Ukraine-Russia war latest: Ukraine peace summit 'opens door to limited talks with Russia' (2024)

An update on our previous posts on Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov's trip to Africa.

Mr Lavrov announced that Moscow will sendadditional military supplies and instructors to Burkina Faso tohelp the west African country boost its defence capabilities,Russian state media reported.

Some pictures have come in of Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov's visit to Africa (see 9.20am post), where he met his counterparts from Burkina Faso, Republic of Congo and Guinea.

He also met the President of the Republic of the Congo Denis Sassou Nguesso.

A senior US Treasury official has saidUS and allies' budget assistance is designed to help Ukraine combat corruption and increase transparency - amid its bid to become a NATO member.

Brent Neiman, deputy undersecretary for international finance, said in a speechto the Atlantic Council thinktank that Ukraine's wartime economy has proven resilient during the conflict.

But he said that Ukraine needs to undertake reforms to "reduce the likelihood for conflicts of interest and corruption".

Mr Neiman laid out anti-corruption steps Ukraine has taken, including having public office holders report their asset holdings, insulating Ukraine's special anti-corruption prosecutor's office from political pressure and improving corporate governance at state-owned companies.

The US has provided roughly $175bn to Ukraine, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The European Union and NATO have demanded widespread anti-graft measures before Kyiv can join the blocs.

“To be clear, I believe the US and the international community should help Ukraine defend itself against Russia's barbaric attacks even if there were no scope for Ukraine to make these sorts of reforms," Mr Neiman said.

"Nonetheless, this is an important opportunity to help Ukraine do both.”

“To this end, budget assistance from the United States, Europe, and the International Financial Institutions is designed to help support Ukraine in undertaking a number of priority reforms.”

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected on an anti-corruption platform in 2019. Both Mr Zelenskyy and his aides have portrayed the recent firings of top officials, notably that of Ivan Bakanov, former head of the State Security Service, in July 2022, as proof of their efforts to crack down on graft.

The past two years has seen Ukraine's defence minister, top prosecutor, intelligence chief and other senior officials lose their jobs.

Russia's supreme court has rejected an appeal by sociologist and activist Boris Kagarlitskyagainst his five-year prison sentence on charges of "justifyingterrorism", the TASS state news agency reported.

Kagarlitsky, 65, is a long-time political dissident and hasspoken out repeatedly against the conflict in Ukraine in amagazine he edited and on his YouTube channel.

A petition calling for his release has been signed byintellectuals and politicians from around the world includingCanadian author Naomi Klein, former British Labour Party leaderJeremy Corbyn and former Greek finance minister YanisVaroufakis.

A former teacher at the prestigious Moscow Higher School ofSocial and Economic Sciences, Kagarlitsky was designated a"foreign agent" by the Russian government in 2018 and was lastyear added to a register of "terrorists and extremists".

A Russian court handed him a 600,000-rouble (£5,272) fine inDecember 2023 after finding him guilty of "publicly justifyingterrorism" in a video commenting on a Ukrainian attack on thebridge linking Russia to annexed Crimea in October 2022.

The video was entitled Explosive Congratulations forMostik the Cat - a reference to a real cat who lived on theCrimean Bridge and whose image was used by state media topromote the idea of Crimea belonging to Russia.

Prosecutors appealed, saying the fine was too lenient,and Kagarlitsky's sentence was later increased to a five-yearprison term.

Remote-controlled electric stretchers may be spotted on the Ukrainian battlefield soon.

The vehicle, designed by Dmytro Mamonov, was on display at a Ukrainian manufacturing presentation outside Kyiv last week.

Here Mr Mamonov demonstrates the stability of the medical evacuation vehicle that he built for the military in his workshop in central Ukraine.

The Russian Orthodox Church has "Russified" Ukrainian children abducted by the country's occupying forces, according to a new investigation.

Children from orphanages and boarding schools in the occupied Donetsk region were sent to Russia's Rostov region, a jointinvestigation by DOXA, a Russian opposition student journal, and open source outletKidmapping found.

The report, cited by the Institute for the Study of War, found that in Rostov, the children were visited by senior clergyman Metropolitan Mercury - also known by his secular name Igor Ivanov - who encouraged them to consider baptism into the church.

Other clergy have also called for the baptism of deported Ukrainian children into the church and reportedly encouraged them to join various "military-patriotic" youth organisations in Russia, the report said.

Ukrainian children from occupied Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts also stayed at shelters run by the Orthodox Church in Voronezh Oblast, where clergy and affiliated officials held "military-patriotic" events in an effort to encourage pro-Russian and pro-ROC sentiment among the children and cut them off from their Ukrainian identities.

The Institute for the Study of War previously found that the ROC is instrumental in enacting the Kremlin's Ukraine occupation plan.

Maria Lvova-Belova, the Kremlin-appointed commissioner on children's rights, against whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant due to her role in the deportation of Ukrainian children, is married to an ROC priest.

Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said Moscow is prepared to target French military instructors in Ukraine.

Speaking at a joint news conference with his counterpart in the Republic of Congo, Mr Lavrov said he had "reason to believe" the instructors were "already working" in the country.

It comes after top Ukrainian commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said last week that he had signed paperwork allowing French military instructors to visit Ukrainian training centres soon.

"Regardless of whether they are members of the French Armed Forces or simply mercenaries, they represent an absolutely legitimate target for our armed forces," he said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has also said anyone training Ukrainian troops doesn't "have any sort of immunity, and it doesn't matter whether they are French or not".

The office of French President Emmanuel Macron declined to comment on Mr Lavrov's remarks.

Here is how the situation looks on the ground...

More on the story we brought you yesterday on a Microsoft report that alleged Russia was targeting this summer's Paris Olympics with a disinformation campaign.

Colonel Simon Diggins, former British defence attache in Kabul, told Sky News that Russian disinformation is "only going to get worse".

He said Russia's motivation in attacking France "appears to be sour grapes".

"Russia obviously is not allowed to appear at the Olympics as Russia.

"In the past, when Russia's been put in a bad place like this, for example in the 1984 Olympics, the Soviet Union was banned because of the invasion of Afghanistan.

"They also ran disinformation campaigns and tried to disrupt and divide the Olympics as well."

But Col Diggins believes that this isn't the only reason why Russia is targeting the Olympics.

He said: "The bigger picture is Russia's very, very irritated with France because France has been saying very clearly that they're comfortable with Ukrainians using their missiles for attacks into Russia.

"This slight ambiguity that we saw with the Americans about the use of their weapons systems into Ukraine does not exist with the weapons system provided by France."

Col Diggins added that Russia's disinformation tactics were "very sophisticated" but also are "plausibly deniable" for Moscow.

"A group of people put [disinformation] out, they've got these codenames, which might be criminal, might be hackers - could be anything.

"So the Russian state can claim 'this is not us' but actually it is them and that's what they've been doing elsewhere as well. It's a malign influence operation," he said.

Ukraine's military says it has downed 22 out of 27 Russian drones launched overnight.

The air force said Russian forces launched the Shahed drones from the Russian Kursk region and from occupied Crimea.

Anti-aircraft weapons downed 22 of the drones over Ukraine's Mykolaiv, Kherson, Dnipro, Sumy and Poltava regions, it said.

It did not say what happened to the remaining five.