Russia downs two drones over Moscow; Zelensky visits Athens to meet Balkan, EU leaders

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Athens on Monday for talks with leaders of Western Balkan nations and top European Union officials on the bloc’s enlargement process.

Zelensky earlier spoke in front of the parliament in Copenhagen and thanked the Danish people for their support for his nation’s defence against Russia’s invasion, including the 19 F-16 fighter jets pledged at the weekend. “Today we are confident that Russia will lose this war,” Zelensky said.

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Zelensky attended a dinner on Monday with leaders from Western Balkan countries and European Union chiefs to discuss the bloc’s enlargement process.

Greek Premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis hosted the informal dinner along with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel.

The discussions were part of a broader effort to keep those aspiring to join the EU close to the bloc, amid efforts by Moscow to wield its influence in the region and long-delayed membership processes — even as other nations like Ukraine inch forward. The meeting comes after European and Western Balkans leaders met to discuss enlargement in Tirana in June and will gather again in October in Granada, Spain.

The EU granted Ukraine and Moldova candidate status for EU membership last June, leapfrogging countries like Georgia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in their path to join the bloc.

Zelensky’s trip comes after two North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members said they would send fighter jets to Ukraine. Denmark pledged to send 19 F-16s to Kyiv and the Netherlands also said it would provide the jets.

Musk told Pentagon he spoke to Putin directly, says New Yorker

Elon Musk told Pentagon officials during a call about the satellite-based internet SpaceX supplies to Ukraine’s military that he’d spoken personally with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the New Yorker reported.

Musk made the comments during an October 2022 conversation with Colin Kahl, then the Pentagon’s top policy official, about Ukrainian forces losing connection to Space Exploration Technologies’ Starlink service as they entered territory contested by Russia, the magazine said on Monday.

“My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told the New Yorker.

Russia’s oil-product exports have fallen this month as local refining activity eased, at a time when some fuels exceeded Group of Seven price caps to potentially increase scrutiny on Western shipping service providers to move cargoes.

Shipments of Russia’s main products — including diesel, fuel oil and naphtha — dropped in the first 12 days of August, according to Vortexa data compiled by Bloomberg. Most of those have breached price thresholds imposed by the G7, complicating traders’ access to shipping logistics services and insurance.

Russia’s oil exports are being closely watched to estimate its crude production since Moscow stopped releasing official data. The nation’s seaborne oil flows slipped last month, suggesting Russia is adhering to pledged output cuts. Refined product flows had climbed in July with the winding down of spring maintenance, but are now starting to ease.

Oil-product exports totalled about 2.29 million barrels a day so far, the lowest daily average since October, according to the Vortexa data compiled by Bloomberg as of Friday. That’s 14% below July’s total, when volumes hit a three-month high.

The crash of Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft into the moon over the weekend isn’t just a setback for Putin’s ambitions to overcome war-related sanctions.

It’s also an embarrassment for Chinese President Xi Jinping — Putin’s partner in building a proposed base on the moon meant to challenge the US and its space allies.

The Russian spacecraft was aiming to be the first to land near the moon’s south pole, the intended location of a joint base that space agencies in China and Russia announced in 2021 they had agreed to build together.

Wu Yanhua, the chief designer of China’s major deep space exploration project, led a delegation to the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s far east to attend the launch and discuss deepening cooperation between the two countries’ space programmes, Chinese media reported earlier this month.

Now that the mission has ended in failure, Chinese media reports on the crash have been few and far between, with the official Xinhua news agency only carrying a terse five-sentence missive on Sunday.

Luna-25 was the first Russian spacecraft to attempt a moon landing since the end of the Soviet Union.

“We will have to learn everything again,” space historian Alexander Zheleznyakov told privately owned Russian media group RBC. “We must learn how to confidently fly to the moon, land confidently on its surface, and only after that proceed with the implementation of grandiose plans alone, either with China or with other countries.”

Russia’s space programme has stagnated because of corruption, mismanagement and sanctions, said Bruce McClintock, lead of the Rand Space Enterprise Initiative and a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation.

“For Russia, this is really bad,” he said. “This was their long-awaited, near-last chance to regain any credibility when it comes to outer space exploration.” DM