More than 2,000 people in total have been detained across Russia for protesting against President Vladimir Putin’s partial military mobilisation, including 798 people detained in 33 towns on Saturday, according to independent monitoring group OVD-Info.
Russia’s military call-up is designed to fill its army with hundreds of thousands of men after a string of setbacks in its seven-month war with Ukraine.
More than 2,000 people have been detained in Russia after protests against a mobilisation order, according to a human rights group.
It comes after Live Nation Poland announced on Saturday that the dates had been scrapped but without giving an explanation.
Russian authorities have vowed to fix errors in their troop call-up after older and sick people were mistakenly ordered to report for duty.
Announcing a partial mobilisation in Russia this week, president Vladimir Putin said military service would only apply to those with “relevant” skills or military experience.
But several cases of people who are unfit for service being summoned have been reported.
For Ukrainian and Russian military planners, the clock is ticking, with the approach of winter expected to make fighting more complicated, AP reports.
But the think tank said Ukrainian forces are still gaining ground in their counteroffensive, launched in late August, that has spectacularly rolled back the Russian occupation across large areas of the northeast and which also prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new drive for reinforcements.
It comes after Ukraine downgraded diplomatic ties with Iran and stripped its ambassador of his accreditation over Tehran’s decision to supply Russian forces with the weapons.
One of the monitors sent at the invitation of the Russian state to assess the legitimacy of the referendums under way in occupied areas of Ukraine has been revealed to be none other than the CEO of a publicly owned German energy provider, Stefan Schaller.
Acknowledging the danger of being instrumentalised for Russian propaganda purposes, Schaller said that he was “always at pains in my statements to concentrate on facts and not on political valuations.
Pro-Russian authorities in the occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson have accused Kyiv’s forces of killing two people in a missile strike on a hotel.
On that note, one of the five Britons released by Russia this week after being detained in Ukraine for months has given his first interview to the media.
He had been living in Ukraine for a number of years and was serving with its regular forces before the Russian invasion began.
It comes after Russia released 10 foreigners it had captured in Ukraine, including five Britons, to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.
Kristin Ulrichsen, a political scientist at Rice University’s Bake Institute in the US, said the working relationship between Saudi Arabia and Russia appears to have been a crucial element in the choice of intermediary.
More than 2,000 people in total have been detained across Russia for protesting against President Vladimir Putin’s partial military mobilisation, including 798 people detained in 33 towns on Saturday, according to independent monitoring group OVD-Info.
At a news conference following his speech to the United Nations general assembly in New York, Lavrov was asked if Russia would have grounds for using nuclear weapons to defend annexed regions of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military said early on Sunday that Russian forces had launched dozens of missile attacks and air strikes on military and civilian targets, including 35 “settlements”, over the past 24 hours.
Its RIA state news agency, citing unidentified sources, said earlier that Ukrainian forces shelled a granary and fertiliser warehouses.
More than 730 people were detained across Russia at the latest protests against the country’s mobilisation decree, a rights group said, three days after president Vladimir Putin ordered the country’s first military draft since the second world war.
Bulgakov, who has been in charge of military logistics since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion, has been replaced by Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of the National Defence Management Centre, who oversaw Russia’s siege of Mariupol.
Lavrov, in a news conference following his speech to the assembly in New York, said the Ukrainian regions where votes were under way would be under Moscow’s “full protection” if they were annexed by Russia, including with nuclear weapons.
The so-called referendums are continuing in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces, areas of Ukraine fully or partially occupied by Russian troops, with residents told to vote on proposals to declare independence and then join Russia.
The regional governor, Oleksandr Starukh, said on Telegram that Russian forces launched “a massive missile strike” on the region from about 10 planes, wounding at least three people.
Russia’s RIA state news agency, citing unnamed sources, said Ukrainian forces shelled a granary and fertiliser warehouses in the region.
It came after Ukraine stripped Iran’s ambassador of his accreditation over what it called Tehran’s “unfriendly” decision to supply Russian forces with drones
The queue at the border between Russia and Georgia is about 10km (six miles) long, where people have reportedly been waiting more than 20 hours to cross
Russian authorities in the occupied regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson have allegedly started handing out draft notices and mobilising men of conscription age who “renounced Ukrainian citizenship and received passports of the Russian federation”, according to Ukraine’s ministry of defence
However, if they ended up in the Russian military, Zelenskiy asked people to save their lives and help liberate Ukraine
Russian forces are probably trying to attack dams in Ukraine in order to flood Ukrainian military crossing points amid Russian concerns about battlefield setbacks, the latest UK Ministry of Defence briefing said
The strikes were “unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations due to the distance between the damaged dams and the combat areas”, it said
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