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Slower than expected but still moving forward, frontline soldiers say the Russian defenses are fierce in southern Ukraine as they take villages after brutal fights. From Makarivka, a recently re-captured village in Ukraine, VOA’s Heather Murdock reports with Videographer Yan Boechat.
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A Russian missile attack wounded at least seven people early Thursday in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Serhiy Lysak, the regional governor, said on Telegram that six of the injured were hospitalized.

Lysak said Ukrainian air defenses shot down one Russian missile but that strikes from others destroyed a transport facility and damaged a dozen other buildings including a bank, a hotel and two residential buildings.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its air defenses shot down three Ukrainian drones over Russian territory.

The ministry said two of the drones were shot down in the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine.  The third drone was destroyed in the Kaluga region, located southwest of Moscow.

Ukraine has conducted daily drone attacks targeting Russian territory during the past week, with Russia reporting it shot down the aircraft or brought them down by way of electronic jamming.  In some cases, falling debris has caused damage on the ground, including crashing into a building in Moscow.

Russia has used Iranian-made drones through much of its invasion of Ukraine, while also using missiles in aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.  
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A Moscow court on Thursday extended by three months the pre-trial detention of jailed U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich. He will now stay behind bars on espionage charges until at least the end of November, Russian state news agency Tass reported.

The Wall Street Journal reporter was detained at the end of March while on assignment in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.

Moscow has accused him of spying, which he, his employer and the U.S. government vehemently deny. The State Department has classified him as wrongfully detained.

Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be detained in Russia on espionage charges since the Cold War.

Gershkovich, 31, arrived at the Moscow court Thursday in a white prison van and was led out handcuffed. He appeared in court to hear the result of the prosecution’s motion to extend his arrest from August 30.

This is the second time his pre-trial detention has been extended, both times by three months.

Reporters were not allowed to witness Thursday’s proceedings in the court. Tass said it took place behind closed doors due to the classified nature of some details in the case.

On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal said in a statement, “Today, our colleague and distinguished journalist Evan Gershkovich appeared for a pre-trial hearing where his improper detention was extended yet again. We are deeply disappointed he continues to be arbitrarily and wrongfully detained for doing his job as a journalist. The baseless accusations against him are categorically false, and we continue to push for his immediate release. Journalism is not a crime.”
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Mykola and Natalia Navrotsky are from the small town of Dymer, about 48 kilometers from Kyiv. They last saw their son, Oleksandr, in March 2022, when the 33-year-old man tried to lead his family out of the then Russian-occupied region.

“Our son was taken by the military of the Russian Federation at the Dymer checkpoint when he was driving his wife and son from the village of Havrylivka to Hlibivka. They found something in the phone and detained him. His wife and son were released, they came home at night in freezing cold,” the Navrotskys said.

Dymer and neighboring towns in the Kyiv region had come under Russian occupation on Feb. 26, 2022. Roadblocks, arbitrary arrests and the torture of civilian prisoners quickly followed, according to the locals and Ukrainian officials.

“They took him away on March 8, 2022, they were severely beating him, they tortured him, then they took him to Hostomel,” Mykola and Natalia Navrotsky said in an interview, relating what they had learned from a neighbor who also was arbitrarily detained in the same prison until the Russian forces retreated.

According to the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), made up of Ukrainian journalists who investigate alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Russian forces created two prisons in Dymer, a town of about 7,000 people. In just more than a month of occupation, about 500 prisoners went through those prisons and about 50 of them are still in Russian captivity.

Navrotsky was kept at an industrial facility in Dymer until the retreating Russian forces transported him to Belarus, and finally to Russia, his parents said, based on information Ukrainian military prisoners of war who met their son in the prison in Russia.

“He is still in captivity. At the moment, we don’t know anything about his condition, what happened to him, or how and when he will return home — we don’t know anything at all,” the Navrotskys said.

Their son was able to send a note to them through the Red Cross last year.

“We know about his whereabouts as of August 29 [2022] — there was a note written almost a year ago, in April: ‘Hello. I am alive and well, everything is fine,'” the Navrotskys told VOA. They assume he hasn’t been moved since he wrote the note.

Several other residents of Dymer, whose relatives disappeared during the Russian occupation, told VOA similar stories.

Russian intimidation

About 25,000 civilians, like Navrotsky, have been taken from the occupied territories of Ukraine, according to Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament commissioner for human rights.

“These are civilian hostages, citizens of Ukraine, who were arrested by the Russian Federation and kept in captivity with no legal grounds. And more continue being detained en masse,” Lubinets said.

He said the arbitrary arrests and torture of civilians started during the occupation of Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, “and all this continues.”

He said this is a “systemic pressure on the population” intended to intimidate Ukrainians and suppress the will to resist.

“This is their preventive work against everyone who may pose any danger to the Russian occupation authorities — former law enforcement officers, pro-Ukrainian people, former volunteers,” the Ukrainian ombudsman said.

Russian authorities do not comment on the detention of Ukrainian civilians. Russia does not differentiate between civilians and prisoners of war. Both are considered by the Russian authorities as those who were “detained for counteracting the SVO,” or special military operation, according to Ukrainian human rights lawyers interviewed by the BBC.

Russia rarely replies to queries from attorneys but  Russian human rights lawyer Alexei Ladukhin did receive one while working for the family of another Ukrainian detained by the Russian occupying forces.

The Russian Defense Ministry told Ladukhin in a letter that information about “persons detained for countering a special military operation” is classified and cannot be shared with third parties.

The letter was signed by Major General Vitaly Kokh, the deputy head of the Main Directorate of the Military Police of the Ministry of Defense.

Widespread torture

The Navrotskys say their son was beaten by the Russian soldiers so badly that the soldiers had to seek medical aid for him when he was still in Ukraine. His parents learned of this, as they have much of what happened to him, from one of the prisoners who was freed by the Russian soldiers.

The former prisoner said the Russians kept them in the dark, blindfolded to prevent them from finding out who was around them and where they were being taken.

Numerous former civilian prisoners, including some who spoke to VOA, said that people are kept without food and water in the Russian prisons and that torture is widespread, including with electric current.

A United Nations report published in June says civilians were often detained during so-called filtration procedures in the occupied territories because of their perceived support for Ukraine.

“We documented 864 individual cases of arbitrary detention by the Russian Federation, many of which also amounted to enforced disappearances,” Matilda Bogner, head of the U.N. Monitoring Mission, told journalists in Geneva while presenting the report.

The report documented 77 executions of civilian prisoners and one death due to torture.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press dating from January, Russia plans to build 25 new prison colonies and six other detention centers in occupied Ukraine by 2026 in addition to at least 40 detention facilities in Russia and Belarus, and 63 makeshift and formal ones in occupied Ukrainian territory.

Civilian exchanges

Desperate relatives are trying their best to attract the attention of authorities and international organizations to help get their loved ones returned from captivity.

“We appealed to all authorities, wherever we could, we went on a peaceful rally, we went on a peaceful march to attract the attention of society, the world community, to help bring our relatives back home, all those who are in captivity,” the Navrotskys said.

Lubinets said exchanges of prisoners do take place. They started after Russia first occupied Ukrainian territory in 2014 and continued until February 2022.

According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as of the beginning of June 2023, Ukraine has gotten back about 2,500 of its citizens from Russian captivity, including about 400 children and 150 civilians.

He explained that was it is difficult to negotiate the return of civilians because “you exchange military personnel for military personnel. … We do not have very many [Russian] civilians that we can exchange for civilians.”

This story originated in VOA’s Ukrainian Service. 
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China and Russia used the second day of the BRICS Summit of emerging economies to criticize the West, while also throwing their support behind the proposed expansion of what’s seen by some as an alternative power bloc.

The leaders of Brazil, India, and China are all in South Africa — which is hosting the event — while Russian President Vladimir Putin is participating virtually to avoid arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant over war crimes in Ukraine.

Via video link, Putin — who ordered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year — said the West’s actions had led to that conflict by trying to “promote their hegemony,” “exceptionalism,” and policies of “neo-colonialism.” 

“Our actions in Ukraine are guided by only one thing, to put an end to the war that was unleashed by the West,” said Putin, speaking through a translator. 

Meanwhile, the leaders of Brazil and South Africa stressed the need for a peaceful solution to the Ukraine war — though there were no words of criticism for Moscow. 

For his part, Chinese leader Xi Jinping noted the world was undergoing major shifts and had entered a new period of “turbulence and transformation.” He blamed countries that form “exclusive blocs” for the problems. 

“The cold war mentality is still haunting our world and the geopolitical situation is getting tense,” he said through a translator. 

Xi had baffled China-watchers the day before by failing to turn up when the leaders each made a first-day address, instead sending his commerce minister to fill in for him. 

Paul Nantulya, a researcher at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said one could only speculate. 

“What I think is happening is there are some headwinds back home in China …which are upsetting the domestic dynamic, and I think something must have erupted that required the president’s attention,” he said. 

In other developments, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi threw his support behind the group expanding, after reports India was only lukewarm about the idea. 

High on the agenda of this summit is possible expansion of the BRICS group — with Argentina, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia among the countries that have applied to join. 

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also expressed support for expansion. However, he said BRICS must not aim to rival the U.S., and Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, also stressed BRICS was not in opposition to anyone. 

“While firmly committed to advance the interests of the Global South, BRICS stands ready to collaborate with all countries that aspire to create a more inclusive international order,” he said. 

Another theme of the summit is de-dollarization and a move towards greater use of the BRICS currencies. Xi said he would like to see reform of the international financial system. 

The summit concludes Thursday, with a final statement from the group expected. 

 
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Russia on Wednesday requested that the pre-trial detention of American journalist Evan Gershkovich be extended. 

The Wall Street Journal reporter’s current detention period is set to expire on August 30. The 31-year-old journalist has been in Russian custody since his arrest on March 29. 

Russia accuses Gershkovich of espionage, a charge that he, the newspaper and U.S. officials deny. 

In a request submitted Wednesday, Russian authorities requested that Gershkovich be detained for an unspecified period, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

Russian state media have reported that a Moscow court is due to hold a hearing Thursday on the request. 

“Evan’s wrongful detention is outrageous, and we continue to demand his immediate release,” The Wall Street Journal said in a statement on Wednesday. 

Few visits since arrest

Since his arrest, Gershkovich has been allowed only three consular visits with U.S. officials. 

The most recent was August 14, when he met with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy.

“Ambassador Tracy reported that Evan continues to be in good health and remains strong, despite the circumstances,” the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said in a statement. 

In July, Moscow said officials were in contact with Washington about a possible prisoner swap. 

‘Serious about a prisoner exchange’

President Joe Biden said his administration is “serious about a prisoner exchange,” but the White House has also said discussions with the Kremlin on a potential swap have not yet given way to “a pathway to a resolution.” 

Clayton Weimers, executive director of the U.S. bureau of Reporters Without Borders, told VOA earlier in August that Gershkovich’s case shows that the U.S. needs a better strategy to respond to the threat of these issues. 

“The United States, and indeed democracies around the world, need to find ways to raise the cost of this kind of bad business,” Weimers said. “How do we impose stiffer penalties to disincentivize hostage-taking in the first place?” 
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Syrian forces have ramped up their attacks on rebel bases and weapons depots, targeting dozens of fighters, the defense ministry said on Wednesday amid an upsurge in violence. 

Both the Syrian army and Russian air force “carried out several air and artillery strikes targeting terrorist headquarters in the countryside of Aleppo, Latakia and Hama,” a statement said, after “repeated attacks” on regime-held areas in the provinces. 

The strikes left dozens of fighters “dead or wounded,” the defense ministry said. 

“Terrorist” bases, missile and drone launchers and ammunition depots were all targeted, it said. 

The jihadi Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group (HTS), led by Syria’s former al-Qaida affiliate, controls swaths of Idlib province as well as parts of the adjacent provinces of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia. 

Since June, Russian airstrikes have killed 13 civilians, including two children, and about 28 jihadis, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor. 

Moscow’s intervention since 2015 in the Syrian conflict has helped President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus claw back much of the territory it lost to rebels early in the 12-year civil war. 

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman attributed the increased number of attacks by Assad’s ally Moscow as retaliation for drone strikes by HTS and its allies on government-held territory. 

Russia’s military has mainly targeted HTS bases suspected of manufacturing drones, Abdel Rahman said. 

HTS regularly carries out deadly attacks on soldiers and pro-government forces, and Russia has repeatedly struck the Idlib area of the rebel-held region in the northwest of the country. 

Earlier Wednesday, shelling that targeted Assad’s hometown in the coastal province of Latakia wounded one civilian, state media said. It was the second such attack in two months. 

“Five shells were fired by terrorist groups deployed in the northern countryside on agricultural lands in the Qardaha area, wounding a citizen,” the official news agency SANA said, quoting a police source. 

The Observatory, which has a wide network of sources inside Syria, said the attack was carried out early in the morning by factions affiliated with HTS. 

In the previous attack on Qardaha, a civilian was killed in a drone strike on June 23, the Observatory reported at the time. 

On Tuesday, five people including two civilians were killed in separate Russian strikes in Syria’s rebel-held northwest, the monitor said. 

The Syrian war broke out after Assad’s repression of peaceful anti-government demonstrations in 2011 escalated into a deadly conflict that pulled in foreign powers and global jihadis. 

The conflict has killed more than 500,000 people and forced about half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes. 

The rebel-held Idlib region is home to about 3 million people, about half of them displaced from elsewhere in Syria. 
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Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency deliberately lured a Russian military pilot to land his Mi-8 helicopter at a Ukrainian airfield, spokesperson Andriy Yusov said on Wednesday, amid differing media reports of what happened. 

“This was a GUR operation. The aircraft moved according to the plan,” Yusov told Reuters. 

A coup for Ukraine

A successful operation to capture a working Russian helicopter and its pilot would represent an audacious coup for Ukraine, allowing it to simultaneously replenish its limited aviation stocks while also potentially getting valuable intelligence on the Russian air force. 

Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda cited unnamed intelligence sources as saying the agency worked for more than six months to convince the pilot to cooperate and fly the aircraft to Ukraine. 

The report said the helicopter landed in eastern Ukraine with the pilot. Two other crew members who were unaware of the plan were subsequently “liquidated.” 

Ukrainian military journalist Yuriy Butusov reported that the Mi-8 helicopter had landed at a Ukrainian air base “some time ago,” citing unnamed sources in the Ukrainian military command. 

Ukrainian military will use helicopter

Butusov said the helicopter was fully operational and would serve in the Ukrainian armed forces after being examined. 

Asked about reports of the incident on national television, GUR spokesperson Yusov said that his organization was working with the helicopter crew and that official information would be given soon.  

“You will need to wait a bit, work is being conducted, including with the crew. Everything is fine, there will be news,” he said. 

Russia’s defense ministry did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment. 

Earlier on Wednesday, Fighterbomber, a popular Russian pro-war Telegram channel focused on aviation, said it had information that the helicopter had become lost and accidentally landed in Ukraine “a couple of weeks ago.” 

In April, Ukraine’s domestic security service accused a number of Ukrainian military personnel of treason after what it said was an unsuccessful attempt to lure a Russian pilot to land at a Ukrainian air base, which led to a lethal Russian missile strike on that location in July 2022. 
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A private jet crashed over Russia on Wednesday, killing all 10 people on board, emergency officials said. Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he was on board.

Unconfirmed media reports said the jet belonged to Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company.

Russia’s state news agency Tass cited emergency officials as saying that the plane carried three pilots and seven passengers. It was not clear if Prigozhin was among those on board, though Russia’s civilian aviation regulator, Rosaviatsia, said he was on the passenger list.

The plane was en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg and went down in the Tver region, more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of the capital. Authorities are investigating.

Flight tracking data reviewed by The Associated Press shows a private jet registered to Wagner that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.

The signal was lost in a rural region where there are no nearby airfields where the jet could have landed safely.

Prigozhin, whose private military force Wagner fought alongside Russia’s regular army in Ukraine, mounted a short-lived armed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in late June. The Kremlin said he would be exiled to Belarus, and his fighters would either retire, follow him there, or join the Russian military.

Shortly after that, Wagner fighters set up camp in Belarus, but Prigozhin’s plane, according to media reports, was flying back and forth between Belarus and Russia.

This week, Prigozhin posted his first recruitment video since the mutiny, saying that Wagner is conducting reconnaissance and search activities, and “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free.”
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Latest Developments:

Australia is sending $74 million in new military assistance to Ukraine. The package includes armored vehicles, special operations vehicles and trucks.
Britain’s defense ministry says allies have trained more than 17,000 Ukrainian troops, and that the number could reach 30,000 by 2024.

Ukraine’s military said Monday its forces downed two of three cruise missiles that Russia fired from the Black Sea as well as seven of eight Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Russia.

Such aerial attacks have been a common part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Ukrainian officials hailing the work of air defenses in countering the assaults.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Sunday after a phone call with U.S. President Joe Biden that he was “especially grateful” to the United States for the reliability of Patriot air defense batteries.

Biden reaffirmed unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine, including through continued security, economic and humanitarian aid, according to a White House statement.

Zelenskyy said he also discussed the fighting on the front lines and strengthening Ukraine’s troops in his call with Biden and similar conversations Sunday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Ukraine Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Monday that Ukrainian forces had made some gains in the eastern part of the country during the past week, and that there was heavy fighting ongoing in the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Maryinka areas.

Maliar also said that while “the situation in the south has not undergone significant changes over the past week,” overall Ukrainian forces had freed 130 square kilometers since launching a counteroffensive earlier this month.

US, Ukrainian reaction

The unprecedented challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin by fighters from the Wagner paramilitary forces has exposed fresh “cracks” in the strength of Putin’s leadership that may take weeks or months to play out, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday in a TV interview on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”

Blinken characterized Wagner Group’s mutiny and its subsequent crisis as a Russian “internal matter.”

He added, “This is a challenge coming from within to Putin, and that’s where his focus has been. Our focus is resolutely and relentlessly on Ukraine making sure that it has what it needs to defend itself and to take back territory that Russia has seized.”

Blinken said that although it is too soon to tell what Russia’s internal turmoil meant, Putin’s distraction is to the advantage of Ukraine. He also said that at the end of the day, the reason Ukraine will prevail is that “this is about their land, this is about their future, this is about their freedom, not Russia’s.”

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said he discussed the turmoil in Russia in a phone call with his U.S. counterpart Sunday, describing the Russian authorities as “weak” and saying things were “moving in the right direction.”

In a brief readout of the call with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Reznikov said they also discussed Ukraine’s counteroffensive and steps to strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces.

“We agree that the Russian authorities are weak and that withdrawing Russian troops from Ukraine is the best choice for the Kremlin,” Reznikov wrote on Twitter.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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The daughter of a German citizen of Iranian descent who was sentenced to death by Tehran pleaded Tuesday for the United States and Germany to act urgently to save him. 

The daughter of Jamshid Sharmahd was making her case in Washington, including holding a sit-in outside the State Department, on the heels of a deal by President Joe Biden’s administration to free five U.S. citizens who were imprisoned in Iran. 

According to his family, Sharmahd, a software developer who had been living in California, was kidnapped in 2020 on a visit to the United Arab Emirates and taken to Iran. 

He was sentenced to death over a deadly blast at a mosque in 2008 in the southern city of Shiraz, charges the family describes as ridiculous. Iran’s Supreme Court confirmed the death penalty in April. 

“What I’m asking the U.S. and Germany is to free my father, to bring my father back, to save (his) life,” said his daughter Gazelle Sharmahd, who lives in California. 

“This is a life-and-death situation,” she told a roundtable. 

She voiced frustration that Germany and the United States are playing “some form of responsibility ping-pong.”  

“It goes back and forth. Not my citizen. He doesn’t live here. Not my problem, not my problem. And we’re not getting through to them,” she said. 

Germany has said it is engaging at the highest levels and through all channels on the case, with a foreign ministry spokesman acknowledging that the family is “going through something unimaginable and unbearable.” 

But Gazelle Sharmahd insisted that German efforts were focused only on improving his conditions in prison. 

“What, does he need better toothpaste before they murder him right now?” she said. 

The U.S. State Department has called Iran’s treatment of Sharmahd reprehensible but said it was for Germany to discuss the case of its own citizen. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that all U.S. citizens have been released from prison under the deal, which drew fire from the Republican Party. 

Under the arrangement, the five U.S. citizens, all of Iranian origin, were freed to house arrest and are expected to be allowed to leave after the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue that had been held in South Korea to comply with U.S. sanctions. 
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