Ukraine live briefing: Dnipro strike injures 9; Brazil rejects U.S. request for alleged Russian spy
A missile strike injured nine people, including two teenagers, in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Friday evening, the regional governor Serhiy Lysa. Hek said said the Russian attack hit a high-rise and a building belonging to the Security Service of Ukraine, also known as SBU.
In Brazil, justice officials have rejected a U.S. request to extradite Sergey Cherkasov, who is accused of being a Russian spy, because Brazil has already been processing Moscow’s own request for him.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
High-precision missiles were used in the strike on Dnipro’s city center, which destroyed the buildings and caused no deaths, the mayor said on Telegram. It is the first such missile attack on the center of Ukraine’s fourth-largest city in months.
Russia’s request for Cherkasov’s extradition was conditionally approved by the top court in Brazil earlier this year, the country’s Justice Ministry said. The 37-year-old, who is serving time in Brazil on charges of using fraudulent documents, was charged by the U.S. Justice Department in March with acting as an illegal agent of a Russian intelligence service while attending Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington as a master’s student.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law moving the date of Christmas from Jan. 7 to Dec. 25, as part of an effort to “renounce Russian heritage.” The government said that Christmas is a Christian holiday, integral to Ukraine and that observing the Julian calendar, which celebrates Christmas on Jan. 7, had long been imposed on Ukrainian people.
Russia claimed it intercepted two Ukrainian missiles in Russian territory, including one that local officials said landed in the town of Taganrog in the Rostov region on Friday, injuring nine people. Russia’s Defense Ministry said earlier that air defenses thwarted a Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow, with no casualties or damage. The Washington Post could not independently verify the claims.
The International Olympic Committee invited Ukrainian fencer Olga Kharlan to compete at next year’s Paris Games after she was disqualified from the Fencing World Championships in Milan for refusing a mandatory handshake with Russian opponent Anna Smirnova. She will be granted “an additional quota place” if she failed to qualify, the President of the Committee, Thomas Bach, wrote in a letter to Kharlan, which she shared on Instagram. “As a fellow fencer, it is impossible for me to imagine how you feel at this moment,” Bach wrote.
As a result of the strikes, “Odessa’s grain industry suffered tens of millions of dollars in damage,” they write. “The attacks destroyed at least 60,000 tons of grain, enough to feed more than 270,000 people for a year, according to the U.N. World Food Program.”
