Russia has dismissed the idea of a ceasefire with Ukraine in the Black Sea, saying it saw no grounds for “half-measures that merely grant the Kyiv regime a temporary breathing space”.
In an interview broadcast by state television yesterday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia will intensify its efforts to destroy anything used to support Ukraine from the West.
“We will make our methods much tougher in order to dismantle everything that fuels Kyiv’s war machine from the West. And we are already doing this,” Lavrov said.
Speaking about efforts to end the war, Lavrov said Russia ruled out an immediate halt to the fighting. “We must only stop once there is a long-term, reliable and sustainable settlement,” he said.
Russian forces captured the settlement of Novomykolaivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. At least one person was killed and 15 others were wounded in Ukraine’s eastern city of Kramatorsk in Russian strikes on Thursday.
Russian forces also struck the railway station in the Ukrainian port city of Izmail, the Russian defence ministry said.
The ministry said it believed the station was being used to load, store and transport military cargo and fuel supplies for Ukraine’s armed forces.
A Ukrainian missile hit a residential building in Russia’s western Bryansk region, killing one person, the region’s acting governor Yegor Kovalchuk said on Telegram.
Debris from “enemy drones” damaged the wall of a Wildberries warehouse in Russia’s Tver region during an overnight attack, Vitaly Korolyov, the local governor, said yesterday.
Smoke at the site quickly dissipated and no employees were injured, he added.
Meanwhile, an Italian fighter jet, part of a Nato mission, shot down a drone of unknown origin that entered the airspace of Nato and EU member Latvia yesterday during Ukrainian attacks on Russian ports, the Latvian authorities said.
Latvian soldiers were searching for debris from the drone around midday in a wooded area near the village of Rugaji — around 35 km from the Baltic nation’s border with Russia — which was identified as a potential crash site.
