Ukraine fights off 36 tanks in one of Russia’s biggest assaults – latest news

Ukrainian officials accused Russia of firing its new hypersonic Zircon missiles at Kyiv five times since the start of this year, the capital city’s military administration said.

The Zircon was hailed by Vladimir Putin as part of a new generation of weapons systems during his annual state-of-the-nation address in February. Fired from the sea, Zircon missiles have a range of 1,000km (625 miles) and travel at nine times the speed of sound, according to officials in Russia.

The five Zircon missiles were among more than 180 Russian missile and drone attacks launched against the Ukrainian capital in the first three months of the year, the administration said in a post on Telegram.

Six other types of missiles were also used including the Kh-101, an air-launched cruise missile, of which 113 have been fired on Kyiv since the start of this year, the administration said.

Ukraine’s exports by sea hit 11.8 million tonnes in March, the country’s economy minister Yulia Svyrydenko wrote on X.

The country’s grain exports, a major source of contention since Russia’s invasion led to spiking food prices around the world, have exceeded expectations in recent months.

“Positive developments in Ukrainian maritime exports. In March, we exported 11.8 million tonnes worth $3.2 billion. Keeping up the pace is crucial,” the minister said.

A Russian court ordered a detained Russian-American journalist to be held in jail for two more months pending investigation and trial, in a further step in the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent and free speech.

Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor for the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir service, was taken into custody on 18 October and charged with failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military. Later, she was also charged with spreading “false information” about the Russian military.

A court in Tatarstan said she will remain behind bars at least until 5 June.

She told reporters in the courtroom that she wasn’t doing “very well physically” and that some of her medical conditions have flared up in detention. “Living conditions are very bad, I have no way of taking care of my health,” she said, adding that medical assistance in the detention center was “minimal.”

Russia is looking at removing the Taliban’s designation as a terrorist organization, Meduza reported on 1 April.

The country’s foreign ministry is currently “working through the issues” and a final decision will be made by the Kremlin.

The announcement came on the same day that Russian state news agency TASS said the Taliban had been invited to participate in the “Russia – Islamic World: KazanForum,” scheduled for May.

Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister Dmytro Kuleba is heading to The Hague today for bilateral talks with his Dutch counterpart Hanke Bruins Slot, the ministry said.

Mr Kuleba’s visit to the Netherlands comes just days after he returned from a diplomatic meeting in India where he said he went to advance Kyiv’s vision of the path to peace in Ukraine and to strengthen ties with India.

The Ukrainian leader will attend a ministerial conference where Volodymyr Zelensky’s seven-point peace formula “Restoration of Justice” will be discussed. The talks will also review the results of documenting and investigating crimes committed by the Russian occupiers on the territory of Ukraine, the foreign ministry said.

Ukraine hopes to hold a summit of world leaders without Russian participation in the coming months to advance its blueprint for peace, a “formula” that calls among other things for the withdrawal of Russian troops from its territory.

“Particular attention will also be paid to further steps toward the establishment of a Special Tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine,” it added.

The Ukrainian drones attacking Russian oil infrastructure have a range spanning hundreds to a thousand kilometres, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov said.

“Most of the drones that attacked Russian oil refineries have a range of 700 to 1,000 kilometres, but now there are models that can fly over 1,000 kilometres,” the minister said in an interview with German news website Welt.

He added that Ukraine plans to build more than a million drones this year and has already managed to increase the production of long-range aerial vehicles tenfold compared to 2023’s production.

Mr Fedorov added that the first prototypes of artificial intelligence drones, likely in fewer units, could make it to the battlefield by the end of this year.

He added that while it is not yet clear who is winning the technological war, in some areas Ukraine is winning and in some areas “Russians are surpassing us”.

North Korea continues to supply Russia with weapons, the Pentagon said last night, as the Kim Jong-un regime becomes the leading supplier of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Speaking about the sharing of munitions between North Korea and Russia, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said: “We do assess that the partnership continues to flourish, that North Korea does continue to provide support to Russia. We’ve certainly had declassified intelligence read out to all of you. So we do believe that support continues but I don’t have anything to share in terms of, like, recent shipments or anything like that.

“It continues to grow. We see that partnership – you know, we continue to see Russia reach out to partners like North Korea, to Iran, to continue to get support for its war in Ukraine. And, you know, we continue to stand with Ukraine for however long it takes.”

Russia has used nearly 50 North Korean missiles to attack Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to Oleksandr Filchakov, the head of the Kharkiv Oblast prosecutor’s office.

In October last year, the North Korea-Russia border saw a sharp increase in rail traffic in likely signs of Kim Jong-un helping Russian president Vladimir Putin by supplying munitions, a US think-tank claimed, citing recent satellite photos.

Satellite images from 5 October showed a “dramatic and unprecedented level of freight railcar traffic” at the Tumangang rail facility, according to Beyond Parallel, a website run by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.