August 18, 2023 Russia-Ukraine news

Ukraine has ramped up missile strikes on Russian-occupied Crimea in recent weeks in an effort to disrupt Russian logistics and resupply efforts as fighting rages in southern Ukraine – but it’s a strategy that some US officials in Washington are viewing with skepticism.

For some military and Biden administration officials, Ukrainian attacks on Crimea are at best a distraction, and at worst, a valuable waste of resources in a strategy that many analysts now believe has left Ukraine stretched too thin between multiple axes of attack.

Ukraine has in recent weeks used long-range missiles to strike two bridges linking Crimea to Russian-occupied territory in southern Ukraine, and on Saturday, targeted the only bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia. With roughly a third of the peninsula now within the range of the US-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), according to one senior Western intelligence official, Ukraine has also stepped up strikes on Russian ammunition dumps and other logistics and resupply infrastructure there.

“There’s more and more pressure on Crimea, and especially so in recent weeks,” that official told CNN. “I mean, they get pounded.”

Crimea holds a deep symbolic importance to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered his forces to invade and illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014. And it is also a strategically vital logistics hub for Russia’s war effort; its location on the Black Sea has made it sought-after territory for centuries.

For Ukraine, the attacks are an integral part of their counteroffensive strategy, intended to try to isolate Crimea and make it more difficult for Russia to sustain its military operations on the Ukrainian mainland, a Ukrainian source familiar with the strategy told CNN.

Read more about Ukraine's recent focus on Crimea.

Russia blamed Ukraine for Friday’s attempted drone strike on Moscow, which forced authorities to suspend traffic to four major airports in the Russian capital. During the suspension, seven flights were diverted to alternative locations: three to Nizhny Novgorod, three to St. Petersburg and one to Minsk, in Belarus.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said that Russian air defenses shot down a drone over the capital city overnight into Friday. He said in a post on Telegram that debris from the drone fell into Expocentre, an exhibition center that lies within the wider Moscow city center, about three miles (five kilometers) east of the Kremlin.

Here's what else is happening:

Ukrainian officials say civilian infrastructure in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia suffered minor damage, with no reports of casualties at the moment, after a Russian missile strike on Friday.

The secretary of Zaporizhzhia city council, Anatolii Kurtev, said the blast had blown out “out apartment and balcony windows and windows in stairwells in three multi-story buildings.”

Some 14,000 people in the frontline region of Donetsk have been left without power after Russian shelling affected generation at a thermal powerplant, according to Ukraine's grid operator Ukrenergo.

The operator also said that months after the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam, around 11,000 people were still without power in the Kherson region.

“Power engineers are working to restore the power supply, but repairs are slowed down by shelling,” it said.

Remember: Tens of thousands of people were deprived of power and clean water after the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine in June, one of the biggest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe for decades. The catastrophe destroyed entire villages, flooded farmland and caused massive environmental damage.

 A Ukrainian flag was hung near a building operated by Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, several videos posted on social media and verified by CNN show.

The flag appeared to have been hung from powerlines above a road and has reportedly been taken down by the local fire department.

Russian officials have yet to comment on the incident.

Where is it? Nizhny Novgorod is Russia’s sixth largest city by population, with 1.2 million people, and is located around 400km (250 miles) east of Moscow.

Japan’s defense ministry said Friday that it scrambled fighter jets in response to two Russian IL-38 information-gathering aircrafts seen flying to and from the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea through the Tsushima Strait, which separates Japan and South Korea.

The Russian air force activity came a day after Japan’s defense ministry said on Thursday that it saw Russian and Chinese naval ships crossing international waters between Okinawa Island and Miyako Island in southern Japan.

The defense ministry said it was the first time the Chinese and Russian naval ships sailed through that particular area of the sea together and had expressed “grave concern” about their joint military activities in the sea and airspace surrounding the country in recent years, saying they are “intended as a show of force against Japan.”

Some context: It's standard practice for Japan to scramble fighter jets in response to Chinese and Russian aircrafts flying close to its territory.

Japan’s relations with Russia have deteriorated since the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 18 months ago. Tokyo has joined its Western allies in imposing sanctions on Moscow and pledged billions in humanitarian aid for Kyiv.

An alleged drone strike attempt on Moscow forced authorities to suspend traffic to four major airports in the Russian capital on Friday, according to the country’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsiya. 

“This morning, August 18, 2023, in order to ensure the safety of civil aircraft flights, flights to Moscow airports: Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo were temporarily restricted. Also to Zhukovsky airport,” Rosaviatsiya said on its Telegram channel. 

Russia blamed Ukraine for Friday’s attempted drone strike on Moscow, calling it a “terrorist attack.”

During the suspension, seven flights were diverted to alternative locations: three to Nizhny Novgorod, three to St Petersburg and one to Minsk, in Belarus.

Restrictions on air travel have since been lifted and “Vnukovo, Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo and Zhukovsky airports are operating normally,” Rosaviatsiya also said.

A container ship laden with grain that departed from Ukraine's southern port of Odesa on Wednesday has transited through the Bosporus and arrived in the sea of Marmara near Turkey, its final destination. 

The Hong Kong-flagged Joseph Schulte, carrying 30,000 metric tons of cargo including food products, is the first vessel to use a temporary Black Sea shipping corridor established following the breakdown of a UN-brokered grain deal last month, Kyiv officials said.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky on Thursday hailed the "functioning of the 'grain corridor,'" as the ship sailed through the Black Sea along Romanian and Bulgarian territorial waters on its passage to Turkey. 

Some context: Russia pulled out of a UN and Turkish brokered deal in July that allowed Ukraine to move its grain via the Black Sea and warned that any ships headed to Ukraine would be treated as potentially carrying weapons. 

Last week, the Ukrainian navy issued an order declaring "temporary corridors" for merchant ships sailing to and from Ukrainian ports. However, it admitted that the military threat and mine danger from Russia remained along all routes.

On Sunday, a Russian warship fired warning shots and boarded a Turkish-owned cargo ship it claimed was headed to Ukraine, in what Kyiv said was "an act of piracy."

Japan expressed “grave concern” after Chinese and Russian warships sailed close to its southern islands on Thursday, just a day before its leader is expected to discuss rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific at a summit with counterparts from South Korea and the United States.

Six Chinese ships, among them missile destroyers, and five Russian vessels, some of them destroyers, sailed between Japan’s Okinawa Island and Miyako Island before moving toward the East China Sea on Thursday, according to Japan’s defense ministry.

Japan’s relations with Russia have deteriorated since the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 18 months ago. Tokyo has joined its Western allies in imposing sanctions on Moscow and pledged billions in humanitarian aid for Kyiv.

China, meanwhile, has strengthened political and economic ties with Russia, despite maintaining it remains a neutral party in the conflict and a proponent of peace.

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