Ukraine-Russia war latest: At least 21 killed after Moscow strikes Ukrainians queuing to collect pensions

Poland is closing its border with Belarus on Thursday at midnight local time as a result of the Zapad military exercises taking place in Belarus, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday, amid escalating tensions between Minsk and Warsaw.

The scheduled “Zapad-2025” (West-2025) drills, to be held in western Russia and Belarus, have raised security concerns in neighbouring NATO member states Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

“On Friday, Russian-Belarusian maneuvers, very aggressive from a military doctrine perspective, begin in Belarus, very close to the Polish border,” Tusk told a government meeting.

“Therefore, for national security reasons, we will close the border with Belarus, including railway crossings, in connection with the Zapad maneuvers on Thursday at midnight.”

Already strained relations between Poland and Belarus have hit new lows since Minsk’s ally Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Donald Trump gave Russian president Vladimir Putin “what he wanted” after their summit in Alaska, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said.

“I don’t know. I think that it was a bilateral summit. It’s a pity that Ukraine was not there,” Mr Zelensky replied when asked how he felt watching Putin in Alaska.

“I think that President Trump gave Putin what he wanted. He wanted very much to meet with President Trump, with the president of the United States. I think that Putin has got it, and it’s a pity,” he said.

“Putin doesn’t want to meet with me, but he wanted very much to meet with the president of the United States to show everybody a video and images that he’s there.”

The number of people killed in Russia’s airstrike on Ukraine’s Donetsk region is now 21, Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha has said.

“At least 21 civilians were killed and more than two dozen injured following a barbaric direct Russian strike with an air bomb on ordinary people lined up to receive pensions in the village of Yarova in the Donetsk region,” he wrote on X.

A man died as a result of Ukrainian drone attack overnight on the Russian Black Sea city of Sochi, a Russian regional governor said on Tuesday morning.

Debris from a destroyed drone hit a car the man was driving in the Adler district of Sochi, Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev said on his Telegram channel.

In addition, six residential houses were damaged, Mr Kondratyev said.

The full-scale of the attack was not immediately known.

The Russian defence ministry said its air defence units destroyed two drones over the Krasnodar region, but the ministry reports only how many drones its forces destroy, not how many Ukraine launches.

Overall, Russian defence systems destroyed 31 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 15 over the Black Sea, the ministry said on Telegram.

Four Ukrainian soldiers have been rescued from a hospital deep inside Russian territory after remaining hidden for three years, the commander of the Ukrainian Navy said.

The troops were wounded in battle in 2022 and remained in hospital in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where “sympathetic doctors” helped to protect them from Russian secret services, commander Oleksii Neizhpapa said on Facebook.

A marine, three National Guards and a medical worker who had helped to hide the soldiers have all been evacuated.

“Our guys survived where it seemed there was no chance,” said Mr Neizhpapa, in a post announcing the rescue and giving details of how it was carried out.

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Russia is set to manufacture close to 2,500 high-precision missiles in 2025, according to a top Ukrainian intelligence official.

Major General Vadym Skibitskyi told Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform that the weapons span cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic classes.

“In addition, we are observing a significant growth in the output of unmanned aerial vehicles, primarily such as Geran, Garpiya, and FPV drones,” Skibitskyi added.

A Ukrainian troop who was wounded in the leg by an attack drone in eastern Ukraine has described his dramatic five-day escape back to safety.

Surovyi, a 40-year-old Ukrainian soldier, knew his flight to safety would be fraught with danger.

In the end, it meant five days of crawling through the scrub, hiding in ditches and covering himself with branches and earth to escape the gaze of Russian surveillance and attack drones buzzing in the air searching for targets.

“My leg went numb, I do not even know how to call this feeling, but I understood it was useless and I said to my comrade: let’s get out of here or we will get killed,” he recalled in an interview.

Surovyi, which means “strict”, is the soldier’s call sign, which is how troops identify themselves for security reasons.

He was speaking in a field hospital where he was taken by members of his brigade once they managed to rendezvous with him.

Russia’s latest attack which killed 20 people in the eastern Donetsk region was on a group of pensioners waiting for their pension, Kyiv has said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack on “ordinary civilians” was carried out “the very moment when pensions were being disbursed”.

Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, also wrote on X: “The bombs hit civilians right at the moment they were receiving their pensions. According to preliminary data, more than 20 people were killed.

“Russia has launched a cynical and brutal airstrike on the village of Yarova in the Donetsk region,” he added.

“This is yet another confirmation of the systemic terror against the civilian population of Ukraine, which requires a decisive response from the international community and the inevitable punishment of the perpetrators.”

US president Donald Trump said he is ready to move into a second phase of Russian sanctions after Moscow hit Ukraine with its largest air attack of the war.

On Sunday, Mr Trump signalled he may finally escalate sanctions on Moscow or its oil buyers, which he has so far delayed to pursue peace talks.

The European Union followed on Monday with confirmation it is coordinating new sanctions with the US, echoing US treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s comments that Washington would need “European partners to follow us” if they were to exert further economic pressure.

After repeatedly vowing to end the war within 24 hours, the US leader has grown increasingly frustrated with Putin as fighting continues to intensify.

Steffie Banatvala reports: