Kremlin praised U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of Ukrainian strikes with U.S. missiles deep into Russian territory. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Kremlin on Friday (December 13, 2024) praised U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of Ukrainian strikes with U.S. missiles deep into Russian territory and said the position was fully in line with Moscow’s own position.

Also Read | Trump calls for ’immediate’ ceasefire in Ukraine

Mr. Trump criticized Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied missiles for attacks deep into Russian territory in a Time magazine interview published on Thursday (December 12), comments that suggest he could alter U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

“The statement itself completely coincides with our position,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. He said Trump’s statement was in line with “our vision of the causes of escalation”.

Also Read | Ukraine facing ‘massive’ Russian attack on energy sector

“It appeals to us.” (Reporting by Dmitry Antonov Writing by Maxim Rodionov; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)

A rescuer walks in front of a building hit by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Odesa, Ukraine November 25, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Russia’s military captured a British national fighting with Ukrainian troops who have occupied part of Russia’s Kursk region, according to reports Monday (November 25, 2024), as Moscow began daylight drone attacks on civilian areas of Ukraine and its ground forces accelerated gains along parts of the front line.

The Briton was identified by State news agency Tass. The news agency quoted him saying that he had served as a signalman in the British army for four years and then joined the International Legion of Ukraine, formed early on in Russia’s nearly 3-year-old war against its neighbor.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces are straining to hold at bay a push by Russia’s bigger army at places in the eastern Donetsk region. Russian forces recently have gained ground at “a significantly quicker rate” than they did in the whole of last year, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.

The Russians have detected and are exploiting weaknesses in the Ukrainian defenses, it said in an analysis late Sunday. The war surpassed 1,000 days last week, and the milestone coincided with a significant escalation in hostilities.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Air Force said Russia is adapting its drone tactics, as it fired 145 Shahed drones at Ukraine.

Russia has started launching drones during the day, whereas in the past most drone attacks occurred during the night, the air force said.

Andrii Kovalenko, the head of the National Security Council’s Counter-disinformation Centre, said earlier this month that the Russians were looking to conserve their stocks of more destructive but more expensive missiles and also terrorise civilians.

The air force said it stopped almost all the drones before they struck.

But a morning missile attack on downtown Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city in the northeast, injured at least 23 people, according to Mayor Ihor Terekhov. He said the attack on a densely populated residential area was carried out by a modified surface-to-air S-400 missile.

A Russian ballistic missile also struck the southern Ukraine city of Odesa in the middle of the day, injuring 10 people as it landed in the downtown area, officials said.

Ukraine, meantime, continued its attacks on logistical targets inside Russia that support the Kremlin’s war effort.

Ukrainian drones set off explosions and a fire at an oil depot in Russia’s Kaluga region overnight, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) from the border, a military intelligence official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the rules of his job do not allow him to be quoted by name.

Russia made no comment about the alleged strike. It was not possible to independently verify Ukraine’s claim.

The father of the British man says he was told by a Ukrainian commander of his capture.

The captured Briton reportedly served as an instructor for Ukrainian troops and was deployed to the Kursk region against his will. Tass published a video of the man saying in English that he doesn’t want to be “here”.

The report couldn’t be independently verified, but if confirmed it could be one of the first publicly known cases of a Western national captured on Russian soil while fighting for Ukraine.

The U.K. Embassy in Moscow said officials were “supporting the family of a British man following reports of his detention” but provided no further details.

The Russian Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The soldier’s father, Scott Anderson, told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper that his son’s Ukrainian commander had informed him that the young man had been captured.

Scott Anderson said his son had served in the British military for four years, then briefly worked as a police custody officer before going to Ukraine to fight. He said he tried to convince his son not to join the Ukrainian military, and now he fears for his safety.

“I’m hoping he’ll be used as a bargaining chip, but my son told me they torture their prisoners and I’m so frightened he’ll be tortured,” he told the newspaper.

The International Legion for Defense of Ukraine was created at the request of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The Legion is a unit of Ukraine’s Ground Forces that consists mostly of foreign volunteers. Apart from the Legion, Ukraine recruits foreigners to other units of its army, filling squads, companies, or even battalions.

Early on in the war, Ukraine’s authorities said over 20,000 people from 52 countries came to Ukraine to help it defend itself against Russia’s aggression. Ever since, the numbers of foreign fighters in the ranks of the Ukrainian military have been classified.

Tankers from the 33rd separate mechanized brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces ride on a Leopard 2A4 tank during a field training at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on October 27, 2024, amid the Russian invasion on Ukraine.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Russian forces thwarted an attempt at another cross-border incursion by Ukraine into southwestern Russia, a local official reported Sunday, months after Kyiv staged a bold assault on its nuclear-armed enemy that Moscow is still struggling to halt.

An “armed group” sought Sunday to breach the border between Ukraine and Russia’s Bryansk region, its governor, Aleksandr Bogomaz, said but was beaten back. Bogomaz did not clarify whether Ukrainian soldiers carried out the alleged attack, but claimed on Sunday evening that the situation was “stable and under control” by the Russian military.

There was no immediate acknowledgement or response from Ukrainian officials.

The region neighbors Kursk province, where Ukraine launched a surprise push on Aug. 6 that rattled the Kremlin and constituted the largest attack on Russia since World War II. Hundreds of Russian prisoners were blindfolded and ferried away in trucks in the opening moments of the lightning advance, and Ukraine’s battle-hardened units swiftly pressed on across hundreds of square miles (square kilometers) of territory.

Responsibility for previous incursions into Russia’s Belgorod and Bryansk regions has been claimed by two murky groups: the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion.

Russian officials and state media have sought to downplay the significance of Kyiv’s thunderous run in Kursk, but the country’s forces have so far been unable to dislodge Ukrainian troops from the province. Western officials have speculated that Moscow may send troops from North Korea to bolster its effort to do so, stoking the almost three-year war and bringing geopolitical consequences as far away as the Indo-Pacific region.

Russian lawmakers Thursday ratified a pact with Pyongyang envisioning mutual military assistance, a move that comes as the U.S. confirmed the deployment of 3,000 North Korean troops to Russia.

North Korean units were detected Wednesday in Kursk, according to Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, known by its acronym GUR. The soldiers had undergone several weeks of training at bases in eastern Russia and had been equipped with clothes for the upcoming winter, GUR said in a statement late Thursday. It did not provide evidence for its claims.

Also on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow is working on ways to respond if the U.S. and its NATO allies allow Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia with long-range Western missiles.

Putin told Russian state TV that it was too early to say exactly how Moscow might react, but the defense ministry has been mulling a range of options.

Russia has repeatedly signaled that it would view any such strikes as a major escalation. The Kremlin leader warned on Sept. 12 that Moscow would be “at war” with the U.S. and NATO states if they approve them, claiming military infrastructure and personnel from the bloc would have to be involved in targeting and firing the missiles.

He reinforced the message by announcing a new version of the nuclear doctrine that considers a conventional attack on Russia by a nonnuclear nation that is supported by a nuclear power to be a joint attack on his country — a clear warning to the U.S. and other allies of Kyiv.

Putin also declared the revised document envisages possible nuclear weapons use in case of a massive air attack, opening the door to a potential nuclear response to any aerial assault — an ambiguity intended to deter the West.

Ukrainian leaders have repeatedly said they need permission to strike weapons depots, airfields and military bases far from the border to motivate Russia to seek peace. In response, U.S. defense officials have argued that the missiles are limited in number, and that Ukraine is already using its own long-range drones to hit targets farther into Russia.

That capability was evidenced by a Ukrainian drone strike in mid-September that hit a large Russian military depot in a town 500 kilometers (300 miles) from the border.

The U.S. allows Kyiv to use American-provided weapons in more limited, cross-border strikes to counter attacks by Russian forces.

In a separate update, Bryansk Gov. Bogomaz claimed that over a dozen Ukrainian drones were shot down over the region on Sunday. Separately, a total of at least 16 drones were downed over other Russian regions, including the Tambov province some 450 kilometers (290 miles) north from the border, officials reported. There were no reports of casualties from any of the alleged attacks.

In Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson, Russian shelling killed three civilians on Sunday, local Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin claimed. Another Kherson resident died in a blaze sparked by shells hitting a high-rise, according to Ukraine’s Emergency Service.

Air raid sirens wailed for over three hours in Kyiv overnight into Sunday, and city authorities later reported that “around 10” drones had been shot down. They said no one had been hurt. Ukraine’s air force on Sunday reported that it had shot down 41 drones launched by Russia across Ukrainian territory.

Russia said that its forces had taken full control of a town in eastern Ukraine
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Russia said on Sunday (September 8, 2024) that its forces had taken full control of a town in eastern Ukraine as Moscow’s forces advance on the strategically important city of Pokrovsk and seek to pierce the Ukrainian defensive front lines.

Russian forces, which control about a fifth of Ukraine since invading in February 2022, are advancing in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to take the whole of the Donbas, which is about half the size of the U.S. state of Ohio.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had taken the town of Novohrodivka, which lies 12 km from Pokrovsk, an important rail and road hub for Ukrainian forces in the area. The town had a population of 14,000 before the war.

Yuri Podolyaka, an influential Ukrainian-born, pro-Russian military blogger, published maps showing Russian forces attacking beyond Novohrodivka in at least two places less than 7 km from Pokrovsk.

President Vladimir Putin said last week that a Ukrainian incursion into the Russian region of Kursk had failed to slow Russia’s own advance in eastern Ukraine and had weakened Kyiv’s defences along the front line in a boost to Moscow.

Ukraine’s top military commander said on Thursday that Kyiv’s incursion into the Kursk region was working and that there had been no Russian advances on Pokrovsk for the previous six days.

He said that one of the objectives of the Kursk incursion was to divert Russian forces from other areas, primarily Pokrovsk and Kurakhove. Russia had diverted large numbers to Kursk, but was also strengthening the Pokrovsk front, he added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said the Kursk operation was also to prevent Russian forces from crossing the border in the opposite direction.

Russia currently controls about 80% of Donbas. Given the speed of recent Russian advances in the east, some Russian war bloggers have raised concern about the army overreaching itself.

Mr. Putin ordered tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022 in what he calls a special military operation. Ukraine and its Western backers have vowed to defeat Russian forces and expel all Russian troops.