LIVE. “Russian troops repulse attacks on Crimea” – British defense minister wants to give up mandate | War Ukraine and Russia

According to a by Russian-installed official in Crimea, Russian Black Sea Fleet and Russian Air Force are engaged in repelling Ukrainian drone strikes over the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

The attacks are ongoing over the port of Sevastopol and the Balaklava and Khersones districts of the city. So says Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, on the Telegram messaging app.

There are no details yet on the extent of the attack or possible damage from the attacks on the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.

UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace plans to resign at the next government reshuffle. He said this in an interview with The Sunday Times.

Wallace was instrumental in the British response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has been defense minister since July 2019 and is known as an ally of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He survived the very short term of Johnson’s successor Lizz Truss and also remained in post under current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Wallace also held government positions under Johnson’s predecessors Theresa May and David Cameron, making him the longest-serving government member.

According to British media, Sunak plans to reshuffle his government again in September. That’s when Wallace wants to call it quits. He will also not stand in the next parliamentary elections, he says. “I entered politics in the Scottish Parliament in 1999. That’s 24 years. I spent more than seven years with three phones by my bedside,” Wallace told The Sunday Times.

Earlier, the British defense minister had expressed his interest in the post of Secretary General of NATO. However, the mandate of current Western Defense Alliance chief Jens Stoltenberg was extended by one year at the beginning of this month until October 1, 2024.

The Russian secret service FSB claims to have thwarted an assassination attempt against two well-known people. They are Margarita Simonian, one of the most important voices in the Kremlin’s media apparatus, and Ksenia Sobchak, a well-known influencer critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The day before, the FSB said in a press release that it had arrested members of a neo-Nazi group called ‘Paragraph 88’ in Moscow and in the western region of Ryazan. They would have been engaged by the Ukrainian secret services to kill the two people for a fee.

As always, the Russian allegations could not be independently verified.

Margarita Simonian is the editor-in-chief of state broadcaster RT. She is one of the most famous faces of Moscow’s information war that parallels the offensive in Ukraine.

Ksenia Sobchak is the daughter of a former mayor of Saint Petersburg, Anatoli Sobchak, who was a mentor to current president Vladimir Putin at the time. Ksenia Sobchak has a YouTube channel with a huge following in Russia that regularly criticizes the authorities. She also criticized the attack on Ukraine.

Attacks or attempted attacks against proponents of the war in Ukraine often take place in Russia. Moscow accuses Kiev, but the Ukrainians mostly deny this or refrain from commenting.

The commander of Ukrainian troops, Valery Zaluzhnyi, has confirmed in an interview with the Washington Post that his country has carried out attacks on Russian soil.

“It is our problem and it is up to us to decide how to kill the enemy,” said the commander. “It is possible and necessary to kill him in the war on our own territory.”

The Russian border regions are regularly under fire from artillery and drones from Ukraine. It is striking that Kiev confirms this. The Ukrainians normally keep silent.

According to Zaluzhnyi, the attacks are carried out with their own weapons, not with Western weapons. The West supplies weapons to Ukraine, but does not want them to be used on Russian soil.

In an interview in the Russian newspaper ‘Kommersant’, Russian President Vladimir Putin admits that he attempted to replace Yevgeny Prigozhin as leader of the mercenary army Wagner. However, that attempt failed, the president said, after Prigozhin himself rejected the offer. After the short-lived mutiny at the end of June, Putin seems to want to cause a rift between the Wagner fighters and their current leader.