Ukraine war live: 1,000 people evacuated from Krasnodar amid Kyiv’s drone barrage

President Volodymyr Zelensky said he hoped to meet Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump next week when he travels to the United States to present Ukraine’s “victory plan” in the war against Russia.

“We will most likely have a meeting, I think, on September 26-27,” Zelensky told media late on Friday, without providing further details.

At least 1,200 people were evacuated from the Tikhoretsky District in Russia’s southwestern Krasnodar region, the local governor said on Saturday.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had downed 18 drones over the Krasnodar region overnight. The battlefield reports could not be independently verified.

Most of those evacuated were staying with friends and relatives, Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Krasnodar region, said on the Telegram messaging app.

Vladimir Putin’s troops have launched over 100 deadly glide bombs at Ukraine as part of their ongoing aerial assault of the country.

Russia fired 108 KABs – the Ukrainian acronym for guided aerial bomb – at Ukrainian positions on Friday, Kyiv said.

They are old-fashioned “iron” aerial bombs of the sort that were dropped by bombers during the Second World War.

In Kryvyi Rih, central Ukraine, a 12-year-old boy was killed alongside two elderly women after a Russian overnight missile attack.

“Again, a terrifying enemy attack on Kryvyi Rih. In the middle of the night, when the city slept,” the city’s governor Serhiy Lysak said.

The two women killed in the attack were 75 and 79. Mr Lysak also said two buildings were destroyed and 20 more were damaged.

A proposed corridor through Armenia would effectively sever the country’s connection to Iran and slice through its sovereign territory, with the support of Moscow, writes former MP Lord Alton.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow is prepared to defend its interests in the Arctic through diplomatic, military, and technical means.

His comments come in response to increasing US and Nato military exercises in the region, which Mr Lavrov sees as a potential threat. In comments quoted in Russian media, he emphasised that Russia is fully equipped to protect its interests amid rising tensions.

“We see how Nato is intensifying exercises in connection with possible crises in the Arctic,” Mr Lavrov was quoted as saying in a documentary series titled “Soviet Breakthrough”.

“Our country is fully ready to defend its interests in military, political and military-technical terms.”

His remarks follow a US Pentagon report highlighting intensified Russian activity in the Arctic, including the reopening of Soviet-era military sites and cooperation with China on shipping routes and minerals, which the US believes could affect polar stability.

Nato concluded a major anti-drone exercise this week, with Ukraine taking part for the first time as the Western alliance seeks to learn from the rapid development and widespread use of unmanned systems in the war there.

The drills at a Dutch military base, involving more than 20 countries and some 50 companies, tested cutting-edge systems to detect and counter drones and assessed how they work together. The 11-day exercise ended with a demonstration of jamming and hacking drones.

On Wednesday, an attack which Ukraine claimed was carried out by large drones triggered a major blast at a major Russian arsenal.

The following day, Vladimir Putin said Moscow was ramping up drone production tenfold to nearly 1.4 million this year.

The proliferation of drones in the war “to destroy targets and survey the battlefield” has prompted Nato to increase its focus on the threat they could pose to the alliance.

“Nato takes this threat very, very seriously,” said Matt Roper, chief of the Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Centre at the alliance’s technology agency.

“This is not a domain we can afford to sit back and be passive on,” he said at the exercise site, Lieutenant General Best Barracks in the east of The Netherlands.

Experts have warned Nato that it needs to catch up quickly on drone warfare. “Nato has too few drones for a high-intensity fight against a peer adversary,” a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank declared last September.

“It would be severely challenged to effectively integrate those it has in a contested environment.”

European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen travelled to war-ravaged Ukraine on Friday with the promise of 160 million euros ($180 million) in fresh energy funds to get the nation through the winter.

Von der Leyen told reporters that 100 million euros ($112 million) of the funds would come the proceeds of the Russian assets held in the EU because of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “It is only right that Russia pays for the destruction it caused,” she said.

The European Union estimates that about half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed, making the job of heating homes, hospitals and schools increasingly difficult as temperatures dip ahead of the third war winter that the nation will face.

Von der Leyen said Russia knew full well that bombing energy stations was hitting Ukraine where it really hurts. Morale to keep on fighting can be significantly sapped if millions shiver in the brutal winter for months on end.

Russell Bentley, a US national who went missing in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine early this year, is believed to have been tortured to death by Russian soldiers who are now set to go on trial, Russia’s top investigative body said.

Bentley died in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk in April, Margarita Simonyan, head of Russia’s state media outlet RT, wrote at the time, saying he had been “fighting there for our guys” and working with Russia’s Sputnik news service.

Russian media outlets have suggested that the soldiers may have mistaken Bentley – the subject of a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone magazine titled “The Bizarre Story of How a Hardcore Texas Leftist Became a Frontline Putin propagandist” – for a US spy.

The Investigative Committee said in a statement that it had completed its probe and accused three Russian servicemen of torturing Bentley to death in Donetsk on 8 April.

It said two of the soldiers had then put his body in a car and blown it up. A fourth soldier had been ordered the following day to move Bentley’s remains to another location in an attempt to conceal the crime.

The Committee’s statement said the accused soldiers, whom it named, were familiarising themselves with the allegations before the indictment was sent for approval.