Russia-Ukraine war live: ‘too early to say’ whether Ukraine’s summer offensive has failed; Russian drones attack Kyiv

Two foreign aid workers were reportedly killed in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as Russian shelling hit a van carrying a team of four working with a Ukrainian NGO, while dozens of Russian drones targeted Kyiv and wounded at least one civilian.

The four volunteers from the Road to Relief NGO, which helps evacuate wounded people from front-line areas, were trapped inside the van as it flipped over and caught fire after being struck by shells near the town of Chasiv Yar, the organization said on its Instagram page, AP reported.

Road to Relief said Canadian Anthony Ihnat died in the attack, while German medical volunteer Ruben Mawick and Swedish volunteer Johan Mathias Thyr were seriously injured.

Road to Relief added that it could not trace the whereabouts of the van’s fourth passenger, Emma Igual, a Spanish national who was the organization’s director. Hours later, Spain’s acting foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares told Spanish media that authorities in Madrid had received “verbal confirmation” of the 32-year-old Igual’s death.

The volunteers were on their way to assess the needs of civilians on the outskirts of Bakhmut, Road to Relief said, in reference to the eastern town that saw the war’s longest and bloodiest battle before falling to Moscow in May. Ukrainian forces have held on to Bakhmut’s western suburbs and are pushing a counteroffensive in the area.

A Spanish aid worker was killed when a missile hit the vehicle in which she was travelling in Ukraine, the Spanish foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, said on Sunday.

“Unfortunately, I can confirm a missile hit a vehicle in which this Spanish worker was travelling who was working for a humanitarian NGO in Ukraine. We have verbal confirmation of her death,” Albares told reporters in India, where he attended the G20 meeting.

Albares did not name the aid worker, Reuters reported.

A Canadian aid worker also died in the attack on Saturday in Chasiv Yar, in the region of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, authorities said.

It is too early to say whether Ukraine’s summer offensive has failed, the head of the US military has said.

Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, Gen Mark Milley said:

That offensive kicked off about 90 days ago. It has gone slower than the planners anticipated. But that is a difference between what Clausewitz called war on paper and real war.

So these are real people in real vehicles that are fighting through real minefields, and there’s real death and destruction, and there’s real friction. And there’s still a reasonable amount of time, probably about 30 to 45 days, worth of fighting weather left.

So the Ukrainians aren’t done. This battle is not done. They haven’t finished the fighting part of what they’re trying to accomplish. So we’ll see, it’s too early to say how this is going to end. They at least have achieved partial success in what they set out to do, and that’s important. And then the rains will come in. It’ll become very muddy.

It’ll be very difficult to manoeuvre at that point, and then you’ll get the deep winter. And then at that point, we’ll see where things go. But right now, it is way too early to say that this offensive has failed or not failed.

The South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, said on Sunday the country would provide an additional $2bn in aid to Ukraine starting in 2025 over the longer term, in addition to the $300m previously pledged for next year, Yonhap news reported.

Yoon made the comment at a session of the G20 summit held in Delhi, India, Yonhap said.

Russia is 'adapting and copying' Ukrainian military tactics, says Ukraine's head of military intelligence

Shaun Walker

Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, last night spoke at the Yalta European Strategy forum in Kyiv, which gathered Ukrainian and international policymakers to discuss the progress of the war.

Budanov had this to say on Russia’s tactics:

In terms of creativity and flexibility, we still have an edge over them, they are rather outdated. But they are adapting, they are trying to change tactics, to alter the way they use forces, they miserably fail with their strategy, but their tactics do have some improvements.

They switched to the mass use of drones, before the war they simply didn’t understand the importance of them, now they are adapting and copying us a lot.

On the ongoing scandal over Elon Musk and Starlink, Budanov had the following to say:

It’s hard to tell where the truth sits, what is invented. I am personally not sure that Elon Musk himself pressed some buttons to stop some drones from moving. As regards Starlink systems, they weren’t operative for some time near Crimea.

We did use some special equipment and we knew there was no coverage for us available. Starlink continues to play an amazing role because many systems use it for data links with drones when remote communication is required with command points, and they’ve been rather good on the frontline.

Russian air defence forces destroyed a Ukraine-launched drone over the Bryansk region on Sunday morning, the defence ministry said.

The ministry’s statement on the Telegram messaging app did not immediately report any damage or casualties, Reuters reported.

The Bryansk region in south-western Russia borders Ukraine.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan has become the latest figure to praise the G20 summit declaration that stopped short of directly criticising Moscow for the war in Ukraine.

The world’s biggest economies adopted a consensus declaration in Delhi on Saturday that avoided condemning Russia for the war, but highlighted the human suffering the conflict had caused and called on all states not to use force to grab territory.

Sullivan told reporters the declaration “does a very good job of standing up for the principle that states cannot use force to seek territorial acquisition or to violate the territorial integrity and sovereignty or political independence of other states”.

Germany and Britain have also praised the resolution but Ukraine has said “it was nothing to be proud of”.

Svetlana Lukash, the Russian G20 sherpa, or government negotiator, was quoted as saying by Russian news agency Interfax: “All members of the G20 have agreed to act as one in the interests of peace, security and conflict resolution around the world.”

In the weeks leading to the summit, sharply differing views on the war had threatened to derail the meeting, with the west demanding members call out Moscow for the invasion and Russia saying it would block any resolution that did not reflect its position.

On Sunday, the leaders, including the US president Joe Biden, German Olaf Scholz, British prime minister Rishi Sunak, French president Emmanuel Macron and Japan’s Fumio Kishida, visited the memorial of the Indian independence hero Mahatma Gandhi.

Here are some of the latest photos coming in from the global news agencies:

More now on that latest Russian air attack on Kyiv early on Sunday.

Ukraine’s land forces said air defence systems destroyed 25 out of 32 Russian-launched Iran-made Shahed drones, most of which targeted Kyiv and the surrounding region.

Reuters witnesses heard at least five blasts across Kyiv, and Ukrainian media footage showed a number of cars damaged.

“Drones came onto the capital in groups and from different directions,” Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s city military administration, said on Telegram.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said one person was injured in the historic Podil neighbourhood and a fire broke out near one of the city’s parks.

Debris from downed drones fell on the Darnytskyi, Solomianskyi, Shevchenkivskyi, Sviatoshynskyi and Podil districts, Klitschko and the city’s military administration said.

There was no immediate comment from Russia. Moscow has been conducting near-nightly assaults on Ukraine’s territory. A Russian attack killed 17 people on Wednesday in the eastern city of Kostiantynivka, according to Ukrainian officials.

Welcome back to our live coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is Christine Kearney and here’s a rundown on the latest.

Russia has praised a G20 summit declaration that stopped short of directly criticising Moscow for the war in Ukraine and said the bloc’s leaders had acted in the interest of conflict resolution as deliberations headed into a second day on Sunday.

The group adopted a consensus declaration in New Delhi on Saturday that avoided condemning Russia for the war but called on all states not to use force to take territory. Ukraine earlier called it “nothing to be proud of”.

Svetlana Lukash, the Russian G20 sherpa, or government negotiator, said: “There were very difficult negotiations on the Ukraine issue; first of all, the collective position of the BRICS countries and partners worked, everything was reflected in a balanced form.” The remarks were carried by the Russian news agency Interfax.

Meanwhile, Russia launched an air attack on Kyiv early on Sunday, with blasts ringing out across the Ukrainian capital and its region for almost two hours and drone debris falling on several of the city’s central districts, officials said.

More on those stories shortly. In other news:

• An adviser to the head of the office of Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned about the consequences of lifting sanctions against Russia, which pushed for a grain deal in the joint G20 declaration that would lift the international Swiftbank payments ban on some Russian banks. “Even the slightest lifting of sanctions on Russia or any discussions suggesting such an option have consequences,” Mykhailo Podolyak said.

• G20 leaders adopted the consensus declaration on issues facing the bloc after some disagreement over the wording on the war in Ukraine. Western countries had pushed for strong condemnation of Russia while Russia blocked a compromise that was “acceptable otherwise for everyone else”, an EU diplomat told Reuters.

• The wording on a portion of the declaration on Ukraine noted the “different views and assessments” on Russia’s war, but underscored that all states must act in a manner “consistent with the purposes and principles of the UN charter in its entirety”. It called for the “timely and effective” implementation to ensure “immediate and unimpeded” deliveries of grain, food stuff and fertilisers from Ukraine and Russia.

• Ukraine’s top diplomat, Dmytro Kuleba, also condemned the lack of progress on the creation of a tribunal to prosecute Russian leaders and on the transfer of frozen assets. The foreign minister said the G7 group “stands firmly” in favour of a hybrid tribunal based on Ukrainian legislation. This would not allow for the immunity of Vladimir Putin and other leading Russian figures to be stripped – an unacceptable option for Kyiv.

• Ukraine’s newly nominated defence minister, Rustem Umerov, has called on Kyiv’s partners to increase deliveries of heavy weapons, amid a long and difficult counteroffensive against Russian forces. “We are grateful for all the support provided … we need more heavy weapons,” Umerov said in an embargoed speech released on Saturday.

• Kyiv residents are fearing a property grab by developers, with the war not diminishing the appetite for prime property in the city, or halting the scramble to get hold of empty plots for construction. While developers seek to take advantage of Russia’s invasion, it has also spurred opposition to their plans.

• New fragments of a drone similar to those used by the Russian military were found on Romanian soil, the president and defence ministry said on Saturday – the second discovery of its kind in Romanian territory this week.

• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned of a potential threat to nuclear safety after a surge in fighting near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The UN atomic watchdog said its experts at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant reported hearing explosions over the past week.

• Zelenskiy said on Saturday he had agreed to begin bilateral talks with Japan over security guarantees at a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi, in Kyiv.