Ukraine-Russia war latest: Putin hit Kyiv cabinet building with cluster missile; Trump threatens new sanctions

Ukraine is at risk of shortages of air defence weapons after a US defence department review of military aid resulted in slower deliveries, according to the Financial Times, citing Western officials.

It comes just as Russia intensifies air attacks, with the number of drones and missiles fired at Ukraine overnight surpassing 800 over the weekend.

Portugal’s prime minister Luis Montenegro urged Chinese president Xi Jinping to use his country’s close relationship with Russia to push for a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine, during a meeting in Beijing on Tuesday.

Montenegro’s visit to China is the first by a Portuguese head of government in nearly a decade.

It comes a week after Xi hosted a massive military parade in Beijing marking 80 years since Japan’s World War Two defeat, flanked by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in what EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has called an “autocratic alliance”.

“We really count on your contribution and the close relationship that China maintains with the Russian Federation in order for us to build, as fast as possible, a just and lasting peace in Ukraine,” Mr Montenegro told his host.

Russia appears intent on capturing the Ukrainian territories of Odesa and Mykolaiv, according to images shared on social media.

A map could be seen in the background last month when Russia’s chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, was addressing a briefing of Moscow’s ministry of defence. In the map, Ukraine and Russia are divided by a thick black line.

The Russian side of the line included five publicly claimed regions of Ukraine but also the territories of Odesa and Mykolaiv.

Both the oblasts near the Black Sea coastline hold significant strategic importance.

Russia already claims full control of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, and the map suggested Moscow’s territorial ambitions extend into Odesa and Kharkiv, neither of which had been included in earlier demands.

A man died as a result of Ukrainian drone attack overnight on the Russian Black Sea city of Sochi, a Russian regional governor said this morning.

Debris from a destroyed drone hit a car the man was driving in the Adler district of Sochi, Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev said on his Telegram channel.

In addition, six residential houses were damaged, Kondratyev said.

The full-scale of the attack was not immediately known.

The Russian defence ministry said its air defence units destroyed two drones over the Krasnodar region, but the ministry reports only how many drones its forces destroy, not how many Ukraine launches.

Overall, Russian defence systems destroyed 31 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 15 over the Black Sea, the ministry said on Telegram.

New surveillance footage captures the final moments of a Ukrainian refugee’s life before she was stabbed to death on a light rail train in North Carolina.

Iryna Zarutska, 23, had recently arrived in the US seeking safety and “new beginnings” after fleeing her war-torn home, only for her life to be tragically cut short, according to a GoFundMe campaign set up to support her family.

The Charlotte Area Transit System has released footage that showed Zarutska boarding the Lynx Blue Line just after 9.45pm on 22 August at the East/West Boulevard light rail station in South End.

Wearing her pizzeria job uniform, Zarutska was seen scrolling on her phone as she sat in front of a man in a red hoodie who was making strange faces.

Russia launched the biggest aerial strikes of the war so far Ukraine over the weekend, killing four people including a mother and her three-month-old baby.

More than 800 drones and 13 missiles were fired at cities across Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv, in the early hours of Sunday 7 September. The strike marked the first attack of the war on the main Ukrainian government building, and is the second major assault on the capital within two weeks.

In response, president Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack “a deliberate crime and prolongation of the war” and called on the US to provide a “strong response” to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

At least two people were killed and 16 others were injured after Ukrainian forces launched heavy drone and missile attacks on Russia-occupied parts of the Donetsk region, a Russia-installed official said late last night.

Denis Pushilin said Ukrainian forces had struck targets in the region’s main city, also called Donetsk, and in Makiivka, an industrial town further north.

Russian news agencies quoted security officials in the occupied areas as saying that at least 20 drones had been deployed in the two assaults and that air defence units were in action. They said explosions had resounded throughout the city of Donetsk and the air was hanging heavy with smoke.

The popular Russian war blog Rybar said there had also been explosions in Yenakiievo, another Russian-held industrial town, where it said at least one apartment block had been hit.

Russia controls a little less than 20 per cent of all of Ukraine’s territory and about 75 per cent of Donetsk region.

Russia claims to have annexed four regions in their entirety, including Donetsk, and is engaged in a slow drive westward to capture the rest of the area.