Ukraine said it carried out an overnight drone strike on the Kirovske airfield in Crimea and claimed that multiple Russian helicopters and an air defence system were destroyed in the strike. According to a Ukraine Security Service (SBU) statement, the drones targeted areas where Russian aviation units, air defence assets, ammunition depots and unmanned aerial vehicles were located. The agency claimed that Mi-8, Mi-26, and Mi-28 helicopters, as well as a Pantsir-S1 missile and gun system were destroyed. "Secondary detonations continued throughout the night at the airfield," the SBU said, calling the strike part of broader efforts to disrupt Russian aerial operations. "The enemy must understand that expensive military equipment and ammunition are not safe anywhere – not on the line of contact, not in Crimea, and not deep in the rear."

Russia is vowing Thursday to repair the warplanes damaged by Ukraine in a massive drone attack earlier this week, with an official claiming they were "not destroyed but damaged." The comments from Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov come after Ukraine said its forces destroyed 40 of Russia's most powerful bomber jets and surveillance planes in "Operation Spider's Web," a series of coordinated drone strikes Sunday penetrating deep into Russian territory. "As the defense ministry said, these aircraft were not destroyed but damaged. They will be repaired," Ryabkov was quoted telling Russia's state-run TASS news agency. However, satellite images of Russian airfields show extensive damage to the planes.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Finishing a cigarette with a final deep puff outside a hospital building in central Kyiv, a wounded Ukrainian drone operator sums up Russian President Vladimir Putin's readiness to end the Ukraine war along the current front lines. "Don't trust these leaks, the … vampire is just dragging the talks out," Arseny, a 31-year-old recovering from a cranial wound that left him blind in one eye, told Al Jazeera while standing near a blossoming apple tree. He referred to a Financial Times report on Tuesday that suggested that Putin could "relinquish" Moscow's claims on four partly-occupied Ukrainian regions. In September 2022, seven months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Moscow recognised the regions as part of Russia even though it did not fully control them – and began losing some occupied areas within weeks. In return for the Kremlin's concession, the US may recognise Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014, as part of Russia, and "acknowledge" the Kremlin's de facto control over the four regions' occupied parts, the Financial Times claimed, citing officials familiar with the talks.

Large language models excel at creative generation but continue to struggle with the issues of hallucination and bias. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides a framework for grounding LLMs' responses in accurate and up-to-date information, it still raises the question of bias: which sources should be selected for inclusion in the context? And how should their importance be weighted? In this paper, we study the challenge of cross-lingual RAG and present a dataset to investigate the robustness of existing systems at answering queries about geopolitical disputes, which exist at the intersection of linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries. Our dataset is sourced from Wikipedia pages containing information relevant to the given queries and we investigate the impact of including additional context, as well as the composition of this context in terms of language and source, on an LLM's response. Our results show that existing RAG systems continue to be challenged by cross-lingual use cases and suffer from a lack of consistency when they are provided with competing information in multiple languages. We present case studies to illustrate these issues and outline steps for future research to address these challenges. We make our dataset and code publicly available at https://github.com/manestay/bordIRlines.

One person has been killed and others wounded in a Ukrainian drone attack on a ferry at port in southern Russia, the regional governor has said. Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev said the ferry had caught fire at Port Kavkaz but there was no risk of it spreading. The port lies a few kilometres from the Kerch bridge, which enables road and rail travel between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. "Unfortunately there are injured and dead among the crew and port staff," Mr Kondratyev said. He added that emergency services were on the scene.

The Russian navy's Black Sea Fleet has been forced to rebase nearly all its combat-ready warships from occupied Crimea to other locations, and its main naval hub is becoming ineffectual because of attacks by Kyiv, Ukraine's navy chief said. Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa said Ukrainian missile and naval drone strikes had caused heavy damage to the Sevastopol base, a logistics hub for repairs, maintenance, training and ammunition storage among other important functions for Russia. "They were established over many decades, possibly centuries. And clearly they are now losing this hub," Neizhpapa told Reuters in a rare interview in the port city of Odesa ahead of Ukraine Navy Day on Sunday. More than 28 months since Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv has dealt a series of stinging blows to Moscow in the Black Sea although Ukrainian ground troops are on the back foot across a sprawling front.

At least 11 people were killed and dozens injured after Russia bombed a busy lakeside resort on the edge of Ukraine's second-largest city of Kharkiv and attacked villages in the surrounding area. At least 13 people were injured after the Ukrainian military shelled areas of Russia's southern Belgorod region, according to Belgorod's regional Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Russian attacks in the Kharkiv area "slowed down a bit" but that forces "continue their attempts to break through our defences near Vovchansk, Starytsya and Lyptsi". Russia's Ministry of Defence, which claimed earlier to have seized Starytsya, said its units "continued to advance into the depth of the enemy's defences". Officials said Russia shot down at least 103 Ukrainian drones, including 62 over Russian regions, as well as missiles that targeted Crimea, which Moscow seized and annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Fox News' Greg Palkot on the latest from the war in Ukraine as more weapons are sent from U.S. A massive Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea early Friday caused power cutoffs in the city of Sevastopol and set a refinery ablaze in southern Russia, Russian authorities said. The drone raids marked Kyiv's attempt to strike back during Moscow's offensive in northeastern Ukraine, which has added to the pressure on outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces who are waiting for delayed deliveries of crucial weapons and ammunition from Western partners. Ukraine has not commented on the attack or claimed responsibility for it. The Russian Defense Ministry said air defenses downed 51 Ukrainian drones over Crimea, another 44 over the Krasnodar region and six over the Belgorod region. It said Russian warplanes and patrol boats also destroyed six sea drones in the Black Sea.

In one of the biggest strikes on the Black Sea fleet, last September Ukraine attacked naval targets and port infrastructure, using as many as 10 missiles and three unmanned boats. It caused a large fire at a Sevastopol shipyard.

There was no confirmation from Russia's navy that the Caesar Kunikov had been sunk in the Black Sea, merely that six Ukrainian drones had been destroyed. Video appearing to show the aftermath of the Ukrainian attack was uploaded only recently, BBC Verify confirmed.