Russia Ukraine war latest: Russia plotted terror attacks on airlines around world, Polish PM Tusk claims

Security officials have said that parcels that exploded at logistics depots in Europe were part of a test run for a Russian plot to trigger explosions on cargo flights to the United States. The explosions occurred in depots in Britain, Germany and Poland in July.

The United States has taken fresh action against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, aiming efforts to circumvent US sanctions as Washington continues to increase pressure on Moscow in the final days of the Biden administration.

The US Treasury Department in a statement said Washington was imposing fresh sanctions on almost 100 targets – including Russian banks and companies operating in Russia’s energy sector – that were previously sanctioned by the United States in a move it said increases secondary sanctions risk for critical Russian entities.

The fresh sanctions are issued under an executive order a senior Treasury official said puts in place a Congressional review notification requirement before any of the measures issued under it are lifted.

The action comes in the final days of President Joe Biden’s administration. President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.

Washington also took action against a sanctions evasion scheme established between actors in Russia and China as well as Keremet Bank, a Kyrgyzstan-based financial institution that coordinated with Russian officials and a bank designated by the United States to circumvent sanctions, according to the statement.

“Our goal in taking these actions today is to make clear to financial institutions, but companies as well, that doing business with Russia that supports its military industrialized complex exposes you to sanctions risk yourself,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

The State Department is also issuing sanctions against more than 150 entities and individuals, the Treasury said.

Senator Marco Rubio, president-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, said an end to the war in Ukraine was essential with both sides having to make concessions.

Mr Rubio said it should be US policy that the war must end, and said reaching an agreement to stop the fighting would involve concessions from both Moscow and Kyiv, suggesting Ukraine would have to give up its goal of regaining all the territory Moscow has taken in the last decade.

“I think it’s important that the Ukrainians have leverage, but they also will have to make concessions to reach this agreement,” he said.

Debris from falling Ukrainian drones triggered a fire at an oil storage facility in Russia’s southern Voronezh region late yesterday night, regional governor Alexander Gusev said.

Emergency services had been dispatched to the area, Mr Gusev wrote on Telegram. No casualties were reported.

Russia’s defence ministry said air defence units had destroyed, over a 10-minute period, four drones over Voronezh region and one over Belgorod region.

Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump now concede that the Ukraine war will take months or even longer to resolve, a sharp reality check on his biggest foreign policy promise – to strike a peace deal on his first day in the White House.

Two Trump associates, who have discussed the war in Ukraine with the president-elect, told Reuters they were looking at a timeline of months to resolve the conflict, describing the Day One promises as a combination of campaign bluster and a lack of appreciation of the intractability of the conflict and the time it takes to staff up a new administration.

Those assessments dovetail with remarks by Trump’s incoming Russia-Ukraine envoy, retired Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, who said in an interview with Fox News last week that he would like to have a “solution” to the war within 100 days, far beyond the president-elect’s original timeline.

Yet even Kellogg’s extended deadline was “way, way too optimistic,” said John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

“For this to work, Trump has to persuade (Russian President Vladimir) Putin that there’s a downside for being intransigent,” Herbst said.

Russian military strikes against energy infrastructure in western Ukraine were carried out in response to Ukrainian strikes using Western weaponry, the Russian defence ministry said early today.

Russia’s military had acted in response to Ukraine’s use of US ATACMS missiles and British-made Storm Shadow missiles, it said in a statement claiming a successful strike on a large gas storage facility in the western Ukrainian town of Stryi.

It also referred to an attempted Ukrainian attack in Russia’s Krasnodar region intended to halt gas supplies through the Turkstream pipeline network.

There are several variants of Army Tactical Missile Systems, a long-range missile system that often carries varying amounts of cluster bomblets.

Ukrainian forces used the US-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles for the first time in October 2023, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy saying the weapons had “proven themselves.”

Ukraine likely has what are known as M39A1 Block IA ATACMS that are guided in part by Global Positioning System and have a range of 40 to 190 miles. They can carry a payload of 300 bomblets. The M39 Block IA were used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Army documents, and were added to the US arsenal in 1997.