Ukraine war briefing: Bomber dies in attack on army recruitment centre

A person died setting off an explosion at an army recruitment centre in western Ukraine on Wednesday, officials said, amid a string of attacks against the mobilisation effort. The explosion at the Kamianets-Podilsky recruitment centre wounded four other people, said Sergiy Tyurin, the regional administrator. Ukrainian police said it was the ninth such attack on a recruitment centre this year, and alleged the perpetrator had been recruited by Russian agents. In all cases, the perpetrators had been detained. A person who set off a blast on Saturday at a draft centre in Rivne, north-west Ukraine, was also killed in the explosion, with six others wounded, police said. Also on Saturday, a man with a hunting rifle shot dead a Ukrainian army recruitment soldier and escaped with a conscript before both were caught by police.

Russia and Ukraine each said on Wednesday that 150 of their captured soldiers had been returned in a prisoner-of-war exchange. “Some of the guys had been in captivity for more than two years,” said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Russia confirmed the swap, mediated by the United Arab Emirates, which has helped broker many such exchanges.

Ukraine’s military will create robotic vehicle units to deploy at the front, the defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said on Wednesday. “Our goal is to create a military where innovative technologies help perform the most dangerous tasks, saving the lives of our defenders,” he said. The ministry published a photograph of a robotic vehicle with a gun mounted on it. With both sides deploying tens of thousands of airborne drones each month, a race is on to replace as many soldiers on the ground as possible with unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), officials say.

Russian attacks on Wednesday killed two people near the frontline in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and one near the Black Sea port of Odesa, officials said.
Emergency services said a house was shelled in the town of Druzhkivka, south of the city of Kramatorsk in Donetsk region, killing two people. The Odesa regional governor, Oleh Kiper, said a missile attack killed one man and badly injured another outside an unfinished building near the port.

Germany is investigating whether vandalism aimed at hundreds of cars that was widely blamed on climate activists may have been a Russian pre-election campaign seeking to smear the Greens party. No German prosecutors or officials have confirmed that Russia is thought to be behind the campaign, but the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, a Green, said: “Whoever stands against Russia’s illegal war of aggression comes into the crosshairs of the Kremlin and its henchmen.” Prosecutors in the southern city of Ulm said four people aged between 17 and 29, from countries including Romania, Serbia and Bosnia were suspected of involvement in more than 100 incidents in which car exhaust pipes were blocked with self-hardening industrial spray foam.

The US vice-president, JD Vance, will be at the Munich security conference next week where discussions will be held focused on national security issues, including Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The leading French newspaper Le Monde on Wednesday denounced the “disguised expulsion” of its Moscow correspondent Benjamin Quenelle, after his press accreditation was revoked. Since starting the war, the Kremlin has thrown domestic journalists and several western reporters in jail and severely restricted war coverage. Le Monde’s editorial director, Jerome Fenoglio, said: “This arbitrary decision constitutes a new obstacle to the freedom of the press in the country … Even in the tensest moments of the cold war, Le Monde pursued its work in Moscow and beyond.” Russia’s foreign ministry said it was in retaliation for France’s refusal to issue press visas to journalists from Komsomolskaya Pravda whom Paris accuses of being Russian agents.