Russia says it fully controls Kherson region

KYIV• • The Kremlin yesterday said Russian armed forces had taken full control of Ukraine's southern region of Kherson, and that it was banning US President Joe Biden and 12 other top American officials from entering Russia.

"The armed forces of the Russian Federation have taken full control of all the territory of Kherson region," Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said. His assertion could not be independently verified.

Kherson was the first key urban centre to fall into Russian hands.

US defence officials have said Moscow could use it to move into Mykolaiv and Odessa, other strategic cities in the south.

Up north, in the capital Kyiv, strikes on residential areas killed at least two people yesterday. Witnesses heard at least three powerful explosions in the centre of the city early in the morning.

Two bodies were pulled from the rubble after a strike on a 16-storey building in the Sviatoshynsky district, emergency services said.

Another residential building in the Podilsk area also came under attack, causing a large blaze in the 10-storey block of flats, it said.

A private home was also hit in the Osokorky district.

Fighting has intensified around Kyiv in recent days, and the capital is now almost completely surrounded by Russian forces.

Russia's Foreign Ministry announced the travel ban on US top officials yesterday evening, putting Mr Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and others on a "stop list" of 13 individuals barred from Russia in response to sanctions imposed by the US on Russian officials.

The ministry said, however, that high-level contacts with the people on the list could still take place, if necessary.

Meanwhile, Britain's Defence Ministry said Moscow could be planning to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine.

"Such an operation could take the form of a faked attack (on Russian troops), a staged 'discovery' of agents or munitions or fabricated evidence of alleged Ukrainian planning to use such weapons," it said on Twitter yesterday, citing no evidence for its assertion.

US officials have made similar statements in recent days, following Moscow's accusations that Ukraine plans to use chemical and biological weapons in warfare.

The British Defence Ministry said it had seen no evidence of such plans.

Separately, US intelligence officials recently discovered decoy devices implanted in Russian ballistic missiles fired into Ukraine. The dart-shaped devices - about 30cm long and white with an orange tail - are designed to trick air-defence radar and evade heat-seeking missiles, one US intelligence official said, on condition of anonymity.

The decoys are released by the Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles that Russia is firing from mobile launchers across the border. Each one produces radio signals to jam or spoof enemy radar attempting to locate the Iskander-M, and contains a heat source to attract incoming missiles.

Experts say this may explain why Ukrainian air defence weapons have had difficulty intercepting Russia's Iskander missiles.

The incorporation of the devices into weapons like the Iskander-M that have conventional warheads has not been previously documented in military arsenals.

The use of these decoys in the conflict may point to some level of carelessness or urgency in the Russian military leadership, according to Professor Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Russia would be aware the devices would inevitably be collected and studied by Western intelligence services. "That suggests to me that... this war is important enough to them to give that up," he said.

REUTERS, NYTIMES, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE