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Another round of US-brokered peace talks will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday in Geneva
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Ukraine and Russia have traded deadly strikes this weekend, ahead of fresh talks next week in Geneva aimed at ending the war.
The two sides have resumed strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure in recent days, after a US-brokered moratorium on such strikes expired.
On Saturday, drone strikes killed one person in Ukraine and another in Russia, Ukrainian officials said.
An elderly woman died when a Russian drone hit a residential building in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, Ukraine’s state emergency service said.
In Russia, a civilian was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on a car in the border region of Bryansk, regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said.
The attacks came ahead of another round of US-brokered talks on Tuesday and Wednesday in Geneva, just before the fourth anniversary of the all-out Russian invasion.
Earlier on Sunday, UK foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said the UK and its allies had exposed a “barbaric Kremlin plot” to poison opposition leader Alexei Navalny as she suggested new sanctions against Moscow could follow.
The Russian embassy in London has denied Moscow was involved in Mr Navalny’s death and described the announcement, made on Saturday, as “feeble-mindedness of Western fabulists”.
A magnitude 6 earthquake struck in waters off Russia’s Kuril Islands on Sunday, the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) said. The quake was at a depth of 10 km (6.21 miles), GFZ said.
Marco Rubio said said a report by five European allies blaming Russia for killing late Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny using toxin from poison dart frogs was “troubling”, adding that Washington had no reason to question it.
“We obviously are aware of the report. It’s a troubling report. We’re aware of that case of Mr. Navalny and certainly… we don’t have any reason to question it,” the US secretary of state told reporters on Sunday at a news conference in Bratislava during a visit to Slovakia.
In a joint statement, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands on Saturday said analyses of samples from Navalny’s body “conclusively” confirmed the presence of epibatidine, a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America and not found naturally in Russia.
After the findings were announced by Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya, foreign secretary Yvette Cooper pinned the blame squarely on the Kremlin and said only Russia had the “means, motive and opportunity” to carry out such an attack. The Kremlin has rejected the claims
A Ukrainian drone strike ignited fires at one of Russia’s Black Sea ports, officials said on Sunday, ahead of fresh talks aimed at ending the nearly four-year-old war.
Two people were injured in the attack on the port of Taman in the Krasnodar region, which damaged an oil storage tank, warehouse and terminals, according to regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev.
Meanwhile, falling debris from Russian drones damaged civilian and transport infrastructure in Ukraine’s Odesa region, officials said, causing disruption to the power and water supply.
Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on Russian energy sites aim to deprive Moscow of the oil export revenue it needs to pursue its full-scale invasion.
Russia, meanwhile, wants to cripple the Ukrainian power grid, seeking to deny civilians access to heat, light and running water in what Kyiv officials say is an attempt to “weaponise winter”.
The latest attacks came ahead of another round of US-brokered talks between envoys from Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday and Wednesday in Geneva, just before the fourth anniversary of the all-out Russian invasion of its neighbour on February 22.
As world leaders wring their hands over Ukraine, Sam Kiley in Kyiv meets a leading politician whose daughter Sophia was born just before the invasion and – alongside her parents and sister – is battling to survive as Putin’s latest strategy targets power supplies
Read the special dispatch – Growing up in a cold and dark Ukraine under constant Russian attack: ‘My 4-year-old can tell the bombs apart’
Russian air defences downed five drones on Sunday on approaches to Moscow, the Russian capital’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said in statements published on his social media channels.
The city of Moscow has been a regular target of Ukrainian drones since Russia ordered tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022.
The two sides have resumed strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure in recent days.
New sanctions against the Russian regime could follow from Britain and its allies blaming the Kremlin for poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the foreign secretary has suggested.
Asked on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme what the consequences of the accusation would be, Yvette Cooper said: “We continue to look at co-ordinated action, including increasing sanctions on the Russian regime.
“As you know, we have been pursuing this as part of our response to the brutal invasion of Ukraine, where we are also coming up to the fourth anniversary of that invasion as well.
“We believe that it is the partnerships that we build abroad that make us stronger at home. It is by acting alongside our European allies, alongside allies across the world, that we do maintain that pressure on the Russian regime.”
She added: “The other thing that I would say specifically about Alexei Navalny is one of the things he said was ‘tell the truth, spread the truth’, because that is the most dangerous weapon of all.
“That was his comment about the Russian regime. He is no longer able to do that, but that is why we are continuing to do that for him, and for his widow as well.”
The Druzhba pipeline carrying Russian oil through Ukraine to Hungary and Slovakia may have been fixed after recent damage but Ukraine may be holding up restarting supplies to pressure Hungary to drop opposition to Ukraine’s future membership in the European Union, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico said on Sunday.
“I perceive what is happening around oil today as political blackmail toward Hungary due to the uncompromising stance of Hungary on Ukraine’s EU membership,” Fico said after meeting US secretary of state Marco Rubio in Bratislava.
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