Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has imposed sanctions on 37 Russian groups and 108 people including a former prime minister and a former education minister and said he aimed to fight wartime abductions of children from Ukraine and other “Russian terror”.
Ukrainian officials said on Saturday that the armed forces shot down 29 of 38 drones in an overnight raid. More than 400 towns and villages in the south, south-east and north of the country were affected by the drone attacks, including an oil refinery that was hit in Odesa.
Ukrainian troops are working to push back Russian forces positioned on the east bank of the Dnipro River, the military has said, a day after Ukraine claimed to have secured multiple bridgeheads on that side of the river that divides the country’s partially occupied Kherson region.
Two Ukrainian emergency workers were killed in the Zaporizhzhia region by Russian rocket attacks on Saturday. Ukrainian police said seven people were also injured when Russia fired a series of rocket strikes at the village of Komyshuvakha, close to the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia region, which Russia claimed to have annexed last year.
Ukraine’s armed forces claimed to have killed another 620 Russian soldiers on Friday during operations. In response, Russia has said it had heavily bombed Ukrainian forces near the river and killed about 75 soldiers.
In an intelligence briefing, the UK’s Ministry of Defence noted Russian forces were suffering “particularly heavy casualties” in fighting around Avdiivka, one of three areas seeing heavy ground fighting. Despite the heavy fighting, the MoD said neither side was making significant progress.
Hungary must say no to the current Europe model built in Brussels, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, told a congress of his Fidesz party on Saturday, as his government continues to object to Ukraine joining the EU.
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has called on the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to take the first step towards a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine.
More than 100 Russian doctors have signed a joint letter calling on Putin to release a woman jailed for a supermarket protest against the war in Ukraine. A St Petersburg court last week sentenced Alexandra Skochilenko, 33, to seven years in prison for spreading “false information” after she swapped supermarket price tags with slogans criticising Russia’s offensive in Ukraine.
Ukraine has been the target of nearly 4,000 cyber-attacks since the invasion began, three times higher than before, according to Ukrainian officials who oversee cyber defences.