Putin apologises over Azerbaijan plane crash as Kremlin says Russian air defences were repelling Ukrainian attack – live | Ukraine

The European Union’s top diplomat on Saturday called for a “swift, independent” probe into the Azerbaijan Airlines crash, after the US suggested the incident may have been caused by a Russian anti-aircraft missile.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign affairs chief posted on X:

Reports that Russian fire could have caused the Azerbaijan Airlines plane are a stark reminder of #MH17. I call for a swift, independent international investigation. Our thoughts are with the families and friends of the victims. I wish for a speedy recovery to the injured.

Here is the response from Azerbaijan. Regarding the phone call with Putin, Baku’s presidency said in a statement:

President Ilham Aliyev emphasized that the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane encountered external physical and technical interference while in Russian airspace, resulting in a complete loss of control.

It added Aliyev:

…highlighted that the multiple holes in the aircraft’s fuselage, injuries sustained by passengers and crew due to foreign particles penetrating the cabin mid-flight, and testimonies from surviving flight attendants and passengers confirm evidence of external physical and technical interference.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he expressed condolences to Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev about the Azeri plane that crashed in Kazakhstan.

He posted on X:

The key priority now is a thorough investigation to provide answers to all questions about what really happened.

Russia must provide clear explanations and stop spreading disinformation.

We are getting more from Reuters on the conversation between Putin and Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan.

In a statement, the Kremlin said:

(President) Vladimir Putin apologised for the tragic incident that occurred in Russian airspace and once again expressed his deep and sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to the injured.

It was noted in the conversation that the Azerbaijani passenger aircraft, which was travelling according to its schedule, repeatedly tried to land at Grozny airport. At that time, Grozny, Mozdok and Vladikavkaz were being attacked by Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, and Russian air defense systems repelled these attacks.

Aliyev told Putin the passenger plane was subjected to extraneous physical and technical intereference in Russian airspace, completely lost control and was diverted to Aktau, Reuters adds.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologised to Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, for what the Kremlin said was a “tragic incident” in Russian airspace involving the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan on 25 December.

The Kremlin said as the aircraft attempted to land in Grozny, Ukrainian drones were attacking Russia and Russian air defence forces repelled the attacks.

“During this time, Grozny, (the town of) Mozdok and Vladikavkaz were being attacked by Ukrainian combat drones and Russian air defence was repelling these attacks,” the Kremlin said Putin told Aliyev, without saying that Russian air defence hit the plane.

Italian police said on Saturday that they were investigating cyberattacks claimed by a pro-Russian group targeting several websites including Milan’s airports and the foreign ministry.

The websites of the ministry, Malpensa and Milan-Linate airport, and the transport systems in Siena and Turin were hit, according to national cybersecurity police spokesman Marco Valerio Cervellini, Reuters reports.

The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057(16) claimed responsibility for the attacks in a Telegram post, Cervellini said on LinkedIn.

The group is known for targeting public institutions and strategic sectors in Nato countries that have supported Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion.

Ukraine said on Saturday it had struck a storage and maintenance depot for long-range Shahed drones in Russia’s Oryol region, adding that this had “significantly reduced” Russia’s ability to launch mass drone attacks on Ukraine.

Ukraine military’s general staff said in a statement on Telegram the attack took place on Thursday and was conducted by Ukraine’s air force.

The statement said:

As a result of the strike, a depot for storage, maintenance and repair of Shahed kamikaze drones, made of several protected concrete structures, was destroyed.

This military operation has significantly reduced the enemy’s potential in terms of conducting air raids of strike drones on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.

Moscow has not made any comment on the attack.

Ukraine’s air force said earlier on Saturday it had downed 15 out of 16 drones launched by Russia overnight, with the other one disappearing from radars.

Regular flights between Ashgabat and Moscow are to be suspended for a month from 30 December after an Azerbaijan Airlines jet crashed in Kazakhstan, the state-run Tass news agency reported on Saturday citing Turkmenistan’s national air carrier.

A passenger jet operated by Azerbaijan Airlines, which had been due to land in Russia, crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan on Wednesday killing 38 people.

The plane was flying from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to the Russian city of Grozny in Chechnya when it crashed in a field near Aktau, hundreds of miles off its planned route. Twenty-nine people survived.

Germany said on Saturday the suspected sabotage of an undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia this week was a “wake-up call” that demanded new EU sanctions against Russia’s “shadow fleet”, Agence France-Presse reports.

The Estlink 2 cable that carries electricity from Finland to Estonia was disconnected from the grid on Wednesday, just over a month after two telecommunications cables were severed in Swedish territorial waters in the Baltic.

In a statement to the Funke media group, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said:

Almost every month, ships are damaging major undersea cables in the Baltic Sea.

Crews are leaving anchors in the water, dragging them for kilometres along the seafloor for no apparent reason, and then losing them when pulling them up.

It’s more than difficult to still believe in coincidences. This is an urgent wake-up call for all of us.

Baerbock urged “new European sanctions against the Russian shadow fleet”, ships that transport Russian crude and oil products despite embargoes imposed over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The fleet is “a major threat to our environment and security” that is used by Russia “to finance its war of aggression in Ukraine”, she said.

Finnish authorities said on Thursday they were investigating the oil tanker, Eagle S, that sailed from a Russian port, as part of a probe into “aggravated sabotage” of the Estlink cable.

Nato will bolster its military presence in the Baltic Sea in response, the Western alliance’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said on Friday.

Oleksandr Mykhed

Can Europe switch to a ‘wartime mindset’? Take it from us in Ukraine: here is what that means

Day 1,024 of the invasion. Kyiv, 7am. Friday the 13th. In a former life, someone would have observed that this is a day that portends bad luck. But in a country where shelling is a daily occurrence, it has become irrelevant. I wake up to the sound of an app on my phone warning me of an increased missile threat. While my partner and I are hiding in the corridor, I read the news that the Nato chief, Mark Rutte, has called on members of the US-led transatlantic alliance to “shift to a wartime mindset”.

With the first bang of the air defence system, a thought strikes me: for those who have not already been living with it for nearly three years, how would you explain this mindset? What is this wartime thinking?

Let’s start with the basics. Try to accept the thesis that Russia is your enemy. Everything Russian is your enemy. I know this is complicated. But Russia has been using literally everything as an instrument of hybrid warfare: sports, ballet, classical music, literature, art – these are all platforms for promoting its narratives. Even your neatest Russian Orthodox church could conceal Russian intelligence officers, just waiting for the command to put down their incense burners and take up arms. Don’t forget that for advocates of the political doctrine known as “the Russian world”, this world is potentially limitless; it exists wherever the Russian language is spoken and monuments to Pushkin have been plonked down.

Read the full report here.

Charlotte Higgins

On 8 March 2023, International Women’s Day, Russian soldiers were handing out tulips and boughs of mimosa to women and girls in the city of Melitopol, southern Ukraine – a move designed to promote friendly relations between the occupiers and the inhabitants.

But the night before, someone had been discreetly sticking posters to walls and lamp-posts. They bore the image of a young Ukrainian woman, dressed in a traditional embroidered shirt, smashing a bouquet over a Russian soldier’s head. “I don’t want flowers,” read the slogan. “I want my Ukraine.”

This was one of the earliest acts of a women’s resistance movement in Russian-occupied Ukraine that claims hundreds of members, from Crimea in the south to the Luhansk region in the east.

The movement is called Zla Mavka, which, when roughly translated, means “wicked forest spirit”. The mavky of Ukrainian mythology are female supernatural beings who tempt men to their doom.

Read the full report here.

Hello and welcome to the Ukraine live blog. We start with news that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has foiled a plot by Ukraine to kill a high-ranking Russian officer and a pro-Russian war blogger with a bomb hidden in a portable music speaker.

According to the FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, a Russian citizen had established contact with an officer from Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency through the Telegram messaging app.

On the Ukrainian intelligence officer’s instructions the Russian had then retrieved a bomb from a hiding place in Moscow, the FSB claimed. The bomb, equivalent to 1 1/2 kg of TNT and packed with ball bearings, was concealed in the portable music speaker, the FSB said.

The FSB did not name the officer or the blogger who was the target. Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency could not be immediately reached for comment.

Ukraine says Russia’s war against it poses an existential threat to the Ukrainian state and has made clear it regards targeted killings – intended to weaken morale and punish those Kyiv regards guilty of war crimes – as legitimate.

Russia has said they amount to illegal “acts of terrorism”.

In other news:

• Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service accused American and British spies of trying to provoke attacks against Russian military bases in Syria in a bid to force the evacuation of the bases, the state-run RIA news agency said on Saturday. The SVR gave no evidence for its allegation.

• North Korean troops deployed in Russia’s Kursk region are suffering heavy losses and being left unprotected by the Russian forces they are fighting alongside, according to Ukraine, while the US says Russian and North Korean generals see the soldiers as “expendable”. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that said Russian troops were sending the North Koreans into battle with minimal protection and that the North Koreans were taking extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner. “Their losses are significant, very significant,” the Ukrainian president said in his nightly video address.

• The Biden administration pledged to approve fresh military aid to Ukraine, including crucial air defence systems. John Kirby, the US national security communications adviser, said the promised US security assistance package was expected to be announced “in the next couple of days”, though it was unclear how much it will include.

• Slovakia has confirmed its readiness to host any peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, despite Kyiv’s accusation that it is playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin. The Russian president on Thursday called it “acceptable” for the country to become a “platform” for dialogue over the conflict. The Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico, said on Facebook late on Friday: “If someone wants to organise peace talks in Slovakia, we will be ready and hospitable.”

• Ukraine has received its first batch of liquefied natural gas from the US, a deal that Kyiv says will boost Ukrainian and European energy security as a major gas transit deal with Russia ends. “Dtek, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, has today taken delivery of its first cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States,” the company said on Friday. The consignment was of about 100m cubic metres of gas, it told Agence France-Presse.

• A Russian court has sentenced a singer who burned his passport in protest against Moscow’s Ukraine war to five-and-a-half years in prison. Eduard Sharlot, 26, was found guilty of “publicly insulting” the religious feelings of believers and “rehabilitating nazism” by a court in the Volga city of Samara in a case over videos he published online, the state news agency RIA Novosti reported.