Putin warns West of attacks if longer-range missiles are supplied – follow live

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has called on the West to impose a new wave of sanctions on Russia to punish it for launching attacks on Kyiv in the early hours of Sunday morning.

“The Kremlin resorts to new insidious attacks. Today’s missile attacks on Kyiv have only one goal: to kill as many as possible,” she wrote.

Moscow’s Tu-95 strategic bombers launched missiles at Kyiv from the Caspian Sea earlier today, Ukraine’s air force said.

The attack targeted railway infrastructure, according to Serhiy Leshchenko, assistant to President Volodomyr Zelensky’s chief of staff.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it fired rockets at Kyiv from long range and destroyed T-72 tanks and armored vehicles that had been supplied to Ukraine by Eastern European countries and were being held in a railway carriage repair building.

“According to preliminary data, the (Russians) launched missiles from Tu-95 aircraft from the Caspian Sea,” the Ukrainian air force said in a statement.

The Russian Defense Ministry has called for the forced destruction of tanks and other armored vehicles on the outskirts of Kyiv that had been supplied to Ukraine by European countries.

The ministry’s statement came after the Ukrainian capital was rocked by several explosions early on Sunday.

France has started talks with the United Arab Emirates to replace its reliance on Russian oil following the EU’s ban on crude from Moscow, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has said.

“There are talks with the United Arab Emirates. We have to find an alternative to Russian oil,” Le Maire told Europe 1 radio.

Despite suggesting that the West sending in more advanced rocket systems would aggravate the conflict, President Vladimir Putin has said it will not bring any fundamental change to the battlefield.

“We understand that this supply (of advanced rocket systems) from the United States and some other countries is intended to offset the losses of this military equipment,” he said.

“This is nothing new,” he said. “It doesn’t change anything in essence.”

Russia will strike a new set of Ukrainian targets if the United States starts supplying Kyiv with longer-range missiles, President Vladimir Putin has warned.

According to the TASS news agency, Putin told the state-run Rossiya-1 TV channel that if such missiles are supplied, “we will hit the targets we have not yet hit.”

A Russian cruise missile flew “critically low” over Ukraine’s second-largest nuclear power plant near the southern city of Mykolaiv, state operator Energoatom said.

“It is likely that it was the missile that was fired in the direction of Kyiv,” the operator of the Pivdennoukrainska plant, also called the South Ukraine Nuclear Plant, said in a post on Telegram.

Ukraine has rejected French President Emmanuel Macron’s call not to “humiliate” Russia for the sake of diplomacy.

Reacting on Twitter, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said such calls “could only humiliate France and all other countries that request it.”

“Because it is Russia that is humiliating itself. It is better that we all concentrate on how to put Russia in her place. This will bring peace and save lives,” she said.