Live Updates | A Russian official is looking for a base in the Kherson region

In the Kherson region of Ukraine, an official appointed by Russia says that the pro-Kremlin administration of the region will ask Moscow to deploy a military base there.

“There should be a Russian military base in the Kherson region,” Russian state news agency RIA Novosti quoted Kirill Stremusov, deputy head of the Russian-established administration in Kherson, as saying. “We will ask, the whole population is interested in this. This is vital and will be a guarantee of security for the region and its people. “

Russian troops took control of the Kherson region in southeastern Ukraine at the beginning of the war and established their own administration there. Ukrainian officials have suggested that Russia plans to hold a referendum in the region to declare independence, similar to those held in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014. Moscow recognized the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics two days before the invasion of Ukraine and used this as a basis for sending troops to its former Soviet neighbor.

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Earlier this month, Stremusov denied such plans and said the region would ask the Kremlin to make it part of Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the people of Kherson will decide how and where they want to live.

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KEY DIVISIONS OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR:

– Russian sentenced to life imprisonment in 1st trial in Ukraine for war crimes

– The Pentagon says that more high-tech weapons are going to Ukraine

– After three months of war, life in Russia has changed profoundly

Follow the coverage of the war in Ukraine in the AP at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

LONDON – British military authorities say Russian forces have intensified efforts to encircle and capture Severodonetsk and neighboring cities, the only part of the Luhansk region that remains under Ukrainian government control.

The UK Department of Defense in a briefing released Tuesday morning said the northern and southern parts of the Russian operation are currently separated by about 25 kilometers (15 miles) of territory under Ukrainian rule.

The ministry says Russian forces have achieved “some local success” despite strong resistance from Ukrainian troops occupying well-established defensive positions.

The ministry says the battle for Severodonetsk is only part of a Russian campaign to seize more of Donbass in eastern Ukraine, and the fall of the city could cause logistical problems for the Kremlin.

“If the front line in the Donbass moves further west, it will expand Russia’s lines of communication and is likely to lead to further difficulties with logistics,” the ministry said.

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KIV, Ukraine – As a result of the Russian shelling of a house in Severodonetsk killed four people, said on Tuesday the governor of the Ukrainian region Sergei Gaidai. He did not specify when the shelling took place.

In recent weeks, Russian forces have tried unsuccessfully to take control of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in the region, subjecting both cities to heavy shelling.

As a result of the latest shelling, Haidai said, six houses in each of the two cities were damaged.

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MANILA, Philippines – Outgoing Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has sharply criticized Russian leader Vladimir Putin for killing innocent civilians in Ukraine, saying while they were both branded as murderers: “I kill criminals, I don’t kill children and the elderly.”

Duterte, who openly calls Putin an idol and friend, for the first time voiced his criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a statement Tuesday denouncing a three-month war over soaring world oil prices in many countries, including the Philippines. .

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Stressing that he did not condemn the Russian president, Duterte disagreed with Putin’s call of the invasion a “special military operation” and said it was indeed a full-scale war against a “sovereign nation.”

Addressing Putin “as a friend” and the Russian embassy in Manila, Duterte called on them to stop bombing and artillery shelling of residential areas and allow innocent civilians to evacuate safely before the bombing begins.

“I’m out and I don’t know how to solve the problem,” Duterte said. “You have to resolve the war between Ukraine and Russia before we can talk about a return to normal life.”

Duterte, who resigned on June 30, ending his tumultuous six-year term, led a fierce fight against drugs that killed more than 6,000 mostly petty suspects.

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The United States and Britain have accused Russia of spreading misinformation on the Internet and manipulating public opinion about the war in Ukraine and categorically reject Russia’s claims that the West seeks to control all information flows and determine what is true and what is not.

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Britain’s Deputy Ambassador James Roscoe told the UN Security Council on the use of digital technology for peacekeeping, saying that Russia had carried out cyber attacks and used an “online troll factory” to spread misinformation and manipulate public opinion about its war.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield said the Russian government “continues to shut down, restrict and worsen Internet connections, censors content, spreads disinformation on the Internet, and intimidates and arrests journalists for reporting the truth of their invasion.”

Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, has accused countries calling themselves a “community of democracies” of building “cyber-totalitarianism” and, along with technology giants such as Meta, shutting down Russian TV channels, expelling Russian journalists and blocking access to Russian websites.

Nebenzia again accused Western governments and the media of fabricating a story about the killing of civilians by the Russian military in Bucha near Kyiv. He claimed that civilians died from injuries inflicted by artillery shells fired from obsolete equipment of the Ukrainian army.

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Britain’s Roscoe has opposed Russia’s claims of a “staged provocation” and the view that Ukrainians were responsible for the deaths of civilians after they recaptured the city, saying satellite imagery showed the bodies there for weeks when Russia controlled Bucha.

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Luhansk Governor Sergei Gaidai says police continue to evacuate daily due to the war with Russia, and the number of people willing to leave is increasing.

Gaidai posted on Facebook on Monday a video taken from a car he said was driving on the highway near Severodonetsk. The car is speeding along the road, dodging debris, earth mounds, barricades and destroyed vehicles when shells explode in fields a few meters away.

In the photo in the post you can see about a dozen civilians and their luggage, tightly packed inside, it seems, the back of the car.

Gaidai writes that people “agree to take risks because what happens in cities is much worse.”

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Kyiv, Ukraine – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia is waging a “total war” against his country, which involves as many casualties as possible and the destruction of infrastructure.

Zelensky said this in his night address on Monday, on the eve of the three-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In it, he noted that since February 24, the Russian army has launched 1474 missile strikes on Ukraine, using 2275 different missiles. According to him, the vast majority hit civilian targets. More than 3,000 Russian air strikes were carried out during this period.

“Indeed, there has been no such war on the European continent for 77 years,” he said.

Zelensky said the attack on the town of Desna, 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of Kiev, killed 87 people.

Now the Russians are concentrating their forces in the cities of Donbass, such as Bakhmut, Papasnaya and Severodonetsk, said Zelensky.

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He called on Ukrainians who are not on the battlefield to help in every possible way, and said that his own task is to increase international pressure on Russia. “The absolute priority is weapons and ammunition for Ukraine.”