Russia Ukraine war live: Drone attack south of Moscow after two killed in Kherson shelling

Russian forces shelled southern Ukraine‘s Kherson region on Sunday, killing two people and injuring at least eight, the region’s governor said, as Ukraine‘s armed forces said they were keeping in check Russian advances in the east and south.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, newly returned from a visit to the United States and Canada, praised Ukrainian forces for successes in both areas of a three-month-old counteroffensive, but he gave no indication any new movement forward.

Kherson governor Oleksandr Prodkudin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said shelling from the Russian-held eastern bank of the Dnipro River had hit private homes in Beryslav, on the Ukrainian-held west bank. A man was killed in the nearby village of Lvove.

An air strike on Kherson, the region’s main town, injured at least five people and caused considerable damage to buildings.

The Russian military abandoned positions on the west bank of the river and in Kherson city late last year.

The General Staff of Ukraine‘s Armed Forces said the country’s forces had repelled Russian attacks on two villages near Bakhmut, where Kyiv has been trying to regain ground lost when the city fell to Moscow’s forces in May.

Russian textbooks praising Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are an attempt to encourage “self-sacrifice” among schoolchildren, experts have warned.

One chapter claims that Ukrainian membership of Nato could have led to a catastrophic war and “possibly the end of civilisation”, an outcome it says Russia had to prevent.

Alexander Butler reports:

One woman was injured and port infrastructure was damaged in southern Ukraine’s Odesa as Russia launched an overnight missile and drone attack, officials said.

A fire broke out in a non-residential high-rise in the city of Odesa, the administrative centre of the Odesa region, as a result of the attack, but was promptly extinguished, Oleh Kiper, governor of the Odesa region in southern Ukraine, said on his Telegram channel.

The scale of the attack and the full extent of the damage were not immediately clear.

Ukraine has fought back courageously against Mr Putin’s warped bid to restore territory lost to Moscow with the collapse of the Soviet Union and has continued to defy the odds by defending itself against Russian onslaughts with the help of Western military aid.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has rubbished Ukraine’s 10-point peace plan and warned the conflict will be resolved on the battlefield if the West stuck to it.

Addressing the UN General Assembly on Saturday, Mr Lavrov dismissed the West as an “empire of lies” and said the plan promoted by Kyiv was “completely not feasible”.

In a letter to Mr Lavrov last month, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres outlined four measures the UN could facilitate to improve Russia’s grain and fertiliser exports in a bid to convince Moscow to return to the Black Sea deal, which allowed Ukraine to export grain through the corridor and helped address a global food shortage.

Pope Francis on Saturday labeled the weapons industry as being a key driver of the “martyrdom” of Ukraine’s people in Russia’s war, saying even the withholding of weapons now is going to continue their misery.

Francis appeared to refer to Poland’s recent announcement that it is no longer sending arms to Ukraine when he was asked about the war during brief remarks to reporters while returning home from Marseille, France.

Francis acknowledged he was frustrated that the Vatican’s diplomatic initiatives hadn’t borne much fruit. But he said behind the Russia-Ukraine conflict was also the weapons industry.

Ukraine says its missile strike on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Crimea successfully targeted a meeting of senior naval officials, with “top” commanders among “dozens of dead and wounded”.

Kyiv launched the missile attack on the fleet based in the port city of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea on Friday morning.

Ukrainian officials said the attack, targeting what is believed to be the best of Russia’s navy, was timed to coincide with the naval commanders’ meeting.

There are two opposing theses about the U.N. General Assembly: It’s a place that shows the true power of words, where leaders inspire action with rousing speeches on the urgent issues of our times; or it’s a talking shop, where leaders perform for domestic audiences with political rhetoric on the cause of the day.

These dueling viewpoints were tested when the coronavirus pandemic shut down much in-person diplomacy for several years. After three years of virtual, then hybrid General Debates, the scores of top leaders who attended the annual U.N. summit this week exhibited the return of in-person diplomacy, and provided ammunition to those who advocate for its importance.

North Korea on Monday slammed South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for criticising its cooperation with Moscow following leader Kim Jong Un’s Russia visit, saying it is “natural” and “normal” for neighbours to keep close relations.

Yoon, speaking at the U.N. General Assembly last week, said that if Russia helped North Korea enhance its weapons programmes in return for assistance for its war in Ukraine, it would be “a direct provocation.”

In a piece carried by KCNA news agency, the North denounced Yoon for “malignantly” slandering its friendly cooperation with Russia, and said Yoon was serving as a “loudspeaker” for the United States.

“It is quite natural and normal for neighbouring countries to keep close relations with each other, and there is no reason to call such practice to account,” it said.

Kim returned home last week from a week-long trip to Russia in which he and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to boost military and economic cooperation.

U.S. and South Korean officials have expressed concern that Russia could be trying to acquire ammunition from the North to supplement its dwindling stocks for the war in Ukraine while Pyongyang seeks technological help for its nuclear and missile programmes.

An imprisoned Russian opposition figure has been transferred to a maximum security prison in Siberia and placed in a tiny “punishment cell,” his lawyer said Sunday.

Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., 42, earlier this year was convicted of treason for publicly denouncing Russia’s war in Ukraine and sentenced to 25 years in prison as part of the Kremlin’s relentless crackdown on critics. On Thursday, he arrived at IK-6 — a maximum security penal colony in the Siberian city of Omsk, his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said in a Facebook post Sunday.

Dasha Litvinova has more: