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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says it is clear King Charles has a great affection for Australia, confirming he has invited the monarch to visit.

Mr Albanese described the private audience he had with the King at Buckingham Palace, on Tuesday local time, as "very warm".

"I appreciated the discussion that we had and that King Charles has a great love for and affection for Australia," Mr Albanese told reporters while visiting Barrow-in-Furness in northern England on Wednesday.

"It comes from his time as a student there but also his many visits to Australia."

The prime minister's comments come as a YouGov poll, published in The Australian, shows more than 50 per cent of his constituents have a positive view of the monarch.

But King Charles' approval rating among Australians in the May survey has improved from the 43 per cent who had a positive opinion of the royal in April 2021.

Prince William and his wife Kate remain the most popular royals, while Queen Camilla is among the least popular.

Mr Albanese, a republican, said he was looking forward to being at the monarch's coronation ceremony on Saturday and the King was "very familiar with the range of issues that Australia is facing".

The prime minister said he had extended an invitation to visit Australia during the meeting.

"I can confirm that I once again reiterated that King Charles and Queen Camilla would be very welcome visitors to Australia as would any other member of the royal family."

The YouGov poll revealed 43 per cent of the Australians surveyed had no interest in the coronation, while the remainder said they had at least a little interest.

Older people were more likely to be interested in the coronation, while support was lowest amongst generation Z.

Mr Albanese is among a contingent of Australians invited to the coronation along with Governor-General David Hurley and state governors.

The Australian delegation includes Matildas captain and football star Sam Kerr, singer Nick Cave, Aboriginal artist Jasmine Coe, comedian Adam Hills and London-based nurse Emily Regan.

In honour of the coronation, the Australian government will contribute $10,000 to the West Australian conservation charity Friends of the Western Ground Parrot.

Mr Albanese said King Charles long championed conservation and the government was pleased to mark the event by helping to protect the critically endangered bird.

The King, who is the monarch of 14 overseas realms including Australia, will host a lunch for prime ministers and governors-general at Buckingham Palace and also attend a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on Friday, the day before his crowning.

On Sunday, Australia's Federation Guard will fire a national 21-gun salute from the Parliament House Forecourt, followed by a Royal Australian Air Force flypast.

© AAP 2023

Russia has accused Ukraine of a failed attempt to assassinate President Vladimir Putin in a drone attack on the Kremlin citadel in Moscow.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zekenskiy said his country had nothing to do with the reported incident.

"We don't attack Putin, or Moscow, we fight on our territory," Zelenskiy told a press conference during a visit to Finland, alluding to Russian forces that swept into Ukraine last year.

A senior aide to Zelenskiy called the accusation a sign that the Kremlin was planning a major new attack on Ukraine.

Shortly after the Kremlin announcement, Ukraine reported alerts for air strikes over the capital Kyiv and other cities.

Russia said that two unmanned aerial vehicles were aimed at the Kremlin.

"As a result of timely actions taken by the military and special services with the use of radar warfare systems, the devices were put out of action," a Kremlin statement said.

"We regard these actions as a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the president's life, carried out on the eve of Victory Day, the May 9 Parade, at which the presence of foreign guests is also planned."

Fragments of drones were scattered in the Kremlin grounds but there were no injuries or damage, it said.

Putin himself was safe.

The RIA news agency said he had not been in the Kremlin at the time, and was working on Wednesday at his Novo Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow.

"The Russian side reserves the right to take retaliatory measures where and when it sees fit," the Kremlin added.

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of Russia's Security Council, said the incident "leaves us no option but to physically eliminate Zelenskiy and his clique".

Two of numerous videos published on Russian social media channels show two objects flying on the same trajectory toward one of the highest points in the Kremlin complex, the dome of the Senate.

The first seemed to be destroyed with little more than a puff of smoke, the second appeared to leave blazing wreckage on the dome.

Reuters could not independently verify the videos.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the drone accusation, along with an announcement that Russia had caught suspected saboteurs in Ukraine's Russian-occupied Crimea region, "clearly indicates the preparation of a large scale terrorist provocation by Russia in the coming days".

Elsewhere, oil depots were ablaze in both southern Russia and Ukraine, as both sides escalated a drone war ahead of Ukraine's promised spring counteroffensive against Russian forces.

Scores of firefighters battled a huge conflagration that Russian authorities also blamed on a Ukrainian drone crashing into an oil terminal on Russia's side of its bridge to Crimea.

A fuel depot in Ukraine was ablaze after a suspected Russian drone strike on the central city of Kropyvnytskyi.

An administrative building in Ukraine's southern Dnipropetrovsk region was also hit by a drone and set ablaze.

Ukraine said it had shot down 21 of 26 Iranian-made drones in an overnight volley, shielding targets in Kyiv where air raid sirens blared for hours through the night.

Sixteen people were killed by Russian shelling in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, 12 of them in Kherson city, on Wednesday, the Ukrainian prosecutor's office said.

Russian forces have regularly shelled the city from parts of the region occupied by Russia.

Ukraine and Russia have both been carrying out long-range strikes since last week in apparent anticipation of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, which Zelenskiy said would begin soon.

Russia says it has struck military targets although it has produced no evidence to support this.

Ukraine, without confirming any role in incidents in Russia or Crimea, says destroying infrastructure is preparation for its planned ground assault.

© RAW 2023

Russia says the United States was behind what a drone attack on the Kremlin that aimed to kill President Vladimir Putin, while Moscow's forces fired more combat drones at Ukrainian cities including the capital Kyiv.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov, without providing evidence, on Thursday said Ukraine had acted on US orders with the alleged drone attack on the Kremlin citadel in the early hours of Wednesday.

Kyiv has denied involvement in that incident, which followed a string of explosions over the past week targeting freight trains and oil depots in western Russia and Russian-controlled Crimea. Moscow has blamed Ukraine for those attacks too.

"Attempts to disown this (attack on the Kremlin), both in Kyiv and in Washington, are, of course, absolutely ridiculous. We know very well that decisions about such actions, about such terrorist attacks, are made not in Kyiv but in Washington," Peskov told reporters.

The Kremlin has said it reserves the right to retaliate. Peskov said on Thursday an urgent investigation was under way and that any response would be carefully considered and balanced.

Separately, Russia's foreign ministry said the alleged drone attack "must not go unanswered" and that it showed Kyiv had no desire to end the 15-month old war at the negotiating table.

Earlier, Russia fired two dozen combat drones at Ukraine, hitting Kyiv for the third time in four days and also striking a university campus in the Black Sea city of Odesa, ahead of a major counteroffensive by Ukraine to recapture occupied land.

There were no reports of any casualties.

Kyiv's city administration said Russia had probably fired ballistic missiles as well as drones but that they had all been shot down.

Ballistic missiles are difficult to shoot down, and their downing could indicate Ukraine used sophisticated Western-supplied air defence systems against them.

In total, air defences shot down 18 of 24 "kamikaze" drones in the pre-dawn attack, officials said. Of 15 drones fired at Odesa, 12 were downed but three struck a university campus, the southern military command said.

Shelling in the Donetsk region damaged a power station owned by electricity company DTEK Energo, but no casualties were reported, DTEK and the Energy Ministry said.

The death toll from Russian shelling of Kherson and its environs in southern Ukraine on Wednesday rose to 23, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.

"The enemy's targets are the places where we live. Their targets are our lives, and the lives of our children," he said in an online video on Thursday, after a hypermarket, a railway station and residential buildings were hit.

Russia denies targeting civilians in Ukraine.

Russian emergency services quickly extinguished a fire at the Ilsky oil refinery, one of the largest in southern Russia, after a drone attack set product storage facilities ablaze, TASS news agency reported.

Ukraine rarely claims responsibility for what Moscow says are frequent drone strikes against infrastructure and military targets, particularly in regions close to Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the International Court of Justice (ICC) in The Hague on Thursday and said Putin must be brought to trial over the war.

The ICC in March issued an arrest warrant for Putin for suspected deportation of children from Ukraine.

"The aggressor must feel the full power of justice. This is our historical responsibility," Zelenskiy said in a speech.

Russia, which is not a member of the ICC and rejects its jurisdiction, denies committing atrocities during its "special military operation" in Ukraine, which it says is needed to protect its own security against a hostile, aggressive West.

Zelenskiy, whose country has received substantial Western military and financial support, has vowed to drive all invading Russian forces back to the borders established in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There are currently no peace talks to end the war, which has devastated Ukrainian towns and cities, killed thousands of people and driven millions from their homes.

The Kremlin on Thursday said it was aware that Pope Francis was thinking about ways to end the war, but that it did not know of any detailed peace plans from the Vatican.

© RAW 2023