Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday dismissed a longtime aide and several advisers in a continuing reshuffle, while Russia unleashed fresh attacks overnight.
Zelenskiy dismissed top aide Serhiy Shefir from his post of first assistant, where he had served since 2019. He also let go three advisers, and two presidential representatives overseeing volunteer activities and soldiers’ rights.
No explanation was immediately given for the latest changes in a wide-reaching personnel shakeup over the past few months. It included the dismissal on Tuesday of Oleksii Danilov, who served as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, and Valerii Zaluzhnyi as commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Feb. 8. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK earlier this month.
Photo: AFP
The Ukrainian Air Force on Saturday said that Russia launched 12 Shahed drones overnight, nine of which were shot down, and fired four missiles into eastern Ukraine.
Russia unleashed a barrage of 38 missiles, 75 airstrikes and 98 attacks from multiple rocket launchers over the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian Armed Forces said on social media.
Two people were killed and one wounded in Russian shelling in Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk Oblast, regional Governor Vadym Filashkin said.
Ukrainian energy company Centrenergo announced that the Zmiiv Thermal Power Plant, one of the largest thermal power plants in the eastern Kharkiv Oblast, was completely destroyed following Russian shelling last week.
Power outage schedules are still in place for about 120,000 people in the region, where 700,000 people had lost electricity after the plant was hit on March 22.
Russia has escalated its attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in the past few days, causing significant damage in several regions.
Officials in the Poltava Oblast on Saturday said there had been “several hits” to an infrastructure facility, without specifying whether it was an energy facility.
The toll of Friday’s mass barrage of 99 drones and missiles hitting regions across Ukraine came to light on Saturday, with local officials in the Kherson Oblast announcing the death of one civilian.
A resident of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast died in a hospital from shell wounds, regional Governor Serhiy Lisak said.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant