Russia-Ukraine war: death toll rises to 52 after attack on Kharkiv village; boy, 10, and grandmother killed in new attack – as it happened (2024)

• The death toll from a Russian missile strike on the village of Hroza in north-eastern Ukraine rose to 52 on Friday after another victim died overnight in hospital, the regional governor said. A missile slammed into a cafe and grocery store in the village on Thursday as people gathered to mourn a fallen Ukrainian soldier. “Fifty-two people died as a result of this missile attack. One person died in a medical facility,” Oleh Synehubov, governor of the Kharkiv region, told Ukrainian television earlier. Separately, interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said people from every family in the Ukrainian village of Hroza have been affected by the missile attack.

• Russia unleashed new airstrikes on Ukraine early on Friday, killing a 10-year-old boy and his grandmother in the city of Kharkiv and damaging grain and port infrastructure in the Odesa region in the south, Ukrainian officials said.

• Russian lawmakers will consider revoking the ratification of a global nuclear test ban, the parliament speaker reportedly said on Friday.

• Russia is seeking re-election to the UN’s top human rights body next week in what is seen as a crucial test of western efforts to keep Moscow diplomatically isolated over its invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reports. Some diplomats are reported to have said Russia has a reasonable chance of getting voted back onto the UN Human Rights Council in Tuesday’s secret ballot, 18 months after it was ousted in a US-led drive.

• Sweden will send Ukraine a new military support package worth 2.2bn crowns ($199m), consisting mainly of ammunition and spare parts to earlier donated systems, the Swedish defence minister, Pål Jonson, said on Friday.

The US has expelled two Russian embassy officials after Russia earlier expelled two American diplomats from the American embassy in Moscow, the US state department said on Friday.

Kazakhstan has announced efforts to promote the use of the Kazakh language over Russian in its media, amid growing scepticism over Moscow’s influence in the country since the invasion of Ukraine.

Kazakh is the official language of the former Soviet republic in central Asia, but Russian is recognised too and is widely spoken among the tightly controlled country’s population of about 20 million.

“The draft law on the media stipulates an increase in the share of the state language in television and radio from 50% to 70%,” the culture minister, Aida Balayeva, told reporters in the capital, Astana.

You can read the full story here:

Joe Biden on Friday said it is possible that he may meet with China’s president, Xi Jinping, next month in San Francisco, though nothing has been set up yet, according to Reuters.

Washington has provided over $40 billion to supply Kyiv with dozens of tanks, thousands of rockets and millions of rounds of ammunition that Ukraine has used to defend itself since Russia invaded in February 2022.

Beijing, meanwhile, has maintained close economic and diplomatic ties with Russia since the invasion, and has accused US-led Western forces of seeking to prolong the war by providing arms and support to Ukraine.

The US commerce department has added 42 Chinese companies to a government export control list over support for Moscow’s military and defence industrial base, Reuters reports.

Another seven entities from Finland, Germany, India, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom were also added to the trade export control list.

The circuits include microelectronics that Russia uses for precision guidance systems in missiles and drones launched against civilian targets in Ukraine, the commerce department said in a statement.

“Today’s additions to the Entity List provide a clear message: if you supply the Russian defence sector with US-origin technology, we will find out, and we will take action,” assistant secretary for export enforcement Matthew Axelrod said.

Arriving at the EU summit in Granada earlier on Friday, Latvia’s new prime minister, Evika Siliņa, said supporting Ukraine was at the top of her agenda.

“For Latvia our main topic and main priority will remain Ukraine,” she told reporters.

“We believe that we must support Ukraine financially, military and politically, but in the same time, there are other issues that are important to our society such as high inflation rates, illegal migration,” she said.

Russia will start delivering its grain to African countries within a month to six weeks, the Interfax news agency cited agriculture minister Dmitry Patrushev as saying.

“We are now finalising all the documents. I think that within a month - or a month and a half - they will start,” Interfax quoted Patrushev as saying.

Vladimir Putin told African leaders in July he would gift them tens of thousands of tonnes of grain despite western sanctions, which he said made it harder for Moscow to export its grain and fertilisers.

Addressing a Russia-Africa summit at the time, the Russian president said:

We will be ready to provide Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic and Eritrea with 25-50,000 tonnes of free grain each in the next three to four months.

UN chief Antonio Guterres has called the promised grain “a handful of donations”.

In July, Russia quit a year-old agreement that had allowed Ukraine, one of the world’s biggest exporters, to ship grain from its Black Sea ports.

The process through which countries can access the EU is a “merit based” one, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday, as European leaders met in Spain to discuss EU enlargement and how to tackle a migration crisis.

“The accession process to the European Union is a merit-based one,” von der Leyen said at a news conference in Granada.

She said last month that Ukraine has made “great strides” towards joining the EU since getting candidate status in 2022, but that hard work still lies ahead.

Ukraine and other hopefuls must meet strict criteria including on their democratic track record and economic performance to advance on their path to membership.

The head of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) said on Friday that for Russia to consider pulling out of the treaty would be “concerning” after Moscow indicated it was moving towards revoking its ratification (see earlier post at 13.41).

In a statement, CTBTO chief Robert Floyd said:

The Russian Federation has consistently reaffirmed its strong support of the CTBT since its very inception.

It would be concerning and deeply unfortunate if any state signatory were to reconsider its ratification of the CTBT.

Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has called for more Su-34 fighter jets to be produced, AFP reports.

“These planes are real workhorses. They can make four to five flights a day,” Shoigu said during a visit to an aeronautical manufacturing base in Novosibirsk in Siberia.

“That’s why we need to step up, accelerate” their manufacture, Shoigu said.

He said the defence ministry has “tasked the factory’s management with accelerating production and repair work” of Su-34s because the weapon is “in demand”.

A Ukrainian court has frozen the Ukrainian assets of three Russian businessmen over their alleged support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, prosecutors and the security service said.

The Ukrainian Security Service said assets owned by Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven and Andrey Kosogov had been frozen, Reuters reports.

They were considered part of Vladimir Putin’s close circle and contributed to “large-scale financing of the Russian Federation’s armed aggression”, it said.

The three businessmen did not immediately comment on the moves and comments by the SBU and prosecutors.

“At the request of prosecutors... assets of 20 Ukrainian companies totalling over 17 billion hryvnias ($464.48 million) were frozen,” the prosecutor general’s office said on Telegram.

It said the frozen assets included securities and corporate rights of mobile phone operators, a mineral water producer, financial and insurance companies.

“The beneficial owners of the companies are three Russian oligarchs who own one of the largest Russian financial and investment consortia,” it said.

Russia scrambled a MiG-31 fighter jet on Friday to escort a US navy P-8A Poseidon patrol plane approaching its airspace over the Norwegian Sea, the Russian defence ministry has said.