Russia says it has hit ‘Ukrainian military-industrial complex’ facilities
Russia’s defence ministry has said it destroyed its targets in a series of strikes on facilities producing ammunition and drones in Ukraine.
“This morning the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out a group strike … against facilities of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex,” the defence ministry said in a daily briefing, AFP reports.
Russia said it had targeted facilities producing shells, gunpowder and unmanned aerial vehicles, saying “all designated facilities were hit”.
Ukraine earlier said that it had recorded 40 missiles and drones launched from Russia, with eight missiles destroyed and “more than 20 devices” failing to reach their targets. The proportion of missiles that were downed is understood to be lower than usual.
No fatalities have been reported so far, but Ukrainian authorities said a civilian was wounded in the northeastern Sumy region.
Key events
A bit more on the “foreign agent” designation, a phrase which in Russia has strong associations to cold war era espionage. Once a person is registered as one, they’re subject to extra audits and must mark their social media and other publication with a disclaimer that they are being distributed by a “foreign agent”.
The “foreign agent” designation list that Grigori Chkhartishvili has been placed on includes journalists, opposition politicians, figures who worked on Alexei Navalny’s campaign and in his non-profit, cultural figures including actors and musicians and human rights campaigners.
After Russia’s ministry of justice designated one of the country’s most popular fiction writers a “foreign agent” due to his opposition to its war in Ukraine, the author has hit back on social media.
The ministry designated Georgian-born Grigori Chkhartishvili, who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin, a “foreign agent” late on Friday, citing his opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine. It also accused him of distributing false and negative information about Russia and of helping raise money for the Ukrainian army. The 67-year-old author lives in the UK.
Other writers and cultural figures who have spoken out against the Ukraine war have received the same label, and books by Chkhartishvili had already been removed from sale in Russia after the authorities added him to a ‘terrorist’ list in December.
Chkhartishvili, whose books used to be bestsellers in Russia and is open about his opposition to the Ukraine war, joked about his foreign agent designation online.
“They are writing that I have been declared a foreign agent today. Me, a terrorist and extremist?! I feel like Bin Laden who has been given a ticket for parking illegally,” he wrote.
More detail has come through on the missile attacks that Russia launched across Ukraine overnight.
Reuters cites Ukraine’s air force as saying it recorded a total of 40 attacks, of which 37 were missiles and three were drones. Ukraine said it destroyed eight missiles.
The attack included weapons including cruise, ballistic, anti-aircraft missiles as well as drones.
The force said that “more than 20” devices failed to reach their targets, with spokesperson Yuri Ignat saying that “either they fell in the fields, they were detonated in the air, or they were affected by means of radio-electronic warfare of our defence forces”.
As a neighbouring country, Poland briefly activated its air defence systems due to the increased level of threat.
Saturday morning’s attacks come after the air force’s spokesperson said earlier this week that Ukraine was running low on air defence missiles. It downed a lower proportion of missiles in the mass attacks than usual – but it is not yet clear whether this or any other factor was the reason for the low hit rate.
Here are some images of people taking sheltering in Kyiv’s metro during the air raid alert on Saturday.
Photograph: Alina Smutko/Reuters
More detail about the damage caused by the attacks, from the former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine:
Another massive missile attack on Ukraine in the morning. The missiles were fired at Kyiv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Chernihiv, Poltava, Ivano-Frankivsk regions. A boiler house in Chernihiv was damaged, and the blast wave smashed windows in residential buildings. One missile fell in the… pic.twitter.com/5bJDzED3T5
— Гюндуз Мамедов/Gyunduz Mamedov (@MamedovGyunduz) January 13, 2024
Photos from Russian online retailer Wildberries’ warehouse fire have started coming through – here are a couple showing the huge blaze in a suburb of St Petersburg.
I previously reported the fire as covering 50,000 metres – latest figures from Reuters are now giving it as 70,000 metres.
Russia launches attacks across Ukrainian regions in early hours of Saturday
Russia launched attacks against regions across Ukraine on Saturday morning using weapons including hypersonic missiles, according to the local authorities and the Ukrainian air force.
The air force warned that Russia had fired Kinzhal missiles, which move at several times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to shoot down.
Here are the regions that have been affected, courtesy of the Kyiv Independent:
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In the Chernihiv region in northern Ukraine, the governor said that the attack had caused damage in an unspecified location but there were no casualties.
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In central Ukraine, a missile was shot down over Kremenchuk in the Poltava region. A building was damaged but no casualties were reported.
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In the Dnipropetrovsk region in south-east Ukraine, two cruise missiles were downed over the district of Kryvyi Rih.
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Explosions were also heard in the city of Kropyvnytskyi in the Kirovohrad region in central Ukraine, with no casualties reported.
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In the Khmelnytskyi region in the west of Ukraine, with local authorities reporting that no “critical infrastructure” or civilians affected.
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Air defence forces were also operating in the Rivne region in western Ukraine, with no casualties or damage reported.
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In Lviv, western Ukraine, there was an air raid alert from around 6.30 am to 8.25am – but the governor said air defence forces meant “rockets did not manage to enter the airspace” of the Lviv region.
It comes after Russian shelling on Friday killed two people in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.
A warehouse in St Petersburg owned by one of Russia’s biggest online retailers has gone up in flames, Reuters reports Russia’s ministry of emergency situations as saying, as firefighters battled a huge blaze on Saturday.
The owner, Wildberries, stated that all its staff had been evacuated. Nobody was reported to have been hurt.
It is not yet known how the fire, which covered 50,000 sq metres and was rated as category five, the most severe, had began.
Nearly 300 firefighters, dozens of fire engines, and also helicopters, were battling to put out the fire, officials said.
Opening summary
Good morning, we are restarting the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has praised a security deal signed with Britain during a visit by prime minister Rishi Sunak as a history-making “model for our time”.
The deal, which guarantees that the UK will give “swift and sustained” help should Russia attack Ukraine again “gives us confidence now, while we defend ourselves from Russian aggression, and establishes our strong security positions throughout the period until Ukraine joins Nato”, Zelenskiy said in his nightly address.
During his visit to Kyiv on Friday, Sunak made a £2.5bn commitment to Ukraine’s defence, and pledged that the UK would not falter at a time when military aid from the US has stalled.
More on that soon. In other developments:
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The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said he would visit Kyiv in the next few days. Warsaw is one of Ukraine’s key allies in its war against Russia but relations between the two countries became tense last year, under the rule of Tusk’s predecessor, Mateusz Morawiecki.
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Zelenskiy said he was more positive now than he was last month that his country would secure new financial aid from the US. But there was no indication in Washington that congressional approval for an aid package proposed by the White House would be forthcoming anytime soon. “I am viewing this with more positivity than in December, I think we will [get it],” Zelenskiy told a news conference in Kyiv.
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Ukraine’s military spy chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said Kyiv’s attacks in Russian-annexed Crimea were set to intensify, adding that Moscow’s economy was proving surprisingly resilient despite sanctions. “In 2023, the first Ukrainian incursions took place in temporarily occupied Crimea,” Budanov, 38, said in an interview with French daily Le Monde published on Friday. “And this is just the beginning.”
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Ukraine’s ground forces commander told Reuters that Kyiv needed more military aircraft for its war effort, such as US A-10 attack jets to support infantry as well as planes that could fire long-range cruise missiles. “I would talk about A-10s as an option if they’ll be given to us … this is not a new machine, but a reliable one that has proven itself in many wars, and which has a wide array of weapons for destroying land targets to help the infantry,” Col-Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi said.
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Russian shelling on Friday killed two people in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, while a drone attack by Kyiv in the Moscow-controlled east killed another two, officials said. The head of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said the Russian army used artillery, striking a street. A Ukrainian drone, meanwhile, killed two people and wounded six during an evacuation of injured people near the Russian-controlled city of Gorlivka, the Russian-backed mayor, Ivan Prikhodko, said.
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Russia labelled the exiled writer Boris Akunin, who has spoken out against Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, as a foreign agent. The Kremlin has intensified its crackdown on dissent since launching its offensive in Ukraine in February 2022 and targeted the arts, with books by authors critical of Moscow disappearing from bookshops. Akunin is the pen name of Georgian-born writer Grigory Chkhartishvili.
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Moldova’s pro-Russian separatist Transniestria region accused central authorities in the ex-Soviet state of training Ukrainian soldiers to launch attacks on the rebel area’s institutions and leaders. Moldova’s pro-European government, which denounces Russia’s war in Ukraine, immediately denied the allegation.
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The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, made a £2.5bn commitment to Ukraine’s defence on Friday during a visit to Kyiv, and pledged that the UK would not falter at a time when military aid from the US has stalled. Sunak met the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, embracing him warmly and addressed Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. The two leaders held talks and signed a new UK-Ukrainian security treaty. It guarantees that the UK will give “swift and sustained” help should Russia attack Ukraine again.