Rail bridge and power plant among latest infrastructure targeted by Kyiv in Crimea, where restrictions on public life have come to prevail. What we know on day 1,582
Ukraine said its forces struck a railway bridge, a power plant and other infrastructure targets in Crimea. Ukraine’s special forces said their units, working with the resistance movement in Crimea, destroyed a rail bridge over the North Crimean canal near the village of Rozdolne. The military described the bridge as a key logistics route used to supply Russian forces in southern Ukraine and said drones began hitting the structure late Sunday to Monday, collapsing part of it. A second strike on Tuesday targeted railway repair equipment deployed at the bridge and its remaining sections.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol in Crimea, announced “enforced temporary measures” including the closure of public transport at 10pm, and of large shops and cafes at 8pm, with street lighting also dimmed. Petrol stations had a day earlier been banned from selling fuel to non-government users. Riding mopeds and motorbikes at night was banned last week – the noise said to hinder defences against drones, with an official claiming “children taking night-time rides” have been lured into the treachery by Kyiv.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said drones struck an oil storage depot at the Kerch thermal power plant in eastern Crimea, an electrical substation in the west, and a liquefied natural gas distribution station in Simferopol, the peninsula’s second-biggest city. Parts of Crimea were without power on Tuesday, the area’s energy supplier said, seeking to blame “technical malfunctions”.
Vladimir Putin made his first comments about Ukraine’s strikes disabling Russian strategic infrastructure. Ukrainian drones “coming in a huge stream” were meant to “destabilise” society, disrupting energy supplies and tourism, said the Russian president. He railed that “the entire west” was working for Kyiv. Putin called on the Russian government to take additional measures to offset the consequences from the strikes – continuing his approach of distancing himself from addressing the impact of his war at home.
Russia’s deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, told Putin on Tuesday that officials were considering suspending diesel fuel exports to protect the country’s motorists, adding to ongoing bans on the export of jet fuel and gasoline, according to the Tass news agency. Novak said scheduled maintenance at refineries had been postponed. “We are using reserves that were not previously tapped, and are also encouraging increased supplies of additional volumes to the domestic market.” Restrictions on fuel sales have come in across several regions of Russia.
Crimea’s ministry of sport on Tuesday cancelled all sporting events, competitions, and training sessions for children through 1 September. It described the measures as “aimed solely at ensuring the safety of our children, athletes, and anyone who is involved with sport”. On Monday, Sergei Aksyonov, the governor, said that for security reasons all summer camps in the region had stopped accepting children and new bookings until 1 September.
Moscow is complaining that the US has failed to deliver on “understandings” reached between Putin and Donald Trump at a summit in Alaska last August. After Trump began trying last year to end the war in Ukraine, and blamed Zelenskyy for failing to reach a deal, the Kremlin repeatedly expressed gratitude for the US president’s efforts and spoke of “the spirit of Anchorage” – shorthand, analysts say, for Russia’s contention that Trump agrees Ukraine should hand over the whole of its Donbas region in return for peace.
On Tuesday, though, Sergei Lavrov suggested the Alaska summit may have been a US “ploy to buy time to rearm the Kyiv regime”. The Russian foreign minister’s deputy, Sergei Ryabkov, accused the US of departing from the “fundamental understandings” reached in Alaska.
Vladimir Putin said Russia would enter negotiations if they were based on the Anchorage discussions and the “Istanbul agreements” – also known as the “Istanbul communique”, a set of maximalist Russian demands for Ukraine’s capitulation that were put forward in Turkey in 2022, and which Kyiv never published or signed.
Oleg Ignatov, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Russia wanted the US side to resume diplomacy to help Russia end the war on its own terms. “There’s no structured diplomatic process, there’s no deal on the table, there’s actually nothing,” Ignatov said. “The Russians are very disappointed about this, they really want the Americans to engage.”
Russian strikes killed nine people across Ukraine on Tuesday. In Kryvyi Rig, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home town, “two men aged 25 and 34 and a 54-year-old woman were killed”, said the Dnipropetrovsk region’s governor, Oleksandr Ganzha. Separate Russian attacks on the region killed three others, while strikes on the southern regions of Odesa, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson killed one person each, regional authorities said.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy will skip a high-level conference on the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine amid a deepening rift with Poland over his naming of a military unit after one that killed tens of thousands of Poles during the second world war, writes Jakub Krupa. The EU warned on Tuesday that only Russia, “the aggressor in Ukraine”, would benefit from worsening relations between the two neighbours.
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