Ukraine-Russia war latest: Putin launches record drone attack on Kyiv as Briton captured fighting for Ukraine
Russian drones enter Kyiv from different directions in a multi-wave attack this morning
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Your support makes all the difference.Ukraine’s military says Russia fired a record number of attack drones overnight, with 76 out of the total of 188 being shot down by air defences.
Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko warned of drones approaching the Ukrainian capital in multiple waves this morning, as most of the country sounded air raid alerts.
The air force said it lost track of 96 of the drones, likely due to active electronic warfare, and five drones headed towards Belarus.
This comes as Russia’s military said it had captured British national James Scott Rhys Anderson, who was fighting for a Ukrainian foreign regiment in an occupied part of Russia’s Kursk region.
It represents one of the first known cases of a Western national being captured on Russian soil while fighting for Ukraine. The 22-year-old man’s father said he feared his son would be tortured, while the UK Foreign Office confirmed it was “supporting the family of a British man following reports of his detention”.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon said the US had seen no signs of North Korean troops inside Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine or that they are heading in that direction.
Former British soldier ‘fighting for Ukraine is captured by Russian forces’
A Russian charged with sending video of military equipment to Ukraine gets 14 years in prison
Joe Rogan accused of pushing Russian propaganda by Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko
Russian threats will not ‘dictate our decisions’ on Ukraine, minister tells Nato
A Russian charged with sending video of military equipment to Ukraine gets 14 years in prison
A Russian man was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison Monday after being found guilty of high treason for a video he sent to Ukraine’s security services, the latest in a series of espionage cases involving the conflict.
The Volgograd District Court said Nikita Zhuravel had been “in disagreement with the political course of the Russian Federation” and entered into correspondence with a representative from Ukraine’s security services online and carried out tasks for him. It did not give details on the tasks.
Zhuravel is already serving a 3 1/2-year sentence for burning a Quran in front of a mosque, which was handed down in February.
A Russian charged with sending video of military equipment to Ukraine gets 14 years in prison
A Russian man has been convicted of treason and sentenced to 14 years in prison after being found guilty of high treason for a video he sent to Ukraine’s security services
BREAKING: Ukraine downs 76 out of 188 Russian drones overnight
Ukraine’s military says it has shot down 76 out of total 188 Russian drones fired overnight. This is the highest number of attack drones Russia has fired at Ukraine in a single night.
The previous record came on 10 November, when Moscow launched a total of 145 drones overnight.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of ‘Shahed’ type attack UAVs and unmanned aerial vehicles of an unknown type,” the Ukrainian air force said on Telegram, adding they came from Orel, Bryansk, Kursk and Primorsko-Akhtarsk in Russia.
It said a total of 192 air targets, including four Iskander-M ballistic missiles, were fired at Ukraine overnight.
“Unfortunately, critical infrastructure objects have been hit, and private and multi-apartment buildings have been damaged in several regions due to a mass attack by UAVs,” the air force said.
Power and water cut off as Russia strikes grid at Ternopil
Russia’s overnight air attacks have damaged the power grid in Ternopil, a major city in western Ukraine, cutting off electricity and water and disrupting heat supplies, officials said this morning.
Emergency services were working to restore water supply by early morning, Serhiy Nadal, head of the Ternopil region defence council headquarters, said on his Telegram channel, but power disruptions are set to continue for hours.
Electric buses that service the city will be replaced with regular buses and generators will help with power shortages in schools, hospitals and government institutions, he said.
The official did not provide details on the extent of the damage in the city that had a population of nearly of a quarter of a million before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The full scale of the attack was also not immediately clear.
Ternopil, some 220km (134 miles) east of Nato-member Poland, and most of Ukraine were under overnight air raid alert for hours, according to Ukraine’s air force data.
White House confirms US cleared ATACMS for Ukraine
Senior US officials have confirmed Ukraine has received clearance from the Biden administration to launch long-range ATACMS missiles on targets in Russia.
The US has changed the guidance and allowed Kyiv to use them “to strike particular types of targets” around Kursk, said John Kirby, national security council coordinator for strategic communications at the White House.
“Right now, they are able to use ATACMS to defend themselves, you know, in an immediate-need basis. And right now, you know, understandably, that’s taking place in and around Kursk, in the Kursk Oblast. I’d let the Ukrainians speak to their use of ATACMS and their targeting procedures, and what they’re using them for and how well they’re doing,” he said, responding to a question from a reporter on the effectiveness of use of ATACMS by Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelensky has warned of a “severe escalation” of Moscow’s invasion, after Russia fired a new intermediate-range ballastic missile at Ukraine last week.
Initally, Ukraine suggested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) had been launched against the city of Dnipro, would be the first known use in the war of a weapon designed to avoid defences travel thousands of miles, with the potential to carry nuclear warheads.
The new missile was experimental, but not an ICBM and Russia likely possessed only a handful of them, US officials said.
My colleague Barney Davis has more details here:
What is an intercontinental ballistic missile and how many does Russia have?
While Russia has not used an ICBM on Ukraine yet, but Kyiv initially thought a new missile was the long-range weapon
UK spies ‘watching’ Russia amid cyberwarfare fears, minister to warn
British spies will seek to counter Russian cyberwarfare with a new laboratory for artificial intelligence, with a senior government minister warning that Russia will not “think twice” about targeting the UK.
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden will speak at the Nato cyber defence conference at Lancaster House on Monday night.
Vowing never to let Vladimir Putin deter the UK from supporting Ukraine, Mr McFadden will say the UK and its Nato allies are watching Moscow and combating its attacks both publicly and “behind the scenes”.
UK spies ‘watching’ Russia amid cyber warfare fears, minister to warn
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden will say the UK and its Nato allies are ‘watching’ Moscow and combating its attacks both publicly and ‘behind the scenes’
Russia says it downs 39 Ukrainian drones overnight
Russia’s air defence systems destroyed 39 Ukrainian drones overnight over seven regions, Russia’s defence ministry said this morning.
Of these, 24 drones were destroyed over the Rostov region in the southern part of Russia, the ministry said on its Telegram channel.
Russian troops approaching Kurakhove as they advance inside Ukraine
Russian forces have been advancing in Ukraine at their fastest pace since the early months of the war and have been exploiting vulnerabilities among Kyiv’s troops, analysts said yesterday.
“Russian forces recently have been advancing at a significantly quicker rate than they did in the entirety of 2023,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said.
The report noted recent confirmed Russian battlefield gains near Vuhledar and Velyka Novosilka, which are in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, and said Putin’s forces were moving into the strategic town of Kurakhove.
The Russian army captured almost 235sq km (91 square miles) in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, according to a report published by the independent Russian news group Agentstvo.
Agentstvo analysed data from Deep State, a group with close links to the Ukrainian army that studies combat footage and provides frontline maps.
“Russian forces’ advances in southeastern Ukraine are largely the result of the discovery and tactical exploitation of vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s lines,” analysts at the ISW said in their report.
Trump’s intelligence pick Tulsi Gabbard’s history with Russia is even more concerning than you think
In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies. Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.
“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.
It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.
“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”
Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.
In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.
My colleagues Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg have more analysis here:
Tulsi Gabbard’s history with Russia is even more concerning than you think
One expert says her views are ‘so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming’, Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg write
Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko slams Joe Rogan over Russian propaganda
Ukrainian boxing icon Wladimir Klitschko has slammed American podcast host Joe Rogan for promoting Russian propaganda.
“You talk about sending American weapons to Ukraine which you believe will lead to the Third World War. Putin’s Russia is in trouble, so Putin wants to scare you and people like you. His war was supposed to last three days. It lasted three years thanks to the heroism and sacrifice of Ukrainians,” the former heavyweight champion Klitschko said on X.
His remarks come after Rogan on Friday criticised president Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to strike Russia with US-supplied long-range missiles, which he claimed will start a Third World War.
Mr Klitschko has also dared Rogan to invite him on for a chat.
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