Odesa governor warns Izmail residents to remain in shelters; Ankara set to use Sochi meeting to push for new grain agreement
Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 558 of the invasion
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine with me, Helen Livingstone.
Russia has launched an attack on a Ukrainian port critical to the country’s grain exports hours ahead of a meeting between Russian president Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Ankara is keen to use the meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to revive a deal that had allowed Kyiv to export its grain via its Black Sea ports but which Moscow refused to renew in July.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said he plans to dismiss the defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, from his post and will ask parliament this week to replace him with Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine’s main privatisation fund. The announcement, made in the Ukrainian president’s nightly video address to the nation, sets the stage for the biggest shake-up of Ukraine’s defence establishment since the war was launched by Russia in February 2022. Zelenskiy has to submit Umerov’s candidacy to parliament for review.
Zelenskiy and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, spoke on Sunday, discussing the “functioning” of a sea corridor set up by Kyiv for safe navigation of ships after Moscow exited a landmark grain deal in July. The phone call came on the eve of a summit in Russia between president Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who wants to revive the deal.
Russia is exploiting foreign nationals in its effort to acquire more personnel for its war effort in the face of mounting casualties, and probably views millions of migrants from central Asia as potential recruits, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defence.
Moscow has recruited 230,000 people into the army since the start of the year, ex-president and Security Council chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Sunday according to Tass news agency. “Part of them were in the reserves, part of them volunteers and other categories,” he said during a visit to the Far Eastern Russian island of Sakhalin. It was not possible for the Guardian to verify these numbers.
Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky has been arrested on suspicion of fraud and money laundering. The detention of the one-time supporter of Zelenskiy, whose election he backed in 2019, comes as Kyiv is trying to signal progress during a wartime crackdown on corruption.
Ukrainian forces have decisively breached Russia’s first defensive line near Zaporizhzhia after weeks of painstaking mine clearance, and expect faster gains as they press the weaker second line, the general leading the southern counteroffensive has told the Observer. Brig Gen Oleksandr Tarnavskiy said Ukrainian forces were now pushing out on both sides of the breach and consolidating their hold on territory seized in recent fighting.
A non-residential building in the western Russian city of Kurchatov caught fire on Sunday after an attack by a Ukrainian drone but emergency services put the fire out and there were no casualties, Roman Starovoit, governor of the Kursk region, said.
Ukraine expects a boom in drone production as early as this autumn, according to its outgoing defence minister. Reznikov told the state-run Ukrinform news agency one reason for the growth of production was that authorities had reduced various regulations and laws.