Damage at Air Base in Crimea Worse Than Russia Claimed, Satellite Images Show - The New York Times

A Russian missile attack kills 13 in a district near a key nuclear plant, a Ukrainian official says.

Russia wants to divert electricity from a nuclear plant to Crimea, says a Ukrainian official.

Satellite photos taken after a series of explosions on Tuesday at a Russian air base in Crimea appear to show at least eight wrecked warplanes, indicating an expensive and serious blow to the Russian military in contradiction to the Kremlin’s account.

A senior Ukrainian official has said the blasts were an attack carried out with the help of partisans, but was not more specific, and the Ukrainian military has not publicly acknowledged any involvement.

Military analysts have said Ukraine does not have missiles that can reach the base from territory it controls, well over 100 miles away, and that Ukrainian jets would have been unlikely to penetrate that far into Russian-controlled airspace.

Sergei Aksyonov, the Kremlin-installed leader of Crimea, said on Wednesday that at least 62 apartment buildings and 20 commercial structures had been damaged.

Since seizing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Russia has heavily militarized it, and has used it as a vital jumping-off point for military operations since its broader invasion of Ukraine on Feb.

Russian forces killed at least 13 civilians and wounded 11 others in an overnight missile attack in southern Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian military official said on Wednesday, in an escalation of fighting around a key nuclear power plant held by Moscow.

The Russians used Grad missiles in the attack on the Nikopol district, across the Dnipro River from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, according to the head of the Dnipropetrovsk military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko.

In his nightly address on Wednesday, President Volodymr Zelensky said Ukraine would not leave the “Russian shelling of the Dnipropetrovsk region unanswered.”.

According to Ukrainian officials, those attacks have included shellfire directed at Nikopol from the Zaporizhzhia plant, which Russian forces seized in March soon after invading Ukraine in February.

Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for the episode, which prompted the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, Rafael Mariano Grossi, to express “grave concern” and renew his appeals for a formal inspection of the plant.

The Ukrainian authorities, as well as independent military and nuclear experts, say that the transformation of the plant, the largest in Europe, into a combat zone is almost without precedent.

On Wednesday, foreign ministers from the Group of Seven major industrialized democracies, who were meeting in Germany, issued a statement demanding that Russia withdraw its forces from Ukraine and immediately return control of the nuclear complex to Ukraine.

The statement blamed Russia’s military actions around the plant for “significantly raising the risk of a nuclear accident or incident,” endangering the entire region.

Fighting in the south is intensifying as Ukrainian forces receive an influx of long-range artillery from the United States and other Western countries, increasing its capacity to strike Russian military infrastructure far behind the front lines.

A Ukrainian official said that Ukrainian forces were responsible for a blast on Tuesday at a Russian air base on the western coast of Crimea, the peninsula that Moscow illegally seized in 2014, but said that a domestically manufactured weapon had been used in the strike.

Ukrainian forces have also been trying to mount a counteroffensive in Kherson Province, aimed at retaking the provincial capital, Kherson city, which lies more than 100 miles downstream from the nuclear plant.

A British military intelligence report on Wednesday said that, in response to its losses, Russia has most likely established a major new ground forces formation, the 3rd Army Corps, based east of Moscow.

“Russian commanders highly likely continue to be faced with the competing operational priorities of reinforcing the Donbas offensive, and strengthening defenses against anticipated Ukrainian counter attacks in the south,” the report said.

Ukraine still uses advanced military drones supplied by its allies for observation and attack, but along the frontline the bulk of its drone fleet are off-the-shelf products or hand-built in workshops around Ukraine — myriad inexpensive, plastic craft adapted to drop grenades or anti-tank munitions.

The fixed-wing Punisher, a high-end military drone manufactured in Ukraine, can strike from more than 30 miles away.

Russian investigators detained a former state television journalist on Wednesday, months after she staged a rare protest against the war in Ukraine live on air.

Ovsyannikova $650 for discrediting Russian armed forces, her second fine related to that charge.

BERLIN — Hungary’s main oil conglomerate said on Wednesday that it would pay an outstanding bill owed by Russia’s oil pipeline operator to the Ukrainian authorities, clearing the way for Russian oil deliveries to resume to three Central European countries.

The conglomerate, MOL Group, an administrator of the Hungarian arm of the Druzhba, or Friendship, pipeline, said on Wednesday that it had “transferred the fee due for the use of the Ukrainian section of the pipeline.”.

The authorities in those three countries said on Tuesday that Russian oil deliveries from the pipeline had stopped last week over “technical” banking issues linked to the sanctions that Europe had imposed on Russia to punish it for invading Ukraine in February.

Yermakov said they had no viable alternatives to Russian oil in the short term.

The head of Ukraine’s nuclear energy company says that Russia wants to use a nuclear power plant it has occupied in southern Ukraine to supply electricity to the Crimea region that Moscow has controlled since 2014.

If confirmed, the development could intensify military competition for the Zaporizhzhia plant, where recent fighting has raised the risk of a nuclear accident.

In the last few days, Russian forces at the Zaporizhzhia plant, which is Europe’s largest and supplies about a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity, have damaged three transmission lines that connect it to the Ukrainian grid, according to the president of the company that runs the plant.

For several weeks, Russian forces controlled the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine, before retreating.

Kotin said on Ukrainian television, because the power lines do not just carry electricity from the complex.

The Ukrainian authorities say that Russia has launched missiles from Zaporizhzhia’s grounds to attack the city of Nikopol on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, knowing that Ukrainian forces cannot return fire without risking hitting a reactor.

The Russian authorities then rerouted mobile and internet data from Kherson through Russian networks, government and industry officials said

Then they shut off Ukrainian cellular networks, forcing residents to use Russian mobile service providers

When efforts to punish Russia over its invasion of Ukraine spread to the cultural realm, boycotts began with Russian artists who supported President Vladimir V

But after Ukrainian filmmakers called for a boycott of Russian culture, he was mostly addressed as a representative of his hostile country