Ukraine war: Reuters journalist missing and civilians killed after fresh Russian strikes

A member of the Reuters news agency is missing and two others have been injured after a Russian missile struck a hotel overnight in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk.
Reuters said the missing person and those taken to hospital were part of a team of six working in the eastern Donetsk region. “One of our colleagues is unaccounted for, while another two have been taken to hospital for treatment,” the news agency said.
The other three had been accounted for, it added, and said it was seeking further information and would provide an update in due course. Ukrainian authorities said a search and rescue operation was taking place at the site.
Russia has been bombing hotels in frontline areas for more than a year. A double-tap missile strike on the Druzhba hotel in Pokrovsk, also in the Donetsk region, killed seven people last August. Eleven were injured in a bombing of a hotel in Kharkiv in January.
In the Sumy region, four civilians were reported to have been killed and 13 injured, local police said, on a day in which Russian attacks targeted 50 different sites. The Sumy region borders Russia’s Kursk province, where this month Ukrainian forces launched a surprise cross-border incursion, gaining more than 1,250sq km of territory.
Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk appears to have stalled, however, with fighting still said to be taking place around Korenevo, 24km inside the Russian border. Progress north and east of Sudzha, the principal settlement taken by Ukraine, has also been limited in the past week.
Russian officials said five people were killed by Ukrainian shelling in Rakitnoye in the Belgorod region, to the south of Kursk and to the east of the incursion area. The Russian regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said 13 more were injured.
Ukraine and Russia agreed to swap 115 prisoners of war on Saturday after Kyiv had seized hundreds during the Kursk incursion. However, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was criticised by Denys Prokopenko, the commander of the Azov brigade, for not negotiating the return of the estimated 900 fighters from the unit still held by Russia. “Precious opportunity and time have been lost,” he said.
Mr Zelenskiy, speaking at a joint news conference with the leaders of Poland and Lithuania, said the cross-border incursion had in part been a preventive move to stop Russia taking the city of Sumy. Other objectives included capturing Russian prisoners of war, creating a buffer zone, and some that he could not disclose publicly.
Mr Zelenskiy also promoted his top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, from the rank of colonel general to full general, in a reward for the success of the incursion, whose careful planning had the hallmarks of the chief of staff.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin held a meeting with the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. The Kremlin said they discussed “countering enemy forces invading the Kursk region and measures being taken to destroy them”.
The bellicose language was more marked than recent Russian statements, which have generally downplayed the significance of the incursion, describing the response as counter-terrorist. – Guardian