������Ƶ

KYIV: Russia said Monday it captured its first village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region after grinding toward the border for months, dealing a physchological blow for Kyiv as its worries mount.
Moscow launched a fresh large-scale drone and missile barrage before the announcement, including on Ukraine’s army recruitment centers, as part of an escalating series of attacks that come as ceasefire talks led by the United States stall.
The Russian defense ministry said its forces captured the village of Dachne in the Dnipropetrovsk region, an important industrial mining territory that has also come under mounting Russian air attacks.
Russian forces appear to have made crossing the border a key strategic objective over recent months, and deeper advances into the region could pose logistics and economic problems for Kyiv.
Kyiv has so far denied any Russian foothold in Dnipropetrovsk.
Moscow first said last month its forces had crossed the border, more than three years since launching its invasion and pushing through the neighboring Donetsk region.
Earlier Monday, Ukraine’s army said its forces “repelled” attacks in Dnipropetrovsk, including “in the vicinity” of Dachne.
Dnipropetrovsk is not one of the five Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea — that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.


Russia used its main city of Dnipro as a testing ground for its “experimental” Oreshnik missile in late 2024, claiming to have struck an aeronautics production facility.
An AFP reporter in the eastern city of Kharkiv saw civilians with their belongings being evacuated from a residential building damaged during Russia’s overnight attacks, and others sheltering with pets in a basement.
At least four people were killed and dozens wounded across Ukraine, mostly in the Kharkiv region bordering Russia and in a late-morning attack on the industrial city of Zaphorizhzhia.
“Air defense remains the top priority for protecting lives,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media after the attacks, as fears mount over the continuing deliveries of US military aid.
Zelensky said Ukraine was “strongly counting on our partners to fully deliver on what we have agreed.”
The air force said Moscow had launched 101 drones across the country and four missiles. Seventy-five of the drones were downed, it added.
Attacks on Monday targeted two recruitment centers in separate cities wounding four people, the Ukrainian army said, in what appears to be a new trend following similar strikes over the weekend and last week.
“These strikes are part of a comprehensive enemy operation aimed at disrupting mobilization in Ukraine,” Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications, a government-funded body, wrote on social media.
It added that Russia had attacked recruitment centers last week in the cities of Kremenchuk, Kryvyi Rig, and Poltava.
In Russia, the defense ministry said that it had shot down 91 Ukrainian drones overnight, including eight in the Moscow region, with the majority of the rest in regions bordering Ukraine.

NAIROBI: Kenyan police opened fire on a charging crowd of protesters in Nairobi on Monday, a Reuters reporter said, with one man subsequently seen lying motionless on the road with a visible bloodied wound.

Kenya marked its fight for democracy on Monday, with police blocking main roads in Nairobi ahead of potential protests, after last month’s demonstrations descended into violent clashes.

Saba Saba Day marks the uprising on July 7, 1990 when Kenyans demanded a return to multi-party democracy after years of autocratic rule by then-president Daniel arap Moi.

This year’s event comes as young Kenyans – frustrated over economic stagnation, corruption and repeated acts of police brutality – are once again engaging in protests that have degenerated into looting and violence, leaving dozens dead and thousands of businesses destroyed.

Protesters accuse the authorities of paying armed vandals to discredit their movement, while the government has compared the demos to an “attempted coup.”

On Monday, the streets of Nairobi were eerily quiet after police mounted roadblocks on the main roads, preventing most people from entering the center, with many businesses closed for the day.

Leading activist Hanifa Aden wrote on X: “the police getting rained on as they block every road while we stay at home warming our beds.”

“Total shutdown and forced holiday executed by the state,” she said.

On Sunday afternoon, a press conference by the Kenyan Human Rights Commission calling for an end to “enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings” was broken up when men, some armed with sticks, forced their way into the compound.

Social media and rising economic expectations have created anger at inequalities in a country where around 80 percent are trapped in informal, poorly paid jobs.

But the violent response of the police – at least 80 people have died in protests since June 2024 and dozens detained illegally – has scared many off the streets.

Politically, President William Ruto – elected in 2022 – still holds a strong position having forged an alliance with the main opposition leader Raila Odinga, leaving no clear challenger ahead of the next vote in 2027.

But each violent crackdown is fueling further unrest, said activist Nerima Wako.

“Every time people organize a protest, they kill more people, so it just continues to feed off itself,” she said.

It is as though the government is recycling tactics from the 1990s, said Gabrielle Lynch, an African politics expert at Britain’s University of Warwick.

“But we’re not in the nineties,” she said. “They don’t seem to have realized the world is different.”

“People don’t have the same inbuilt fear of the state.”