Ukraine-Russia war live: Putin ‘invokes Cuban Missile Crisis’ as he moves ‘nuclear-capable’ ships to Havana

Donald Trump has downplayed the threat of the climate crisis in his latest interview with Fox News, insisting that international unrestand the danger of nuclear war are of far greater concern, declaring: “The only global warming that matters to me is nuclear global warming.”

The Republican presidential candidate and convicted felon sat down with the conservative network’s anchor Sean Hannity to lambast Joe Biden for emphasising environmentalism over the threat of nuclear war.

“I love this country. I don’t want to see this country get into a nuclear war and be so badly damaged. What we say won’t matter. This won’t matter.

This place won’t matter, nothing will matter because practically nothing is going to be here anymore,” Trump told Hannity, outlining his nightmarish vision of man-made apocalypse.

Nine-year-old Sasha rushed down to the basement as Russian-launched drones buzzed in the sky above him. He was terrified, shivering as he desperately tried to block out the noise of the “Shaheds”, the Iranian-designed drones that have become a deadly feature of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

The boy was living with his mother and five siblings in the village of Zakharivka, just a few miles from the Russian forces advancing across the border into Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region. The region has been the scene of intense fighting for weeks.

This was five days after the Russian attack had started in the middle of May. Poor defensive fortifications and severed communication lines, the result of Russian signal jammers, had caught Ukraine’s forces off guard. Moscow’s troops had then pushed rapidly across the border.

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Russian naval vessels that will be making port in Cuba next week is an attempt to invoke the historical memory of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, according to a leading thinktank.

The Cuban ministry of the revolutionary armed forces announced yesterday that four Russian northern fleet vessels would make an official visit to the port of Havana between 12-17 June.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said the move was “likely part of a larger effort to invoke the historical memory of the Cuban missile crisis as part of Russia’s reflexive control campaign to encourage US self-deterrence”.

The Russian foreign ministry accused Ukraine of using US- supplied HIMARS rockets to shell civilian targets in Russia’s Belgorod region and of being responsible for the deaths of women and children.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova set out the allegation at a news conference held on the sidelines of an economic forum in St Petersburg.

She said fragments of the HIMARs rockets would serve as proof of what had happened.

Russia has arrested a French NGO worker on suspicion of spying on its military, a move that is likely to further strain already frought relations with Paris.

The Russian authorities claimed, without providing evidence, that the Frenchman was involved in the “targeted collection of information in the field of military-technical activities of the Russian Federation”.

They have launched a criminal case against him for allegedly violating the country’s law requiring any person receiving foreign support to register as a “foreign agent”.

Ukrainian forces drowned 48 drones and five cruise missiles overnight, the military said in its morning update today.

The drones were launched from occupied Crimea, the Russian town of Yeysk and Primorsko-Akhtarsk, located on the coast of the Azov Sea, it added.

Russia reportedly flew Tu-95MS bomber planes to launch Kh-101 cruise missiles from Saratov Oblast.

US president Joe Biden yesterday drew parallels between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and World War II throughout his speech commemorating the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France.

Mr Biden warned “the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine”.The president vowed that the US would “not walk away” from the conflict, claiming “if we do, Ukraine will be subjugated, and it will not end there”.

“Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened.”