KYIV/MOSCOW Sept 13 (Reuters) – Russia attacked a truck near Ukraine’s border with Poland, Polish and Ukrainian officials said on Sunday, the latest strike to hit areas near NATO as Moscow and Kyiv intensify their long-distance strikes to try to shift momentum in the war.
Polish border guards told Reuters that the Dorohusk-Yahodyn crossing point had briefly stopped working after the attack around 800 meters (half a mile) from Poland, but that the crossing has since resumed operations.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had targeted infrastructure facilitating military cargoes from Europe in Western Ukraine. Ukraine is dependent on trade and arms shipments from across the Polish, Romanian and Moldovan borders.
Russia has begun targeting Ukraine’s border crossings with its Western allies in recent weeks, part of a growing campaign by both sides to erode the other’s economic infrastructure more than four years into Russia’s invasion.
INDIA AND CHINA OFFER TO HELP BROKER PEACE
In India, where Russian President Vladimir Putin had been attending the BRICS summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had offered help brokering a peace settlement, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
Last month, at a summit in Kyrgyzstan, Modi told Putin that the war must end, one of several calls for peace by leaders of nations that have traditionally strong relations with Russia.
Last month, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev publicly told Putin that he should halt the conflict along the front line, which has remained largely static this year.
Russia has ruled that out, saying Ukraine should pull back to leave the industrialised eastern Donbas region in Moscow’s hands, something Kyiv has said it will never do.
Both Brazil and China, themselves founding BRICS members, have called for a resumption of peace talks.
TASS cited Peskov as saying that Putin had informed Modi of the situation “on the ground” in Ukraine, and that Russia had not ruled out resuming three-way talks between Russia, Ukraine and the United States in October.
RUSSIA REPORTS STRIKE NEAR ZAPORIZHZHIA NUCLEAR POWER PLANT
Overnight, hostilities showed no signs of letting up.
In the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, the head of Russia’s state nuclear energy company Rosatom accused Ukraine of striking fuel trucks close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europe’s largest.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been controlled by Russia since March 2022, and remains close to the front line. A Ukrainian military spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Russia itself, the mayor of the city of Nizhnekamsk, in the Volga River region of Tatarstan, said that “civilian and industrial” targets in the city had been struck by Ukrainian drones, causing at least two deaths and several more injuries.
Mayor Radmir Belyaev did not clarify which targets had been struck, but the city hosts a major oil refinery which has been attacked in the past.
Ukrainian authorities did not immediately comment on the strike on Nizhekamsk, but did say they had struck another refinery in the southern Krasnodar region.
(Reporting by Felix Light, Pavel Polityuk and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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