Volodymyr Zelenskiy says he will keep up military pressure on Russian-occupied Crimea The Ukrainian president has vowed to maintain military pressure on Russian-occupied Crimea. Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s comments came in a video address to a security conference in Prague on Tuesday that was marred by technical glitches and a possible hacking, Reuters reports. Kyiv has ramped up strikes on Russian forces in the Black Sea and Crimea, which was seized and annexed by Moscow in 2014, as Ukrainian forces press on with a near five-month counteroffensive. In remarks disrupted by technical faults, including one that intermittently modulated his voice to a higher pitch, Zelenskiy said the “illusion” of Russia’s domination of Crimea and the Black Sea had been shattered. He said: The Russian (Black Sea) fleet is no longer able to operate in the western part of the Black Sea and is gradually fleeing from Crimea. And this is a historic achievement. Ukrainian attacks in and around Crimea have included strikes on a Russian airbase on the peninsula, a Black Sea fleet command post in Sevastopol, and the only bridge linking Crimea to Russia. “We have not yet gained full fire control over Crimea and surrounding waters, but we will,” Zelenskiy told a meeting of the Crimea Platform, a diplomatic initiative he launched in 2021. “This is a question of time.” A spokesperson for the Czech parliamentary speaker said the website for the event, which brought together lawmakers from various countries, “had come under a hacking attack” but did not specify by whom. Closing summary Ukraine has set up a joint defence venture with German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall AG to service and repair western weapons sent to help Kyiv against Russia’s full-scale invasion, officials said. Ukraine expects Germany to provide it with an additional €1.4bn to enhance its air defences and help it get through a second winter at war with Russia, Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said. The EU is on track towards its goal of ending its reliance on Russian fossil fuels within this decade, the European Commission said. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, vowed to maintain military pressure on Russian-occupied Crimea. “We have not yet gained full fire control over Crimea and surrounding waters, but we will,” Zelenskiy told a meeting of the Crimea Platform, a diplomatic initiative he launched in 2021. “This is a question of time.” Two people died and others were injured in Russian shelling of Kherson, the local governor claimed. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, met the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, in Tehran earlier. Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has pledged to maintain Germany’s aid to Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion even as Berlin supports Israel in its conflict with Hamas. Speaking at a German-Ukrainian business forum in Berlin, attended by the Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmygal, and joined virtually by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Scholz vowed Kyiv would have assistance “as long as necessary”. “We are backing Ukraine economically, financially, with humanitarian aid and also with weapons,” Scholz said. “This support will in no way be impacted by the fact that we of course since the horrible morning hours of 7 October have focused on Israel and the Middle East with the greatest sympathy and concern.” Military analysts say that Buryatia, as well as some of the other Russian regions which are home to Indigenous peoples, have provided a disproportionately large number of soldiers for Russia’s war effort, Reuters reports. Civil society group Free Buryatia Foundation has said the drive to mobilise a disproportionate number of Buryats was a political choice, as the Kremlin saw Buryatia as posing less of a risk in terms of anti-government protests. Ukraine launches joint defence venture with German arms manufacturer Ukraine has set up a joint defence venture with German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall AG to service and repair western weapons sent to help Kyiv against Russia’s full-scale invasion, officials have said. Announced by Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, at a German-Ukrainian business forum in Berlin, the venture will also help with the local production of some key equipment made by Rheinmetall AG, he said. It will bring “cooperation between our countries to a qualitatively new level and will allow us to build together the arsenal of the free world”, Shmyhal told the forum, according to Reuters. Oleksander Kamyshyn, minister for strategic industries, said Ukraine was committed to launching the production of western weapons locally to keep up with growing Ukrainian demand with the war now at the 20-month mark. He said he met 25 major German defence producers in Berlin. Rheinmetall said in a statement it owned a 51% stake in the venture that would operate on Ukrainian territory. Shmyhal told reporters in Berlin: The first project will be repairing of German equipment, tanks, heavy armoured vehicles, Panzerhaubitzers and other German equipment. All other production projects – it’s not public information, but we have some plans what to produce in Ukraine, but the companies will announce it by themselves when the time will come. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, has said his country is committed to strengthening the UN and has a “vision for its reform”. A Russian court has rejected an appeal by an opposition activist who was sentenced to seven years in prison over social media posts that prosecutors said “justified terrorism”. AFP reports: Russia has banned criticism of its military campaign and has orchestrated a huge crackdown on dissent as troops fight in Ukraine. The activist, Mikhail Krieger, 63, was sentenced in May on charges of “justifying terrorism” and “inciting hatred”. The charges were brought in relation to Facebook posts from 2019 and 2020, in which Krieger said the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, should be “hanged” and praised men who had attacked Russian FSB officers as “heroes”. At the hearing on Tuesday, he denounced the Kremlin’s Ukraine offensive and – according to the rights group Memorial – shouted: “Glory to Ukraine!” His appeal was rejected by a Russian military appeals court in the town of Vlasikha, a closed military city 20km (12 miles) west of Moscow, Memorial said on social media. Krieger spoke to the court via video link from a Moscow prison … During his trial, he refused to apologise for his posts and said he was being persecuted for his anti-war and openly pro-Ukrainian position. Since the beginning of Moscow’s full-scale invasion last year, Russian soldiers have damaged 21,000 private houses and pieces of “social infrastructure” across Ukraine, with 1,788 of these buildings being “completely destroyed”, the governor of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, has said. “And this is only in the de-occupied territory,” he posted on Telegram. “At the same time, the shelling does not stop. So we have more and more destruction. And people need somewhere to live. To restore homes. They want to stay and work in their native land.” Finnish police have said they retrieved a large anchor from the seabed near where a Baltic Sea gas pipeline ruptured earlier this month, and were investigating whether it belonged to a Chinese container vessel, Reuters reports. Police have previously said damage to the Balticconnector subsea gas pipeline and two Baltic Sea telecoms cables was cause by external mechanical force and were investigating whether this was a deliberate sabotage or caused by accident. Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) on Friday said they were focusing their probe on the Chinese NewNew Polar Bear container vessel which had travelled above the pipeline and the cables at the time of the damage. The NBI on Tuesday said they had established that the NewNew Polar Bear was in fact missing one of its front anchors, and said they had tried unsuccessfully to contact the ship to ask whether this was the one retrieved in the Gulf of Finland. The damage to a telecommunications cable running under the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Estonia was “purposeful”, Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has said. “We will not be more precise than that as of today,” Kristersson said at a press conference, after Swedish divers had investigated the seabed, the Associated Press reports. A spokesperson for the Swedish navy, Jimmie Adamsson, told the Swedish public broadcaster SVT that “we see seabed tracks nearby, but we don’t know if it’s deliberate or an accident”. On 17 October, Sweden reported damage to an undersea telecommunications cable that authorities believe occurred at the same time as damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable between Finland and Estonia. Sweden’s civil defence minister, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, said at the time that the cause of the damage was unclear, adding that it was “not a total cable break” but “partial damage”. Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, told the press conference on Tuesday that member countries had: Tens of thousands of kilometres of internet cables, of gas pipelines over power cables, all the oil pipelines crossing the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and of course, these types of undersea critical infrastructure [are] vulnerable. The military alliance was working “closely with the private sector”, Stoltenberg added, because “most of this critical infrastructure is owned by private companies, operated by private companies”. Russia scrambled an Su-27 fighter jet after two US B-1B strategic bombers approached its border over the Baltic Sea, the Russian state news agency RIA has reported. As the fighter jet approached, the US bombers “performed a U-turn” away from the Russian border, the defence ministry said, according to Reuters. An airstrike by Russian forces has damaged a hospital and a fire station in the Kherson region, Ukrainian authorities have said. The State Emergency Service, posting on Facebook today, shared pictures of the roof and windows of what it said was a local fire station, which appeared to have sustained damage. The regional military administration said more than 50 windows, the roof and doors of the hospital were damaged in overnight shelling. It added that two women, aged 63 and 66, sustained injuries.