"The Russian captain's legs were blown off and he died of blood loss," a Ukrainian security official told the AFP news agency about the assassination.

A Russian Black Sea fleet commander has been killed in a car bomb explosion in Crimea, it has been reported. Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of the occupied peninsula, said that a military officer was in a car that exploded in the street in the city of Sevastopol on Wednesday morning.

Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital Kyiv with a sophisticated combination of missiles and drones for the first time in 73 days on Wednesday, authorities said, as the Pentagon said most of the North Korean troops sent to help Moscow’s war effort are fighting to drive Ukraine’s army off Russian soil in the Kursk border region.