Ukraine-Russia war live: Anger in Moscow at Putin’s war spending as Russia closes in on key frontline city
Russian forces have reached Vuhledar which has resisted repeated Russian assaults since Moscow’s full-scale invasion
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Vladimir Putin’s plans to hike defence spending to the highest level on record have sparked outrage among some people in Russia as the war with Ukraine drags into the third year.
Russia is expected to allocate over 40 per cent of its total budget to defence and security, committing to prolonging the invasion of Ukraine and confronting the West.
Several in Russia objected to the spending which was more than the money allocated for education and social welfare sectors in the country.
It’s a “shame and a disgrace”, Irina, a 70-year-old pensioner said to AFP. She said the government is spending on war when the “country has no money to treat its own children”.
It comes as Russian forces have made frontline gains in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have reached the centre of Vuhledar in eastern Ukraine, a bastion on strategic high ground in the industrial Donbas region, according to Ukraine’s regional governor Vadym Filashkin.
Vuhledar has resisted repeated Russian assaults since Moscow’s full-scale invasion but now risks falling into Putin’s hands. Footage posted to social media showed Russian soldiers waving a flag from atop a bombed-out multi-storey building and unfurling another flag on a metal spire on a roof.
Watch: Russian fighter jet narrowly misses American aircraft off coast of Alaska
Putin’s plans to boost defence budget draw ire from some Russians
Vladimir Putin’s plans to boost its defence budget next year and prolong the war have drawn backlash from some quarters of the Russian public.
Russia is set to increase its spending on defence by 25 per cent next year, taking it to the highest level on record.
The newly proposed increase in spending will push Russia’s defence budget to a record 13.5 trillion rubles (£109bn) by 2025, according to draft budget documents released on Monday on the parliament’s website.
The spending on defence and security combined will account for 40 per cent of Russia’s total budget. Irina, a pensioner, called it an “outrage” and said “we need to end this war”, reported AFP. She said increasing spending on war is a “crime”.
Another pensioner called it a “shame and a disgrace” in a country that has no money to treat its own children.
Russia to conduct nationwide emergency public warning tests
Russia will run a nationwide test of its emergency public warning systems on Wednesday, letting sirens wail and interrupting television and radio broadcasts in a twice-yearly initiative amid the war in Ukraine.
At around 10.30am in most of Russia’s 11 time zones, sirens will sound for a minute, with loudspeakers broadcasting an “Attention everyone!” call, the emergency ministry said on the Telegram messaging app.
The exercise aims to check the warning systems, the readiness of those responsible for launching them and to raise public awareness, the ministry said, adding, “Don’t panic - everything is according to a plan.”
The frequency of rehearsals was doubled from last year, following the first event held in 2020.
It comes amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, which Moscow started in 2022, triggering the deepest crisis in its relations with the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
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Death toll rises to six in Ukrainian supermarket strike
At least six people were killed and three were injured in an alleged Russian artillery strike in a busy market in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson yesterday.
The attack came on the same morning Ukrainians across the country were observing a minute’s silence for their military and war dead.
The strike happened as shoppers made their way between stalls at the city centre market, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.
He published a video showing the blurred corpses of people in civilian clothes lying near a stall with tomatoes and other vegetables.
Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office said the strike was “most likely” carried out by Russian artillery and hit close to a public transport stop.
It initially reported that seven people were killed but later corrected that toll to six, saying a severely wounded person thought to be dead was in intensive care at a local hospital.
Zelensky confirms successful test of ballistic missile
Ukraine successfully tested its own ballistic missile and has exponentially ramped up domestic ammunition production, president Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Addressing Ukraine’s second international defence industry forum, Mr Zelensky said Ukraine produced 25 times more artillery and mortar ammunition so far this year than in the entire year of 2022.
“The total number of drones we are now capable of producing annually in Ukraine is 4 million, with more than 1.5 million already contracted,” he said.
Mr Zelensky also touched on the advancement of long-range weaponry, highlighting Ukraine’s Palianytsia missile-drone and domestically developed ballistic missile.
“Our new ballistic missile has successfully completed flight tests,” he announced.
He had initially revealed that Ukraine tested its own ballistic missile in late August, though specific details of the project remain undisclosed.
UK sanctions Russian cyber-crime gang tasked with attacking Nato
Britain said it sanctioned 16 members of the Russian cyber-crime gang Evil Corp, a group it said had been tasked by Russia to conduct operations against Nato allies.
Evil Corp was once believed to be the most significant cyber-crime threat in the world, Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said after taking coordinated action with officials in the United States and Australia.
“Today’s sanctions send a clear message to the Kremlin that we will not tolerate Russian cyber-attacks - whether from the state itself or from its cyber-criminal ecosystem,” foreign minister David Lammy said in a statement.
In 2019, the US indicted and sanctioned Evil Corp’s alleged leader, the Lamborghini-driving Maksim Yakubets, and put a $5m bounty out for information leading to his arrest.
In its latest disclosure, the NCA said the group had been tasked by Russian intelligence services to conduct cyber-attacks and espionage operations against Nato allies, although it gave no further details.
Yakubets, it said, had worked with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and military intelligence unit GRU.
Ukraine investigating alleged killing of 16 POWs by Russian army
Ukraine said it had launched an investigation into what it said was an apparent shooting of 16 Ukrainian prisoners of war by Russian soldiers.
The soldiers who were allegedly killed had surrendered on the eastern Ukrainian frontline.
“This is the largest reported case of the execution of Ukrainian POWs on the front line and yet another indication that the killing and torture of prisoners of war are not isolated incidents,” Ukraine’s prosecutor general Andriy Kostin said on X.
“This is a deliberate policy of the Russian military and political leadership.”
Moscow did not immediately comment on the accusations. The Kremlin denies that Russia commits war crimes in Ukraine.
The Ukraine prosecutor general office said on the Telegram messaging app that it was looking into a video shared on social media showing the alleged killing.
A video with grainy drone footage purported to show a group of more than ten people leaving a trench. They are lined up and then fall down after being fired upon by other, indistinct figures.
Mr Kostin said the incident took place on the Pokrovsk front, an area of intensified Russian assaults.
Russian troops reach centre of Ukraine's Vuhledar in the east, Ukrainian governor says
Russian troops have reached the centre of Vuhledar, a bastion on strategic high ground in eastern Ukraine that has resisted Russian assaults since Moscow’s full-scale invasion, the regional governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region said on Tuesday.
Vadym Filashkin, the governor, said the situation in Vuhledar was extremely difficult.
“The enemy is already nearly in the centre of the city,” Filashkin told Ukrainian TV.
Russian forces reached the outskirts of the small mining town last week and intensified their offensive push in recent days.
Moscow’s troops in eastern Ukraine advanced at their fastest rate in two years in August, according to multiple open-source maps. Their relentless advance in the Ukrainian east comes despite Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region
New Nato chief not worried by potential second Trump presidency
New Nato chief Mark Rutte has doubled down on his commitment to Ukraine as he takes charge at a critical time for the Western alliance.
The former Dutch prime minister replaced Jens Stoltenberg as Nato secretary general on Tuesday, where he pledged continued support for Kyiv’s fight against Russia.
Mr Rutte’s appointment comes just before a pivotal US presidential election in November, with Nato-sceptic Donald Trump, who declined to say whether he wants Ukraine to win the war, on the Republican ticket.
“We have to make sure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent, democratic nation,” Mr Rutte said at Nato’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
Speaking about the prospect of former US president Donald Trump’s re-election, Mr Rutte added: “I’m not worried.
“I worked for four years with Donald Trump. He was the one pushing us to spend more on defence and he achieved this.
“Because indeed, at the moment, we are now at a much higher spending level than we were when he took office.”
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