Lithuania hits out at Russia "disinformation" over spy claims The Lithuanian government has said there have been “false Russian claims of sabotage planned by a person who allegedly entered to Russia from Lithuania in March”. Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Crisis Management Centre said Russia claims that a saboteur had any links to Lithuania were false. He said he did not have any information about the incident reported by Interfax but “this element of linking that to a Nato state” was disinformation. “Russia has been systematically conducting disinformation campaigns and provocations for a long time in order to raise tensions among societies and allies and to cover its aggressive actions. “This disinformation spread by the FSB is a case in point. One of the objectives of such aggressive activities is to influence Lithuania’s support for Ukraine. Disinformation will not change Lithuania’s efforts to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom. “Given that Lithuania is currently conducting the Thunder Strike military exercise, we may see more disinformation attacks of this nature. We urge citizens to remain vigilant and those who disseminate information to be cautious about the disinformation being spread by Russia,” he said. Closing summary The Lithuanian government has said there have been “false Russian claims of sabotage planned by a person who allegedly entered to Russia from Lithuania in March”. Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Crisis Management Centre said Russia claims that a saboteur had any links to Lithuania were false. He said he did not have any information about the incident reported by Interfax but “this element of linking that to a Nato state” was disinformation. Any Western-backed Ukrainian strike against the Crimean bridge or Crimea itself will be met with a powerful revenge strike from Russia, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “I would like to warn Washington and Brussels that any aggressive actions against Crimea are not only doomed to fail, but will also be met with a devastating revenge strike,” said Zakharova. The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, has confirmed Russian security forces have been deployed to the same airbase as American troops in the Nigerien capital, Niamey. It remains unclear when the Russian troops, who have been in Niger for weeks, were deployed to Airbase 101, which is next to Diori Hamani international airport in Niamey. It is also unclear how many troops are on the ground. Ukraine’s president and foreign minister has pressed British foreign secretary David Cameron to accelerate the delivery of promised military aid to Kyiv, as Russia heaps battlefield pressure on depleted Ukrainian forces in the third year of war. “It is important that the weapons included in the UK support package announced last week arrive as soon as possible,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on the social platform X, as Cameron visited Kyiv on Thursday. A Russian activist has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for attempting to set fire to a military conscription office in protest against the Russian action in Ukraine, officials said Friday. A military court in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s far east, said Angel Nikolayev was convicted on charges of terrorism for placing two bottles containing a flammable substance in the windows of a district conscription office in the city and setting them ablaze. The US has been preparing since 2022 for the possibility that Russian president Vladimir Putin would stop selling it nuclear power fuel, and a pending ban on Russian imports will help boost domestic capacity to process uranium fuel, the outgoing top nuclear energy official told Reuters. The US senate passed legislation on Tuesday that bans the imports from Russia, the latest move by Washington to disrupt Putin’s ability to pay for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022. The Czech Republic’s institutions have been targeted by a Russian cyber attack since last year, the Czech foreign ministry said on Friday. It said the Russian APT28 group, believed to be connected to Russia’s GRU military intelligence, had exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Outlook programme, Reuters reported. The ministry issued its statement after the German Interior Ministry said on Friday a series of cyber attacks attributable to the GRU targeted Germany’s governing Social Democrats as well as the country’s logistics, defence, aerospace and IT sectors. Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said on Friday that Russian troops had captured 547 sq km of territory in Ukraine this year. Shoigu said Ukrainian forces were retreating all along the front line. The Russian defence ministry said on Friday that its air defence forces destroyed six drones that Ukraine launched overnight. Five of the drones were downed over the Belgorod region that borders Ukraine and one over the Crimean Peninsula, the defence ministry said on the Telegram messaging app. Germany has said it has evidence that Russian state-sponsored hackers were behind an “intolerable” cyber-attack last year in which several websites were knocked off line in apparent response to Berlin’s decision to send tanks to Ukraine. The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said a federal government investigation into the 2023 cyber-attack on the Social Democrat party (SPD) had just concluded. Ukraine will at some point have to enter into talks with Russia to bring an end to their more than two-year-old war, a senior Ukrainian intelligence official said in an interview published on Thursday. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly ruled out talks with the Kremlin, and a decree he issued after Russia formally annexed four Ukrainian regions in 2022 deems negotiations “impossible”, Reuters reports. That’s it for the Ukraine live blog for today. Thanks for following along. The US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, has confirmed Russian security forces have been deployed to the same airbase as American troops in the Nigerien capital, Niamey. It remains unclear when the Russian troops, who have been in Niger for weeks, were deployed to Airbase 101, which is next to Diori Hamani international airport in Niamey. It is also unclear how many troops are on the ground. “Airbase 101 where our forces [are], is a Nigerien air force base that is co-located with an international airport in the capital city. The Russians are in a separate compound and don’t have access to US forces or access to our equipment,” Austin said at a press conference in Honolulu. A large crowd of people, some of whom hold a placard reading: ‘US army, you leave, you move, you vanish. No bonus, no negotiation.’ In response to news of the deployment, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Friday that Russia was, “developing ties with various African countries in all areas, including in the military one”. Lithuania hits out at Russia "disinformation" over spy claims The Lithuanian government has said there have been “false Russian claims of sabotage planned by a person who allegedly entered to Russia from Lithuania in March”. Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of the National Crisis Management Centre said Russia claims that a saboteur had any links to Lithuania were false. He said he did not have any information about the incident reported by Interfax but “this element of linking that to a Nato state” was disinformation. “Russia has been systematically conducting disinformation campaigns and provocations for a long time in order to raise tensions among societies and allies and to cover its aggressive actions. “This disinformation spread by the FSB is a case in point. One of the objectives of such aggressive activities is to influence Lithuania’s support for Ukraine. Disinformation will not change Lithuania’s efforts to support Ukraine in its fight for freedom. “Given that Lithuania is currently conducting the Thunder Strike military exercise, we may see more disinformation attacks of this nature. We urge citizens to remain vigilant and those who disseminate information to be cautious about the disinformation being spread by Russia,” he said. Any Western-backed Ukrainian strike against the Crimean bridge or Crimea itself will be met with a powerful revenge strike from Russia, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “I would like to warn Washington and Brussels that any aggressive actions against Crimea are not only doomed to fail, but will also be met with a devastating revenge strike,” said Zakharova. Zakharova also said that remarks by British foreign secretary David Cameron amounted to an acknowledgement that the West is waging a war against Russia using “Ukrainian hands”. Cameron said on Thursday Ukraine had a right to use weapons provided by London to strike targets inside Russia, and that it was up to Kyiv whether to do so. “Cameron’s words are further evidence of the hybrid war the West is waging against our country,” Zakharova said. “Russia is responding to that and will continue to respond.” Further to Russian defence minister’s Sergei Shoigu’s comments about Russia’s troops taking control of 547 sq km of Ukrainian territory this year (see 11.17 entry), he has made further comments. Shoigu, in remarks on Friday to senior military commanders, said Ukrainian forces were retreating all along the frontline and that Russian troops were breaking what he called a network of Ukrainian strongholds. “The Ukrainian army units are trying to cling on to individual lines, but under our onslaught they are forced to abandon their positions and retreat,” said Shoigu. “Over the past two weeks, the Russian Armed Forces have liberated the settlements of Novobakhmutivka, Semenivka and Berdychi in the Donetsk People’s Republic,” he said, referring to the name Russia uses for one of the four annexed regions. Ukraine’s top commander said on Sunday that Kyiv’s outnumbered troops had fallen back to new positions west of three villages on the eastern front. Moscow said in September 2022, seven months after sending troops into Ukraine, that it had incorporated four Ukrainian regions – Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia – into its own sovereign territory despite not fully controlling any of them. A Russian activist has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for attempting to set fire to a military conscription office in protest against the Russian action in Ukraine, officials said Friday. A military court in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s far east, said Angel Nikolayev was convicted on charges of terrorism for placing two bottles containing a flammable substance in the windows of a district conscription office in the city and setting them ablaze. Nikolayev, 39, was also convicted of damaging Russian flags that were put on the graves of soldiers killed in action in Ukraine at a local cemetery. In addition to that, he was found guilty of removing symbols of Russian military action in Ukraine from a bus stop and several vehicles in Khabarovsk. The Solidarity Zone, a Russian messaging app channel that follows protests by opponents of Moscow’s action in Ukraine, said that Nikolayev had pleaded guilty to the charges but didn’t express regret. The Czech Republic’s institutions have been targeted by a Russian cyber attack since last year, the Czech foreign ministry said on Friday. It said the Russian APT28 group, believed to be connected to Russia’s GRU military intelligence, had exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Outlook programme, Reuters reported. The ministry issued its statement after the German Interior Ministry said on Friday a series of cyber attacks attributable to the GRU targeted Germany’s governing Social Democrats as well as the country’s logistics, defence, aerospace and IT sectors. “Czechia jointly with Germany, the European Union, NATO and international partners strongly condemns activities of the Russian state-controlled actor APT28, which has been conducting a long-term cyber espionage campaign in European countries,” the ministry said. It did not say which institutions were targeted. Ukraine’s president and foreign minister has pressed British foreign secretary David Cameron to accelerate the delivery of promised military aid to Kyiv, as Russia heaps battlefield pressure on depleted Ukrainian forces in the third year of war. “It is important that the weapons included in the UK support package announced last week arrive as soon as possible,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on the social platform X, as Cameron visited Kyiv on Thursday. He said armoured vehicles, ammunition and missiles of various types were top of the list. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, who also met with Cameron, said on X that the focus was on “speeding up military aid.” The US has been preparing since 2022 for the possibility that Russian president Vladimir Putin would stop selling it nuclear power fuel, and a pending ban on Russian imports will help boost domestic capacity to process uranium fuel, the outgoing top nuclear energy official told Reuters. The US senate passed legislation on Tuesday that bans the imports from Russia, the latest move by Washington to disrupt Putin’s ability to pay for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022. The ban, which is expected to be signed by president Joe Biden, starts 90 days after enactment, although it allows the Department of Energy to issue waivers in case of supply concerns. The move has led to fears that Putin could retaliate by freezing exports to the US boosting uranium prices. Russia supplied about 24% of the uranium used by reactors in the US in 2022, and was its top foreign supplier. But Kathryn Huff, the DoE’s assistant secretary for nuclear, who steps down on Friday, told Reuters the US is prepared for any scenario. “The reality is this: over the last few years there has been a very real and present possibility that Russia could stop abruptly sending enriched uranium to the United States.” Countries including Canada, France and Japan will help the US deal with an “allied alternative” to Russian uranium, Huff said. Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said on Friday that Russian troops had captured 547 sq km of territory in Ukraine this year. Shoigu said Ukrainian forces were retreating all along the front line. Ukrainian agent killed before he could attack fuel terminal - Russian FSB Officers of Russia’s FSB state security service have killed a Ukrainian saboteur planning to attack a fuel terminal in the northwesterly Leningrad region with explosives, the FSB said on Friday, according to the Interfax news agency. The FSB said the man was a Russian national recruited by Ukraine’s military intelligence, and that he had been killed after shooting at security agents. It said he had entered Russia from Lithuania in March. Ukraine will at some point have to enter into talks with Russia to bring an end to their more than two-year-old war, a senior Ukrainian intelligence official said in an interview published on Thursday. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly ruled out talks with the Kremlin, and a decree he issued after Russia formally annexed four Ukrainian regions in 2022 deems negotiations “impossible”, Reuters reports. But major-general Vadym Skibitsky, deputy chief of Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence directorate, told the Economist magazine that talks would eventually be needed, as would be the case with any war. “General Skibitsky says he does not see a way for Ukraine to win the war on the battlefield alone. Even if it were able to push Russian forces back to the borders - an increasingly distant prospect – it wouldn’t end the war,” the magazine wrote. “Such wars can only end with treaties, he says. Right now, both sides are jockeying for the ‘the most favourable position’ ahead of potential talks. But meaningful negotiations can begin only in the second half of 2025 at the earliest, he guesses.” Zelenskiy and other officials have said Russia is not invited to a “peace summit” planned for Switzerland in June as there is no assurance that Moscow will bargain in good faith. Germany has said it has evidence that Russian state-sponsored hackers were behind an “intolerable” cyber-attack last year in which several websites were knocked off line in apparent response to Berlin’s decision to send tanks to Ukraine. The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said a federal government investigation into the 2023 cyber-attack on the Social Democrat party (SPD) had just concluded. “Today we can say unambiguously [that] we can attribute this cyber-attack to a group called APT28, which is steered by the military intelligence service of Russia,” she told a news conference during a visit to Australia. “In other words, it was a state-sponsored Russian cyber-attack on Germany, and this is absolutely intolerable and unacceptable and will have consequences.” The Russian defence ministry said on Friday that its air defence forces destroyed six drones that Ukraine launched overnight. Five of the drones were downed over the Belgorod region that borders Ukraine and one over the Crimean Peninsula, the defence ministry said on the Telegram messaging app. The ministry did not provide any details on possible damage due to the attack. Reuters could not immediately verify the Russian defence ministry’s comments. Hungary will need to boost defence spending further next year if the war in neighbouring Ukraine drags into 2025, reducing the amount of funds available for other expenditure, prime minister Viktor Orban told public radio on Friday. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has triggered a surge in defence spending on Nato’s eastern flank led by Poland, which has doubled defence expenditure to 3.9% of economic output by 2023 from 2014 levels based on NATO figures, Reuters reported. While strongly opposing Western military and financial support to Ukraine over concerns of the conflict spilling over into Europe, Hungary has also ramped up its defence spending sharply, to 2.43% of GDP last year, above a 2% Nato guideline. “If the war drags on into 2025, then the 2023-2024 defence spending levels will not be sufficient and will have to be increased,” Orban said in an interview, adding that the move would leave less funding for other purposes. Russian troops enter base housing US military in Niger, US official says Good morning and welcome to the blog. The time in Kyiv and Moscow is approaching 10.30am. In a worrying sign of how tensions are spreading, Russian military personnel have entered an air base in Niger that is hosting US troops, a senior US defence official told Reuters. The move that follows a decision by Niger’s junta to expel US forces. It puts US and Russian troops in close proximity at a time when the nations’ military and diplomatic rivalry is increasingly acrimonious over the conflict in Ukraine. The military officers ruling the West African nation have told the US to withdraw its nearly 1,000 military personnel from the country, which, until a coup last year had been a key partner for Washington’s fight against insurgents who have killed thousands of people and displaced millions more. A senior US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russian forces were not mingling with US troops but were using a separate hangar at Airbase 101, which is next to Diori Hamani international airport in Niamey, Niger’s capital. We will bring you more on this as it develops. In other news: Weapons supplied by Britain to Ukraine can be used to strike inside Russia, David Cameron has said, as the UK foreign secretary promised £3bn a year “for as long as it is necessary” to help Kyiv. Emmanuel Macron has said the question of sending western troops to Ukraine would “legitimately” arise if Russia broke through Ukrainian frontlines and Kyiv made such a request. In an interview with the Economist, the French president maintained his stance of strategic ambiguity, saying: “I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out.” At least eight children were injured in the town of Derhachi in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region on Thursday when Russian guided bombs struck a site close to a sports complex where they had been training, local officials said. An elderly man was also wounded. Russia said on Thursday it had captured the village of Berdychi which lies about 12km (7 miles) north-west of Avdiivka – a week after Ukrainian forces pulled out.