Liveblog: ++ Russia should cut staff in the Danish embassy ++

Denmark has ordered Russia to reduce its embassy staff in Copenhagen. The Kremlin confirmed an upcoming meeting between Russian President Putin and Turkish leader Erdogan. All developments in the live blog.

Belarus has accused neighboring Poland of illegally penetrating its own airspace with a military helicopter. The Mi-24 machine flew to the Berestoviz border region and returned to Poland a little later, reported the Belarusian state agency Belta, citing the border guards of the authoritarian country.

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski told Polsat News: “We will analyze the situation, but such statements by the Belarusian services must be treated with great caution.” As a rule, these were not based on the truth, but pursued the political goal of behaving hostilely towards Poland, emphasized Jablonski.

The Kremlin has criticized Denmark’s call for staff cuts at the Russian embassy in Copenhagen. It is another expression of Denmark’s hostile attitude, the Russian Foreign Ministry said, according to the Reuters news agency. “The necessary conclusions are of course drawn,” said ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to attend the annual United Nations gathering in New York this month. Zelenskyy is also expected to attend a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine, said Albania’s UN Ambassador Ferit Hoxha.

Albania holds the presidency of the 15-member Council in September. From September 18, the heads of state and government are expected in New York for the UN General Assembly. The Security Council meeting on Ukraine is scheduled for September 20.

On the occasion of the start of the new school year in Russia, President Vladimir Putin appeared with selected children and young people. Russian media broadcast how the 70-year-old head of the Kremlin justified, among other things, his war of aggression against Ukraine in a studio that had been converted into a classroom in front of around 30 girls and boys. Putin said it was clear why Russia won World War II: “We were absolutely invincible. And we are now.” With regard to several Ukrainian territories annexed in violation of international law, Putin also claimed that Russia “supported” these “new regions”.

Over the next two and a half years, nearly two trillion rubles ($18.4 billion) from Russia’s state budget will go into rebuilding Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, where the Russian army has wreaked havoc, he claimed. Putin also opened a school in occupied Mariupol in eastern Ukraine via video link. The port city is considered a symbol of the brutality of the Russian army, which besieged Mariupol for weeks last year, completely destroyed it and finally occupied it.

More than 2,000 soldiers from a Russian-led security alliance have begun military maneuvers in Belarus. Troops from Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan took part in the exercises of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Armenia is also a member of the organization but did not send any soldiers. The Belarusian Defense Ministry said the maneuvers were scheduled to last until Wednesday and are in preparation for joint operations, including responding to a nuclear accident.

The exercises took place in three regions in western Belarus bordering NATO member countries Poland and Lithuania. Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau said the purpose of the military exercises was to destabilize the region. Russia has deployed troops and equipment in Belarus for use in the war against Ukraine. The Belarusian armed forces are not involved in the war. In addition, Russia says it has deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

According to its own account, the USA is observing the successes of the Ukrainian military. “We have noted some notable advances by Ukraine’s armed forces over the past 72 hours,” said John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council. This was “in the southern line of advance out of the Zaporizhia area”. In addition, Ukraine has had some successes against Russia’s second line of defense.

The Russian Ministry of Defense also reported that the “most tense and complicated” fighting was taking place near Zaporizhia and Donetsk. However, according to Moscow, Ukrainian forces attacked Russian positions “without success”. The information cannot be verified.

According to Russia, it has taken key positions near the eastern Ukrainian city of Kupyansk. “In the direction of Kupyansk, units of the West Group have improved their tactical position by capturing enemy fortresses and key heights,” the Russian Defense Ministry said.

It also said Ukrainian forces had suffered “significant” casualties. Local Ukrainian authorities had previously reported attacks on several locations.

Denmark has announced that Russia will have to reduce its embassy staff in Copenhagen. According to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow is still allowed to employ a maximum of five Russian diplomats and 20 administrative and technical staff there.

According to Denmark, the country has long tried to negotiate with Russia about issuing visas for employees of the Danish embassy. “These negotiations have not led to any result, as the Russian side has repeatedly tried to include visa requests for Russian intelligence officers in these negotiations,” it said. It is not known how many employees have to leave the Russian embassy. Russia has until September 29 to do this.

The Russian ambassador’s invitation to this year’s Nobel banquet drew criticism in Sweden. “Of course, the Nobel Foundation decides who to invite. But like many others, I was very surprised that Russia was invited,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told AFP. “I wouldn’t have done it if I was in charge of the invitations to an awards ceremony and I understand that this upsets a lot of people in both Sweden and Ukraine.”

The Nobel Foundation announced that this year it would invite all ambassadors from the countries represented in Sweden and Norway, including Russia and Belarus.

According to official information, Russia has put into service the new powerful ICBM “RS-28 Sarmat”. The head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, Yuri Borisov, said on television, as reported by Russian agencies. Earlier in June, President Vladimir Putin said the nuclear missile would soon go into service.

According to Russian information, the weapon stationed in underground missile shafts with the NATO designation “SS-X-30 Satan 2” can carry up to 15 individually controllable nuclear warheads. The US military is more likely to assume up to ten warheads. With a total weight of 208 tons, the rocket is extremely heavy and has a range of 18,000 kilometers. The new missile is intended to replace the “RS-20” (NATO: “SS-18 Satan”) type ICBMs from the 1980s.

Russia shot down a total of 281 Ukrainian drones this week, according to the Moscow Defense Ministry. Of these, 29 were intercepted over the west of the country, the ministry said. Since the beginning of its war of aggression on February 24, 2022, Russia itself has regularly attacked targets in Ukraine from the air, both with drones and with missiles.

The new school and university year has started in Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war, more and more men have enrolled to study – often to avoid being drafted into the army. Hardly anyone wants to talk about it.

US authorities accuse a German-Russian of having exported US-made military technology to Russia. The US Department of Justice said the 33-year-old had violated export controls by selling US microelectronics to a Russian company that supplies “critical electronic parts” to the Russian military. The man had been arrested in Cyprus a few days earlier at the request of the United States.

According to the US authorities, the 33-year-old used a company in Cyprus to disguise the true buyer of the products and informed the dealers that the parts were used in fire protection systems in the EU state and in other approved countries. However, the actual buyer was the St. Petersburg-based company Electrocom VPK, which supplies electronic parts for weapons production.

The Russian government presented new history books at the beginning of the school year. Key messages: the desire for a return to Soviet grandeur and the justification for the war against Ukraine.

The drone attack on Pskov airport in Russia, which hit several military planes, was carried out from Russian territory, according to Ukrainian sources. “The drones used to attack the Kresty airbase in Pskov were launched from Russia,” Ukrainian intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told online services. During the attack on Wednesday night, two Il-76 military transport aircraft were destroyed and two others were “seriously damaged”.

Two more cargo ships have left southern Ukrainian Black Sea ports despite a Russian naval blockade. According to data from the Marinetraffic website, the two ships left the port of Pivdennyj, about 20 kilometers east of Odessa. The freighters “Filia Glory” and “Ocean C ourtesy” sail under the flags of Liberia and the Marshall Islands. It was stated for the “Filia Glory” that it first called at the port of Odessa and then set course for the Bulgarian port of Varna. Whether the ships were loaded with cargo was not revealed known.Other ships had also ignored the blockade.

According to the AP news agency, at least two Ilyushin Il-76 transport planes were destroyed in a suspected Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian air base. This emerges from satellite images evaluated by the AP.

According to local media reports, four “Il-76” were damaged in drone attacks on the airport. Thursday’s footage shows Princess Olga International Airport in Pskov, which is used for both military and civilian purposes. It is about 700 kilometers north of the Ukrainian border near Estonia and Latvia.

Russia threatens to block a G20 statement if its views on Ukraine and other crises are not taken into account. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told students in Moscow. The G20 summit is in New Delhi on September 9th and 10th. Russia is represented by Lavrov. President Vladimir Putin has not left the country since an international arrest warrant was issued for him in March.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan will hold talks in Sochi on Monday. This was announced by the Russian Presidential Office.

Turkey wants to reach a renewal of the agreement that secures Ukrainian grain exports across the Black Sea. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had already held talks with his Russian colleague in Moscow. Ankara repeatedly emphasizes that the agreement is important for the secure supply of food to the world. It also ensures security in the Black Sea region.

The Nobel Foundation, which is responsible for the Nobel Prizes, is backing down on its invitation policy. Representatives from Belarus, Iran and Russia were again invited to this year’s Nobel Prize awards on December 10 in Stockholm and Oslo, said the Foundation’s director, Vidar Helgesen, according to the AP news agency.

Last year, the ambassadors of Belarus and Russia were not invited because of the war against Ukraine. The Iranian ambassador did not receive an invitation because of the police’s brutal crackdown on protests in his country, and the right-wing populist party Sweden Democrats was also left out. Helgesen now said the Nobel Foundation wanted to counter a general trend to limit dialogue between people with different views. She invites all countries that have diplomatic missions in Sweden and Norway, as well as parties that are democratically elected to parliament.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Inhuman Treatment, Alice Jill Edwards, will visit Ukraine next week to investigate the prosecution of war-related crimes. This was announced today by the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Office in Geneva.

This is the Australian lawyer’s first visit to the country. The government in Kiev had invited Edwards to do so. The focus of the week-long visit, which begins on Monday, is possible crimes of torture, including rape, but also the prison conditions of prisoners of war and suspected war criminals.

According to British estimates, Russia has taken special protective measures for the Crimean bridge. As of Tuesday, images confirmed that Russia had erected an underwater barrier, the British Ministry of Defense wrote today on short message service X, formerly Twitter.

Shipwrecks and floating barriers were used for this. In the southern part of the bridge there are several ships at a distance of 160 meters. The Kerch Strait, which connects the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azov, is a bottleneck for militarily supplying Russian forces in the occupied areas of Cherson and Zaporizhia. “Russia is very dependent on the Crimean Bridge and ferries to cross the straits,” the British wrote. Russia also uses smoke generators and air defense systems.

According to the authorities, three people were injured in a Russian rocket attack in the central Ukrainian region of Vinnytsia, regional governor Serhiy Borsov said. “Unfortunately, there are victims who are given all the help they need,” he wrote on the short message service Telegram.

During the night attack, a civilian company was hit by a Russian cruise missile. The Ukrainian air defense shot down a second cruise missile over the central Kirovohrad region.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres wants to revive the grain agreement with Russia and Ukraine with new proposals. He wrote a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a number of concrete offers, Guterres said, according to the AP news agency. “We have some concrete solutions to the problems that will allow effective or more effective access of Russian food and fertilizers to global markets at reasonable prices,” he said. Guterres said nothing about the exact content of his proposals. He demanded that the new agreement must be stable and not “drag from crisis to crisis” again.

Lavrov said at a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan that Russia had presented a list of demands that the West must meet in order for Ukrainian grain shipments across the Black Sea to resume.

The United Nations and Turkey negotiated an agreement in July 2022 that allowed Ukraine to ship grain and other food from three Black Sea ports. The deal was extended three times before Moscow suspended it in July.

Russia reported multiple drone strikes on Russian cities this morning. According to a Russian governor, two Ukrainian drones have attacked the Russian city of Kurchatov. A residential building and an administration building were damaged, writes Roman Starowoit in the messaging app Telegram.

According to the Russian air defense system, it shot down a drone that was approaching the city near Moscow, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin also wrote on Telegram. The drone was shot down near Lyubertsi, a suburb south-east of the Russian capital, he said.

In his evening video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed to sign a joint arms production contract with Britain’s largest defense contractor, BAE. “Our goal is to produce the most useful defense weapons in Ukraine. And that will happen,” he said.

According to a Russian governor, the air defenses of Russia shot down an unknown missile in the north-western region of Pskov Oblast. Governor Mikhail Vedernikov posted a video on Telegram showing an explosion in the sky. According to Wedernikow, it was an “unidentifiable object”. There was no damage to the ground after the launch.

In the same region, Russia said it had already thwarted a drone attack over the Pskov military airfield on Wednesday. As a result four Russian transport planes had been damaged.

In view of increasing drone attacks on the Russian capital, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has spoken of expanding its own air defense. “This year we have done a lot to protect Moscow from drones and attempted terrorist attacks,” Sobyanin told representatives of municipal companies, according to the Interfax agency.

In the past few weeks, new anti-aircraft systems have been installed, sometimes on a daily basis, claimed Sobyanin, who wants to be re-elected in more than a week. “Sometimes the asphalt doesn’t even have time to cool down – and then the rockets are deployed, shooting down the flying drones.”

Independent observers, on the other hand, have repeatedly expressed doubts about official reports that many of the suspected Ukrainian drones were recognized and shot down by Moscow’s air defenses. The unmanned missiles have repeatedly penetrated into the city center in recent weeks and caused damage there, for example in the famous skyscraper district of Moscow City.

According to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, the country needs a total of 160 combat aircraft for defense. Ukraine has signed an arms production contract with a British company. Thursday’s developments to read.