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Russian airspace becoming unsafe for commercial airlines, Zelenskyy says

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has declared that Russia’s airspace is becoming unsafe for commercial airlines as Vladimir Putin promised to step up strikes against Ukraine’s energy facilities in the run-up to winter. The Ukrainian president said there was no intention to directly threaten civilian flights, but the growing number of attack drones being flown into Russia by Ukraine would have to be “taken into account” by the aviation industry. “We want to warn every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer, and everyone who still uses Russia’s key airports: Russian airspace is becoming completely unsafe,” Zelenskyy said in a statement. Ukraine’s foreign secretary, Andrii Sybiha, said Kyiv had notified the International Civil Aviation Organization that “Russian airspace is not safe for civilian aviation” because of increased military activity. A rapid escalation of Ukrainian military capability in the past few months has allowed Ukraine’s forces to strike at targets around Moscow, St Petersburg and other locations deep inside Russia. Reliable figures for the number of drone flights are hard to obtain but Ukraine is already capable of launching a few hundred a day, and military sources say the country is chasing a target of 1,000 drones in an effort to hurt Russia’s economy. Justin Bronk, an aviation analyst at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said he believed Ukraine could force “periodic closures of Russian airports on a semi-regular basis” by relying on an element of surprise. It could do so by flying small waves of drone at short notice, though trying to close an airport permanently would be difficult, he said, because a sustained attack would become predictable and easier for air-defence systems to halt. Ukraine’s commercial airspace has been closed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 because Russia has been able to strike targets throughout the country, making airports unsafe for civilians. This year, Ukraine has begun bombing oil refineries and warehouses near Moscow and St Petersburg, as well as hitting military and industrial sites at ranges in excess of 2,000km (1,250 miles) from its border. Concerns about the safety of civilian aviation in the war zone linger. A Malaysian airlines plane was shot down as it flew over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 by Russian separatists operating a surface-to-air missile launcher. All 298 people onboard were killed. Putin described Zelenskyy’s remarks as “state terrorism”, saying: “Negotiations are not conducted with terrorists.” Giving one of his most detailed updates on the war, the Russian leader told a news conference that Moscow was preparing to step up its campaign bombing Ukraine’s energy facilities this winter, aiming to knock out heating and electricity supplies. “The Russian armed forces have been ordered to prepare and carry out mass strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities. They are striking us, and they will get a response,” Putin told reporters after a two-day summit in Kyrgyzstan. “I’m not saying we’ll collapse the economy there, but it’s a serious challenge for them.” Asked whether Russia would strike British military facilities in the UK that produced weapons for Ukraine, Putin sidestepped the question, saying: “That’s a military secret.” Russia earlier accused the UK of “escalation” and threatened “consequences” after reports that British-made drones were used by Ukraine in long-range strikes deep inside its territory. Putin sought to stress that Russian forces retained the initiative on the battlefield in Ukraine, despite Moscow’s slowing progress. He appeared to push back against western intelligence reports suggesting he was being given an overly optimistic picture of the war, saying he relied on numerous sources of information that together provided him with an “objective assessment” of the battlefield. Russia’s sluggish advance on the battlefield has fuelled widespread speculation that the Kremlin could resort to another round of mobilisation, the first since Putin called up about 300,000 reservists in September 2022. Zelenskyy and western officials have warned that Moscow could be preparing such a move, though its diplomats do not consider it a certainty. Addressing the speculation for the first time, Putin dismissed the prospect of a new mobilisation as “nonsense”. Also on Wednesday, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said a drone attack on Leipzig airport marked a new escalation by Russia, which fitted a broader pattern of “repeated incursions in our airspace, drones that paralyse our airports, interference with our critical infrastructure”. The German government said on Tuesday that Russia was responsible for a drone laden with explosives discovered at Leipzig airport last month near a Ukrainian plane used to transport weapons. Von der Leyen said: “Europeans are faced with the hard truth that this is the new normal. We have to step up, and that means being ready to respond to Russia’s recklessness faster and better.” The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, who told reporters Russia had grown “increasingly reckless” and there had been an increase “in malign activities, targeting our territory directly”. The EU is drawing up further sanctions against Russia targeting about 1,600 companies and individuals. Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, said the bloc should pass these sanctions in response to the Leipzig attack and others.“Hybrid war is not just nuisance on the internet,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of a meeting with his European counterparts. “Hybrid war means assassination squads, it means arsonists, it means blowing up moving trains, like in Poland, it means breaches of airspace with drones and cruise missiles. We need to convince Putin that such actions are not for free.” The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said the Leipzig attacks had the “hallmarks of state-sponsored terrorism”, adding that Brussels had summoned Russia’s ambassador to the bloc.

Russian ‘attempts to intimidate Europe will fail’, says EU’s Kallas as Germany blames Moscow for Leipzig drone incident – as it happened

And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the attempted Leipzig drone attack, attributed by Germany to Russia, “marks a new escalation on EU soil” (12:52). She said it fitted “a broader pattern of increasingly dangerous incidents” involving Russia, leaving Europeans no choice but to realise “the hard truth that this is the new normal” (12:53). Speaking alongside Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte, von der Leyen insisted the EU “will not just maintain pressure on Russia; we will increase it.” Nato’s Rutte warned that “Russia has grown increasingly reckless” in recent years as he stressed that the alliance’s unity is “unshaken” (12:59). EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said EU foreign ministers held talks on tightening the bloc’s sanctions against Russia and visa rules for Russians seeking to enter the union’s territory, including a ban for ex-combatants (16:39, 16:40, 16:58). But there is still no agreement on revisiting the use of frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine, as countries such as Belgium remain opposed to existing proposals (17:25), even as others – like Italy, Poland and Spain – are in favour (10:55). For what it’s worth, Russia has dismissed Germany’s move to attribute the attack to Moscow, with Vladimir Putin calling it “a grave mistake” and questioning the evidence behind it (11:26). Separately, German police have stepped up its investigation into yesterday’s attempt to disrupt the operation of a power substation near Brandenburg, opening a probe looking at alleged terrorism element (11:44). Ukraine faced another night of Russian attacks, including on its capital Kyiv, as it notified the International Civil Aviation Organisation that it no longer deemed Russia’s airspace safe for civilian aviation, suggesting a potential escalation. If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

‘How do I not crumble’: from Australia, Akash and his brother wait for news of their parents in Nepal

Akash Venkatraman’s parents wished him a happy 22nd birthday before they left for Nepal on a spiritual pilgrimage. Three days later, a glacial collapse sent a torrent of mud, water and debris through the Nepal-Tibet border, bursting the banks of the Trishuli River, and sweeping away homes, bridges and roads. He hasn’t heard from them since. Venkatraman Balakrishnan, 52, and Chitra Venkatraman, 46, are among 38 Australians who have been reported missing after the deadly flash floods and landslides on Wednesday last week. The couple and their family friends – Sreedharan Iyer, 52, Lakshmi Iyer, 50, and their sons Rishab Iyer, 23, and Rudhra Iyer, 20 – had been taking part in a pilgrimage to the sacred site of Mount Kailash. They were staying in riverside accommodation in Syabrubesi with other members of the Himalayan Glacier Adventures tour group the morning the flood came in. In the days since losing contact, Akash has cried – as a psychology student, he knows not to repress his emotions – but he has also tried to keep going. His parents would have wanted him and his 17-year-old brother who is studying for HSC to maintain normalcy, but it is difficult, he says. “What if I graduate and they’re not there? What if I get my first job and they’re not there?,” Akash says. “Because everything you do, you do to make them proud.” Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email Akash’s uncle has now travelled to Nepal to search for clues while he and his brother try to help from home. Their family has received an outpouring of support from the community, but as the days pass, Akash worries that Australians’ attention is falling away and that “efforts to find my parents and everyone else with them will also reduce”. “The worst thing that could happen is that they hang on for seven or 10 days and no help comes – that’s my biggest worry,” he says. “Us losing attention could create that situation.” More than 4,000 people have been reported missing since the floods and more than 1,000 have been confirmed dead. Police in Kathmandu have urged relatives of missing tourists to provide DNA samples to assist with identification efforts. Though five Australians previously believed to have gone missing in Nepal have now been confirmed safe, the government still holds “grave concerns” for those still unaccounted for. In Kathmandu, the anxiety is palpable. The wall of missing loved ones at the teaching hospital has quadrupled in size. Other hospitals around the city, like the trauma centre, are also filling up. On Wednesday, Uttam Tamang, 25, was standing outside the National Trauma Centre in Kathmandu, clutching his heart. “We are searching for my brother,” Tamang says. His brother, 25, was an electrician working at a hydro plant in the upper Ruswian region – the army has not been able to get in there yet. Now, Tamang spends his days going from hospital to hospital. “I just,” he touches his chest. “I can’t,” he says. Sita Thapa Magar is standing outside at the teaching hospital – her younger brother, Anil Thapa Magar, is also missing in a hydroplant tunnel in the upper region. And they, like many other families, are also doing the daily rounds of hospitals. She says there has not been enough information from the army about why they haven’t been able to search the tunnels yet. “Every day we are looking for information from the government,” Thapa Magar says through a translator. “But we are not getting much information about the missing. “So we have to come here every day; we give his details. It’s been a week, and still, there is not much information.” As the morgues in Kathmandu fill up, a temporary burial site has been set up on the outskirts of the city. While golfers strode around the course next to the forest on Tuesday, police officials laid 85 people from up the valley to rest. It is one of many temporary burial sites around the country. DNA samples and photographs are being collected so families can later reclaim their loved ones’ remains. In Sydney, Sarada Viswanathan, the partner of Rishab Iyer and a longtime friend of his family, is taking matters into her own hands. The 23-year-old medicine student has set up a search HQ from her Sydney home, where family and friends come together to look for signs of their loved ones. They have been monitoring official Nepali websites and calling embassies and nearby hospitals and camps. Every day, they are tracking down the social media accounts of rescued people to ask whether they recognise any of their family members and have liaised with a Jeep vendor company in Nepal so they can track the cars their relatives were driving. “It’s still just a crumb, and we’re trying to follow that trail, but we need a lot more crumbs and a lot more help to get us there,” Sarada says. Akash and Sarada are calling on the Australian government to increase its military and humanitarian support in Nepal, with their petition receiving more than 12,000 signatures. The Gyirong Port area, where the Iyer family and Akash’s parents were last believed to have been heading towards, was finally opened on Wednesday. Chinese state media reported the road was open from the Tibetan border and rescue equipment could be brought in. Sarada’s relatives who are in Nepal have been barred from entering the area by the army, so she is hoping Australia’s official on-foot rescue teams will be able to reach Rishab and his loved ones. “I can feel his energy. Even when I’m sitting here, I can feel him next to me, and I can feel that he’s still here, and he’s trying his very best,” Sarada says. “I know that they’re very strong people, they have a very strong will, and I know that they wouldn’t give up. So I’m not going to give up on them either.” Akash could also travel to Nepal to join his uncle in the search effort, but for now he is committed to securing a future for him and his brother. “The next few days is about ensuring that if the worst case happens, how do I not crumble with it,” he says. “Because the worst-case possibility is that I’d have to take care of the family … and take responsibility for our lives.”

Trump ally defends Venezuela oil deal amid ‘gunpoint diplomacy’ criticism

The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, has denied Washington is seeking to commandeer huge quantities of Venezuelan oil, amid growing criticism of Donald Trump’s energy deal with the country’s interim leaders. “Absolutely not,” Wright replied when asked by a CNBC journalist if the US was engaged in a “heavy-handed” attempt to “take” Venezuelan oil in violation of the South American country’s constitution. Wright landed in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Tuesday night, four days after Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history”. “I think we are seeing an absolutely historic transformation of both Venezuela and the relations between Venezuela and the US,” Wright said of the deal, which Trump has claimed will give the US control of 65bn barrels of Venezuelan oil. “This is President Trump’s grand plan to replace conflict with commerce,” Wright said. The White House says the deal will help secure US “energy dominance for the next century” as well as “purging foreign malign influence from our back yard” by excluding China and Russia from oilfields in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves. But there has been criticism from across the political spectrum. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board said Trump’s deal with Venezuela’s unelected interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, “looks less like a normal commercial transaction than it does the famous scene of US businessmen meeting with the Cuban strongman in The Godfather Part II”. “The US government is essentially getting in bed with a foreign dictator and her favored capitalist,” the newspaper complained, in reference to Alejandro Betancourt, the Venezuelan tycoon at the centre of the deal. The economist Francisco Rodríguez told Democracy Now: “It’s clear that this is not a deal that any Venezuelan government would have entered into unless this country had been subject to an invasion, and unless its authorities had been held at gunpoint. So I think we’ve replaced gunboat diplomacy now for gunpoint diplomacy.” Delcy Rodríguez was installed as interim president on 5 January, two days after the president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by US special forces during a predawn raid on Caracas. Trump warned Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice-president, she would face an even worse fate if she did not toe the US line. Since Maduro’s capture, Rodríguez has made a series of once unthinkable concessions to US officials who their nominally socialist political movement, Chavismo, had spent years denouncing as predatory imperialists bent on stealing Venezuela’s natural resources. On Saturday, Rodríguez claimed the oil deal had “endless” benefits and would help produce more than $209bn in revenues that could be used to improve healthcare and education. “We are thinking of Venezuela’s future,” she said during a televised broadcast to the nation. The deal has dealt a body blow to Venezuela’s political opposition who fear Trump is unlikely to push for a democratic transition or fresh presidential elections given his lucrative arrangement with Rodríguez. “This is a game between the Trump administration and Delcy and her people,” one opposition figure lamented after the deal was unveiled.

What’s really behind Trump’s deference to Putin?

Could Donald Trump be a Russian asset? The headline on a review in the Guardian of my new book Betrayal has provoked heated international debate. Written by the historian Lawrence Freedman, the piece generated thousands of comments from across Europe and beyond on social media. Many people responded with a single word: “Duh!” Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin is the biggest mystery in international politics. In 2017 I wrote a book called Collusion, which set out Moscow’s operation to support and cultivate Trump, going back decades. The US president, of course, denies links with Russia. But in his second term, his behaviour towards Putin has been as weird and perplexing as during his first. For example, at the Alaska summit last year the US president applauded his Russian counterpart, meeting him at Anchorage airport and rolling out a red carpet. Trump seemed uncharacteristically nervous, as he waited for Putin to emerge from his plane. At their joint press conference after talks, he allowed the Russian president to speak first. It was a bizarre act of deference. Why? There are, I think, overlapping reasons for Trump’s submissive behaviour. I explore them in Betrayal, (which is published this week in Denmark by Politikens Forlag, with Italian, Finnish and Ukrainian language editions to follow.) As I mentioned in a Q&A with Guardian readers, one factor is ideological: Trump’s Maga supporters see Russia as an “anti-woke” kindred state. Putin leans into this idea, positioning himself as a defender of conservative values, under threat from a decadent and godless Europe. High-profile Trump supporters have travelled to Moscow. Erstwhile Maga cheerleader and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson even absurdly praised the Russian capital’s well-stocked supermarkets. Another explanation – advanced by Fiona Hill, the former White House adviser – is strongman envy. Trump would like Putin’s freedom of action, when it comes to making money and crushing opponents. It is evident the US president prefers the company of autocrats. By contrast he frequently badmouths European democrats, among them the former British PM Keir Starmer (“no Churchill”), and Giorgia Meloni (“I felt sorry for her”.) A third theory is kompromat, a KGB term to describe potential compromising material. We know from declassified records that the Czechoslovakia secret police began spying on Trump in the 1970s, when he married a woman from behind the iron curtain. He visited Moscow in 1987, on a trip organised by a Soviet state agency, and subsequently made many visits to Russia including in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. What exactly happened on these excursions is unclear. But I know from my own experience in Moscow – I was the Guardian’s bureau chief from 2007 to 2011 – that Russia’s intelligence agencies are adept at surveillance operations. Shortly after I arrived, the FSB broke into the apartment I shared with my wife and our two children. They left clues, busting open the window in my son’s bedroom, with a perilous drop to the courtyard below. The British embassy advised us our home was bugged. Possibly, Putin’s ghost-like spies had installed video cameras too, we were told. Over the next four years we experienced on-off harassment from a shadowy and paranoid state. There were mysterious break-ins, veiled threats from foreign ministry officials, and a summons to visit Lefortovo, the FSB’s infamous pre-detention centre and gloomy prison. Undoubtedly, the KGB and FSB will have spied on Trump too, as well as on other high-profile foreign guests. A 2020 report by the US Senate intelligence committee alleged that the FSB has secret cameras inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where Trump stayed during his 2013 trip. There will be tapes. They may be innocuous. But Putin knows what they show, and Trump knows that Putin knows. *** Consequences remain the same Does this make Trump an asset? My conclusion is that the terminology doesn’t much matter. As the chess champion Garry Kasparov notes, if Trump were an asset, or an agent of influence, what exactly would he do differently? Since 2025 he has stopped direct US military aid to Kyiv, humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, and repeated Kremlin lies and disinformation. The US president’s Russia-friendly actions have consequences. I have been visiting Kyiv for nearly two decades, and have spent much of the past five years reporting from Ukraine and the frontline. I was in the capital in February 2022 when Putin tried to seize it. Since then, the conflict has evolved. It is no longer fought with armoured vehicles and tanks, and has become instead a hi-tech aerial battle. Most nights, Russia bombards Kyiv with kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles. Ukraine, meanwhile, carries out its own long-range strikes. It has the world’s most innovative drone and counter-drone industry. But Kyiv badly lacks US-made Patriot interceptors – the only system capable of shooting down fast-moving ballistic missiles. Trump refuses to send Patriots or allow Kyiv to develop its own version under licence. And so civilians die – families, elderly couples, teenagers – entombed under the ruins of pulverised apartment blocks. At night you hear explosions, a moped-like growl from enemy drones, and booms from Ukrainian air defence. Asset or not, Trump is doing little to make this horror stop. Betrayal: Trump, Putin and the New Age of Conquest, is published in the UK by Guardian Faber. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. To receive the complete version of This Is Europe in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.

Tumbler Ridge mass shooting victims file 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI

OpenAI faces 30 new lawsuits filed on behalf of victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. The suits, filed on Wednesday, allege the company’s ChatGPT chatbot induced the shooter to carry out the attack in rural Canada in February, in which eight people were killed and dozens more wounded – most of them children. “These were people who really endured just total hell that day,” Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in an interview. “Young kids who watched their teachers die, watched friends die and thought they were going to get shot and killed.” These new lawsuits, filed in federal court for the northern district of California, come after Edelson filed seven initial suits in April – bringing the total number of cases against OpenAI for the Tumbler Ridge shooting to 37. All of the suits allege that the violent intentions of the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, were well-known to the senior leadership of OpenAI, which failed to report her to the authorities. Employees on the company’s safety team had flagged the shooter’s account to executives eight months before the attack, describing her in internal messages as “a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people”, according to court filings. OpenAI banned her account, but she was able to quickly create a new one, the suits claim. The lawsuits accuse OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of negligence, aiding and abetting a mass shooting and product liability. Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement that he thinks about what happened at Tumbler Ridge every day and that the company works hard to create standards for reporting cases to law enforcement. “The professionals working on these teams choose to do this incredibly difficult work because they care so deeply about keeping people safe,” Kwon said. “They come to work every day knowing that they may have to make a decision that they’ll think about for the rest of their lives.” A groundswell of cases have been brought against OpenAI and other tech companies alleging that their chatbots exacerbate mental health crises and provoke violent acts. OpenAI has been sued in seven separate cases that blame ChatGPT for acting as a “suicide coach”. A criminal investigation and civil lawsuit, brought by the attorney general of Florida, accuses OpenAI of concealing safety risks after a mass shooting at Florida State University. The shooting in Tumbler Ridge took place in a secondary school, shortly after Van Rootselaar killed her mother and 11-year-old brother in their family home. The new tranche of lawsuits includes cases from the family of one girl who was shot, along with the principal, teachers and students. The attack was one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. In the aftermath, questions swirled in the small British Columbia town about how it could have happened. Edelson singled out Chris Lehane, who is OpenAI’s head of global affairs and a former member of Bill Clinton’s administration who specialized in opposition research. He said Lehane was one of the people who received warnings from the company’s safety team but overruled repeated appeals to alert the authorities. That decision was also sanctioned by Altman, the lawsuits allege. “What’s clear is that OpenAI over and over has made decisions to hide how dangerous their platform is because they’re worried about regulation and public pushback,” Edelson said. In response, OpenAI’s Kwon said: “It is absolutely false to say Chris Lehane was involved with our original referral decision … It’s also completely untrue to say that the people at the center of these challenging decisions do not prioritize safety, or that there are ‘political’ or ‘public relations’ factors at play.” When the first seven lawsuits were filed against OpenAI in April, the company published a blogpost about its “commitment to safety”. Altman also sent a letter to the Tumbler Ridge community apologizing for not notifying Canadian police about what OpenAI knew regarding the shooter’s potential threat. “While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered,” Altman wrote. David Eby, the British Columbia premier, posted the letter to social media with the comment: “The apology is necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge.”