Further drone and missile strikes reported across Ukraine, US to reject ‘sham’ Russian elections in occupied territories, Elon Musk denies war interference claims

A separate missile attack on the city of Sumy in north-western Ukraine destroyed a two-storey residential building, injuring three people and damaging another 20 buildings.

Two senior citizens were pulled from the wreckage, the Ukrainian emergency services reported on Friday.

Russian forces also launched 20 drones at the Odesa region in the early hours of Friday, 16 of which were successfully downed, the Ukrainian Air Force said. This is the fifth drone strike on the Odesa region this week.

A missile strike on the city of Zaporizhzhia also injured one local.

Blinken: US will not recognise elections held in Ukraine’s occupied territories

The US will not recognise the “sham elections” that Russia is organising in the occupied regions of Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday.

“Russia’s sham elections in occupied areas of Ukraine are illegitimate and an affront to the UN Charter. The United States will never recognize Russia’s claims to any of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. We will support Ukraine for as long as it takes,” he tweeted.

Russia is conducting nationwide regional and local elections on 10 September, including in the four partially occupied regions of Ukraine that Moscow unilaterally announced it had absorbed into its territory in September last year.

Elon Musk denies he shut off internet around Crimea to prevent Ukrainian attack

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has denied claims he instructed staff to turn off Starlink’s internet services around the annexed Crimean peninsula in an attempt to thwart a surprise Ukrainian attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet last year.

The claims were made in a biography of Musk by written by Walter Isaacson that were subsequently reported by CNN. In his account, Isaacson wrote that Ukrainian underwater drones loaded with explosives “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly” as they approached their targets.

The author claims that Ukrainian officials asked Musk to switch the satellites back on, but that the SpaceX CEO feared Russia could opt for nuclear retaliation, a concern Isaacson attributes to Musk’s conversations with high-ranking Russian officials.

“It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes,” the SpaceX CEO said in an interview.

Responding to the claims, Musk said that Starlink had not been operational in the areas in question at time, stressing that “SpaceX did not deactivate anything”.