Russian forces have struck Ukraine’s southern Black Sea port of Odesa, damaging port facilities and a ship, the region’s governor says.

The attack late on Monday followed another at the weekend when Moscow carried out a sustained barrage of drones and missile attacks on the wider area around Odesa, which is home to ports crucial to Ukraine’s overseas trade and fuel imports. They followed Russian threats to cut “Ukraine off from the sea”.

The escalation in Russia’s assault on Odesa, Ukraine’s biggest port city, has unfolded as Washington steps up diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the war. Ukrainian officials met members of a US delegation on Friday in Florida while US envoys held talks with Russian representatives on Saturday.

“The situation in the Odesa region is harsh due to Russian strikes on port infrastructure and logistics,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv on Monday. “Russia is once again trying to restrict Ukraine’s access to the sea and block our coastal regions.”

What happened in the latest Russian attack on Odesa?

On Tuesday, the head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration, Oleh Kiper, said Russian strikes overnight had damaged a civilian cargo vessel and a warehouse in a district of Odesa while the roof of a two-storey residential building had caught fire.

Meanwhile, strikes on Saturday on the port of Pivdennyi near Odesa damaged storage reservoirs, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said. Those came just one day after a ballistic missile strike, also in Pivdennyi, had killed eight people and wounded at least 30.

These are just the latest strikes in an escalation of hostilities in the area over the past few weeks.

Last week, Russia launched one of its largest aerial assaults of the war on the Black Sea region, damaging energy infrastructure and causing a power outage in Odesa, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without electricity for several days.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence did not immediately comment on the strikes, but the Kremlin has previously described Ukraine’s economic infrastructure as a “legitimate military objective” during the nearly four-year war.

On the Telegram messaging app, Kuleba said on Friday that Russian forces were targeting power infrastructure and a bridge over the Dniester River near the village of Mayaky, southwest of Pivdennyi, which was struck five times in 24 hours.

That bridge links parts of the region separated by waterways and serves as the primary westbound route to border crossings with Moldova. It is currently out of operation. Kuleba said the route normally carries about 40 percent of Ukraine’s fuel supplies.

Why is Russia targeting Odesa?

“The focus of the war may have shifted towards Odesa,” Kuleba said, warning that the “crazy” attacks could intensify as Russia tries to weaken Ukraine’s economy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously said Moscow wants to restrict Ukraine’s Black Sea access in retaliation for Kyiv’s recent drone attacks on Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet” of vessels, which carry a variety of commodities.

Ukraine said those vessels are used to illegally export sanctioned oil, which provides Russia with its main source of revenue for financing its full-scale invasion of its neighbour.

How important is the port of Odesa to Ukraine?

Odesa’s port has long been central to Ukraine’s economy. Called a “pearl by the sea”, Odesa is Ukraine’s third most populous city after Kyiv and Kharkiv.

Black Sea ports – including Odesa and two others close by, Pivdennyi and Chornomorsk – and Mykolaiv to the east handled more than 70 percent of Ukraine’s exports before the war.

But Odesa’s role as a trading hub has grown in recent years as ports in the Zaporizhia, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions have been occupied by Russia.

Since the war began in February 2022, Ukraine has continued to rank among the world’s top five exporters of wheat and corn – largely through Odesa.

By targeting Odesa’s shipping facilities with missiles and drones, Ukrainian officials said, Putin aims to destroy Ukrainian trade and business infrastructure.

Zelenskyy, who has previously accused Russia of “sowing chaos” on the people of Odesa, said: “Everyone must see that without pressure on Russia, they have no intention of genuinely ending their aggression.”

What would it mean for Ukraine if Odesa were destroyed?

If the port of Odesa were badly damaged, the economic impact for Ukraine would be severe. The city and its surrounding areas would suffer major job losses in the shipping and logistics industries, seriously squeezing local incomes. Meanwhile, port-dependent businesses would falter and investment would fall away.

Nationally, Ukraine’s export capacity would be hit hard. As a key gateway for grain and other commodities, disruptions there would raise transport costs, slow shipments and reduce export volumes, choking foreign currency earnings and piling pressure on the hryvnia, Ukraine’s currency.

Elsewhere, farmers would suffer from lower prices for their produce as well as storage bottlenecks with knock-on effects across rural economies. The government would also lose customs revenue just as reconstruction costs would rise, weakening the country’s overall economic resilience.

What other acts of maritime warfare have Ukraine and Russia engaged in during the war?

Over the past six months, maritime warfare between Ukraine and Russia has intensified. Both sides have targeted naval and commercial assets across the Black Sea and beyond.

Ukrainian forces have increasingly used underwater drones and unmanned surface vessels to strike ships tied to Russia’s shadow fleet.

Several shadow fleet tankers, including the Kairos and Virat, were hit by Ukrainian naval drones in the Black Sea near Turkish waters in late November.

Kyiv has expanded its reach elsewhere, claiming drone strikes in the Mediterranean on December 19 on the Qendil, a Russian-linked tanker, marking an expansion in Kyiv’s maritime operations.

At the same time, Russian forces have ramped up attacks on commercial targets, including a Turkish-flagged ship carrying trucks and other freight near Odesa with drone attacks on December 13.

These actions reflect a shift towards what is referred to as “asymmetric naval warfare”, in which drones and improvised systems play a growing role in disrupting each side’s economic and military support networks at sea, experts said.

Israel’s parliament has extended an order allowing the government to shut down foreign broadcasters operating in the country.

The legislation, passed by 22 votes to 10, expands temporary powers introduced during the Gaza war to shutter outlets seen as a threat to national security.

It allows the government for the next two years to cease operations of a foreign outlet even in peace time and without the need for a court order.

Originally dubbed the “Al Jazeera Law”, the powers were used to shut down the Qatari-owned channel’s offices and block its broadcasts in May 2024.

Israel accused Al Jazeera – which has been a strong critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza – of anti-Israel bias and of supporting Hamas in its coverage.

Al Jazeera denied the accusations and condemned Israel’s actions, calling it a “criminal act” and an attack on press freedom.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said last year that the temporary order violated “freedom of expression, the right to information and freedom of the press, and blocks citizens and residents from receiving a variety of information that does not fit the Israeli narrative or is not broadcast on Israeli media channels”.

The legislation extending the order was passed hours after the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to shut down Army Radio, or Galei Tzahal (GLZ), a state-funded station that is operated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but is editorially independent.

Under the plan proposed by Defence Minister Israel Katz, the station will cease operations by 1 March 2026.

Katz argued that Army Radio, which employs both active duty soldiers and civilians, “no longer serves as a mouthpiece and ear for soldiers and broadcasts political and divisive content that is not in line with IDF values”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the cabinet meeting that a station broadcasting under the authority of the military was highly unusual.

“I think it exists in North Korea and maybe a few other countries, and we probably don’t want to be counted among them,” he said.

The Union of Journalists and Journalists’ Organisations said they would petition the High Court of Justice against the decision, calling it “a severe and unlawful infringement on freedom of expression and freedom of the press”.

The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) think tank said shutting Army Radio constituted a serious violation of freedom of expression and effectively wiped out half of Israel’s independent public radio news broadcasts.

“The decision to shut down a public media organisation is not an isolated move. It is part of a broader and worrying pattern of ongoing harm to Israeli democracy,” it warned.

Clashes between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, did not come in a vacuum.

Tensions between the two sides have been high as an end-of-year deadline to incorporate the SDF into the Syrian armed forces approaches.

The fighting erupted on Monday afternoon during a visit by Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan but had ended by that evening after the two sides agreed to halt firing.

Analysts told Al Jazeera that the SDF, led by military leader Mazloum Abdi (also known as Mazloum Kobani) and the Syrian government, have seemingly reached an impasse on how to integrate the Kurdish fighters into the new state military structure and that a failure to find a serious deal could lead to renewed bouts of fighting or military confrontation between the two sides.

“The red lines of the [Kurdish] self-administration on one hand, and Turkiye/Damascus on the other, do present some striking incompatibility, and I do not see a way that the two can be reconciled,” Thomas McGee, the Max Weber Fellow specialising on Syria at the European University Institute in Florence, told Al Jazeera.

Negotiations

On March 10, the new Syrian government in Damascus, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, and the SDF signed a historic agreement that planned to integrate the latter group into Syria’s new armed forces by the end of 2025.

The SDF is largely made up of members of the People’s Defense Units (YPG), the military wing of the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK is labelled a “terrorist” organisation by the United States, the European Union and Turkiye.

The agreement was seen as a means of avoiding a potentially explosive confrontation between Damascus and the US-trained SDF. However, 10 months on, while the agreement has helped the two sides avoid clashes, little progress has been made.

”For there to be any progress on implementing this point, one side would have to give way … as such, the status quo prevails,” McGee added.

A point of contention seems to be between the SDF’s preferred position of incorporating their existing battalions into the Syrian armed forces with a degree of autonomy, versus Damascus’s preferred position of the individual integration of SDF fighters.

Analysts told Al Jazeera that these two positions were likely untenable and that an agreement didn’t seem imminent.

Turkiye has backed Damascus and even threatened unilateral military intervention should an agreement not be reached.

“We just hope that things go through dialogue, negotiations and peacefully. We don’t want to see any need to resort to military means again. But SDF should understand the patience of the relevant actors is running out,” Turkish Foreign Minister Fidan told Turkish state media.

After a decades-long armed rebellion by the PKK, Turkiye has reached a deal with the group to disarm and lay down its weapons. Despite Fidan’s strong words, analysts said it is unlikely it would want to undermine those talks by militarily confronting the SDF.

Kurdish self-administration

On December 8, the more than five-decade rule of the Assad regime ended, allowing millions of Syrians to return to their country amid hopes for a better future. This was particularly true in areas controlled by the SDF during Syria’s civil war; under Bashar al-Assad, Kurdish rights were restricted and many Kurds said they were treated as second-class citizens.

But during Syria’s revolution and the subsequent almost 14 years of civil war, the SDF controlled areas in the northeast – at times by force and against the will of Arab inhabitants – and was able to build a level of autonomy. Analysts said the group is hesitant to relinquish that power.

“In terms of Kurdish self-defence and ability of Kurds to make own decisions, they think they’ve now achieved something which they’ve never had before, and don’t want to give it up,” Robin Yassin-Kassab, a Syrian writer and co-author of the book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, told Al Jazeera.

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said on Monday that the SDF ”showed no willingness” to integrate into the country’s central administration in Damascus.

Yet analysts say there is a deep mistrust between Damascus and the SDF and that the government could have taken some steps to build confidence.

“The government has failed to take advantage of certain opportunities to show good faith in implementing the agreement from its side,” McGee said.

He added that the government could have taken steps such as recognising Newroz as a national holiday or acknowledging the rife Kurdish statelessness that occurred under the Assad regime.

“Also, during my recent visit to Hasakah, many locals were commenting on the fact that services [such as civil documentation] that had been available to them through the Security Squares of Qamishli and Hasakah under the Assad regime are no longer in place since December last year,” McGee said.

Little progress

Syria’s new administration has gained substantial international and regional backing, and that could have built its confidence in its dealings with the SDF.

The US, in particular, has grown closer to Damascus in recent months, with al-Sharaa making a historic visit to the White House and seemingly winning the approval of US President Donald Trump.

The US also trained and armed the SDF in its fight against ISIL (ISIS). But Trump’s special envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, has said the US supports the SDF integrating into the Syrian state and that it would not like to see the SDF breaking away to form an autonomous entity or even a semi-autonomous region like Iraqi Kurdistan. Barrack also praised the ”reasonable options” presented by the government to the SDF.

“The US want the SDF to integrate into the new Syrian transitional government but don’t want the SDF – Damascus to descend into conflict because it will create more opportunities for ISIL to pop up in vacuums,” Wladimir van Wilgenburg, an analyst of Kurdish politics based in Erbil, told Al Jazeera.

On Friday, Reuters news agency reported that Damascus “expressed openness to the SDF reorganising its roughly 50,000 fighters into three main divisions and smaller brigades as long as it cedes some chains of command and opens its territory to other Syrian army units”.

However, officials also told Reuters a deal didn’t appear to be imminent and more talks were needed.

Still, analysts said the March 10 deal signed by al-Sharaa and Abdi in Damascus did have a positive impact in limiting clashes.

“It is notable that there has been extremely little direct conflict between the Syrian government and self -administration since the signing of the agreement, indicating that at least the provision relating to the ‘ceasefire’ has broadly held,” McGee said. “Other provisions have clearly, however, seen little progress.”

It’s still unclear how Monday’s clashes may affect the deal, and analysts say the prospect of SDF fighters integrating into government forces before the end of 2025 is unlikely.

“The deadline is approaching fast but some officials say it’s more important to implement the agreement than focus on the deadline, so there could be an extension,” van Wilgenburg said.