Russia-Ukraine war – latest: Zelensky calls on Nato to shoot down Putin’s missiles amid glide bomb attacks

A Russian court on Monday opened the trial of a theater director and a playwright accused of advocating terrorism in a play, the latest step in an unrelenting crackdown on dissent in Russia that has reached new heights since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine.

Zhenya Berkovich, a prominent independent theater director, and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk have been jailed for over a year. Authorities claim their play “Finist, the Brave Falcon” justifies terrorism, which is a criminal offense in Russia punishable by up to seven years in prison. Berkovich and Petriychuk have both repeatedly rejected the accusations against them.

Moldova has signed a security and defence partnership with the European Union, the first country to agree such a deal with the bloc, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Tuesday.

Led by pro-European president Maia Sandu, Moldova, which lies between Ukraine and NATO and EU member Romania, hopes to join the European Union by 2030. It has strongly condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

“This partnership will enhance the country’s resilience. It will allow (us) to jointly address common security challenges, make our engagement more effective and explore new areas of cooperation,” Borrell wrote on X.

Slovakia’s parliament returned to work on Tuesday after adjourning in the wake of an assassination attempt on prime minister Robert Fico, with the government coalition signalling its contested policy agenda remained on track.

Fico is recovering and no longer in immediate danger after being hit by four bullets last week, in the first major assassination attempt on a European political leader for more than 20 years.

The incident highlighted the deep polarisation of politics in the central European country of 5.4 million people where Fico has been a dominant force for nearly two decades. Since winning back the prime minister’s job last September, Fico and his coalition have shifted policy, including ending state military aid to Ukraine, scrapping a special prosecutor’s office fighting corruption, and planning an overhaul of public broadcaster RTVS after it accused it of bias.

The government has faced opposition-led protests in the past six months against reforms of the criminal code and over fears for media freedom if the public broadcaster’s remit is changed.

The proposal on the broadcaster was under debate in parliament when it was adjourned last week, and lawmakers are due to pick it up again in this restart.

“We are united, and sending a clear signal of our determination to continue in the (policy) tempo and direction set by Robert Fico,” deputy prime minister Robert Kalinak said in a news conference of Fico’s ruling SMER party on Tuesday.

Poland’s prime minister announced on Tuesday the re-establishment of a commission to look into undue Russian influence, as Warsaw grapples with what it says is an intense campaign by Moscow to destabilise the country.

While Poland has long said that its position as a key distribution hub for supplies to Ukraine makes it a major target for Moscow’s spies, the defection of a judge to Russian ally Belarus this month put Poland on high alert.

“I issued an order on the establishment of a commission to investigate Russian and Belarusian influence on the internal security and interests of the Republic of Poland in the years 2004-2024,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk told a news conference.

He named the head of the Military Counterintelligence Service, general Jaroslaw Strozyk, as head of the commission.

Ukraine’s military hit the Russian missile ship Tsiklon in Moscow-occupied Crimea on Sunday, the Ukrainian general staff said on Tuesday.

It provided no further details on the matter.

A Moscow court ruled on Tuesday that Russia’s Investigative Committee is not obliged to investigate two attempts on the life of jailed dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, independent news outlet Mediazona reported.

Moscow-born Kara-Murza, who has both Russian and British passports, was jailed last April for 25 years on treason charges after he repeatedly condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine and lobbied for Western sanctions against Moscow. His appeal against the sentence was rejected this month.

The 42-year-old politician and former journalist has survived two poisoning attempts. He became ill and was hospitalised in Moscow in 2015, a few months after his colleague, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was gunned down while walking across a bridge near the Kremlin walls.

In 2017, Kara-Murza was placed in a medically induced coma and put on life support after the onset of similar symptoms.

A joint investigation led by the Bellingcat outlet subsequently found that Kara-Murza was trailed by the same unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) that allegedly poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020. Navalny died in an Arctic prison in February.

Kara-Murza’s wife Evgenia says the poison attempts have left him with a nerve disorder and she fears for his life in prison.

European Union countries announced on Tuesday that they have reached an agreement to use the profits earned from frozen Russian assets to provide military support to Ukraine and help rebuild the war-torn country.

The 27-nation EU is holding around 210 billion euros ($225 billion) in Russian central bank assets, most of it frozen in Belgium, in retaliation for Moscow’s war against Ukraine. It estimates that the interest on that money could provide around 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) each year.

Ukraine is desperate to obtain weapons and ammunition as Russia presses its military advantage.

EU headquarters said that 90 per cent of the money would be put into a special fund known as the European Peace Facility that many EU countries already use to get reimbursed for arms and ammunition they send to Ukraine.

The other 10 per cent would be put into the EU budget. The programs that this money funds would help to bolster Ukraine’s defense industry or to help with reconstruction, should some countries object to their share being used for military purposes.

A small group of member states, notably Hungary, refuse to supply weapons to Ukraine.

Officials have said that a first tranche of the funds could be available in July.

US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen urged German bank executives on Tuesday to step up efforts to comply with sanctions against Russia and shut down efforts to circumvent them to avoid potential penalties themselves that would cut off dollar access.

Yellen said at the start of a meeting with bankers that the Treasury’s new authority to hit banks with secondary sanctions if they aid Russian military-related transactions had helped to frustrate Russia’s efforts to procure goods needed for its war in Ukraine, but more work was needed.

“Russia continues to procure sensitive goods and to expand its ability to domestically manufacture these goods. We must remain vigilant and be more ambitious,” Yellen said.

“I urge all institutions here to take heightened compliance measures and to increase your focus on Russian evasion attempts,” Yellen said in prepared remarks for the meeting in Frankfurt.