Ukrainian leader issues starkest warning yet of air defence weapons running out; Russian attack kills eight in eastern city. What we know on day 774
Ukraine could run out of air defence missiles if Russia keeps up its intense long-range bombing campaign, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned in remarks aired on Saturday. “If they keep hitting [Ukraine] every day the way they have for the last month, we might run out of missiles, and the partners know it,” he said in an interview that aired on Ukrainian television. On Sunday he said Ukraine does not have enough ammunition for a counteroffensive against Russia but has started receiving some from partners to defend itself.
Zelenskiy also said on Saturday that he hoped that he and Swiss president Viola Amherd would set a date within days for a world peace summit in Switzerland with 80 to 100 countries. Russia has said such a meeting would be pointless if it did not participate. Kyiv has previously proposed a world peace summit but has said Russia would not be invited.
A close ally of populist prime minister Robert Fico has defeated a pro-western career diplomat to become Slovakia’s new president. Critics worry Slovakia under Fico will abandon its pro-western course and follow the direction of Hungary under populist prime minister Viktor Orbán. Thousands have repeatedly taken to the streets across Slovakia recently to rally against Fico’s pro-Russian and other policies.
Two Russian missile and drone strikes, one in the early hours of Saturday and a second in the afternoon, killed eight people and wounded at least 10 more people in northeastern Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, national emergency services and the city’s mayor said on Saturday. Igor Terekhov also said in Telegram post that the attack had targeted Shevchenkivskyi, a northern area of the city, Agence France-Presse reports. Terekhov said Iranian-made drones had carried out the attack, hitting at least nine high-rise buildings, three dormitories and a petrol station.
Oleg Synegubov, the region’s governor, said earlier that two men were killed in Shevchenkivskyi. Police confirmed the deaths and said a further eight people were hospitalised “with blast injuries and shrapnel wounds”. Police added that there were no casualties in a separate attack on Mala Danylivka, a village on Kharkiv’s north-west outskirts.
In the eastern region of Donetsk, artillery shelling killed four people in the village of Kurakhivka including a 38-year-old woman and her 16-year-old daughter, and a 25-year-old man in the village of Krasnohorivka was killed, local officials said.
Russia on Saturday condemned as a provocation a drone attack on a military facility of pro-Russian separatists in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region and called for an investigation. An explosive drone hit a facility belonging to the separatist authority’s defence ministry six km (four miles) from the border with Ukraine, the region’s security ministry said on Friday.
Ukrainian forces are still in control of the town of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine despite attempts by Russian troops to break through their defences, commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said. Russia’s RIA news agency on Friday cited an official as saying Russian forces had entered the suburbs of the town, which Moscow sees as an important staging point for Kyiv’s troops. Ukrainian military said the report was untrue, Reuters reported. “Chasiv Yar remains under our control, and all enemy attempts to break through to the settlement have failed,” Syrskyi said on the Telegram messaging app on Saturday.
On the ground in Ukraine, Russian forces were advancing, and pushing back against them was “difficult”, said Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine’s armed forces. Syrskyi said the situation in the Bakhmut area in the partially occupied eastern Donetsk region was particularly challenging, Reuters reported. He said Russian forces are carrying out offensive operations day and night, using assault groups with the support of armoured vehicles, as well as assaults on foot.
Tajikistan’s foreign ministry on Saturday rejected a claim by a top Russian security official that Ukraine’s embassy in the Tajik capital was recruiting mercenaries to fight against Russia. “We note that this assertion by the Russian official has no basis to it,” Russian news agencies quoted Tajik foreign ministry spokesperson Shokhin Samadi as saying.
