Ukraine-Russia battle newest: Putin’s forces hit residences in Kyiv with in a single day drone assault, officers say

Russia has launched an overnight drone attack on Kyiv, hitting apartment buildings and sparking several fires throughout Ukraine’s capital, officials have said.

Emergency services were dispatched to Kyiv’s historic Podil district after drones hit two high-rise apartment buildings there and started fires, said Timur Tkachenko, the head of the capital’s military administration.

Mayor Vitali Klitschko urged people to stay in shelters, but said there were no immediate reports of injuries from the attacks that also sparked fires in at least two other districts of the capital. Kyiv, its surrounding region and the eastern half of Ukraine were under air raid alerts on Saturday night.

Reuters staff reported hearing several blasts in what sounded like air defence units in operation.

Moldovan authorities have issued an international wanted notice for a missing pro-Russian member of parliament, who disappeared the day he was handed a 12-year jail sentence on corruption charges.

A second pro-Russian parliamentarian, due to be sentenced next week, has also disappeared, officials said.

Both are associates of Ilan Shor, a fugitive business magnate also jailed for his part in a mass fraud scheme who now leads a political party from exile in Moscow. Moldova’s pro-European government accuses him of trying to destabilise Chisinau.

The warrant for politician Alexandr Nesterovschi was issued late on Friday and interior minister Daniela Misail-Nichitin said attempts to locate him had failed. Authorities in neighbouring Ukraine and Romania had found no trace of him. Ms Misail-Nichitin said police had considered whether Nesterovschi, who was granted Russian citizenship as his sentence was being announced, was hiding in the Russian embassy, but that had proved to be untrue.

Mr Nesterovschi was accused of accepting money from a criminal group to finance the activities of Shor’s “Victory” bloc. Politician Irina Lozovan, awaiting sentencing on similar charges, has also disappeared.

Shor was sentenced to 15 years in prison two years ago in connection with the disappearance of $1bn from the banking system in Moldova’s “theft of the century” in 2014-15. He fled initially to Israel then to Moscow, now has Russian citizenship and has evaded all attempts to extradite him.

Moldovan courts have banned political parties linked to Shor, who has organised noisy anti-government protests in the capital.

With Donald Trump floating the idea of taking control of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, my colleague Tom Watling has this report on the location and details of the facilities in the US president’s sights:

Ukraine’s military have reported 70 combat clashes along the frontline so far on Saturday as of 4pm local time.

The heaviest fighting was once again reported in the direction of Pokrovsk, the key Donetsk city which has for months been central in Vladimir Putin’s sights – an axis of fighting in which the casualty rate is believed to be particularly high since fighting intensified there last year.

The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said in their update on Saturday afternoon that Russia’s forces had also launched artillery attacks in Sumy, Chernihiv and Karkhiv, with fighting ongoing in the latter region, near the settlement of Vovchansk.

Police have said they are not treating the death of Oleg Gordievsky – an 86-year-old Soviet KGB officer who helped change the course of the Cold War by covertly passing secrets to Britain – as suspicious.

Historians consider Gordievsky one of the era’s most important spies. In the 1980s, his intelligence helped avoid a dangerous escalation of nuclear tensions between the USSR and the West.

Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky joined the KGB in the early 1960s, serving in Moscow, Copenhagen and London, where he became KGB station chief. He was one of several Soviet agents who grew disillusioned with the USSR after Moscow’s tanks crushed the Prague Spring freedom movement in 1968, and was recruited by Britain’s MI6 in the early 1970s. He has lived in England since defecting in 1985.

Surrey Police said on Saturday that officers were called to an address in Godalming on 4 March, where “an 86-year-old man was found dead at the property”. It said counterterrorism officers are leading the investigation, but “the death is not currently being treated as suspicious” and “there is nothing to suggest any increased risk to members of the public”.

For Donald Trump, talks with the Kremlin are a path to ending the Ukraine conflict as fast as possible. And if there’s a Nobel Peace Prize in it for him, all well and good. Securing some great deals for US business would be even better. For Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, talks are a path to victory and to the victor, the spoils. To get there, the KGB veteran has read Trump like a book.

Trump is obsessed by his image as the king of the art of the deal. Putin has clocked that and is only too happy to offer Trump the prospect of every kind of deal he can to con the White House into handing over something much more worthwhile. Renewed influence over Ukraine, a lifting of sanctions and a future where Russia is treated as a great power again.

Read the full analysis from Owen Matthews below:

One year since the Moscow concert hall attack killed 145 people, Russian officials asserted on Saturday that it was planned and organised by “the special services of an unfriendly state”.

The aim, according to a a statement by Svetlana Petrenko, the representative of the Russian Investigative Committee, was to “destabilise the situation in Russia”.

Though she did not specify the “unfriendly state,” she noted that “six Central Asians” currently outside of Russia had been charged in absentia and placed on Russia’s wanted list for allegedly recruiting and organising the training of four of the suspected perpetrators.

The four men, all of whom were identified in the media as citizens of Tajikistan, appeared in a Moscow court at the end of March last year on terrorism charges and showed signs of severe beatings. One appeared to be barely conscious during the hearing.

According to Petrenko, 19 people are currently in custody in Russia in relation to the attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall.

A faction of the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the massacre in which gunmen shot people who were waiting for a show by a popular rock band and then set the building on fire. But Russian officials including president Vladimir Putin have persistently claimed – without presenting evidence – that Ukraine had a role in the attack. Kyiv has vehemently denied any involvement.

With Ukraine’s troops having retreated from swathes of territory seized during their incursion into Russia’s Kursk region last August, the Reuters news agency has spoken to some Ukrainians who have cast doubt over the operation’s efficacy.

Mariia Pankova, whose friend Pavlo Humeniuk has been missing for nearly four months after being deployed to Kursk, said tearfully: “I’m just not sure it was worth it, adding: “We’re not invaders. We just need our territories back, we do not need the Russian one.”

Soldier Oleksii Deshevyi, a 32-year-old former supermarket security guard who lost his hand while fighting in Kursk in September, said he saw no logic in the operation.

“We should not have started this operation at all,” he said, speaking in a rehabilitation centre in Kyiv, where he has spent the past six months adjusting to life after injury.

Yet despite her doubts over the operation in Kursk, with Donald Trump now negotiating with Vladimir Putin in a bid to end Russia’s war, Ms Pankova cast doubt over the possibility of a peace deal which prevents Russia from returning to seize more Ukrainian land – and is herself considering joining Kyiv’s armed forces.

“Every time that someone tries to, let’s say, sell some piece of Ukraine, they just have not to forget what we already gave,” she said. “How many lives our people gave for that.”

Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s influential Security Council, has met Serbia’s outgoing deputy prime minister Alexandar Vulin in Moscow and discussed anti-government protests in his country, Russian state news agencies have said.

Both referred to the protests as an attempted “colour revolution” – a term used to describe pro-Western protests that toppled governments in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in recent decades.

“Western intelligence services are behind the colour revolution in Serbia and would like to bring another government to power in Serbia. We will not allow this,” the Tass news agency quoted Mr Vulin as claiming, without providing evidence.

The previous day, Mr Vulin said that Russia’s spy services had assisted Belgrade authorities in responding to the protests – in a move which critics said revealed the extent to which Serbia’s government has become dependent on Moscow.

Mr Shoigu said on Saturday that both countries maintained regular dialogue and exchanged information “including with a view to countering ‘colour revolutions’”, adding: “This helps to prevent destabilisation of the situation in brotherly Serbia in the changing geopolitical environment.”

Students, backed by teachers, farmers and workers, have maintained daily protests across Serbia since last November, when 16 people died in a roof collapse at a train station in the northern city of Novi Sad, which they blame on corruption.

Earlier this week, Serbian parliament formally approved the resignation of prime minister Milos Vucevic, who offered to step down on 28 January, triggering a 30-day deadline for the formation of a new government or the calling of a snap election.