July 12, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Our live coverage of Russia's war in Ukraine has moved here.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has touted the successes of Western-donated “modern artillery” after his country’s forces struck another Russian ammunition depot on Tuesday. 

“The occupiers have already felt very well what modern artillery is, and they will not have a safe rear anywhere on our land, which they occupied,” Zelensky said in his nightly address. “They felt that the operations of our scouts to protect their Motherland are orders of magnitude stronger than any of their 'special operations.'”

“Russian soldiers — and we know this from interceptions of their conversations — are frankly afraid of our Armed Forces,” he added. 

Zelensky’s remarks come after explosions rocked the town of Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region of Ukraine on Monday night. Video posted on social media showed loud explosions and a huge ball of fire lighting up the night sky.

Serhiy Khlan, a Ukrainian official who is a member of Kherson regional council, said on Facebook, "In Nova Kakhovka minus one Russian ammo depot. They brought, brought, stockpiled, stockpiled and now have fireworks at night."

Ukraine has been using US-donated HIMARS Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, as well as other western made weaponry, to target Russian ammunition depots, deep inside Moscow-controlled territory, over the past few weeks. 

A massive crater is the only thing left after a Ukrainian missile hit a building — which Ukrainian officials say was being used as an ammunition depot by Russia — in Russian-occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region of Ukraine, according to a new satellite image from Planet Labs.  

The satellite image was taken on July 12, according to Planet Labs. Comparing it to a satellite image taken by Planet Labs on July 11, a number of the surrounding buildings have also been destroyed, or significantly damaged.  

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated when the images were taken. It was July 12 and July 11.

Russian authorities have launched a criminal case on Tuesday against Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin for spreading “fake” information about the Russian army, according to his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov.

“The Main Investigation Department has initiated the criminal case under Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, against Ilya Yashin,” Prokhorov said on Facebook. 

"I got a call from an investigator – they are beginning to search his home," he said. 

Yashin, who is also a former Moscow city council and Alexey Navalny’s close ally, has been openly speaking out against Russia’s war with Ukraine and has been a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin for years. 

Shortly after coming back to Russia, Yashin was detained on the night of June 28. The next day, he was arrested for 15 days for police disobedience. 

He started his career in opposition politics along with Navalny and has risen to public prominence during the 2011-2012 mass protests against Putin’s third term. 

A criminal case has also been opened against another prominent opposition leader, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who now faces up to 10 years in prison. 

Similarly, to Yashin, Kara-Murza has been detained and arrested for 15 days in April before being charged for spreading “fake” information about the Russian army. 

European Space Agency is terminating cooperation with Russia on the mission to launch Europe's first planetary rover, designed to search for signs of life on Mars, the agency’s chief said on Tuesday.  

The ExoMars Rover, a collaboration between the ESA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, had been on track to leave for Mars in September this year. But the ESA said in February that Russia's invasion of Ukraine had made that "very unlikely." 

Then in March, the agency suspended cooperation with Roscosmos over their joint mission on Mars in the wake of the Ukraine invasion and sanctions imposed on Russia. 

“Today @ESA Council addressed the ExoMars Rover and Surface Platform mission, acknowledging that the circumstances which led to the suspension of the cooperation with Roscosmos – the war in Ukraine and the resulting sanctions – continue to prevail,” ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.  

As a consequence, the agency’s board instructed him to officially terminate cooperation with Russia on the program, Aschbacher said.

“New insights on the way forward with other partners will come at a media briefing on 20 July, details to come,” he added.  

The rover was initially scheduled to launch in July 2020 but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. 

The mission is intended to search for life on Mars and investigate the history of water on the red planet. The rover has the capability to drill beneath the surface of Mars to a depth of 6.5 feet (about 2 meters), where the scientists hope they may find signs of life. 

CNN's Katie Hunt contributed reporting to this post.

"Unsanitary conditions are growing" in Severodonetsk and "there is not enough water and not enough food" in the city, said Roman Vlasenko, head of the city's regional administration.

Vlasenko added that there are also issues with gas and electricity supplies.

He described the living situation as “very sad” for those that have remained even though "there are not many people left there."

A sign in the city was repainted from Ukrainian to Russian colors on Monday.

Vlasenko said that "pressure continues on pro-Ukrainian activists" and that they continue to face serious challenges.

The United States on Monday unveiled a potential new player in the Ukraine war: Iran.

Newly declassified US intelligence indicates that Tehran is preparing to supply Russia with "hundreds" of drones -- including those with weapons capability -- for use in the war in Ukraine, White House officials said. 

"Our information further indicates that Iran is preparing to train Russian forces to use these UAVs, with initial training session slated in as soon as early July. It's unclear whether Iran has delivered any of these UAVs to Russia already," national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House press briefing on Monday.

Sullivan argued that news of Iran supplying the drones is evidence that Russia's attacks against Ukraine in recent weeks are coming at the "severe" cost of depleting of its own weapons.

The announcement has raised eyebrows, and not everyone is convinced that Iran is capable of exporting large quantities of drones. “It's unlikely Iran even has that many operational drones in its own fleet,” tweeted Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder of Bourse Bazaar, a London-based think tank. “It also has no experience exporting drones at scale.”

The White House’s claim comes as nuclear talks between Iran and the United States have come to a dead-end, potentially raising the specter of renewed conflict in the Middle East should they fail. But it also comes as Middle East states prepare to launch an alliance of Arab states and Israel, reportedly under US backing, to counter potential threats from Iran. Iran has warned that it views the move as provocative and a threat to its national security. 

If Iran is indeed planning to sell arms to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine, it would be essentially inserting itself into a Russian-Western proxy war in NATO’s backyard. The message to the Biden administration is that Tehran too can spread its influence to faraway conflict zones where the US has vested interests.  

While Iran’s drones haven’t been known to be sought after by militaries around the world, they do pose a potent threat to its adversaries. They have been an integral part of Iran’s military strategy and have caught the attention of American officials. Last year, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the top US commander in the Middle East, told Congress that Iran-linked drones “present a new and complex threat to our forces and those of our partners and allies.” For the first time since the Korean War, “we are operating without complete air superiority,” he said.

Drone warfare was especially important in the early weeks of the Ukrainian conflict, when Turkish-made strike drones were used by the Ukrainian military to great effect. But Russian air defenses now provide greater coverage in the east. 

Iranian drones would not be a game changer but might mitigate Russian weaknesses in exploiting UAVs. 

Major General Hossein Salaami, the commander of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, said last year that his country possesses drones with a 7,000 kilometer (4,300 mile) range. According to the United States Institute of Peace, Iran’s medium-to-large drones can likely stay in the air for up to 20 hours while carrying fairly sophisticated sensors, payloads and a range of weapons. Some its drones, like those used by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, can carry a payload of up to 150kg, it said.

Iranian drones have been used outside its borders before, but that has largely been in Middle East conflict zones where Tehran can smuggle them to its non-state proxies. They have been effective in Iraq, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, where they were believed by the US to have been used in an attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019 that saw crude prices soar to a record high. Iran denied launching that attack. 

The arrival of Iranian weapons into Europe’s biggest conflict since the Second World War would be a major milestone for Iran’s weapons industry and its status as an arms manufacturer. And it would represent a rare occasion when Tehran’s weapons were being employed not just by a state actor, but one that is a top global military power. 

CNN’s Tim Lister contributed to this article.

The death toll from a strike at a residential building in the town of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine on Saturday has increased to 38, including a child, according to the Emergency Services of Ukraine. 

Nine people were rescued from the rubble and "more than 320 tons of destroyed elements of the building were cleared and disassembled," according to an earlier statement on Facebook from Ukraine's State Service for Emergency Situations in the Donetsk region.

Emergency teams continue to work at the site, it said.

There have been several unexplained explosions and reports of gunfire in the Ukrainian town of Enerhodar in the past 12 hours, according to social media accounts and the Russian-installed mayor.

"Enerhodar did not sleep tight tonight," said Dmytro Orlov, the mayor of the town, who is now in nearby Zaporizhzhia.

"At first, people were awakened by the sounds of several explosions that were heard either in the city itself or somewhere outside of it," he added. "And then during the second half of the night, weird chaotic shots were heard in various residential neighborhoods."

Unofficial social media accounts — reposted by Ukraine's state nuclear enterprise Energoatom — claimed that the Russians had staged a firefight that damaged the local Security Services (SSU) building.

"Why they did it is unclear. Perhaps to "justify" the shelling of settlements on the opposite bank of the Dnieper [river]," the reposted message said.

"What is certain is that it makes no sense for our Armed Forces to fire at the SSU building, since it has not been used by the Russians themselves for a long time."

A later post on a local, unofficial Telegram channel showed smoke rising from somewhere in the town on Tuesday morning.

Russia claimed the Ukrainian Armed Forces attempted to use a "kamikaze" drone in Enerhodar, but it was destroyed by the air defense systems of the Russian Armed Forces, a spokesperson from the press service of the city's military-civilian administration told Russian state news outlet RIA Novosti on Tuesday. 

According to RIA Novosti, the Ukrainian military used the drone to attack a residential area.

"The Armed Forces of Ukraine have just tried to use another drone in Enerhodar. It was destroyed by the air defense of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation," the spokesman told RIA Novosti.

"Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, located in the city of Enerhodar, is operating normally. At the nuclear power plant itself, the situation is still calm," he added. 

Authorities are clarifying information about possible victims, RIA Novosti reported. 

According to RIA Novosti, the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Monday hit a building near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is located in Enerhodar, with two drones. The drones dropped two mines with a caliber of 120 millimeters, damaging the roof and glazing, according to RIA.  

Enerhodar has been occupied by Russian forces since early March and is adjacent to a large nuclear power station that is also under Russian control.