Russia-Ukraine war live: three drones downed in Moscow region, says mayor; Russia attacks Danube grain facilities | Ukraine

Russia has appointed a new acting head of its aerospace forces to replace Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon”, the RIA state news agency reported on Wednesday.

In June, US intelligence claimed that Surovikin, who previously led the invasion force in Ukraine, had prior knowledge of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s uprising, in which Wagner group mercenaries captured the city of Rostov and moved on Moscow before cutting an amnesty deal.

Since the mutiny, some Russian and foreign news outlets have said that Surovikin was being investigated for possible complicity in it and being held under house arrest.

His reported removal suggests the authorities found fault with his behaviour, but the details of his alleged wrongdoing remain unknown.

Russian news outlet RBC and Rybar, a Telegram channel close to the ministry of defence, on Tuesday reported that Surovikin had been removed from his position as the head of Russia’s air force, Reuters reports.

On Wednesday, RIA cited an unnamed source as saying:

Ex-chief of the Russian Air and Space Forces Sergei Surovikin has now been relieved of his post, while colonel-general Viktor Afzalov, head of the main staff of the airforce, is temporarily acting as commander-in-chief of the airforce”.

The report has not yet been independently verified. Surovikin was nicknamed “General Armageddon” for his hardline and unorthodox approach to waging war.

You can read more about Surovikin in this profile piece:

UK government support for Ukraine’s nuclear fuel supply will help end the country’s reliance on Russian supplies, Grant Shapps said after a trip to a Ukrainian power station.

The government has announced its intention to provide a £192m loan guarantee through UK Export Finance – the UK’s export credit agency – enabling UK-headquartered Urenco to supply Ukraine’s national nuclear company, Energoatom, with uranium enrichment services, which are vital for nuclear fuel.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that, once provided, the support will bring the UK’s non-military financial assistance to Ukraine close to £5bn, PA media reports.

Ukraine has four nuclear power plants, with its largest plant, at Zaporizhzhia, currently held by Russia.

Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year, Ukraine had been receiving most of its nuclear services and fuel from Russia.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said on Tuesday that three civilians were killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on a sanatorium in the village of Lavy, close to the Ukrainian border.

The governor said two people had died on the spot and doctors had been unable to save the life of the third. These claims have not yet been independently verified.

Ukrainian air defences shot down 11 out of 20 drones launched by Russia in overnight attacks, the air force said on Wednesday.

The Ukrainian military and local officials said Russia carried out attacks in the southern region of Odesa and in the Danube River area, which is important for grain exports, reportedly causing a fire in at least one grain facility (see post at 06.23).

The military published photographs – which have not yet been independently verified -showing piles of grain under the burnt shell of a storage facility, Reuters reports.

Odesa governor Oleh Kiper said the attack on the region lasted for three hours.

“Unfortunately, there were hits to the production and transhipment complexes where a fire broke out… The damage includes grain storage facilities,” Kiper said on Telegram.

Ukraine’s Danube ports accounted for around a quarter of grain exports before Russia pulled out of a UN-backed deal to provide safe passage for the export of Ukrainian grain via the Black Sea in July.

The ports have since become the main route out, with grain also sent on barges to Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta for shipment onwards.

Russia attacked grain facilities in Odesa and the Danube River region overnight, causing fires in grain facilities, Ukrainian military and local authorities said on Wednesday.

“The enemy hit grain storage facilities and a production and transshipment complex in Danube region. A fire broke out in the warehouses and was quickly contained. Firefighters continue to work,” military said on the Telegram messaging app.

A drone hit a building under construction in central Moscow early on Wednesday, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, has said, in what AFP reported was the sixth straight night of aerial attacks on Russia’s capital region.

The Russian military downed two more drones over the western part of the Moscow region, the mayor said on his Telegram channel.

A loud explosion was heard in the capital’s central district on Wednesday morning, a short while after flights were suspended at the city’s airports, Russia’s RIA news agency reported. The central district is 5km from the Kremlin.

The Russian defence ministry said that the drone had been “suppressed by electronic warfare” before losing control and colliding with the building.

“At night, air defence forces thwarted another attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack by three aircraft-type unmanned aerial vehicles on the city of Moscow,” the ministry said. There were no casualties, it said.

In addition to the Moscow city attack, two drones were “destroyed by air defence systems” in Moscow’s Mozhaisk and Khimki districts, it said.

Welcome to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine. This is Helen Sullivan with the latest.

Our top story this morning: A drone hit a building under construction in central Moscow early on Wednesday, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, has said, in what AFP reported was the sixth straight night of aerial attacks on Russia’s capital region.

More on this shortly. In the meantime:

• Ukraine said its troops had entered the strategically important south-eastern village of Robotyne, a potentially significant advance in its counteroffensive against Russia. Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, said Ukrainian soldiers were organising the evacuation of civilians, but were still coming under fire from Russian forces.

• A prominent Russian journalist said on Tuesday that Gen Sergei Surovikin, former commander of Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine, had been dismissed as head of Russia’s aerospace forces. There was no official confirmation of the report by Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected former head of the now defunct Ekho Moskvy radio station, but it was cited by some other Russian news outlets on social media, Reuters reported.

• Three people were killed and two were injured as a result of Russian shelling of several villages in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, the prosecutor general’s office said. According to the prosecutors, all three people, two women and a man, were killed in the village of Torske on Tuesday evening. The prosecutors provided no further detail of the attack.

• Russia said on Tuesday that it destroyed two Ukrainian military boats in the Black Sea. Moscow’s defence ministry said one of its Sukhoi Su-30sm jets destroyed a Ukrainian “reconnaissance boat” near Russian gas production facilities. It later said it also destroyed a US-made speedboat carrying Ukrainian troops east of Snake Island, without providing further detail. The claims were not verified.

• A group of Ukrainian “saboteurs” tried to breach Russia’s border in the Bryansk region, the regional governor, Alexander Bogomaz, said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The claim was not verified.

• The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Russia would remain a “responsible supplier” of food and grain to African countries and could take Ukraine’s place as an international supplier of grain, in recorded remarks to a summit of the Brics countries in South Africa. He also said said the use of US dollars in trade between Brics nations was decreasing, as the countries moved towards national currencies and away from dollars in an “irreversible process of de-dollarisation”.

• The international court of justice will hear Russia’s objections to its jurisdiction in a genocide case brought by Ukraine in hearings starting in September, the body said on Tuesday. Ukraine filed a case with the ICJ shortly after Russia’s invasion began on 24 February 2022, which accused Moscow of falsely applying genocide law to justify the attack, Reuters reported.

• Denmark has begun training eight Ukrainian pilots in flying F-16 fighter jets as part of its commitment to donate aircraft, the Danish armed forces said on Tuesday. Denmark and the Netherlands pledged on Sunday to donate F-16s to Ukraine.

• The leaders of 11 Balkan and eastern European countries signed a joint declaration backing Ukraine’s territorial integrity at a summit in Athens on Monday. In the presence of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, they expressed their “unwavering support for Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders” in the face of Russia’s aggression.

• Poland’s president has said Russia is in the process of shifting some short-range nuclear weapons to neighbouring Belarus. Andrzej Duda said the move would shift the security architecture of the region and the entire Nato military alliance, Associated Press reported.

• Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has said the commitment made by some European countries to donate F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine will help to minimise Ukrainian losses and de-escalate the conflict.

• A drone appears to have destroyed a supersonic Russian bomber on an airfield hundreds of kilometres from Ukraine, British military intelligence has said, the latest in a string of successful assaults on prestige infrastructure and military hardware. These attacks, far beyond the frontlines, are powerful propaganda for Ukraine, though Kyiv rarely claims them directly.