Ukraine-Russia war – live: Kyiv gains ground in counteroffensive as Putin condemned for ‘inhuman attack’

Photos show firefighters working to extinguish a fire on the port infrastructure on the Danube river in the Odesa region on Friday.

Russian forces carried out an overnight missile strike on Ukraine‘s southern Odesa region, damaging port infrastructure, Ukrainian authorities said early on Saturday.

Governor Oleh Kiper said four people were wounded in the strike, which hit a boarding house and a portside grain facility. He did not specify where the attack took place.

Ukraine‘s military said the strike involved supersonic Onyx missiles fired from Russian-occupied Crimea.

Russian forces have carried out regular missile and drone strikes on port infrastructure in recent weeks, making it difficult for major grain producer Ukraine to export its products.

Moscow quit a deal in mid-July that had enabled Black Sea grain shipments and helped combat a global food crisis.

A party official in the Russian-held town of Nova Kakhovka in Ukraine‘s Kherson province was killed by a car bomb on Saturday, the provincial governor said.

Vladimir Malov, executive secretary of the town branch of Russia‘s governing United Russia party, died in hospital, Vladimir Saldo said in a post on his Telegram channel.

He said it had been a “terrorist attack”, meaning one orchestrated by Ukraine. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv.

Officials seen as supporting Russian rule in the parts of Ukraine that Moscow claims to have annexed since its full-scale invasion in February last year have often been targeted in assassination attempts, many of them fatal.

In July, Russia said it had thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to kill Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of unilaterally annexed Crimea, arresting an agent before he could blow up Aksyonov’s car.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry has voiced its support for Israel’s “right to defend itself and its people” as Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel and stormed across the heavily fortified border from Gaza.

The ministry said it “strongly condemns the ongoing terrorist attacks against Israel, including rocket attacks against the civilian population in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv”.

The Israel Defence Forces have said they are striking targets in Gaza, as Al Jazeera cites medical sources claiming that scores of Palestinians have been killed.

Defence minister Sergei Shoigu has inspected the manufacture of Sarmat, Russia‘s new silo-based intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile system, due to enter service shortly, his ministry said on Saturday.

Shoigu essentially repeated comments by President Vladimir Putin that the missiles were being made combat-ready, but the timing of the statement added to an intensification of Russia‘s nuclear rhetoric in its standoff with the West over the war in Ukraine.

“Re-equipping the Strategic Missile Forces with this system, which will become the basis of Russia‘s ground-based strategic nuclear forces, is a priority in ensuring the country’s defence capability,” Shoigu was quoted as saying.

On Thursday, Putin said Russia had successfully tested the Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable cruise missile with a potential range of many thousands of miles.

And after Putin declined to rule out the possibility that Russia could carry out explosive nuclear weapons tests for the first time in more than three decades, officials on Friday promptly said Moscow would take steps to revoke its ratification of the global Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Russia‘s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which it calls a “special military operation”, prompted the West to send billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, and Finland and Sweden to seek to join the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

In response, Moscow has suspended its participation in the New START treaty, the last remaining pact limiting the size of the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals, and hinted at a possible use of nuclear weapons if it feels sufficiently threatened.

“Disturbed” by the move, the US denounced it as endangering “the global norm” against nuclear test blasts.

The announcement by Mikhail Ulyanov on Friday added new fuel to tensions between Russia and the United States over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and arms control disputes between the world’s largest nuclear weapons powers.

Many woke up dazed in the Ukraine’s Hroza on Friday – with the village in the northeast of the country having lost a sixth of its residents in the devastation caused by a Russian missile strike the previous day.

Ihor Klymenko, minister of internal affairs of Ukraine, said the village only had 330 residents – and that at least 52 had been killed in the assault. He added that every family had at least one person they knew at the wake for Ukrainian soldier Andrii Kozyr inside the cafe (and grocery shop) that was wrecked by the missile.

That wake followed a funeral that had been an attempt to rebury a father who had been killed in Russian-occupied territory last year. Now candles mark the spot where the lives of those mourners were lost.