Russia has intensified its strikes on the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa, causing widespread power cuts and threatening the region's maritime infrastructure. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Moscow was carrying out systematic attacks on the region. Last week, he warned that the focus of the war may have shifted towards Odesa. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the repeated attacks were an attempt by Moscow to block Ukraine's access to maritime logistics. Earlier in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to sever Ukraine's access to the sea as retaliation for drone attacks on tankers of Russia's shadow fleet in the Black Sea.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Taras, a seasoned Ukrainian serviceman recovering from a contusion, expects "no miracles" from United States President Donald Trump's August 15 summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. "There's going to be no miracles, no peace deal in a week, and Putin will try to make Trump believe that it is Ukraine that doesn't want peace," the fair-haired 32-year-old with a deep brown tan acquired in the trenches of eastern Ukraine, told Al Jazeera. Taras, who spent more than three years on the front line and said he had recently shot down an explosives-laden Russian drone barging at him in a field covered with explosion craters, withheld his last name in accordance with the wartime protocol. Putin wants to dupe Trump by pandering to the US president's self-image as a peacemaker to avoid further economic sanctions, while the Russian leader seeks a major military breakthrough in eastern Ukraine, Taras said. "Putin really believes that until this winter, he will seize something sizeable, or that [his troops] will break through the front line and will dictate terms to Ukraine," Taras said.

Kyiv, Ukraine – As luck would have it, emergency doctor Elina Dovzhenko was far enough from her vehicle when a Russian drone struck it, breaking the windshield and splattering pieces of shrapnel around. It was getting dark on July 9 in the bombed-out, nearly-abandoned city of Kupiansk which sits less than 5km (3 miles) from the front line in the northeastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv – and just 40km (25 miles) west of the Russian border. But there was definitely enough light left for the Russian drone operator on the front line's opposite side to see that Dovzhenko's vehicle was a white ambulance with red stripes parked near a shelling-damaged hospital where she and her colleagues were. "We heard the drone move, it swirled and swirled around [the building], then we heard the blast," Dovzhenko, 29, told Al Jazeera. She and her colleagues were shocked and angry – but not surprised.

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.

Kyiv, Ukraine – On Sunday, a top Russian security official in Moscow lauded dozens of servicemen who used an abandoned natural gas pipeline as a tunnel to infiltrate a Ukraine-occupied area in the western Russian region of Kursk. "The lid of a boiling cauldron is almost closed! Good job!" Dmitry Medvedev, who served as president and prime minister before becoming deputy head of Russia's Security Council, wrote on Telegram. But a Ukrainian serviceman deployed in Kursk offered a starkly different version of how the Russians barely got out of the pipeline on Saturday – only to be reportedly killed en masse. "Some suffocated right [in the pipeline], some turned back. About a hundred came out in our rear, split into two groups and were almost immediately ambushed by our special forces. And [also killed by] a massive squall of artillery," Evhen Sazonov wrote on Telegram.

Ukraine's state electricity operator has announced blackouts in the capital, Kyiv, and seven other regions of the country in the aftermath of Russia's devastating strikes on energy infrastructure. The move comes as Russian forces continue to pound Ukrainian cities and villages with missiles and drones, inflicting damage on power plants and water supplies, in a grinding war that is nearing its nine-month mark. Ukrenergo, the sole operator of Ukraine's high-voltage transmission lines, initially said in an online statement on Saturday that scheduled blackouts will take place in the capital and the greater Kyiv region, as well as several regions around it – Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Poltava and Kharkiv. Later in the day, however, the company released an update saying that scheduled outages for a specific number of hours are not enough and instead there will be emergency outages, which could last indefinitely. Ukraine has been grappling with power outages and disruption of water supplies since Russia started unleashing barrages of missile and drone attacks on the country's energy infrastructure last month.

The White House has accused Iran of being "directly engaged on the ground" in Russian-occupied Crimea, helping to train the country's forces on Iranian-made drones that have been used in attacks in Ukraine. US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday that a "relatively small number" of Iranian personnel are operating in the Ukrainian region that was annexed by Russia in 2014. "Tehran is now directly engaged on the ground and through the provision of weapons that are impacting civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine," Kirby said. "The United States is going to pursue all means to expose, deter and confront Iran's provision of these munitions against the Ukrainian people." Tehran has denied supplying Moscow with drones or helping launch them.