Ukraine-Russia war latest: Number killed and others feared trapped in fire at Russian former research centre

The European Union has approved a plan to use a first tranche of profits from frozen Russian assets for military aid to Ukraine, getting around a Hungarian block, diplomats said on Monday.

Earlier in the day, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the bloc had found a way to use the funds to buy arms and other aid for Ukraine without needing Hungary’s consent.

Borrell said the first tranche of the profits of “around 1.4 billion euros” is expected to be available next week.

The multistorey building stands alone just off a main road. The houses around it are completely destroyed, razed to the ground by relentless Russian shelling, and the dirt road is scarred by shrapnel. All that can be heard is the sound of a bomb being dropped, followed seconds later by a mighty explosion.

The bomb smashes into the ground 10 metres from the building, opening up a huge crater before a swelling fireball engulfs the entire three floors. When the smoke eventually dissipates, the footage shows the building’s whole roof has been ripped off.

This, Russian military bloggers are claiming, is the first test of a 3000kg glide bomb, otherwise known as the Fab-3000, a modified munition that is packed with nearly a tonne and a half of explosives. Earlier versions of these explosives, which are Soviet-era munitions retrofitted with fixed wings and GPS navigation systems that extend their range beyond the reach of Ukrainian anti-air defences, appeared earlier this year. These were the Fab-500s and the Fab-1500s.

On a lazy summer weekend a year ago, Russia was jolted by the stunning news of an armed uprising. The swaggering chief of a Kremlin-sponsored mercenary army seized a military headquarters in the south and began marching toward Moscow to oust the Defense Ministry’s leaders, accusing them of starving his force of ammunition in Ukraine.

Yevgeny Prigozhin and his soldiers-for-hire called off their “march of justice” only hours later, but the rebellion dealt a blow to President Vladimir Putin, the most serious challenge to his rule in nearly a quarter-century in power.

Prigozhin’s motives are still hotly debated, and the suspicious crash of the private jet that killed him and his top lieutenants exactly two months after the rebellion remains mired in mystery.

Russian authorities said more than 30 drones were shot down over the country’s western regions overnight into Sunday, just hours after a Russian bomb attack on Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv killed three people and left dozens in hospitals.

One of the four aerial bombs hit a five-story residential building on Saturday afternoon, officials said. Regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said 41 people were still being treated for injuries.

In a video address following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Ukraine’s partners to bolster its air defenses.

The sanctions were part of trade restrictions, including asset freezes, against 11 entities in five countries, including China, Kazakhstan, UAE, and Uzbekistan, on Friday.

This is the first time Japan has imposed sanctions on an Indian company since 1998 and the first time for China-based firms in connection with the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s southern region of Dagestan held the first of three days of mourning Monday following a rampage by Islamic militants who killed 19 people, most of them police, and attacked houses of worship in apparently coordinated assaults in two cities.

Sunday’s violence was the latest that officials blamed on Islamic extremists in the predominantly Muslim region in the North Caucasus, as well as the deadliest in Russia since March, when gunmen opened fire at a concert in suburban Moscow, killing 145 people.

The March attack was claimed by an affiliate of the Islamic State group. but no one has stepped forward to take responsibility for Sunday’s attacks in Dagestan’s regional capital of Makhachkala and nearby Derbent, both adjacent to the Caspian Sea.

Polish President Andrzej Duda met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping Monday on a visit to Beijing that brought the head of state of a NATO member to a country that has backed Russia in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

At the meeting at the Great Hall of the People accompanied with a full honor guard and 21-gun salute, Duda told Xi that relations between the former Russian-allied nation, which inspired democratic movements with its push for democracy, and China, which remains under single-party Communist Party rule, remain strong.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict was on the agenda for talks, but no remarks on the issue were delivered before journalists were ushered from the vast carpeted meeting room.

Despite war-time restrictions, Ukrainians marked midsummer with festivals that featured frenetic folk dancing, flower decoration and jumping over bonfires.

The festival of Ivana Kupala on Sunday was held as Ukrainians start their third summer at war, with Kyiv and other cities hit by regular blackouts and remaining under nightly curfew.

An hour’s drive south of the capital, several thousand joined the summer festival, many wearing shirts and dresses embroidered with traditional patterns.

Two people jumped to their death from the top floors of a burning eight-storey former Russian electronics research institute in Moscow on Monday.

At least six other people have died in the fire as people became trapped on the top floors and were unable to escape, the state-run TASS news agency reported.

One man was shown jumping from the upper floor of the building by the Baza Telegram channel. Another, with serious burns, fell from the upper floors, footage published by Shot Telegram channel showed.

It was not immediately clear what caused the fire.

A Hungarian legal team in Brussels is looking for ways of challenging an EU decision to use proceeds from frozen Russian assets by circumventing Budapest’s opposition, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on his Facebook page on Monday.

Earlier, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said the EU had found a way to use the proceeds from frozen Russian assets to buy arms for Ukraine despite hold-ups from Hungary.