Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed Ukraine for what he described as a deadly drone attack on a student dorm in Luhansk, a Russian-controlled region in eastern Ukraine, and has vowed to retaliate. Ukraine’s military denied the Russian accusations and said it had struck an elite drone command unit in the area. The Russian president said in a statement, carried by state TV on Friday, that he had ordered his military to prepare options to retaliate for the attack in Starobilsk that killed six people and wounded dozens, with 15 people still unaccounted for. He said Kyiv’s military must have known what it was targeting. At a UN security council emergency meeting called by Russia, Melnyk Andrii, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN, rejeced his Russian counterparts’ accusations of war crimes, calling them a “pure propaganda show”. He added that the operations on Friday “exclusively targeted the Russian war machine” with strikes neutralising an oil refinery, “which was fuelling occupation forces, ammunition depots, air defence assets, and also command centres.”
The Czech president, Petr Pavel, has urged Nato to “show its teeth” in response to Russia’s repeated testing of the alliance’s resolve on its eastern flank, suggesting a range of options including switching off its internet, cutting off its banks from global financial systems and shooting down jets that violate allied airspace. Speaking to the Guardian in Prague, Pavel called for “decisive enough, potentially even asymmetric” responses to counter Moscow’s provocative behaviour against the alliance or risk the Kremlin intensifying its actions.
