The Guardian reports:

Ukraine’s top security official has confirmed that Iranian military advisers have been killed in Crimea, and warned that any other Iranians on occupied Ukrainian territory in support of Moscow’s invasion would also be targeted.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, said Iranians were present in Crimea to help Russia pilot the Shahed-136 armed drones supplied by the Tehran government, but did not say how many Ukraine had killed.

Reports in the Israeli press in October said that 10 were killed because of Ukrainian military strikes in occupied Crimea. Danilov made it clear that any further Iranian military presence would be targeted.

“You shouldn’t be where you shouldn’t be,” Danilov said, in an interview in Kyiv. “They were on our territory. We didn’t invite them here, and if they collaborate with terrorists and participate in the destruction of our nation we must kill them.”

Wave after wave of Russian air attacks, including drone and missile strikes, have since October targeted Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure, plunging it into blackouts as the winter cold has begun to fall across the country. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, told a meeting UN security council late on Wednesday that the attacks “an obvious crime against humanity” and said Kyiv would put forward a resolution condemning “any forms of energy terror”. [Continue reading…]