Ukraine latest updates: Separatist urges seizure of more cities

Volkswagen is looking to sell its car assembly plant in the Russian city of Kaluga and a Kazakh carmaker could be a potential buyer, Russia’s Vedomosti newspaper reported.

Vedomosti, citing an unnamed source familiar with the company’s intentions, said Volkswagen would finalise its plans for the facility by the end of the year.

In an emailed response to the Reuters news agency, Volkswagen spokesman Nicolai Laude said, “We are constantly monitoring current developments and are considering various future scenarios. However, no decision has been made.”

Volkswagen announced in March that production at its Kaluga and Nizhny Novgorod sites would be suspended until further notice because of Western sanctions imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and vehicle exports to Russia would be stopped with immediate effect.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine will up its export of electricity to the European Union as the bloc faces an energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion.

“We are preparing to increase our electricity exports to consumers in the European Union,” Zelenskyy said in his daily address to the nation.

“Our exports would not only allow us to increase our income in foreign currency but will also help our partners to resist Russian energy pressure,” he said after Russia drastically slashed its gas deliveries to Europe.

“We will gradually make Ukraine one of the guarantors of European energy security,” he added.

The fate of Ukraine’s second-biggest power plant was hanging in the balance after Russian-backed forces claimed to have captured it intact, but Kyiv did not confirm its seizure, saying only that fighting was under way nearby.

Seizing the Soviet-era coal-fired Vuhlehirsk power plant in eastern Ukraine would be Moscow’s first strategic gain in more than three weeks.

Read more here.

The US has offered a deal to Russia aimed at bringing home WNBA star Brittney Griner and another jailed American, Paul Whelan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.

The statement marked the first time the US government has publicly revealed any concrete action it has taken to secure the release of Griner, who was arrested on drug-related charges at a Moscow airport in February and testified on Wednesday at her trial.

Blinken did not offer details on the proposed deal, which he said was offered weeks ago, and it is unclear if it will be enough for Russia to release the Americans. But the public acknowledgement of the offer at a time when the US has otherwise shunned Russia, reflected the mounting pressure on the administration over Griner and Whelan and its determination to get them home.

Blinken said Washington would like a response from Moscow. Russia has for years expressed interest in the release of Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer once labelled the “Merchant of Death,” who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2012 on charges that he schemed to illegally sell millions of dollars in weapons.

Jailed WNBA star Griner appeals to Biden: ‘Get me home’ https://t.co/MOZO0XsfiZ

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 4, 2022

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said he will speak to his Russian counterpart for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but would narrowly focus the call to priorities including the release of detained Americans.

The phone call “in the coming days” with foreign minister Sergey Lavrov “will not be a negotiation about Ukraine”, Blinken told reporters.

Ukraine’s ports have been stacked with grain since Russia attacked in February.

Since then, the ports have been too unsafe for ships to export corn, wheat and sunflower oil, bringing the world ever closer to a global food shortage.

Now that Russia and Ukraine have agreed to allow safe passage for Ukrainian wheat, farmers continue their harvests. But getting from farm to table is a dangerous job in a warzone.

Al Jazeera’s John Hendren reports from Krasne, Ukraine.

Russian space officials told their US counterparts that Moscow expects to remain on the International Space Station at least until the country’s own outpost in orbit is built in 2028, NASA’s space operations chief told the Reuters news agency.

The assurance from Russia came after the newly appointed head of its space agency, Roscosmos, surprised NASA on Tuesday by announcing that Moscow intended to end more than two decades of partnership on the space station “after 2024”.

A police officer in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson was killed by an explosive device planted by the Ukrainian “resistance movement” and another was injured, Ukraine’s defence ministry has said.

The reported killing is the latest in a series of attacks on local officials in regions captured by Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February.

“The resistance movement clears Kherson of traitors,” the ministry’s defence intelligence directorate said in a statement. The device was set off by radio control on a street just north of the city centre, it said.

The Czech government has backed allowing its fighter jets to protect neighbouring Slovakia’s air space starting in September, the defence ministry has said.

Slovakia has sought help from its NATO allies as it looks to ground its Russian-made MiG-29 fighter jets in August under longstanding plans to modernise the military.

Slovak government officials have said the old jets could be sent to neighbouring Ukraine to help Kyiv defend itself against Russia’s invasion.

From September, the Czech army’s Gripen JAS-39 fighter jets will provide air policing for Slovakia until at least the end of 2023, the Czech defence ministry said. Poland is also expected to take part, it said.

The leader of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk region has called for Moscow to conquer cities across Ukraine.

Denis Pushilin said on the messaging app Telegram: “Today the time has come to liberate Russian cities, founded by Russians: Kyiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, Odessa, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lutsk.”

The cities cover almost the whole of Ukraine.

Keep reading about the war here:

• Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 154
• Is the INSTC Russia’s new economic escape route?
• What is Nord Stream 1 and why is it crucial to Europe?
• ‘The Russians have nothing equivalent’: How HIMARS help Ukraine

French President Emmanuel Macron has branded Russia “one of the last imperial colonial powers” over its invasion of Ukraine.

“Russia launched an offensive against Ukraine. It’s a territorial war the likes of which we thought had disappeared from European soil,” Macron said while on a visit to Benin which marked the second leg of a trip to Africa aimed at resetting Paris’s relations with the continent, where many nations are former French colonies.

“I speak on a continent that has suffered colonial imperialism. Russia is one of the last imperial colonial powers,” he added.

Italy has enough gas supplies to avoid a supply crunch until the end of the coming European winter if Russia were to turn off the taps, according to the country’s ecological transition minister.

Italy has been building up storage and hopes to have facilities filled to 90 percent or more of capacity by the end of the year or before.

Roberto Cingolani said such storage would be sufficient until February if Russia shuts off all gas exports to Europe at the start of winter.

“In the event of a deterioration in other gas supplies we can make a tougher savings plan, but at the moment energy security is guaranteed,” he told a news conference.

Ukraine may have many years to wait before joining the European Union, but the war-battered country has been granted a place alongside members of the bloc at “Mini-Europe”, an open-air theme park of famous European landmarks.

Set among more than 300 miniature models and scenes in the park in Brussels, Belgium, visitors this week will see depictions of refugees fleeing Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in February, and trucks taking medical and food aid into the country.

The centrepiece is a model of the independence monument in Kyiv’s Maidan Square surrounded by people with Ukrainian and EU flags, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handing over Ukraine’s formal application for membership of the bloc.

Mini-Europe owner Thierry Meeus told the Reuters news agency the idea was to demonstrate the EU’s solidarity with Ukraine, and the country’s European destiny, making it the first candidate for eventual membership of the EU to be represented at the park.

Moscow cannot be trusted to honour the deal it signed to allow Ukraine to resume exporting grain from its Black Sea ports, Poland’s prime minister has said, citing Russian forces’ attack on Odesa shortly after the accord was brokered as evidence of the Kremlin’s insincerity.

“The day after the signing [of the agreement], the Russian armed forces… attacked Odesa,” Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference.

“It follows that such agreements cannot be considered fully credible, because unfortunately that is what Russia is like.”

Gazprom’s deputy CEO has said the company has still not received a Siemens turbine used at Nord Stream 1’s Portovaya compressor station that has been undergoing servicing in Canada.

Vitaly Markelov blamed Siemens, which is servicing the turbine, for the delay, saying that there were sanctions risks associated with the machinery.

John Stawpert, manager for environment and trade at the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), says there are about “100 ships stranded in the ports of the north and western Black Sea” but that not all of them will be able to transport Ukrainian grain to global markets.

“Of those [ships], about 50 will be able to carry this grain out,” Stawpert told Al Jazeera from London, where the ICS is headquartered.

“How we crew them remains a question that needs to be answered,” he added.

“Obviously, there is a large number of seafarers that come from Ukraine but we are an international industry and if we can guarantee the safety of seafarers then I’m sure that we will be able to crew these ships, but the safety is paramount, firstly from the mine threat and also from collateral damage.”

American basketball star Brittney Griner, who is on trial in Russia on drug charges, has said in court that her rights were not read to her when she was arrested at a Moscow airport on February 17.

Griner, who had played for a Russian club during her off-seasons since 2014, faces up to 10 years in prison. The US Department of State has said that she has been unfairly imprisoned.

Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom has halved the amount of natural gas flowing through a major pipeline from Russia to Europe to 20 percent of capacity.

Data on the Nord Stream website and the head of Germany’s network regulator, Klaus Mueller, confirmed the reduction.

“Gas is now a part of Russian foreign policy and possibly Russian war strategy,” Mueller told Deutschlandfunk radio.

Gazprom had announced on Monday that it would slash flows on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that runs to Germany because of maintenance works. European leaders and analysts have said the reductions are a pretext to try to gain political leverage over European Union countries and elevate prices.

Turkey has formally opened a joint coordination centre to oversee Ukrainian grain exports under a UN-backed deal aimed at resuming shipments from the war-torn country’s Black Sea ports.

Turkish defence minister Hulusi Akar unveiled the monitoring centre in Istanbul at a ceremony held five days after Moscow and Kyiv signed the accord.

He told reporters the goal of the facility was to ensure the safe shipment of grains from three Ukrainian ports, with more than 25 million tonnes of grain waiting there.

Ukraine’s navy says work has resumed at three Black Sea ports designated as export hubs under a recently brokered grain deal with Russia.

“In connection with the signing of the agreement on the unblocking of Ukrainian ports for the export of grain, work has resumed in the ports of Odesa, Chernomorsk and Pivdennyi [Yuzhny],” the Ukrainian navy said in a Telegram post.

“The departure and arrival of ships to seaports will be carried out by forming a caravan that will accompany the lead ship,” it added.