Key events
Ukraine replaced the Soviet-era hammer and sickle on one of its most prominent landmarks on Sunday with its national trident, as part of its efforts to reclaim its own history and culture.
Kyiv’s Motherland monument is 62 metres tall and holds a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. Workers began removing the Soviet Union’s coat of arms from the shield last month.
Images sent through on the wires show what a feat it was to raise the trident:
Ukrainian attacks on two key bridges linking the occupied Crimean peninsula with the Russian occupied Kherson region “will likely pose significant disruptions to logistics” for the Russian military, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has said in its latest update on the conflict.
Ukraine launched precision missile strikes on the Chonhar and Henichesk road bridges on Sunday. Russian sources had circulated images showing “significant damage” to the Henichesk bridge and claimed that a section had partially collapsed, the US-based thinktank said.
The Chonhar bridge meanwhile suffered “minor damage” according to footage posted by Russian sources, it continued.
It is unclear how quickly Russian officials will be able to repair the Chonhar bridge and it is equally as unclear if Russian officials have repaired the Chonhar railway bridge that Ukrainian forces struck on July 29. The damage to the Henichesk Strait bridge will likely take Russian officials substantially longer to repair.
Some routes the military may be forced to use are closer to Ukrainian positions in upper Kherson oblast and in many cases within artillery range of the Ukrainian-held western bank of the river, the ISW said.
Russian forces likely can reduce risks from Ukrainian indirect fire in this area by taking slower and less efficient village roads … but at the cost of slower and more complicated logistics support.
Russia’s air defence system destroyed an aircraft-type drone over the Ferzikovskyi district in the Kaluga region, Vladislav Shapsha, governor of the region, has said on the Telegram messaging app.
The Kaluga region borders the Moscow region to the north. “There has been no impact on people or infrastructure,” Shapsha said according to Reuters.
It was not clear who launched the drones, and there was no immediate comment from Ukraine. Kyiv almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russia-controlled territory in Ukraine.
Daniel Boffey
Olexsandr is perhaps Ukraine’s deadliest kamikaze drone pilot: he has destroyed five tanks, five combat infantry vehicles, one armoured personnel carrier, one combat reconnaissance vehicle, two multipurpose lightly armed transporters, an infantry fighting vehicle and an airborne combat vehicle.
That is 20 pieces of deadly and highly valuable pieces of Russian hardware taken off the battlefield.
He prefers not to think of the lives that have been taken in the process but he concedes that, on Friday morning at 7.15am, his explosive-packed drones killed two Russian soldiers and injured six in a fortified trench position near the village of Robotyne in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, where Ukraine’s counter-offensive forces are inching forward through a phalanx of tripwires and anti-personnel and anti-armour mines. Word had just reached him that the position has since been taken. “We did good work,” he says.
Olexsandr – he has asked for his full name not to be used – has footage to prove his deadly work. A video from Friday morning shows Russian soldiers, unaware of the peril from above, firing over the trench at Ukrainian soldiers seeking to storm their position, only for one of Olexsandr’s Mavic 3 drones to make its lethal swoop.
It is not to brag, however, that he has agreed to meet by a sunflower field in Zaporizhzhia, near to where he was killing and maiming just a few hours earlier. “War is nothing to boast about,” he says. Olexsandr is here to complain.
Read on below:
Zelenskiy praises ‘powerful’ US and German air defence systems
Air defence systems donated to Ukraine by Germany and the US “already yielded significant results” Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said in his latest evening address, shooting down a “significant number” of Russian missiles and drones over the past week.
The Ukrainian president, who spoke hours after Russia launched a multi-wave attack on Ukraine that killed six people, said Moscow had fired 65 different missiles and 178 drones at Ukraine in the past seven days.
The US Patriot and German Iris-T systems were “powerful systems, very effective”, Zelenskiy said. “Here, in our skies, we can prove that terror is losing … Ukraine can win this battle, and our sky shield will eventually guarantee security for the whole of Europe.”
A blood transfusion centre in Kupiansk, a city in Kharkiv, was also destroyed early Sunday, in what was one of the busiest nights of strikes for weeks. The overnight assault on Ukraine was said to be in retaliation for successful strikes against Russian naval vessels.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine with me, Helen Livingstone.
Air defence systems donated to Ukraine by Germany and the US are already yielding “significant results”, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said in his latest evening address: “These are powerful systems, very effective.”
He said Ukraine had managed to shoot down a “significant number” of the 65 different missiles and 178 drones fired by Russia in the past week using the US Patriot and German IRIS-T defence systems.
His comments came after Moscow launched a deadly multi-wave assault across Ukraine, killing six people and destroying a blood transfusion centre in what the president separately called “a war crime of “beasts”.
In other developments:
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The Chonhar bridge to the occupied Crimean peninsula was damaged by a missile strike, the Moscow-installed governor said. Another of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk, was shelled and a civilian driver wounded, a Moscow-appointed official said.
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A hostile drone was destroyed by Russian air defences as it approached Moscow on Sunday morning, the city’s mayor said. The capital’s Vnukovo airport temporarily suspended flights.
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Russia has said its forces struck military airbases in the Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions in western Ukraine and that “all targets were hit”. The deputy governor of the Khmelnytskyi region, Serhiy Tiurin, said on Sunday that a military airfield in Starokostiantyniv was among the targets. He said most of the missiles were shot down but explosions had damaged several houses, a cultural institution and the bus station, and a fire had broken out at a grain silo.
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The Mother Ukraine statue in Kyiv, one of the nation’s most recognisable landmarks, has lost its hammer-and-sickle symbol after officials replaced the Soviet-era emblem with the country’s trident coat of arms. The move is part of a wider shift to reclaim Ukraine’s cultural identity from the Communist past.
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A weekend conference in Saudi Arabia of senior officials from some 40 countries including the US, China and India – part of a diplomatic push by Ukraine to build support beyond its core Western backers – ended with no concrete action beyond a commitment to further consultations. Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said the discussions had been very productive, but did not give details.