President Volodymyr Zelensky said he will meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, but said both leaders are ready to fly to Istanbul if Russian President Vladimir Putin chooses to attend the talks there.
U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg, will travel to Istanbul for possible peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, Reuters reported on May 13, citing three undisclosed sources.
A captive named Umit allegedly agreed to serve in the Russian army in exchange for Russian citizenship and a monetary reward of 2 million rubles ($25,000).
Russia's Buryatia Republic declared a state of emergency on May 13 over massive forest fires that have engulfed multiple regions in the Russian Far East.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko's statement came as Strong Shield 5 exercises involving military personnel from other NATO countries began in Lithuania.
"Amendments to the Budget Code are needed to implement the provisions on funding the U.S.-Ukrainian Reconstruction Investment Fund," lawmaker Roksolana Pidlasa said.
During reconnaissance in an unspecified front-line sector, Special Operations Forces' operators detected Buk-M3 and Uragan-1 on combat duty, the unit said.
The suspect quit his job at the Rivne NPP before the full-scale war began. In the spring of 2025, a GRU liaison contacted him and offered cooperation in exchange for money.
A view of the Russian Central Bank headquarters in downtown Moscow on May 26, 2022. (Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP via Getty Images)
Ukraine's military intelligence agency (HUR) on July 29 carried out a cyberattack against the Russian central bank, a source in the agency told the Kyiv Independent.
This appears to be only the most recent step in an ongoing cyber campaign, which began on July 23 and affected several top Russian banks, including Gazprombank, VTB, Raiffeisen Bank, and Alfa Bank.
The central bank's services have become unavailable or began experiencing significant interruptions at around 11 a.m. local time, the source said.
This corresponds to an article in the Russian business news outlet Frank Media, which said that users began encountering issues with the bank's website around the same time. Several sources confirmed for the outlet that a DDoS attack against the institution was underway.
Russian users also cannot access the online services of Gazprombank and Bank Zenit, a situation further complicated by cyberattacks against Russia's telecommunications providers, the source noted.
"Broker applications, ATMs, Russian social media networks, messengers, Internet providers, and payment systems were also attacked," according to the source.
The central bank's website remains inaccessible from abroad. According to Frank Media, accessing the site from Russia is possible only intermittently.
The bank said on July 27 it would carry out scheduled maintenance of the site, but the work was not expected to last more than one day.
Martin Fornusek is a news editor at the Kyiv Independent. He has previously worked as a news content editor at the media company Newsmatics and is a contributor to Euromaidan Press. He was also volunteering as an editor and translator at the Czech-language version of Ukraïner. Martin studied at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, holding a bachelor's degree in security studies and history and a master's degree in conflict and democracy studies.
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