Russia

Ukraine struck Russia’s Tuapse oil refinery for the second time in less than a week, according to Robert Brovdi, commander of Kyiv’s drone forces, who announced the attack in a social media post. Russian officials said a Ukrainian drone assault on the Black Sea port city of Tuapse triggered a fire and killed at least one person, coming only hours after authorities had put out a blaze caused by a similar strike on 16 April. Rosneft’s Tuapse refinery, which is geared toward exports, can process about 240,000 barrels of crude a…

Hours after a brief Orthodox Easter truce expired, Ukraine and Russia returned to overnight drone warfare, with both sides trading accusations that the 32-hour pause had been violated on a massive scale. Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 98 drones overnight and reported that air defence units shot down 87 of them. Officials in Ukraine said an infrastructure site in the central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region was struck, adding that casualty details were still being established. Russia, for its part, said that “on April…

Charges of truce-breaking flew from both Kyiv and Moscow over Orthodox Easter, with each side alleging thousands of violations as the war stretched into its fifth year. The two countries had agreed to a ceasefire for the religious holiday. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the pause on Thursday, more than a week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky first proposed suspending hostilities. "As of 7:00 a.m. (5am Irish time) on 12 April, 2,299 ceasefire violations were recorded. Specifically: 28 enemy assault…

With a ceasefire now taking hold between the United States and Iran, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pressing for Washington to restore full energy sanctions on Russia, arguing that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz removes the rationale for easing pressure on Moscow’s oil exports. "Now a ceasefire is beginning in the Middle East and the Gulf. And I am waiting for sanctions on Russian oil to be fully reimposed, as they were before," Mr Zelensky said. Last month, the United States relaxed some sanctions on…

In one of the war’s few recurring acts of coordination, Moscow has returned the remains of 1,000 soldiers to Ukraine, according to a source in Russia's negotiating delegation, while Kyiv handed back the bodies of 41 dead Russian troops. The exchanges of war dead have continued even as the four-year conflict, unleashed by Russia's full-scale invasion, has killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and left little room for cooperation elsewhere. Footage published by Russia's state-run Ruptly video agency showed men wearing white…

A Russian FPV drone slammed into a bus in central Nikopol, killing three people and injuring 12 others in one of the deadliest strikes reported in the frontline city in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region. "Three people were killed and another 12 injured. The enemy attacked a city bus with an FPV drone right in downtown Nikopol. It was pulling up to the stop - there were people both on board and at the stop," the head of the region's military administration, Oleksandr Ganzha, wrote on social media. Elsewhere, Russian shelling…

After months of grinding advances, Russia’s offensive in Ukraine stalled in March, with Moscow’s forces failing to make any territorial gains along the front for the first time in two-and-a-half years, according to an AFP analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Over the same period, Ukrainian troops retook nine square kilometres, the analysis found, as Russian momentum slowed across the length of the front line. The total does not include infiltration missions carried out by Russian forces beyond the…

With the war’s economic shockwaves still rippling through energy markets, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on Russia to agree to a reciprocal pause in strikes on energy infrastructure, arguing that such a move could help calm pressure on global oil prices. Mr Zelensky told reporters that Kyiv was prepared to mirror any such step if Moscow stopped targeting Ukraine’s energy network. "If Russia is ready to stop hitting Ukrainian energy facilities, we will not respond against their energy sector," he said. He…

A Russian oil tanker nearing Cuba has opened a narrow lifeline for the island as US President Donald Trump insisted the shipment would do little to change the trajectory of Havana's communist government. Even as the expected delivery promised some badly needed relief, Mr Trump sharpened his warnings toward Cuba's leadership, saying the government would collapse "within a short period of time." The Anatoly Kolodkin, carrying 730,000 barrels of crude, was positioned off Cuba's northeastern coast yesterday evening and was due…

Russia launched nearly 1,000 drones at Ukraine over the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s air force said, after an unprecedented daytime barrage that left at least three people dead across the country. "Taking into account the night attack ... the enemy used almost 1,000 strike drones," the air force wrote on Telegram, saying the daytime strikes covered a broader geographic area than overnight raids and reached western parts of Ukraine, hundreds of kilometres from the front lines. Kyiv's air force reported it shot down 541 of the 556…