainian navy in 1996 when the naval fleet of the Soviet Union was divided up, according to the Kyiv Independent.
In other developments:
Investigations are continuing into Friday evening’s devastating terror attack at the Crocus city hall in Moscow in which at least 139 people were killed. Four suspects have already appeared in court showing signs of torture. Overnight the news wires services reported that Russian investigators were questioning the men’s families in Tajikistan. The central Asian country has suffered from a long-running extremist Islamist insurgency. Despite Islamic State claiming responsibility for the attack, Vladimir Putin continues to suggest that there is a Ukrainian link. On Monday night he said: “This atrocity may be just one part in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014 by the hands of the neo-Nazi Kyiv regime.” No evidence has been provided for Ukraine’s involvement.
Finland and Sweden think there is need for a new round of EU sanctions against Russia, Finland’s foreign minister, Elina Valtonen, has said.
Ukraine shot down all 12 attack drones launched overnight by Russia over the southern Mykolaiv and eastern Kharkiv regions of the country, Kyiv’s air force said.
Any global peace summit on Ukraine that excludes Russia is simply “absurd” and will fail, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in an interview published on Tuesday. “Can the Ukrainian problem be resolved without Russia’s participation? The reply is clear – it cannot,” he told the news outlet Argumenty I Fakty. “Because Ukraine has been turned into an instrument in the hands of the collective west with whose help it intends, so it seems to them, to put more pressure on Russia, restrain Russia and abandon it to the fringes of development. And, should they succeed, to finish it off,” he added. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called for an international peace summit, and earlier this year Switzerland said it would host the meeting.
Iceland has announced it is joining the Czech initiative, which is aiming to deliver at least 800,000 shells sourced from around the world, in addition to the EU commitments.