Ukraine war: Kyiv troops retreat from key eastern town

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday he was not in a position to negotiate between Ukraine and Russia following media reports that he would travel to Moscow during the day to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Orban, a critic of Western military aid to Ukraine who has the warmest relations of any EU leader with Putin, said the fact that Hungary currently holds the bloc’s rotating presidency does not give him a mandate to negotiate on its behalf.

“I do not need a mandate as I do not represent anything,” Orban said on his regular Friday morning radio interview, without saying whether he would travel to Moscow later in the day.

“All I do is go to places where there is a war or threat of war that threatens the European Union and Hungary, or has a negative consequence on them, and ask questions,” he added.

In a sign of their more defensive posture, some Russian warships that seldom entered the Sea of Azov to the east of Crimea are now stationed there regularly, Ukraine’s navy chief said.

Monitoring data compiled by the Ukrainian Navy and provided to Reuters showed that as of June 27, 10 Russian warships were stationed in the Sea of Azov compared with none in 2023.

Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa said the Black Sea Fleet is primarily used now for logistics, a small amount of coastal territorial control and for firing Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine.

He declined to say what Ukraine‘s future plans in the Black Sea would involve.

Ukraine‘s operations in the Black Sea have allowed it to establish and secure its own shipping corridor without Russia‘s blessing after Moscow pulled out of the wartime food export deal brokered by the United Nations last year.

Neizhpapa said the delivery of U.S.-made F-16 fighter aircraft, expected to happen soon, would be a boost allowing it to challenge what he called Russia‘s “full dominance” of the skies over the Black Sea.

“F-16s with the right armaments will be able to push away Russian warplanes. The northwestern part of the Black Sea, particularly the corridor for civilian ships, will be almost 100% secure,” he said.

The Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet has been forced to rebase nearly all its combat-ready warships from occupied Crimea to other locations, and its main naval hub is becoming ineffectual because of attacks by Kyiv, Ukraine’s navy chief said.

Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa said Ukrainian missile and naval drone strikes had caused heavy damage to the Sevastopol base, a logistics hub for repairs, maintenance, training and ammunition storage among other important functions for Russia.

“They were established over many decades, possibly centuries. And clearly they are now losing this hub,” Neizhpapa told Reuters in a rare interview in the port city of Odesa ahead of Ukraine Navy Day on Sunday.

“Almost all the main combat-ready ships have been moved by the enemy from the main base of the Black Sea Fleet, and the ships are kept in Novorossiisk, and some of them are kept in the Sea of Azov,” he said.

Neizhpapa said Ukraine had destroyed or damaged 27 naval vessels, including five that he said were destroyed by sea mines laid by Ukrainian naval drones near the Bay of Sevastopol.

Russia‘s Federal Security Service said it had prevented an attack on a defence facility in the Samara region in southwest Russia, the RIA state news agency reported on Friday.

Chasiv Yar is a short distance west of Bakhmut, which was captured by Russia last year after a bitter 10-month battle. For months, Russian forces have focused on capturing Chasiv Yar, a town which occupies an elevated location. Its fall would put nearby cities in jeopardy and compromise critical Ukrainian supply routes.

The Ukrainian army retreated from a northeastern neighborhood in the town, Nazar Voloshyn, the spokesperson for the Khortytsia ground forces formation, told The Associated Press in a written message Thursday.

A six-year-old girl died in hospital after a Ukranian drone attack on the town of Primorsko-Akhtarsk in Russia’s Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, the regional governor, said on Friday.

He said six people were hospitalised after the attack. Ukraine has not commented on the incident so far.

A Russian military court has placed the commander of the country’s 83rd Guards Air Assault Brigade in pre-trial detention for two months on charges of large-scale fraud, the Tass state news agency reported.

In 2022, The New York Times reported that Colonel Artyom Gorodilov was in command of Russia’s 234th Air Assault Regiment which Ukraine and the West say killed Ukrainian civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in March that year.

Vladimir Putin has dismissed the Bucha allegations as “a provocation” and said the Russian army had nothing to do with the killings which Russian officials have suggested were staged for propaganda purposes.

Gorodilov, who was promoted for his exploits in what Russia calls its special military operation in Ukraine, is the latest in a series of high-ranking Russian military officers and senior defence officials to be arrested on charges of corruption in recent months.

The Ukrainian air force said it downed all 32 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack. Three drones were shot down over the southern region of Mykolaiv, its governor said.

Three more were downed over Dnipropetrovsk region, according to the governor.

The Kyiv region governor reported that the air defence was at work to shoot down the drones in the early hours today.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban is scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow today, Radio Free Europe and the Financial Times reported.

Russian news agencies quoted Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as neither confirming nor denying the visit. State news agency RIA cited Peskov as saying that Putin had a “busy schedule” on Friday about which the Kremlin would inform reporters later.

It would be the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that Putin and Orban have met inside Russia.

Orban, who has maintained a closer relationship to Moscow than other EU nations since the invasion, visited Russia in 2022 without meeting Putin and has met him in other countries.

From the start of this month, Hungary has taken over the rotating presidency of the European Union, a largely ceremonial role tasked with agenda-setting and brokering agreements in legislative affairs.

Earlier this week, Orban visited Kyiv where he urged Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to consider a ceasefire to accelerate an end to the war with Russia.

“The EU rotating presidency has no mandate to engage with Russia on behalf of the EU,” Charles Michel, president of the Council of European Union leaders, said on X.

“No discussions about Ukraine can take place without Ukraine,” he said, reacting to Orban‘s visit to Moscow. Hungary, a member of the EU and Nato, has refused to send weapons to Ukraine and vocally criticised EU sanctions against Russia, while stopping short of using its veto power to block them.

Donald Trump has been presented with a plan to bring an end to the war in Ukraine by two key advisers that would require Kyiv to sit down for peace talks with Russia or receive no further US weapons: