[caption id="attachment_34326" align="alignnone" width="620"] File photograph of Vitaliy Shabunin, a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist, after he was arrested and charged on 11 July with fraud and evading military service. Photograph: Ukrinform/Shutterstock[/caption]

By Theguardian. Media: Theguardian

Ukrainian security services arrested officials from the country’s main anti-corruption agency, the NABU, on Monday and conducted dozens of searches in a crackdown that the agency said went too far and had effectively shut down its entire mission. The SBU said it had arrested one of the officials as a suspected Russian spy and others for alleged ties to a banned party. But NABU, which has embarrassed senior government officials with corruption allegations, said the “vast majority” of cases involved unrelated allegations such as years-old traffic accidents. Anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International said the searches conducted without court orders showed that authorities were exerting “massive pressure” on Ukraine’s corruption fighters. Ambassadors of G7 nations in Kyiv issued a statement saying they had “serious concerns and intend to discuss these developments with government leaders”. Anti-corruption campaigners have been alarmed since Vitaliy Shabunin, a top anti-corruption activist, was charged earlier this month with fraud and evading military service. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office denies that prosecutions in Ukraine are politically motivated. Russia and Ukraine will hold new peace talks on Wednesday in Istanbul, said Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president. It is a follow-up to two earlier rounds that made little progress on ending their war. Zelenskyy has offered to hold direct talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Russia has broadcast footage from inside a plant assembling the deadly attack drones it fires at civilian targets in Ukraine on a daily basis. The video was published on Sunday by Zvezda, a TV channel owned by the Russian defence ministry, showing workers with their faces blurred assembling jet-black triangle-shaped attack drones. “This is the world’s largest factory producing unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and the most secretive one,” said plant director Timur Shagivaleev, who has been sanctioned by the US. The plant is near the town of Yelabuga in the central Russian region of Tatarstan. Russia’s Geran drones are based on Iranian Shahed drones. The French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, arrived in Kyiv on Monday for a surprise visit while rescuers were still sifting through the rubble from a massive drone and missile barrage against the Ukrainian capital. Six districts of Kyiv came under attack on Monday, sparking fires at a supermarket, multiple residential buildings and a nursery, authorities said. The entrance to a metro station where civilians were sheltering from the barrage was damaged. “This inhumane, cynical and cruel violence has no military purpose,” Barrot said. Barrot visited the Chornobyl power plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident. In February, Ukraine accused Russia of using an explosive drone to damage the confinement arch protecting the structure – prompting France to pledge €10m to help fix it. Barrot said Russia “targets energy infrastructure in defiance of international law, security and nuclear safety”.