Zelenskiy fires regional military recruitment chiefs in anti-corruption drive; Russia gains ground around north-east town of Kupiansk
Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the dismissal of all the heads of Ukraine’s regional military recruitment centres in the latest drive to root out corruption after officials were accused of taking bribes from those seeking to avoid the frontlines. Ukraine’s president described the taking of cash from people who wanted to avoid conscription while others suffered as a form of treachery.
Russia on Friday said it had improved its fighting positions around the north-east Ukraine town of Kupiansk, where its advance has prompted Ukrainian officials to urge residents to evacuate. Kupiansk and the surrounding areas of the north-east Kharkiv region were recaptured by Kyiv’s forces in September but Moscow has since pushed back.
Russian forces fired four Kinzhal hypersonic missiles on western Ukraine early Friday, targeting an airfield but killing an eight-year-old boy who lived nearby, Ukraine said. Of the missiles fired from southern and central Russia, one was shot down over the Kyiv region by air defences, but the rest struck close to an airfield in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region, the Ukrainian air force said.
The US has imposed new sanctions on four “prominent members of Russia’s financial elite”, the US treasury department said in a statement on Friday. All four have served on the supervisory board of the Alfa Group Consortium, one of Russia’s largest financial and investment conglomerates.
The European Union has delivered 223,800 shells to Ukraine under the first part of a plan to provide a million artillery rounds to aid Kyiv’s fight against Russia, a spokesperson said on Friday.
At least 499 children have been killed and 1,097 injured so far in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukraine prosecutor general’s office said on Friday. The office, tasked with tallying Russia’s war crimes, counted at least 81 new crimes registered this week, bringing the total to 102,849.
Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko said he had ordered “contact” with Poland and that he was ready to talk amid rising border tensions between the Nato member and the Moscow ally. “We need to talk to the Poles. I ordered the prime minister to contact them,” Lukashenko said on Friday, according to state news agency Belta.
Russian media has reported that the Kremlin is considering closing some or all Moscow airports as Kyiv continues its drone attacks on the Russian capital.
Repairs to the Chonhar Bridge that links Crimea to Kherson will take at least a month, the Russian-imposed acting governor of the occupied portion of Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, was quoted as saying. The bridge was damaged in a Ukrainian strike on 6 August.
Russian authorities have taken Ukrainian teenagers from occupied territories of the country to a military education camp in Russia, where they received military training, Ukraine’s Centre of National Resistance said. The camp opened in the town of Penza on 1 August, it said.
Ukrainian border guards have stopped a number of Ukrainian men attempting to leave the country, apparently to avoid conscription in the war. The State Border Guard Service said that in Odesa, guards found two Ukrainian men of military age hiding in a vehicle after paying two Moldovans $4,500 each to get them to Moldova. In Zakarpattia province in Ukraine’s west, border guards stopped a vehicle in which four men had paid smugglers $4,000 each to cross into Romania.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, vowed that any Taurus cruise missile supplied to Kyiv would be used only within Ukrainian borders. This has been a point of contention between Kyiv and its western allies – Kyiv has been asking for Taurus missiles, which can travel more than 500km (300 miles), but nations such as Germany have balked at the request over concerns about the long range.
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