War in Ukraine: Russia fires missiles on kyiv, drones shot down in Rostov… update on the situation

Serhiy Popko added that Ukrainian air defenses also destroyed drones fired by Russian forces. Eight drones and five missiles out of eight fired overnight at the Kiev, Sumy and Poltava regions were shot down, the head of the Ukrainian Air Force said, adding that no casualties or damage had been reported. Kiev region governor Ruslan Kravchenko, however, said two houses had been destroyed and 16 others damaged by falling debris.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced the destruction of two Ukrainian drones fired overnight at the Rostov region in southwestern Russia. The debris from one of them sparked a fire in a warehouse, the region's governor Vasily Golubev said.

A third of Belarusian army on Ukrainian border, Lukashenko says

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko announced on Sunday that nearly a third of his country's armed forces had been deployed to the border with Ukraine, which Minsk accuses of fomenting a “provocation”. This decision, declared the head of state quoted by the official Belta news agency, was taken in response to the positioning of more than 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers on the other side of the border. Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Moscow, added in an interview on Russian television that the border between Ukraine and Belarus was “mined like never before” and that Ukrainian troops would suffer heavy losses if they attempted to cross it.

Andriy Demchenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian border service, told Ukrainska Pravda on Sunday that the situation on the border with Belarus had not changed. "As we can see, Lukashenko's rhetoric has not changed either, constantly fueling an escalation to please the terrorist country", he said. "We do not see any increase in the number of equipment or personnel of Belarusian units near our border."< /p>

The Belarusian president had already stated on Thursday that Ukraine, which launched an operation on Russian territory on August 6 in the Kursk region, could consider attacking Belarus. Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin considered on Friday the hypothesis of an armed provocation by Ukraine highly probable, considering that the situation remained tense on the border.

Moscow denies the existence of indirect talks with Kiev

Russia on Sunday denied reports by the Washington Post that Ukraine's attack on the Kursk region had derailed indirect talks between Moscow and kyiv aimed at halting strikes on the two countries' power and energy facilities. The American daily reported Saturday that delegations from both sides were preparing to travel to Doha this month to negotiate an agreement via the Qatari mediator, but that the meeting had been canceled after the Ukrainian military operation in the Russian region of Kursk, launched on August 6.

“Nobody broke anything because there was nothing to break”, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reacted Sunday. “There were no negotiations, neither direct nor indirect, between Russia and the Kiev regime on the security of civilian infrastructure “strategic”, she insisted. In response to questions from the Washington Post, the Ukrainian presidential office said that the Doha talks had been postponed due to the situation in the Middle East but were to take place in the form of a video conference on August 22.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russians and Ukrainians have spoken directly only in the first weeks of the conflict, in secret talks in Istanbul that failed to produce results, and then to reach an agreement on grain exports from Black Sea ports in July 2022, an agreement that will last for one year.