Russia-Ukraine war live: Ukraine reports most extensive Russian shelling of the year | Ukraine

The US Senate will vote on Wednesday on three bills laying out funding plans for agriculture, military and veterans affairs and transportation for the fiscal year ending 30 September 2024, democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer has said.

More than 260 civilians killed after stepping on mines or other explosives

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has said that attention will not be diverted from Ukraine. Posting to X, formerly Twitter, he wrote:

Ukraine reports most extensive Russian shelling this year

Ukraine exported 3m metric tonnes of food in October from its Black Sea ports and ports of the Danube River, according to Spike Brokers, which regularly tracks and publishes export statistics in Ukraine.

The commercial agent gave no comparative figures. Agriculture ministry data showed that 2.3m tonnes of agricultural goods left Ukrainian ports in September, Reuters reports.

Ukraine is trying to build up a new shipping lane along the north-western coast of the Black Sea to Romanian territorial waters to revive its vital seaborne exports.

This comes after Russia quit a UN-brokered deal in July that allowed Ukraine to export grain from its Black Sea ports, despite the war.

Investigators in Moscow said they had opened a criminal investigation into an editor at a news outlet that has regularly angered the authorities on suspicion of “publicly justifying terrorism”.

Moscow’s Investigative Committee, which handles serious crimes, said in a statement that it had begun a probe of Anna Loiko, a journalist with Sota, an online outlet that is independent of the state and publishes mostly on the Telegram messaging app.

Sota, whose founder and editor-in-chief have been branded “foreign agents” by the Russian authorities, has often covered protests and the trials of Kremlin critics that state media sometimes ignores, Reuters reported.

Investigators said that an article written by Loiko in 2021 about the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Russia, had caught their attention because it had justified the ideology of an organisation Moscow regards as “terrorists”.

Loiko, who is outside Russia, said on Sota that she denied justifying terrorism and would study investigators’ expert conclusions about her alleged wrongdoing “with pleasure”.

Sota, which said the apartment of Loiko’s mother had been searched by investigators, said:

The editorial board notes that, given the date of the article, the approaching presidential election, and the numerous threats we have received from various supporters of the authorities, we are talking about political pressure on the media.

Russia, which is due to hold a presidential election next year and is still waging its war in Ukraine, has conducted a sweeping crackdown on media it regards as hostile to the country’s interests, and on political opposition it sees as dangerous and foreign-backed.

The Wagner group has allegedly resumed recruiting in the Russian cities of Perm and Novosibirsk as a unit of Rosgvardia, Russia’s National Guard, local news sites have reported, according to the Kyiv Independent.

At its peak, Wagner had tens of thousands of men (at least 50,000 convicts were offered their freedom if they survived the battles in Ukraine) and tens of thousands of Russian volunteers, including many former special forces troops, according to Reuters.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has discussed the Israel-Hamas conflict with envoys of Arab countries in Moscow, Russia’s Tass news agency reported on Wednesday.

You can follow our live coverage of the Israel-Hamas war here:

A Russian drone attack set ablaze the Kremenchuk oil refinery in central Ukraine and knocked out power supply in three villages, Reuters reports officials having said.

The fire at the refinery, which Moscow has targeted many times during the war and Kyiv says is not operational, was quickly put out, Filip Pronin, head of Poltava region’s military administration, said.

Ukraine’s air force said air defences shot down 18 of 20 drones and a missile fired by Russia overnight before they reached their targets.

“The focus of the attack was Poltava region, it was attacked in several waves,” air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said.

Three villages in the region of Poltava lost electricity supply after power lines and an unnamed infrastructure facility were damaged, the energy ministry said on Telegram.

“Ten legal entities and almost 500 household consumers were disconnected,” it said.

Railway power lines were damaged by falling debris in central Kirovohrad region, but the damage was quickly repaired, governor Andriy Raikovych said.

A Dutch court has sentenced a Russian citizen to 18 months in prison and fined his company €200,000 (£174,000) for breaching trade sanctions against Russia that the EU imposed over the war in Ukraine, Reuters reports.

The 56-year-old man, named Dmitri K by prosecutors, was tried in absentia and is believed to have fled to Russia after being released from custody last year pending his trial.

In its ruling, the court said the man had been trading in microchips and other electronic goods for six years and had been fully aware of the sanctions against Russia.

The man was in charge of a company that channelled “dual use” goods – which can serve both civilian and military purposes – via foreign countries to firms in Russia to bypass EU restrictions, it said.

To do so, the man allegedly forged invoices and statements about the end user of the products to make it look as if they were shipped to the Maldives and in some cases even to a nonexistent company in Ukraine, the district court in Rotterdam said.

Here are some of the latest images coming out from the newswires:

Two people killed in Russian attacks, say officials