Ukraine-Russia war – live: Putin’s strikes kill five in Kherson and Donetsk regions

Russian strikes have killed five and injured six in the Kherson and Donetsk regions of Ukraine, officials have said.

Three women were killed in the street after artillery hit a residential area in Kherson, internal affairs minister Ihor Klymenko confirmed, whilst in the east of the country, two men were killed in attacks on Krasnohorivka.

A further three people were injured, with three more injuries sustained by further shelling nearby in Kostyantynivka.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has appointed former Ukrainian soccer great Andriy Shevchenko as a special adviser and British actor Mark Strong as an ambassador to the charity that the Ukrainian president set up to raise money for Ukraine, his office announced.

It was not clear what Shevchenko’s duties as adviser to the president would entail but the former star striker for Ukraine and squads across Europe suggested it would expand on his work as ambassador of United24, a charity created by Zelensky to collect donations for his nation after Russia’s invasion in 2022.

“My role hasn’t changed that much but I’m going to work even harder now,” he said after playing in an all-star golf match preceding the Ryder Cup outside Rome on Wednesday. “It’s an important job helping my country abroad through soccer and charity events and keeping people talking about Ukraine.”

President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that elections conducted this month in Russian-held parts of Ukraine marked a step towards their full integration into Russia.

The votes in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions – all partly under Russia’s control following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year – were denounced by Kyiv as illegal.

Russia said a year ago that it was annexing the four regions, in an act condemned as unlawful by most countries at the United Nations.

“This is, of course, a significant event, an important step towards the full entry of the new regions into the single legal, state space of our big country”, Putin told a meeting of newly elected governors, referring to the recent elections and describing them as fair.

France and Ukraine pledged on Thursday to work together to continue securing arms for Kyiv’s three-month-old counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces and to jointly develop weapons production.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said he and his French counterpart had focused on boosting cooperation in terms of training Kyiv’s armed forces and in the technical field.

“Dozens of projects have either been launched or are under discussion, aimed at organising joint production of new weapons or maintenance of weapons already with us,” Umerov told a news conference alongside French minister Sebastien Lecornu.

The two sides, he said, were considering the establishment of a fund “to support joint ventures with our partners and companies which want to begin production in Ukraine“.

Lecornu said France would “continue to help Ukraine as much as is necessary,” but gave no details on arms that might yet be provided.

“This war could keep going on,” he told reporters. “Let me restate our confidence in the Ukrainian arms for making this counteroffensive a success.”

Ukraine‘s counteroffensive has focused on retaking areas of eastern Ukraine seized by Russian troops earlier this year and in advancing south to sever a land bridge established by Russia between annexed Crimea and positions held in the east.

Several hundred fighters of the Wagner mercenary group have returned to Ukraine to fight in Russia’s continuing invasion but have not made a significant impact on the battlefield, military officials in Kyiv said.

“We have recorded the presence of a maximum of several hundred fighters of the former Wagner PMC (private military company),” spokesperson for the eastern military command Serhiy Cherevatyi said.

These Wagner fighters were scattered in different places, were not part of a single unit, and had had no significant impact, he said.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg met with President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the status of the war and needs of troops on Thursday, the day after Russia accused Ukraine’s Western allies of helping plan and conduct last week’s missile strike on the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters on the annexed Crimean Peninsula.

Zelensky said that Stoltenberg agreed to make efforts to get NATO members to help provide additional air defense systems to protect Ukraine’s power plants and energy infrastructure that were badly damaged in relentless and deadly attacks by Russia last winter. He also reminded the secretary-general of the persistent attacks that often strike civilian areas, including 40 drone attacks overnight.

“In the face of such intense attacks against Ukrainians, against our cities, our ports, which are crucial for global food security, we need a corresponding intensity of pressure on Russia and a strengthening of our air defense,” Zelensky said. “The world must see how Russia is losing dearly so that our shared values ultimately prevail.”

A court in northern Switzerland on Thursday acquitted a former security Belarusian operative over the enforced disappearances of three of President Aleksander Lukashenko’s political opponents in the late 1990s, said an advocacy group that spearheaded the case.

Judges in the northern town of Rorschach said they were not convinced that the defendant, Yuri Harauski, a former member of a Belarusian military unit known as SOBR, was involved in the disappearances.

According to the Geneva-based advocacy group TRIAL International, the court ruled that Harauski’s participation in the crimes could not be established beyond reasonable doubt.

The exodus of ethnic Armenians this week from the region known as Nagorno-Karabakh has been a vivid and shocking tableau of fear and misery. Roads are jammed with cars lumbering with heavy loads, waiting for hours in traffic jams. People sit amid mounds of hastily packed luggage.

As of Thursday, about 70,000 people had left the breakaway region for Armenia. That’s a huge number — more than half of the population of the region that is located entirely within Azerbaijan.

Still, it’s not the largest displacement of civilians in three decades of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

After ethnic Armenian forces secured control of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding territories in 1994, refugee organizations estimated that some 900,000 people had fled to Azerbaijan and 300,000 to Armenia.

Poland said none of its helicopters had violated Belarusian airspace, denying an earlier report from the Belarusian defence ministry that Polish aircraft had crossed the border on Thursday.

“The Operational Command unequivocally denies these reports. None of the Polish helicopters crossed the airspace of Belarus,” a spokesperson of the Operational Command of the Armed Forces told Reuters.

How do you cook a meal when a staple ingredient is unaffordable?

This question is playing out in households around the world as they face shortages of essential foods like rice, cooking oil and onions. That is because countries have imposed restrictions on the food they export to protect their own supplies from the combined effect of the war in Ukraine, El Nino’s threat to food production and increasing damage from climate change.

For Caroline Kyalo, a 28-year-old who works in a salon in Kenya‘s capital of Nairobi, it was a question of trying to figure out how to cook for her two children without onions. Restrictions on the export of the vegetable by neighbouring Tanzania has led prices to triple.