Ukraine-Russia war latest: Nato jets scrambled to shoot down foreign drone after it enters Latvian airspace

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is reportedly struggling to find a replacement for former envoy to the US Olga Stefanishyna, with prospective candidates being reluctant to take up the job at a critical point in the war, according to two former senior Ukrainian officials and four lawmakers cited by Politico.

Stefanishyna was formally dismissed on 3 August over impending embezzlement charges.

Zelensky had wanted to offer the ambassadorship to Yulia Svyrydenko, the outgoing prime minister, according to a former senior Ukrainian official, but she has declined.

“Framing it as if nobody wants the job would be a kind of oversimplification,” a former unidentified Ukrainian diplomat was quoted as saying by the outlet.

“Of course, there are people who want the job, but there’s no one who really measures up to it. Zelensky is having a hard time filling the position.”

Kim Jong Un’s silence over missile tests earlier this month raises possibility that Pyongyang is refining weapons for use by its ally Russia. Shweta Sharma reports

A Russian military officer who had defected from Ukraine was killed in a bomb blast on Thursday in Russia-annexed Crimea in a targeted assassination plot, the regional governor said.

He was commanding Ukraine’s only submarine, the Zaporizhzhia.

Russia’s Federal Security Service confirmed the death of a military official and announced the detention of a woman, a Russian national, suspected of carrying out the attack.

The suspect was acting “on instructions from Ukrainian intelligence agencies,” said Sevastopol’s governor Mikhail Razvozhayev on Telegram.

Russia and Ukraine exchanged the bodies of killed soldiers on Thursday.

Russia handed Ukraine 261 bodies, while Ukraine returned 24 bodies to Russia, according to officials.

Kyiv says Russia has previously included Russian soldiers and civilians among the remains it hands over, raising suspicions that Moscow may be manipulating the exchanges to inflate the apparent number of Ukrainian deaths.

“The bodies of 261 deceased persons have been returned to Ukraine, which, according to the Russian side, belong to Ukrainian servicemen,” said Ukraine’s prisoners of war agency.

The identities of the 261 bodies have yet to be independently identified.

Fighter jets on a Nato air defence mission shot down a drone that entered Latvian airspace early on Friday, Latvia’s armed forces said on X.

The armed forces later lifted an air threat alert in regions near Russia.

Finland, another Nato and EU member that shares a border with Russia, also temporarily restricted aviation and maritime traffic in parts of the eastern Gulf of Finland as a precaution against possible drones, its defence forces said on X.

Latvia’s armed forces did not immediately provide details about the drone or where it came from.

Countries bordering Russia and Ukraine periodically issue air threat alerts and intercept drones as Moscow and Kyiv continue to exchange attacks more than four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukrainian drones struck a major refinery deep inside Russia, military officials said Thursday, the fourth in three days in Kyiv’s monthslong campaign to choke Moscow’s vital oil sector.

Russia is one of the world’s biggest energy producers, with oil providing an economic mainstay as its army tries to push deeper into Ukraine in a slow and costly advance more than four years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion.

The attacks have dented Russia’s refining capacity, bringing shortages at gas stations. Kyiv officials say the onslaught seeks to compel Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek a peace deal. There is no sign that strategy is working.

A suspected Russian plot to assassinate a Ukrainian-American in Warsaw was foiled by Polish authorities, according to Polish prime minister Donald Tusk.

The suspect, allegedly recruited by Russia’s secret services, was arrested on 7 August.

Police said that he will be in custody for an initial three months.

Tusk said it was the first known attempt by “someone on the orders of Russia” to target a US citizen on the territory of another Nato country.

The target was reportedly a US citizen of Ukrainian origin who was considered “uncomfortable for Putin’s regime”, Tusk said during a press conference.

The operation involved US and Polish intelligence cooperation, Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s minister overseeing intelligence services, said.

Ukraine has reportedly offered Russia a mutual deal to stop attacks on civilian shipping in the Black Sea, aimed at restoring the vital grain export route, Reuters reported.

The move comes as Ukraine’s harvest season begins and its grain exports are severely disrupted.

It also follows US pressure on Zelensky to stop attacks on Russian oil shipments and the port of Novorossiysk, according to The Financial Times.

Kyiv has reportedly made the proposal through a third party, Reuters said, but Russia has not yet responded.

A previous UN-Turkey-backed Black Sea grain deal ran from 2022-23 but collapsed after Russia refused to renew it.

Russian president Vladimir Putin visited Etorofu, one of the four Kuril Islands disputed between Russia and Japan, prompting a strong reaction from Tokyo.

Japan said the visit makes improving already strained relations with Moscow more difficult.

Prime minister Sanae Takaichi said it “hurts the feelings of the Japanese people and is absolutely unacceptable”, adding: “We hope that the Russian side will take the seriousness of this ⁠matter fully to heart.”

The island – known as Iturup in Russia and in Japan as Etorofu – was seized by Soviet forces in 1945 after Japan’s surrender in World War II.

Japan continues to claim the four islands and has made their return a condition for signing a formal peace treaty with Russia.

Relations have deteriorated further since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with Japan joining Western sanctions against Moscow.

Putin’s visit also comes amid Russia’s broader efforts to assert historical territorial claims.

Ukrainian drones targeted a logistics hub owned by Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries and sparked a fire at one of the country’s major oil refineries in Bashkortostan on Thursday, according to regional officials.

Bashkortostan head Radiy Khabirov said 16 drones were shot down over Salavat and another five over the nearby Chishminsky district, according to The Moscow Times.

The areas are about 1,200km east of Moscow and more than 1,300km from Ukraine.

“Two people were injured” in the attacks and were receiving treatment in hospital, Khabirov said on Telegram.

He said falling drone debris caused a fire in an “industrial area”.

Exiled outlet Astra identified the site as the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat refinery, which accounts for about 2.7 per cent of Russia’s total refining capacity.

The refinery halted operations after being damaged in a drone attack last month.

Wildberries said a fire also broke out in an “industrial zone” housing one of its facilities.

The company said staff had been evacuated beforehand and that no retail goods were stored at the site.