Ukraine war: Putin’s home fortified amid growing threat from Kyiv’s drones

Switzerland has opened investigations into more than 50 cases of possible sanctions violations and has found breaches in 15 of them so far, the government said in a statement on Wednesday.

Since Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine, Switzerland has adopted sanctions similar to those of other Western countries, passing new measures earlier this month.

The State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) said in an email to Reuters that the effective implementation of sanctions was a government priority and that it had opened 56 violations proceedings to date.

Of those, around half have been dropped and penalties have been ordered for 15 of them. The others remain under investigation, it said.

SECO did not name the sectors involved, nor the individual companies subject to investigation.

Switzerland said earlier this year it had set up a specialist team to investigate and enforce sanctions that Bern imposed following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s foreign minister accused the United States on Tuesday of holding the entire West “at gunpoint” and impeding international cooperation, a claim the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations denounced as “hypocrisy” by a country that invaded neighboring Ukraine.

The finger-pointing came at Russia ’s showcase event during its presidency of the U.N. Security Council this month, and it chose the topic — “Multilateral cooperation for a more just, democratic and sustainable world order.” Russia’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, flew in from Moscow to preside.

Just before the meeting, Ukraine’s U.N. Ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, read a statement on behalf of about 50 countries, including the United States, whose ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was among the several dozen U.N. envoys surrounding him.

China and Russia carried out live-fire naval exercises in the South China Sea this week, Russian and Chinese state media reported, with the two countries having strengthened military and trade ties in recent years following US sanctions.

Both countries were to deploy at least three vessels each for the three-day exercises, China’s state controlled Global Times newspaper said late on Tuesday, citing the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

The opening ceremony of the Russian-Chinese naval exercise ‘Maritime Cooperation – 2024’ took place in the Chinese port of Zhanjiang, the Russian defence ministry said earlier this week on the Telegram messaging app.

During their sea manoeuvres, the crews of ships of the Russian Pacific Fleet and the PLA Navy were to conduct joint air defense exercises and anti-submarine drills with the involvement of PLA naval anti-submarine aviation, the Russian defence ministry said.

The drills follow the completion of a separate joint naval patrol in the north Pacific, which the Russian defence ministry said earlier involved a detachment of Russia‘s Pacific Fleet ships, including two corvettes, the Rezky and the Gromky.

One person was killed and eight were wounded in Ukrainian attacks on part of the southern Kherson region which is controlled by Russian forces, Vladimir Saldo, the area’s Russian-backed governor, wrote on Telegram.

Saldo accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the area and of striking it with drones.

Reuters could not independently verify his assertions and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

After almost 30 months of war with Russia, Ukraine’s difficulties on the battlefield are mounting even as its vital support from the United States is increasingly at the mercy of changing political winds.

A six-month delay in military assistance from the U.S., the biggest single contributor to Ukraine, opened the door for the Kremlin’s forces to push on the front line. Ukrainian troops are now fighting to check the slow but gradual gains by Russia’s bigger and better-equipped army.

“The next two or three months are going to be probably the hardest this year for Ukraine,” military analyst Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment said in a recent podcast.

The Conservative ex-premier was in Washington this week to attend the Republican National Conference in Milwaukee, where Mr Trump was named the party’s official candidate in the upcoming US presidential elections.

After a photograph circulated showing him giving a speech to a near-empty room at the conference on Tuesday, Mr Johnson later shared an image of himself meeting with Mr Trump, just days after the ex-president survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.

The 42-year-old face of the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin, who grew up in London and earned a history degree from Cambridge University, is currently being held in a medical facility connected to his Siberian penal colony, having been moved there on 4 July. Evgenia Kara-Murza spent days not knowing where or how he was.

Efforts are being made to hold a second peace summit on Ukraine this year, Hungary Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told Russia‘s RIA state news agency in remarks published on Wednesday.

“Efforts are being made to hold the next round of the peace conference this year, which we would certainly welcome and appreciate,” Szijjarto told the agency.

“I believe that if we want to hope for any peace conference in the future to be successful, we need to make sure that both sides are represented.”

Russia and Ukraine are set to exchange 90 prisoners of war on Wednesday in a deal facilitated by the United Arab Emirates, a person familiar with the matter said.

Last week, Ukrainian parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets had said the government, with the help of the UAE, was planning “a big” prisoner exchange with Russia soon.

Russia and Ukraine have conducted a few prisoner swaps in the 27-month-old war that started after Russia invaded its smaller neighbour.

In their last such exchange in June, which was also facilitated by the UAE, Russia and Ukraine each handed back 90 prisoners.