Ukraine war briefing: Up to 11,000 North Koreans in Kursk, say Pentagon and Zelenskyy

Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, visited Ukraine on Monday offering “rock-solid” support in what amounted to a symbolic display. Germany is Ukraine’s second-largest backer after the US but its chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is refusing to provide long-range Taurus missiles and has rejected Ukraine’s request to immediately be invited into Nato.

Baerbock’s arrival was announced a few hours after 13 people, including four police officers, were wounded in another night of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv. Ukraine said it had downed 50 Iranian-designed Russian drones in nine regions, including over the capital, Kyiv, overnight into Monday. Zelensky later said Russia had been using around 10 times more drones compared with the same period last year.

A woman from the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk was given 15 years’ jail on high treason charges for aiding invading Russian forces, Ukrainian prosecutors said on Monday. Between March and April this year she passed information about Ukrainian troop deployments to the Russian army, including where Ukrainian forces were stationed and the placement of checkpoints. Ukraine has opened thousands of cases of potential aiding and abetting Russia since the February 2022 invasion.

An incendiary device hidden in a DHL package that caught fire in Germany in July was due to be sent by air to the UK as part of a suspected Russian sabotage plot that may also have been a dry run for a similar attack on the US and Canada. Dan Sabbagh writes that British police and officials, as well as their European counterparts in Germany, Poland and Lithuania, strongly suspect Russia was behind this an other attacks as part of an effort to cause “mayhem” in the west in retaliation for western military support to Ukraine.