Drone attack on Putin’s hometown as EU battles to end Hungary’s block on Kyiv aid

Russian anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin has said he has submitted 105,000 signatures in his support to the Central Election Commission (CEC) to underpin his bid to challenge Vladimir Putin in an upcoming presidential election.

Mr Nadezhdin is the last remaining anti-war candidate that stands a chance of running in the election. He has been endorsed by leading opposition figures, including Alexei Navalny’s wife Yulia, who was pictured signing for him last week. Evgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of the jailed opposition figure Vladimir, told The Independent her husband recently used a court appearance to endorse Mr Nadezhdin.

The CEC will check the authenticity and quality of the signatures submitted by Mr Nadezhdin and other would-be candidates and announce next month who will join Putin on the ballot paper.

Putin’s victory is widely seen as a foregone conclusion, but Mr Nadezhdin has surprised some observers with trenchant criticism of what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

After a series of heating outages across Russia during an unusually cold winter, Mr Nadezhdin said earlier this month that the country would be able to afford to spend more on its citizens if it was not pouring so much money into the military.

As a candidate nominated by a political party, he needed to gather 100,000 signatures across at least 40 regions in order to stand in the March 15-17 election.

Putin, who has chosen to run as an independent rather than as the candidate of the ruling United Russia party, needs 300,000 signatures but has already collected over 3.5 million, according to his supporters.

You can read more about who Mr Nadezhdin below.

Mr Kara-Murza had spent years speaking out against Russian president Vladimir Putin and has criticised the government’s crackdown on dissent, as well as the war in Ukraine. Criticism of Russia’s invasion is the reason he is currently imprisoned for 25 years on treason charges decried by the international community and likened to a Stalinist show trial.

Evgenia Kara-Murza was told on Monday that he had been moved in an “unknown direction” before it was discovered that he had been transferred to a new, harsher, Siberian penal colony – a short drive from the previous one in the city of Omsk – and placed in solitary confinement in a punishment cell for four months.

Zelensky has denied claims he moved to dismiss Valerii Zaluzhny as tensions between the two appear to reach their boiling point after months of simmering.

Ukraine has carried out a drone strike on an oil facility in Vladimir Putin’s hometown of St Petersburg for the second time in two weeks.

Ukrainian intelligence sources later confirmed the attack to state broadcaster Suspilne. They said they had targeted Nevsky Oil Refinery in St. Petersburg, Russia. This does not amount to official confirmation; Ukraine, by matter of policy, does not confirm strikes on territories outside of its own borders.

Alexander Beglov, governor of St Petersburg, confirmed the incident, adding that residents of the city “heard a loud bang”.

“An incident occurred at an industrial site in the Nevsky district,” he wrote on Telegram.

Local Russian outlets wrote that air defences were active in St Petersburg overnight, while footage posted subsequently showed the aftermath of the drone strike.

Ukraine needs more ammunition, the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has said ahead of a meeting with EU defence ministers in Brussels.

“We have to show that our clear commitment with Ukraine remains and continues,” he said, adding that it is important to clarify the situation and “know where we are now, where we will be by March and by the end of the year”.

Ukraine‘s air defences shot down 14 out of 20 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack that injured one person and damaged commercial buildings, the military has said.

The Air Force said in a statement the Iranian-made Shahed drones and also three Iskander missiles targeted five Ukrainian regions in the south and the east.

The southern military command said one person was injured and agricultural warehouses and a shop were damaged in the Mykolayiv region where five drones were shot down.

Details on damage in other regions were not immediately available.

French President Emmanuel Macron today blamed war-torn Ukraine for intensifying the European agricultural crisis by exporting sub-standard produce.

He spoke out on Tuesday as farmers continued to besiege major cities including Paris as they demanded better pay and conditions, and a reduction in EU red tape.

At a press conference in Sweden, Mr Macron said: ‘We have asked for clear measures on imports from Ukraine, because today we have things in volume and quality that are destabilising the European market, whether it comes to chickens or cereals.’

Saying it was ‘facile’ to blame all farming problems on the EU, Mr Macron continued: ‘As far as poultry is concerned, it is indeed the arrival, in particular, of poultry that was much cheaper from Ukraine.’ In turn, one French union leader called for all imports from Ukraine – which has been at war with Russia for a decade – to be cut completely.

Franck Laborde, head of France’s AGPM association of maize producers, said cheap Ukrainian poultry was not reared to adequate standards.

“We are opening our doors wide in Europe to Ukrainian production so that they can finance the war,” he said. “This is not acceptable. Agriculture is being sacrificed on the altar of war.”

It came after riot police prevented a tractor convoy blockading the largest fresh food market in Europe as militant French farmers attempted to “starve Paris”.

They aimed to surround Rungis, to the south of Paris, in the early hours of Tuesday morning. This would have caused chaos to the city’s food supply, which can last for three days before crisis shortages are announced.

Citing a Russian Telegram news channel Astra, they said the first bomb landed on a farm in Postnikov, whilst the second landed on an urban street in Strelestkoye – prompting an evacuation of up to 150 civilians.

“The increasing frequency of these occurrences likely demonstrates a degree of air and ground crew fatigue within the Russian front line, as well as exposing inadequate training,” the UK’s latest defence intelligence update reads.

The wail of air raid sirens is commonplace in Belgorod, a Russian border city whose residents are on edge following a Ukrainian missile attack on a New Year’s holiday weekend that left dozens of people dead and injured.

A spectacular explosion rocked a huge fuel export terminal on the Baltic Sea southwest of St. Petersburg this month from a Ukrainian drone, forcing the energy company Novatek to suspend operations for several days.

Last week, an apparent drone attack in the Black Sea port of Tuapse in the southern Krasnodar region hit one of Russia’s largest refineries and ignited a fire, while another big refinery in the Volga River city of Yaroslavl, north of Moscow came under attack early Monday, but officials said there was no damage.