Russia-Ukraine war live: Moscow risks dividing its forces to stop Ukrainian breakthrough, says UK | Ukraine

Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, Anton Gerashchenko, has tweeted a photo of a Russian strike in Kramatorsk.

Ukraine’s ministry of defence has tweeted footage of Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, testing the Slinger anti-drone system.

It has also posted a photograph of the remnants of a KAB-500 aviation bomb that Russia used.

Ukraine has called the Nobel Foundation’s decision to bar Russia and Belarus from its Stockholm prize ceremony a restoration of justice.

The foundation cancelled an invitation to the two nations and Iran after widespread criticism.

“Thank you to everyone who demanded that justice be restored,” said Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko.

“We are convinced that a similar decision should be made regarding the Russian and Belarusian ambassadors in Oslo,” referring to the peace prize ceremony that takes place in Norway after the event in Sweden.

Summary

Ukrainian forces are “on the move”, the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said, as the US acknowledged the “notable progress” of the counteroffensive over the past few days.

The defence ministry cited a statement from Zelenskiy’s Telegram channel:

Ukraine’s military retook the southern village of Robotyne this week before its troops moved eastwards toward Verbove, where several lines of Russian defences meet.

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, has claimed that students in Crimea are set to receive military training courses under Russian plans to militarise the annexed region.

In a statement on Telegram, Lubinets said:

From today, Crimean schoolchildren from grades five to nine will attend extracurricular classes – ‘basics of military training’. And for students of the 10th and 11th grades, it was included in the OBZ program.

For this purpose, 25 Crimean teachers have already completed courses of military training, tactical medicine, to assemble and disassemble automatic weapons, organise life in a field camp, handle personal protective equipment and radiological, chemical and biological protection.

The head of a Russian government-funded thinktank has been removed from his post after publishing an article about Russian propaganda during the war on Ukraine.

Valery Garbuzov, the head of the United States and Canada Institute, told Tass:

Yes, yesterday an order was signed to terminate the contract with me. The reason as such is not indicated there, there is an article of the employment contract that is at the initiative of the founder, it is formulated like this.

The BBC reports that Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta ran a column by Garbuzov last week. He claimed that there is an “atmosphere of pseudo-patriotic madness” and conditions of the “creeping restoration of Stalinism”.

Less controversially, in Russia at least, he added: “US dominance is an objective, permanent factor that began the process of its formation at the beginning of the 20th century and still exists.” Before stating: “Russia is a former empire, the heir to the Soviet superpower, experiencing an extremely painful syndrome of suddenly lost imperial greatness.”

He said that Russian people “with amazing ease, naively and thoughtlessly perceives the theses of total state propaganda”.

Iran’s news agencies are reporting that a Russian-made Yak-130 combat trainer aircraft is in the country and has joined the air force.

The report by Isna said the advanced combat trainer aircraft is able to meet the training needs of pilots learning to fly fourth-generation fighters.

In April, Iran announced that it had finalised a deal to buy Su-35 fighter jets from Russia. Iran and Russia have a close relationship, especially in military equipment, reports AP.

Iranian drones have been a key element of Russia’s continued war on Ukraine. Tehran has offered a series of contradictory explanations about the drones, first denying it supplied them to Moscow and then claiming it sold them only before the war began. However, the volume of drones used in the conflict shows a steady supply by Iran of the bomb-carrying weapons.

In June, the White House said Iran is providing Russia with materials to build a drone manufacturing plant east of Moscow as the Kremlin looks to lock in a steady supply of weaponry.

France has been assisting Ukraine in a fresh diplomatic effort to gather the support of more countries in the global south.

The Financial Times reports there have been concerns that Russia emerged from the Brics summit in South Africa last week strengthened since it was announced that next year’s meeting would be held in Kazan, Russia.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was in Paris this week and claimed his country had offered countries the option of choosing which aspects of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s 10-point peace plan they could support.

This flexible method allows us to have a bigger coalition … Much work remains to be done and more diplomatic contacts will be needed. We will use the next session of the United Nations to organise more communication with countries in Africa, Asia and South America.

Some emerging countries such as India and Brazil have not condemned Russia over the war in Ukraine since they maintain that the conflict does not concern them.

Olexiy Haran, professor of comparative politics at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy university, told the FT that Ukrainian diplomatic outreach with the global south was “becoming more active, more professional and taking into account greater specificity” of the countries it sought to engage.

A new Russian high school text book has sought to justify its war of aggression in Ukraine, as students returned to classes following the summer break.

The New York Times reports that a revised textbook alleges that Ukraine is an “ultranationalist state” where “opposition is forbidden,” and that the US is “the main beneficiary of the Ukrainian conflict.”

The rewritten version of “The History of Russia, 1945 to the beginning of the 21st Century,” a textbook for 16- and 17-year-old students, devotes almost 30 pages to the war. The NYT said the authors framed it as a response to “an increasingly aggressive West” that wanted to use Ukraine as a “battering ram” to destroy Russia.