7 killed in occupied Ukraine

Seven people were killed yesterday in separate incidents in the eastern Ukrainian region of Lugansk under Russian control, Moscow-installed authorities announced.

Five civilians were killed when the bus they were travelling in hit a mine and two more were killed by alleged Ukrainian shelling, authorities said.

"There was a tragedy in the city of Kirovsk in the Lugansk People's Republic -- a bus travelling to a cemetery exploded on a mine," governor Leonid Pasechnik said.

"Five people were killed," he added in a comment on social media.

Another official said separately that Ukrainian forces had shelled the town of Kreminna around 70 kilometres (43 miles) further north, killing two civilians.

Most of Lugansk is controlled by Russian forces. It is one of four regions that Moscow claimed to have annexed in 2022, in votes not recognised by Kyiv or its allies.

Meanwhile, a Russian court sentenced a journalist to seven years in prison for criticising the Ukraine offensive in social media posts.

Roman Ivanov, 51, was found guilty of spreading "false information" about Russia's armed forces and punished under Moscow's strict military censorship laws.

Moscow has used laws against "discrediting" the armed forces or publishing "false information" to stamp out public criticism of its full-scale military offensive on Ukraine.

"Peace and freedom," Ivanov shouted as he left the courtroom after the sentence.

The Kremlin yesterday said it did not recognise the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants for two senior Russian officers over their actions in the Ukraine conflict.

The court accused lieutenant general Sergei Kobylash and navy admiral Viktor Sokolov of targeting Ukraine's power infrastructure with strikes between October 2022 and March 2023.

"We don't recognise this," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, he said.

"This is not the first decision, we also know that there are also various closed processes going on there, which are kept secret," he continued.

The court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin in March last year, a ruling that Moscow called "void". Russia levelled its own warrant against the ICC's president in response.