Ukraine war briefing: Cut-price Patriot among options in desperate search for missile defence | Ukraine

Vladimir Tkachuk, the head of Russian drone manufacturer Uraldronzavod, was critically injured in a car bombing, in what appeared to be the latest in a series of assassination attempts targeting figures linked to the country’s war in Ukraine, Pjotr Sauer writes. A bomb planted beneath his Mercedes exploded, according to Russian state media, killing his bodyguard. On Saturday an explosion outside an upmarket restaurant in central Moscow killed five people. Col Gen Aleksandr Chayko, the commander of Russia’s aerospace forces, was reportedly celebrating his birthday at the restaurant.

Ukrainian authorities have ordered hundreds of families with children to leave the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine because of intensifying Russian strikes. Russian forces are within 20km (12 miles) of the city’s eastern edge, according to DeepState, a war monitor close to the Ukrainian army. A total of 525 children and their guardians are being forcibly evacuated. Kramatorsk is part of the “fortress belt” that Ukraine’s troops are fighting to hold.

Russia’s Saratov refinery stopped processing crude oil on 2 August after ⁠a Ukrainian drone attack damaged production facilities and triggered fires at the plant owned by ⁠the country’s ⁠largest ​oil company Rosneft, two industry sources told Reuters. They said the refinery’s CDU-6 crude ‌distillation unit, its ‌only crude processing unit, was shut down. The unit, with a nominal capacity of 20,000 tonnes of oil per day, could take between two and three weeks to repair. Russia’s imports of gasoline and diesel from Belarus surged in July because of Ukrainian strikes disabling Russian oil refineries, according to calculations by Reuters.