Poland announced on Monday it would restrict Russian diplomats’ movements on its soil, prompting Moscow to pledge retaliatory measures. The announcement came after Poland detained several people suspected of planning sabotage attacks on behalf of Russian security services. The new measures will restrict the movement of consular staff to the Warsaw region, but will not affect the Russian ambassador, Sergei Andreyev.
Poland also said it would buy €677m ($735m) worth of long-range missiles from the United States to boost its defence capabilities to counter potential Russian threats. The contract, which is due to be officially signed on Tuesday, is part of a rapid modernisation of the Polish army, accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Spain will provide Ukraine with €1bn in military aid this year after the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, met in Madrid to sign an “enormously important”, decade-long defence and security deal. Although the precise details of the agreement have not been made public, the Spanish government said its assistance would “allow Ukraine to prioritise its capacities, including its air defences”.
Zelenskiy is set to visit Belgium on Tuesday to sign another security deal, the Belgian prime minister’s office said. The Ukrainian leader is set to fly to Brussels from Spain as part of his whistlestop tour to several European countries in a bid to rally support for Kyiv. After Belgium, Zelenskiy is expected to head to Portugal.
The Russian-held city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine came under attack twice within three hours early on Tuesday, officials said, the latest in a series of strikes near the city. Fires appeared to have broken out in both strikes. Ukraine made no official comment on either incident but Ukrainian news outlets said the target of the second strike was an airfield and posted a video of a fire spreading over a wide area.
Russia said Monday it had downed a drone outside Moscow, with restrictions imposed at two major airports in the capital for under an hour. “Today around 9pm in the district of Kuchino in Balashikha, air defences downed a drone, debris fell on a private house,” Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said on Telegram.
Russian forces captured another two villages in Ukraine, the defence ministry said on Monday. The settlements were Ivanivka in the Kharkiv region and Netailove in Donetsk.
A Ukrainian drone targeted a long-range radar site deep inside Russia on Sunday, the second such strike in a week on infrastructure used by Moscow to monitor Ukraine’s military activities, a Kyiv intelligence source said. The source said the strike was aimed at a “Voronezh M” radar near the city of Orsk in the Orenburg region 1,500km from the closest territory held by Kyiv’s forces.
Three people were killed and six wounded in a Russian attack on Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv region on Monday, Ukrainian emergencies service and a local official said, while one person was killed in a Russian attack on Kharkiv.
Ukraine on Monday walked back an announcement that French military instructors would soon arrive in the country, saying it was still in talks with Paris and other allies on the issue. Kyiv’s defence ministry made the “clarification” after army chief Oleksandr Syrsky said that the first French military instructors would soon arrive in the war-battered country.
Swiss lawmakers on Monday called on the government to take a harsher stance on Russian spies operating in the country – a centre of international activity considered a hub for espionage. After a vote in the lower house of parliament last year, the upper house voted overwhelmingly Monday for the systematic expulsion of spies deemed a threat to Switzerland’s national security or its diplomatic standing. The vote targeted what is feared to be a growing number of Russian spies in Switzerland since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday joined France President Emmanuel Macron in warning that Europe was “mortal” in the face of Russian aggression. “We can’t take for granted the foundations on which we have built our European way of living and our role in the world,” the two leaders wrote in a joint op-ed for the Financial Times daily. “Our Europe is mortal, and we must rise to the challenge.”
Russia is trying to test the west’s limits by stepping up its hybrid attacks across Europe, Estonian foreign minister Margus Tsahkna told AFP on Monday. The warning came after Estonia last week was rattled by a border incident with Russia that saw Moscow remove buoys demarcating their shared frontier on the River Narva. “It was not for us the question only about our border, but also it’s the EU and Nato border as well – so and it was provocative behaviour,” he said.
EU foreign ministers urged Hungary on Monday to stop blocking measures to provide billions of euros in military aid to Ukraine, as long-simmering tension with Budapest boiled over. Even before a meeting of the EU’s 27 foreign ministers began, Lithuania’s top diplomat Gabrielius Landsbergis accused Hungary of systematically blocking EU foreign policy positions. “Almost all of our discussions and needed solutions and decisions by [the] EU are being blocked by just one country,” he said as he arrived at the meeting in Brussels.
Moldova has granted citizenship to several members of dissident Russian-Belarusian rock band Bi-2, which opposes Moscow’s war in Ukraine, the government said on Monday. President Maia Sandu had signed a decree giving nationality to “certain members of Bi-2”, her office chief Adrian Balutel announced on social media.
The Guardian