Russia-Ukraine war live: girl, 2, killed in Dnipro blast as Kyiv fends off air attack; border town shelled, says Belgorod governor

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A group of pro-Ukraine Russian fighters said on Sunday they had taken two Russian soldiers captive amid fighting in Russia’s Belgorod region and offered to exchange them during a personal meeting with the regional governor.

The joint statement by the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps was posted on the former’s Telegram channel.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the claim.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said on Sunday that Ukrainian forces shelled a market area in the town of Shebekino, about 7 km (4 miles) from the Ukrainian border, but that no one was injured.

He said the shelling had caused fires to break out near the town’s market, a private area and a grain depot. Reuters was not able to immediately verify his account.

“Emergency services are on the scene,” governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on the Telegram messaging app

A senior Ukrainian government official expressed “disbelief” on Sunday after learning that nearly half of Kyiv bomb shelters inspected during an initial audit were closed or unfit for use.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy ordered an inspection of all Ukrainian shelters on Friday, a day after three people were killed in Kyiv when they were unable to access one during a Russian airstrike, Reuters reported.

Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s minister of strategic industries, said that out of 1,078 shelters examined on the first day, 359 were unprepared and another 122 locked, while 597 were found to be usable.

“I greeted with disbelief that fact that half were open and considered ready,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

“Yesterday, when we selectively checked the shelters in the Obolon district with our mayor, the absolute majority of the shelters were closed.”

Kamyshin said the inspections, taking place with the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine now in its 17th month, would continue.

Rescue teams search through rubble after an airstrike hits a residential district in Ukraine’s central city of Dnipro.

Rescuers were seen digging with their bare hands as they searched for survivors among the debris.

A two-year-old girl was found dead under the rubble of a house outside the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro overnight after Russian missiles had struck a residential area, the region’s governor said.

Serhiy Lysak added that another 22 people were injured, including five children, three of whom were previously described as seriously hurt, in an attack that destroyed or damaged several buildings.

“Overnight, the body of a girl who had just turned two was pulled from under the rubble of a house,” the governor said, who said 17 children had been killed in the Dnipropetrovsk region alone since the start of the war.

A total of 485 children are known to have died across Ukraine and a further 1,005 have been injured since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, according to figures compiled by the country’s office of the prosecutor general on Sunday.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine has grown into an existential conflict for the Kremlin over the past 15 months, its search for internal enemies has intensified, with a sharp rise in treason cases that experts have equated to a “spymania”.

While many of the treason cases focus on those allegedly fighting for or aiding Ukraine, others have burrowed into seemingly loyal state institutions such as the scientific research centres that helped research the very weaponry that Russia is using to strike Ukraine.

Last week, the first of three hypersonic missile scientists to be arrested on suspicion of treason went on trial in a case where the evidence and accusations remain secret. All were from a single institute in Novosibirsk, the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM).

Anatoly Maslov, a 76-year-old professor of aerodynamics at the institute, is thought to be suspected of passing secrets to China, possibly a result of his participation in international conferences on aerodynamics in the 2010s.

The arrest of the respected scientist and two colleagues has led to a rare backlash among the scientific community at his institute, which published an open letter calling for his release.

Four people have been detained in a criminal investigation into the death of a Kyiv woman outside a locked air-raid shelter, the Kyiv regional prosecutor’s office has said.

The office said on Saturday that one person, a security guard who had failed to unlock the doors, remained under arrest, while three others, including a local official, had been put under house arrest, Associated Press reported.

Concerns around civilian safety increased in Ukraine on Saturday as officials said an inspection had found nearly a quarter of the country’s air-raid shelters locked or unusable.

The review came days after the 33-year-old woman allegedly died waiting outside a shuttered shelter in Kyiv during a Russian missile barrage on Thursday.

According to the prosecutor’s office, the suspects face up to eight years in prison for official negligence that led to a person’s death.

The Ukrainian interior ministry said that of more than 4,800 shelters it had inspected, 252 were locked and a further 893 “unfit for use”.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said city authorities had received more than 1,000 complaints regarding locked, dilapidated or insufficient air-raid shelters within a day of launching an online feedback service.

Shelling by Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Belgorod region continued overnight on Sunday after two people were killed the previous night and hundreds of children were evacuated away from the border, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Sunday.

“Overnight, it was quite restless,” Gladkov said on the Telegram channel, adding that the Shebekino and Volokonovsky districts suffered “lots” of damage from shelling during the night.

More than 4,000 people were relocated to temporary accommodation in the region, which borders Ukraine to its south and west, Gladkov said.

Five drones were shot down and four were jammed and did not hit their targets in Dzhankoi in Crimea, a Russian-installed official in the peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014 said on Sunday.

There were no casualties but windows were broken in several houses, Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of Crimea’s administration, said on the Telegram messaging app.

He added that one unexploded drone was found on the territory of a residential house, forcing the temporary evacuation of about 50 people in the area.

Reuters could not independently verify the report.

Russia has a military airbase near Dzhankoi. Ukrainian officials have long said the city and surrounding areas have been turned into Moscow’s largest military base in Crimea.

A drone was shot down in Dzhankoi in Crimea, a Russian-installed official in the annexed peninsula said on Sunday.

Reuters reports that Oleg Kryuchkov, an adviser in the Moscow-installed administration of Crimea, said “there is damage to windows in several houses in a residential district” from the overnight incident.

He posted on the Telegram messaging app:

All services are working. Official information – in the morning.

Russia has a military airbase near Dzhankoi. Ukrainian officials have long said the city and surrounding areas have been turned into Moscow’s largest military base in Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Russia launched a wave of air attacks on Ukraine early on Sunday, with air defence systems repelling all missiles and drones on their approach to Kyiv, the city’s military officials said.

Reuters reports that the capital’s military administration chief, Serhiy Popko, said that according to initial information, “not a single air target reached the capital”.

Air defence destroyed everything that was heading towards the city already at their distant approaches.

Witnesses reported hearing several blasts in the Kyiv region, but not in the city, from what sounded like air defence systems hitting targets.

All of Ukraine was under air raid alerts for nearly three hours.

There were unverified Ukrainian social media reports of blasts heard in Kryvyi Rih in southern Ukraine, near the central city of Kropyvnitskyi, and in the north-eastern region of Sumy.

The full story is here:

A two-year-old girl was killed and 22 people injured when an airstrike hit a residential district in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, officials said on Sunday.

Agence France-Presse reports that the attack, which President Volodymyr Zelenskiy blamed on Russia, partially destroyed a pair of two-storey buildings as well as 10 private homes, a shop and a gas pipeline, according to the region’s governor.

Russian airstrikes over Ukraine have ratcheted up in recent weeks, as have incursions in the opposite direction, ahead of a long-expected Ukrainian counteroffensive to regain territory.

After Saturday’s strike, a girl’s body was pulled from the wreckage.

Serhiy Lysak, the Dnipropetrovsk region’s governor, posted on Telegram early on Sunday:

At night, a girl’s body was retrieved from under the rubble of a house in the Pidhorodnenska community. She just turned two.

Lysak added that 22 people were injured, five of them children, having said earlier that three boys were in serious condition at hospital.

Zelensky said on Facebook:

The Russians attacked the city. Once again, Russia proves it is a terrorist state.

Hello and welcome back to our continuing live coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine. I’m Adam Fulton and here’s a roundup of the latest developments.

A two-year-old girl has been killed in an airstrike that hit a residential district in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro and also left 22 people injured, officials said on Sunday.

The girl’s body was pulled from the wreckage, the regional governor said, after an attack that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy blamed on Russia.

Meanwhile, Russia launched a wave of air attacks on Ukraine early on Sunday, with Kyiv military officials saying the capitals’s air defence systems repelled all the missiles and drones on their approach to the city.

More on those stories shortly. In other news:

Ukraine is ready to launch its long-awaited counteroffensive to recapture Russian-occupied territory, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview published on Saturday. The Ukrainian president said: “We strongly believe that we will succeed. I don’t know how long it will take … but we are going to do it and we are ready.”

Ukraine’s plans for the counteroffensive remained on track, the deputy defence minister, Volodymyr Havrylov, told Reuters on Saturday, despite the “unprecedented” wave of missile and drone attacks across the country in recent weeks.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive plan is “very impressive” and can succeed, Gen David Petraeus told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, adding that the Ukrainians were “determined to liberate their country”. Petraeus, who has headed the CIA and led international forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been in Kyiv recently, meeting Volodymyr Zelenskiy and others.

Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has said Kremlin factions are destroying the state by trying to sow discord between him and Chechen fighters. He said on Saturday that a dispute between him and Chechen forces had been resolved. But the Wagner chief blamed the discord on unidentified Kremlin factions, which he calls “Kremlin towers”.

Two people were killed and two injured by Ukrainian artillery fire on Russia’s Belgorod region on Saturday, said the governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. He wrote on Telegram: “Since this morning, settlements in the Shebekino urban district have been under fire from the Ukrainian armed forces.” Ukraine has denied attacking Belgorod, saying Russian rebels are responsible.

Yevgeny Prigozhin said he was ready to send fighters to the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine and has come under intense shelling.

Kyrgyzstan’s president has said his ex-Soviet republic is ready to work with the EU. Sadyr Japarov, whose country is an ally of Moscow, said on Saturday: “Kyrgyzstan is ready to work hand in hand with the European Union to resolve shared problems, encourage dialogue and find lasting solutions.”

Indonesia’s defence minister, Prabowo Subianto, has proposed a peace plan for the war in Ukraine, calling for a demilitarised zone and a UN referendum in what he called disputed territory. Ukraine dismissed the proposal.

The Kremlin has banned western journalists from “Russia’s Davos”. The Kremlin said journalists from “unfriendly countries” would not be allowed into the St Petersburg international economic forum, which begins on 14 June and which President Vladimir Putin has used to showcase the Russian economy to global investors.

The forced deployment of once-elite Russian VDV troops to Bakhmut amid the withdrawal of Wagner mercenary forces means “the whole Russian force is likely to be less flexible in reacting to operational challenges”, the UK Ministry of Defence has said.

During an inspection of more than 4,800 shelters, 252 were locked and a further 893 “unfit for use”, the Ukrainian interior ministry said through its press service. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said on Saturday that the capital’s authorities had received more than 1,000 complaints regarding locked, dilapidated or insufficient air raid shelters within a day of launching an online feedback service.

Russia has said it will come back to full compliance with the New Start nuclear arms control treaty if Washington abandons its “hostile stance” towards Moscow, Russian news agencies reported, citing the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov.