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Morning Headlines
AFP: Russia's defence ministry said early on Thursday it had downed 11 Ukrainian drones near Crimea overnight, as well as two drones flying toward the capital Moscow.
AP News: The U.S. and its European allies are importing vast amounts of nuclear fuel and compounds from Russia, providing Moscow with hundreds of millions of dollars in badly needed revenue as it wages war on Ukraine.
Bloomberg: Ukraine’s resilience with the help of mainly NATO weaponry has come to define the war — but its cottage industry of military gadgets is also starting to bear fruit.
BBC News: A government official has been arrested in Germany, accused of passing secret information to Russia.
FT: Blocking Ukraine’s ability to export wheat, barley, corn and other grains opens up an opportunity for Moscow to seize greater share of the global grain market, analysts said. The war has pushed up prices, apparently for the long term, allowing the Kremlin to make up for some of the lost revenue due to western economic sanctions.
RFE/RL: Ukraine's nuclear authority, Enerhoatom, has warned that the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhya is on the verge of a blackout because power was cut off from the main high-voltage line to the facility.
ISW: Speculations about the Wagner Group’s withdrawal from Belarus suggest that aspects of the deal between Putin and Wagner Group financier Prigozhin following Wagner’s armed rebellion on June 24 have collapsed.
More News
Ukrinform: Ukraine has a main role to play in determining its own future, and President Zelensky must personally make decisions about any potential negotiations with Putin. This is how State Department spokesman Matthew Miller commented on the UAE proposal to organize a meeting of the Ukraine and Russia leaders at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, Ukrinform's own correspondent reports.
AFP: Russia has decided to open a consular office in Northern Cyprus, the self-proclaimed republic that is recognised only by Turkey, its leader said Wednesday.
The Guardian: After failing to conquer Ukraine by conventional means, Russia tried an energy war, trying to hobble the power grid and freeze the nation into submission. Now it has launched a food war.
Reuters: Two people were killed and seven injured in an apparent missile attack by Russia on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday, Ukrainian officials said.
The Moscow Times: Russia’s absence from the Saudi-hosted summit to find a peace framework for the war in Ukraine exposed the Kremlin’s vulnerabilities despite the fact that no final joint statement or document was signed, four current and former Russian officials familiar with Russia’s diplomacy admitted to The Moscow Times.
The United States sanctions eight individuals and five entities for enabling Lukashenka’s domestic repression and facilitating Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Canada also imposes additional sanctions on third anniversary of Belarus’s fraudulent presidential elections.
Reuters: One person was killed, eight were missing and 60 were injured in a blast on Wednesday at the site of an optics and optical electronics factory in the Russian town of Sergiev Posad, 50 km northeast of Moscow, local authorities said.
Reuters: Russia effectively abandoned its budget rule on Wednesday as the central bank said it would stop conducting finance ministry foreign currency purchases from Aug. 10 until the end of the year to try and prevent the rouble from plumbing new depths.
Reuters Exclusive: A Kremlin official involved in what international prosecutors call the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia was associated online as a teenager with white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, Reuters has found.
Meduza: More than 800 people have enrolled in Russia’s top universities under quotas for ‘veterans’ of the war in Ukraine and their children, according to the independent outlet iStories. The majority of these students scored lower than the minimum score for enrollment on the country’s college aptitude test, the EGE, or didn’t take the exam at all.
Al Jazeera: An ‘elite’ Chechen military unit has been deployed as a police force in the occupied Ukrainian nuclear city of Enerhodar, Al Jazeera reported Wednesday, citing interviews with engineers who fled the town and its remaining residents.
AP News: The Polish government announced Wednesday that it is planning to deploy an additional 2,000 troops to its border with Belarus, twice the number the Border Guard agency had requested, as fears of illegal migration rise.
Euromaidan Press: Ukraine will receive satellite communications aid from the Swedish company Satcube. It will send around 100 of its portable satellite internet terminals to Ukraine, the company’s CEO, Jakob Kallmer, told Swedish media. Germany will fund the aid. It will bolster Ukraine’s internet connection, including in the military, in addition to already used Starlink terminals.
Bloomberg: Russia is increasingly playing a junior role to China in a relationship that’s largely about Beijing’s desire for resources, Ukraine’s ambassador to Beijing said.
Kyodo News: Japan's expanded blacklist for exports to Russia covering about 750 new items, including used cars, came into force Wednesday, aligning with sanctions imposed by the Group of Seven nations amid the war in Ukraine.
worth mentioning
Joint Statement by the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish Foreign ministers on the third anniversary of illegitimate presidential elections in Belarus
Russian Cinemas Screen Pirated Copies of ‘Barbie’
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