Ukraine’s security service said it had foiled a plot to assassinate the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, after the arrest of a woman suspected of gathering intelligence about his movements. The unnamed woman was said by the security service, known as the SBU, to be gathering information about Zelenskiy’s visit to the southern Mykolaiv region where Russia was planning a major air assault.
Two Russian missile strikes killed five people and injured 31 when they hit residential buildings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, said Ukraine’s interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, on Monday. According to Klymenko, four civilians died in the first attack and a Donetsk emergency official was killed during the second attack. Search and rescue operations were continuing, Klymenko said.
Serhiy Lysak, governor of Dnipropetrovsk oblast, has reported that a 36-year-old man died and a 68-year-old man was injured in Russian attacks on Nikopol. “The aggressor has been terrorising Nikopol since the morning. It is pounding the city with heavy artillery.” As well as the casualties, he reported that “private houses, farm buildings and cars were damaged. There is damage to gas pipelines and power lines.”
Ukraine on Monday said it was “very satisfied” with a summit held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia over the weekend on a peace settlement. Russia was not invited. Representatives from about 40 countries including China, India, the US and Ukraine took part.
China’s foreign ministry said the Saudi talks helped “consolidate international consensus”. China’s special envoy for Eurasian affairs, Li Hui, “had extensive contact and communication with all parties on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis … listened to all sides’ opinions and proposals, and further consolidated international consensus”, the foreign ministry said.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, on Monday spoke with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the phone, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement. On the war in Ukraine, Wang told Lavrov that China would uphold an independent and impartial position, actively promote peace talks and strive to find a political settlement to the issue, according to the statement, Reuters reported.
The Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, held a phone call with his US counterpart, Antony Blinken, during which he requested ATACMS long-range missiles. “In our call, [Antony Blinken] and I discussed further steps to broaden global support for the peace formula and solutions to expand grain exports.”
Poland’s government on Monday accused Belarus and Russia of orchestrating another migration influx into the EU via the Polish border in order to destabilise the region. Poland’s border guard has asked the defence ministry to send another 1,000 troops to the border with Belarus. The head of the border guard, Tomasz Praga, said this year 19,000 people had tried to cross the border illegally, up from 16,000 in 2022.
Russia said on Monday its troops had advanced 3km (two miles) along the Kupiansk front in north-east Ukraine over the past three days, as it seeks to regain territory. The city of Kupiansk and surrounding areas of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region were liberated by Ukrainian forces in September 2022. Moscow has renewed its assault there.
Ukraine has released images of prisoners of war returned by Russia. Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian presidency, announced that 22 more Ukrainian soldiers had been returned.
Yermak reported that “the Russians shelled the village of Kucherivka, in Kupyan district, hitting a house. Two dead and three injured people are known.” The deaths were in addition to a person killed and several injured during a “difficult night” of Russian shelling of Kherson, said the city’s governor, Oleksandr Prokudin.
A Ukrainian MP said on Monday that key parliamentary factions in Germany had “reached a consensus” to supply Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles with a range of 500km (310 miles), but an official decision was yet to come. Reuters reported Germany’s defence ministry as saying Berlin’s position has not changed: that it does not plan to supply them and they are not the most urgent priority for now.
The Mother Ukraine statue in Kyiv, one of the Ukraine’s most recognisable landmarks, has had its hammer-and-sickle symbol taken down. Officials replaced the Soviet-era emblem with Ukraine’s trident coat of arms as part of a campaign to reclaim Ukraine’s cultural identity from the communist era.
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