Live, war in Ukraine: Ukrainian drone attack leaves one dead in Russia, authorities say

One person was killed in a Ukrainian drone attack in the Rostov region in southern Russia on Monday night, regional governor Yuri Sliusar announced.

The attack targeted the districts of Salsk, Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, Volgodonsk, Bokovsky and Tarasovsky, Sliousar said on Telegram.

In Salsk, "a car was damaged on Ostrovsky Street. Unfortunately, the driver inside died," he wrote.

Drone debris also fell on the Salsk station, damaging a passenger train and another freight train, without causing any injuries, Russian Railways said.

Volodymyr Zelensky praised the "determination" of his American counterpart, Donald Trump, who gave Vladimir Putin "ten to twelve days" to end the conflict in Ukraine , or face severe sanctions. "A clear position and a strong determination on the part of the President of the United States and at the right time, when many things can change through force in favor of real peace," the Ukrainian president declared on the social network X.

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna announced that he had summoned the Russian chargé d'affaires "to formally protest this serious and unacceptable violation of [its] maritime border," following the incursion of a Russian ship into Estonian territorial waters.

The Estonian army announced in a statement that an unauthorized Russian border guard vessel briefly entered the country's territorial waters, a distance of 500 meters, on Saturday.

Foreign warships may only sail through Estonian territorial waters if they do so peacefully and notify the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 48 hours in advance. "The Russian ship did not do this," the military said, adding that this is the first time this year that a Russian ship has violated Estonia's maritime border.

A 75-year-old man died and another was injured and hospitalized after a Russian drone struck a car in the village of Velyki Prokhody ( 📍 ) in eastern Ukraine, Oleh Synehubov, head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration, said on Telegram.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP

"Mobile network outages are becoming common in Russia." This sentence was not written by a user exasperated by his faulty connection, but by Beeline, one of the country's main telephone companies. In a press release published on July 18, this telecommunications giant details the best reflexes for dealing with shutdowns or voluntary slowdowns of access to mobile Internet which have intensified in recent weeks and which affect almost the entire territory of the federation.

Donald Trump said he was now giving Vladimir Putin "10 or 12 days" to end the conflict in Ukraine or face severe US sanctions against Russia, minutes after saying he wanted to "reduce" the 50-day deadline he gave the Russian president on July 14, without giving further details.

"I'm setting a new deadline of about ten or twelve days from today. There's no reason to wait. We're not seeing any progress," the US president lamented.

In particular, he said he was considering "secondary" sanctions, that is, sanctions affecting countries that buy Russian products, for example hydrocarbons, in order to dry up Russian revenues.

The US president said he was "very disappointed" by his Russian counterpart, who is continuing his attacks in Ukraine. "I really thought it was going to stop. But every time I think it's going to stop, he kills people," he commented. "I'm not really interested in talking to him anymore," he added.

Ukraine has welcomed Donald Trump's "firmness" in announcing his intention to reduce the 50-day deadline he had given Vladimir Putin to end the Russian invasion. "Thank you to the president for showing firmness and sending a clear message of peace through strength," the head of Ukraine's presidential administration, Andriy Yermak, said on the social network X.

UN experts have urged Russia to act to end the trafficking and forced labor of migrant women, who are often trapped in a form of "slavery ." The experts said they had received reports of "dozens of women" lured to Russia with promises of employment in small businesses, only to have their identity documents confiscated and be forced to work up to 20 hours a day without pay in inhumane conditions.

"The victims were allegedly subjected to torture, sexual violence, and forced abortions, and their children were abducted," reads a joint statement by the UN special rapporteurs on human rights in Russia, on modern slavery, on trafficking, and on migrants' rights. It appears to be a "deeply rooted" system of "extreme forms of exploitation and violence" spanning decades, recruiting its victims primarily from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, they said. Despite dozens of complaints from victims and civil society organizations since the 1990s, Russian authorities have never launched a proper investigation, they said.

The four rapporteurs, independent experts mandated by the Human Rights Council – who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations itself – deplored the Russian authorities' refusal to register certain cases or their decision to close investigations, "ignoring overwhelming evidence of coercion and abuse." "The facts described reveal particularly disturbing patterns of human trafficking and modern forms of slavery, enabled by systemic failures in the Russian legal and institutional framework," they said. "The lack of effective and prompt investigations and the failure to hold perpetrators accountable fuels impunity that is unacceptable."

Experts also expressed concern about Russia's failure to adopt a comprehensive legal framework to combat trafficking, as well as its criminalization of assistance to undocumented people, deterring victims from seeking help.

Donald Trump announced that he would "reduce," without giving further details, the fifty-day deadline given to Vladimir Putin on July 14 to cease hostilities in Ukraine, under penalty of severe US sanctions against Russia. The American president, speaking from Turnberry in Scotland, said he was "very disappointed" by his Russian counterpart and added: "I will reduce the fifty days that I gave him to a shorter period."

Russian airline Aeroflot canceled about 50 flights Monday morning due to an "information systems failure," it said on Telegram . The affected flights departed from Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport and primarily flew to Minsk, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad, and St. Petersburg.

Silent Crow, a hacker group, along with another Belarusian group, Cyberpartisans BY, claimed responsibility for the cyberattack, announcing on Telegram "the successful completion of a long and large-scale operation, during which Aeroflot's internal IT infrastructure was completely compromised and destroyed." The operation began a year ago, Silent Crow's statement said, adding that it allowed them to "penetrate the very heart of the infrastructure."

"All [obtained] resources are now inaccessible or destroyed, and their restoration will likely require millions of dollars. These losses are strategic," the hackers further stated, adding that they "had not only destroyed the infrastructure [but also] left a trace." "Glory to Ukraine," the statement concluded.

The Kremlin said Monday that a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump was "not excluded" in China in September, if the American president travels to the country on the same date as his Russian counterpart.

Mr. Putin is due to travel to China for the celebrations marking the ^80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and "if it so happens that the American president decides to go to China at that time, then such a meeting theoretically cannot be ruled out," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at his daily briefing, which was attended by Agence France-Presse.

Since Donald Trump's return to the White House, the US and Russian presidents have spoken several times by phone, notably about Moscow's large-scale offensive in Ukraine, but they have not held a meeting. Moreover, their relations have cooled after Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Mr. Putin on July 14, imposing a deadline of 50 days to conclude a peace agreement with Kyiv, or face 100% tariffs.

A bill designed to "fight corruption and bureaucracy in customs services," according to the Ukrainian business and financial media Mind , was adopted by Ukrainian MPs in mid-September 2024. But many steps, including the search, competition and appointment of a head of these services, still remained to be completed before the new law could actually be implemented.

According to Mind , customs are a major source of revenue for the Ukrainian government, but they suffer from problems of corruption, low work efficiency, parallel imports, and trafficking. The same source estimates that trafficking and parallel imports amount to between 270 billion and 450 billion hryvnias (from 5.5 billion to over 9 billion euros) annually, and represent a loss of 80 billion to 150 billion hryvnias for the government.

The media outlet also highlights a number of corruption cases recently uncovered in Ukrainian customs services. In August 2024, for example, a bribery scheme implemented by the chief inspector of a customs post in Odessa was uncovered.

This new law must first of all "ensure the transparency and efficiency of customs procedures" in Ukraine, and make it possible to "eradicate the presumption of guilt" that exists in the tax and customs administration. Also, and as Kyiv seeks to join the European Union, the law must "harmonize national legislation with that of the EU as quickly as possible."

In our live coverage of the war in Ukraine, we report drone attacks against the country almost daily. We, like the Ukrainian army and authorities, refer to "Shahed-type" attack drones. These are indeed Russian drones, you're right, but they are modeled after Iranian devices.

The overnight Russian attacks left eight people injured, including in a residential building in the capital, according to local authorities. Agence France-Presse journalists heard explosions during the air raid alert, which lasted more than six hours.

Five residents were injured after windows in their buildings were blown out by an explosion, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. A two-year-old girl was among the injured, according to police. Four of the injured in Kyiv were admitted to hospital, the head of the capital's military administration, Timur Tkachenko, said on Telegram .

Drone attacks also injured a 49-year-old woman and a 15-year-old girl in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and a 32-year-old man in the city of Kherson, regional authorities said.

The Russian military made no immediate comment on the attacks.

The Ukrainian Air Force, for its part, counted 331 Russian attacks during the night from Sunday to Monday, mainly carried out with drones. 324 Shahed-type missiles and decoys were launched from several Russian regions, the air force detailed on Telegram , adding that Moscow also used four Kh-101 cruise missiles and three Kh-47M2 Kinjal aeroballistic missiles.

According to the same source, the Ukrainian army "repulsed" the main attack of the night against the town of Starokostiantyniv, in Khmelnytskyi Oblast. Located in the west of the country, hundreds of kilometers from the front, this town is home to a major military airfield and is regularly targeted by Russian airstrikes.

The army also claims to have shot down " 311 Russian air attack assets," including 309 drones and two Kh-101 missiles. In addition, two missiles and 15 drones hit targets in the country, the air force said, without specifying which ones.

Over the past day, the Ukrainian military headquarters recorded 158 combat operations, and Russian troops carried out 86 airstrikes and dropped 132 guided bombs. According to the Ukrainian military, Russian forces also used more than 4,000 suicide drones and carried out nearly 6,000 artillery bombardments on Ukrainian positions and settlements.

The area around Pokrovsk ( 📍 ), in the eastern Donetsk Oblast, continues to be a particular target of the Russian military. Ukrainian armed forces say they have "stopped 57 assaults" there in the past 24 hours.

Protesters gathered in central Kyiv for the sixth day in a row on Sunday evening to protest a law that undermines the independence of two anti-corruption bodies, the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform reported. Following the outcry, Zelensky subsequently submitted a new bill to restore their independence.

But, according to Ukrinform, Ukrainian protesters are now demanding the appointment of a head of the Economic Security Bureau and the implementation of a customs reform. Furthermore, outraged by the pressure on anti-corruption bodies, they hope that Ukrainian MPs will adopt Mr. Zelensky's new text on Thursday.

A commercial flight from Moscow landed in Pyongyang on Monday, according to the air traffic tracking website Flight Aware and Russian news agencies; the first such flight in decades, marking a new milestone in cooperation between Russia and North Korea. According to Flight Aware, a Boeing 777 operated by Russia's Nordwind Airlines landed at the North Korean capital's main airport at 9:15 a.m. (2:15 a.m. Paris time), inaugurating the air connection.

This represents a further step forward in the Moscow-Pyongyang partnership, which has been rapidly expanding since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. North Korea has actively participated in its ally's war effort by providing thousands of troops, in addition to weapons and ammunition. According to Moscow, the new route is to be served once a month. Nordwind Airlines was offering tickets for around 45,000 rubles (484 euros).

In a video posted by Russia's official news agency RIA Novosti on Telegram, North Korean officials and flight attendants can be seen welcoming Russian travelers with flowers at Pyongyang International Airport. One of them checks the arrivals' temperatures with an electronic thermometer. According to RIA Novosti, the Russian delegation was led by Natural Resources Minister Alexander Kozlov. According to TASS , the first flight from Pyongyang to Moscow is scheduled to depart on Tuesday.

The two capitals have been united by a mutual defense pact since 2024 and recently reaffirmed their alliance. In mid-July, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un assured Moscow of his "unconditional" support against Ukraine during a visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.