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.
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How significant would Russia's capture of Ukrainian town of Vuhledar be?
What is Vuhledar?
Vuhledar - which means “gift of coal” - is a coal mining town in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region with a pre-war population of around 14,000 people, nearly all of whom have fled.
It was built by the Soviet Union in the mid 1960s around a mine. There are two mines there now with significant coal reserves.
Russians call the town, which sits on a flat plain and is comprised of high-rise apartment buildings and other structures, Ugledar.
Why does Russia want to take it?
Moscow says the Donetsk region is one of four Ukrainian regions it has annexed since 2022, a claim Kyiv rejects as illegal.
Moscow sees taking control of Vuhledar as an important stepping stone to incorporating the entire region into Russia.
Control of the town - which Russians long regarded as one of Ukraine’s toughest fortified positions to crack - is considered important by both sides because of its position on elevated ground and because it sits at the intersection of the eastern and southern battlefield fronts giving it added significance when it comes to supplying both sides’ forces.
While Ukrainian forces were in full control of Vuhledar, they were able to use the town as a platform to shell Russian military supply lines in the area.
The town sits close to a railway line from Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, to Ukraine’s industrialised Donbas region which comprises Donetsk and the eastern region of Luhansk, most of which Moscow controls.
Taking Vuhledar, which Russia portrays as one of the last Ukrainian strongholds in southern Donetsk, would open the way for Russian forces to advance on other places.
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