Ukraine war latest: Russia vows response over US missiles as conflict hits 1,000 days

Six people were killed, including a child, in Russia’s drone attack on Ukraine’s northeastern region of Sumy, regional officials said this morning.

At least 12 people were injured in the drone attack on a residential dormitory in the small town of Hlukhiv, the military administration of the Sumy region, which borders Russia, said on the Telegram channel.

David Lammy said “one president at a time” when asked how concerned he was about the implications of Donald Trump’s presidency for the war in Ukraine.

Speaking to press after a meeting of the UN security council, the foreign secretary said: “I’ve studied in this country, I’ve worked in this country, and I know that there’s a simple rule: one president at a time.

“We’re dealing with President Biden and we are committed to putting Ukraine in the strongest possible position.”

The clock on her wall stopped almost as soon as the day began, its hands frozen by the Russian bomb that hit the dormitory serving as home for Ukrainians displaced by war.

It was 1.45am in an upstairs room in the eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, Natalia Panasenko’s home for just shy of a year after the town she thinks of as her real home came under Russian occupation. The explosion blasted a door on top of her, smashed her refrigerator and television and shredded the flowers she’d just received for her 63rd birthday.

“The house was full of people and flowers. People were congratulating me … and then there was nothing. Everything was mixed in the rubble,” she said. “I come from a place where the war is going on every day. We only just left there, and it seemed to be quieter here. And the war caught up with us again.”

It should also prompt the British and French to follow suit and to generally encourage other allies to boost their support for Ukraine.

However, it is painful to reflect on how much more effective this change in tactics would have been had the move been made, say, a year or two ago. In hindsight, President Vladimir Putin’s veiled threats about escalation proved to be empty – and now no one thinks he’s about to bomb New York, Paris or London in revenge for the West giving the Ukrainians more firepower.

As it is, in the dying days of the Biden administration, it seems unlikely to be the kind of “game changer” that President Zelensky and his long-suffering people have been virtually begging from the West since the earliest days of this conflict.

Ukraine’s Nato allies have welcomed the green lighting move by Joe Biden to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russia with US-supplied longer-range missiles.

President Andrzej Duda of Poland, which borders Ukraine, praised the decision as a “very important, maybe even a breakthrough moment” in the war.

“In the recent days, we have seen the decisive intensification of Russian attacks on Ukraine, above all, those missile attacks where civilian objects are attacked, where people are killed, ordinary Ukrainians,” Mr Duda said.

Easing restrictions on Ukraine was “a good thing,” said foreign minister Margus Tsahkna of Russian neighbor Estonia.

“We have been saying that from the beginning — that no restrictions must be put on the military support,” he told senior European Union diplomats in Brussels. “And we need to understand that situation is more serious (than) it was even maybe like a couple of months ago.”

But Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico, known for his pro-Russian views, described Biden’s decision as “an unprecedented escalation” that would prolong the war.

He argued the US ban had made it impossible for Ukraine to try to stop Russian attacks on its cities and electrical grids.

We look closer at the weapons that could mark a turning point in the war.

Chinese and Russian foreign ministers discussed bilateral ties, the conflict in Ukraine, and the situation on the Korean peninsula on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Brazil, they said today.

“We are truly at an unprecedented stage in the development of our strategic relations of a comprehensive partnership,” Russia’s Sergei Lavrov told China’s Wang Yi, according to a post on the Russian foreign ministry’s Telegram channel.

Mr Wang said Beijing is willing to work with Russia to further strengthen bilateral “comprehensive strategic coordination”, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement.

The “two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine crisis and the situation on the Korean Peninsula”, it added without providing further details.

China and Russia have held a series of bilateral meetings since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine 1,000 days ago. The war isolated Moscow from Kyiv’s Western allies, bringing waves of sanctions on its politicians and businesses, but pushed it closer to China.

Russia is ready to normalise its relations with the United States, but will not “tango alone”, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told TASS state news agency in remarks published today.

“Russia, as our president has said, is open to normalisation,” TASS cited Mr Peskov, a close aide of Vladimir Putin, as saying. “But we cannot tango alone. And we are not going to do it.”