Russia-Ukraine war latest news: one person killed after Ukraine appears to hit major Russian airbase in Crimea

The leaders of Estonia and Finland want fellow European countries to stop issuing tourist visas to Russian citizens, saying they should not be able to take holidays in Europe while the Russian government carries out a war in Ukraine.

Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas wrote on Tuesday on Twitter that “visiting Europe is a privilege, not a human right” and that it is “time to end tourism from Russia now”, the Associated Press reported.

A day earlier, her counterpart in Finland, Sanna Marin, told Finnish broadcaster YLE that “it is not right that while Russia is waging an aggressive, brutal war of aggression in Europe, Russians can live a normal life, travel in Europe, be tourists”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy went further in a Washington Post interview on Monday, saying all Western countries should ban Russian tourists.

Estonia and Finland both border Russia and are members of the European Union, which banned air travel from Russia after it invaded Ukraine. But Russians can still travel by land to both countries and apparently are then taking flights to other European destinations.

The Ukrainian military claims to have struck a major airbase deep inside the occupied Crimean peninsula.

At least 12 explosions hit the Saky naval airbase, causing a huge plume of smoke.

Russia has disputed the claims and says it was not an attack but a detonation of ammunition.

One person dead in Crimea blast, says head of region

Ukraine appears to have struck major Russian airbase in Crimea

Peter Beaumont

Reuters is carrying a little more details from the witness it has spoken to concerning the reports of explosions in Crimea.

At least 12 explosions of varying intensity were heard in the course of a minute around 3.30pm local time, two witnesses said. Three were particularly loud, triggering sparks and smoke.

(It is worth noting that the social media posts shared by Rodion Miroshnik placed the explosions slightly earlier, at 3pm local time – see post from 22 minutes ago)

Around 30 minutes later, one more blast, described by witnesses as the loudest of all, triggered two more plumes of smoke and dust. In the nearby town of Saky, sirens blared.

Reuters has distributed this image of the scene, which was taken from a third party.

The Russian governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, said in a post on his Telegram channel that he had gone to the area and that the “circumstances are being clarified”.

An adviser to Aksyonov confirmed that explosions had occurred but declined to comment on the possible cause, Russian news agencies reported.

Emergency services were deployed, the Tass news agency reported, citing the regional health ministry.

Russia for decades leased the naval port of Sevastopol, home of its Black Sea Fleet, from Kyiv, but in 2014 annexed the entire peninsula from Ukraine in a move not recognised by most other countries.

On Telegram, the Russian Tass news agency has posted that “the Association of Tour Operators of Russia said that the explosion in the Crimea occurred far from the resort area. There were no casualties or injuries among the tourists.”

Authorities in Crimea appear to confirm reports of explosions in region

The video clips which purport to show explosions in Crimea are being shared by pro-Russian social media as well as Ukrainian social media

Rodion Miroshnik, who goes under the title of the ambassador to Russia for the self-proclaimed and chiefly unrecognised Luhansk People’s Republic, has forwarded a message on Telegram featuring two videos and a still image of the apparent explosions, accompanied by the message:

Residents of Crimea report explosions near the village of Novofedorivka. The first explosion occurred at about 15:00 local time. There were a few more after it. Whether there are victims is unknown.

Three local witnesses have told Reuters they heard several loud explosions and seen black smoke rising from the direction of a Russian military airbase at Novofedorivka in western Crimea on Tuesday.

Videos shared on social media also showed a plume of smoke in the area. Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

More details soon …

Global health aid agency Unitaid is donating 220 specialised portable breathing devices to Ukraine that can help save lives of premature babies even in frontline hospitals where there is no electrical power.

During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hundreds of hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, disrupting supply lines and placing newborn babies at risk of death or disability from a lack of access to equipment and oxygen, Reuters reported.

Herve Verhoosel, a spokesperson for Unitaid, told a media briefing that the war was causing extra stress on pregnant women, leading to an increase in the number of premature births, which had tripled in some areas.

The new bubble nasal continuous positive airway pressure (bCPAP) devices are available in 25 facilities across Ukraine, Verhoosel said. Unitaid funds medical innovation programmes mainly in poor countries, and is hosted by the World Health Organization.

WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris said that on a recent visit to a paediatric hospital close to the frontline in Ukraine she had seen medical staff who sleep in the basement every night, and constantly have to move children on ventilation machines.

“So having very portable devices that can function offline is absolutely critical,” she told the briefing.

Unitaid partnered with Vayu Global Health, a non-profit that specialises in low-cost healthcare equipment for developing countries, to provide the Kenya-made bCPAP machines, which cost about $500 each, as well as 125 oxygen blender systems.

Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad has been struggling with quotas imposed by the European Union for sanctioned goods that it can import across Lithuania from mainland Russia or Belarus, the region’s governor admitted.

Lithuania infuriated Moscow in June by banning the land transit of goods such as concrete and steel to Kaliningrad after EU sanctions on them came into force, Reuters reported.

As part of a deal reached in July, the EU imposed limits on the volume of such goods crossing by land between Kaliningrad and mainland Russia or Belarus, based on average volumes over the last three years, to prevent Kaliningrad being used to dodge sanctions.

Kaliningrad governor Anton Alikhanov estimated that the limits permit Russia to ship around 500,000 tonnes of sanctioned goods in total in both directions each year. But he said some quotas had already been reached, making it impossible, for instance, for Kaliningrad to import cement from Belarus – which used to account for around 200,000 tonnes a year. Moscow says trade with its outlying territory should not be subject to limits.

“Today, we have already exhausted the limits set by Europeans for the transportation of goods by rail: for instance, certain kinds of iron, steel, oil products, fertilisers, antifreeze and timber,” Russian news agencies quoted Alikhanov as saying at a meeting of the Valdai discussion club on Tuesday.

Russia’s former ambassador to Lithuania said that, while the transit deal had helped avoid the “worst case scenario”, the situation was “far from normal”.

More than 10.5m people have crossed border from Ukraine

Russia’s defence ministry said on Tuesday that Russian forces had destroyed an ammunition depot near Uman in Ukraine storing US-made Himars missiles and M777 howitzers, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

The Reuters news agency was unable to verify the battlefield reports.

In its daily briefing, the ministry said it had destroyed more than 300 rockets in the strike.

Kyiv has hailed the arrival of the advanced, long-range Himars from the United States as a possible game-changer, while Moscow has accused the West of “dragging out” the conflict by arming Ukraine.