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Live Updates: One person killed after Ukraine appears to hit major Russian airbase in Crimea

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  • The head of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, said one person had died as a result of the explosion earlier on Tuesday. Blasts rocked a Russian airbase near seaside resorts in the annexed Crimean peninsula, injuring five people according to local authorities. Witnesses told Reuters they heard at least 12 explosions at about 3.20pm local time from the Saky airbase near Novofedorivka on Crimea’s western coast. They described a final blast around 30 minutes later as the loudest.
  • The head of Ukraine’s state nuclear power firm warned of the “very high” risks from shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the Russian-occupied south and said it was vital Kyiv regains control over the facility in time for winter. Energoatom’s chief, Petro Kotin, told Reuters in an interview that last week’s Russian shelling had damaged three lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Ukrainian grid and that Russia wanted to connect the facility to its grid.
  • The leaders of Estonia and Finland want fellow European countries to stop issuing tourist visas to Russian citizens, saying they should not be able to take holidays in Europe while the Russian government carries out a war in Ukraine. The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, wrote on Tuesday on Twitter that “visiting Europe is a privilege, not a human right” and that it was “time to end tourism from Russia now”, the Associated Press reported.
  • Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad has been struggling with quotas imposed by the EU for sanctioned goods that it can import across Lithuania from mainland Russia or Belarus, the region’s governor admitted. Lithuania infuriated Moscow in June by banning the land transit of goods such as concrete and steel to Kaliningrad after EU sanctions on them came into force, Reuters reported.
  • Russia has launched an Iranian satellite from Kazakhstan amid concerns that it could be used for battlefield surveillance in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Iran has denied that the Khayyam satellite, which was delivered into orbit aboard a Soyuz rocket launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, would ever be under Russian control.
  • Russia has suspended an arrangement that allowed US and Russian inspectors to visit each other’s nuclear weapons sites under the 2010 New Start treaty, in a fresh blow to arms control. Mutual inspections had been suspended as a health precaution since the start of the Covid pandemic, but a foreign ministry statement on Monday added another reason Russia is unwilling to restart them. It argued that US sanctions imposed because of the invasion of Ukraine stopped Russian inspectors travelling to the US.
  • The global health aid agency Unitaid is donating 220 specialised portable breathing devices to Ukraine that can help save lives of premature babies even in frontline hospitals where there is no electrical power. During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, disrupting supply lines and placing newborn babies at risk of death or disability from a lack of access to equipment and oxygen, Reuters reported.
  • More than 10.5 million people have crossed the border from Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said on its website on Tuesday. Ukrainians have been fleeing their homes since the Russian invasion began on 24 February.
  • In an interview, the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin, said the advance of pro-Russian forces in the Donbas was developing in a northern direction, with fighting on the outskirts of Bakhmut and Soledar. He said that the DPR was in negotiations with Pyongyang to bring builders from North Korea in to help rebuild the occupied territory. Pushilin also stated that there would be an “open tribunal over the war criminals of Ukraine”, with the first to be held in Mariupol, which would feature the testimony of the “Azovites”, in reference to Ukraine’s Azov battalion.
  • Russia’s assault towards the town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine has been its most successful axis in the Donbas region in the past month, the UK Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence update. Despite this, it had only gained 10km in that time, while elsewhere in Donbas it had gained only 3km over 30 days – “almost certainly significantly less than planned”.

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