“INCREASED RISK OF ATTACKS”
“There are signals of an increased risk of attacks on the government district in the coming days. Also in Kyiv and Ukraine in general,” MP Yevgenia Kravchuk told AFP.
The presidency, however, assured its office was working “as usual in compliance with standard security measures: if the alarm sounds, we will be in shelters”.
The apparent heightened risk comes two days after the embassies of several countries, including the US, said they were closed, citing the threat of a Russian attack.
In Moscow meanwhile, Russian defence minister Andrei Belousov said Moscow’s advances in the war-battered eastern Ukraine had “accelerated” and also “ground down” Kyiv’s best units.
“We have, in fact, derailed the entire 2025 campaign,” Defence Minister Andrei Belousov said of the Ukrainian army in a video published by the Russian defence ministry.
Russia later said its forces had “liberated” the frontline village of Novodmytrivka, about 10km north of Kurakhove, an embattled civilian hub in the eastern Donetsk region that the Kremlin claims is part of Russia.
Observers of the conflict say Moscow and Kyiv racing to gain battlefield advantages ahead of January 2025, when Donald Trump – who has vowed to end the war without saying how – is due to take office in the US.
Belousov spoke a day after Putin had addressed Russians, saying the war in Ukraine, which he launched on Feb 24, had taken on “elements of a global character”.
Putin said Russia had hit Dnipro with a new type of ballistic missile called the Oreshnik and that Moscow could launch more such missiles depending on “the actions of the United States and its satellites”.
The attack, which apparently targeted an aerospace manufacturing plant in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, sparked immediate condemnation from Kyiv’s allies.
