August 18, 2023 Russia-Ukraine news

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Three people are dead and one person was injured after an explosion in the urban center of Donetsk on Friday, according to the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic Denis Pushilin.

They were employees of a public utility company in Donetsk’s Kievsky District and were killed “as a result of the detonation of a previously unexploded cluster submunition,” Pushilin said in a post to Telegram.

Hours later, a separate “unidentified explosive device” detonated at a construction site in the Voroshilovskyi district of Donetsk and killed three construction workers and left five more injured, according to officials from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic Joint Center for Command and Control. 

Pushilin added that four more people in the cities of Donetsk, Makiivka, Vasilievka and Nikolske were wounded after a day of heavy shelling on Friday.

“Today, the enemy shelled the territory of the Republic 34 times, firing 115 rocket and barrel artillery shells,” Pushilin added. 

CNN cannot independently verify these claims.

Ukrainian pilots will start training on how to operate F-16 fighter jets later this month in Denmark, the country’s defense ministry said. The United States approved giving instructional materials on the jets, which contain information about sensitive US technology, to Ukraine, officials said.

Russia has barred dozens of British government ministers and journalists from entering the country

Here’s what to know:

In remarks after a trilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minster Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, US President Joe Biden commended the Japanese leader on his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Answering questions from a Japanese reporter at Camp David in Maryland, Biden said Japan has “showed strong leadership through the G7 as well and contributed to a significant amount of financial and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine as well as nonlethal military equipment. And they’ve joined so many other nations in holding Russia accountable through international sanctions.”

Biden said when he called up Kishida about Ukraine, he didn’t have to convince him “of anything.” 

“Russia has already lost. It cannot meet its original objective which it stated. It’s not possible. … Japan’s leadership from day one, it has been critical making it clear that the consequences for war extend well beyond Europe,” he said.

The invasion is not “only a European problem; there hasn’t been that kind of invasion since World War II,” Biden added.

The Kremlin's Spasskaya tower and St. Basil's cathedral is seen in downtown Moscow, on July 13.

Russia has barred 54 more British citizens from entering the country, according to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the latest update to its sanctions policy, Russia accused the individuals and entities of involvement in “propaganda support of the activities of the [Ukrainian] Zelensky regime” and of being “Russophobic.” 

The sanctions list includes several government ministers as well as journalists from public broadcaster the BBC, the Guardian newspaper and the Daily Telegraph newspaper. 

The updated list includes British cabinet minister Lucy Frazer, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Russian authorities claimed that Frazer is “actively lobbying for the international sports isolation of Russia.” 

Earlier this year, Frazer said in a social media post that she asked sponsors of the Olympic Games “to join 35 like-minded nations and press the IOC for a continued ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes competing in international sporting competitions,” adding that “we must continue to ensure that Russia and Belarus cannot use sport for their propaganda purposes.” 

The new sanctions also include a Minister of State at the British Ministry of Defence, Baroness Goldie DL, who Russia has accused of being “responsible for the supply of weapons to Ukraine, including depleted uranium shells.”

British prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan KC, who is an elected official on the International Criminal Court, will also be barred from Russia due to his involvement “in issuing a warrant for the arrest of the Russian leadership,” according to the Russian foreign ministry statement. 

In February, Khan submitted applications to the ICC for warrants of arrest for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. 

The village of Kozachi Laheri, which is on the east bank of the Dnipro River, has been cleared of all Ukrainian forces, the Russian-appointed head of the occupied areas of the southern Kherson region claimed on Friday.

“Assault units of the Dnipro group of troops have completely cleared the area on the left bank of the Dnipro River near the village of Kozachi Laheri in the Alyoshkin district of Kherson Region,” Vladimir Saldo claimed in a post on Telegram.

Saldo claimed that despite Ukrainian forces continuing to return fire from the right bank of the Dnipro River, the village is under full Russian control.

Earlier this month: On August 9, Russian state media and military bloggers said Ukrainian forces conducted a raid across the Dnipro River and attempted to land near the village.

Natalia Humeniuk, head of the United Coordinating Press Center of Security and Defense Forces of South of Ukraine, dismissed the claims, telling CNN that Russia was “trying to create artificial hype and panic.”

Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar also said the reported raid was “not confirmed” by the military’s general staff at the time.

Remember: Ukraine controls the west bank of the Dnipro River and the city of Kherson after its counteroffensive last year, while Russian troops remain on the east bank in the larger Kherson region.

Russian dissident journalist Elena Kostyuchenko has revealed how she was traveling to Berlin by train last autumn when she abruptly fell ill, a case that has led German authorities to investigate a suspected poisoning attempt.

Kostyuchenko was living in exile at the time in the German capital after being warned of Russian plans to assassinate her. She was on her way back from a trip to Munich to apply for a Ukrainian visa when she suddenly found herself drenched in strange-smelling sweat and experiencing cognitive difficulties, she wrote in the Russian-language publication Meduza this week. A long and mysterious illness then ensued, from which she has yet to completely recover, the journalist said.

An initial investigation by Berlin authorities into a suspected poisoning was closed in May due to lack of evidence, but has now been reopened after further consideration.

Kostyuchenko had been working for the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta for 17 years when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. The paper sent her on assignment to Ukraine at the start of the war.

In March 2022, she said she was tipped off by a source in Ukrainian military reconnaissance about Russian plans to assassinate her. She was told she must leave Ukraine immediately and could not return to Russia.

Kostyuchenko eventually fled to Germany, where she rented an apartment in Berlin and began working for Meduza on September 29. After agreeing to a reporting trip to Iran for the publication, she said she was asked to submit paperwork for a Ukrainian visa before she left – requiring her to make the trip to Munich.

In an ordeal outlined in an article written by Kostyuchenko and published in Meduza and US publication n+1, she described how she first began to sweat profusely after leaving the Ukrainian embassy on October 18, 2022.

After leaving the train, she said she struggled to remember the way to her apartment.

Her condition deteriorated rapidly over the next days. She developed symptoms including a sharp stomach pain, nausea, shortness of breath and swelling.

Read more about the suspected poisoning.

F-16 aircrafts are seen during a military parade in Warsaw, Poland, on August 15.

The US has approved the transfer of F-16 instructional materials to Ukraine, according to a Biden administration official and a US official, as the program to train Ukrainian pilots on the American jets is set to begin.

The approval includes training modules, documentation, and classroom training materials, the official said, which contains information about sensitive US technology. 

The approval of the third-party transfer request from Denmark was one of the critical steps before Ukrainian fighter pilots could begin training to fly the fourth-generation jets, which Kyiv has requested for months. Earlier Friday, the Danish defense ministry said Ukrainian pilots would begin training on F-16 jets later this month, part of a coalition of 11 countries that will be involved in the training program.

On Thursday, the US said it had committed to approving the transfer of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine as soon as training is complete. 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent letters to his counterparts in Denmark and the Netherlands assuring them that the transfer of the jets would have the “full support” of the Biden administration and would move quickly when training on the advanced aircraft is complete. 

Training will take time: On Friday, the commander of US Air Forces in Europe and Africa said the Ukrainian pilots who will learn to fly the F-16 fighter jet are getting language instruction in the United Kingdom, since all of the materials and the instruments in the jet itself are in English, before they start flying training aircraft.

“They’re going to get a little bit more training on (propellor aircraft) and then go down to France and fly in the Alpha jet for a little bit,” said Gen. James Hecker, speaking to a roundtable of reporters as part of the Defense Writers Group. The Alpha jet used by the French is an advanced jet trainer. 

Hecker said the Ukrainian pilots taking part in the F-16 training program are younger pilots who “barely have any hours at all” and are not currently taking part in the war.

The Ukrainians also said on Wednesday that they didn’t expect to receive the F-16s until next year.

Ukrainian pilots will begin training on F-16 fighter jets in Denmark later in August, the Danish defense ministry said Friday. 

A coalition of 11 countries will be involved in the training, it added.

Some background: CNN reported Thursday that the US has committed to approving the transfer of F-16 fighter jets for Ukraine as soon as training is complete, according to a US official.

Denmark and the Netherlands have taken the lead in preparing a program to train Ukrainian pilots on the American jet, but the US is still working with other countries to see who may provide F-16s to the Ukrainian Air Force.

Ukraine said Wednesday that it didn’t expect to receive F-16s until some time next year.

CNN’s Oren Liebermann and Natasha Bertrand contributed reporting to this post.

A view shows the Crimean bridge connecting the Russian mainland with the peninsula across the Kerch Strait, Crimea, on July 17.

Ukraine has ramped up missile strikes on Russian-occupied Crimea in recent weeks in an effort to disrupt Russian logistics and resupply efforts as fighting rages in southern Ukraine – but it’s a strategy that some US officials in Washington are viewing with skepticism.

For some military and Biden administration officials, Ukrainian attacks on Crimea are at best a distraction, and at worst, a valuable waste of resources in a strategy that many analysts now believe has left Ukraine stretched too thin between multiple axes of attack.

Ukraine has in recent weeks used long-range missiles to strike two bridges linking Crimea to Russian-occupied territory in southern Ukraine, and on Saturday, targeted the only bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia. With roughly a third of the peninsula now within the range of the US-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), according to one senior Western intelligence official, Ukraine has also stepped up strikes on Russian ammunition dumps and other logistics and resupply infrastructure there.

“There’s more and more pressure on Crimea, and especially so in recent weeks,” that official told CNN. “I mean, they get pounded.”

Crimea holds a deep symbolic importance to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered his forces to invade and illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014. And it is also a strategically vital logistics hub for Russia’s war effort; its location on the Black Sea has made it sought-after territory for centuries.

For Ukraine, the attacks are an integral part of their counteroffensive strategy, intended to try to isolate Crimea and make it more difficult for Russia to sustain its military operations on the Ukrainian mainland, a Ukrainian source familiar with the strategy told CNN.

Read more about Ukraine’s recent focus on Crimea.

Russia blamed Ukraine for Friday’s attempted drone strike on Moscow, which forced authorities to suspend traffic to four major airports in the Russian capital. During the suspension, seven flights were diverted to alternative locations: three to Nizhny Novgorod, three to St. Petersburg and one to Minsk, in Belarus.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said that Russian air defenses shot down a drone over the capital city overnight into Friday. He said in a post on Telegram that debris from the drone fell into Expocentre, an exhibition center that lies within the wider Moscow city center, about three miles (five kilometers) east of the Kremlin.

Here’s what else is happening:

Ukrainian officials say civilian infrastructure in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia suffered minor damage, with no reports of casualties at the moment, after a Russian missile strike on Friday.

The secretary of Zaporizhzhia city council, Anatolii Kurtev, said the blast had blown out “out apartment and balcony windows and windows in stairwells in three multi-story buildings.”

Some 14,000 people in the frontline region of Donetsk have been left without power after Russian shelling affected generation at a thermal powerplant, according to Ukraine’s grid operator Ukrenergo.

The operator also said that months after the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam, around 11,000 people were still without power in the Kherson region.

“Power engineers are working to restore the power supply, but repairs are slowed down by shelling,” it said.

Remember: Tens of thousands of people were deprived of power and clean water after the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine in June, one of the biggest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe for decades. The catastrophe destroyed entire villages, flooded farmland and caused massive environmental damage.

 A Ukrainian flag was hung near a building operated by Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, several videos posted on social media and verified by CNN show.

The flag appeared to have been hung from powerlines above a road and has reportedly been taken down by the local fire department.

Russian officials have yet to comment on the incident.

Where is it? Nizhny Novgorod is Russia’s sixth largest city by population, with 1.2 million people, and is located around 400km (250 miles) east of Moscow.

A Russian IL-38 information-gathering aircraft flies between the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, in this photo taken by Japan Air Self-Defense Force August 18.

Japan’s defense ministry said Friday that it scrambled fighter jets in response to two Russian IL-38 information-gathering aircrafts seen flying to and from the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea through the Tsushima Strait, which separates Japan and South Korea.

The Russian air force activity came a day after Japan’s defense ministry said on Thursday that it saw Russian and Chinese naval ships crossing international waters between Okinawa Island and Miyako Island in southern Japan.

The defense ministry said it was the first time the Chinese and Russian naval ships sailed through that particular area of the sea together and had expressed “grave concern” about their joint military activities in the sea and airspace surrounding the country in recent years, saying they are “intended as a show of force against Japan.”

Some context: It’s standard practice for Japan to scramble fighter jets in response to Chinese and Russian aircrafts flying close to its territory.

Japan’s relations with Russia have deteriorated since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 18 months ago. Tokyo has joined its Western allies in imposing sanctions on Moscow and pledged billions in humanitarian aid for Kyiv.

Damage to the Expocentre building in Moscow, Russia, following a drone attack on August 18.

An alleged drone strike attempt on Moscow forced authorities to suspend traffic to four major airports in the Russian capital on Friday, according to the country’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsiya. 

“This morning, August 18, 2023, in order to ensure the safety of civil aircraft flights, flights to Moscow airports: Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo were temporarily restricted. Also to Zhukovsky airport,” Rosaviatsiya said on its Telegram channel. 

Russia blamed Ukraine for Friday’s attempted drone strike on Moscow, calling it a “terrorist attack.”

During the suspension, seven flights were diverted to alternative locations: three to Nizhny Novgorod, three to St Petersburg and one to Minsk, in Belarus.

Restrictions on air travel have since been lifted and “Vnukovo, Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo and Zhukovsky airports are operating normally,” Rosaviatsiya also said.

Hong-Kong-flagged container ship Joseph Schulte transits the Bosporus in Istanbul, Turkey on August 18.

A container ship laden with grain that departed from Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa on Wednesday has transited through the Bosporus and arrived in the sea of Marmara near Turkey, its final destination. 

The Hong Kong-flagged Joseph Schulte, carrying 30,000 metric tons of cargo including food products, is the first vessel to use a temporary Black Sea shipping corridor established following the breakdown of a UN-brokered grain deal last month, Kyiv officials said.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on Thursday hailed the “functioning of the ‘grain corridor,’” as the ship sailed through the Black Sea along Romanian and Bulgarian territorial waters on its passage to Turkey. 

Some context: Russia pulled out of a UN and Turkish brokered deal in July that allowed Ukraine to move its grain via the Black Sea and warned that any ships headed to Ukraine would be treated as potentially carrying weapons. 

Last week, the Ukrainian navy issued an order declaring “temporary corridors” for merchant ships sailing to and from Ukrainian ports. However, it admitted that the military threat and mine danger from Russia remained along all routes.

On Sunday, a Russian warship fired warning shots and boarded a Turkish-owned cargo ship it claimed was headed to Ukraine, in what Kyiv said was “an act of piracy.”

Russian and Chinese warships conduct joint patrols in the Pacific Ocean.

Japan expressed “grave concern” after Chinese and Russian warships sailed close to its southern islands on Thursday, just a day before its leader is expected to discuss rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific at a summit with counterparts from South Korea and the United States.

Six Chinese ships, among them missile destroyers, and five Russian vessels, some of them destroyers, sailed between Japan’s Okinawa Island and Miyako Island before moving toward the East China Sea on Thursday, according to Japan’s defense ministry.

Japan’s relations with Russia have deteriorated since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 18 months ago. Tokyo has joined its Western allies in imposing sanctions on Moscow and pledged billions in humanitarian aid for Kyiv.

China, meanwhile, has strengthened political and economic ties with Russia, despite maintaining it remains a neutral party in the conflict and a proponent of peace.

Read the full story here.

A F-16 Fighting Falcon from Colorado Air National Guard's 140th Wing takes off from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colorado on May 15, 2020.

The United States’ decision to approve the transfer of US-made F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine as soon as crew training is complete is a “major milestone,” Netherlands Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said Thursday. 

The US has committed to approving the transfer of F-16 fighter jets for Ukraine as soon as training is complete, according to a US official.

The plan is to make sure Ukraine has the fighter jet it has long sought the moment its pilots complete training on the F-16. The training program was initially expected to start this month, but it is now unclear exactly when it will start or how long it is expected to take.

Denmark and the Netherlands have taken the lead in preparing a program to train Ukrainian pilots on the American jet, but the US is still working with other countries to see who may provide F-16s to the Ukrainian Air Force.

Hoekstra said the Netherlands would work with NATO allies with the view of providing the jets to Ukraine. 

A 61-year-old woman was killed after Russian shelling hit the eastern city of Kupiansk on Friday, a Ukrainian military official said.

Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, said a 60-year-old woman was also injured in the attack.

Shelling also damaged homes in nearby areas, he added.

Earlier this month, Ukrainian authorities ordered mandatory evacuations from Kupiansk and its surrounding areas, as Russia intensified shelling of the northeastern Kharkiv region and claimed to have captured Ukrainian positions near the city.

Some more background: Kupiansk, which lies close to the Russian border, fell to Moscow’s forces within the first week of their invasion in February last year. It remained under Russian control for several months, before a swift Ukrainian offensive liberated the city in September, along with a number of other settlements in the region.