Kyiv to fortify borders with Russia and Belarus: Live updates

The Ukrainian government is set to build new fortifications and military infrastructure in northeast regions that border Russia and Belarus at a cost of nearly $35 million (£30 million), prime minister Denys Shmyhal has said.

“At the request of Kharkiv and Chernihiv…we are allocating 911.5 million hryvnias ($24.7 million) for Kharkiv and 363 million ($9.8 million) for Chernihiv to build military engineering and fortification structures,” Mr Shmyhal said on Telegram on Tuesday.

The Chernihiv region that borders Russia and Belarus was partially occupied at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, but it was later liberated.

Belarus, the Kremlin’s closest ally, initially supported the Russian invasion, opening its borders to Russian troops marching on Ukraine‘s capital Kyiv.

Minsk also provided its territory to fighters from the Wagner mercenary group whose move to Belarus was part of a deal that ended their attempted mutiny in June.

The eastern Kharkiv region, which borders the Russian region of Belgorod, is still partially occupied and has been the site of active fighting in recent weeks.

Since the liberation of its territories, Ukraine has been actively building defences on its borders to prevent being invaded again. It maintains a significant force in the north.

Moscow’s forces control a swathe of southern and eastern Ukraine.

A former FBI agent admitted to working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska while he was under U.S. sanctions and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy in a New York court on Tuesday, in exchange for prosecutors dropping other charges.

Prosecutors in January said Charles McGonigal, who led the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York before retiring in 2018, received concealed payments from Deripaska in exchange for investigating a rival businessman and unsuccessfully pushed in 2019 to have Deripaska’s sanctions lifted.

At the time, McGonigal pleaded not guilty to four criminal counts including sanctions violations and money laundering.

McGonigal, 55, said in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday that he worked for Deripaska between spring and autumn of 2021 to find negative information on Vladimir Potanin in an attempt to have the Deripaska rival put on the U.S. sanctions list.

The former FBI agent received $17,500 for that work, which was routed from Russia through accounts in Cyprus and New Jersey in an attempt to mask the source of the payments, he said.

McGonigal told the court he was “deeply remorseful” for his actions. His attorney Seth DuCharme told reporters after the hearing that his client was treated fairly.

A kindergarten and a residential building were damaged as a result of the overnight missile attack in Ukraine’s western city of Lviv.

The multi-story residential building caught fire due to the falling missile debris early Tuesday morning (15 August) according to regional governor Maxim Kozytskyi.

Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi said one of the strikes hit the yard of a local nursery, injuring four people.

“Two hours ago, this place was a children’s pavilion of our kindergarten. A missile directly hit the pavilion, creating a crater that is nine meters deep and 20 meters wide,” he claimed, in a video message from the site.

Poland is deploying thousands of troops to its border with Belarus, calling it a deterrent move as tensions between the two neighbors ratchet up.

Those tensions between Poland — a NATO and European Union country — and Belarus, which is Russia’s ally in its war on Ukraine, have been building up in recent months on the border. Here is why:

Poland has been backing the Belarusian opposition ever since the 2020 presidential elections, where pro-Russian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko won a sixth term in a vote that Poland and the wider Western community saw as rigged.

In 2021, Belarus began organising and pushing thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa across the border into Poland.

Russia‘s ruble has fallen a long way in recent months, and the country’s central bank has stepped in to try to halt the slide.

Until now, the government stood aside as the declining ruble helped its budget. But a weaker currency also poses the threat of higher prices for everyday people in Russia — and the government has finally moved to halt the drop.

Here are key things to know about the ruble:

Russia‘s defence ministry on Tuesday said its forces had hit key military industrial facilities in Ukraine during the night with high-precision missiles, inflicting “significant damage”, the Interfax news agency reported.

Reuters could not immediately verify the battlefield report.

Russia also said it had for the first time intercepted SCALP cruise missiles supplied to Ukraine by France.

Vladimir Putin has accused Western countries of adding ‘fuel to the fire’ by funding the conflict in Ukraine.

Addressing participants of an international security forum, the Russian president shifted the blame for Russia’s ongoing invasion.

Putin said countries that were “pumping billions of dollars into the neo-Nazi regime” were “igniting the conflict even more, to draw other states into it.”

It comes as experts told The Independent that Western pressure on Ukraine’s counteroffensive to achieve a “Hollywood”-style breakthrough against Russia’s forces is “unrealistic.”

Russia has launched its largest aerial attack on regions bordering Nato in western Ukraine since the start of its invasion nearly 18 months ago.

Russian air strikes hit two western regions of Ukraine bordering Poland – a Nato member – and other areas on Tuesday, killing three people in a factory and wounding more than a dozen, according to officials.

The deaths were reported in the northwestern region of Volyn. Officials said an industrial enterprise in the regional capital Lutsk was struck in the overnight attack. Several people also needed hospital treatment, Governor Yuriy Pohulyaiko said.

Swedish industrial bearings maker SKF said its factory in Lutsk was hit by a missile overnight, killing three employees. Footage released by Ukraine’s state emergency service showed rescuers pulling a man from the rubble.

Latvia’s defence minister ordered the army to help guard the Baltic country’s border with Russian ally Belarus on Tuesday, after 96 attempts by illegal immigrants to cross in 24 hours.

Border Guard officers have also been recalled from their holidays to help with patrols.

Latvia has “information about a possible increase in hybrid threats”, the Border Guard said in a statement. Belarusian authorities were increasingly involved in organising the flow of illegal immigrants, it said.

EU members Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, which share a border with Belarus, have worried increasingly about border crossings since hundreds of Russian battle-hardened Wagner mercenaries arrived Belarus last month at the invitation of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Lukashenko has said several times that he has been restraining Wagner fighters who want to attack Poland.

Poland has also seen an increase in the number of mainly Middle Eastern and African migrants trying to cross the border in recent months.

Poland is planning to move up to 10,000 additional troops to the border with Belarus to support the Border Guard, Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said on Thursday.

In 2021, Latvia, Poland and Lithuania faced an immigration crisis when thousands of people, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, sought to cross into Poland from Belarus but were pushed back.

Since Vladimir Putin rose to power as Russia’s president 23 years ago, few things have rocked his leadership as much as Saturday 24 June when Wagner mercenaries barrelled towards Moscow.

The “army within an army” who had been ruthlessly grinding away for months at the vanguard of some of the bloodiest fighting in eastern flanks Ukraine were now on the verge of triggering a war within a war – this time, against the Kremlin.