Ukraine Russia war live news: Poland scrambles jets in response to major Russian drone attack on Ukrainian cities

Four railway workers in Ukraine’s central region of Kirovohrad were in hospital after the Russian attack, Ukraine’s state-owned railway said on the Telegram messaging app, warning of delays to scores of services caused by damage to rail facilities.

Five people were injured and 28 houses damaged in a Russian attack on the Znamianka community in the region of Kirovohrad, Ukraine’s emergency services said on Telegram.

Public transport in the western city of Khmelnytskyi faced “significant schedule disruptions” after the attack, its administration said on Telegram, with the regional governor flagging fires and damage to residential buildings among others.

There was no immediate comment from Russia.

Polish and allied aircraft were activated in the early hours today to ensure the safety of Polish airspace after Russia launched airstrikes targeting Western Ukraine, near the border with Poland, the operational command of the Polish armed forces said.

“The Russian Federation once again is carrying out strikes on targets located on the territory of Ukraine,” the operational command said in a post on X.

“In order to ensure the safety of Polish airspace… Polish and allied aircraft are operating intensively in our airspace, while ground-based air defence and radar reconnaissance systems have reached the highest state of readiness.”

At 0140 GMT, all of Ukraine was under air raid alerts following Ukrainian Air Force warnings of Russian missile and drone attacks.

Ukraine will never agree to legalise the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and an immediate withdrawal of Russian troops is the only way to guarantee safety there, the Ukrainian foreign ministry said yesterday.

A ministry statement made no direct reference to Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin’s statement during a visit to China that Moscow was ready to cooperate with the United States at the plant, seized in the first weeks after Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is and will remain an integral part of the sovereign territory of Ukraine. Any attempts by Russia to question this fact are legally null and void and politically pointless,” the ministry said.

“The only way to restore nuclear safety is the immediate and complete withdrawal of Russian military and other personnel from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,” it said.

Moscow expects talks between Russia and Ukraine to continue but “new territorial realities” must be recognised and new systems of security guarantees formed, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in remarks published today.

Russia has occupied around 20 per cent of Ukraine since its invasion in 2022, and illegally annexed the Crimea peninsula in 2014.

“For peace to be durable, the new territorial realities … must be recognised and formalised in international legal terms,” Lavrov said in an interview with Indonesia’s Kompas newspaper, according to a transcript provided on the website of Russia’s foreign ministry.

“A new system of security guarantees for Russia and Ukraine must be formed as an integral element of a pan-continental architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia,” he said.

Lavrov said that “Ukraine should be guaranteed a neutral, non-aligned, and non-nuclear status,” in an indirect reference to Moscow’s continued opposition to Ukraine joining Nato.

Ukraine says it is not for Russia to decide what Kyiv can or cannot join, while Nato says that Russia can have no veto over membership of the alliance which was formed in 1949 to counter the threat from the Soviet Union.

Ukraine’s air defence units were engaged in repelling a Russian air attack on Kyiv, the city’s military administration said today, as nationwide air raid alerts followed warnings from Ukraine’s air force of missile and drone strikes.

“Air defence is operating in Kyiv! Stay in shelters until the all-clear is given!” Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said on the Telegram messaging app.

Russia and the United States are in the process of coordinating the next round of bilateral talks, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported today, citing the Russian foreign ministry’s spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, as saying.

Donald Trump has said he was “very disappointed” in Russian president Vladimir Putin as he made a public appearance after five days.

He said he had hoped a meeting with the Russian leader in Alaska last month would help peace talks – but no deal or follow up meeting has been agreed since.

“I’m very disappointed in him – he knows. We have a great relationship,” Trump told the Scott Jennings Radio Show.

“Very disappointed, thousands of people are dying. They’re not Americans that are dying, but they’re Russians and they’re Ukrainians, and there are thousands.”

He added: “We’ll see what happens, but I’m very disappointed in president Putin, I can say that.”

“We’ll be doing something to help people live. It’s not a question of Ukraine, it’s helping people live,” he said.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) and other satellite navigation systems use radio signals from satellites to calculate position. To determine position, a GPS needs a direct line of sight to at least four satellites.

There are two ways to disrupt satellite navigation.

The first is jamming. This works by simply broadcasting high-intensity radio noise in the same frequency band used by the navigation satellites.

Jamming drowns out the satellite signal, like a person shouting loudly in your ear stops you hearing what someone is saying on the other side of the room. This appears to be what happened in Bulgaria.

The second way to interfere with satellite navigation is called spoofing, and it’s a little more elegant. Spoofing involves sending radio signals that pretend to be coming from the navigation satellites.

Where jamming stops the satellite navigation system from producing any location, spoofing tricks it into giving a false location – with potentially catastrophic results.

A plane on which European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was travelling was hit by GPS jamming over Bulgaria in a suspected Russian operation, a spokesperson said.

The plane landed safely at Plovdiv International Airport in the country’s south-central region on Monday.

The incident was first reported by the Financial Times, which said that Ms Von der Leyen’s plane had to circle the airport for an hour.

The commission’s spokesperson Arianna Podestà said that Ms Von der Leyen would continue her planned tour of the seven European Union nations bordering Russia and Belarus.

“We can indeed confirm that there was GPS jamming,” Ms Podestà said.

France will host a meeting of the “Coalition of the Willing,” a group of countries supporting Ukraine, on Thursday, the French presidency has said.

The meeting, which will be held in hybrid format, will focus on security guarantees for Ukraine and on Russia’s refusal to make peace, the Elysee added.

“Following the meeting held between Europeans and Americans in Washington on August 18, the heads of state and government will discuss the work on security guarantees for Ukraine conducted in recent weeks and will take stock of the consequences of Russia’s persistent refusal to make peace,” President Emmanuel Macron’s office said in a statement on Monday.