Three people were killed and 15 injured in an explosion near a cafe in central Moscow, TASS reported on Saturday, citing an official.

“The Interior Ministry’s Moscow branch is working at the site of the incident. According to available information, an explosion occurred near a summer cafe at about 08:10 p.m. (05:10 p.m. GMT) today, as a result of which three people were killed and 15 were injured in various degrees of severity,” the official told the agency.

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Russian forces have taken control of two more villages across two Ukrainian regions, the Interfax news agency reported on Saturday.

The villages are Olgivka in the northern Kharkiv region and Lyubytske in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.

The Independent could not independently confirm the battlefield reports.

Sofia is an 11-year-old Ukrainian girl with scars on her face and light brown hair in a ponytail. She recalls vividly what happened when Russian troops entered her village.

“They took the 16-year-old girls to their place,” she recounts tearfully. “When the girls came back, their clothes were torn. Everything was torn. The Russians behaved badly with those girls.

“Everyone was panicking. We didn’t know what to do, where to go. The Russians came to my house. They checked my toys, my hairpins, and my clothes… They threatened my parents. They had weapons. If you say anything, they might kill you.”

The alleged sexual assaults of young girls are one of the shocking accounts in an extraordinary new documentary called Can I Go Home Now? about the experiences of Ukrainian children during the five-year-long Russian invasion. Viewed by The Independent on an exclusive basis, the film contains interviews with Ukrainian boys and girls; no adult voices are present.

Produced and directed by Pritan Ambroase, a 35-year-old philanthropist and owner of the Hollywood Insider, the film was made with help from humanitarian charities who gave access to 500 children.

US president Donald Trump said he was “not sure” he ⁠would let Ukraine build Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles.

“It’s a very extraordinary weapon, and we have to be a little bit careful ‌of who ​we licence ‌to,” the ⁠president said in ⁠his comments to FT yesterday. This comes weeks after offering to share the license of the coveted air defence systems with the war-hit nation.

On 10 July at the Nato summit in Ankara, Turkey, Trump said: “We’ll give them the right to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it,” Trump said. “I think they can produce them pretty quickly.”

Ukraine has been requesting the US for Patriot missiles to shoot down incoming Russian missiles, drones and bombs.

The Ukrainian military has claimed Russia lost more troops in July than any other month so far this year, with 42,860 either wounded or killed.

In a post on Facebook, Kyiv’s General Staff listed Moscow’s troop casualties as follows:

• • January: 31,710
• • February: 26,090
• • March: 31,960
• • April: 32,980
• • May: 33,760
• • June: 39,290
• • July: 42,860 (record number for 2026)

Russia’s total personnel losses over the first seven months of the year totals at 238,650, the General Staff said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Saturday that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant had lost off-site power for the 23rd time since the military conflict began.

The cause of the latest off-site power loss, which lasted nearly two hours, is not yet known, the IAEA said.

Ukraine hit the infrastructure of three Russian oil refineries in the Bashkortostan region, nearly 1,600 kilometres from the border, president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

Mr Zelensky said on the Telegram app that his troops also sank a sanctioned Russian container ship, Yanina, sailing under the Russian flag and with a capacity of more than 100,000 tons, and hit other targets in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

“Our targets are consistently defined facilities that sustain the war effort,” Mr Zelensky said.

Lithuania’s embassy in Kyiv was damaged on Saturday after two Russian missiles struck nearby, the Lithuanian foreign ministry said.

No injuries were reported, but the blasts shattered the embassy’s windows, damaged solar panels and scattered debris across the grounds, a ministry spokesperson said, according to TRT World.

Russia’s defence ministry has claimed that its overnight missile strikes targeted Ukraine’s military-industrial infrastructure rather than civilian sites.

Without evidence, it claimed that it hit radio-electronics factories in Kyiv that it claims manufacture components for Ukrainian missiles and drones.

It claimed to have struck a facility allegedly producing electronic warfare (EW) equipment, including systems designed to jam the guidance of precision weapons.

Also, “two dry cargo ships were struck yesterday while transiting the sea south of Odessa; they were delivering military cargo to one of Ukraine’s ports,” the military said.

However, Ukrainian officials reported damage to residential neighbourhoods. Images from the capital showed a residential complex engulfed in flames as emergency crews responded to the strikes.